"Are men society's scapegoats?" asks female journalist

By Vicki Larson, Good Men Project website, July 12, 2011
Gabriel Aubry is being a bad dad. Well, we don’t know that for a fact; all we know is that actress Halle Berry, with whom the model had a daughter, now 3, is claiming that he’s been neglectful. She may be right, she may be wrong, but in the eyes of much of the world, Aubry’s already guilty.

People can — and do — say anything they want in a nasty custody or divorce battle. And as a society, we often tend to assume the worst about men. But what if we’re wrong?
We’re used to men being violent. Literature, movies and video games are full of heroes and antiheroes who kill and maim their way into our hearts and nightmares. At the same time, we tell boys to “suck it up” instead of expressing pain, leaving them few emotions but anger. Then we chastise them when they actually get angry — or live in fear of their anger. And sometimes we use the one emotion we’ve allowed them to our advantage.
Men, of course, aren’t the only ones who can do damage; statistics show that women can be just as violent as men. But while the Violence Against Women Act provides millions of dollars for shelters for abused women, you don’t see too many shelters — any, actually — for abused men. “It’s often been taken for granted that women can’t really do that much damage, so it’s OK to maybe slap your boyfriend or do something of that nature,” says Kellie Palazzolo, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication who is overseeing research on how college students perceive female and male perpetrators.
That may be why so many women applauded Elin Nordegren’s alleged golf club attack on then-hubby Tiger Woods – we just don’t like to think of women being violent except in self-defense. He cheated on her; he made her do that!
And in the “he said-she said” of so many marital breakups, like that of Hulk and Linda Hogan, where she claims he was violent and abusive and he says she’s “delusional,” or of actress Meredith Baxter, who claims in her memoir, “Untitled”, that she was physically and psychologically abused by ex David Birney, while he says her book’s “an appalling abuse of the truth,” whom do we believe?
Same when it comes to sexual violence. In the “he said-she said” of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was released from house arrest last week, and the 32-year-old hotel maid he allegedly raped, the maid has a history of lying and Strauss-Kahn has a history of sexual predation. Whom do we believe?
Hélène Périvier, co-director of the gender program at Paris’ Institut d’Etudes Politiques, worries the fallout of the DSK case may hurt women; while false reports of rape and sexual violence are statistically rare, she says, “it suffices to cement doubts and discredit the word of women going to the police in the future.”
But women, like men, lie, and the results can be devastating. And false reports of rape and sexual violence are not as statistically rare as Périvier and others may believe, according to many experts, including Dr. Warren Farrell, chair of the Commission to Create a White House Council on Boys to Men, who details the results of numerous studies in his books “Father and Child Reunion” and “The Myth of Male Power.” In fact, they occur often during divorce.
As Farrell writes:
“Men are about 19 more times more likely than women to say they have been falsely accused of sexual abuse. About 85 percent of these abuse allegations are made by women during battles over parent time, during the throes of divorce, or when a live-in situation is failing. … “(A) sex-abuse charge — even if false — often costs the father his job, his health, his friends, his reputation, and his relationship with his child.”
Like the hotel maid who allegedly discussed the possible benefits of pursuing charges against Strauss-Kahn, we’re all — men and women — able to exploit each other. When it comes to custody cases, however, the odds are often stacked against dads. “Some women are coached to make false allegations of domestic violence, rape and child abuse,” says Dr. Tara Palmatier, the no-nonsense founder of A Shrink 4 Men, in an email exchange with me. “Their attorneys may file baseless restraining orders to raise the stakes on men in the divorce or custody cases. These tactics don’t just hurt men: they create widespread cynicism about the family court and the efficacy of the justice system.”
Oregon took a bold step to address that last week when Gov. John Kitzhaber signed into law HB2183, which comes down hard on anyone knowingly making a false case of child abuse. The key is “knowing,” says the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Wayne Krieger, who acknowledged that false accusations often arise between divorcing couples.
But, how often is that? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Children & Families says of the percentage of the 3.3 million referrals for child abuse and neglect in 2009 it investigated, “Two-thirds of reports found all allegations to be unsubstantiated or intentionally false (64.3% and 0.1%, respectively).” But child abuse or neglect is just a small part of false claims in custody battles.
