The various human rights commissions that rejected the complaint against Maclean’s magazine — most recently the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal — were right to do so, of course. Members of the Canadian Islamic Congress had charged Maclean’s with inciting hatred and contempt towards Muslims when it published an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone, in which he advanced various xenophobic warnings about jihadists taking over the world. Much hand-wringing followed, as the media proclaimed that the media should be left to do as it pleases.

In its decision, the B.C. tribunal — and if they wanted to raise the spectre of totalitarianism, they couldn’t have done better than by calling themselves a “tribunal” — declared that “The article may attempt to rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims, but fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt.” I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Coyne that this bit of casuistry was just the members’ way to avoid enforcing B.C.’s human rights law. Whether Steyn’s article incites fear or hatred depends on the incitee, it seems to me; maybe it’ll cause wimps like me to flee from the nearest brown-skinned person, but your average good ol’ boy might react differently.

Still, except for one genuinely hateful paragraph, in which he links some teenagers’ violence to their North African background, Steyn’s article is soft soap. As usually happens when he cares about a subject, he ceases to be funny. And without the disarming laughs, Steyn is — here, at least — revealed as a common coin hysteric, even claiming at one point that Japan’s declining birth rate means it’s “likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.”

The CIC’s critics were right — dragging this stuff into court was unnecessarily heavyhanded.

Then again, I would say that. I’m white. And so are almost all the people running Maclean’s. And so are most of the journalists wringing their hands. But do you think if we were, say, Arab or South Asian or Trinidadian we might feel differently? D’ya think?

Maclean’s waxing about freedom of the press and creeping fascism and whatnot would be a lot more convincing if they could point to a few more non-Anglo Saxons on the masthead. Then we’d know that they know the marketplace of ideas isn’t just for the majority, and we’d know they have a genuine marketplace of ideas happening in their newsroom. Frankly, I don’t really care what Ken Whyte or Andrew Coyne has to say about the CIC suit; it’s all too predictable. What I would like to know is what their Features editor, Sarmishta Subramanian, has to say. (Has Subramanian commented on it? If so, I couldn’t find it.)

Similarly, Ian Mulgrew’s grumblings in The Vancouver Sun aren’t nearly as pertinent as Haroon Siddiqui’s analysis in The Toronto Star — not only because Siddiqui is liable to have the more nuanced view, but because The Star’s hiring actually reflects Canadian multicultural reality. They’ve earned the right to an opinion.

This skirmish is a heads up for Maclean’s and all its journalistic brethren who are behind the curve. Time to change up their staffs to look more like the country they cover. Then maybe next time Steyn writes one of his nativist screeds they’ll decide to pass on it — not because they’re self-censoring, but because they can’t stop laughing long enough to get it into print.

Jonathon Gatehouse’s biopsy of the Asper family in Maclean’s does a workmanlike job of pursuing the boss’s business. Leonard Asper is presented as earnest but clearly in over his head in trying to run CanWest Global, thus maximizing any damage the article might do to the company (probably not much). A heaping helping of cold revenge is served up in the David Asper profile, which recycles every embarrassing anecdote ever published about the executive vice-president, as well as some that make their debut here. It was Asper, of course, who canned Maclean’s publisher and editor Ken Whyte from his previous job as editor of The National Post, later characterizing Whyte as “a fired former publisher [sic] who has taken his high priced tea party to another employer who will eventually also get tired of the act and the losses.” And Gail Asper is depicted as heir to father Izzy Asper’s wacky notion that there’s life outside Toronto and Ottawa.

Nowhere is the bad blood between the Aspers and Whyte acknowledged, nor that the magazine’s parent company, Rogers, might have an interest in harming a competitor — especially one whose proposed acquisition of Alliance Atlantis would make it dominant in the specialty TV market in Canada. That’s called full disclosure, and it’s not so hard to do. Watch this: I write sometimes for The National Post, which is owned by CanWest and of which David Asper is Chairman. See? Simple.

I can’t imagine why “Leonard and his siblings declined multiple requests over several months for interviews by Maclean’s.” What, they thought they might be treated unfairly?

