Looking Glass World

Imagine having twenty television sets on and being unable or with great difficulty to turn them off or turn them down. Imagine being given vague instructions. Finally imagine being a Mexican jumping bean. If you can imagine any of these you can imagine my world as person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or may be one yourself.

ADHD affects me both personally and professionally as a writer. For example I get bored after 15 to 20 minutes and need constant stimulation. I usually have many projects on the go. I’m currently writing three books, a magazine article and updating my journalism site, not to mention reading a book. My brain races at about a thousand kilometers per hour, while the rest of me struggles to do five. And when I go to a newsstand or bookstore I am overwhelmed by the numbers of magazines and books.

Once at church someone commented on some preschoolers how nice it would be to have their energy. I had that much energy into my twenties and I never ever want it again. I just couldn’t concentrate. Even today I still have lots of energy, but my concentration has improved.

Sometimes I’ll get an assignment and read it, but miss seeing something important until I’m almost at the deadline and then I scramble to take that something into account. It’s not uncommon for me to put my foot in my mouth with unintended consequences as I hadn’t thoroughly thought things out.

It’s no picnic. I find having ADHD very frustrating as no doubt those who have to deal with me. What adds to the frustration is being fairly intelligent. I suffer from anxiety as a result and am constantly second guessing myself.

Society has never been fully accepting of ADHDers and those with other differences and mental health issues. For all the recent talk of dealing with disabilities and mental health issues, I have yet to see any significant changes.

Fortunately I have learned some coping skills. Writing weekly and daily lists of things to do are a big help. For example my weekly list will include appointments, which I also write on a chalk board, specific tasks to do, like get groceries, and ongoing things to do, like reading the book I’m reading or a piece of work I’m writing. My daily list will include such things as take my vitamins and aspirin, appointments, reading and working on specific writing projects, like an article I’m on deadline for. Writing lists has greatly improved my productivity.

Speaking of deadlines, I’ve learned that big tasks get done and done quicker if I break them down into much smaller ones. So once I get a deadline I mark it down and work back from there as to when specific tasks must be done and write it down. I find projects go a lot easier that way and I also reward myself for completing certain tasks, like taking a ten minute break outside or playing a computer game.

To cope with having lots of energy, I bicycle and walk regularly, plus do daily exercises. When writing, I’ll sit for five to fifteen minutes and then get up and walk around. I go back and forth like this until I finish what I’m working on. It helps me cope and focus better.

I’ll have more to say on ADHD in future blogs.

Underreported Stories Of 2012

I thought I’d start the year off with my list of underreported stories for 2012. It is based on my knowledge and so I may have missed some.

The Environment Cliff: Much has been made about the American so-called Fiscal Cliff, but we hear little of the environmental cliff, which we are rapidly plugging over and from which there is no return. It includes not only climate change, but the greatest period of extinction since perhaps the Permian Period, when about 90% of all life went extinct. Each year we’re losing several species, some unknown to science. Some of these might have given us the next cure for some disease. Another part is the global water crisis and the quality of air, except for the summer smog alerts.

Loss Of Democracy: Very little has been said about this in the media. We go through the motions of elections, but little discussion is made in the media about how more and more our lives are governed by big corporations, other special interests and the super rich. They are controlling more and more what can be said and done in society. For example SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are used to silence critics of business when they want to do something that others don’t want them to do.

Concentration Of Wealth: Each year the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Government in the name of austerity are cutting back on social programs, while increasing benefits to the wealthy. Unions are being crushed under freedom to work legislation. Part of this is the policy of deliberately keeping interest rates low and the other part is by destroying credit.

Loss Of Press Freedom: Press freedom is being lost through the concentration of the media into the hands of a few and through restricting free access to information. A recent article in the Toronto Star through delaying tactics and making the cost of obtaining this information prohibitive except for wealthy institutions and people.

Deflationary Depression: In all the talk about the economy, politicians and the media are strangely silent about the possibility of a deflationary depression. When it strikes it will come as a complete surprise to most people. The government warns people about high debt, but fail to heed their own advice.

Newspaper Pay Walls

With the recent conversion of the Globe & Mail from advertising based to subscription based and the Toronto Star about to go this way also, it’s time again to revisit newspapers. When I looked at this issue in June (Newspapers Again) , I said I have mixed feelings about pay walls and I’m not entirely convinced that they are the answer or at least not in the way that newspapers seem to think they are.

