Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

Police had been listening in on wiretap phone calls between Bains and his cousin Dave Basi when they began to hear strange things about BCRail.

So Bains is expected to be a key witness when Basi, Virk, and Basi come to trial in the BC Rail Case.

Neal Hall mentioned that Bains was expected to go to trial himself on drugs charges “sometime in 2008″. So I watched carefully for that. Nothing.

Then in December 2008, an astute follower of my blog overheard a comment at a Basi Virk hearing. He looked around the Supreme Courtroom and saw no media there, and decided to tell me about it.

Frankly, I couldn’t believe it: Bains sentenced to 9 years? When did this happen?

I held the story back for 2 days (just as you said, Ms Bula) … “trying to find out information and then trying to verify it and then trying to shape it into a story”. I was astonished to find it was true.

Jas Bains had gone to trial in June 2008 in Victoria Court House … just a few blocks down the street from CanWest’s Times Colonist. In August 2008, the jury had found him guilty. And in September 2008, the judge sentenced him to 9 years and a huge fine.

That’s how – 6 months after it happened — I, as the blogger BC Mary — broke one of the biggest BC stories ever. My headline was: JASMOHAN BAINS SENTENCED TO 9 YEARS.

But nothing happened. My regular readers were appreciative. Nobody in Big Media picked it up. Two more months went quietly by.

What kind of a news media wouldn’t have noted this story in the first place? wouldn’t have noted it on a blog or in comments (like this)?

Then one day, something I said to Ian Mulgrew caught his attention. He must’ve done what I did: confirmed the story, then wrote it up: DRUG DEALER LINKED TO LEGISLATURE RAID IMPRISONED. Vancouver Sun, Feb 17, 2009 … 8 months after the trial.

I love this line: “This significant event went apparently unreported until it appeared on citizen journalist Mary Mackie’s blog [http://bctrialofbasi-virk.blogspot.com/] and was brought to my attention …”

I have enormous respect for journalism, Frances, but I’m darned if I can understand how such an important story could be treated this way — especially when there’s gunfire in the streets and the politicians are making speeches about fighting crime.

Oh. And there’s been no further mention of the Bains story in Big Media either.

The issue is really “good journalism”. As several of us have commented, we grew up believing that what we were exposed to in the MSM was “good journalism”. Now that we have ready access to the information sources via the internet, it’s easy to do our own research and fact checking, and we have discovered that the overwhelming majority of journalism is not “good journalism”.

What journalists need to do is stop looking down their noses at the bloggers, and instead take a leaf out of their books. Do research properly, don’t take officialdom’s word for everything, provide some in-depth coverage. Take a stand on the facts.

The biggest turn-off for me from the MSM is the content-free, he-said-she-said kind of reporting that you find.

For eg, there was an article in the G&M yesterday (or so), headlined “how to fix the DTES”. An interview with some UBC functionary. The entire article consisted of fluff, with not a single practical suggestion of what might be done; not a single tough question for the interviewee; not a single line suggesting that maybe the interviewee wasn’t exactly coming forward with real solutions. What a complete waste of my time to read that.

On the other hand, I can read a few blog posts here, together with the comments, and find a whole bunch of practical, implementable ideas. There’s a lot of shouting and partisanship and vitriol, but there’s real information in it all. I’m quite happy to wade through a bit of vitriol and crap if I can come out even marginally better informed at the end.

Sure as hell I’m not going to pay for the sanitized hot air that emanates from the MSM.

A lot of people here seem to think the problem is Canwest. I think that’s bogus – this decline is all across the political spectrum, and all over the world. My opinion is that the problem is the mind-set of journalists who believe they’re better than us, the audience, because they have the stage and the “insider” connections. Well, y’all might have the inside connections still, but we now have the stage. And once your connections realise you no longer have the stage, they’ll disappear as well.

Well first, I find this thread itself pretty inspiring because all of these well thought out and carefully expressed opinions put together make a point beyond opinion, which is that there is tremendous depth of knowledge, variety of perspective and most importantly desire both to teach and to learn among people in general when it comes to the issues we care about. That is what blogging mobilizes at its best and it’s extremely powerful. If social progress is related to the increasing interconnectedness of people, which promotes understanding, sympathy, public organization and public action, then I think the near future will be a very exciting time for us and rude blog comments aren’t really going to impact this structural change, although they are annoying.

However, I think both blogs and mainstream media are essential. What we want socially, I believe, is opinion of the greatest quantity and fact of the greatest quality. We want access to the most ideas, but we want someone to really try hard to get us the straight facts so that we can interpret them in these various ways. Blogs can do the opinion thing great, no barriers
to entry usually, instantaneous communication, and for free, but the production of genuine facts typically isn’t free. I don’t think we’re ready to do away with the paid fact-finder yet. It takes time, expertise and organization to get somebody to find out how BC Rail got sold, how much money the DTES efforts are costing etc. and that all requires money and therefore requires generally a price.

