It’s been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn’t it?

Inside — a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.

Outside — 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories, culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee’s prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean’s appears to have asked The Onion’s chronically gormless Area Man to write its unsigned front page cover story this week.

Some highlights from Lock them up :

Anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone . . . arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements . . . . The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

Yup, that’s Area Man alright.

Gosh, what a surprise. The Walrus leads this year’s National Magazine Awards with 33 nominations, followed by Maclean’s with 27 and Toronto Life with 26. This compares to 28 for The Walrus, 27 for Toronto Life, and 20 for Maclean’s last year, and 37 for The Walrus, 29 for Toronto Life, and 18 for Maclean’s in 2008. L’actualité is occasionally allowed to rupture the Toronto Top Three, but only if it promises not to let it happen too often.

The Walrus is a radically improved magazine since I last wrote about it — for one thing, under John Macfarlane, it actually looks and reads like a magazine. So is that the reason it now dominates the awards? No. It does so because it fills the historical role of Toronto alpha-magazine, a role that used to be filled by Saturday Night. When I was jobbed-in briefly as an editor at SN in the late ’90s, I handled seven stories that were eventually nominated for National Magazine Awards. I’d like to think this means that I was the most freaking brilliant editor since Tina Brown, but all it really means is that I was working at Saturday Night.

There must always be a Toronto alpha-magazine, so when Saturday Night folded it was briefly succeeded by Toronto Life, but that raised the uncomfortable question: if this is a national magazine award, why is a city magazine all over it? Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when The Walrus finally got good enough to assume the stance — though it’s worth noting that that happened before The Walrus actually became good.

So now we are returned to the status quo: The Walrus will win mucho d’awards, just because. Meantime, the “coveted” Magazine of the Year prize will continue to be handed out on a semi-regular basis to magazines not from Toronto, as per last year’s award to Alberta Views. Which begs the question: if these publications aren’t good enough to receive double-digit nominations — which they apparently never are — how are they good enough to be the Magazine of the Year?

One explanation would be that the award-givers understand that an allegedly national prize must occasionally be given to a magazine not from Toronto, lest it appear to be less than national. But that would be cynical.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. It would be nice if the English-language judges weren’t overwhelmingly from Toronto (which, despite the claims of the organizers, they are). In the case of the French-language and bilingual juries, however, it’s inevitable that they’ll be drawn almost entirely from central Canada. No, the only possible solution is to stop calling them the National Magazine Awards. Pick some deserving Toronto magazine icon — Pierre Berton, Doris Anderson — and name them after him/her. That would be fitting. But they have never been national magazine awards, and never will be. So why keep pretending they are?

As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here is that, 10 or 15 years from now, when the great majority of people have cottoned-on to the fact that the government lied — just as the great majority now realize that about the Kennedy assassination — we’ll be able to look back and see which of them maintained the best traditions of journalism, and which were compliant or complicit.

This list is pretty much off the top of my head, and certainly subject to change, persuasion, and the wisdom of crowds. In other words, if you have suggestions for additions and subtractions, or moving an organization from one list to the other, let me know via the comments form. Please explain your reasons, and provide links to back them up when you can. Note that organizations can appear on both lists, and that individual columnists are excluded, as an organization may well maintain a columnist it disagrees with. We’re looking for institutional responsibility here. The exception is columnists like Alexander Cockburn, who also have senior editorial responsibility, and thus are the institution, or part of it. Maybe I’ll start a category for just-columnists down the road.

As well, the fact that a newspaper or magazine or network is big and mainstream, and possibly even corporate-owned, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be recognized when it does something right.

“Doing the job” is defined here as not swallowing the government line wholesale, remaining sceptical, reporting new evidence as it emerges, and investigating the facts where warranted. Or at least some of the above. “Dishonour” means credulity in the face of government explanations, ignoring or actively suppressing contrary evidence, deriding debate, failing to correct information that has been proven false, and various other forms of pernicious and/or bush-league behaviour.

