Media coverage bias

Here is a comment to the letters to the editor today in the Daily Gleaner:

The Telegraph Journal, Daily Gleaner and the Times and Transcript are irresponsible in failing to cover significant news related to FSL news in NB. These papers have also failed to publish letters sent to them by experts that oppose Kelly Lamrock’s new FSL plan.
Some omissions by the major papers of southern NB:

• A letter to the editor by expert Dr. Fred Genesee
• A letter to the editor by expert Gene Ouellette
• A letter to the editor by expert Robert Leavitt
• A letter to the editor by expert Joseph Dicks
• Measha Bruggergosman’s public statements against the elimination of EFI
• coverage of the CEC meeting in Fred. with 200 people in attendance
• coverage of the CEC meeting in Moncton on May 27th
• the alternate FSL plan by Dr. Joseph Dicks
• coverage of the French for the Future conference held in Fredericton with 210 French Immersion and Francophone students, 35 teachers and 20 guest speakers in attendance.

Papers should not selectively omit important news and letters.

If you haven’t already,

you might want to read an excellent commentary from Daylene Lumis, “Discuss education and immersion issues fully.” Also worth reading: letters from C. MacCallum, Sue Park, and Lila Johnson from a couple of days back about her eye-opening conversation with her MLA.

Emotion

A recent article in the Gleaner has the following paragraph:

“On some of the issues emotion is very important,” said Graham. “But pertaining to education today, I feel emotion has clouded the real reason on why we are bringing forward an improved education system now that is going to provide bilingual opportunities for every student in the province.”

Reason versus emotion. This is what we eggheads call a “false dichotomy”: the two things are not necessarily opposed. Of course, when the Premier says “the real reason on why we are bringing forward an improved education system,” he is almost certainly not referring to reason in the abstract: thinking; rationality; reasonableness. No, he means “motive,” which in this particular case is the opposite of reasonable.

That aside, one wonders what these “some of the issues” on which “emotion is very important” actually are, if not our children? How about: being cheated? May we get emotional about that? Or about not being listened to? Not being properly represented? Being lied to, and insulted, and treated with disrespect, and manipulated?

Are any of these things about which it is permissible to be emotional?

Media attention

continues unabated:

• Montreal Gazette: “New Brunswick takes a step backward” and “N.B. cutting French immersion program could spark language tensions“
• The Globe and Mail has had excellent coverage: “‘We want to be bilingual!’ ‘We love French!’”; “Anger mounts over French immersion cuts“; “Immersion delayed, immersion denied“; “N.B. schools scrap early French immersion“; and more. Download a PDF.
• Parents of students in the Francophone system have concerns (Daily Gleaner)
• Letters today in the Telegraph-Journal, Daily Gleaner, Times&Transcript

Immersion delayed, immersion denied

The Globe and Mail has an editorial today which begins

The speed with which small children can pick up a language is hardly disputable. Countless people on this planet observe it every day. Again and again, solid research has confirmed the phenomenon. Yet the government of the only province in Canada that has declared itself officially bilingual is acting in defiance of this gift of nature. This month, New Brunswick announced that it will wind down the French immersion program in the early grades of Anglophone schools.

And, an excellent commentary in the Times&Transcript by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau.

See the letters in the Telegraph-Journal and The Daily Gleaner.

And Robert Macleod in the T-J also asks, where’s Shawn?

But is the provincial government listening? No. And apparently, there is even more to come.

Biting tongue.

In an excellent commentary, Marie-Claude Blais asks, “Is our Education Minister smarter than a 3rd grader?” David Wagner points out that he doesn’t know much math. And there are questions about his use of English.