CBC's Heather Mallick shows her True Form

[George Wallace]

Any idea of how one goes about getting the job of CBC Ombudsman?  I really would love a six figure pay cheque just for responding to people that I have no legal rights to do anything, other than reply to queries with a canned response stating that I can't legally do anything.

 

[greentoblue]

It seems that the amount and weight of the criticism of Ms Mallick's commentary got to the CBC.  They just announced an apology:

CBC offers online apology for Mallick column maligning Sarah Palin

"Following 300-plus complaints from readers, and attacks from Canadian and American media organizations, including Fox News, publisher John Cruickshank said the public broadcaster had erred in its editorial judgement and should never had been posted.

In an online statement, Cruickshank said reaction to the column has caused the CBC to install new editing procedures that will ensure inappropriate work won't appear. "
---
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2008/09/28/6913901-cp.html

I am willing to bet it was the criticism from their peers in the media that hurt the CBC the most and made it take a double-look as opposed to us mere taxpayers who fund the organization.  Question: in light of this retraction as well as the cooperation of their (former) Ottawa reporter Erickson with a Liberal MP how can the CBC claim partiality? And why is their no cleanup of the political partisans in it?

 

[The Bread Guy]

Full text of apology - .pdf attached in case link disappears - shared with usual disclaimer...

LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER:  We erred in our judgment
John Cruickshank, CBC News, 28 Sept 08
Article link

More than 300 people have taken the trouble this month to complain to the CBC ombudsman about a column we ran on CBCNews.ca about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Sept. 5.

The column, by award-winning freelance writer Heather Mallick, was also pilloried by the National Post in Canada and by Fox News in the U.S. Despite its age — it is three weeks old, several lifetimes in web years — this posting remains a subject of fascination in the blogosphere.

Vince Carlin, the CBC Ombudsman, has now issued his assessment of the Mallick column. He doesn't fault her for riling readers by either the caustic nature of her tone or the polarizing nature of her opinion.

But he objects that many of her most savage assertions lack a basis in fact. And he is certainly correct.

Mallick's column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan.

And because it is all those things, this column should not have appeared on the CBCNews.ca site.
Healthy restraint

On the whole, the CBC News policy handbook takes a very anxious view of any mixing of opinion in with the news business. It sees the two as nitro and glycerin, innocuous on their own but explosive together. This is a very healthy restraint for a public broadcaster.

But every news organization needs to have an opinion dimension. Access to different viewpoints helps readers, listeners and viewers make reasoned choices, especially during an election campaign.

As a public broadcaster we have an added responsibility to provide an array of opinions and voices to complement our journalism. But we must do so carefully. And you should be able to trust us to provide you with work that's based on solid reporting and free from the passionate excesses of partisanship.

We failed you in this case. And as a result we have put new editing procedures in place to insure that in the future, work that is not appropriate for our platforms, will not appear. We are open to contentious reasoned argument but not to partisan attack. It's a fine line.

Ombudsman Carlin makes another significant observation in his response to complainants: when it does choose to print opinion, CBCNews.ca displays a very narrow range on its pages.

In this, Carlin is also correct.

This, too, is being immediately addressed. CBCNews.ca will soon expand the diversity of voices and opinions and be home to a diverse group of writers with many perspectives. In this, we will better reflect the depth and texture of this country.

We erred in our editorial judgment. You told us in no uncertain terms. And we have learned from it.

 

[2 Cdo]

Personally I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the CBC to provide balance in opinion pieces. In the past their idea of balance has been centre-left, middle-left and looney left. :

 

[a_majoor]

Micheal Coren provides some balance:

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/michael_coren/2008/09/27/6899131-sun.html

Scared witless

Anyone left shaking after CBC's lowbrow attack on Sarah Palin?

By MICHAEL COREN

Last Updated: 27th September 2008, 3:46am

Heather Mallick must be loving it. The largely anonymous journalist, a legend in her own lunchtime, is now the subject of controversy because she called American Republicans "white trash," said Sarah Palin looked like a porn actress and made repugnant personal comments about the governor of Alaska's family. She did all this on the CBC website, paid for by public dollars. The content of the diatribe is less Oscar Wilde and more Oscar the Grouch, but it's become major news in the United States.

This is not a woman whose career has exactly blossomed and the consequent anger and bitterness is obvious, as is her evident jealousy of Palin's physical attractiveness. None of this matters very much; what does matter is that once again the Canadian public is obliged to fund this nonsense. Beyond the abuse of public money, however, is hypocrisy.

