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Canadian Journalist Writes About Palin...and pisses off Fox Network

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d_rawk Newbie

d_rawk

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Heh, oh my that was a hoot. I figure their 'outrage' about these things is pretty much a put on. Hope so.

I love:

- repeatedly calling something that doesn't pretend to be anything other than commentary 'political analysis'

- calling an opinion piece journalism

- getting the name of the CBC wrong

- not bothering to look up pram before getting all hot-under-the-collar about it (or looking it up but running with it anyways - I bet the reason they wouldn't 'even mention it on the air' had more to do with them knowing that it wasn't really as scandalous as they'd hoped it would be)

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d_rawk Newbie

d_rawk

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This is really old, but worth revisiting:

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Heather Mallick

May 1, 2004 at 1:14 AM EDT

It's someone's fault I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Tuesday night to discuss a column I wrote welcoming the presence of American deserters in Canada.

So who's responsible? Either Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle, the Dalai Lama or me.

Eeny meeny miney mo, Doyle.

Mr. Doyle, a dear friend — together we have plucked the gowans fine — has long campaigned for Fox News to run in Canada. I think he regards it as a second Comedy Network. It's all staged, so we can all laugh at its Bush-licking rendition of the news, its ridiculous "fair and balanced" slogan and this man Bill O'Reilly, whose talk show is really more of a spitting contest gone off track.

Al Franken calls Mr. O'Reilly a "lying, splotchy bully," and proves it in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, but Mr. Doyle thinks he's a great comic creation, I guess, like Britain's The Pub Landlord, this guy who's always ranting about how Great Britain used to be called Fookin' Fantastic Britain until all the immigrants arrived.

But Mr. Doyle is Irish and he likes his comedy blacker than a raven's eyeball. I should have remembered this, more fool me.

Eeny meeny miney mo, Dalai Lama.

It's not enough to show compassion to people you love, the great man told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant to Mr. O'Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers victim, "Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces," urged me to appear. You're the best kind of guest, Nate told me. You really believe in what you're saying, so you don't take it personally when ..... and then his voice tailed off. Nate was so sweet, and then the Dalai's (the Lama's?) words echoed in the distance.

Eeny meeny miney mo, me.

I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?

So I asked Nate for a car and driver and a makeup person to lacquer my face into immobility, and I did one of those remote-studio things where the host can see you but you can't see him and he asks you questions through an ear mike. And that's when the trouble started.

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response — not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

Overnight, I received hundreds of e-mail messages from American men who think my private parts have gone communist, if you grasp my meaning. The saddest thing was the e-mail from kind Americans, apologizing for their "idiot," quivering with humiliation and praising me for having remained calm and composed under fire, not realizing that I was simply frozen with disbelief. I have replied to each one of the nice ones.

The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"

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d_rawk Newbie

d_rawk

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So CBC ultimately had ended up caving and pulled the article that this thread was about.

Here's Mallick's latest, FWIW:

Life's a slice of demographic pie

Wanted: Married white females with children

By Heather Mallick CBC News

Stephen Harper's Conservatives yearn for me. It was a shock to find out that I am part of their target demographic.

The Toronto Star ran a novella recently on Harper's failure to win a majority. In a piece headlined "How Harper Let It Slip Away," reporter Kenneth Kidd recited the prime minister's yearnings for particular slices of the Canadian people pie, based on socio-economic data and dressed up by marketing experts to breathe life into social segments.

"The Tories knew, for instance that they had an opening with married women who have children, but it was [a marketer] who dubbed them 'Heather,' as in 'Steve and Heather,' a married Protestant couple with three kids."

My name is Heather. But how did Steve Harper know I'm married? To a guy named Steve, no less? And that we have kids and are nominally Protestant?

How did he know that I am politically vulnerable in the sense that, as the years pass, I have come to despise the hard left (to be fair, the Canadian hard left despises me as well) and am a bit of a drifting voter? I haven't even told My Steve that yet.

My Steve

There are a lot of things I haven't told My Steve that That Steve has somehow sensed.

For instance, My Steve and Heather are against capital punishment but a little voice in Heather thinks it was a good thing for women and girls that Ted Bundy was electrocuted in 1989. I don't tell My Steve that — I would get a lecture on hard cases making bad law.

But That Steve gets my nascent lack of principles. He has seen my dark heart.

That Steve also understands that becoming a mortgage-free homeowner was a high point of my life. That Steve knows that My Steve would secretly like to own a Taser, if only for squirrel-hunting.

