July 21, 2003
When associate editor Arthur Weinreb suggested a new weekly website to be called Canadafreepress.com, I was wary. "Everyone’s doing the Internet," I thought, "and what about all that extra work?" Art’s argument that it would expand our horizons by bringing us into the international arena won the day. Researching and writing stories about international issues would be vastly different from writing about municipal politics in the City of Toronto, which was what we’d been doing for the last 13 years.
Rather than the hijinks at wasteful Toronto City Hall, we dove into my favourite topics: the United Nations and its bizarre obsession with one world government. During the past 52 weeks, colourful characters like Maurice Strong, Ted Turner, and Al Gore have strode through our cover stories and columns.
When we first started writing about the influence a man called Maurice Strong has on a guy called Paul Martin, we were out there on our own. Now, this not so long ago taboo topic has found fresh light in the stories of the National Post’s Anne Dawson.
American writers such as the talented Henry Lamb, whose columns also appear in CFP, had been chronicling the Strong agenda for decades.
This issue marks CFP’s official first anniversary, and looking back, it’s been a year of tremendous success. During its first year online, the site has received 1.9 million hits, 450,000 page viewings, and it is still growing.
From day one, we decided to make CFP investigative like its printed counterpart, Toronto Free Press. Weinreb and I thought that if we could present cover stories that were unavailable anywhere else, in the same spirit as TFP, we could first pick up and then maintain readership. Time did not take long to prove us right.
Even before hosting our own online publication, I always went to Newsmax.com,--in my opinion the best read on the net. Imagine my joy when after nine months of posting CFP stories, to discover that Newsmax.com had picked up and run with one of our cover stories. The story was titled Lining Their Pockets; `Rush’-ing in on the UN Elite. It was a tale of corruption at the world’s largest bureaucracy, the United Nations.
Our cover story Antsy in Toronto, detailing the T.O. SARS scare, written last April, was scooped up by Accuracy in Media, Townhall.com, the Federal Observer on the net, and by both the Washington Times and the Sierra Times printed publications.
On July 3, Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington wrote a column entitled "The Whitest Stars" regarding the 97 mug shots of Toronto Star columnists posted on the CFP website under the headline,The White Star Brigade.
As this column was being written, we received a telephone call from Fox News, which had chosen the same story for their weekend Media Watch program.
CFP stories have been posted by The Voice of Principled Conservatism, PrisonPlanet.com, PropagandaMatrix.com, Orwell Today, The Daily Pundit, Flit and TYSK News and Editorials, just to mention a few.
There have been a few little glitches along the way. CFP was once mixed up with the Toronto Star on the Fox News show, O’Reilly Factor. Military expert David Hunt told viewers not to read Toronto Free Press and we were deluged with angry letters, that more rightfully should have been sent to the Star. When we pointed out the case of mistaken identity to Hunt in an email, he promptly wrote back saying he must have been having a "senior moment".
Numerous letters have poured in from all over the globe, and even the FBI and CIA have logged on to our site!
Some of the letters have been anti-CFP, not the least of them lately from Toronto Star sports writers, ticked off because we wrote about our perception of their publication’s unfounded charges of racism against the Toronto Police and the Toronto Blue Jays.
But that’s part of the turf when you’re into provocative investigative journalism.
When Lynne Martin of Fox News telephoned requesting permission to run our White Star Brigade story, she asked if there were many Canadian publications with CFP’s unabashed right-wing editorial slant.
"Most of our media is left of centre, and as far as I know, we are the only one who is not," I told her. "I’m sure as far as the Toronto Star is concerned, that’s one too many."
Happy Anniversary, Canadafreepress.com. As promised by your editors, the best is yet to come!
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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