Blog by John Miller

< Previous Next >

LaFlammable

August 21st, 2022
For a full month, Lisa LaFlamme continued to anchor Canada’s most trusted newscast, even though her bosses told her she was being fired and CTV National News—for which she’d maintained an audience of more than a million viewers a night-- would be turned over to someone else. She was at the top of her game. The most recognized broadcaster in the country after 11 years at the helm, chosen as C ...

What I do

May 28th, 2022
I started this blog in February 2008 with “The case against Maclean’s,” a challenge to the mainstream media who were supporting the magazine for printing a series of inflammatory attacks on Muslims. One of the articles, by Mark Stein, claimed that Muslims in the West were poised to take over entire societies and “the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.” Without d ...

Oopsies!

April 16th, 2022
When Marina Glogovac’s appointment as president and CEO of the Toronto Star was announced last week, it was initially seen as a Cinderella story. Serbian woman in her 20s leaves the chaos of Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, completes a masters degree in organizational change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, slides into media sales with an alternative entertainment weekly ...

Errors? What errors?

March 9th, 2022
As political stories go in Canada, it was a bombshell. Perhaps one of the biggest in many decades. On the evening of January 24, 2018, four months before an Ontario provincial election, Patrick Brown’s world came crashing down. Canada’s largest television network, CTV, was about to publish a story quoting two anonymous women as saying that the man who was now leader of the Progressive Conse ...

Whiter than white

November 25th, 2021
When I surveyed Canadian newspaper newsrooms in 2004, asking who worked there by race and gender, more than half of them refused to tell me. One managing editor scrawled on the questionnaire: “Frankly, I find these questions insulting.” That surprised me, especially since my survey was endorsed by what was then the Canadian Association of Newspaper Editors, whose mission was to uphold journa ...

no one trusts us

November 10th, 2021
There are cliches about journalism that many journalists use to justify their work. Journalism is supposed to tell truth to power. It’s the first rough draft of history. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. News is something that someone wants suppressed—everything else is just advertising. Here’s the scoop: Hardly anyone who reads journalism believes that anymore. It all ...

A fair question

September 16th, 2021
  The most influential question of the federal election campaign was hardly noticed in the rest of Canada, but it certainly was in Quebec. The question, asked by moderator Shachi Kurl at last Thursday’s English language election debate, was tough but fair. It reflected concerns of some racialized groups and others over controversial legislation passed by the Quebec National Assembly to re ...

We need answers

August 19th, 2021
Jack Morris, who helped pitch the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Series title in 1993 and was recently inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, got in trouble this week and lost his job as a baseball TV analyst. He mocked Shohei Ohtani, the major league home run leader, on air by using an exaggerated and stereotypical Japanese accent, saying pitchers needed to be “very, very careful” w ...

Shameful neglect

June 1st, 2021
You’re reading it here because you can’t read it anywhere else. Not one major newspaper or media outlet in Canada carried news that should have interested every one of us—Sunday’s press release from the head of the religious order that was responsible for burying 215 bodies of Indigenous children in unmarked graves at a former residential school. Given the calls for accountability that are ...

Stop the bias

May 22nd, 2021
Several Canadian newspapers carried an Associated Press news story on the carnage in Gaza a week ago. It described the root cause of the conflict between Israel and Hamas this way: “The week of deadly violence, set off by a Hamas rocket Monday, came after weeks of mounting tensions and heavy-handed Israeli measures in contested Jerusalem.” Such descriptions in news stories are often called ...

< Previous Next >