Posts Tagged ‘Commentary’

I didn’t know Gabrielle Giffords before January 8, 2011.

Why would I?

I didn’t live in Arizona and wasn’t particularly plugged into that part of American politics. Sure, I’m sure I saw her name in news stories and reports, especially after Arizona’s controversial immigration law was passed. But as with most other American congressmen and women — and even governors — her name just didn’t stick.

Then January 8 happened. I remembered following the events of that day on Twitter, especially her “death” — which was later proven to be untrue. That day was the first time in a long time I turned on CNN to follow the events in Arizona.

I don’t know why, but Giffords’ story struck a chord with me. Even before we knew anything about how she was doing.

After the first post-shooting images of her were released, I was even more struck by Giffords and her story. She looked so happy, so at peace, so OK.

Giffords’ first television interview was with Dianne Sawyer. I spent most of the hour in tears watching in amazement at the videos of this woman fighting so hard to be who she was all over again.

“She sounds like a child,” my boyfriend commented after one section where Giffords spoke.

He was right, she did. She spoke in short, usually one-word sentences. She looked confused when she was asked some questions, but I still saw so much hope and possibility from her.

Late last year, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope was released — a book by Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. The book told the story of Giffords’ life before the shooting, but more of it took place in the days, weeks and months that came afterward. How she fought to build her life back — to walk, to talk — to learn everything all over again.

Of course, the real question was whether Giffords was going to run for re-election this year. Whenever it was asked, Kelly always gave the same response: The decision was Giffords’ alone to make, and she had until May to make it.

Then this weekend we got more news from Giffords. Only this time, it wasn’t about her future aspirations. This time it was about her present situation. She had decided she would be resigning her congressional seat.

In a video released on her website, wearing a red jacket almost just like the one she was shot in just over a year ago, Giffords said farewell:

“I will return,” Giffords promised, smiling in a way that you could almost see the “old” Gabby shining through.

She promised that while she was getting better, she needed to take some time to focus on her recovery. And while she didn’t expressly say she wasn’t planning to run again, the video made it pretty clear that her political career was probably done.

The New York Times reported Sunday night that Giffords would end her term in congress finishing the Congress on Your Corner event in the supermarket parking lot where she was shot one year ago.

Perhaps because of that decision, and so many others, I still see hope from Gabrielle Gifford. Sunday’s events reminded me of some of what she had written in Gabby‘s final chapter entitled “Gabby’s Voice:”

Hope and faith. You have to have hope and faith.

Everything I do reminds me of that horrible day. Just rolling onto my side is hard. Hard to sleep at night. Reminds me of how badly I was hurt. It was hard but I’m alive …

Long ways to go. Grateful to survive. It’s frustrating. Mentally hard. Hard work. I’m trying. Trying so hard to get better. Regain what I’ve lost. Want to speak better .

Trying to get back to work … I’m so sorry I’m unable to work right now.

I hope I never have to fight a battle like the one that Gabrielle Giffords is fighting, but I know I will fight smaller battles throughout my lifetime.

I hope like Giffords, no matter how tough my fight may seem or how futile it appears to be, I hope I am able to hold my head up high and carry on. I hope no matter how dark things may seem, I am able to say exactly what Giffords said:

I will get stronger. I will return.

 

Of that, I have no doubt.

Good luck, Gabby.

Photo for blog post a screengrab from Giffords’ video announcing her resignation.

Is it just me, or has TV suddenly discovered Twitter?

Sure, TV shows or personalities tweeted before: Survivor‘s Jeff Probst has live-tweeted episodes for the past few seasons, so has Phil Keoghan of The Amazing Race. But suddenly, it seems every TV show wants you to tweet with them while you’re watching the program. Some even give you a hashtag to use with your tweets.

Some recent examples include 60 Minutes (#60minutes), 20/20 and CBC’s The Fifth Estate. Sure, these programs are all newsmagazines, so I can see why they might want to engage their audience on this new medium (and hey, trying to get people to watch live TV again and commercials instead of having them PVR it, is a better business model). But there’s one show who’s sudden interest in social media perplexes me.

The Good Wife.

Yes, that Good Wife. The courtroom show. The women’s show that men also happen to like so it’s a hit.

A couple weeks ago for their season premiere, viewers were invited to follow the actors feeds (and the main Good Wife account), while they tweeted during the episode.

That alone caught me off guard. While I don’t mind keeping half an eye on my iPad while watching Survivor or The Amazing Race, The Good Wife is a show I want to pay attention to (and typically it’s a show you need to pay attention to, it leaves a lot unsaid).