Many high-conflict custody cases don’t start out that way, Farrell says, because most about-to-be divorced moms recognize that kids need their dads, too. But divorce offers a chance to start over — maybe move closer to one’s parents or to a new love, or relocate for a new job. If a savvy lawyer informs a woman that her ex could get equal custody, thus putting the kabosh on her plans, and then asks if she ever feared him, whether he ever cursed at her, called her names, raised his voice or screamed in a fit of rage, “I’m so angry at you, I could kill you” — and what marriage doesn’t have some sort of anger, yelling or threats? — well, there’s a false case of abuse in the making, he says. Divorces can become high conflict if a dad, realizing that his ex’s plans may cause him to lose his kids and he doesn’t want to lose them, cries, “No way!”
In the custody battle between champion fighter Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell and his ex, Lori Geyer, over their 12-year-old son, accusations are flying on both sides. Who knows who’s telling the truth? But one thing Geyer may have on her side is fear; she says Liddell tried to intimidate her by “pacing back and forth and staring her down.” And fear is enough to raise the shadow of a doubt, Farrell says. Most judges would rather take the safe route — after all, who wants to make a mistake and put a child or woman back in an abuser’s control?
And so men walk around somewhat guilty until proven innocent. And sometimes, no one’s too interested in proving them innocent.
Farrell is. He gets weekly calls from men who say they’re being falsely accused. So is Palmatier. The clinical psychologist has worked with numerous men in abusive relationships who feel unheard. Men, she tells me, are often default scapegoats. A woman hits a man and we assume he did something to her to justify it. A father doesn’t see his kids so he must be a deadbeat dad, even if the truth is that his ex has done everything in her power to keep him from them. A woman screams and neighbors call the cops who arrest the husband when it was the wife who assaulted him.
“As a society, we don’t typically think of men in the role of a victim. We can’t even recognize it when we’re confronted by physical evidence,” Palmatier writes. “On the other hand, we’re inclined to believe accusations about men.”
Not only is it unfair and dishonest, she says, but it’s “damaging to boys and young men, gender relations, relationships, families and ‘the best interests of the children.’ And it gives the women who are predators a free pass.”
Automatically assuming the worst of men is a form of discrimination, she, Farrell and others say. And they’re right.
Halle Berry says Gabriel Aubry is being a bad dad, just as many women say about their exes. Whom do you believe?
This article first appeared on the Huffington Post, where Vicki Larson is a regular columnist.
Vicki Larson is the lifestyles editor at the Marin Independent Journal, and writes for Mommy Tracked, Huffington Post, The Working Chronicles, a national project that explores what Americans think about work, as well as other places. You can follow her on Twitter at @OMGchronicles or visit her blog at OMGchronicles.vickilarson.com
Let's not ignore the fact that men, too, can falsely cry fowl if and when the woman declares the marriage over.They can and do accuse their spouse of "being so mentally ill as to be incapable of making such a momentous decision." And if there has been any evidence of aberrant behaviour to that end, most people will believe such a false claim, without the necessary and should-be mandatory step of investigating the full truth.
Women, coached by women, also can and do execute the projected anger of their "counsellors" who may have experienced some nefarious act by a male, even vicariously. They then "counsel" their female clients to misrepresent the facts in their accounting of any relationship. I know of one such female counsellor whose college room mate was allegedly abused sexually by a male, which counsellor years later "counselled" her client to misrepresent the facts in their joint attack against another male, for the purpose of revenge. The statements, uninvestigated and without corroboration, resulted in significant personal and professional loss to the subject male who had, in fact, been engaged to the client female.
No due process was ever enacted and no repercussions were administered on either the female client or the female counsellor.
Another case of my knowledge involved a woman who "hit" on a male, only to be later coached to submit a formal complaint against the male to "authorities" by an older woman who blatantly and overtly sought revenge on the male in question, for her own purposes. No investigation followed the slander of the male in that case either. And certainly no consequences came to either woman from their actions.
A third case that requires mention is that a female of my rather close acquaintance so terrified and threatened her husband that he developed a serious speech impediment, a serious stammer, which left him free to conduct his business but returned the moment he stepped inside his home. The condition plagued this male, also a rather close acquaintance, for the better part of his sixty-plus year marriage, without abatement.
So, when I read a piece like the one above by Ms Larson, I easily understand and empathize with the males who have been similarly, or more seriously, abused and most often without recourse.

