Journalism

  • The Mission Continues

    Convivium publisher, Ray Pennings, writes the last Convivium column as a tribute to this unique platform, expressing the gratitude we feel for all of you who have breathed life into it for over a decade.

    Whenever we need to make statements of conclusion, we’re tempted to say, “mission accomplished.” We’ve done what we have set out to do, so the job is finished.

    As publisher of Convivium, I need to let you know that this will be the last ...

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  • Defining Canada?

    In his most recent Insights newsletter, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings emphasizes the need to recover a sense of vision and national purpose as Canadians, especially as we think about the future of young Canadian leaders.

    Ray's Take is part of a weekly Saturday morning newsletter written by Ray Pennings designed to inform and provide perspective to Christian leaders. Read a sample and sign-up here...

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  • Remembering Ted Byfield

    Ted Byfield was no quitter and until his passing over the holidays, he was a front-line culture warrior in the journalism, publishing, and Christian education spheres, Jonathon Van Maren writes.

    Edward “Ted” Bartlett Byfield passed away in his Edmonton home on December 23, 2021, at the age of 93. For more than a half-century, he was one of Canada’s most significant public Christians, and his life’s work included the founding of a religious order, t...

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  • Stockland Moving On… But Not Out

    Convivium's co-founder says goodbye to become publisher of the Catholic Register but Ray Pennings, Cardus Executive Vice-President, welcomes Peter Stockland home as a Senior Fellow.  

    It is said of Cardus that once you’ve worked here for a certain length of time, you never actually leave; you’re just not there at the moment.

    So it is that while, officially and formally, I’ll be stepping down as editor of Convivium.ca effective Dec...

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  • An Election Exercise in Media Conformity

    The shared-bathwater insularity of Parliament Hill’s media elite has made the 2021 campaign an adventure in safe and narrow thinking, Peter Menzies argues.

    The words of Jody Wilson-Raybould are as good a place as any to begin an assessment of media coverage of Canada’s 44th federal election.

    “In Ottawa, the political culture, which includes the media, lives in a world of its own construction, quite divo...

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  • A COVID Shot in the Dark

    In this first of two parts, Tara Vreugdenhil argues the pandemic response has unleashed a contagion of fuzzy language, shifting definitions, and logic that doesn’t follow.

    This is part one of a two-part series from Tara Vreugdenhil. ...

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  • Digital Chill and Frost Burned Freedom

    Former CRTC Vice-Chair Peter Menzies warns the federal government’s so-called online harms bill, Bill C-36, leaves the Charter rights and liberties of Canadians out in the cold.

    Canada did not build protection of certain rights and freedoms into its Constitution because, as some might think, they are saucy symbols of pop virtues. They are there because serious people understood that without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the na...

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  • Hidebound Habits of Journalistic Minds

    Despite laudable adaptation to extraordinary technological change, too many journalists remain stuck with a story-telling idée fixe that blocks the light of facts, Peter Stockland argues.

    An editor-in-chief infamous for, shall we say, whimsy once decreed no opening sentence of any news story could exceed 21 words.

    The impromptu commandment unleashed a newsroom tizzy equivalent to what might have erupted if an exotic dancer had walked ...

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  • Journos Who Soldier On

    Peter Stockland argues that despite the legitimate criticism journalism gets for all its institutional failings, abundant first-rate reporters and writers serve Canadian democracy well.

    Honesty demands acknowledgement.

    In recent weeks I’ve written, and other Convivium.ca writers have contributed, sharp criticism of journalistic performance on a variety of issues.

    It’s true that at the institutional level, corporate providers ...

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  • Playing the Media Percentage Game

    Peter Stockland flags an institutional shift in journalism that seems to be causing media outlets to follow the State line rather than inquire and clarify in the public interest.

    Warning lights should always flash before our eyes whenever journalists mix raw numbers and percolating percentages in the same paragraph.

    Numbers clearly state actuality. Percentages are the ups and downs of context. Regardless of the axiom attribut...

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  • Caught in the Bill C-10 Spotlight

    Convivium contributor, journalist, and former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies has been centre stage fighting off the federal Internet control bill. Fortunately, he says, fame is fleeting.

    Not long after I ended my decade at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) I began writing about communications issues.

    Pretty geeky stuff, I guess, but now my views are apparently so in demand that Convivium.ca wants ...

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  • COVID’s Cost in Liberty Lost

    Theologian James Bryson surveys the historical landscape of Munich and finds troubling harbingers vis-a-vis his home province of Nova Scotia’s authoritarian response to the pandemic.

    Born and raised in Halifax, I currently live in Munich, Germany. I have been monitoring the Nova Scotian response to the pandemic from abroad by reading the news and by keeping in touch with family and friends.