Mallick's defence is one of freedom of speech. Yet last year I was approached by the editor of a newspaper called The Women's Post and asked if I would write a column for her, providing what publisher Sarah Thomson called "a conservative voice." She explained that she already had plenty of liberal writers but wanted some balance.

One of those left-wing writers employed by The Women's Post was Mallick. When she heard about me being offered a column she became extraordinarily angry and threatened to resign. The good people at The Women's Post called the enraged journalist's bluff and it was goodbye to our control freak comrade. So when Mallick's defenders cry about unfettered expression and the right to offend they ought to know of whom they speak.

Which brings us nicely to radio presenter Michael Enright, who on CBC last Sunday said that he had been fortunate in his life to avoid such unpleasant things as "Michael Coren and the Ebola virus" -- proving that genuine wit and humour require more than pomposity and a silly bow tie. Much as I'm delighted by the attack, twice in two weeks now CBC types have used childlike insults to pursue their own leftist agendas.

Enright was the man who some years ago said that the Roman Catholic Church was the largest criminal organization in the world outside of the Mafia. Enright, or anyone else, has a perfect right to express an opinion, even one as suburban and daft as this. Such ignorance and extremism does, however, bring the man's ability and objectivity into severe doubt. Has he been informed and balanced in his interviews over the years or is he merely a conduit for the cliched Toronto leftism?

I assume that before long Bollinger Bolshevik journalists will simply be throwing bricks through people's windows if they disagree with them. So much easier than writing anything down or picking up a microphone.

There is something exciting and vibrant about the meaty exchange of ideas and ideals, and from such a clash of ideologies Canada becomes a more interesting place. Instead we have dreary and predictable abuse from Enright, Mallick and their dowdy friends.

Time and change are against the corporation. Simply put, the CBC as it stands now has no future. For the time being people who somehow think they're clever apparently will argue with you by the equivalent of calling you smelly or putting a "kick me" sign on your back. How sad. And these dunderheads say Americans are dumb!

 

[Edward Campbell]

If you look here you will see a list of CBC radio stations – all those locations have a Radio 1 station (with announcers, etc) and some have a Radio 2 station, too – all Radio 2 stations are FM, many Radio 1 stations are FM, too. Here is a list of the licensed frequencies that support the whole shebang.

This is a large network – one of the largest in the world – and it has considerable value as a large, national radio network, as several regional networks or as 30± independent stations. While commercial broadcasting is no longer a licence to print money I don’t hear too many private broadcasters threatening bankruptcy.

Prime Minister Bennett said, and most Canadians still agree, that “This country must be assured of complete Canadian control of broadcasting from Canadian sources. Without such control, broadcasting can never be the agency by which national consciousness may be fostered and sustained and national unity still further strengthened.” But national control of radio broadcasting need not and, clearly - based on world-wide evidence (even China has private broadcasters)- does not equate to a government own broadcasting service. In Canada the CRTC is the regulatory heir of the old CRBC and Board of Broadcast Governors. The CBC, proper, was created, in some part, to suppress religious broadcasters – including a pioneer Jehovah’s Witness station and also to rescue a few pioneer private broadcasters from financial messes but it need not have been perpetuated beyond 1936 – there was, I’m pretty certain sufficient money and interest to develop and sustain several competing private broadcasters – even regional networks – in English and French.

Could we sell the CBC and still retain control over radio broadcasting in Canada. Yes, without question, 100%, no worries and so on.

 

[GAP]

What's wrong with bashing Sarah Palin?
MARGARET WENTE From Tuesday's Globe and Mail September 30, 2008 at 3:54 AM EDT
Article Link

It's fun to bash Sarah Palin. I should know. I've been doing it for weeks. But nobody has bashed her quite as viciously as a semi-obscure columnist named Heather Mallick.

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look ... the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression," she wrote in a column that was posted Sept. 5 on the CBC's online news site. And she didn't stop there. She went on to refer to Republican men as "sexual inadequates," small-town Americans as "hicks" and "hillbillies," Bristol's boyfriend, Levi, as a "ratboy," and the Palins as terrible parents. "What normal father would want Levi 'I'm a fuckin' redneck' Johnson prodding his daughter?" she wondered.

Vitriolic drivel is all the rage these days. The blogosphere is full of it. But this drivel was bought and paid for by the CBC. And soon the organic waste material hit the fan. The National Post went ballistic. So did Fox News, which loves nothing better than denouncing the left-wing loonies who live up here in Canada.

"Is this what actually passes for commentary at a publicly funded broadcasting company in Canada?" seethed a Fox News babe. Even Fox's Greta Van Susteren got into the act. She called Ms. Mallick a "pig." Ms. Mallick was deluged with hate mail, and the CBC with hundreds of complaints. Ms. Van Susteren said it was all in fun and invited Ms. Mallick on the air, but she declined.