Singapore: the model for water conservation and management says author

By Alex Prud'Homme, New York Times, July 16, 2011
Growing population has increased the burden on our water supply. There are more people on earth than ever, and in many places we are using water at unsustainable rates. Cultural shifts contribute to subtle, far-reaching effects on water supplies. In 2008, for the first time, more people lived in cities than in rural communities worldwide, and water is becoming urbanized. Yet some of the world’s biggest cities — Melbourne, Australia; Barcelona, Spain; and Mexico City — have already suffered drought emergencies. Further drying could lead to new kinds of disasters. Consider Perth, Australia: its population has surpassed 1.7 million while precipitation has decreased. City planners worry that unless drastic action is taken, Perth could become the world’s first “ghost city” — a modern metropolis abandoned for lack of water.

Similar fates may await America’s booming desert cities: Las Vegas, Phoenix or Los Angeles.
Our traditional response to desiccation has been to build hydro-infrastructure — dams, pipelines, aqueducts, levees. Many advocate building even bigger dams and ambitious plumbing projects including one that calls for “flipping the Mississippi,” a scheme to capture Mississippi floodwater and pipe it to the parched West. But it is now widely believed that large water diversion projects are expensive, inefficient and environmentally destructive.
The Holy Grail of water managers is to find a drought-proof water source. Weather modification (“weather mod”), or cloud seeding, is a particularly appealing ideal. When American chemists discovered that dry ice dropped into clouds produced snow, and that clouds seeded with silver iodide produced rain, they rhapsodized about ending drought. Under perfect conditions, weather mod can increase precipitation by 10 to 15 percent. Ski areas, including Vail, Colo., hire companies to seed snow-producing clouds. And China claims that it produced 36 billion metric tons of rain a year between 1999 and 2006.
But critics, including the National Research Council, question weather mod and its efficacy. Bottom line: though evidence suggests weather mod works to a limited extent, it is unlikely to produce a major supply of water soon.

The ocean is a more promising water source. For centuries people have dreamed of converting saltwater into a limitless supply of fresh water. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy said that “if we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from saltwater” it would “dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.” By 2008 over 13,000 desalination plants around the world produced billions of gallons of water a day. But “desal,” which is costly and environmentally controversial, has been slow to catch on the United States.
Recycled sewage offers an interesting, if aesthetically questionable, drinking source. (Supporters call recycled sewage “showers to flowers”; detractors condemn “toilet to tap” schemes.) Plans for sewage recycling, which involves extracting and purifying the water, are slowly gaining acceptance. Windhoek, Namibia — one of the driest places on earth — relies solely on treated wastewater for its drinking supply. In El Paso 40 percent of the tap water is recycled sewage. Fairfax, Va., gets 5 percent of its tap water from recycling effluent. But the “yuck factor” has led to a sharp debate about its merits.
MEANWHILE, global demand for water is expected to increase by two-thirds by 2025, and the United Nations fears a “looming water crisis.” To forestall a drought emergency, we must redefine how we think of water, value it, and use it.
Singapore provides a noteworthy model: no country uses water more sparingly. In the 1950s, it faced water rationing, but it began to build a world-class water system in the 1960s. Now 40 percent of its water comes from Malaysia, while a remarkable 25 to 30 percent is provided by desalination and the recycling of wastewater; the rest is drawn from sources that include large-scale rainwater collection. Demand is curbed by high water taxes and efficient technologies, and Singaporeans are constantly exhorted to conserve every drop. Most important, the nation’s water is managed by a sophisticated, well-financed, politically autonomous water authority. As a result, Singapore’s per-capita water use fell to 154 liters, about 41 gallons, a day in 2011, from 165 liters, about 44 gallons, in 2003.
America is a much larger and more complex nation. But Singapore’s example suggests we could do a far better job of educating our citizens about conservation. And we could take other basic steps: install smart meters to find out how much water we use, and identify leaks (which drain off more than 1 trillion gallons a year); use tiered water pricing to encourage efficiency; promote rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling on a large scale. And like Singapore, we could streamline our Byzantine water governance system and create a new federal water office — a water czar or an interagency national water board — to manage the nation’s supply in a holistic way
Alex Prud'Homme is the author of “The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century.”
If ever there were an issue about which the world's inhabitants should be concerned, it is the future of our water supply, a supply to assure the continuation of life in all its forms.
And, living on the shore of the largest body of fresh water in the world, The Great Lakes, one does not notice any attention being paid by political leaders about the need to conserve water.
"We have it; we use it gluttonously!" could be the Canadian mantra. No country takes its water supply more for granted than Canada. And no country could be a better example for the world than Canada.
Let's keep telling and re-telling the story of the need for water conservation, and for the United Nations to continue to push for water to remain a "human right" in the hope that since every person on the planet and every person not yet conceived will depend on clean, accessible drinking water, and we must guard its preservation, conservation and management with our lives.
And Singapore could be our best mentor in that process!

Murdoch hacking scandal besmirches us all

By Eric Reguly, Globe and Mail, July 13, 2011
In Britain, the political backlash against News Corp. and the Murdochs, a family that had been courted by Britain’s political and business elites for decades, has been extraordinarily vicious (Mr. Cameron called it “a firestorm”). While the phone-hacking scandal has been burbling away for years, it picked up momentum in recent months, thanks to a steady stream of nasty revelations reported by The Guardian, and burst wide open early last week.