So here’s the list for starters:

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll:

A Channel (Victoria, BC)
Report on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth press conference

The British Broadcasting Corporation
The Power of Nightmares

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Fifth Estate, “The Unofficial Story”
Sunday Special Edition, “9/11: Facing the Fallout”

Channel One Russia
Showing of documentary Zero, followed by debate

The Copenhagen Post
Article on scientific study of nanothermite found in WTC residue

“Democracy Now!”
9/11 debate (Many Truthers regard Amy Goodman as a “left gatekeeper” — but she did run this debate.)

The Japan Times
Article on 9/11 Diet member Yukihisa Fujita

KBDI, Colorado Public Television
Showing of 9/11 Press for Truth and 9/11 Blueprint for Truth

KMPH FOX 26 (Fresno, Calif.)
Interview with Richard Gage

La Télé Libre
Interview with Cynthia McKinney and Niels Harrit

Maclean’s
“Hijacking the Truth on 9/11″

RT
Various programs and reports

TV2 News (Denmark)
Interview with Danish Scientist Niels Harrit

Vanity Fair
Article on Loose Change

The Washington Times
“Explosive News”

Zoomer Radio (Toronto)
Interview with author of A Guide to 9/11 Whistleblowers

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll:

ABC News
Nightline, “Inside a 9/11 ‘Truther’ Convention”

British Broadcasting Corporation
“9/11: The Conspiracy Files”

Counterpunch
“The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts”

Daily Kos
“The Conspiracists”

The Huffington Post
Editor’s Note

The National Post
“A theory that just won’t die”
From back ofthebook.ca: “On being disappeared by the National Post”
From back ofthebook.ca: “Part II: On being disappeared by the National Post”

Popular Mechanics
“Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report” (Much of the info in this early piece has since been disproven, but PM has never run a correction.)

The Washington Post
“A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy”

The more Maclean’s changes, the more it stays the same. At a recent public discussion in Calgary, co-presented by Maclean’s and CPAC and titled “The West is in. Now What?”, the panel included Fort McMurray Mayor Melissa Blake, Alberta Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett, Saskatchewan Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy, and Rob Anderson of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance. Sounds pretty Westy to me.

But who, besides CPAC moderator Peter Van Dusen, were the journalists on the dais? None other than Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells, fresh from Toronto or Ottawa or wherever, parachutes still billowing behind them. This despite the fact that Maclean’s actually maintains bureau chiefs in Calgary and Vancouver. But they, of course, don’t speak English. Or something.

We have been here before.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of the evening, besides Heppner’s mispronouncing “surreal,” was Wells’ assertion that Blackett must be Alberta’s first culture minister “ever,” or at least “in your lifetime,” and that this was a sign that Alberta was now wearing its big boy pants. That will be news to Horst Schmid, the debonair culture minister with whom many of us worked in Alberta’s fully-fledged arts scene in the 1970s (and I expect he had his own predecessors). Fearlessly, Wells continued to ventilate: “This wonderful theatre that we’re in [Calgary's Theatre Junction Grand], that I saw an extraordinary Russian theatre troupe perform in on Saturday night . . . is a reflection of the reality that this whole region, led by its capital cities, has to admit that it’s becoming sophisticated, even if it doesn’t always feel comfortable.”

It’s true, Paul; it isn’t comfortable, having to dress up in them cummerbunds and all. But it seems to me I also remember international theatre troupes visiting Alberta in the 1970s, though that may just be some ridiculous phantasm of the memory. Why, we sometimes even put on plays of our own — though, of course, they were only ever about cows and gopher hunts.

The West is in. Just not at Maclean’s.

The Beaver is no more. Begun in 1920 in celebration of the Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade, Canada’s foremost historical magazine will now be titled Canada’s History. Who would’ve thought such a venerable institution would buckle under to a bit of competition from internet porn sites?

According to its publisher, Deborah Morrison, the name has become a problem for online readers who find their magazine sometimes blocked by spam filters. Eighty years ago, “beaver” meant a semi-aquatic rodent, and to many it still does, but it’s also, of course, a slang term for a woman’s genitalia. But so what?

