by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
September 10, 2004
There is no doubt that there is a strong left wing bias in the mainstream Canadian media. The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily and our national broadcaster, the CBC are prime examples of where the news is reported from both a small "l" and large "L" perspective. The CBC is the most egregious example of bias in the Canadian media; not so much because they are the most biased, but because the network is publicly funded.
Media organizations like the CBC show their bias by adopting the values of the Liberal Party. Viewpoints that are held by others are ignored or downplayed. During election campaigns the role of Canadian conservative parties, such as they are in this country, is minimized or ignored. a great many Canadians favour capital punishment and oppose abortion and same sex marriage but you would never know it from watching or listening to Canada’s national broadcaster. But in the United States, a lot of the bias of the media is expressed through blatant hostility against those that the media elites oppose.
We may not have the Fox News Channel in this country but on the bright side, we don’t have Chris Matthews either. It is hard to imagine even Teresa Heinz Kerry putting up such a nasty and spirited defense of her husband as the host of MSNBC’s "Hardball" did leading up to the Republican National Convention.
On the august 19 edition of Hardball, Matthews had author and conservative commentator Michelle Malkin as a guest on his show. after asking Malkin if she was speaking on behalf of President Bush just because she refused to condemn the ads of the Swift Boat veterans, the interview turned to Kerry’s war injuries. Malkin asked, "Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the shrapnel in his leg. They are legitimate questions about whether or not it was a self-inflicted wound." Matthews then asked, "What do you mean by self-inflicted? are you saying that he shot himself on purpose? Is that what you’re saying?"
Matthews then lost it. He kept asking the same question about Kerry having shot himself and refused to let Malkin answer. Every time she attempted an answer she was cut off. Much of the conversation went like this:
Matthews: I want an answer yes or no, Michelle.
Malkin: Some of the veterans say…
Matthews: No. No one has every(sic) accused him of shooting himself on purpose.
Malkin: Yes some of them say that.
Matthews: Tell me where that….
Malkin: Self-inflicted wounds — in February, 1969
Matthews: This is not a show for that kind of talk.
Michelle Malkin never said that John Kerry shot himself. Nor did she say that she was claiming that Kerry had given himself self-inflicted wounds. all she was trying to do was talk about an allegation in the book, Unfit for Command, where mention was made that Kerry suffered a self inflicted wound when shrapnel from a grenade came back and hit him. No one other than Matthews, and definitely not Malkin, ever said that John Kerry might have shot himself. In his zealousness to defend his boy, Chris Matthews was rude, refused to let Malkin complete her answers, attempted to bully her and threw her off his program before she had an opportunity to discuss her latest book; the reasons that she was on the program to begin with.
Chris Matthews is only one example of the lengths that liberal journalists go to shill for John Kerry. In 2001, when Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party caucus to sit as an independent, the Media Research Centre that monitors bias in the american media predicted that if Georgia’s Zell Miller ever crossed the floor, some in the media would bring up his segregationist past. It didn’t take too long after Miller’s speech at the RNC for al Hunt, of the Wall Street Journal and CNN’s Capitol Gang to continually talk about Miller’s racist and segregationist history. The media never mentioned Miller’s questionable history when he was just an ordinary high ranking Democrat.
There is a lot of liberal bias in the Canadian media. But it is nowhere near what it is south of the border.