It’s the media equivalent of setting fire to a bag of doggie do-do and knocking on the front door. But instead of the alarmed occupant running out to stamp his foot in it, imagine him instead blasting the culprit away with a rocket launcher.
The clique of journalism school-indoctrinated libertarians populating the editorial staff of mainstream media in Canada has reacted with viciousness to the slightest of provocations launched from the smallest of independent —and anti-libertarian—newspapers.
In what can only be described as a mean-spirited fusillade, no less than the Globe and Mail—the stuffy, pipe-smoke-thickened national newspaper from staid and dowdy Toronto, owned by Canada’s richest person, and the world’s ninth-richest—devoted fully 36 column inches in its highest-circulation Saturday edition on May 6 to a personal attack on The Republic of East Vancouver and its publisher, myself, Kevin Potvin.
The article, titled “Working through Wikipedia’s vanity fair,” by Shannon Rupp, ostensibly about the unreliability of the open-source online encyclopedia, was riddled with errors large and small—the very charge the author was attempting to make against myself, this newspaper, and Wikipedia.
On the small side first, The Republic of East Vancouver was called a “weekly” despite the fact it has been a punctual bi-weekly for its entire five-plus years of existence. It was called a “tabloid”—a term defined in a media context as a paper given to condensed, usually sensational-ized, news articles, accompanied by lurid illustrations—while The Republic’s articles are anything but short, and we lack illustrations almost completely, making it the opposite of a tabloid.
The article goes on to misrepresent the Wikipedia entry in question by leaving off a qualifying “Though” that begins the supposedly most offending sentence, rendering its meaning exactly opposite to that which the article’s author states.
Rupp’s smear goes on to suggest that I was the author of the gloating sentence (which, in reality, is a disparaging sentence), a suggestion she herself later contradicts by mentioning that a different author wrote it. Confused? Most readers of the article were, too.
The Globe and Mail came libellously close to labelling me a liar! Among other terms bandied about in the article, it is said, or inferred, that I am unreliable, vituperative, incorrect, irrelevant, insignificant, not credible, shameful, nonsensical, a fabulist, a vandal, a shyster, devious, and dangerous. The Republic of East Vancouver newspaper is dismissed as “full of inflammatory opinion pieces reminiscent of the ideological rants of 18th-century pamphleteers.”
That’s what this journalism-school-indoctrinated author says about the 800 well-written essays produced by nearly 100 intelligent and observant—but non-journalism-school-trained—citizens who have contributed to The Republic over the years.
A journalism school professor, Alan Bass, is quoted in the article saying that “for a brief time [Potvin] belonged to a Canadian Association of Journalists’ listserve,” which Bass moderates, without mentioning that he was instrumental in my being banned for life from that listserve, while the author of the article, Shannon Rupp, further failed to mention that she and I have had serious dealings in the past on that same listserve.
The story of my banning is interesting enough in itself. I first appeared on the listserve by notifying participants that I planned to quote comments from it for an article I was preparing for The Republic of East Vancouver that was critical of journalism in Canada.
I was widely condemned. The author of the Globe and Mail article, Shannon Rupp, launched personal invectives against me, questioning my basic knowledge of the practices of journalism and questioning my age (as though I was childlike!), before carrying on to post insults against me and The Republic newspaper.
My first banishment from the listserve, a ten-day penalty, came when I questioned widely held, but inaccurate, assumptions among Canadian journalists about World War II, evident in their coverage of Remembrance Day events in 2004. In particular, I corrected a post by a journalist that praised those who volunteered to serve in 1939, who, he said, were motivated by a desire to stop Hitler from killing the Jews. I pointed out that no one in the West knew of the holocaust till four years later, and that motivations were more likely formed around desires to get off the farm and see a different, more exciting world—and exotic women—in Europe.
Though professionally trained journalists wear their badges proclaiming objectivity with much pride, this truth proved too much to accommodate. My comment was found inflaming and insensitive and I was reminded that many journalists had fathers who served and died in World War II, and I was therefore banned for ten days from the listserve by the moderators, including Professor Bass, the one quoted in the Globe and Mail article, who referred to my “stream of vituperative posts that did not appear to impress other journalists on the list, to put it politely.” So much for professional journalists’ much-vaunted objectivity—or allegiance to truth, for that matter.
Finally, near Christmas, posts began appearing on the listserve celebrating Christianity and wishing Christian tidings to other participants. The rule that was invoked to ban me from the listserve earlier—that nothing should be posted that inflames others or engages in partisan politics—appeared to me to be breached. I wrote that such posts appeared to violate the rules I was held up to, on the grounds that Christianity had always historically been a partisan tool, and that they were inflaming, especially as the Christian West was presently engaged in launching murderous wars against Muslim countries. I earned a lifetime ban from the listserve, courtesy, in part, Professor Bass.
