April 21, 2003
The mainstream liberal media--the ones that appeared to spend some time rooting for Saddam Hussein are not likely to drop their "blame Americans for everything" stand anytime soon. In fact the opposition of the media to the United States seems to be worsening.
After days of constantly criticizing the American war plans the media was shocked and awed at the coalition’s swift victory. Needing new reasons to dump on the United States didn’t take too long. Despite the fact that the Americans are moving quickly to have an interim Iraqi government installed, the media loves to refer to the coalition as "occupiers". Of course, had they simply pulled out, they would have been accused of abandoning the innocent Iraqi civilian citizens.
The rioting and looting of Baghdad and other cities was blamed on the U.S. The liberal elite, who pontificate the evil of America being the world’s policemen are now criticizing them for not being able to control the looting, especially of museums and other cultural centres. And the media just loves to find Iraqis who will say that they hated Saddam Hussein, but…
The media usually doesn’t take the time to say that as a result of the coalition, Iraqis now have the freedom to say that they hate Saddam. They are too busy salivating, waiting for the "but".
The news we missed
I wrote in a previous column that since the start of the war in Iraq there was virtually no mention of other foreign news. I singled out the National Post that had completely dispensed with their World News Section to concentrate on the war. The day after Tikrit fell and the Pentagon announced that the major war was over, foreign coverage once again resumed.
One story that was neglected by most of the media was the long jail terms given to 76 Cuban dissidents. It has been speculated that Castro would not have taken that action had the world’s press not been so focused on the Iraqi war.
On April 3, 966 people were massacred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a relatively short period of time by a rival tribe. Had that number of Iraqi civilians been killed under similar circumstances, it would still be playing a prominent role in the news today. The Canadian media managed to cover the SARS epidemic while giving substantial coverage to the war. Is it too much to expect a couple of war related items be scrapped to make room for the slaughter of 966 innocent people?
The Star, racial profiling, and the courts
On April 16, the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the Crown’s appeal of a lower appellate court that quashed the impaired driving conviction of former Toronto Raptors player Dee Brown.
The reason for the Court of Appeal’s decision rested with the finding of the reasonable apprehension of bias in the trial court. The appeal court found that the trial judge precluded the argument that Brown, who is black, could have been a victim of racial profiling. The significance of the ruling is that while the onus will be on the accused to show that he or she has been the subject of racial profiling, the concept of racial profiling exists and need not be proved.
The next day’s account of the decision by the Star’s Tracey Tyler was unusual in that it gave no mention of the paper’s Race and Crime series that found that blacks are treated more harshly by the police than whites are. Mention of the series is almost always made in Toronto Star articles that deal with race and crime. It could have been omitted for the simple reason that the arguments made regarding Brown’s 1999 arrest were made prior to the Star’s series.
profiling must be proved on an individual basis. The Toronto Star would have us believe that it is just a numbers game--that if proportionately more blacks are arrested for certain offences, then racial profiling exists..