This is the way the CBC remebers Adscam ... not as a corrupt Liberal Party but as a Liberal Party painted corrupt by the opposition:

The sponsorship program, now defunct, was designed to raise the federal government's profile in the wake of the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec. Over its life, Liberal-friendly ad firms in that province took in millions of taxpayers' dollars.

Some of the money ended up in the pockets of high-ranking Liberal organizers in Quebec, allowing the opposition to paint the government of former prime minister Jean Chrétien as corrupt.

Poor Jean Chretien... he was treated so unfairly... why everyone knows that he and his buddies never got a dime. And Paul Martn knew nothing about it .... nor did Dion or Tobin or Copps....

With so much accepted truth out there in the media and in the legislatures of Canada, we need to look south of the border to find a debate that would be worth watching:

The Editors’ Challenge This should be an offer that the Wall Street Journal can’t refuse — debate the editors of National Review on the immigration bill. ...

It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week. Click here to watch — you have to see it to believe it. We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do. (We would challenge President Bush himself to a debate on behalf of the conservatives he has maligned, but we fear he hasn’t read the bill.)

Where can I tune in?

The Ontario Liberals have been dodging questions about a sponsorship slush fund for at least a month. Premier McGuinty took the early position of avoiding Question period all together; so too his impugned Minister, Mike Colle. Now that they have shown up, the answer is to call the Tories racists or to avoid the question. The Star opines:

The daily ritual in the Ontario Legislature is called "question period" for a reason: for 60 minutes MPPs may ask questions of the government, but they can't count on getting answers.

However, last week's performance by the Liberal government was even worse than usual in this respect and ought not to be allowed to pass without comment.

The opposition asked a series of questions about the decision-making process that lay behind some $30 million in government grants to various and sundry ethnic groups, some with Liberal ties.

The government responded by either changing the subject or impugning the motives of the questioners.

Not once was a question on the so-called slush fund directly answered by a government minister.

The whole article is well worth the read and concludes:

By the end of last week, the Liberals were looking pretty chuffed with themselves.

They ought not to be. Their handling of this file has been the nadir of their four years in office.

The sad part is that there is an election coming up in the fall, and for all of the condemnation by The Star of the handling of this clear use of tax dollars for political purposes including lining the pockets of the government's buddies, I'm willing to bet that The Star will be endorsing McGuinty and the Liberals in October.

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

(via Instapundit)

Via Dust My Broom:

A Muslim journalist beaten with a cricket bat outside a Toronto-area home fears for his life after facing repeated death threats apparently because someone has deemed his writing to be anti-Islam.

A cricket bat? In North America the preferred club is the baseball bat... wait a second:

 The CP article doesn’t mention that the attackers were fellow Muslims.

From the Washington Times a study of the mainstream media coverage of the midterm elections. It's all bad for the Republicans and all good for the Democrats.

The Big Three television networks have used unprecedented midterm election coverage to bash the Republican Party with negative stories, and plenty of them, a study says.     Only 12 percent of election stories that aired on NBC, ABC or CBS were favorable toward Republican candidates, according to a study released yesterday by the District-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).     In contrast, Democrats basked in glory. The study found that 77 percent of the news accounts between Sept. 5 and Oct. 22 offered favorable evaluations of Democratic candidates and lawmakers.     "These numbers are pretty striking," said Robert Lichter, director of CMPA, a nonpartisan researcher of news and entertainment media. "The coverage has become a referendum on Republican leadership. The big question for all three networks is this: Why are the Republicans in trouble and how bad is it going to get?"  

The economy is booming and it is getting zero coverage.

  Other issues of potential importance to voters -- the economy or redistricting, for example -- got short shrift, such topics earning mention in six or fewer stories.

With that said, I am certainly not shocked by this report and the incumbent always gets a rougher ride. However, the telling statistic i think is found in this paragraph:

While midterms typically garner only tepid interest from broadcasters, the networks have dramatically ramped up their coverage this time around, providing 167 stories during the study period. Only 35 stories had been aired during a comparable time in 2002.

The article concludes:

  Like negative campaign ads, negative news reports may have a destructive rebound effect on a fickle viewing public.     "For the past week, the mainstream media has run story after story about the nastiness of this year's campaign ads -- perhaps as a way to distract our attention from their own dirty tricks," observed Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online yesterday.     "Viewers can get sick of negative TV coverage. They consistently rate the news coverage as one of the worst parts of a campaign, specifically citing negative content," Mr. Lichter said. And its going to get worse in the shrill run-up to Nov. 7.     "The GOP is the story, and they're caught in an echo chamber," he added.

These are the standard complaints. The Media will claim that nothing is wrong, the story really is about "why the republicans are in rouble and how bad is it going to get?" and the press may be right about that. However, defining the election question is the key to victory. Will it be about the economy, the war or just dissatisfaction? That the press has been instrumental in defining the question no one can deny.

TORONTO -- The man who ran Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign and gave political advice to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former South African president Nelson Mandela is lending his expertise to Ontario's Liberals.

James Carville, the man known as the Ragin' Cajun, spoke to 1,200 Ontario Liberals at their annual general meeting in Toronto Saturday, the last such gathering before the party tries for re-election next October.

How do you think the Canadian media would have reacted if Karl Rove came to Toronto to address the Conservative Party? I suspect there would have been a lot of pontificating about American interference and influence in Canadian poitics and the plans of Rove/bush to take over the world.

 Cross posted at The London Fog

Indeed there is a bias at the BBC as this leaked report indicates, ( I assume it is this report) . An excerpt:

The full account of the meeting shows how senior BBC figures queued up to lambast their employer.

Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'

Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to 'correct', it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it 'no moral weight'.

Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.'

Randall also told how he once wore Union Jack cufflinks to work but was rebuked with: 'You can't do that, that's like the National Front!'

Quoting a George Orwell observation, Randall said that the BBC was full of intellectuals who 'would rather steal from a poor box than stand to attention during God Save The King'.

The BBC is in court to block the release of an internal report that is thought to be quite critical of the BBC's Middle East coverage:

The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage.
The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.
The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

Read the article. I am sure there will be plenty of commentary on the same. I simply point out that the BBC is government funded and that freedom of the press is an included part of the freedom of expression. I would love to see a similar report on the CBC.

Best quote on the cartoon crisis comes from Tim Blair:

"They won"t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them."

There is a lot of rationalizing going on in the media these days. As commented before, the media are not printing the Mohammed cartoons out of fear and then justifying it as respect. Why, the question is asked, do you need to show the cartoons to report the story? Well, it kinda puts things perspectiveive. The reader/viewer can see what the stink is all about. It seems obvious to me. With that said, opposition to printing pictures from Abu Ghraib will never be found at this site. UPDATE: Damian Penny has more UPDATE II: You will note that I do not have the cartoon posted. Frankly I do not know how to post a cartoon, but here is a link.