But the more immediate origins of the Globe and Mail attack on The Republic of East Vancouver may stem from two articles The Republic prepared on a British Columbian online journal called The Tyee.
In a recent issue, regular Republic correspondent Dan Crawford drew attention to weaknesses in The Tyee’s safeguarding of story ideas generated by its investigative journalism contest that would award two $5,000 prizes to the best ideas submitted. David Beers, editor of The Tyee, was so enraged by the negative coverage he threatened to sue The Republic in several phonecalls and emails.
The overreaction piqued my curiosity, and I took a closer look at the origins of the prize money. The resulting article in The Republic tied The Tyee’s prize money ultimately to the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, two organizations with well-documented financial ties to the CIA, an organization that has long attempted—by its own admission at its website—to subvert the radical left by buying off the “soft” left through such false fronts as apparently-philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, set up specifically to channel money to putative left-leaning outfits like The Tyee (funded mostly by the BC Federation of Labour).
Shannon Rupp’s Globe and Mail article appeared one week later. According to The Tyee website, Rupp “writes regularly . . . for The Tyee,” where she has appeared 23 times over the last three years, beginning with its launch. She signed the Globe and Mail article as an unattached “freelance journalist who writes for both online and traditional media,” choosing to stay silent about her Tyee connection, an association she does not fail to make in other published work.
So much for why this writer would pen such an angry, vengeful screed. But why would the venerable Globe and Mail accept it for publication? The real surprise is that this article, which purports to be an exposé about the weaknesses of Wikipedia, but instead focuses almost entirely on me—who is, on the national stage, a nobody—would ever be printed. In communications with the editor of the section, Jerry Johnson, who printed the article, it became evident that it wasn’t the angle regarding the Wikipedia entry that justified his running the smear, but rather Johnson’s reaction to what the article intimated to him about my take on the state of professional journalism in Canada.
“I’m sorry if you’re upset, but I hope it’s not without reason,” he wrote back, rather inflamingly himself. “I realize from the piece that you believe facts are just whatever people say they are,” he went on—as much as confirming that the article really was meant to attack me and my anti-scholastic criticisms of journalism in Canada. He insisted the article was about Wikipedia, not me, even after I pointed out that “Wikipedia” is mentioned 12 times in the article, while I am mentioned 26 times—or that 13 of the 28 paragraphs are solely about me.
I submitted to him an article about journalism in Canada and its infiltration by libertarians (“The Public Hates Professional Journalists for a Very Good Reason,” printed in The Republic of East Vancouver, issue 138), which he rejected, saying, “I don’t know what to make of it. I guess most of us are so beaten down by the Conrad Black notion that we’re all a bunch of weedy leftists, the idea that in reality corporate-greased J schools are cranking out libertarians en masse seems incredible.”
What’s incredible is that, while most journalists in Canada vociferously and thoroughly rejected Conrad Black’s characterization of them as leftists, at least this one is now hoisting up that same characterization as a shield against the more credible charge that rampant libertarianism infects their ranks.
It may be a result of The Republic’s attempts to undermine libertarian-inspired journalism in Canada that the usually far more circumspect Globe and Mail ran the unusual risk of a libel suit by recklessly printing the statement that I—someone who would more typically be viewed from Toronto as a small-time buffoon of no consequence, if viewed at all—am a dangerous liar, and that my newspaper, tiny and inconsequential by all measures, is “inflammatory.”
For anyone interested in reforming journalism in Canada, in releasing it from the grip of corporate-financed journalism “accreditation factories,” as the late Jane Jacobs described universities in Canada, and in exterminating the corporate-financed libertarianism that has infected it, these events show how viciously reactionary the professional body of journalists—and the journalism school professors who indoctrinate them—can become when an outsider pokes a stick at their all-too-comfortable nests.
The real threat that probably best explains the attack in the Globe and Mail may be the existence of The Republic itself. It is, after all, perhaps the first truly independent newspaper launched in the last 30 years without any government or private foundation grants or without any support from any large corporations, either in grants or in advertising, and that has a growing readership, a profitable bottom line, and strong local community and small business support—and not a single, professionally trained university journalism school graduate can be found among its 98 contributors over its five-and-a-half year existence.
That is to say, The Republic of East Vancouver runs happily and successfully completely outside the control of professional journalists, the journalism school professors who create them, and the big corporations who finance the journalism schools and richly endow those professors’ chairs. That’s why the Globe and Mail, some professors at schools of journalism, and a lot of professional practicing journalists, are so furious with The Republic of East Vancouver. You decide how much it's worth to you:
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