Backlash prompts CBC to apologize 
Ms. Mallick has professed shock at the hate mail she's received (tell me about it), while revelling in her new-found notoriety. But Sunday, the CBC finally ate crow and yanked the column from its website. "We erred in our judgment," said news publisher John Cruickshank, who called the column a "viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan" piece of political invective that should never have been published. The ombudsman had looked into the matter, and found many of her "most savage assertions lack a basis in fact." I'll say. For one thing, she obviously knows nothing about the sex lives of Republicans.

The Mallick affair is bad news for the CBC, because it reinforces the widespread belief the place is a hotbed of left-wing bias. That's not good news when a Tory government controls the purse strings. Nor is it entirely fair. The CBC's online commentary arm is not exactly the flagship of the network. It is a backwater that has served as a sort of semi-retirement home for aging lefties (think Judy Rebick) who could no longer find an outlet in the mainstream media and, one suspects, supplied copy cheap. They had little oversight and less influence - until now.

The truth about the CBC is more complicated. Its problem isn't an overt left-wing bias. Its problem is an earnest, mushy-liberal mindset that can scarcely entertain a contrarian idea. Its editors, producers and directors strive to be fair-minded. It's just hardly any of them would ever vote Tory. Oh, they try. Once they even had right-wing commentator David Frum guest-host The Current. But people were so shocked they never did it again.

Ironically, no one is more bothered by this groupthink than the top CBC managers themselves. More than one have told me that it drives them crazy. And it's no accident that left-wing faces such as Avi Lewis have recently decamped for the greener fields of English-language Al Jazeera. Although I haven't talked to Mr. Cruickshank (a former colleague), my guess is that part of his mandate is to vigorously encourage a wider range of world views. Too bad Ms. Mallick popped up to prove the critics right.

Meantime, I'm not feeling too sorry for Ms. Mallick. She is a sour, narrow-minded writer - the kind of who makes Michael Moore look like a world-class wit. Her reflexive anti-Americanism is heavy-handed and stale, to say nothing of casually racist. There are many, many ways of dissing Sarah Palin. But Ms. Mallick's naughty, coarse puerility is not among them.
More on link

 

[Hollywog]

The way to handle these folks is to use their own tools against them. If I were an American living here, I would launch a Section 13 HRC complaint. If McLeans and Steyn can be persecuted prosecuted for repeating someone else's comments, then surely this "lady" can be for the comments she made.

If she had used the same adjectives to talk about Obama just change the colour/sex every journalist in Canada would have wanted her head on a platter.  The front of our MSM's would be reeling saying to fire her.  Instead they are trying to paint her as the victim.

HRC's will never charge her they support legal affirmative action.

Why would she think  its ok to call someone white trash but not another colour? Isn't treating people differently based on their race, racist?

 

[The Bread Guy]

Reviving the necrothread with Strike Two for Ms. Mallick:

The following apology appears in the print edition of today’s Toronto Star.

'A column by Heather Mallick on July 28 contained a number of inaccurate statements about the well-known British journalist and author Melanie Phillips.

Ms. Phillips has expressed her horror at the slaughter at Utoya, Norway in a clear and unambiguous way, writing “there can be no excuse, justification or rationale whatsoever for the atrocity perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik.”

The column made reference to Ms. Phillips’ writings in an entirely misleading and inappropriate manner.

The defamatory article has been removed from our website.

The Star and Ms. Mallick regret the errors and apologize to Ms. Phillips.'

It also appears online here and will remain on the newspaper's website for 14 days.

The Toronto Star has agreed to pay my legal costs in full. The newspaper has also agreed to make a donation to a charity of my choice in lieu of damages.

Source:  melaniephillips.com, 15 Aug 11

Heather's original article in response to Melanie's piece on the Norway killing is not available, but it MUST have been a doozy to get this result.  Here's Strike One if you don't want to go all the way back through the thread.

 

[Old Sweat]

Here is a link to a blog spot with the column. Click on the column to enlarge it.

http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2011/08/melanie-phillips-apology.html

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here is a link to a blog spot with the column. Click on the column to enlarge it.

http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2011/08/melanie-phillips-apology.html

And another: http://www.sooeys.com/viewtopic.php?t=6222&start=30&sid=9c75d7e76b99f54f9402e0ef2387e3c7

Mallick is a real 'piece of work,' but, not surprisingly, she has big 'cheering sections' amongst e.g. the "Friends of Judy Rebik," and other assorted lost causes.