I felt some sympathy for Ezra Levant around the shuttering of his Western Standard magazine, until I received this item of boilerplate e-mail:

Dear Western Standard reader,

I’m sorry to report that we’ve had to shut down the print edition of the Western Standard. Despite nearly four valiant years of trying, we were unable to make ends meet financially. I regret that means we will be unable to fulfill our oustanding subscription obligations, and for that I’m very sorry.

I wasn’t a Western Standard subscriber — I received its e-mails because I had registered for its website, in hopes it would provide grist for this blog. As it has. It is to laugh. All those loyal subscribers with their avaricious belief in the free-market, now invited to place their subscriptions where the liberal sun don’t shine. Perfect.

Levant didn’t help matters by telling The Globe and Mail that “the magazine wasn’t purely an economic mission to begin with, but also a moral one.” Apparently that morality doesn’t extend to meeting one’s financial commitments. It’s not easy to find the responses of aggrieved dumped subscribers on the website (which is, so far, still extant), so — as just another of the many public services we provide here at BoB — sans subscription fee, by the way — I’ve posted a few at the end of this message.

Perhaps this experience will help right-wingers get over their fantasy that an endeavour like Western Standard is possible in Canada without government grants. Even $63,366 in postal subsidies from the feds in 2005-06 wasn’t enough to keep it going; what it probably needed to have a shot at survival was assistance from the Canada Magazine Fund. Let me be a bit conciliatory: I’d gladly have had my tax dollars directed to Western Standard in order to be able to continue to read it; it had some good writers, and its comic value was incalculable.

My schadenfreude spent, let me be even more conciliatory. It’s hard to celebrate the loss of a western Canadian magazine that, its title notwithstanding, aimed to have a national circulation and the sway that goes with it. We do still have among us The Report, a monthly out of Edmonton that is the true heir of the old Alberta Report, but it is largely unknown elsewhere. That leaves those of us west of Mississauga to the ministrations of Maclean’s and various other central Canadian colissi. Maclean’s has made some strides in becoming genuinely national since Ken Whyte took over, but Whyte, for all his talents, is too much now a creature of downtown Toronto to really do the job.

There is one ray of hope, digitally-generated, in all this, and that’s the emergence of a handful of online magazines like thetyee.ca, orato.com, and, dare I say? — backofthebook.ca in and around Vancouver. The Tyee is BC-oriented, orato is determinedly internationalist, but they, like we, are at least coming from someplace other than walking distance of Yonge Street.

Wait, there’s one other. Perhaps the death of Western Standard will spell the end of the absurd conflation of conservative and western Canadian interests that began with Bible Bill Aberhart and picked up speed at Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report back in the days when both Whyte and I were working there. Believe it or not, being right wing and, say, Albertan, aren’t necessarily one and the same. As Ezra Levant is currently discovering, the hard way.

Just some of the happy Western Standard subscribers! . . .

“We too have lost out on most of the remainder of our subscription and while I supported this magazine, I understand people complaining about the loss of their money (especially those poor people who renewed in the past month when magazine leadership should have known that this was going to happen).

“I do not perceive their complaining as being selfish or cheap but I view what has happened regarding subscriptions as an ethical issue.

“By accepting someone’s money for a subscription you are entering into a legal agreement to provide a service for that money. To take someone’s money when you have no intention of providing that service is fraudulent and, in my opinon, immoral.”

***

“Three times I have supported getting out the Conservative message; the first time it was buying $1000.00 in Ted Byfield’s enterprise (last I heard the share was worth 1 cent); the second time it was Link Byfield’s BC/Alberta Report magazine (A two year subscription lost when the Magazine went into bankruptcy); now another two year subscription lost as the Western Report folds. I wonder how much those two “Conservative Cruises” contributed to the bankruptcy and were the two Byfields guests or paying passengers?”

***

“One thing, Ezra. I sent $50 to your magazine to help fight the Human Rights case. After that, I subscribed when you sent me an email promising me your book, “The War On Fun”, if I should subscribe. I never received the book after a year, and stalled re-subscribing until I did. I looked at it like a campaign promise broken, which it really was. Since I stalled on re-subscribing until this book promise was resolved, and your magazine folded in the meantime, I saved my money. This was the only blight on an otherwise politically fresh red apple.”