Mr. Cameron said he was “absolutely disgusted” by the scandal and, on Friday, launched two independent inquiries, the first to determine the true extent of the hacking scandal, the other into press regulation. Meanwhile, the police are investigating possible police corruption in connection to the payments from reporters.
When Rupert and James Murdoch euthanized the News of the World, their biggest newspaper, with a circulation of 2.7 million, they may have thought the swift and brutal act was enough to buy them some political sympathy and preserve their attempt to buy the 61 per cent of BSkyB that they did not already own. They were dead wrong.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown went ballistic when reports surfaced that his phone may have been hacked to discover medical information about his son. On Wednesday, in Parliament, Mr. Brown accused News International of “law breaking on an industrial scale” and said the News of the World “had descended from the gutter into the sewers.” Ruling and Opposition politicians joined the fray, demanding that News Corp. kill its attempted takeover of BSkyB while the criminal inquiries were under way.
It did. The Murdochs’ power stranglehold over the British media market has been broken.
Allegations of phone hacking into the private messages of former Prime Ministers (Brown) and of murder victims, and potentially of 9-11 victims in New York, by reporters for the Murdoch media empire, plus televised interviews of reporters admitting they simply "made up" stories about public figures for insertion into Murdoch-owned papers is criminal, and could conceivably land some people in jail. Several have already been arrested as the story continues to be investigated both in Britain and in the U.S.
However, there are two aspects to the story that have received little, if any, mention.
First, the public appetite for smut, no matter the source, and no matter the veracity of the content.
These Murdoch papers, led by the News of the World, are heavily subscribed because of their "below-the-belt" gossip content. There are literally millions of people whose daily diet of information has included feeding at the trough of  info-slime that has poured though the ink onto the pages of tabloids like News of the World.
The public appetite for this stuff is limitless, and we are all tainted by the gluttony of those whose lives and whose perceptions of the rest of the people of the world are scum-bags, whose stories are papering over both that insatiable appetite and Murdoch's (and others') insatiable appetite for greed and profit that counts on the readers spending their cash on this garbage. So let's not, as the "public," be so outraged at the Murdoch's and their ilk who profit from our collective scurrilous and mean-spirited appetite for the worst kind of private "peeping" into the lives of those perhaps victims, perhaps ruling class (including the royals according to some reports). Prime Minister David Cameron, only recently a "friend" of the now resigned former editor of the News of the World, is only the leader of the pack of the public who formerly fed at Murdoch's trough of parties for favours in order to get the kind of ubiquitous coverage that all political aspirants need for their power-hungry motives to get elected.
Second, it is even more disconcerting that humanity, including individual human lives, and especially the private and often less-than-salutary details of those lives that is considered "fair game" in a world drunk on technological capability to acess and to publish anything, so long as it sells and so long as it generates profit for owners, executives and investors.
We have become the devourers of our own "shit" in the metaphoric sense. And many of us thought only "animals" ate the feces as part of their diet. And, regardless of the laws we pass, and the lectures to which we are subjected, often by those who stirred the pots in the Murdoch kitchens where this vomit was cooked, and the court cases that will drag this story out into the far distant headlines and digital reports, we will continue to be characterized, all of us, by this tragic reminder of the Swiftian dung so characteristic of his cast in Gulliver's Travels.
It is our darkest side that the Murdoch appetites of ambition (reporters and editors), and the appetites of greed (Murdoch and his investors) and the appetites for power (Cameron and the political class) and the appetites for gossip (the readers who shelled out cash daily for this kind of story and we all have the smell and the colour (brown) and the historic stench of our own worst demons "all over" this story.
And we all need to take a look at what we are doing to our society, to our weakest humans whether they are the starving and the dying on long walks in drought-ridden Africa, or the people in our political "board rooms" and ask ourselves if this is the kind of society we want to leave to our grandchildren.
I, for one, do not. And I can only hope there are enough others who share that view, so that not only through new legislation but more importantly through new and revised attitudes, we re-consider how we value human life, not merely whether it was conceived "inside marriage" but how we value it in and through the lives of all pilgrims on the planet.
And digging for this kind of smut, in order to satisfy profit and thirst for gossip, true or not, is not "our best"...we can do better!

Hunger Crisis on Horn of Africa, needs support from around the world now!

From cbc.ca/thenational website, July 14, 2011
There is a crisis of epic proportions in the Horn of Africa. People are starving and the numbers in danger keep rising. According to the CBC report, some 10,000,000 million people are hungry, two million of them children. And for a few dollars, a child can be fed for a week on a single portion of a newly developed nutritional food based on peanut paste.
According the World Food Program, only a few months ago, a Kenyan farmer could buy a bag of corn with the sale of a single goat. Today, that same bag of corn costs him 5 goats. So there is apparently a perfect storm brewing: drought, now one every two years, whereas three decades ago, it was more like one draught every decade, and the governments of Ethopia, Kenya and Somalia are ill-equipped to meet the crisis.
This is also a global security problem because people without food will do anything to get it, and are vulnerable to the seductions of those who would prey on them for ulterior motives.
We are all, every single person reading this, and every single person in every single country in the world, needed to meet this crisis...through a meagre $5 if everyone reading this were to link with one of the aid agencies, many of these starving people would survive.
While the list is not exhaustive, it is at least a beginning for those readers who might be interested in and willing to make a contribution....and also speak to your government representatives... because there is not only a short term crisis, there is also a long-term problem that requires governmental assistance...And there is reason to believe that this is only the beginning of a much longer and a more serious crisis in hunger, and resulting mass deaths from starvation, as food prices rise, and as many, especially in the developed world, "hang back" to use Brian Stewart's words, a veteran reporter from CBC who covered the Ethopian hunger crisis of 1984...and when we hang back, waiting for someone else to step up to the plate, hundreds will die, without our support.
There is no time to wait!
Donate today! Whatever you can!
UN World Food Programme

