21 Feb Maher critiques Contrarian

PostMedia’s Stephen Maher, whose blog post on the Toews contretemps I featured moments ago, has weighed in with a critique of Contrarian’s first two posts on the subject. Here’s what he wrote (and then let’s close the subject for now):

In your post on the Parliamentary Press Gallery, you say the gallery met @vikileaks30 with a “frenzy of denunciation,” but provide no examples. You do not accurately describe the gallery’s reaction to @vikileaks30. The journalists I know found it to be a matter of lively interest. Nobody reacted with anger, fear or embarrassment.

Also, to point to the failings of the gallery, you point to Toronto Star stories about Adam Giambrone and the Citizen story that identified the IP address of @vikileaks30. Those stories were not produced by reporters in the gallery. The gallery did, in fact, report on Toews divorce, just not as extensively as you would like, and did not report on Giambrone, which is a municipal story.

It seems normal to me that media outlets in Winnipeg and Toronto would approach questions of privacy differently. That has nothing to do with the gallery, however.

You may be able to argue that the gallery is too timid when it comes to the private lives of cabinet ministers, but you would need to do more research for it to be persuasive.