Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Woe is us. I have this awful, awful feeling that we’re too late. The war has been won by the other side and there are just mopping up operations left…

I had a similar feeling on the TV Ontario show. At one point I looked across at the Sock Puppet Three and thought: It’s not about who wins the argument. They’re the future of this country, and that’s that.

IN TOM STOPPARD’S play Night And Day , the African dictator Mageeba explains his views on freedom of the press: “Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr Wagner?”

“Not exactly, sir, no,” says the Fleet Street hack.

“I mean,” says Mageeba, “a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”

Here in the citadels of western civilization, we have a slightly different problem: our relatively free press is a press edited by relativists.

Item: In 2007, six imams returning from a big conference of imams were removed from a plane at Minneapolis Airport after other passengers grew concerned about loud cries of “Allahu Akbar!”, and the imams reseating themselves in the same configuration as the 9/11 hijackers and demanding seatbelt extenders, even though none was of sufficient girth to need them. Aside from Fox, America’s national media showed little interest in the story. But nor, oddly, did the local media. After complaints, the managing editor of The Minneapolis Star Tribune , Anders Gyllenhaal, replied to at least one reader:

I don’t think the paper dropped this story, but I do think it had run its course… I think this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days, then subsides.

Well, the reason he thinks this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days is because he chose to run it only for a couple of days. Had it been something more consequential – like, say, fictitious stories about guards at Gitmo desecrating the Koran – he would have run it into the ground.

Why would a Minneapolis editor with a hot local story decline to cover it? Because the implications of that story – that those imams were deliberately probing the weaknesses of an airline system too craven to profile – is at odds with the orthodoxies of a free press edited by relativists.

When the Canadian Islamic Congress filed their multiple “human rights” complaints because a privately owned magazine had declined to let them hijack its content, cover and artwork, it quickly became clear that the broad mass of Canadian media were generally indifferent to the outrage. Had the CIC prevailed in their power grab, it would have reduced mainstream Canadian news publications to a maple-flavored variant of Pravda . However, as some leftie website put it, “Defending freedom of speech for jerks means defending jerks.” Well, in a very narrow sense. But, in a far larger one, not defending the jerks means not defending freedom of speech for yourself.

Consider a cringe-making TV appearance by my old boss at The Chicago Sun-Times , John Cruickshank. Newly ensconced as the big cheese at CBC News, John was appearing on his own network to explain the particular sensitivity of Canada’s national broadcaster on a certain topical subject. He posited a sophisticated equivalence between Muslim “extremists” and “extremists” who are “intolerant of any restrictions on speech rights”. “To equate violent terrorists with free speech activists,” pointed out Ezra Levant, “is grotesque.” But, as the head of CBC News sees it, we’re both just as “extreme” – on the one hand, people who threaten to (and actually do) kill you; and, on the other, people who point out there are fellows who want to kill you. A pox on both their extremist houses.

An alarming proportion of the Dominion’s “media workers” seemed relatively relaxed about playing the role of eunuchs to the Trudeaupian sultans, if the alternative involved re-examining their complacent assumptions. Even when the Canadian Association of Journalists roused itself to apply for intervenor status at the trial in Vancouver, not every member was happy about the move. An esteemed – okay, self-esteemed – Ottawa journalist wrote back to the executive committee:

Hello all:

I would like to find out more from the CAJ executive about what we feel is at issue here, and what we plan to say before the tribunal. I am familiar with some of Steyn’s work in the past and have written about it. It was not the sort of material that I was able to defend on a professional basis. At the time I believe I referred to it as ‘obscene’.

It is one thing to say ‘I don’t agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to defend your right to say it’ and quite another to say we will tolerate as professional journalists the most unprofessional sort of journalism just because someone wrote it.

Oh, my. I only wish my work were more “obscene” and preferably state funded: you know, crucifixes floating in my urine, or pictures of naked kids – I’d have a lot more defenders.

It’s regrettable how few expensively educated members of the west’s elites understand principle, but it’s even sadder how few can even grasp basic self-interest. Were the Canadian Islamic Congress to get both the statutory penalty (the cease-and-desist order) and the remedy they applied for (a court-ordered right of reply), that would be a landmark legal precedent in advancing state regulation of the editorial content of Canada’s mainstream magazines and newspapers. That’s what you’re defending, Obscenity Boy. I’ll be long gone, a fading memory in the dimmest recesses of a few lonely right-wing madmen. But the BCHRT and the OHRC and the NSHRC and the CHRC and all the rest have made it plain that what you do is subject to their whims and the ambition of whatever fashionable lobby groups take their fancy. You’ll be the poodle on their leash, not me.

A while back, I had lunch with Ken Whyte, my publisher at Maclean’s , and mentioned en passant that one consequence of a year’s worth of thought-police investigations was that it was no longer possible to avoid the painful truth that, for a profession that congratulates itself incessantly on its courage, bravery, fearlessness, etc (far more than, say, firefighters do) and hands out awards all year long for “speaking truth to power”, most journalists are total pussies happy to suck up to state power as long as it’s in PC clothing. A “journalism professor” boldly campaigning for the right of government bureaucrats to censor writers, would seem to be an almost parodic example of the phenomenon. Yet that was the role in which John Miller, a J-school ethics bore, chose to cast himself. Professor Miller attempted to intervene in the British Columbia trial on the side of the censors. Even after he was denied standing, he persisted in ever more obtuse attacks on me. Of course, even in Canada few journalists are willing to come out in favor of direct censorship, so instead they choose to defend the thought police as a kind of copy-editor of last resort: My writing, declared Professor Miller, was riddled with errors and thus unworthy of the protections accorded to “professional” journalism. I stand by the accuracy of my columns – although, given that truth is no defense at the “human rights” commissions, that’s neither here nor there. But when the professor attempted to point out an actual example of factual inaccuracy he ran into a wee spot of bother. He ended up pinning an awful lot of his prestige on a nuttily obsessive determination to fact-check a joke. I thought Professor Miller’s charges were so loopy they made a useful “case study”, which begins on the page opposite. It illustrates the western media’s commitment to the PC pieties: If it’s a choice between illusions and the facts, they’ll stick with the illusions, even as they’re consumed by them.