WFP is targeting the most vulnerable individuals with much-needed food. They aim to reach nearly 6 million people in the coming months.
Canadian Red Cross
Money raised will go to support the work of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in the region, both providing emergency relief and helping people recover their livelihoods.
CARE Canada
CARE is improving water harvesting structures such as water pans, shallow wells; supporting livelihoods by implementing cash-for-work programs and cash relief to most vulnerable households in the affected areas.
Doctors Without Borders
Doctors Without Borders has worked in the camps at Dadaab for 14 years. They offer medical services in Dagahaley camp, providing a general hospital and five health posts.
Mennonite Central Committee
MCC is committing $1.2 million through Canadian Foodgrains Bank to support two food-for-work programs in Kenya that will have short- and long-term benefits. Kenyans will be paid with cooking oil, maize and beans for their construction of 92 sand dams and 25 wells. In Ethiopia, MCC funds are expected to be used for supplemental food for children under age 5 and lactating or pregnant women.
World Vision Canada
World Vision provides food, clean water, agricultural support, health care, and other vital assistance to children and families in need.

Obama walks out of negotiations with Republicans on debt ceiling talks

From Huffington Post, July 13, 2011
President Barack Obama walked out of a contentious meeting in ongoing talks to raise the nation's debt limit on Wednesday, an aide tells Reuters.

Politico reports that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said the president stormed out of the negotiating session with top congressional lawmakers.
The Hill reports that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi disputed Cantor's account of what occurred at the end of the meeting.
"Cantor's account of tonight's meeting is completely overblown," a House Democratic aide told HuffPost. "For someone who knows how to walk out of a meeting, you'd think he['d] know it when he saw it. Cantor rudely interrupted the President three times to advocate for short-term debt ceiling increases while the President was wrapping the meeting. This is just more juvenile behavior from him and Boehner needs to rein him in, and let the grown-ups get to work."
A GOP aide told Reuters after Wednesday's meeting that the president would not renegotiate his bottom line as to what he would compromise in the ongoing discussions. According to the aide Obama said, "I have reached the point where I say enough." He reportedly added, "Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I've reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this."

The AP reports that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke issued a warning to lawmakers on Wednesday that failing to strike a deal and allowing the country to default on its debt would send "shock waves through the entire financial system."
Anybody who has been watching the struggle to raise the debt ceiling between leaders of the Congress and the White House cannot but "side" with the President here. The Republicans, cowering behind their peers in the House of Representatives where they hold a majority of the seats, have consistently refused to open the door to tax hikes in the next two or three years, not this year or next year, in extended negotiations at the White House.
Publicly, the President has indicated his willingness to open up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to cuts in benefits, something Democrats are strongly opposed to doing, because their base depends on those benefits, and he has invited, coaxed, cajoled, pushed, embarrassed and even attempted to bully the Republicans into a similar "movement" on their sacred cow, of no hike in taxes, but all his efforts have failed so far.
Clearly, if the U.S. fails to raise the debt ceiling by August 2, there will be people in large numbers who will not receive their cheques, the same cheques that the depend on to continue to exist: veterans whose disability cheques permit them to buy food, the elderly who are also dependent on those cheques. And furthermore, the U.S. will, for the first time in its history, default on its responsibilities, leaving the bond rating institutions no choice but to lower the bond rating, lower the credit rating, raise the interest rates that everyone pays, and plunge the western world into a chaos that we may not be able to extricate ourselves from easily.
This is not only brinkmanship; it is irresponsible.
And most people in Obama's shoes would have "walked out" long before he did yesterday, at the immaturity, and the deviousness and the sheer bull-headedness of the Republican "leadership". They are not leaders; they are merely hungry for power, determined to make Obama a one-term president, while offering nothing by way of balanced alternatives.

McMaster Doctor designs M.M.I. to screen applicants to medical schools

By Gardiner Harris, New York Times, July 10, 2011
Dr. Leora Horwitz, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale, recalled an incident in her residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York when a medical student marched into the hospital room of an elderly minister surrounded by his wife and several parishioners.

“And he announces in front of everyone: ‘We found the reason for your problem. The syphilis test is positive,’ ” Dr. Horwitz said. “It was a devastating event for the family and the whole church, and this student had no sense for that.”
Even more dangerous is when poor communication becomes so endemic that the wrong operations are performed. A 2002 study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine of one such incident found that the patient, doctors and nurses went along with the mistaken treatment because they were used to being kept in the dark about medical procedures. A survey by the Joint Commission, a hospital accreditation group, found communication woes to be among the leading causes of medical errors, which cause as many as 98,000 deaths each year....
At Virginia Tech Carilion, the nation’s newest medical school, administrators decided against relying solely on grades, test scores and hourlong interviews to determine who got in. Instead, the school invited candidates to the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical.

