The Journalism Doctor

I'm a retired headline writer. It was the best thing that I did as a newspaperman. I once wrote a headline that sold 145,000 extra newspapers, and I liked it because it consisted of only one word. One of our hallowed brethren much more famous than me just retired, so I must say a few words about the joy of writing headlines for a living. First let Vincent A. Musetto say it. He worked 40 y ...

Anyone who doubts that newspaper proprietors are different from you and me only has to look at Rupert Murdoch. I rest my case. The evidence is indisputable that his News of the World operated for years with scant regard for either the law, recognized standards of journalism, or society's innocent victims. The paper's motto could have been "We Afflict the Uncomfortable." Yet the 80-year-old A ...

It's a bad decision, and even worse timing: During a month in which tabloid journalism is under the microscope as never before, the company that owns the Toronto Sun has closed itself off from public scrutiny by pulling out of the Ontario Press Council. This is a regrettable move that can only undermine public confidence in the press, and lead to further erosion of the Sun's own standards o ...

It was a newspaper that never met a line it wouldn't step over -- a fitting epitaph for Britain's News of the World. The closure of the 168-year-old Sunday paper is the most spectacular suicide in the history of journalism. It was Britain's largest-circulated national paper, but even Rupert Murdoch knew it had to go when evidence emerged that its journalists routinely invaded people's priva ...

No one rose so far, so fast in British journalism as Rebekah Brooks. And now, as a result of journalistic sins so heinous they defy explanation, she stands to lose it all. Britain has been in a furore since The Guardian newspaper alleged that in 2002, when Brooks was editor, the tabloid News of the World hacked the voicemail of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler (later found to be murdered) to ...

    It's about time: Conrad Black finally got hung by his own overinflated rhetoric. The man who rather unwisely protested his innocence by attacking "the putrification of the U.S. justice system" and by accusing the court of an "outright rape" of the law was, not surprisingly, ordered back to jail by Chicago Judge Amy St. Eve. She didn't seem to believe his last-minute assertion tha ...

It's unfortunate that the first time a jury got to consider Canada's new "responsible communication" defence for libel, it did not involve a journalist but a former journalist, and one who unwisely decided to act as his own lawyer. It did not turn out well: Shareholder rights activist Bob Verdun has been ordered to pay $650,000 to a bank director after a jury decided he had defamed him. Th ...

Honestly, I hate to pick on Sun Media, but it's such an easy and deserving target. The Sun newspapers and TV network yesterday published a dishonest and highly suspect opinion poll that said a majority of Canadians believe there should be some restrictions on abortion. Sun Media did not say who paid for the poll, just that it had been "conducted ahead of Thursday afternoon's annual March for ...

There must be an awful lot of red faces at the Sun newspapers and Sun News Network these days. And they should be ashamed of themselves. On the eve of the federal election, Sun editors and producers ran a story that claimed Michael Ignatieff helped plan the Iraq war. They also seriously entertained the idea of publishing a picture showing the Liberal leader in uniform in Kuwait, wearing U.S ...

It's been three months since the Quebec government received a blueprint that would almost certainly shake the practice of journalism to its core. Yet journalists there aren't really engaged in much debate about it, and those in the rest of the country are still acting as if this was all happening on Mars. I'm talking about a report to Quebec's communications minister, Christine St. Pierre, ...