The Globe goes gunning for Heather Mallick

Whoa! What's with The Globe and Mail's nasty little assault on their former columnist, Heather Mallick? Not only did they sic Margaret Wente on her but they added an indignant editorial for good measure. Mallick really seems to have gotten up their nose. The source of their ire is Mallick's recent article on the CBC website trashing Sarah Palin. Mallick did go over the top, as she tends to do, and it is to be expected that the raging right at the National Post and their execrable American companion Fox News might be furious, but why is The Globe getting its knickers in a twist? After all, the CBC withdrew the column and apologized (and that's yet another story), so relax, folks.

I don't much like writers as rude as Mallick tends to be, yet when her column was appearing in The Globe and Mail, I never missed it. She is just so damn funny. It's rather like watching South Park and its potty-mouthed little characters. You feel you really shouldn't be watching this stuff but you're laughing too hard to change channels. She is a guilty read, in other words. I wasn't surprised when she and The Globe parted ways. Her contempt for the American Empire didn't fit with the Globe's pro-Americanism, certainly not in the way Margaret Wente's snide anti-Canadianism does. Mallick now keeps better company, writing for the CBC and the Guardian.

The Globe editorial concludes with a cop-out, insisting the CBC must not run "biased commentary," but "privately-run newspapers or broadcasters are free to run whatever points of view they wish, with or without balance." Fair enough that the CBC should be balanced, but the rest of the mass media, all corporate controlled, should be free to monolithically indoctrinate us in their conservative agenda? How convenient for the right. And yet another reminder how badly we need a more varied and democratic media.