I find it a bit ironic that newspapers are having so many problems with the Internet when they were among the first to jump on it. It reminds me of Kodak inventing the digital camera and yet going bankrupt because of digital cameras.

The biggest problem that I’ve seen is newspapers seem to forget that the Internet is layered. Papers have struggled with this for years and they still don’t entirely have the hang of it. For example, how many poorly done videos have I seen on newspaper sites? They have gotten better, but need more refinement. And I’m still seeing too many flat stories, that is stories with no deeper connections. For example an article in the Portland Press Herald Ceremonial ride to mark Downeaster's Maine expansion on the expansion of rail service fails to include a link to the new schedule. The Toronto Star also often fails to include links, for example a story on a new high-tech card for the Detroit – Windsor tunnel High-Tech card will speed travel through Windsor to Detroit toll boths didn’t include a link for further information.

This raises the question that if layering can be done for information why not for pay walls? Online medical journals do this. If I want to take a look at a particular study I have two choices: read the abstract for free or read the entire study for the price of a subscription. Why can’t the newspaper industry follow these examples?

Why does it have it to be an all or nothing deal for them? Why can’t they post a synopsis of one to three paragraphs, depending on the story, for free viewing and if you want to read the full, in depth article, then you’d have to subscribe? For an investigative piece(s) like the Toronto Star’s recent series on Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario Marineland animals suffering former staffers say a newspaper could post a longer shortened version online for free. If you then wanted to read more you get a subscription. They can always post full articles free for anyone to read, like for election night or for storm reports.

And while a pay wall does provide additional income, it also drives away readers. People can go to a t.v. website and get news for free. You can go to the Business News Network and view and read business stories, like the Globe & Mail covers, for free. It seems to me the last thing newspapers need is to further drive away readership.

Finally why can’t I go to one place and get a subscription to a number of newspapers instead of having to individually subscribe to each newspaper I want. There are about five newspapers I would be willing to subscribe to if the price was right and it was convenient for me to do so, as in being a one stop, one payment, place.

I’ll talk about Newsweek’s decision to go digital in a future post.

Wentegate

I confess I really don’t care for Margaret Wente, never have ever since her days at Canadian Business. However, I will not call for her head over her plagiarising a couple of sentences from someone else’s column.

It’s very easy to see how something, like what Wente did, can happen. A journalist is reading and talking and emailing so much that, as Wente herself said, you can make notes and forget to put down where something came from. That doesn’t excuse plagiarism, but it does make it understandable.

What she did was careless, not, it seems, part of a regular habit. And there is a BIG difference between someone like Margaret Wente and someone like Jayson Blair to whom plagiarism and fabrication seemed as regular as breathing.

The Toronto Star’s public editor Kathy English put it nicely in a recent column, “One can have zero tolerance for unethical journalism, but still possess understanding for the journalist.”

The Globe & Mail did err in its slow response to the allegations of plagiarism. And Wente did not help herself when in her column of September 25th she seems to excuse her behavior by blaming the blogger who Carol Wainio, who Wente says “...has more than once accused me of stealing the work of other writers with whom I happen to share an opinion.”

Rightly or wrongly Wente feels harassed by Wainio. And while I can appreciate Wente’s feelings, in my view it would have been far better had Wente left out the third and second last paragraphs of her column and just ended with a whoops I goofed.

One final comment, is plagiarism any worse than lying or deceiving? For example the media regularly labels money given to passenger rail and to transit a “subsidy”, while money given to roads is always labelled an “investment”. That is a deception/lie. I’ll deal with this issue and the media’s turning a blind eye on certain issues in a future blog.

Media Framing

Over the past two years there have been two stories that raise the question of the role of the media in framing events.

In the summer of 2010 the pastor of a small Florida church proposed to publicly burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9-11. The church, known for its anti-Islam and anti-gay views, had not received much attention until a short article appeared on a site called Religion News Service in July. From there it was gradually picked up by other, bigger, news sites, eventually being picked up by the international media, which in turn help stir up riots and escalated things still further. The pastor, Terry Jones, was being interviewed by print and broadcast media.

It raised serious questions about the role of media in reporting stories. The executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, was quoted in his paper as saying, “The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.” In this had the general media chosen to ignore the story, there would not have been riots, lives would not have been put at risk and American reputation would not have suffered damage.

