Franken-Steyn’s monster
Uncovering the consequences of "free" speech
BY Donald Gutstein
Human rights commissions are power-hungry commissars out to crush our democratic tradition of free speech and impose a gulag of politically correct thought on freedom-loving Canadians.
This message reverberated in mainstream media during the first half of 2008, as libertarians and social conservatives, many placed in newsrooms by Conrad Black a decade earlier (and kept there by the Asper family), rose as one to defend soulmate Mark Steyn and his anti-Islamic screed, America Alone, against accusations that his writing crossed the line into violating the rights of others.
They were fuming that human rights commissions had the temerity to deal with complaints about free speech. Steyn, they said, should be able to say anything he wants about Muslims.
And what did he say? That the Muslim world is plotting to take over the West and will accomplish this through sheer population growth—as the number of Muslims expands, he quotes, “like mosquitoes”—and jihad.
Their maelstrom of malevolence drowned out voices arguing that human rights commissions play a positive role in a democracy and that free speech needs some limits. The Globe and Mail offered that “ideas that are merely wrong-headed should be defeated in the court of public opinion” and not in the courts of law. True, perhaps, but we shouldn’t forget that the side that owns the media usually wins such judgments.
In his 2004 bestseller, The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock describes how once-fringe right-wing U.S. media had all but eclipsed the mainstream media. The Bush White House issues talking points; these are picked up and amplified by conservative radio talk-show hosts and bloggers; they splash onto cable and network TV and into the major newspapers. Bewildered citizens have no idea where these talking points came from or who is behind them. And the right moves its agenda forward.
Canadian conservatives have attempted to replicate the Republican noise machine with limited success, but their efforts are tenacious. Ken Whyte began his journalistic career at the fringe right-wing Alberta Report, before jumping to Saturday Night. He moved to the daily mainstream as Conrad Black’s founding editor at the National Post. His appointment as head of billionaire Ted Rogers’ Maclean’s magazine in 2005 gave the conservatives two launching pads—Maclean’s and the National Post—to fashion their own echo chamber. Steyn’s case provided the opportunity for a trial run.
The release of Steyn’s book in October 2006 was treated as a coronation by Black’s acolytes. Steyn himself attained prominence after Black hired him to write a column in the Post. Black hires, such as Fraser Institute policy analyst John Robson (Ottawa Citizen) and tax lawyer Jonathan Kay (National Post), waxed ecstatic at Steyn’s ability to suggest racist ideas without actually uttering them.
For instance, in one column he quoted the blog Dead Reckoning: “This is so Muslim. If you want to accuse somebody in an Islamic country of offending Islam, you go to an Imam and get him to issue a fatwa against the offender.” Steyn continues: “There’s something in that.” He makes his point, but the words are not his.
But it was the human rights complaints laid by four Muslim law students that provided the opportunity for Black’s children and other media conservatives to ramp up the volume. Over the 18 months after Whyte assumed control, Maclean’s published 22 columns (largely by Steyn and Barbara Amiel) that promoted Islamophobia and represented Muslims as violent. The magazine published no columns that painted a positive picture. The law students filed their complaint against Maclean’s only after Whyte refused them space in the magazine to reply to Steyn and Amiel in a column to be written by a mutually acceptable author. Why didn’t conservative defenders of free speech berate their kindred spirit Ken Whyte for refusing to print a response? That would have created a free-speech precedent.
Instead, they went into full-frontal-attack mode, with anti-rights-commission rants bouncing across the country through blog postings, talk-radio shows and newspaper columns.
Even The Globe and Mail, officially untouched by Black’s ideological hand, disseminated the same message. Of nine columns and editorials about Steyn and human rights commissions in the Globe, eight—two by Margaret Wente, two by Rex Murphy, one by conservative Ian Hunter and three unsigned editorials—defended Steyn and attacked the commissions.
Free speech is a bedrock Canadian value, they shout. But how honest are they? As renowned journalist A. J. Liebling once wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