The Boy Scouts don’t appear to be afraid of internet mislabeling. Their youngest cohort, ages 5-7, continues to be called “Beavers” in many parts of the world, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. No mention on their website that they’re concerned about being mistaken for women’s privates.

The football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, soccer, and volleyball teams at Oregon State University are still the Beavers. Benny Beaver continues to be the university’s mascot, initially chosen because of Oregon’s historic fur trade. Given the beaver’s dam-building prowess, he is also a proud representative of their engineering program.

Even Surrey, British Columbia, a city willing to kill beavers — as shown by the rise in beaver murders, from 15 in 2006 to 40 in 2008 — continues to display the furry creature on its flag. Local teams such as the Surrey Beavers Rugby team continue to be so-named in spite of the innuendo. Even their lodge, housed in Cloverdale, is the “Beaverlodge.”

The Beaver magazine, though, seems to take pride in turning tail. They point out the “international attention” their change of title has earned them in the UK’s The Register, Australia’s Daily Telegraph, and the National Post. According to Morrison, the move to the innocuous Canada’s History was made largely for the sake of women and people under the age of 45. “Unfortunately, sometimes words take on an identity that wasn’t intended in 1920, when it was all about the fur trade,” she told the Post.

Well, speaking as a woman under the age of 45, I’m disappointed in the change from double entendre to dull and boring. And as one who shares a similar name, I’m doubly disappointed. I’m proud to be called “Beverley,” or “of the beaver lake or stream.” Should I follow the decision of a magazine that I have, until recently, held in high regard, and change my name to simply “Lake” or “Stream”? Or, concerned about the sexual innuendo in the expression “eager beaver,” should we now change it to “eager rat”?

Watch out, Canadian magazines. Owl, the magazine for ages 9-13, could be mistaken for a magazine about prostitutes. After all, both come out at night. Gripped, Canada’s Climbing Magazine, might be thought of as a publication better suited for a very private setting. Cottage Life, a magazine of cottage traditions and lifestyles, may soon be considered an alternate lifestyle publication. Such titles could be the next offerings sacrificed on the altar of the new P.C.: that is, pornographic censorship.

A number of years ago I proposed a story to Saturday Night magazine on the journalist Barry Broadfoot, veteran western Canadian newspaperman and pioneer in Canada of oral histories (Ten Lost Years, Six War Years), who had a new book coming out. Over the phone, I extolled his virtues to my editor in Toronto, who replied, “And he’s a very funny guy, too.”

Really? Funny? There were all sort of things I admired about Broadfoot, but I wasn’t aware of his stand-up routines. Some time later I realized the editor thought I was talking about Dave Broadfoot, the longtime “Royal Canadian Air Farce” mainstay. No wonder they didn’t go for the story.

It was about that time I decided I was tired of trying to get Toronto media types to get a clue about the rest of the country. This may inform my reaction to the recent announcement of the winners of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, as presented by the trade publication Masthead Online. To wit: that the last thing we need is more awards coming from the centre of the universe, which is, as we all know, Mississauga.

Masthead kindly was in touch with us back when the awards were announced. I e-mailed back to say that we’d probably send in some entries (despite the $50 per entry price tag), if they could tell me that the judges would be drawn from across Canada, and not just Toronto. Awards fests have a funny way of favouring hometown entries, and the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure there’s no hometown. I don’t really care about Torontoists giving one another awards and pretending they’re “national” — one gets used to it — but I don’t want to send in multiples of $50 to support it.

I didn’t get an answer, and so we didn’t enter anything. As it turns out, though, my question was apropos. Of the 30 judges over numerous categories, 20 are from Toronto. Another two come from the States. Precisely eight come from what those of us who live there like to mordantly call the “Rest of Canada.”