A year after this story, in July, 2011, the media were all abuzz again. This time it was over Carmageddon, which would result from the 53 hour closure of a 16 kilometer stretch of highway (Interstate 405) in the Los Angeles area. According to the media the shutdown of America’s busiest highway would result in complete and utter traffic chaos from the mother of all traffic jams. And what happened? Traffic in the Los Angeles area actually declined by 65% during this period.

It nicely illustrates the media’s (and society’s) obsession with cars. And it shows in the language used by the media: trains chug, cars are vehicles, public transit and passenger rail are heavily subsidized, no one considers the massive subsidies given to the automobile, roads and highways get investment, rail is obsolete, while cars are considered a necessity. Given this it’s no wonder that the media can only picture catastrophe with the shutdown of a major highway.

These two stories nicely illustrate how the media can take a small story and blow it WAY out of proportion: the first with very serious consequences, the second providing comic relief and a window into the North American obsession with cars.

In a future post I’ll talk about how the media has taken BIG stories and blown them WAY under proportion.

The Mixed Legacy Of Helen Gurley Brown

A special post on the death of Helen Gurley Brown: In her day Brown was certainly a powerhouse and a pioneer of sorts in the publishing business.

One cannot help, but admire her gutsiness in rising to the top, despite not having had any higher education. She had her wits and a flair for publicity. She took Cosmopolitan from decline to super stardom among magazines. Ad revenues were a mere $1.5 million when she took over in 1965. Two years before she left, in 1997, they were $159 million. As Jane Francisco, editor of Chatelaine, put it, “She (Brown) brought glitz and glam into women’s magazines.” A look at women’s magazines around the time Brown took over Cosmopolitan readily verifies Francisco’s comment. In a word they were dull.

Another thing Brown did was to bring discussion of women’s reproductive health out into the open. It’s hard to imagine now, but at one time a person could be jailed for promoting birth control. Even after it became legal birth control still tended to be talked about in hushed tones. (And I’m not talking about abortion.)

However, Brown had her downside. Before she left the American editorship of Cosmopolitan (She remained editor-in-chief of the international editions until her death.) she downplayed the danger of aids to heterosexual women. She also disregarded the issue of sexual harassment on the job.

As a Christian, I certainly cannot agree with her quip, “Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.” (Bad girls do not go to heaven.) I agree that by the 1960s a frank and open discussion about sex was and still is needed. However, I felt that Cosmo under Brown went way too far and promoted sex for sex’s sake. I remember picking up the magazine and seeing an article on having an affair with your boss. Cosmo promoted extramarital sex and casual sex, which I cannot condone.

The whole image of Cosmo seemed to be to promote women as sex objects and to do what they can to please a man sexually. This seemed to be setting up vulnerable women to live in abusive situations. Some critics felt Brown made women cartoonish.

Brown said she wanted her legacy to be, “She created something that helped people.” In my view she left a mixed legacy.

Deflation Update

Fourteen months have passed since I last warned of a new great depression and in those fourteen months have things gotten any better? No. The situation in Europe has gotten a lot worse. Italy, Spain and Cyprus have joined Greece in needing bailouts. The Americans have not done a thing to reduce their debt, which continues to get worse by the day. The banking industry comes up with scandal after scandal.

Economists, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much, say that Europe is now in recession. Even China’s economy, considered the powerhouse of the world, is slowing.

The only thing that continues to hold up the markets is optimism, optimism that somehow the central banks of the world, particularly those of Europe and the United States, can somehow turn things around. So far all their quantitative easing and twists and printing of money and keeping interest rates low (They don’t have a choice with interest rates.) haven’t worked. Neither have all the meetings of the European leaders to resolve the debt crisis worked. The Germans are growing increasingly tired of sacrificing their economy to save the economies of their weaker neighbors.

It is a given that Greece will formally default on their loans and will leave the Euro Zone. Other European countries, such as Spain, are likely to follow. Once this begins to happen it will trigger an even bigger banking crisis than in 2008 and global economic crisis. As part of this process the Euro will collapse,possibly along with the European Union.

It’s not just me who is warning of this, Elliott Wave International (where I picked this up from), Weiss Research and Comstock Partners, to name a few, are all warning of deflation and depression. They are also all saying we haven’t much time left before this economic crisis happens.

To totally switch gears here, hearty congratulations to Silver Don Cameron for being awarded the Order Of Canada. For anyone not knowing who Silver Don is, he is a great and highly respected writer of long standing. I have nothing but admiration for the quality of his writing skills.