Jian Ghomeshi: a catalyst for a prolonged CBC budget crisis with the Harper Government.

Former CBC Q host Jian Ghomeshi in a no-win position.

Jian Ghomeshi, consenting adults, the public good, legal wrangles and the CBC budgets.

by Tom Thorne

Jian Ghomeshi was fired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) last weekend. Apparently the CBC administration has discovered that Mr. Ghomeshi likes rough sex and he allegedly enjoys hitting and smacking women during sex. Mr Ghomeshi, himself,  has revealed that some of allegations do have traction.

In a weekend lengthy 1586 word Facebook account of his difficulties, Mr. Ghomeshi admitted to consensual rough sex with several different women. Some of the women are now coming forward saying they don’t remember giving their consent. None ever went to police to complain or to lay a charge against Mr. Ghomeshi. Most of the women have remained anonymous except actress Lucy DeCoutere and lawyer Reva Seth.

The problem the CBC faces is Mr. Ghomeshi  is prominently in the public eye and is a poster boy for the CBC in a time of crisis when their federal government budget allocations are under intense fire. The CBC has laid off possibly 600 plus staff because of their budget crisis with more recently. CBC morale is already tapped out.

The last thing the CBC administration needs at this time is to fuel the Harper Government with a scandal that won’t play very well with Conservative’s support base, which in turn will enable Harper to cut more CBC budget to look good with his political base in an election year. That’s the 38 percent that gave Harper a majority government last time.

So when this situation surfaced CBC administrators had little choice but to confront Mr. Ghomeshi for the greater good of the CBC which is sailing some very rough fiscal seas. Of course there are problems of removing their star from the firmament and removing Mr. Ghomeshi’s 3.5 metre high poster from their CBC building hallway in Toronto.

They have deals to consider with 170 US radio outlets where Mr Ghomeshi’s program Q is now aired daily. The CBC administration may end up saving face, doing the right thing for violence against women, but lose audience and prominence in the ever shifting broadcasting and developing web based distribution models. Not a good situation during a budget crisis.

However, CBC has little choice. In addition to the obvious business problems created by the Ghomeshi firing they may be in a lose-lose situation since they will experience more federal government budget cuts and they will be facing a civil suit for $55 million launched by Mr. Ghomeshi through his lawyers Dentons Canada LLP.  Mr Ghomeshi is also filing a reinstatement attempt with the broadcast union that represents on air CBC people.

An interesting development is the withdrawal of the public relations firm Navigator from the fray. This public and media relations company was initially engaged by Mr. Ghomeshi to represent his image interests and to offer advice. Their council may have been ignored in some way because they now realize that they cannot help him.

Was Navigator involved in the Facebook 1586 word statement? It gets his story out front. After that statement Mr. Ghomeshi has only remained silent. He has let his law firm represent him which is probably his wise and only choice. 

Navigator cannot hope to counter Lucy DeCoutere and Reva Seth going public describing their sexual experiences with Mr. Ghomeshi.  Anything Navigator could say or do with be seen as supporting violence against women. It is a no win argument and hence their departure from working with Mr. Ghomeshi.

Navigator’s only defence of Mr. Ghomeshi is to say that the rough sex was consensual implying that all the women also made a kinky personal sexual choices. That is also a public and media relations situation that is also a loser.  

What appears to be the case is Navigator has cut their loses for what quickly developed into a no-win situation which can only be seen as a tactical withdrawal before their own reputation for good PR work is sullied.

Mr. Ghomeshi may very well be permanently adrift with his career in tatters and facing legal wrangles that could go on for years. This CBC case will probably never get to court and it may yet be compounded by suits launched by the women involved. It remains to be seen if they launch actions and if their cases are criminal or civil. Violence against women has no statute of limitations. 

One can only conclude that Mr. Ghomeshi is in very deep trouble. The longer outcome for the CBC is not promising. The women involved probably now know that not reporting violence is bad for all women, and mostly those not involved with the famous.

©  Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved

How an Information Society digitally stores, secures and retrieves its history. History is made from what information survives time.

Papyrus scrolls are fragile preservers of history. Cuniform clay tablets preserve history very well for thousands of years. Digital media preservation may be even more fragile than papyrus because its information volume will be too intangible and large to fully interpret. 

That may very well define the nature of the history studies of a digitally-based Information Society. 

Digital content and preserving history.

by Tom Thorne

This article is the 165th that I have written for this blog. It is 100 percent captured, stored and displayed by digital systems.  As I examined the stories and articles that I have done since the blog started in 2011, I realized that the blog itself has never been downloaded as an entity or entirety by me for any possible archival survival or simply as a backup. 