Now, Masthead may point to the fact that the Vancouver online mag thetyee.ca ended up winning three awards, including Best News and Best Community Feature. Indeed, they did so in the announcement of the winners. So all is well on the national unity front. The fact that the top awards (for best overall magazine website and best overall online-only website), in both the Red (consumer) and Blue (business) categories, went to Toronto publishers simply means that, er, wait, not that these awards are the same as the National Magazine Awards, where Toronto Life and The Walrus always clean up, or that, on the whole, the judges would prefer to give awards to people they’ve actually heard of and perhaps had a beer with on pub night, but because, um, excuse me, I have to go catch my subway now.

Besides the fact that it’s good to be the self-appointed King of All One Surveys, these sorts of awards are a cash cow for those who administer them. The Canadian Online Publishing Awards received over 250 entries; at $50 a pop, that’s over $12,500. That’s not chump change to a magazine that recently had to abandon its print version. And this was Year One; wait until more players, including more of the big ones, get involved. I e-mailed Masthead to ask if those fees are used to pay the judges or, if not, what they go towards. They haven’t got back to me yet, but I’ll let you know if they do (or, of course, they can reply below). But this time I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for an answer.

Meantime, congrats to The Tyee for its win(s). Much deserved. As for the others: dailyxy.com? Seriously? A magazine that features an advice column by the egregious dandy (but rather good novelist) Russell Smith? Where do you get your judges from? Toronto?

Of course, in saying that, I’m exposing my west coast bias. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it?

Your feckless Media blogger has been off cheating with his other mistress — theatre, of all things — which is why this section has been quiet as a dying newsroom lately. While I was away, Canada lost one of its few genuine sources of shit-disturbance, Frank magazine. Its folding was duly reported but went curiously unremarked upon, as if the pundits it had routinely skewered knew that, if they got started, there’d be no end to their grave-dancing.

To my knowledge, I only made Frank once, when something I’d written in The National Post appeared in its “Drivel” section. I was elated. It was not commonplace for a writer outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal axis to merit its scorn. (Despite some game efforts, Frank was generally as Upper Canadian as the publications and broadcasters it covered.) I felt I had passed some career milestone. And the fact that I couldn’t see anything wrong with what I’d written suggested to me they might be on to something.

Others, of course, were less delighted, when their extramarital canoodlings or unceremonious dumpings from various media or political aeries were revealed. But Frank was exactly what this snobby contry, with its left-over notions of aristocracy and deluded notions of meritocracy, needed. I understand it was based on the British magazine Punch, but having never seen its progenitor, it all seemed quite new and brilliant to me.

Frank relied on a network of “contributors” (read: tattlers) who provided fodder, often from inside various newsrooms and editorial offices. If one was oneself on the inside of an organization, it wasn’t particularly hard to figure out who the moles were; you simply came up with a mental list of likely suspects, and then waited to see what happened when they left or were fired. If items on that publication dried up, you knew you had your double agent. It was fun.

In recent months, I had come to appreciate it for additional reasons. Whenever anyone searched on the net for “Frank” and “magazine,” it tended to bring traffic to backofthebook, since my name is Frank and this is a magazine. Thanks, fellas. I also appreciated its entrepreneurial spirit. I was a subscriber to eFrank.ca, the electronic wing of the magazine, but earlier this year had decided I would let my subscription lapse — it was pricey, and I rarely had time to visit (though always found it rewarding when I did). I accomplished this, I thought, by simply not sending in my new credit card information. When renewal time came up, they sent me a “Hey, your credit card info is no longer up-to-date” message. When I ignored that, they apparently went through various possible new expiry dates until they found the right one. Despite my best efforts, I found myself still a subscriber after all. Some might consider that, oh, I don’t know, let’s use the word “shady.” I thought it was pretty clever.

And possibly also desperate. Seven months later, Frank publisher Michael Bate announced its closing. (An unrelated Atlantic-only edition continues.) It was a great run, Mr. Bate; thanks for the laughs.

Now who is going to keep the “braünnosers” and “fartcatchers” and “moist but garrulous” windbags in check?

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.)”