A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Doom-scrolling is real, and I know to try to avoid it for fear of entering that hyper-vigilant, chronically worried state that can set in when your adrenal system gets worked up. But these days it's hard to find a news feed of any kind that doesn't feel like doom-scrolling.  Historians hasten to put such gloomy thoughts about "these times" in perspective. They rightly note that in fact, many grand woes of the world are actually lessening. We have less poverty. Fewer nuclear warheads. Less global terrorism. We live longer, having invented cures, treatments and vaccines for many things that used to kill us. All of that is good news at the big-picture level. But it isn't actually of much comfort to those who are alive in this moment and living in this destabilized state, when flu-stricken birds are falling out of the sky and the Earth is splitting open and every season heralds a new round of record-smashing extreme weather somewhere in the world.   It's hard to a...

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption sites and non-poisoned drugs for people "will only lead to their ultimate deaths." Alas, he's not some random dude, he's a man who could actually end up being Canada's prime minister someday.  So even when he tweets something stupid and wrong, the media pick it up and send it across the country. And the fact of that pickup gives his foolish musings weight among those who already hate any sensible conversation around drugs. That particular group of people have controlled the illicit drug conversation for almost 70 years, if we want to start the clock at BC's landmark 1956 study of heroin use that largely concluded that harm reduction made a lot more sense than criminalizing users. At what point do the rest of us get to say hey, shuddup already? BC's poisoned drug supp...

Consider yourself a journalist? Post your ethics code No TC column this past week (CanWest cutbacks), but I thought I might fill the blank by posting my personal ethics code as a journalist. I put it together last fall when I was teaching a journalism course at the University of Victoria. We got into a big discussion one day about ethical behaviour in journalism, and I went home and for the first time wrote down the personal code I followed as a journalist. In these times of disintegrating mainstream media and anyone-is-a-journalist, I think it's going to be essential for readers/viewers to ask their favourite bloggers and writers to produce their own codes. If we're all going to be getting our news from wildly diverse sources, we'd be wise to understand what principles our news gatherers are using when collecting their information. Anyone can call themselves a journalist, but there's no association that journalists have to belong to, or code that we have to swear to up...

Wane of traditional media leaves information gap I’ve been slow to slip into Chicken Little mode on the question of whether the Internet will be the death of traditional media. People have asked me about that for at least 15 years now, and for the longest time I assured them the industry would always survive. But whether it really is the Web or just a sign of the times we live in, there’s not much question anymore that the industry is in the fight of its life. Blame the recession for some of that. All media rely heavily on advertising dollars, and those dollars aren’t as dependable during tough economic times. But the bigger problem for the industry is that its readers, viewers and listeners simply don’t want to pay for information about their community anymore. Even just a couple of decades ago, that would have been unthinkable. Local media outlets were virtually the only way anyone got reliable information about their community and the world. Most households had a subscription to...

I wrote a while ago about a media report that really got it wrong about rates of HIV infection among Vancouver sex workers. I alerted University of Victoria professor Cecilia Benoit to the error, as she has done considerable competent research work around sex workers, and she in turn wrote a great piece for Harm Reduction magazine (where the original piece appeared) that sets things straight. Follow this link to find her response, which serves as a fine reminder that we can't be too careful when reading any research document, not to mention the media's interpretation of it.

Update on HIV/sex worker issue I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject: RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009) by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy and programmatic responses. We wish t...

Sadly, I've had to give up some of my regular Friday columns, due to cutbacks to the freelance budget at the Times Colonist. I won't be writing for the first Friday of the month anymore. It's bothering me more than I would have expected, but so it goes. Change always ends up being a positive thing, in my experience, but that's not to say it ever starts out pleasantly. I've never seen the media industry in such a state. Where's it all going? Nowhere good for the immediate future, and for the industry as it currently exists. But something new will rise from the ashes, and perhaps it's time. My wish would be for a return to smaller, locally owned media. I never got to experience that during my career, because the Thompson corporation owned all the small papers I was working at in my early years, and since then it's been Southam, Hollinger and Canwest in rapid succession. But I've always thought that would be the model with the most potential for underst...

Media wrong to conspire in hiding kidnapping news Best wishes to Mellisa Fung, the intrepid CBC reporter who was released last week from what must have been a horrific and traumatic month imprisoned in a cave in Afghanistan. She’s safe, and I’m very glad to hear that. But what are we to make of recent word that the world’s media reached a private agreement to keep her kidnapping a secret until now? With no disrespect to Fung or those who wanted to keep her safe, I’m stunned by the news. As happy as we are to have Fung back, the truth is that most of us didn’t even know she was missing. That’s because in a most unusual development, the global media agreed from the outset not to report on her high-profile kidnapping. It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment and see the media’s decision as evidence of the industry finally thinking about whether it’s helping or hurting with the way it covers the news. “We must put the safety of the victim ahead of our normal instinct for full...