HIGH-PROFILE MEDIA TYPES ARE GOING DOWN LIKE BOWLING PINS AS THEY OPPOSE RIGID ORTHODOXY.
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD, WHO ADMITS TO BEING A FELLOW SINNER, FEELS IT’S TIME TO SPEAK OUT.
Poor Steve Ladurantaye. I hesitate to speak in his defence only because as a fellow sinner (I too engaged in the “Appropriation Prize” joke on Twitter), my support may do him more harm.
But someone has to speak up: The managing editor at CBC’s The National, Ladurantaye is the third highprofile media type in recent months to resign or be demoted for expressing an idea offensive to the rigid current orthodoxy.
As Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychology professor who knows a thing or two about taking on sacred cows, said Thursday in a brief phone conversation, that’s scary.
“You guys are being knocked off one by one,” he said. “Journalists better start fighting or they’re going to die.”
There’s a fourth figure too, less well-known until all this blew up — Hal Niedzviecki, the former editor of Write, The Writers’ Union of Canada quarterly.
He resigned after he was raked on social media for writing that writers should be free to write anything, in any voice, and having jokingly suggested an “Appropriation Prize” for the writer who best wrote outside her own experience.
That in turn led to former National Post editor Ken Whyte offering money for the prize on Twitter, which is where Ladurantaye and the others (me among them) got in trouble.
I certainly took it just as Whyte later said he’d meant it: He wasn’t seriously offering to sponsor a prize, but was rather saying, as he put it, “I agree wholeheartedly with what Hal wrote, and I don’t think he should have lost his job for it.”
Neither do I think that Andrew Potter should have resigned his seat as the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, though he was allowed to stay on as an associate professor. (There are some who say he was shown the door, though the university denies it.)
Potter was the first to feel the power of the social media/appropriation backlash.
He wrote a column published by Maclean’s on March 20 in which he said that the blizzard which stranded hundreds of cars overnight in Montreal had also revealed cracks in Quebec civil society.
You could agree or disagree with the piece, but it was hardly outrageous or outlandish.
Yet in venturing outside the lines of what’s permissible for a non-Quebecker to say about Quebec, Potter got a reaction that was swift, high-powered and vicious.
Next was Niedzviecki, and then there was Jonathan Kay, who resigned as editor of The Walrus after writing a column in the Post not in defence of Niedzviecki, but in defence of the debate.
The reaction to Kay’s column, he said, had not much to do with him packing it in at the magazine.
But a line in that column seems prescient: The Niedzviecki piece, Kay said, “had the air of someone exasperated with the political correctness, tokenism and hypersensitivity that now pervade academia and cultural organizations.” He said he’d found himself censoring himself more and more. So do I. So do we all, I think.
Then came Ladurantaye, whose contribution to the “appropriation prize” tweetfest was this: “I’ll throw in $100.” (I am five times as guilty, I suppose, since I offered to kick in $500 for the bar tab.)
It’s what’s happened to him since which is galling.
He deleted what he called the “dumb, glib tweet.” He apologized to his colleagues at The National, and in 13 tweets, to the world.
He could not have been more abject. Did he imagine that would be enough?
CBC let him swing in the wind for several days. It was only on Wednesday that CBC News editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire sent the note announcing that Ladurantaye was “stepping away” from his role as managing editor.
She said that “In addition to taking the time necessary to reach out to indigenous communities and other communities as part of his learning process, Steve will work in our content experience area to help evolve our storytelling strategies,” McGuire said.
In the fall, CBC will “reassess his connection to The National going forward,” she said, and in the interim, CBC News has created an “emerging leaders program” to develop a more diverse leadership team and is conducting “training about unconscious bias” across the country.
Oh good: Ladurantaye, having been through a “struggle session” straight out of Mao’s China, is now off to re-education camp.
It’s Canada, 2017, and journalists are in peril of losing their jobs or being pressured to quit for expressing controversial ideas.
Thus far, neither of the two national journalist organizations — the Canadian Association of Journalists and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression — has publicly uttered a peep.
The national board of the CAJ, its president Nick Taylor-Vaisey said Thursday, “is currently considering this.”
The CJFE, executive director Tom Henheffer said, is going to be issuing a statement soon.
“To sum it up, though, we don’t see this as a free expression issue,” Henheffer said in an email Thursday. “Freedom of expression is not freedom from criticism. … Caving to societal pressure is not censorship,” he said. “If the government was involved in any way, or if a lawsuit was launched with the intent to silence someone, it would be different.”
All in all, I think I’d rather face government repression or even a couple of terrorists with guns, as they did at Charlie Hebdo magazine not so long ago, than this insidious erosion of the freedom to think and write.
Of course, freedom of expression doesn’t spare you from criticism, even the withering sort — but when it’s accompanied by demands for your head, your job, and systemic reform within your company, it’s no longer just criticism.