Media@McGill is organizing a book launch to celebrate two releases - Media Divides: Communication Rights and the Right to Communicate in Canada, and Digital Solidarities, Communication Policy and Multi-stakeholder Global Governance: The Legacy of the World Summit on the Information Society.

The book launch will be held on Thursday, 2 December, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. in Room W220, in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Arts Building, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal. (map)

Update: A video recording of Ehrenreich's lecture is now available for viewing online.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the outspoken feminist, journalist, activist and writer, will give the Media@McGill Beaverbrook Annual Lecture on Thursday, 18 November at 6:30 p.m.

This free, public lecture will be held at the Stewart Biology Building, Room S 1/4, ave. du 1205 Dr. Penfield, Montreal.
(Please note that, due to road construction, automobile access is difficult and parking is limited). (map)

Title: Reinforcing the culture of optimism

Barbara Ehrenreich will be talking about the ideology of positive thinking, how the media has helped spread it, and how it has undermined America. "We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking," says Ehrenreich. In North America, people have often tended to be optimistic about solving major problems, but has this optimism helped or hurt them? Can positive thinking actually get in the way of finding solutions, preventing people from accurate and critical examination of a crisis? Barbara Ehrenreich will address that question of optimism: whether, somehow, that thinking frames unhappiness, and critical thought and speech, as pathological and counter-productive. Ehrenreich's most recent book is Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (published by Metropolitan Books in October, 2009), a myth busting exploration of how America's irrational optimism and the refusal to consider negative outcomes contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

We've had some hot days this summer and it promises to be an even hotter fall, at least as far as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is concerned.

The press has been rife these past weeks with allegations that the Harper government is trying to pressure the upper echelons of the broadcast regulator in various ways, notably to obtain the CRTC's accord for the creation of a "Fox-like" right wing television news channel in Canada. The CRTC rebuffed a first application from Quebecor Media for such a channel (to be known as Sun TV News) earlier this year and is now considering a second application.[1]

This is not the first time (nor likely the last, sadly) that a Government has tried to promote a project friendly to its interests before the CRTC. But this Government is not content with mere lobbying. In a sinister manner that has become in many respects its hallmark, the Government seems to have decided to go straight to the root of the problem. This is indeed a radical bunch in power in Ottawa at the moment.

If press reports can be believed, the Government is seeking the early resignation of CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein - a Harper appointee who apparently takes the idea of independent public service seriously. Von Finckenstein has been a controversial Chair whose decisions have pleased some people some of the time and no one all of the time. He has one of the toughest and most important jobs in Canada and he tries to do it properly.