But the I found this: A fake gossip website that’s blogging about things that are happening in storylines in the show.

It leaves me a little perplexed. I know that women tend to use social media more than men, but I wonder how much traction stuff like this gets. Do people tweet while watching the show? Is there an appetite for some gamification around the web? Will the show’s demographic even participate in an online game based on the show?

I’m not sure where The Good Wife is going with all of this, but I’m interested to find out.

Why don’t creative young writers care if they get paid?

That’s the headline on a column by Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail, where he laments that young writers, like me, don’t care if they get paid for their work, unlike old writers, like him.

The column stems from a “recurring argument” he has with young writers about why they choose to write for publications, such as The Huffington Post, where they are not paid for their work. They claim they do it to further their brand, while Smith’s generation (the older generation), would never imagine writing something for free — let alone to something like HuffPo that can afford to pay its writers.

He writes:

There now exists an entire generation of intelligent people who have grown up without any expectation of compensation for imaginative work.

As a young writer, I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Nor do I believe that I contently give away my creative work for free without getting anything back out of it.

As someone under the age of 30, I can only assume I am the demographic Smith is speaking about. I wish he were as right about me as he thinks he is.

I began writing for newspapers at 17, and I was paid for every word I wrote. Sometimes I was paid too little for the amount of work I put into a story, other times too much, but I was paid.

When I moved to a small town, the weekly papers there were happy to have me contribute, but I didn’t get paid from them until I began working as a staff reporter at one of them. Weekly papers don’t have the budget for freelance. (Or at least not the ones in my small town.) Nor should they. After all, being a community paper means the community contributes. Paying every citizen who contributed to a small town weekly paper would bankrupt it pretty fast, I would guess.

When I moved to Toronto, I knew I’d have to take some lumps to make it. I worked for free at a website here and there, volunteered for my school paper for two out of three years, and wrote stories and blog posts when I worked at a national paper that I considered, for the most part, part of my job as a sports copy editor.

Did I make a willing decision not to get paid for my work? I wouldn’t say that. But I do have this blog. And no one, not even Google Ad Sense, is paying for me to write this blog post.

Perhaps then Smith is right. I’m just too willing to give away my creative content, but then I look at what I got out of all that giving away and suddenly things aren’t as black and white.

I got exposure. I got experience. I got to interview celebrities and cover stories and beats I love. I got to find my voice.

And yes, Smith addresses all this:

Somehow, they know, money will come in from another source. They can get famous fast this way, and it’s gratifying to have a huge audience.

That’s right, I do what I do to get famous. And I’m pretty famous, in case you couldn’t tell. (I mean, more than 1,000 people follow me on Twitter.)

Smith explains in his day, reporters worked their way up:

We old farts did that tiring reporting/interviewing stuff for years before we were allowed to write our opinions on things.

Well, people still work their way up, for the most part. The whole getting-famous-for-a-blog-or-something-else-you-did-for-free is prettty rare.

Another difference between the two generations?

I still don’t even aspire to this ideal of not being edited; not being edited doesn’t seem like a benefit to me. I still have a deep-rooted (and unjustified) instinct telling me that something published has value only if it has been commissioned by someone else.

I prefer being edited. I know this blog is not perfect because I wrote it and no one proofed it. I’m not an expert writer on my own, I know that (and so do my editors). Does something published only have value if commissioned by someone else? I say no. There’s lots of great ideas out there, and some of them come from reporters themselves.

Should the Huffington Post pay? Maybe, but if you’re happy getting the kind of exposure you would get writing for a site like that, then there’s no need to complain.

Now, if you’d excuse me, I’ve got to get back to some writing I’m getting paid for.

I came across an article that really piqued my interest and bothered me, both as a journalist and an avid TV watcher.

The article, The Sexual Proclivities of Friends, was written by Mike D’Avria and aimed, I think, to discuss how disgusting and shocking it was that over the course of 10 years, six characters had 85 sexual partners between them.

I don’t know why this is shocking, many other series did it too. He sites Sex and the City as an example of one character who has many sexual conquests, but as I remember the series, it wasn’t just Samantha who jumped into the sack (or sac as he wrote it) with every man she saw.

But I digress.

Do these Friends sleep with too many people?

How did D’Avria come to his conclusions? By watching the series again? Of course not. Instead, he went through and read “every single outline, and look(ed) at the guest star cast list, for every episode aired in the ten seasons on NBC.”

