Fair and balanced reporting
p2p news view / p2pnet:- Canada’s prestigious Globe and Mail has done it again —— featured entirely self-serving corporate studies commissioned by vested interests as though they come from credible sources.
Recently, the national newspaper had CAAST, the Canadian clone of America’s Business Software Alliance, saying almost two-thirds of computer science students, who are preparing for careers in programming and software development, “pirate” software, compared with 46% of students in other fields of study.
Nowhere in the report was this outrageous assertion questioned or balanced with counter-views.
At the end of last month, the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) released “national polls” it had bought and paid for which suggested Canadians who don’t get their downloads from the CRIA’s owners, EMI, Universal, Warner and Sony BMG, are shop-lifting thieves who cheat on exams and steal clothing.
Now the Globe and Mail is running a Canadian Press item wittily headlined What’s with them young whippersnappers? with “Canadians illegally download 14 music CDs or other files from the Internet for every file they take from the web legally, a new recording-industry poll suggests” as the intro.
The piece is clear that the claims come from two polls commissioned by the CRIA, but it’s written in such a way as to give the assertions weight as serious statements from a credible body, quoting CRIA mouthpiece Graham Henderson but failing to balance his observations with others from national Canadians organizations such as the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC).
Addressing the CRIA polls, CIPPIC lawyer David Fewer points out the CRIA wants to “eliminate essential user rights that enable research into digital security and software inter-operability”.
The federal government, with Heritage minister Liza Frulla front and center, is already close to amending the country’s copyright laws to favour the movie, music and software cartels at the expense of independent Canadian businesses and innovators.
JN
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See:-
had CAAST – Thieving Canadian students, August 9, 2005
shop-lifting thieves – CRIA: ‘vilifying young people’, September 30, 2005
wittily headlined – What’s with them young whippersnappers?, September 29, 2005
October 2nd, 2005 at 8:52 am
It disappeared a long, long time ago.
October 2nd, 2005 at 3:02 pm
If you have thoughts about this, then send a letter to the editor. There is a lot of lazy reporting where press releases become articles in the mainstream media without any reference to balance, but this laziness also has many publications simply printing letters to the editor as a way to restore some balance.
The more people write, the more likely some of these letters will get printed.
My suggestion is to send copies of any letters to your member of parliament. The primary audience of the CRIA misinformation is parliament, so ensuring that parliament is exposed to a “reality check” is important.
October 2nd, 2005 at 5:27 pm
I guess the Globe and Mail doesn’t like new customers either. If I was in that age category and having known of this biased article, would I be inclined to buy a copy of their newspaper? Not likely.