***

“Great magazine, sad to see it go. However, I am a full time student, and unlike most subscribers, I don’t have money to throw around, and I just renewed last month (after a phone call asking me to renew, no less, which makes me wonder if it was a cash grab).”

***

“If the WS still has an Internet presence, then there is still a company carrying on business. It hasn’t gone bankrupt. It is presumably making money off its advertising on the Internet. So why shouldn’t it pay its print subscribers?”

***

And one mildly peeved former columnist, Colby Cosh:

“It has to be admitted that the shutdown was poorly handled from the standpoint of the editorial employees and contributors. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I got the news the same way the public did, from Ezra’s announcement on the Shotgun. I was mere hours away from leaving town for Thanksgiving, and those who depended more heavily on the Standard for their income must have been in the same rather awkward situation. (Cook a bigger turkey, Grandma, I’m out of work!)

“. . . I pers
onally am in arrears for only one issue, and if I never see the final payment that makes me even-steven with the magazine (no one has officially told me it is not in the mail), I will still have been treated more fairly than I was by my longtime employers at Alberta Report, who owed me thousands of dollars in back pay and statutory severance and failed to follow up on repeated verbal promises to send at least some meagre crust. (I’m grateful that the Standard did not attempt some preposterous strategy like converting the magazine to a non-profit while everyone was still employed and then claiming that the old obligations of the for-profit company had been mystically liquidated by the changeover.)”

Monday’s New York Times contained an article with the hed Trial of Black Raises Conflict Issue, about the game of Twister that Maclean’s has gotten itself into trying to cover the proceedings. It noted that Lady Black is the magazine’s star columnist, and both main trial correspondent Mark Steyn and publisher and editor-in-chief Kenneth Whyte are former employees of Black’s (not to mention editor Mark Stevenson, managing editors Dianne de Fenoyl and Dianna Symonds, and, for all I know, members of the janitorial staff). And Whyte, of course, just finished up a stint as a witness for the defence, filling in the glamour quotient as best he could, given that Donald Trump wasn’t called to testify after all.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I, too, have been an employee of Black’s, when I worked as an editor for Saturday Night for two stints in the late ’90s. I also freelanced for both SN and The National Post during Black and Whyte’s tenures there. (I still do so for the latter.) The difference between me and those others is this: they got paid way more, and I live on a small island off the coast of BC and so don’t have to worry about running into any of these people at a cocktail party.

Whyte told the Times, “Mr. Steyn has informed me that he plans to prove his journalistic integrity by treating me twice as harshly as other witnesses.” I’m sure we can enjoy a good chortle right along with the two of them. But the best that Steyn has been able to come up with in the way of criticism of Whyte has been to assay that “in Thursday’s testimony Ken was a bit too rueful and self-deprecating and that, in response to Ms Ruder’s dimestore dominatrix style of cross-examination, something a bit more combative might be more called for.” In other words, Whyte was just too nice a guy, and why did that mean Ms. Ruder have to pick on him? And this was after the Times had raised the issue of their chumhood.

Of course, the skein of mutually supportive relationships identified in the Times is just standard practice for the clusterfuck known as the Toronto media. Or, as Kelly McBride, a “journalism ethics specialist” at the Poynter Institute, helpfully explained it away: “A lot of journalists marry other journalists, are children of other journalists, and it looks very suspicious to outsiders.” Don’t it just. McBride goes on to suggest that, in order to judge the impartiality of a journalist who’s writing about friends and associates you should look at what’s on the page. But that’s only one measure of impartiality. The other is what isn’t on the page.

For example, how is it that neither Steyn nor anyone else, as far as I can see, has asked what Ken Whyte was doing taking $100,000 from Conrad Black in 2003? This was almost two years after Black had completely divested himself of his ownership of the Post, but before Whyte had been fired as editor by its new owners, CanWest Global. In his testimony, Whyte first described this as a “performance bonus” (paid out 18 months late?), then later acknowledged that it was also paid because Black wanted to maintain their relationship. (Hmm, I wonder if that would work with my wife: “Wanna maintain our relationship, honey? It’s gonna cost ya.”) Whatever; let’s give Black the benefit of the doubt and say that he just felt bad about selling the Post and leaving Whyte to twist in the wind. $100,000 worth of bad. But what was Whyte, as editor of the Post, doing accepting any money, much less a hundred grand, from a highly newsworthy and controversial public figure whom his paper would almost certainly be covering? Is that the way he runs Maclean’s?

