A journalist at one of Toronto’s major news broadcasters is believed to be Canada’s first anchor to don a Muslim head scarf.
Ginella Massa was asked to fill in on the anchor desk for CityNews’ 11 p.m. broadcast last week. She created a buzz after the broadcast ended and she tweeted: “That’s a wrap! Tonight wasn’t just important for me. I don’t think a woman in hijab has ever anchored a newscast in Canada.”
“I’ve talked to many women who are journalists in the U.S. who work behind the scenes, and they’ve told me that they face multiple challenges trying to get on air. They’ve been told because of their hijab, that’s not going to happen. That makes me really sad because they’re being held back by someone else’s idea of what the public can or cannot handle.”
Massa, 29, said Friday that she became Canada’s first hijab-wearing television news reporter in 2015 while reporting for CTV News in Kitchener, Ontario, west of Toronto. She moved back to Toronto, where she grew up, this year to take a reporting job at CityNews.
“But this is all the more reason in today’s climate to see positive images of Muslim women. They are a symbol of Islam when they wear the hijab, and that carries a powerful image. It’s so important to see positive images of us in the media.”
Massa said in an interview that it took her editor to point out the larger significance. “It wasn’t until my editor said, ‘Hey, great job! Was that a first for Canada? A woman in a hijab?’ And I said yes. Read the rest of this entry »
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. Read the rest of this entry »
David Rutz reports: Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough assailed mainstream liberal media bias Monday, leading a lengthy discussion about the far-reaching influence of Democrats in television media and challenging his panel to name any Republicans who’d held such positions.
“Somehow, if you’re George Stephanopoulos, it’s ok because you’re a Democrat. If you’re Tim Russert, it’s ok. All I am saying is, you cannot do it. Name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years. You cannot do it.”
His fellow MSNBC panelists could offer only sporadic examples, one of whom was deceased.
Scarborough remarked legendary anchor Walter Cronkite and the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert were liberals, yet they were considered “objective.” No Republicans, he said, were ever allowed to hold such esteemed places in the mainstream press by left-leaning network heads.
“Outside of Brit Hume, who has been a conservative in the mainstream media in the past 30 years who you’ve worked for? Outside of Brit Hume, who has held a powerful position at ABC, NBC or CBS News on the air?”
“When you say objective, we Republicans have been forced to define objective as people who were objective Democratic voters,” Scarborough said. “Outside of Brit Hume, who has been a conservative in the mainstream media in the past 30 years who you’ve worked for? Outside of Brit Hume, who has held a powerful position at ABC, NBC or CBS News on the air?”
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