See no evil, no more
Being pro-American was one thing, but the National Post's Canada-bashing finally went too far, says the paper's former columnist PATRICIA PEARSON
By PATRICIA PEARSON
Saturday, April 19, 2003 - Page A19
suppose it's rare, nowadays, to see journalists quit their jobs to protest their paper's politics. We talk about media oligarchies, about their corporate agendas, their "bias." But we view them as monoliths and don't expect the living souls of which they are comprised to beg to differ. There is the bias of Al-Jazeera, the bias of CNN, the liberal bias of The New York Times.
"Did The New York Times watch the same war as the rest of us?" a hawkish columnist wondered in The Wall Street Journal the other day.
Could she be more specific? The New York Times is a collection of hundreds of individual editors, reporters and commentators, some as conservative as William Safire and others as left-wing as Bob Herbert, some reporting straight from Iraq, while others remain cloistered in film-screening rooms or on their beats.
Were they all watching the war with one, miraculously fused pair of eyes? No. And for the past three years, working as a columnist for the National Post, I saw a different world than my colleagues on the paper's op-ed page. I described the view from where I stood, and if the Post was perceived as "right-wing," then so be it. I, myself, and many wonderful reporters and editors there, were not.
So I did not quit the Post because of its bias. Not exactly. What I want to explain is that I quit because of mine.
It happened gradually, by increments and subtle turns. But being a liberal columnist at the Post grew increasingly unpleasant. A paper that started out as imaginative and vibrantly skeptical began sliding into orthodoxy. A kind of Political Correctness, so excoriated as a disease of the left, began to prevail.
When CanWest, controlled by the Asper family, acquired the paper from Conrad Black, I no longer dared to express sympathy for Palestinians. When my editor, of whom I am fond, revealed a deep suspicion of environmentalism, I self-censored in favour of conviviality. When I mentioned that Canadians were more tolerant of abortion than Americans, I found myself accused by another columnist in the paper of "being more persuaded than the rest of us" by the merits of enforced abortion in China. That, in turn, unleashed a flood of hate mail from the pro-life crowd.
It was vexing, but not intolerable. I simply felt as I imagine a man would in a roomful of radical feminists.
Then came the prelude to the war in Iraq and, with it, a deep unease throughout the world about the massive, rumbling shift in the international order. The White House stamped its foot impatiently while the world thought the implications through, and emotions intensified. At my paper, they exploded.
Debate -- so critical for Canadians at this juncture -- was trounced at the Post by a sort of Shock and Awe campaign against any liberal position, not only from the neo-cons' favourite wit, Mark Steyn -- who treats punditry as a sport and shoots liberals like skeet -- but also from every other editorial writer on the page.
Perhaps 9/11 knocked them off their horse on the way to Damascus. I cannot presume to say. But the paper got religion. What arose from the editorial page, with remarkable intensity, was a neo-conservative vision of America that did not remotely reflect the America that I once lived in, and continue to love and respect. Instead, it was a cultish adoration by Bush people of American power unleashed.
This vision of America blatantly favours the rich, displays a breathtaking indifference to the environment, crushes civil liberties, manipulates patriotism by stoking fear, insults its allies, and meets skeptics with utter contempt.
To see it confused with America per se was actually shocking. When Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia -- an American, I believe, but the Post might wish to check his ID -- stood up on Capitol Hill last month and said, "today, I weep for my country," he was expressing the concern of many. Fascism rising. But, to the Post, such objections to the neo-conservative vision became an unpatriotic heresy to be heaped with scorn.
How astonishing, utterly, to watch a Canadian newspaper presume itself to be more pro-American than the most senior politician in the United States Senate.
At times, the Post's hostility to critics of the war was simply childish. There wasn't a peace movement. There was a "peace" movement, quote unquote. There wasn't a valid argument that UN inspectors be given more time to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or that pre-emptive invasion should be seriously hashed out in light of precedents in international law, or that an alternative to force might be imagined.
All along at the Post, protesters were dismissed as loathsome "peace" activists indulging "an infantile nostalgia for anarchy" whilst "wrapped in the warm fuzz of self-righteousness." In recent days, such people were said to have betrayed "our best friend" America, and should stop "henpecking" U.S. forces to restore order in Iraq, because they really ought to be "too busy eating crow."
Note the lack of grace here, the meanness of spirit, the selective memory and the gloating. Not a day went by this month when I didn't want to write a letter to the editor of my own newspaper.
But even still, that wasn't what prompted me to hand myself a pink slip. What finally provokes a journalist to resign in protest of bias? The answer is when she begins to feel that that bias is doing her nation harm.
Allow this piece to stand as my retort to columnist Diane Francis, who wrote in last Saturday's Post that unlike American patriotism, which is fabulous, "Canadian nationalism is an oxymoron." Really, Ms. Francis? Well, call me a freak of nature, but I am an ardent Canadian nationalist. I love my country, and I am fiercely proud of it.
I cannot sit back and watch this nation attacked, relentlessly and viciously, by a newspaper that would trash so much of what we believe in, from tolerant social values to international law, belittling us for having our beliefs, while turning around and saying that what makes America great is Americans' ardour in defending their beliefs.
I can not be a part of a newspaper that would hector our business community into fearing that Canada is to blame for the deterioration in U.S.-Canada relations, when the Americans themselves concede that the White House has fence-mending to do.
I am in Mexico now. Remember Mexico? That other, vulnerable satellite state that opposed unsanctioned U.S. action? I sit here watching the Mexicans comfortably and elegantly banter about that "loco" George Bush, a man who -- as Carlos Fuentes mused recently in a conservative paper -- was less threatening when he was drunk, and I weep for those of my countrymen who have been made to feel ashamed by the Post.
O Canada, Ms. Francis. The fact that I bugger up the verses at ball games doesn't mean that I don't get the meaning of the song. I sat at the knees of my grandfather as a child, absorbing the love he felt for this country with every exhaled breath, and you cannot -- and will not -- make me betray him in favour of becoming George Bush's "best friend."
Patricia Pearson, an award-winning writer, was a columnist for the National Post until this week. She is the granddaughter of Lester B. Pearson.
Posts