    I write this article to lend some persp...

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  • Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths

    Peter Stockland brings a journalist’s mindset and hometown origins to his analysis of media coverage around the finding of Indigenous children’s bodies in Kamloops, B.C.

    Melissa Mollen-Dupuis and I don’t know each other but we appear to share similar thoughts on the journalism around Kamloops, B.C. and the discovery of an unmarked grave containing remains of Indigenous children.

    In an interview with Montreal’s Le...

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  • Failing to Speak for Free Speech

    Eerie silence has met Ottawa’s plan to regulate the Internet and outlaw hurtful – not just hateful – expression, Peter Menzies reports.

    Canada’s long march towards violating Charter rights to free expression continues without any sign of political or media opposition.

    Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s campaign to suppress the Internet has now opened up on three fronts. It is no l...

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  • In What Do We Trust?

    As Cardus’ The Long Way podcast probes alarming declines in institutional trust among Canadians, Convivium’s Peter Stockland explores the specific effect on media and academia.

    Purely at the institutional level, it’s troubling enough to watch the current media revolution in which the workers seek control of the means of redaction.

    Journalistic greybeards know in their bones no good can come from recent eruptions whereby you...

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  • COVID’s Media Monologue

    Bad news sells but Peter Menzies wonders why journalists eager to echo alarms about pandemic case numbers ignore the social devastation of lockdown policies.

    It has long been accepted both within and without the world of journalism that negative news trumps developments of a positive nature pretty much every time. Much may have changed in how news is delivered to people but the old cliches - “if it blee...

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  • Newspapers Must Face the Facebook Music

    Print journalists’ pleas for the government to keep social media from eating their lunch are as fact-free as claiming the Pyongyang Times is a bulwark of democracy, Peter Menzies argues.

    A little more than 20 years ago, Conrad Black and David Radler saw the future. It was the Internet, and it was going to eat the newspaper business’ lunch. So they sold their extensive chain of Canadian newspapers to Canwest - a broadcasting company owned by...

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  • No Easy Solutions for Journalism’s Woes

    Cardus’ Daniel Proussalidis marks National Newspaper week by speaking with independent journalist Jen Gerson on what the future holds for newsgathering in Canada.

    Canada needs journalists – such is the theme of the 80th annual National Newspaper Week, which began Sunday. It’s tough to argue with the claim, frankly. Of course, Canada needs journalists who are free to uncover, discover, and convey news from ...

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  • The Perils of Facing Down Facebook

    Canada’s federal Heritage Minister needs a better grip on who he’s dealing with before shaking his fist too often at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media colossus, Peter Menzies writes.

    Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is determined to pick a fight with Facebook in his bid to find a way to fund failing newspaper publishers - a battle that may end with news media being blocked from access to global social media audiences.

    Over the...

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  • The Everlasting G. K. Chesterton

    Retiring this summer after 46 years as editor of the Chesterton Review, Father Ian Boyd tells Peter Stockland why the great Christian journalist has such enduring appeal and importance.

    At dinner during an event I attended last weekend, a young journalistic rising star of decidedly Calvinist conviction acknowledged G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy ranks among the most inspiring books he’s read.

    The confession draws surprisingly ...

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  • Making Book on Chrystia Freeland

    Newly minted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s best bet for sussing out his Liberal foes is putting his money down on the newly appointed Finance Minister’s eight-year-old manifesto, Robert Joustra writes.

    It’s not often a new Minister of Finance has written a prize-winning economic manifesto. Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Globa...

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  • Finding the Right Helping Hands for Beirut

    Canadian NGOs are meeting the challenge of keeping aid dollars from disappearing into corrupt pockets after the explosion that shredded the Lebanese capital, Susan Korah reports.

    I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash Is added to her wounds.

    William Shakespeare

    It’s a long way from the bleak, windswept moors of...

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  • #SOMUCHMUD

    The federal election has begun with more mud than Saturday bath night at a pig farm. Alas, Convivium contributor Peter Menzies says, too many reporters are jumping in and further sinking journalism’s #credibility.

    It was predictable. #sopredictable. And sad. #sosad

    Journalists covering Canada’s federal election became one of the biggest social media stories of the campaign’s first week, overwhelming news regarding the contesting parties’ policy platforms.

    ...

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  • Cracks in Canada’s Media Freedom

    The good news, Convivium contributor Susan Korah reports, is Canadian journalists aren’t murdered like their global colleagues. The bad news is subtle intimidation and harassment that lets the powerful keep their secrets.

    The cloud that hovers over Canadian journalists’ freedom to report the truth has a silver lining.

    But even clouds with silver linings sometimes bring rain, and Canadian journalists need to be prepared for the storm that sometimes breaks over their he...

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