[A guest post from Dr. Adam Davidson-Harden, post-doctoral fellow at Queen's University in Kingston and an old friend.]

Well, pleased to be a guest here! I’ve been catching up on some of my reading, and the most recent piece by British journalist George Monbiot got me worked up again. Here is a journalist who is completely open about his position, and is never afraid to write from that premise, comprehensively and critically.

I think it’s true that journalism would be better if there were more openness about political positions.. or perhaps a two-pronged approach of laying out the facts and competing positions, as well as the opinion of the journalist.. balance, in this sense, would mean a balanced presentation of two arguments, which the public/reader can pick through, disagree with, etc. This is part of the power of the web – print media would likely balk at this kind of task, because of space issues. Incidentally, a reporter at the Waterloo Record confided in me that many of her colleagues share a displeasure that the paper has been thinned out beyond belief (she reacted when I made a comment to this effect).. the web is democratizing media, in a de facto, automatic kind of way.

I wonder how many students here at Queen’s (was in Kitchener-Waterloo until awhile ago) actually read broadsheets? Or do they get their news, as I now do, online from rss feeds and the like? Well, there’s a couple of cents for you.. in the meantime, I continue to be stunned and outraged by the politics of food and hunger, which Monbiot explicates well (along with Raj Patel in his book Stuffed and Starved).

To be further incited on the politics of exploitation of Africa, see Patrick Bond’s book Looting Africa…pleasure blogging here, my friend!

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