The Black Rod

With the federal election campaign in full swing, it was only a matter of time before the issue of media bias bobbed up. On Saturday last, the Globe and Mail published a column by its "public editor" (remember when they were called ombudsmen?) Sylvia Stead which was titled:  "Who complains about campaign coverage – and why". The newspaper, said Sylvia, has an editorial code that "requires that The Globe maintain a reputation for “honesty, accuracy, objectivity and balance." Whiners aside, the Globe has lived up to its code, she said, and she, personally, is monitoring the balance of "overall coverage, where it plays within the paper" and even  "the number of photos."   So there.  Case closed. Welllll  ...  readers of The Black Rod know that we like to check assertions out for ourselves, so we went through Saturday's Globe cover to cover to see how Sylvia defines "fair and balanced" news coverage. Uh oh. ...

One year after teenager Tina Fontaine's body was discovered  in the Red River, two memorial events were held.  One was on the Sagkeeng Reserve where she was raised by a great- aunt from the age of three;  another, much smaller, was at the Alexander Docks near where her body was located accidentally by a search party looking for someone else. The news media was out in force, feeding on the grief.  But none of the "professional journalists" seemed to notice that one important person wasn't at either of these gatherings. Tina's mother. At first glance, maybe it came as no surprise that Valentina Duck wasn't there. She's persona non grata on the reserve, where the responsible side of the family blames her for leading her departed 15-year-old daughter deep into the dark side where the seeds of her death are thought to lie. But her absence at the Alexander Docks is more troubling. The inner city is her turf. There's more than one connection wi...

Fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine was pregnant at the time she was killed. That's just a smidgen of what her older brother Charles revealed during an interview last week with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) in which he delivered a carpet bombing of details about Tina's sad life, horrific death, dysfunctional family and possibly murderous associates. He blamed his and Tina's mother for getting Tina hooked on the hard drug crystal meth and into prostitution.  He said his mother told him she was disowning him and "that if she ever sees me she's going to beat the shit out of me just like she did to Tina." This provides confirmation of a statement made a year ago when the Winnipeg Free Press interviewed Thelma Favel, who raised Tina Fontaine, on the Sagkeeng Reserve from when she was a child.   "... Fontaine claimed she had been beaten up by her mother and even texted pictures of her face, (Favel) said." (Winnipeg Free Press, ...

Like most in Winnipeg, we were first shocked, then titillated by the news stories about the damning report into the Winnipeg School Division by John Wiens, "dean emeritus and professor, faculty of education, University of Manitoba," that was  released last week. Then we read the report. We can't recall ever reading a more alarming political document in recent Manitoba history. Instead of what we had been lead to believe from the news accounts --- that Wiens found the school board so dysfunctional that the province may have to seize control -- we found a biased attack by an NDP insider with a major personal conflict of interest whose intention was to discredit the school board to set up a hostile takeover by the NDP government. But that's not even the unnerving part. A careful reading of  the 106-page report revealed a chilling mindset of authoritarian governance that would be perfectly normal in North Korea or Soviet Russia---but never, ever in a free an...

Janice Lukes has to be fired from Winnipeg council's executive policy committee immediately. She was hand-picked by Mayor Brian Bowman to sit on EPC and to chair the city's influential public works committee.  We'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know what a mistake he was making. Winnipeg cannot have someone who openly breaks the law sit on the city's most powerful committee.  Especially now that we see how much of a Trojan Horse she is for the bike lobby, promoting, priorizing and spearheading major projects that benefit a tiny special interest group at the expense of the rest of taxpaying Winnipeggers. It was that allegiance to the bike lobby that caught her up. The Winnipeg Free Press recently published a story about a stretch of Pembina Highway leading to the University of Manitoba that bicyclists feel is unsafe. Stretch of Pembina has already proved deadly for cyclists By: Kristin Annable  It’s a no man’s land for cyclists. A ...

Aided and abetted by the laziest and worst reporting in the mainstream media,  the long con known as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights made the news again this week. A "jovial" Gail Asper crowed that the fundraising arm of the museum, which she heads, had surpassed its goal of $150 million in private donations thanks to four million dollars pledged by two foundations and a labour union.  The total raised was $1.5 million over the goal, the news media gushed. The only problem with that announcement -- a problem which went unreported by a single news outlet --- is that it's a lie. The only way the 'Friends of the CMHR' could reach its fundraising goal was to ignore almost $80 million in advances, loans, and unpaid obligations that still have to be covered.  You read that right---Gail Asper's pet project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights still owes almost $80 million! Asper, with the collusion of the MSM, has to rewrite history to, as they sa...