RUTHFULLY YOURS

Steyn on Canada and the Commonwealth

I’m overseas at the moment and a little late getting to this. But I see John Miller, Canada’s self-appointed “Journalism Doctor” and Ryerson University’s Emeritus Professor of Ovine Fornication, has decided to take a whack at Christie Blatchford for declining to get with the Dianysian grief-feasting over Jack Layton.

I wonder if you can anticipate on what basis Canada’s most portentous J-school ethics bore chose to chastise the great Blatch. Go on, I’ll give you three guesses. Oh, never mind. You only need one. Take it away, Professor!

She chose not to do the hard job of journalism.

While it is easy to dismiss her as a journalistic carpetbagger, eager to sell her talents to the highest bidder, that is not the point, and probably does her a disservice. Rather, we must instead accuse her of something much worse — abandoning the relentless search for truth that should propel the best who toil, as she does, in the public realm and at the public’s pleasure. She abandoned the discipline of verification and opted for the easier surrender to ideology.

My, aren’t you the Princess Prissy-Pants? You know that’s pretty funny for a guy who “chose not to do the hard job of journalism” and “abandoned the discipline of verification” and “the relentless search of truth” by accusing me of making up an easily verifiable quotation. Relentless journalism physician, heal thyself!

So once more with feeling! Here’s ovine fornication afficionado John Miller’s greatest hits at SteynOnline:

The Shagged Sheep.

And let’s not forget:

The Doctor Is In.

At the conclusion of “The Shagged Sheep”, my response to Professor Miller’s ill-advised foray into bestiality, I wrote as follows:

I had a thousand points of disagreement with Oriana Fallaci, but I adored her. She was a fearless woman, and when she went into a room with the dictators of the day she was full of facts. In a navel-gazing media forever congratulating itself on “speaking truth to power”, she just got on and did it. In his “open letter” to me, Professor Miller wrote of Oriana:

‘When the New York Times wrote her obituary on Sept. 15, 2006, the headline called her a “writer-provocateur.” Sound familiar? Remind us of anyone we know?’

What a sad little man. He actually thinks he’s insulting me by comparing me to the peerless Fallaci. But, of course, he’s only doing it so he can go all J-school on us:

‘Journalists usually try to deal with primary sources (Writer-provocateurs seldom do).’

Oh, my! I wonder if he has any idea quite what a Ryerson-atrophied pansy he sounds wagging his finger at Oriana Fallaci? “Writer-provocateurs” don’t “deal with primary sources”? Well, her “primary source” on Ayatollah Khomeini is Ayatollah Khomeini. What have you got, Finger Boy? When she was hurling her chador at him in 1979, what were you doing? Retyping press releases from Ed Broadbent?

And I concluded:

Oriana Fallaci is a hundred times the man John Miller is. Read her interviews with Arafat or the Shah and ask yourself whether she needs any posthumous lessons in “journalistic ethics” from an unread parochial poseur. And, if you are considering a career in journalism, think about what you’d like to be looking back on in 40 years’ time: Oriana’s resume or Professor Miller’s.    .

Now he’s moved on to Christie Blatchford, and the same question applies: Whose cuttings would you rather have to look back on? Blatch’s or the Shagged Sheep’s?

His attack on Christie over her coverage of events at Caledonia is particularly pathetic because on that story she did what almost every other “journalist” declined to do: She pierced through the euphemisms of multiculti squeamishness to expose the ugly truth. On this as on free speech, Miller is content to play the eunuch in the PC enforcers’ harem: That’s his consistent view of journalistic “integrity”.

By the way, “The Shagged Sheep” is preserved within hard covers in my book Lights Out. So, if you’re at Ryerson, feel free to buy a copy and hold a staged reading.