Press Council biased

Coming on the heels of blatant liberal-left bias in media coverage during the recent federal election campaign comes disturbing news of further bias and a conflict of interest on the part of a press watchdog organization in Ontario.

The Ontario Press Council has rejected final appeals into a complaint over a series of pieces by Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick, which appeared in January and February 2003 editions of that newspaper. The complaint covered a number of points with regard to those pieces - centring around Mallick's exhortations that leading abortionist Henry Morgentaler be named to the Order of Canada - and especially concerned factual claims and the refusal of Mallick or the Globe and Mail to provide adequate - or even any - space for opposing points of view.

In justification for its decision to not even consider the complaint, the press council wrote in a letter from its executive secretary, Mel Sufrin, that it regarded Mallick's original article as "an opinion piece" and that "it is appropriate for newspapers to exercise wide latitude in expressing their opinions in editorials, no matter how controversial or unpopular the opinions may be, and to give columnists and others the same latitude in expressing personal opinions."

The press council ignored the fact that the article in question was not an opinion column, but rather a 3,000-plus word extravaganza in the Globe's Focus section extolling Morgentaler and what Mallick saw as his heroic efforts to bestow Canadian women with abortion "rights."

Worse still, a recent news article in the Hamilton Spectator newspaper indicated that despite its claims to the contrary, the press council does, in fact, adjudicate complaints on opinion columns and finds the writers of those columns guilty of transgressing journalistic norms.

The June 11 article, "Press council slams Star column on Hamas," reported that Toronto Star opinion columnist Rosie DiManno used "unnecessarily hurtful language" in describing the Arab world. DiManno had said Arab society is such that "wickedness is bred in the bone." In another ruling, the press council upheld a complaint about a humour column in the Ajax-Pickering News Advertiser about a metaphorical reference to a "menopausal Eskimo."

The press council, in the past, has also found opinion writers such as Michael Coren and Michelle Landsberg guilty of similar transgressions. Coren, for example, was found to be in error for including a claim in his Sun Media column that UNICEF supports abortion in Third World countries. Landsberg, meanwhile, was found to have unnecessarily condemned evangelical Christians in her now-defunct Toronto Star column.

The press council offered no explanations for these apparent discrepancies; however, the discovery that the organization is chaired by an ardent pro-abortion activist may offer a clue.

According to the press council's website at www.ontpress.com, a Doris Anderson is listed as the chair. Anderson is well known as a notorious feminist and pro-abortion activist for decades in Canada - by her own boasts, she wrote a pro-abortion editorial almost 50 years ago in the Chatelaine magazine she edited at the time.

Anderson also provided a foreword to the Childbirth by Choice Trust's document, "No Choice: Canadian Women Tell Their Stories of Illegal Abortion," produced as recently as 1998. In the forward, Anderson described how, in 1959 and soon after she became editor of Chatelaine magazine, she "dared tackle a subject that threatened to get me fired and to put the magazine out of business." Her article suggested abortion be legalized in three instances: if a woman's life were in danger, in cases of rape or incest and if the woman knew she was carrying a baby with extremely severe disabilities. She went on to claim that "hundreds of women died at the hands of back-street butchers."

Further, Anderson was a star speaker at a June 4 pro-abortion press conference during this year's federal election campaign that was organized by the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics. The event was also attended by such stalwarts for the cause as June Callwood, Shirley Douglas and Norma Scarborough.

At that time, Anderson stated with respect to abortion "rights" that, "We thought we had this quite won" and vowed that if there was one issue that would bring women out into the streets or to the polls "it is this issue - control over their bodies."

The Ontario Press Council offered no explanation as to how an individual with such a pro-abortion orientation as Anderson could hold the chair of a journalistic watchdog organization and then, in a non-partisan manner, sit in judgement of a complaint regarding the very same abortion issue with which she was so intimately involved.

A nationally known journalist who writes for a major Canadian newspaper and was contacted by The Interim observed that the Mallick/Globe case and the Ontario Press Council's handling - or mishandling - of it was a matter of journalists "looking after their own." Indeed, several other journalists contacted by The Interim took a hands-off approach and wouldn't even comment on the matter, apparently out of concern for what it might mean for their standing within the Canadian journalistic community.

Rank-and-file Canadians, however, had reason to be concerned that a major Canadian national newspaper exhibited blatant bias regarding a tremendously important and contentious social issue, defended its position to the hilt and then was backed up by a watchdog organization whose role was supposed to be to ensure that fairness and journalistic integrity were maintained by media outlets under its purview.