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Front Page Challenge: November 10, 2015
This week's Front Page Challenge is a bit of a flashback to the eighties (with the evil Soviet Empire) and the nineties (with Alanis) on this, Remembrance Day's eve.
In Front Page Challenge, Torontoist analyzes the best and worst of Toronto’s major dailies.
Photo by Christopher Hylarides from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
National Post
One of the Post‘s most “Poppy”-ular front pages every year is their Remembrance Day cover, and this year is no exception, with the front page splashed out in red watercolour flowers with limited text, indicating articles within detailing Canadian soldiers’ stories from Afghanistan (where poppies grow, you’ll note). After the bad press the Post received in the wake of endorsing the Conservatives on the eve of Trudeau’s historic victory (and running cynical wraparound ads for the Conservatives that were splashed in the yellow tone associated with Elections Canada) perhaps this is also a good day to remember when the paper was more influential.
The Globe and Mail
Russia is the bad guy on today’s front page, with the release of a doping probe levelling serious allegations against Russia’s track and field teams; their findings recommend the strong measure of banning Russian athletes from organized sport. Not helping Russia’s cause any is a central photo of a smiling Russian coach looking like a Steven Berkoff-esque bad guy from an ’80s action film.
Metro Toronto
Today’s headline “Food swamp T.O.” is slightly confusing. At first it looks like a typo for a story about Toronto being buried in food, but it’s actually about the “food swamp” that the city has become, in the sense that some communities have easier access to junk food than to fruits and vegetables in terms of walking distance. One can also quibble about the upper-right headline “Public Transit Is Healthier Than Walking,” as it fails to consider that on some mornings when the subway breaks down, public transit IS walking.
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star has a very complex cover today, with the Russian doping scandal (cleverly illustrated with a syringe in place of the hammer of the Soviet Union’s main visual icon), an article about the slap on the wrist received by the cop charged with assault during the G20 protest, and an eyebrow-raising article about potassium iodide tablets being mailed to residents within the radius of nuclear power stations to be kept on hand in case of a disaster. Weirdly the headline to this piece offers a shout-out to the 20th anniversary of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. The article is disturbing but I guess the Star figured “you oughta know”.
Toronto Sun
Today’s issue (seemingly guest edited by J. Jonah Jameson from the Daily Bugle) is the kind of front page you would see if Spider-Man lived in Toronto. You know that Spidey would love to catch these “punks” who stole a donation box from a Tim Hortons in the west end, pretty much the most outrageous act of petty theft imaginable. In lieu of Spidey, the Sun is calling for a city-wide manhunt, assisting with the search by furnishing any budding bounty hunters or good samaritans with a blown-up grainy surveillance photo of the punks, which is bad news for anyone out there who vaguely fits the visual description.
This week’s winner: The Post – everyone loves poppies!