The new process has enormous consequences not only for the lives of the applicants but, its backers hope, also for the entire health care system. It is called the multiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States — including those at Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cincinnati — and 13 in Canada are using it.
At Virginia Tech Carilion, 26 candidates showed up on a Saturday in March and stood with their backs to the doors of 26 small rooms. When a bell sounded, the applicants spun around and read a sheet of paper taped to the door that described an ethical conundrum. Two minutes later, the bell sounded again and the applicants charged into the small rooms and found an interviewer waiting. A chorus of cheerful greetings rang out, and the doors shut. The candidates had eight minutes to discuss that room’s situation. Then they moved to the next room, the next surprise conundrum and the next interviewer, who scored each applicant with a number and sometimes a brief note.
The school asked that the actual questions be kept secret, but some sample questions include whether giving patients unproven alternative remedies is ethical, whether pediatricians should support parents who want to circumcise their baby boys and whether insurance co-pays for medical visits are appropriate.
Virginia Tech Carilion administrators said they created questions that assessed how well candidates think on their feet and how willing they are to work in teams. The most important part of the interviews are often not candidates’ initial responses — there are no right or wrong answers — but how well they respond when someone disagrees with them, something that happens when working in teams.
The system grew out of research that found that interviewers rarely change their scores after the first five minutes, that using multiple interviewers removes random bias and that situational interviews rather than personal ones are more likely to reveal character flaws, said Dr. Harold Reiter, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who developed the system.

Kai Nagata: TV Reporter tells why he quit TV News...A Must Read!

Kai Nagata quit as CTV’s bureau chief in Quebec City on July 8. In an essay on his personal blog ( http://kainagata.com) that has attracted wide attention, he explains why he gave up on TV journalism at age 24:

Until Thursday, I was CTV’s Quebec City bureau chief, based at the National Assembly, mostly covering politics. It’s a fascinating beat — the most interesting provincial legislature in Canada, and the stories coming out of there lately have been huge. The near-implosion of the Parti Québécois has kept the press gallery hopping well into summer. If you’re not from Quebec, it’s hard to explain the place the National Assembly holds in the popular imagination — but suffice to say that within francophone journalistic circles it carries more prestige than Parliament Hill. I had the privilege to be working next to several of the sharpest reporters in the country.
The city is beautiful, ancient, and a great place to learn French. As master and commander of my own little outpost, I had significant editorial control over what I covered and how I treated it — granted, within a recognizable TV news formula. My bosses trusted and encouraged me, my colleagues at the station in Montreal were supportive and fun to work with, and my closest collaborator, cameraman/editor Fred Bissonnette, quickly became a close friend.
I was a full-time employee making good money, with comprehensive benefits and retirement options (I was even lucky enough to be hired before Bell bought CTV and began clawing back some of those expensive perks). It was what I would classify as a “great job,” especially for a 24-year old. But there was a growing gap between the reporter I played on TV, and the person I really am and want to become. I reached my breaking point suddenly, although when I look back now, the signposts were clear.
Let me pause for a minute and tell you the reasons for which I did not quit my job. I didn’t quit my job because I had a falling out with anyone at CTV or the National Assembly or in my life outside work. And I didn’t quit my job because it was too hard. It’s true that the position demands responsibility. You have to know what’s happening, what’s important, and deploy your limited resources accordingly (namely, me and Fred). When I went to bed I turned email notifications off on my BlackBerry, but I left the ringer on. After all, when you’re the network’s only reporter between Montreal and the Maritimes, they have to be able to reach you. But I would say, humbly, that I didn’t just meet expectations — I excelled. In everything I was asked to do, I performed consistently at a level above my experience. We made some good TV. So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.
I’m trying to think of the reporters I know who would do their job as volunteers. The people who feel so strongly about the importance and social value of the evening news that, were they were offered somewhere to sleep, three meals a day, and free dry-cleaning — they would do that for the rest of their days. I’m not saying those people don’t exist, but such zeal is scarce. People do the job for all kinds of reasons. A few are raging narcissists. Many have kids to feed and mortgages to pay. Most believe they are fighting the good fight, if indirectly. In my case, I discovered it was something I was good at, I could see the potential to get better, and in the meantime, people were willing to trade me a lot of money to put the other things on hold. But even though I had the disposable income, I never bought a television. I was raised without one, and once I moved out on my own I decided I didn’t want one in the house.
TV news is a curious medium. You don’t always know whose interests are being served — or ignored. Although bounded by certain federal regulations, most of what you see in a newscast is actually defined by an internal code — an editorial tradition handed down from one generation to the next — but the key is, it’s self-enforced. Various industry associations hear complaints and can issue recommendations, or reward exemplary work with prizes. There are also watchdogs with varying degrees of clout. But these entities have no enforcement capacity. Underneath this lies the fact that information is a commodity, and private TV networks are supposed to make money. All stations, publicly funded or not, want to maintain or expand their viewership. This is what I’ll call the elephant in the room.
Consider Fox News. What the Murdoch model demonstrated was that facts and truth could be replaced by ideology, with viewership and revenue going up. Simply put, you can tell less truth and make more money. When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed. CTV, in my experience, maintains high standards in factual accuracy. Its editorial staff is composed of fair-minded critical thinkers. But there is an underlying tension between “what the people want to see” and “the important stories we should be bringing to people.” I remember as the latest takeover was all but finalized, Bellmedia executives came to talk about “growing eyeballs” in the “specialty channels.” What they meant was, sports is profitable — so as long it keeps raking in cash, we can keep funding underperforming assets like our news division. (The same dynamic exists at the CBC, by the way.)
Certainly it would be a poor move, optics-wise, to make cuts in local news. For some reason, job losses and factory closures in the media sector tend to generate a lot of coverage. But at every network the bean counters are looking at a shrinking, aging audience (fixed incomes are harder to sell to advertisers) and there is intense pressure to keep the numbers up.
Human beings don’t always like good nourishment. We seem to love white sugar, and unless we understand why we feel nauseated and disoriented after binging on sweets, we’ll just keep going. People like low-nutrition TV, too. And that shapes the internal, self-regulated editorial culture of news.
Take newsroom esthetics as an example. I admit felt a profound discomfort working in an industry that so casually sexualizes its workforce. Every hiring decision is scrutinized using a skewed, unspoken ratio of talent to attractiveness, where attractiveness often compensates for a glaring lack of other qualifications. The insecurity, self doubt and body-image issues endured by otherwise confident, intelligent journalists would break your heart. And clearly there’s a double standard, a split along gender lines. But in an environment where a lot of top executives are women, what I’m talking about applies to men as well. The idea has taken root that if the people reporting the news look like your family and neighbours, instead of Barbie and Ken, the station will lose viewers.
The problem with the CBC
Aside from feeling sexually attracted to the people on screen, the target viewer, according to consultants, is also supposed to like easy stories that reinforce beliefs they already hold. This is where the public broadcaster is caught in a tough spot. CBC Television, post-Stursberg, is failing in two ways. Despite modest gains in certain markets (and bigger gains for reality shows like Dragon’s Den and Battle of the Blades) it’s still largely failing to broadcast to the public. More damnably, the resulting strategy is now to compete with for-profit networks for the lowest hanging fruit. In this race to the bottom, the less time and money the CBC devotes to enterprise journalism, the less motivation there is for the private networks to maintain credibility by funding their own investigative teams. Even then, “consumer protection” content has largely replaced political accountability.
It’s a vicious cycle, and it creates things like the Kate and Will show. Wall-to-wall, breaking-news coverage of a stage-managed, spoon-fed celebrity visit, justified by the couple’s symbolic relationship to a former colony, codified in a document most Canadians have never read (and one province has never signed). On a weekend when there was real news happening in Bangkok, Misrata, Athens, Washington, and around the world, what we saw instead was a breathless gaggle of normally credible journalists, gushing in live hit after live hit about how the prince is young and his wife is pretty. And the public broadcaster led the charge.