He admits the number could be “way higher” (but not way lower) because of the way he collected his data (which the column header refers to as “important”).

(And in case you’re wondering, Chandler scored the lowest and Joey scored the highest.)

The first comment on the piece rips apart a number of the partners that D’Avria sites in it, pointing out that those people never had sex with any of the friends, they were in relationships — or just casually dating them. D’Avria responds to the comment, admits he didn’t rewatch the series “something that would take an extremely long time,” and even congratulates himself for admitting his mistakes saying, “I wanted to show how I got to my conclusion — wouldn’t it be nice if all journalists were as transparent in their reporting?”

Here’s the thing, if you’re going to do an analysis of something, you need to commit 110 per cent to that analysis. If that means renting the DVDs and spending a weekend watching over 200 episodes of Friends, you need to do that.

According to the article, Joey slept with 1.7 women a year over the 10 years we knew him. Oh, the horror.

And just what are D’Aviro’s qualifications to write such an article? He has a journalism degree. That’s it. And sure, there’s a lot of so-called “criticism” from self-proclaimed critics on the Internet these days, but really there should have been something more here. Like what, exactly, is D’Aviro criticizing, we never really get a thesis in the intro to his piece except, “Hey, remember that show Friends? Yeah, they had a lot of sex.” Uh, OK.

As an aside, my partner wonders what the next piece of D’Aviro’s will be. Perhaps the fact that Dexter kills more people than any other character on television before him? Oh the outrage.

If you’re going to try to your hand at criticism, you need to know what you’re criticizing and actually do the work involved to properly criticize your subject. Journalism is not just looking up stuff on the Internet, there’s offline work to be done as well.

This piece has almost inspired me to rewatch the series of Friends and do a proper analysis of their sexual conquests. Who’s in?

ABC announced late Saturday night it has snagged a one-on-one interview with embattled actor Charlie Sheen.

The interview was held after CBS announced it was halting production on his sitcom Two and a Half Men for the season because of  his off-screen behaviour.

This isn’t the first time the star has “spoken out” (if you want to call it that), since he started making headlines for partying too hard, drinking too much and behaving badly.

Last week, in a radio interview with syndicated radio host Alex Jones, Sheen spoke out. (The interview was apparently the reason production was halted on his sitcom).

Some of what Sheen said included:

Well yeah but I’m tired of being told “well you can’t talk about that and you can’t talk about that” BULL S-H-I-T. Let me just say this, there’s nothing. I just think it’s deplorable that a certain Heim Levine, that’s Chuck’s real name by the way, mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy bro.

Well, you’ve been warned dude. Bring it.

It’s yeah, it’s an understatement, you know it’s, I’m sorry man I got magic and I got poetry at my fingertips most of the time and this includes naps. I’m an F-18 and I will destroy you in the air and I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.

I was shackled and oppressed by the cult of AA for 22 years… Newsflash, I’m special. The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning.

Debate me on AA right now. I have a disease? Bullshit. I cured it right now with my mind.

So it begs the question, just what crazy things will Charlie Sheen say Tuesday night?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is: Is it really fair to mock Charlie Sheen? If he is having a problem with alcohol or drugs right now, is it right that we laugh at what comes out of his mouth?

I say no.

However, some of my Twitter followers disagreed with me when I posed the question to them Sunday afternoon.

“It is fair. Nobody held a gun to his head. He wanted the show to get cancelled and found a way,” Noah Love commented.

And he wasn’t alone: “All public figures are fair to make fun of. (Unless something really bad as happened to them like they get shot.)” Sam Obermeyer said.

JGoldborough agreed: “Absolutely fair to make fun of him. Public figure. And he has made lots of $ playing himself in 2 and a Half Men.”

Is Charlie a public figure? Sure. Does that mean that he shouldn’t be made fun of? No. But alcoholism and drug addiction is a serious problem that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Is anyone doing Charlie Sheen any favours by not offering the man some help?

Shutting down his sitcom for the rest of the year only puts hundreds of people out of work who have nothing to do with what Sheen does in his personal life. It will not teach Sheen a lesson, nor should it be expected to.

Sure, I don’t know what’s really going on with Charlie Sheen, and I don’t pretend to. But there comes a point when the jokes aren’t funny anymore, and I think we’ve crossed that line.

Perhaps instead of making fun of Charlie Sheen, or just simply putting him out of work (when he’s already made millions of dollars this year), somebody should step in and try and get him some help.

Otherwise, Charlie Sheen might lose more than just his career.