About that Petition Against Sun TV…
September 3, 2010 | 1 Comment
Well, if you weren’t following the Canadian twitterverse today, you missed a bunch of stuff. Apparently, someone signed the names of numerous journalists to that slightly paranoid petition Avaaz.org set up to fight Sun TV (aka ‘Fox News North’). Even Tory Keneycke (the man behind Sun TV) had his name affixed to the petition.
Well, CBC’s Kady O’Malley did some digging (and way too much twittering for her sanity, though just enough for the enjoyment of the rest of us) and found out a few things:
Right about the same time that the above showed up on my screen, my phone rang, and it was none other than my twitter correspondent himself [Kory Teneycke]. He confirmed that his source was, in fact, the person who had added those names to the petition, apparently to prove “what a joke” it was, what with the complete absence of any sort of verification process that would prevent someone with mischief in mind from doing — well, pretty much exactly what his correspondent did.
…
This afternoon, I spoke with Avaaz executive director Ricken Patel — who had just wrapped up a pretape of a debate with Teneycke that will run on tonight’s edition of Power and Politics. He told me that, although they still hadn’t identified the source, they have “tracked all of the suspect names to a single IP address,” and that it appears that “a good number of the journalists who were fraudulently added were from the same source that added the Snuffluphagus” — which would, of course, be the very same correspondent who tipped off Tenecyke to the fake names in time for him to include them in his column today.
…
Just I was writing up the above chronology, I got another call from Teneycke, who told me that he’d asked his correspondent whether he had added the journalists’ names as well as the joke submissions, and he denied it. Which means that unless and until Avaaz provides the IP logs from last night — which could present privacy concerns if done publicly — it’s Patel’s word vs. that of Teneycke’s unnamed and confessed-fake-signature-submitting source.
In the end, does much of this really matter (aside from prominent journalists wanting to clear their names – that I understand). We’ve got a silly ill-formed online petition “maliciously attacked” as it lobbies for the CRTC to block a new news channel. Sure, I see no reason to get excited about Sun TV, but I’m no more excited about CBC Newsworld. I’m down with altering the CRTC so that it treats the two stations equally… even if it requires some – gasp – political manoeuvering. When will someone start an online petition for that?
Wait, forget I asked that…
Tags: Avaaz > CRTC > Fox News North > Kady O'Malley > Kory Teneycke > Sun TV > Twitterverse
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One Response to “About that Petition Against Sun TV…”
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September 4th, 2010 @ 2:04 am
“a single IP address”
This has been a minor rage in journalism lately – tracking back “web vandalism” to its source IP address.
So, for all you potential wikipedia freelancers out there two words of advice: IP Proxy.
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