Heather Mallick has a right to her opinions

There’s really no debate over whether Heather Mallick is a toxic cesspool of ill-concealed rage and ill-conceived ideas. Her vitriol is ever more shrill and ever less reasoned and it’s a safe bet to assume that the best parts of her career can dimly be viewed in the rear-view mirror, while her road forward gets ever narrower and more constrained.

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Hence her descent as a writer for a fairly mainstream national newspaper to the ratings starved national disgrace, the CBC. But hey, misery loves company and at the CBC Heather Mallick is in very good company. Barbara Kay, who is among my favourite columnists at the National Post wrote that Ms Mallick’s piece verged on hate speech, an accusation that in the True North, Brave and Free (sic) can bear grave implications. While I think Mallick’s hit piece on Sarah Palin is catty, tasteless, mean-spirited and overly rich in clichés, it’s nevertheless what passes for her opinion and as such, she’s perfectly entitled to it, as are we all. I do not agree with one word of it, yet I would go to the wire for her to have it. It’s unfortunate that opinions as hateful and biased as those of Ms Mallick would be delivered to the public’s eyes compliments of Canada’s national broadcaster with Canadian taxpayers picking up the tab. This travesty is yet more evidence that the CBC is totally out of touch with the niceties of objective journalism and might be best off it were privatized and left to find its own way in the world. Other news organs with views similar to those of the CBC are doing the same. In the US the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) has all but managed to turn itself into an arm of the Democratic National Committee with a resultant hemorrhage in viewers. Recently the company has had to take steps to rein in its DNC cheerleaders, lest the ratings drop even further. A dose of economic reality would be a good thing for Mother Corp. As for Ms Mallick? Frankly, I feel sorry for her, as she appears to have lost all sense of what constitutes the boundaries of wit and good taste. Like an addict looking for a bigger high, her columns appear to be getting ever more extravagant and loathsome, while her ability to reason and exercise sound judgment is withering on the vine. It’s likely that the CBC is the last “news” organization in Canada that would publish her work.