Certainly I have digital copies of all the stories on the blog, but the blog itself with its presentation, pictures and comments is not backed up until today when I finally did it. But the blog is also stored digitally and is about as secure as a future hard drive crash or a scratch on a CD or DVD. It also sits ethereally on some Google host computer located somewhere in the vast digital expanse of the Internet. 

I have no real idea where Google keeps this blog. I know that when I post during the morning in Belleville, Canada it is put up somewhere in the early morning somewhere else on planet earth. My blog usage statistics has a different day ending than the one I am living in Ontario. The day where my blog viewer statistics ends is at 21:00 hours Ontario time.

So I backed it all up knowing full well that if I place it on a hard drive or digital CD or DVD it could easily be lost in the future. That act provoked thought about what using digital media really means. History is made from what media survives time or by what information can be accessed. It is also true for print and broadcasting both audio and video which are all also stored as digital files these days.

Archives that were buried or lost from Sumerian times 4000 years ago exist today on clay tablets most of which are tedious records of transactions by merchants. These caches of history are usually discovered by accident and made sense of by archaeologists.  A small number of these clay tablets record literature or art so there is always a bias of communications. The media that survive are literally the message. What that means to an Information Society is a big question.

Ideas we have of ancient Egypt are gleaned from surviving temple stones with chiselled hieroglyphic texts or from the much more fragile papyrus scroll medium. I well remember in 2010 seeing several versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead on papyrus in the Cairo Museum. It is a major preservation job to keep them from turning to dust. History is what survives as primary sources and as a result may offer only a fleeting fragment of what actually happened in those times.

In the case of these ancient texts on papyrus, clay or the fragile paper of the Dead Sea Scrolls for example, they are now also preserved and stored digitally while the originals are carefully put away in climate controlled storage.

Archives are regularly subject to the destruction of warfare. They are also destroyed by natural disasters or buried for safe keeping only to be lost when the human in charge dies or forgets where they are.  What survives becomes history. It can never be the full story. It is a selective story or account of a small window into human time and place. Digital storage of information is even more fleeting than paper, clay or stone.

Imagine a society that is interpreted in the future by a study of Facebook or Twitter files. Imagine all the blogs including this one that become the fabric for the social interpretation of our times.  I think I need to be much more responsible using this new medium if that is the case in the future. 

I like to think that this blog has some useful ideas and content, but a family blog showing their kids activities may have more sociological value to examining the 21st century than anything I say.  But how much will any of this survive as an archival record? They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Just zeros and ones magnetically held in place or burned into a plastic surface by a laser beam.

A few weeks ago we received a letter from our family doctor. He announced that he is retiring on 20 November 2014. He asked that we make certain that we order  our medical files which are in paper file folders and get them scanned and placed on a CD. Then whenever we find a new doctor we can present our disk. He has hired a document management company to do these backups at our expense.

As it turns out our doctor who we have had for 29 years has found a replacement but he wants a CD of our files when he takes over the practice in December.  We are having the backup disks made after 20 November. My wife’s file  is quite big and mine is average sized and we will be charged by the number of pages they have to scan.

This process calls into question paper versus electronic medical files. When the new doctor gets our digital file presumably the files will be digital from that time forward. I just saw a specialist who makes digital files as he talks to you. No paper, just notes on his laptop. My dentist does the same thing and is phasing out his paper files. My Income Tax is also a digital file each year. 

Hopefully these digital doctors and professionals have good backup systems so patient and client files are not lost in a crash. It seems to me that there is a huge digital document business is developing. At the moment these files are all held by individual professionals but it a short time until they will be all connected. 

In the medical world your health insurance number will access a digital file that shows the state of your health, medicines and pharmacy, specialists you have seen and any hospital stays. Ontario bureaucrats botched getting this running but it is inevitable since it is being done at the doctor’s office level.

This database will be digital so how it is secured and how it is stored and backed up is a crucial issue for our times. It will be able to offer a profile of what you cost the health system. It should stop duplication of dangerous prescription drugs. But where will this data be stored and secured and who will get to retrieve it? A future history drawn from these files will be able to analyze data to show the incidence of heart disease and cancer in the 21st century and how many people had dental mouth guards to stop them grinding their teeth when they are sleeping.

Digital history stores much more intimate information than ever before. Therefore it is more complex than ever before to manage. How so much data will be selected for use is an issue and how that information is pulled and selected from databases will define history of our times in the future. And if a digital system crashes then history will be redefined from what has survived just as it has been for the last six millennia from other more tangible media.


© Copyright, Tom Thorne, 2014, All Rights Reserved.