I don’t say that either Whyte or Black had anything but the purest, most filial of intentions in making the deal. I just say that it was a highly dumb move on Whyte’s part. Steyn writes, vis-a-vis the New York Times story, that “all this media navel-gazing about ‘conflicts of interest’ ignores the obvious: as I’ve said before, I have no financial interest in defending Conrad and nor does Ken. He signed our paycheques, but that was long ago now.” Well, that $100,000 wasn’t no paycheque. And exactly when does the statute of limitations on financial interests run out?

Here at backofthebook.ca we’ve done a rigorous scientific study and determined that Mark Steyn has used the personal pronoun “I” precisely 1,546,784 times since beginning his “Books” column for Maclean’s. We’d provide documentation of our rigorous scientific study, but this is the internet, so we don’t have to. But if, say, our figures were off by a million-and-a-half or so, the findings would still stand: the “Books” column of Maclean’s isn’t really about Books, but about Mark Steyn — part of Ken Whyte’s strategy since his National Post days: More Mark Steyn, All The Time.

That’s why I’ve been putting “Books” in italics. Maclean’s once ran a Books section; now it runs a “Books” section. They might as well put a nudge-nudge, wink-wink after the heading. The reason is obvious enough: Steyn, after his departure in high dudgeon from the Post when Whyte was fired, signed on to write a column for Ezra Levant’s stab at becoming Ted Byfield, The Western Standard. Obviously, The Western Standard wouldn’t cotton to Steyn’s writing another political column for another Canadian magazine, not even one run by a fellow traveller, and so Steyn’s “Books Nudge-Nudge Wink-Wink” column was born.

Mr. Steyn has done us the favour of corroborating our findings this week by publishing a “Books” column about . . . his own book. This must set some new standard in po-mo self-referentialism. He is, of course, a bit embarrassed, adding tugging of the forelock to the general nudging and winking. “Don’t worry,” he assures us, as if the problem is ours; “lest you think this is a book plug, I don’t think it’s possible to plug a book that at the time of writing is unavailable in any Canadian bookstore.” His problem, you see, is that his latest, the breezily-titled America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, is apparently not available in any of the major bookstores in Canada, perhaps because Heather Reisman, who runs them, has something against him. Not that he’d ever suggest such a thing; his many admirers, e-mailing his website, say it’s so. Mr. Steyn is also circumspect enough not to give the name of his book in his column — its “title escapes me,” he chortles — because, of course, that’ll settle the matter of our thinking he might be rolling his own log. It’s not like anyone is going to say, “Hm, I wonder what this book of his might be,” and then type his name into the search engine at amazon. Though he does helpfully mention later in the column that the book can be found precisely there.

Look, we understand. When you write as much as Mark Steyn, who currently also contributes to The Atlantic, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Telegraph, Aluminum Today, and his mother’s bridge club’s newsletter, it’s hard to come up with new subjects. But, as the local Buddhists like to say, “Wherever You Go, There You Are.” Oneself is always good for a thousand words. This approach worked well enough at the Post, where Steyn’s putative subject was Canadian politics; how else to make it entertaining? It works less well, though, applied to books (without the quotation marks), because, last time we checked, some books are actually more entertaining, or interesting, or full of ideas, or full of good ideas, than the person writing about them. It’s hard to believe, Mr. Steyn, but it’s true.

Oh well, let’s give the kid a break; he’s just trying to build a career for himself. Our real beef is with Whyte, for turning the once respectable, if not exactly scintillating, Books section of Maclean’s into a Yuk-Yuks franchise. (”Good evening, ladies and autodidacts . . .”) It happens that I once sat in Whyte’s office at Saturday Night and spied some copies of Henry James on the floor behind the desk, so I have the idea that he actually likes books. It’s possible they were left behind by Conrad, but let’s just say. Why he can’t find something else for Steyn to do is beyond me. Maybe, as he does for The Atlantic, Steyn could write the obituaries. Or should that be, “Obituaries”?