Remember the Ottawa Press Gallery's rending of garments over the "despicable" violation of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews's privacy when Vikileaks30 revealed seamy details from the public record of his divorce proceedings—details that called into question the minister's personal adherence to the family values he used to denigrate gay Canadians and oppose their exercise of equal rights under the law? The view that embarrassing details from a cabinet minister's private life are off-limits, even when they conflict with his sanctimonious public pronouncements, has suddenly acquired unanimous support among Canada's major media organizations. Why, suppressing such details is practically a sacred duty. Parliamentary reporters...

05 March, 2012

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...

21 February, 2012

Parliamentary scribe Stephen Maher, formerly of the Herald and now with PostMedia, offers a different view on why the Press Gallery all but ignored Vic Toews’s infidelity prior to #vikileaks30. (Previous views here, here, and here.) Maher's blog post is the more refreshing for its inclusion of updates from people who disagree with him. It rewards  reading in full. I actually agree with most of what he says. Generally, I have little stomach for exposing the private lives of public figures, let alone their sex lives. But unlike Maher and his colleagues, I think there are clear grounds for an exception in Toews's case. Maher wrote: If [a] secretly...

21 February, 2012

Press gallery' tweets in response to this and this (best read from bottom to top): My favorite response was Glen McGregor's question, "Do you know any journalists?" Yes, Glen, I have two National Magazine Awards, one Michener Award (out of three times as a finalist), and when I left journalism, I had more Atlantic Journalism Awards than the province of Prince Edward Island. No offense, though. I'd never heard of you, either. And for the record, I did not call Kady O'Malley anything. My criticism was directed to the Ottawa press pack generally, and neither attempted nor purported to assess any individual reporter's...

21 February, 2012

Blogger and tech journalist Jeff Jedras has a good analysis of the moral panic that swept through the Parliamentary Press Gallery last Friday (and previously touched on here). The leading lights of Canadian journalism had had the news cycle snatched from their grasp not once but twice the day before, and not by the customary culprits in the PMO but by a pair of tweeters, one obscure (the PEI man who kicked off the wildly popular #tellviceverything meme) the other anonymous (@vikileaks30). After floundering unhappily for 24 hours in the turbulent wake of these citizen journalists, the gallery regrouped Friday for an...

20 February, 2012