Aside from being overrun by “Action News” prophets from Iowa, the CBC has another problem: the perception that it’s somehow a haven for left-wing subversives. True or not, the CBC was worried enough about its pinko problem to commission an independent audit of its coverage, in which more consultants tried to quantify “left-wing bias” and, presumably using stopwatches, demonstrate that the CBC gives the Conservative government airtime commensurate with the proportion of seats it holds in the House of Commons. Or something like that.
Jon Stewart talks about a “right-wing narrative of victimization,” and what it has accomplished in Canada is the near-paralysis of progressive voices in broadcasting. In the States, even Fox News anchor Chris Wallace admitted there is an adversarial struggle afoot — that, in his view, networks like NBC have a “liberal” bias and Fox is there to tell “the other side of the story.” Well, Canada now has its Fox News. Krista Erickson, Brian Lilley and Ezra Levant each do a wonderful send-up of the TV anchor character. The stodgy, neutral, unbiased broadcaster trope is played for jokes before the Sun News team gleefully rips into its targets. But Canada has no Jon Stewart to unravel their ideology and act as a counterweight. Our satirists are toothless and boring, with the notable exception of Jean-René Dufort. And on the more serious side, we have no Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. So I don’t see any true debate within the media world itself, in the sense of a national, public clash of ideas. The Canadian right wing, if you want to call it that, has had five years to get the gloves off. With a majority Conservative government in power, they’re putting on brass knuckles. Meanwhile, the left is grasping about in a pair of potholders. The only explanation I can think of is they’re too polite, or too scared. If it’s the latter, I think it’s clear enough why.
Coming out of the closet
I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.
I’ll say off the bat that my views don’t completely mesh with any one political party. I’m not a partisan operative and I never was. Fiscally, I believe a government should be conservative. Caution seems like a good thing in stewarding the public purse. At the same time, I believe we should be taxed according to our capacity and that revenue invested, sometimes massively, in projects for the public good. Under those criteria, I see no sense in buying stealth fighters more than a decade after the Cold War, or building bigger prisons when crime rates are decreasing. If we have that kind of capital to spend, it should go on high-speed rail or renewable energy infrastructure.
On what we call the “social issues,” I think a government ought to err on the side of keeping its mouth shut. If a woman needs to get an abortion or a gay couple wants to get married, one minister’s opinion shouldn’t be relevant. If a theatre festival wants to explore homegrown terrorism or an arm’s-length agency criticizes a military ally, there better be a damn good justification for yanking their funding. And when science debunks ideology, reason should be allowed to prevail in determining public policy.
A caution: there are a number of small-c and big-C conservatives that I like a lot. My grandfather, for example. Or any number of federal staffers and MPs. But those blinded by tribal partisanship might not like what I have to say.
Right now, there’s a war going on against science in Canada. In order to satisfy a small but powerful political base, the PMO is engaged in a not-so-clandestine operation to dismantle and silence the many credible opponents to the Harper doctrine. Why kill the census? Literally in order to make decisions in the dark, without the relevant data. Hence the prisons. Why defund scientific research? Because whole branches of the natural sciences are premised on things like evolution, a theory the minister responsible made it clear he doesn’t understand — and likely doesn’t believe in. Why settle for weak platitudes on climate change? Because despite global scientific consensus, elements of the Conservative base don’t believe human activity could warm the planet. Centuries of rational thought and academic tradition, dating back to the Renaissance, is being thrown out the window in favour of an ideology that doesn’t reflect reality.
Meanwhile, we’re wrapping up a real war, one that invites us to take stock of where we stand in the world ten years after it began. When I joined the infantry reserve, I asked about the possibility of volunteering for a peacekeeping mission (a practice this country invented). I was told by the warrant officer I spoke to that with all available resources tied up in Afghanistan, indefinitely, I could forget about wearing a blue beret. One Conservative campaign ad told us Canada is a “courageous warrior,” and yet we lost our seat at the UN Security Council. The Canada whose values I thought I was signing up to promote and defend is increasingly unrecognizable from an international vantage point.
We have withdrawn from humanitarian projects because aspects might offend evangelicals back home. We have clung so tightly to our U.S. allies overseas that we figure on lists of terrorism targets where we didn’t before. We are deporting people to be tortured and closing our borders to the family members of foreign professionals. We have become, in Mr. Harper’s characterization, an island. A sea of troubles lapping at our shores. In other words, we are closing the harbours when we most need to be building bridges.
On climate change, the conclusion I am forced to draw is that the current federal government has completely abdicated its responsibility. The message to my generation is: figure it out yourselves. The dogmatic refusal to accept that people have created this crisis and people must do what they can to avert it reminds me of the flat-earth crew. Except this time, we really are going to sail off the edge. We need to be recruiting international scientists, funding research, stimulating the green economy, legislating disincentives to fossil fuel use, and most importantly, reaching out and building alliances with the countries who are already taking a proactive stance. As an Arctic nation — a country of inventors, diplomats and negotiators, we should be taking the lead in brokering global accords that might save the world as we know it. Instead we are closing ourselves off, alienating our neighbours, and looking inward, to our past achievements. In the interests of short-term political gain, and medium-term profits for energy companies, Conservative politicians are abandoning my generation and any that hope to come after.
Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to be holding decision-makers to account are instead broadcasting useless tripe, or worse, stories that actively distract from the massive projects we need to be tackling instead of watching TV.
Next steps
What I need is to better myself spiritually, physically and intellectually so I can effect meaningful change in the world around me. I don’t know yet where this impulse will take me, but I know I can’t go back to working parallel to the real problems, hiding my opinions and yet somehow hoping that one viewer every night might piece together what I wanted to say. I thought if I paid my dues and worked my way up through the ranks, I could maybe reach a position of enough influence and credibility that I could say what I truly feel. I’ve realized there’s no time to wait.
If storytelling turns out to be my true passion and the best use of my skills, then I’ll continue down that path. If elder care, academia, agriculture, activism, art, education, Budo or as-yet unforeseen pursuits turn out to make the flame burn brighter, I’ll make the switch, or do them all. I’m willing to work with anyone of any religion or political stripe, if they’re sincere about doing what it takes.
I’m broke, and yet I know I’m rich in love. I’m unemployed and homeless, but I’ve never been more free.
Everything is possible.