Friday, June 27, 2014

Dear Leah McLaren: Go Fuck Yourself, You Sanctimonious Bottomfeeder

Dear Leah McLaren,

Open letters are fun, aren't they? You've been getting a lot of them lately. Many of them are written by feminists -- those whom you seem to believe are otherwise your contemporaries -- criticizing you for your sexist treatment of Nazanin Asham-Jam MacKay. My favourite letter to you was from Asham-Jam MacKay herself.

Well, I'm not going to pretend to be kind to you. I'm going to say some pretty mean things to you, and it's not because you're a woman. It's because you embody the ongoing betrayal of the public interest that the Canadian media has become.

But mostly, I'm just come right out and say it: you can go fuck yourself, you sanctimonious bottomfeeder.

Not just you, really. You and every other so-called "journalist" pushing this pile-on of MacKay over comments that, it turns out, he never actually made and over emails that, as it turns out, he didn't actually write.

Apparently these are two facts that just don't matter in the eyes of you and every other muckraking demagogic hack masquerading as journalists in the Canadian media.

As I'm told, this is quite a change. I'm assured that, once upon a time, facts actually mattered in the media. When journalists and columnists decided to jump all over someone for some slight, it mattered whether or not there had actually been a slight. Real, not imagined. Or made up. And apparently I have to rely on these assurances, because of late in the media I've seen no evidence of this whatsoever.

Your arrogant, obnoxious and nasty letter to Mrs Asham-Jam MacKay was written long enough after this non-story had been thoroughly revealed to be false for you to actually know that the story had been revealed to be completely and utterly false. MacKay never actually made the comments in question, and not only did he not write the emails in question, but they were completely inoffensive to anyone other than clowns like you who were looking for something to be offended about.

Perhaps you would have preferred that the female staffer who wrote those emails have suggested that female civil servants who happen to double-shift as mothers neglect their kids? Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you?

That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. While some of the other open letters written to you do a fairly good job of explaining what the fuck is wrong with you, I'd actually like to hear, from you, your personal account of what the fuck is wrong with you.

Because guess what? To write a letter like that to the wife of a politician because he was alleged to have said something wrong when in fact he didn't say something wrong and you and innumerable other hacks in the media don't want to admit to it? Something is fucking wrong with you.

And while I'm honestly interested in hearing you account for what this is, I do have some ideas of my own. For example: you're a fucking idiot.

You insist that it's not true that not enough women don't apply for judicial appointments. For my own part, I don't actually know if that's true or not. Because it's never actually been shown whether or not that's the case. The best the Toronto Star -- who with their shoddy reporting started this farce in the first fucking place -- could do was conjure the example of a woman who admitted that her own application for a judicial appointment was based not on her qualifications but on her politics, but also based out of ideological hostility to the sitting government. And that's the one example the Star was able to come up with.

So let's get this clear: your case that there isn't a lack of women applying for judicial appointments is a sample of one. And not only on a sample of one, but a sample of one who pretty much admits that she didn't make her application in order to stand on her qualifications. Holy fuck, that's so stupid it's almost brilliant. And while it's becoming clear you must have eaten paint chips has a child, please do me this one favour: please, please, pleeeeease assure me you haven't been eating them while pregnant with or nursing your child. Please assure me this. You know, for the children.

So I'm sure you've figured out by this point that I'm angry. Really, really angry. Like punch a journalist in the face for participating in this farce then tell them exactly why they just got punched angry. Let me explain to you why.

It's because apparently the media in this country reported a story they knew they couldn't adequately support, then when they learned the story was false they just ignored that and went on reporting it as if it were true. Whether this was done out of malice or just plain old dumb-as-fuck stubbornness is immaterial. The media decided that the truth doesn't matter. And you have made yourself emblematic of this indifference to the truth.

Let me conclude this letter with some advice for you: retire. Retire, and darken the pages of Canada's newspapers with your garbage no more. This personal experiment of you trying your hand at journalism? It failed in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. And take every single "journalist" who participated in this smear of Peter MacKay with you. Not a single one of you is worthy of the title "journalist" -- only people willing to commit to a media where facts and truth matter are worthy of that title. And you've demonstrated that you aren't.

Canadians deserve a media where the truth matters, where facts matter. We need a media that will help us make good decisions based on facts and based on truth, not one that will have us making bad decisions based on stories that turn out to not actually be true. The former helps us. The latter hurts us. And as Jon Stewart once told Tucker Carlson, you're not helping us. You're hurting us.

And I don't mean hurting conservatives. Somehow I get the sense you wouldn't feel very bad about that. You're hurting the Canadian people by deliberately feeding them ideologically-narcissistic bullshit.

And for that you can go fuck yourself.

Go fuck yourself,
-Patrick Ross

ps For anyone reading this in the midwest, I'm sorry I said "fuck" so much.

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