November 10, 2003
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how terrible the mayoralty candidates debate was on Citytv. Groups of supporters cheered for their candidate and the mayoral hopefuls were all speaking over one another, leading to the conclusion that they were incapable of serious debate. In that column I blamed the fiasco, not on the candidates, but on the un-professionalism of the debate’s moderator, Gord Martineau who did little other than stop the debate to go to commercial breaks.
On November 3, the same candidates appeared on CFRB radio for a 90-minute debate. At the outset of the debate, the moderator took firm control indicating that if anyone tried to speak over anyone else, he would signal the engineer who would cut the offending candidate’s microphone off (which happened on a couple of occasions). The moderator, in what had to be a dig at City, told the audience that the candidates and reporters were the only ones in the studio--there was no peanut gallery present.
The mature way that CFRB handled the program left no doubt that it was City’s amateurish way of running the debate and not the candidates that left a lot to be desired.
Last week, I wrote about conservatives in the United States who were outraged at the upcoming miniseries on CBS, entitled "The Reagans". Complaints about the show ranged from fabricated quotes attributed to the former president about AIDS sufferers deserving what they get, to leaving out some of Reagan’s great accomplishments, to casting James Brolin, husband of outspoken critic Barbra Streisand, as Ronald Reagan.
CBS has now announced that it will not be airing the miniseries on its main network--rather the production will appear on Showtime, a U.S. cable network. The network’s president, Leslie Moonves did an about face and admitted that the program was in fact, biased.
Apparently the reversal occurred after Marc Christian, the former lover of actor Rock Hudson who died of AIDS in 1985, wrote to Moonves indicating that the portrayal of Ronald Reagan as a homophobe was completely false. Christian wrote that Reagan, who knew that Hudson was gay, phoned him while the latter was on his deathbed and sent his and Nancy’s prayers. Christian went on to say that the former president had many gay men on his staff when he was Governor of California. All this was in response to the fictitious scene wherein Reagan says, in regards to AIDS sufferers, "Those who live in sin, shall die in sin".
Babs Streisand and others on the left, are, of course, babbling on and on about Republican conspiracies and freedom of speech…
After clearly showing a bias for the provincial Liberals during the recent Ontario election campaign, Citytv is now rooting for their party on its newscasts. If the Liberals are not paying for the publicity, they should be. On one newscast, Anne Mroczkowski, with her eyes wide apart, described how the Liberal’s inheritance of a $5.6 billion dollar deficit was a "shocker". In describing it in that way, she was following the party line like a good girl. The Liberals and their buds in the media want us to forget that senior Liberal MPs, Gerry Phillips and Monte Kwinter, both now cabinet ministers, predicted during the election campaign that the deficit would be at least $5 billion and not the $2 billion that leader Dalton McGuinty was saying it was. They weren’t really "shocked" although Mroczkowski undoubtedly was.
On the same newscast, a smiling Adam Vaughan listed what his hero, McGuinty, was doing to fight the deficit--cancelling the school tax credit and scrapping the tax credit for seniors. The problem is that not going ahead of these two programs were part of the Liberal platform and had absolutely nothing to do with any measure that would be brought in to rid the province of the deficit.
And in case anyone was upset with McGuinty’s real deficit-fighting policies, reporter Jee-Yun Lee assured viewers that although McGuinty would remove the capped rate on hydro, the rates won’t "go through the roof".
Dalton and his spin doctors could not have done a better job.