(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)
Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."
By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."
So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.
It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.
The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.
That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:
-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.
But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.
The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.
(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)
Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."
By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."
So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.
It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.
The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.
That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:
-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.
But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.
The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.
(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)
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