One question raised in the wake of Hillary Clinton's come-from-behind win is this: Does the press have a crush on Obama?

In composing the above post, I linked to the I Got A Crush On Obama vid.

In it, I saw this image:

This is relevant because John Kerry endorsed Obama today.

That would be the same John Kerry who lost to Dubya in 2004.

The Globe and Mail had a story today that noted while the polls were very close on the Republican outcome of the New Hampshire primary, they apparently blew it on the Democratic race.

One major difference: In the Democratic race, one leading candidate was a black man, while the other was a white woman.

Or is that too simple an explanation?

From Warren Kinsella:

The context in which he is writing is about the Shawinigate affair, in which former prime minister Jean Chretien was alleged to have thrown his weight around in his Shawinigan riding and engaging in (at the very least) some conflict-of-interest behaviour (here's a CBC.ca timeline, for those who care). The National Post, for which Kinsella writes a column, was obsessed with the story:

From the outset of the controversy, in or around 1999, the Post was determined to transform the inoffensive Quebec town of Shawinigan into something synonymous with the Watergate apartment complex. For months, Post reporter Andrew McIntosh (whose employer, it should be recalled, was suing the prime minister for denying him a lifetime barony) had been a veritable journalistic St. George, charging out to slay the twin-headed dragon of prime ministerial perfidy and misdeeds. To McIntosh’s frustration, no doubt, neither the Canadian public nor competing newspapers seemed to give a sweet damn. But the Post was undeterred, because, for most of the relevant period, it could count on Canada’s two conservative opposition parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, to do its bidding.

Disgruntled former Alliance staffers would later tell Liberals that the Post usually supplied the Alliance, under the leadership of Preston Manning or, later, Stockwell Day, with advance notice of the stories McIntosh and others intended to publish about Shawinigate. In this way, the Official Opposition would have sufficient time to prepare the questions it intended to raise in the House of Commons. It also ensured that the Post’s hoped-for revelations would receive a parliamentary boost, giving stories with a short shelf-life another day or two on the public agenda. While some of the twists and turns in the Shawinigate story had been the product of actual research efforts by the Tories or the Alliance themselves, it was common knowledge that most of the Shawinigan-related oppo was being done by the Post.

This is relevant because the Conservative Party, the successor to the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, used the allegation of a CBC reporter passing questions to a Liberal MP about the Mulroney-Schreiber affair as hook on which to hang a fundraising letter.

More in this earlier post.

While in Alberta last week, I was surprised to see a story in the Edmonton Journal that had energy industry types less than enthusiastic about the current spike in oil's price.

In India, a $2,500 car is unveiled to tap that market of 1.1 billion people.

In Canada, a CIBC World Markets analyst is predicting gasoline costs of $1.50 per litre in the near future.

From Russell Smith's column in todays Globe and Mail: (paywalled; subscriber access only)

Happiness sounds terribly sweet. Economists at something called the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research recently published a study that claimed to show that people who live in small towns in this country are happier than those who live in big cities. They claim that Saint John and Charlottetown are among the top five Canadian cities for quality of life. What could this "happiness" possibly mean?

The authors say people who trust in and are involved with their neighbours are happier, so you're better off in a small town. I say happiness is proximity to a video store with the complete Criterion Collection. If happiness means living in Saint John, then perhaps I want to be miserable.

Like the vast majority of political junkies watching the New Hampshire primary, I went into Tuesday night expecting Barack Obama to win, just like the polls said he would.

He didn't.

Butch Ward, a Poynter Institute fellow, says journalists could learn from the wise words of Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of one of Canada's worst-ever weather disasters -- the 1998 ice storms that crippled much of Quebec and eastern Ontario.

The Globe and Mail covered it, as did other major Canadian news outlets.

Many Globe reporters are worldly, sophisticated people who have been to some of the worst, most conflict-ridden hellholes on Earth -- places like Somalia, Bosnia and Chechnya.

Their worldliness may have worked against their empathy.

I seem to remember a Globe story from the ice storm's early days which essentially said that on a global scale, the ice storm wasn't that bad a disaster!

Oopsie.

I tried to find the original story, but globeandmail.com's archives only go back to 2000.

For a round-up of ice storm coverage, check out this Fagstein posting.

