By Ron Gray
The story and photograph reproduced below, taken from the Vancouver Sun’s web-page, represent a new low in Canada’s decaying journalistic standards.
The headline and story are about hate crimes. The picture is of a battered lesbian. The inference is that she is a victim of an “anti-gay” hate crime.
But she’s not.
Shannon Barry is a self-proclaimed lesbian; she was attacked by a 14 year-old stranger, in a brawl outside an Edmonton bar. But police investigation concluded it was not a hate crime.
That misrepresentation is bad enough; but what makes it even worse is that fact that the accompanying story doesn’t mention anti-gay hate crimes at all. The rise in reported hate crimes was in the categories of race and religion: the victims were Blacks, Asians, Arabs, and Jews.
But the way the Sun editors played the story creates the impression that Canada is deep in a wave of anti-gay violence – a non-fact often parroted in the media.
The Sun, like most of Canada’s major metropolitan dailies, is notoriously pro-gay; their bias colors both editorials and news coverage. Readers find it difficult to distinguish between editorials and the news. The uninformed opinion of writers in both genres bleeds into their work embarrassingly.
When I worked at the Vancouver Sun – when the late, great Jack Webster was City Editor, and Hal Straight was Managing Editor – keeping the editorial and news pages separate was an article of faith. Jack used to tell cub reporters, “You can’t ever be perfectly objective, but you must try.” Sometime in the 1970s, the journalism schools at Canadian universities began teaching neophyte journalists, “You can’t ever be perfectly objective; so be subjective.” And the reporters, instead of being invisible observers, became the focus of the stories they covered.
Opinion has replaced news in today’s newspapers.
But you have to wonder: why have today’s media become so blindly pro-gay? What’s the big attraction?
There are several factors. The most unsavory is the fact that most journalists are, by and large, a pretty randy bunch: they want their own licentiousness excused, so they abuse their position as opinion-molders to become advocates for almost all forms of “sexual diversity” embraced by the politically-correct and paid for by us the tax-payer.
A more noble impulse among journalists is what I call “righteousness envy”.
In the late 1940s, the Fifties, and into the Sixties, newspapermen (we didn’t get the exalted title “journalists”, back then) were on the front lines of the struggle for the civil rights of Blacks (who were then called “Negroes”). I remember a white journalist from Texas, John Howard Griffin, in 1959 underwent treatments with drugs and ultraviolet light to darken his skin colour; then he traveled through the Deep South, and wrote about his experiences in a devastating expose of Jim Crow laws and racism, Black Like Me. Griffin became a hero to many journalists, much like Bernstein and Woodward in the 1970s for their exposé of Watergate.
A lot of contemporary journalists like to think they are walking in the same path of civil rights by embracing the cause of homosexuals. But there’s a world of difference.
For one thing, homosexuals may experience some social rejection, but they’re not a persecuted minority: their average education level and employment success are well above the national average. There’s no persecution in employment, and they have a much higher-than-average disposable income. They also have political clout wildly beyond their small numbers.
Another difference from racial discrimination is that militant gays really do have an agenda to change society by manipulating attitudes. Their agenda was clearly outlined in Kirk and Madsen’s 1989 book After the Ball: How America will conquer its fear and hatred of gays in the 90’s (sic).
The problem with their agenda is that it is dishonest, and it is dangerous.
The militant gays almost never talk about the health problems that are endemic to men who have “sex” with men, or women who have “sex” with women. (They made an exception in 2009, when a coalition of Canadian “gay rights” groups filed a human rights complaint against Health Canada, noting that their health problems are much worse than those of the “straight” population, and demanding more spending on their peculiar and behaviour-induced illnesses.)
And their lies and propaganda become dangerous when they are adopted by schools and forced on an innocent captive audience: school-children.
Dr. Scott Lively, when he taught law at Pepperdine University in California, warned state school boards that if they sanction lessons designed to increase acceptance of homosexual behaviour, some students would be tempted to experiment; and some who experiment would become addicted; and those who had sanctioned the misleading lessons would be guilty of condemning those children to an early grave – and the school boards and their trustees might well be sued.
Later, the American College of Pediatricians sent a letter to every school board in the United States, warning that such pro-gay curricula are actually dangerous to children.
None of those facts ever make the pages of our major metropolitan newspapers. Instead of news that could warn parents about how their schools are being subverted by militant gay activists, by the BC teachers’ Federation’s militant gay wing, and by pro-gay school boards, the “downstream” media have become cheerleaders for the propaganda campaign, and viciously attack parents who rightly and responsibly seek to protect their children and to defend the public education system from political abuse.
When propaganda replaces news – like the editorial decision to play the photo below with an unrelated story—respect for the Fourth Estate takes a well-deserved nose-dive.
Shame on you, Vancouver Sun, shame.
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Police-reported hate crimes rise in Canada: StatsCan
By Beatrice Fantoni, Postmedia News / June 7, 2011
Shannon Barry is a lesbian who was kicked in the face and knocked unconscious by a stranger in Edmonton on Saturday April 17, 2010. Figures released Tuesday by Statistics Canada suggest the number of hate crimes reported to police is on the rise. Instances of hate crimes increased by 42 per cent between 2008 and 2009, bringing the total to 1,473. Photograph by: Larry Wong, Edmonton Journal
OTTAWA – Figures released Tuesday by Statistics Canada suggest the number of hate crimes reported to police is on the rise.
Instances of hate crimes increased by 42 per cent between 2008 and 2009, bringing the total to 1,473.
While hate crimes remain primarily motivated by race (and black Canadians remain the most-targeted by hate crime), the data also showed the number of reported hate crimes perpetrated against Arabs and West Asians doubled (to 75 from 37). There was also a 71 per cent increase in hate crimes committed against Jewish people.
Statistics Canada analyst Mia Dauvergne says two factors might have influenced the result: While there may have been a real increase in hate crimes, it is also possible that more crimes are being reported as police forces across Canada set up special hate-crimes units.
Len Rudner, the Ontario regional president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said while the statistics could be a result of more reporting, “We have to acknowledge the fact that a lot of this is the result of an increase in criminal acts.”
Rudner said he has noticed a pattern where flare-ups in the Middle East are linked to flare-ups in hate crimes against Jews. Late-2008 was one such time, he said, and so it could have influenced the 2009 statistics.
Rudner also acknowledged that reporting crimes varies between communities, since not all cultural or religious communities enjoy equal access to police and justice services. While the Jewish community enjoys a good relationship with police, other groups are not necessarily as well-represented on the hate-crimes radar, he said.
It is this lack of representation that partly explains the jump in reported hate crimes against Arabs and West Asians, said Khaled Mouammar, president of the Canadian Arab Federation. In addition, the Canadian government is fostering an environment of hostility toward Arabs and Muslims in Canada, he said.
“We are a very vulnerable community,” Mouammar said. “We don’t have resources, we don’t have the numbers,” he said. “Many people are silenced and try to avoid talking about issues to avoid being targeted.”
Sohail Raza, president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said the opposite was true.
“It’s a two-way street,” Raza said. “We have to get over the victim mentality…. Only then will (there) be less hate crimes,” he said.
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