CBC interviewer Carol Off, photo grabbed from the Internet. Below: Kory Teneycke, Ezra Levant.
If you think Sun News Network is bad now, just wait until they’ve got their ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that their broadcasts must be carried on basic cable television and paid for by cable subscribers.
Any listener could infer they’ll be much worse after listening yesterday evening to CBC interviewer Carol Off demolish Sun News Network Vice-President Kory Teneycke’s slippery attempt to defend the far-right network’s commentator Ezra Levant for his racist diatribe against the Roma people six months ago.
In a short segment on the CBC’s As It Happens radio program last night, Mr. Teneycke, a former communications director for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, remained determinedly barricaded inside his “message box,” doing his best to sound contrite while refusing to acknowledge the patently racist intentions of Mr. Levant’s remarks on the Sept. 5, 2012, episode of his regular Sun News program.
“I don’t believe his intent was racist,” Mr. Teneycke insisted at one point in response to Ms. Off’s persistent questioning, which could serve as a textbook example of the now mostly forgotten art of how to conduct an interview with an evasive subject. “I don’t think his intent was spreading hatred.”
Indeed, Mr. Teneycke suggested at one point, Mr. Levant’s rant was just misunderstood … it was merely meant to be entertaining and satirical, even if it didn’t quite make the grade in that regard.
And why did Mr. Levant himself wait six months, Ms. Off wondered, to apologize for his remarks? Really, Mr. Teneycke seemed to suggest, the network’s sly apology in September 2012 ought to have been enough.
As has been noted in this space, it was hard to take that apology very seriously when it stated, “it was not the intent of Sun News, or anyone employed by Sun News, to promote negative stereotypes about the Roma people.” Excuse me!
“Why didn’t you fire him?” Ms. Off persisted, noting, “I would have been fired for saying that.”
Ah, Mr. Teneycke responded, but he knows Mr. Levant. “There’s no hatred in his heart.”
Anyone who heard the original nine-minute episode of The Source back in September would find this explanation very hard to square with what was actually said by the well-known commentator. Unfortunately, readers will be hard pressed to confirm that now, since Sun News as washed all copies of Mr. Levant’s vicious screed down the corporate Memory Hole and a recording placed on Youtube.com by a third party has been removed “due to a copyright claim by Sun News Network.”
Ms. Off’s interview left listeners with the inevitable conclusion that the timing of Sun News Network’s pleas to the CRTC for must-carry instead of optional status for its broadcasts on basic cable service – and the $18 million or so in consumer subsidies that would flow to it each year as a consequence is what is driving the network’s untypical and convenient remorse.
Not having that money, Mr. Teneycke claimed, poses an “existential threat” to the survival of Sun News – a bit of a stretch to anyone who understands the economics of the broadcast industry in Canada.
Still, the timing of Sun News’s CRTC application and the market fundamentalist network’s desire to get its snout deep into the public trough is no doubt part of the story. Its application is scheduled to be heard by the CRTC in less than a month, on April 23.
But other commentators on the Internet, like Rabble’s Karl Nerenberg, have made a persuasive case that Mr. Levant came very close to being charged with hate speech by the Metro Toronto Police Service and was saved only by highly unusual political interference with the police investigation by senior officials of the Ontario government.
Now that would have looked really bad for the network’s shredded credibility!
The Ontario officials, wrote Nerenberg, were “deterred by Levant’s well-known reputation for being a loud-mouthed bully, and didn’t want the Ontario government getting into a public spitting match with Sun News’ professional ranter. So Levant, ironically, was saved by his own notoriety and unsavory reputation.”
The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui reports that staff of Toronto’s Roma Community Centre were told by police “they found more than enough evidence to charge Levant under the Criminal Code, and the Crown attorney agreed.” Detectives said they’d never before encountered a decision to reject charges in such circumstances.
This is why, of course, Mr. Teneycke’s previous employment in the Prime Minister’s Office is important, as is the warm and prominent reception received by Mr. Levant at the recent Manning Centre conference on conservative big ideas – which one hopes do not include encouraging organized attacks on identifiable cultural groups.
As Mr. Nerenberg wrote, “despite his near-buffoon status, Levant is still capable of striking politically-motivated fear in the hearts of senior decision makers.”
