He Talks Loser Talk

John talks loser talk/
he takes a defeat and whines about it

Apparently, the Globe and Mail hasn't tired of John Doyle. At this point they must be almost the only ones. Over the past month his work has become more politicized, more sanctimonious, and more contemptuous of basic little things like... facts.

In his most recent work, Doyle takes it upon himself to whine about the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruling on the namby-pamby complaints filed -- at Gillis direct request -- by people who were outraged that Sun News personality Krista Erickson wasn't deferential enough to "iconic" interpretive dancer Margie Gillis.

But even in the wake of acknowledging that the CBSC has no business punishing broadcasters if their on-air personalities are "obnoxious" (the CBC, with Marg Delahunty, wouldn't stand a chance), Doyle is still playing pretend.

He's still pretending that Gillis wasn't obnoxious, despite the fact that she was the one speaking over Erickson at will.

Not that Doyle seems to think that Canadian TV is any better for the alleged freedom to be obnoxious.

"Those who felt they could gain justice for Margie Gillis were naive. The obnoxious have triumphed on TV here," Doyle complains. "If being obnoxious was a disqualification, then Don Cherry and Kevin O’Leary would have disappeared from the airwaves many years ago. They didn’t. They prevailed."

It's laughable to think that Gillis should be able to go on any TV show of any kind, speak over the host at will -- as she did, regardless of the will on Doyle's part, and on the part of Gillis' disciples to simply ignore this -- and then later demand justice. Which is precisely what happened.

The 6,000+ complaints that were directed the CBSC's way over the Gillis interview weren't, by any means, spontaneous. They were, each and every one of them, organized and orchestrated by Gillis herself through her Facebook page. They were astroturf, nothing more, and nothing less.

At the end of the day, Doyle is so stunned by this setback for his personal crusade against Sun News that all he can manage is to regress: he regresses back to his argument that the Sun News audience is tiny, when in fact they are setting ratings records.

More people watch Sun News than read John Doyle's column. But that, along with the simple fact of who was speaking over who, is a fact that's simply too inconvenient for Doyle, so he ignores it.

It's just what he does.