So long as people can recognize fact from opinion and value fact independently, they will be willing to pay a price for fact-finders. But MSM needs to do 2 things that it’s not doing: First, be conscious of the fact that your only unassailable niche is now In-Depth Fact Finding. Don’t tell me something I can read for free that’s all. I should be able to read pretty much any article and tell pretty soon that this is not the free paper or a website or else there is no mystery why your paper isn’t selling for $1.50. Second, find a way to conveniently charge a price for this, maybe a higher price than is now normal. The Province’s Operation Phoenix is exactly what a paper is now for but why a ‘paper’. Tell me how much money we are putting into the DTES, find obvious inefficiencies, interview people about how we can help the destitute better, put it on my screen in my bedroom, and I’ll send you a dollar on my PayPal. So I think rumours of MSM’s death are highly exaggerated.

PS. I also believe part of the problem with newspapers is an interesting little economic phenomenon. If a newspaper doesn’t differentiate itself from others, the online version will have to be free because if even one other paper has a free online version to promote readership, all other paid newspaper sites with similar content are obsolete. The cost to any individual newspaper of pushing their content onto the internet is virtually nil and if no one else is doing it than you are competing mainly with the paid version of other papers rather than your own and so this is a good way to generate readership. However, once one paper does this everybody must soon jump in and suddenly everyones free internet version is competing with everyone’s paid newspaper version. In other words, the technology of the internet is forcing newspapers to offer free products which collectively compete with their own paid products.

The only way to get away with charging for an online version of the newspaper is to offer something different from the others, mainly In Depth Fact Finding such as Operation Phoenix, specific interviews, exclusives of various kinds, unique segments. Then you can charge because people can’t get it elsewhere. You might read one interview somewhere for free, but you will still be willing to pay for a different interview on a different subject elsewhere.

The CanWest business model if I understand it, of information sharing, reliance on newswire and on shallow information, requires pushing so much onto the internet for free and is now suicidal. When everyone is doing this, it only creates the illusion that people won’t pay for MSM, but they just don’t have to that’s all.

I’d like to offer thoughts on many of the other comments here, but that would be exhausting for all concerned. But I will just add one little response to Forthingham above here — do you really think that universities would be untouched by political or economic concerns when it comes to supporting investigative journalism? Increasingly, they are hyper-sensitive about endowments and government funding.

The fundamental problem that I keep turning over in my head is: Who is willing to pay for good journalism? I don’t see any answers here. It seems to me that the danger of the future is that there will be two kinds of journalism: 1. Journalism supported by those willing to pay for information, which will be primarily business interests. (That’s the way journalism started, back in the early days.) That doesn’t mean it will be bad, but it will be focused very tightly on what that audience wants 2. Journalism that no one wants to pay for, which means it will be either blogs run by people with single interests or junk commercial journalism that supports itself with minimal advertising and is produced with the least investment possible.

…. this in fact could be the Corporate marching orders read to Canwest Journalists.

And after a few years of proffering such puffery on their readers they find themselves on the wrong side of relevancy.

As for the rest of the Western Media …

I believe there are good opportunities and business models that will foster good journalism. At the momentum the sate of journalism is in transition, and we are too close to the ground to see the future sources of in depth news analysis … but they will come…

With blogs and other avenues of publications, one could even make the case that Universities and Schools of Journalism will provide new opportunities for scholars and journalist to practice their craft of investigative reporting without being beholden to over zealous owners and Political ties.

There specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ‘quick to cover’, ‘safe to publish’; they need to ‘select safe facts’ preferably from official sources; they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the highly connected political lobbies; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because you haven’t said anything’). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. So goes Canwest, so goes Western Media…

The public was failed miserably by MSM in the past decade. Several major stories were ignored, misrepresented or written on order.
Multinationals cannibalized smaller periodicals and local newspapers in their bid to get the lion’s share of a market they thought they will easily control when the competition would become a thing of the past. One single mistake although; they miscalculated the power of the new Kid on the block, the WWW a.k.a. the Internet.
Of course the Internet is not immune to censorship and/or brainwashing diseases.
A recent Trojan horse manoeuvre by the Facebook administrators meant to control, direct and own in perpetuity the personal content of their members failed dejectedly when the whole story was exposed on personal blogs. Facebook backed off, for now…
The MSM will become less and less used as an information source, not only that it moves at slower speeds than the already embedded blogger but the credibility loss is not going to be recaptured. Think MSM vs. Blogger the equivalent to RCMP vs. Paul Pritchard whose video of the YVR Robert Dziekanski Taser incident made it around the world in a nanosecond.
Voila! Why not your next topic for discussion? It’s local, it concerns all of us and it affects all of us in ways more vivid than some lost chickens in the city.
I always wondered, if he was still alive, what would Rudyard say?
We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.