Here's a feature I did for CTV.ca. It features some of your favourite international characters: Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, Vladimir Putin, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and an emerging favourite, Nicolas Sarkozy.

With respects to the latter, I didn't learn about his new nickname until it was too late for this piece. And what is that new nickname? President Bling Bling. :)

From the Jan. 8 AP story:

President Nicolas Sarkozy hinted Tuesday he may soon marry former model Carla Bruni, but polls suggest he's heading toward divorce with some of the voters who put him in power.

Many are irritated by Sarkozy's flaunting of his whirlwind affair with someone whose cast of past partners includes Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. And they question Sarkozy's use of a billionaire friend's private jet for the couple's vacation.

He's being called "President Bling Bling," and it's not a compliment among the taste-conscious French.

It's now past my bedtime, but The A Daily Show and the Colbert Report are back on the air -- sort of.

From a Jan. 7 AP story:

A Mississippi Blues Trail marker will be placed at the birthplace of Elvis Presley on Tuesday.

The ceremony will honor Presley for his contribution to Mississippi and America's blues heritage.

He was born in Tupelo on Jan. 8, 1935. Presley died at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn., on Aug. 16, 1977. He first encountered the blues in Tupelo, and it remained central to his music throughout his career.

His early recordings helped revolutionize popular music with a unique mix of blues and country music, which led many rock 'n' roll artists to follow his lead.

"By all accounts, Elvis Presley was the single greatest influence on modern-day rock 'n' roll in America, and much of his musical inspiration drew on the Mississippi blues," Gov. Haley Barbour said in a statement Friday.

Here's my post on Elvis's 70th birthday.

Off The Bus is a project conceived by NYU j-prof Jay Rosen, who runs the citizen journalism site NewAssignment.net, and executed in conjunction with the Huffington Post.

Here's how OJR describes it:

Late last year we told you about the Networked Journalism Summit, an all-day gathering of industry influencers with a collective sight set on a functional juxtaposition of citizen and traditional journalism.

The Huffington Post looks to create that with its new election-season site, Off The Bus, a mash-up digest of feature articles, opinion pieces, polls and videos solicited from a gamut of trad-pub newsies, grassroots bloggers and distributive data journalists. Since its September launch, Off The Bus has been among the most comprehensive pool of election fodder available on the Web, sifting hundreds of daily submissions for insightful "ground-level coverage," as they describe it, of the 2008 campaign season.

It's much more than an aggregator, and this project has some groundbreaking projects of its own. The work-in-progress Polling Project digs behind the scenes of the polls that dominate our spoon-fed MSM election coverage, encouraging pollees to spill the beans on that dinnertime phone call. Also on deck: an interactive map exploring campaign contributions by race and zip code and an exit-poll insider forum for staffers of losing campaigns.

The full article has an interview with Marc Cooper, a j-prof at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, who is the project's editorial co-ordinator.

Addendum

For tonight's purposes, trying to follow the New Hampshire primary online, I would say the NYT or MSNBC proved to be a better use of my time than On The Bus. The H-P home page provided breaking news; however, I find myself perplexed as to why that content wasn't duplicated at the On The Bus homepage.

I particularly liked Katherine Q. Seelye's live blog at nyt.com.

Merrill Lynch would seem to think so. From the BBC:

Merrill Lynch said that the figures showing the jobless rate hitting 5% in December were the final piece in that puzzle.

"According to our analysis, this isn't even a forecast any more but is a present day reality," the report said.

Here's what Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly did at a Hillary Clinton rally in New Hampshire last Friday:

He stood in the audience and urged an audience member to ask the New York senator and former first lady about her plan to remove troops from Iraq.

Given there was some words directed in anger at the CBC after word got out that a Corpse reporter had allegedly passed some questions on to a Liberal MP on the Commons ethics committee to ask former prime minister Brian Mulroney during his appearance over l'affaire Schreiber, I would expect principled conservatives to condemn O'Reilly's actions.

President Pervez Musharraf lifted the state of emergency he imposed, yet Geo TV, Pakistan's most popular private TV station, remains off cable TV.

On Dec. 31, I posted about the request by Cincinnati Post editor Mike Philipps that none of his staff bring booze to work for the paper's last edition.

Slate's Jack Shafer makes the following argument in his Jan. 3 column: (thanks, Kevin S.!)

Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC Newsroom, has a long post at The BBC Editors blog on the value of citizen journalism.

From the post, which is largely based on a speech he gave to the University of Leeds' Institute of Communications Studies:

Some insights on the care and feeding of a journalist's identity in cyberspace. I would have posted this on Dec. 31, but Blogware went into a funk -- again. :(

From the Jan. 5 NYT:

In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings.

The trend — part of a broader phenomenon known as video snacking — is turning into a growth business for news and media companies, which are feeding the lunch crowd more fresh content.

The recent heart attack of Om Malik, a high-profile U.S. tech blogger, has some talking about the stresses inherent in being a one-man media band.

Since I reported the original allegation, here's the follow-up: Conservative pundit Rachel Marsden will not be charged with criminal harassment in the case of an ex-boyfriend and OPP officer.

If you read the post below, you'll realize I just returned from a holiday visit to Edmonton, the land of my birth.

I hit two favourite restaurants -- The King and I, a Thai joint, and Koutouki, a Greek one -- and am happy to report that since my last visit to the city, prices appear to be up about 30 per cent.

For example, a souvlaki dinner at Koutouki is now $26. I would think you could easily get an equivalent in the $15 to $20 range in Toronto.*

* Update: I walked by Asteria, on the Danforth in T.O., on Jan. 9. The pork souvlaki dinner is $9.95. I've eaten there, and while the decor is more basic than Koutouki, the food is pretty tasty.

Count on spending at least $70 for two at the King and I, which is up substantially from the cost of my last visit (although I can't precisely remember that cost :) ). I think you could do a little better on cost even here in the Big Smoke, and the quality would likely be better.

There might be an Alberta Advantage, but it ain't in restaurants.

That would be from Edmonton to Toronto from takeoff to landing -- a distance of about 2,700 kilometres.

And how long did it take Air Canada to move my baggage from the aircraft at Terminal 1's Gate 145 to Luggage Carousel 3, maybe 800 to 1,000 metres (that would be a guesstimate)?

An hour!

I was in line to report my bag as missing and was in the on-deck circle when the bag magically appeared.

Call me demanding, but that's atrocious service.

Addendum

I'm a whiner with no sense of proportion. CTV Edmonton reported Tuesday, Jan. 8 that hundreds of passengers flying through Edmonton International Airport with Air Canada have been waiting up to five days for their luggage to show up.

From the Jan. 4 Globe and Mail:

Conrad Black, who has already given up Canadian citizenship in exchange for a seat in the British House of Lords, is now asking the United States to extend the rights of its citizenship to him.

In what is effectively a bid to make Lord Black an honorary American, at least as far as where he is jailed, his lawyers have cited his admiration for the United States and his record of business there in a move to ease his prison conditions. ...

"Mr. Black's oral and written admiration for and support of the United States is well documented," the letter said. It added that Lord Black, who is a British citizen, "has been a very productive member of society, extensively investing in the American economy as a business owner over many years."

If Black gets the waiver, he could serve his time in a minimum security prison, possibly one relatively close to the Palm Beach manse.

I wonder if the argument will be hampered by the fact that this lifelong Amerophile broke U.S. laws. :)

From CBC.ca:

The number of journalists killed in the field has skyrocketed by 244 per cent in the past five years, and more than half of the 86 reporters slain in 2007 fell in Iraq, according to an annual tally compiled by Reporters Without Borders. 

The international media watchdog released on Wednesday its annual Press Freedom Roundup, which lists the number of journalists and media assistants killed in the line of duty over the past year, as well as statistics on media representatives who have been arrested and imprisoned.

According to the Paris-based group, there were 86 journalists killed in 2007 — the most since the 103 media deaths in 1994, which saw the Rwandan genocide, civil warfare in Algeria and fighting in the former Yugoslavia. The group said there has been a steady rise in the toll since 2002, when 25 journalists were slain.

The group singled out Iraq, which was where 47 journalists were killed in 2007 — all locals except for one Russian.

"No country has ever seen more journalists killed than Iraq, with at least 207 media workers dying there since the March 2003 U.S. invasion — more than in the Vietnam War, the fighting in ex-Yugoslavia, the massacres in Algeria or the Rwanda genocide," the agency said.

Here's the RSF report -- Press freedom round-up 2007.