FOX News Takes On The CBC And – Big Surprise – Loses Badly

I must admit I haven’t been very inspired lately in terms of adding a new entry to my blog. That is until I heard about the latest cry foul from the American news channel FOX News against the news wing of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aka the CBC. At the center of this latest tirade from the Fox News team is an article from Canadian writer/columnist Heather Mallick called “A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention”.

The article is Mallick’s assessment of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and the fact that it provides a rather unflattering impression of Palin has got FOX News in an uproar. During a news segment on the FOX News cable network, the FOX News anchor refers to Mallick’s article as “getting beyond vicious” and states that Mallick refers to Palin’s daughter Bristol by “a nasty name that we will not repeat here on this broadcast”. The FOX News anchor also takes exception to Mallick’s assertion that Palin has helped “sewn-up the quote ‘white trash vote’ for the Republican ticket”. Now, that’s how FOX News presented this article, but why don’t we see what the article really says. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

A Great Example Of The Power of Citizens in Democracy

Yesterday, Canadians were reminded of just how much power they have as voters in a democratic society. At the beginning of the day, the news broke out that two national parties – specifically the PC and NDP parties – were forcing television networks to exclude Green Party leader Elizabeth May from the upcoming leadership debates for this year’s federal election. The reason provided by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NDP leader Jack Layton was that the arrangement between May and Liberal Party leader Stephan Dion to not run candidates in each other’s riding amounted to May being a closet Liberal supporter and her presence at the leadership debates would give the Liberal party two voices for their platform. The PC and NDP leaders went so far as to threaten to boycott these debates if the networks dared to include May. As such, the consortium of networks that carry the debates had no choice but to tell May that she would not be given a place in the leadership debates to present her party’s platform to the voting public.

As the day progressed and news of this exclusion of May from the debates seeped into the public conscious, something wonderful happened – the public got angry. Very angry. And with good reason – Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

What the Frak! – Our Ever-Evolving Language For New Profanities

As it’s the end of a short workweek, I wanted to dive back into the blog with something on the lighter side of things and what could be an easier topic to bring up than a discussion of a fictitious profanity word. As the title of this entry infers, I’m talking about that BSG colloquialism – frak.

In case you haven’t caught it, the Associated Press is carrying a news story about the prolific nature of this invented swear word. The article has its beginnings from a blog entry by writer Lee Goldberg appropriately titled ”The Power of Frak”. In his entry, Goldberg applauds “Battlestar Galactica” series creator Glen Larson for doing what few writers/TV show creators have been able to do – create a random meaningless word to replace a contemporary profane one so that it passes by network censors and yet still retains the intensity and meaning of the actual word it’s replacing. And he’s right – when you watch BSG and one of the characters says “frak off”, there’s no question what word the character is really saying. But at the same time, this made-up word works brilliantly in the context of the show in that it creates another layer of realism to the show’s backdrop, of these people being from another planet like Caprica, Picon, or Gemenon – after all, it’s only natural being from another civilization that they would have their own swear words. Click to continue reading the rest of this entry