Annals of internship

New Brunswick has for many years been an exemplar of the evils of media monopoly and we have, courtesy of a posting on the Montreal blog Fagstein, another example to add to a long litany. In this case, an intern for the St. John Telegraph-Journal, Matt McCann, was fired for writing a story about a controversy surrounding the University of New Brunswick giving an honourary degree to the premier, Shawn Graham. He was told his story was “seriously unbalanced and severely underplayed the university’s side of the story” and that “the newspaper has worked hard to establish a good relationship with UNB and that I had damaged that relationship”.

The heavy-handedness of the paper was so embarrassing that even the premier, who the paper said had been a victim of the McCann's "reckless" reporting, felt the firing was too severe a punishment and asked for the intern's resume!

According to the post, the errors in the story were arguable and minor in any event. What the hapless intern apparently did was a perfectly normal story, with reaction from all sides, but still managed to cheese off the powerful Irving family, who own almost all the news media in the province (save for Transcon's L'acadie Nouvelle and Transcon's Sackville (NB) Tribune Post).

Not about magazines, true, but worth attention being paid.