The Steyn show trial
An excerpt from Kathy Shaidle's and Pete Vere's "The Tyranny of Nice." Here, Shaidle and Vere rip into Canada's main stream media, and its collective demure attitude towards the Human Rights Commission hearing against Mark Steyn and Maclean's.
Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere - September 22, 2008
By the time the “show trial” against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s began on June 2, 2008 the case had become a cause celebre in the formidable U.S. conservative media network of blogs and talk radio. Four heavyweight pundits--Jonah Goldberg, Robert Spencer, David Harsanyi and Pat Buchanan--rebuked the censors of “Soviet Canuckistan” on the very same day.
But Canada’s liberal mainstream media more or less shrugged. Veteran journalism professor John Miller condemned the “xenophobic” Steyn in an online forum by and for professional reporters, accusing Steyn of failing to express his opinions “in food [sic] faith”, then scolding prissily that “everyone must obey the law.” This lead Parliament Hill reporter Deborah Gyapong to ask the obvious question: “What if the law advocated slavery or chopping off hands?”
With professors like John Miller training journalists, it is no wonder that the state-run, taxpayer-funded CBC got the name of Steyn’s book wrong or that their local reporters admitted that they knew nothing about the trial they’d been sent to cover. Their broadcasting rival outlet, CTV, published a glorified review of America Alone in lieu of an objective news report. (They at least managed to render the book’s title correctly.)
Columnist David Warren bluntly explained: “Among the spookiest aspects of these cases is the silence over, and indifference to them, on the part of journalists whose predecessors imagined themselves vigilant in the cause of freedom. As I’ve learned first-hand through email, many Canadian journalists today take the view that, ‘I don’t like these people, therefore I don’t care what happens to them.’ It is a view that, at best, is extremely short-sighted.”
The trial lasted five days, and Maclean’s own Andrew Coyne live blogged for, well, four and a half. As Coyne explained:
“There will be no more live blogging. As I left the courtroom for the lunch break [on Friday June 6], I was taken aside by a sheepish-looking court official, who said that he’d just learned that I had been ‘broadcasting’ from inside the courtroom. So had I? Broadcasting, I said? I didn’t have a microphone, or a camera.
“No, he explained: but live blogging counts as broadcasting. It’s not the computer that’s the problem. You can type away on it all you want. If you step outside to send it, that’s okay, too. But if you send text from within the courtroom, that’s broadcasting.
“Anyway, I gave him my solemn word that I would do no more broadcasting. What with the hearings being almost over and all. It seemed a fitting way to put a cap on the week.”
Despite the national media’s indifference, other troubling or just plain bizarre developments during the trial made their way into the public record, thanks to Coyne’s liveblogging (while it lasted), the National Post’s Brian Hutchison and live reports from Ezra Levant, who attended the first two days:
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