That Steve knows that I think David Ennis (formerly Shearing) who killed a family of campers in the B.C. interior in 1982, shooting the grandparents and parents but keeping two little girls alive for six days for sexual torture, should not have had a parole hearing in Alberta last week. Twenty-five years is not enough. We Heathers don't forget.

But I understand that That Steve has a broader brush. I take it that Protestant is code for white, that married is code for socially biddable and that having boring names like Steve and Heather are code for plodding personalities, my dull doppelgangers who live lives marked by incuriosity and a hostility to public transit.

Chuck the Teacher

You can divide voters into groups. But it's odd to start with individuals — defining voters with first names and a quick, callous guess at income level, and working outwards.

The Republicans are doing this right now. It began with Joe the Plumber who turned out to be (a) not Joe but Samuel and (B) not a licenced plumber or even © a Republican.

Then Team McCain couldn't stop. It started in on "Ed the Dairyman" (that shows McCain's age: what is a dairyman?), "Rose the Teacher," "Phil the Bricklayer," "David the Dentist," and "Joe the Florist."

Sarah Palin picked up the habit. Last week, she was all "Wendy the Waitress, Jane the Engineer, Molly the Dental Hygienist, Chuck the Teacher," all people who'll be living in their cars, by the way, if McCain wins.

It's embarrassing how badly she and her running mate reprise those roles, like casting a play. A smart Republican would go with Townsend the Stockbroker, Cluke the Rancher and Griffy the Baptist, plus some of the Fox-viewing "angry pajamas" who are my readers. That's the base right there.

Is this a North American thing, or do they do it in other countries? In Austria, is it Josef the Dungeonmaster or Joerg the Goosestepper or Stefan the Boyfriend? I suppose every nation has its own types, some more populated than others.

Steve's marketing men jumped to absurd conclusions. I call my husband by his nickname and when I need him to do something masculine like waterproofing masonry or spin-barbecuing animals whole, I call him "Husband." I didn't want to marry; the children requested it; and in the early years I referred to myself as "Itty Bitty New Wife."

If I were a Tory Heather, I would accept $100 a month in child-care grants, but would still be insulted each month to be reminded of how little That Steve understands about the actual cost of child care.

No Zoe zone

I never wanted to be a Heather, and indeed I've had some helpful suggestions that I shouldn't be. I once had a boss slowly stroke my back and run his fingers up and down my spine while holding a damning evaluation letter in front of my face.

He told me I was so exotic-looking I shouldn't be named Heather but Petronella or Clothilde or some damn thing. "I can change this letter and you'll be hired," he told me, his beady little eyes blinking wetly at me.

It was one of the defining moments of my life. I left the building, never to return, and realized that that was ethical Heather-type behaviour. I was proud.

The Star's Ken Kidd reports that That Steve has no interest in "Zoe," a single twentysomething university student who eats organic food, does yoga and lives in a downtown apartment. In other words, my children repel him.

That's a mistake, Steve! Zoes are young. They don't have families now, but they will later and they don't suddenly morph into Steves and Heathers; they're as snarky and unpredictable as their parents.

As for stereotypes, Republican Red State and Democratic Blue State have worked magnificently for years now.

But That Steve thinks he wants Steve the Doughnut and Heather the Hausfrau. His problem is that people morph. They vote other than they were intended to. They're not as they seem.

What is it to be one self? Ibsen asked in Peer Gynt. (It was the core question of the AMC drama Mad Men this week, since you ask. That Mad Men, so upmarket.) In our authentic selves, maybe Steve and Heather are really Bonnie and Clyde, and you wouldn't want us then. Or maybe we're Steve and Steve. Heather and Heather even.

We're unknowable.

Source article: CBC

/me wonders of which hard left she speaks

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Birdy Newbie

Birdy

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So CBC ultimately had ended up caving and pulled the article that this thread was about.

Thank god. That piece was utter tripe and pretty damn embarassing posted on the cbc, opinion piece or not. I can only imagine the outcry from those who outcried 'opinion piece' if say it were some whacked out evangelist going off the deep end instead.

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ollie Newbie

ollie

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So CBC ultimately had ended up caving and pulled the article that this thread was about.

Thank god. That piece was utter tripe and pretty damn embarassing posted on the cbc, opinion piece or not. I can only imagine the outcry from those who outcried 'opinion piece' if say it were some whacked out evangelist going off the deep end instead.

That's right, what with us being a bunch of hypocrites and all.

I'm no fan of Malik but pulling it after the fact is weak.

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