Well, we all know from experience how bullies operate.
If the Sun News Network and Mr. Levant are now rewarded for their glib and evasive apologies – which parsed carefully were only for causing offence, not for the offence caused – they will be further empowered.
If there are no consequences for their actions because they have friends in high places, their behaviour will grow more extreme.
This is just the way bullies are. So if you think Sun News Network is bad now, count on it they’ll be much worse if the CRTC forces cable subscribers to subsidize their activities.
Anonymous comments? Dean Del Mastro’s right: there oughtta be a law!
It’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Dean Del Mastro, the Conservative MP for the Ontario riding of Peterborough, who informed us the other day that there oughtta be a law about anonymous comments on the Internet.
“One of the best ways to end on-line and electronic bullying, libel and slander would be to force people posting hurtful comments to properly identify themselves,” Mr. Del Mastro (or some anonymous political sluggo toiling away in his constituency office) wrote last week on his Facebook account.
“This morning I read comments on a news story posted on an electronic news publication, many of them could only be described as hateful rants. The common denominator is that none of them identified the person that wrote them; this strikes me as something that Parliament should address,” said Mr. Del Mastro, who according to his official webpage “will be fully exonerated.” (What that’s all about, Mr. Del Mastro explained on his MP page, is that Elections Canada is just following up “on false complaints from a disgruntled former supplier who sued me unsuccessfully.” So, enough said about that, anonymously or otherwise.)
Well, I for one kind of agree with Mr. Del Mastro’s views on Internet anonymity, although it prompted a storm of snotty 140 character protests, many of them sorta, semi, somewhat anonymous. At least, I agree that it would be a better world in most ways if we would all just identify ourselves with our actual names when we wanted to say something rude about a powerful politician, businessman or corporation.
But then, we might want to amend some provincial Defamation Acts, like the ones in 10 of our provinces, so that Canadians actually enjoyed their Charter guarantee of free expression without the risk of SLAPP suits by powerful individuals and corporations with extremely well-financed chips on their metaphorical shoulders.
And even so, would be pretty hard to enforce given the ease with which false identities, fake identities, satirical identities and multiple online personalities can be ginned up on the Internet nowadays – a capability for which, as fans of the market like Mr. Del Mastro would have to admit, there’s a market.
But what really got me wondering about Mr. Del Mastro’s commentary was whether he cleared it through the Prime Minister’s Office. I mean, isn’t Stephen Harper’s PMO the sinister agency pulling the strings attached to what has come to be known (here, anyway) as the Tory Online Rage Machine?
And doesn’t the TORM, more to the point, depend on the anonymity of its legion of identities to be effective – if only because on most nights the vast majority of its thousands of defamatory, offensive and often profane observations are composed by the same five or six pimply faced adolescent Conservative Party operatives sitting in their underwear at their computers in their basement bedrooms in their moms’ houses?
You know, the kind of anonymous heroes who labelled the late Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for having the temerity to suggest that the so-called NATO coalition should open lines of communication with the Taliban, something that the Conservative government of the day rejected as unconscionable although the same Conservative government is prepared to consider it.
Mr. Layton has passed on, but those of us who admired him are still waiting for the apology.
Who can forget the famous Craigslist advertisement a few weeks before the last federal election from “a social media organization working for a political organization” looking for “a team of writers who will post to newspaper comments, media forums, FB pages, etc. We are NOT officially affiliated with the Harper campaign.” (The italics are mine.)
“Your writing must be right-wing, strong and use supplied talking points,” the ad said. “You are creating an on-line persona with a consistent tone. Ideally, you can make up facts and statistics to stir controversy. Where suited, humour, sarcasm and personal insults are welcome.”
“To apply,” continued the ad, which did not mention who would supply the talking points, “submit a 100 word post based on the headline ‘Ignatieff promises no coalition after election.’” That would be a reference to Michael Ignatieff, a now-forgotten pre-Justin-Trudeau leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Whatever, I think all reasonable Canadians could get behind Mr. Del Mastro’s effort to ensure these opinionated multiple personalities – who, we must remember, are NOT associated with any Harper campaigns, post or future – are required by law to identify themselves.
But will Mr. Del Mastro’s former pals and patrons in the Harper Election Machine? That remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.