Congratulations are in order.
Winnipeg's very own Krista Erickson has been fully exonerated by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for her feisty interview with dancer Margie Gillis which sent Canada's left-wing elite into a carpet-chewing frenzy.
Sun News had barely begun broadcasting when, last June, Krista went toe-to-toe with Gillis over government funding of the arts. Gillis, who hops around, flaps her arms and calls it modern dance, has been sucking at the public tit for most her, ahem, career.
The challenge to Gillis drove the arts community wild. An organized Facebook campaign resulted in an unprecedented 6676 complaints to the CBSC. Friday, Krista kicked 6676 Leftie butts with a vengeance.
The CBSC said her interview met the standard of a full, fair and proper presentation, which might have been controversial, but in a way that is "essential to the maintenance of democratic institutions."
Addressing the complaints directly, the council said the interview was fair and balanced, and "the list of figures and information that Canada Live presented on screen were accurate."
"While Erickson was forceful, she did not make any nasty comments about Gillis personally. In fact, she made positive comments about Gillis’ accomplishments and expressed her appreciation for Gillis’ participation in the interview."
And the best part of the story? Krista didn't give the whiny Facebookies an inch.
“To be clear, regardless of how the CBSC ruled, it wouldn’t have changed our behaviour,” she said on air Friday. “At Sun News, we’ll never apologize for challenging the status quo, for asking the hard questions that the consensus media willfully ignores. We’ll never apologize for standing up for freedom of speech.”
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/1432032999001
England may have Margaret Thatcher. We have our own Iron Lady.
Now compare this with how the CBC handled complaints about a totally ficticious story it ran last October regarding Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.
A CBC actor named Mary Walsh ambushed Ford outside his home to create an incident she could broadcast on her television show, which we can't name because we've never watched it or heard of Mary Walsh before. Confronted by a babbling fat woman in a corset (he didn't know who she was either), the controversial mayor phoned 911.
CBC, citing secret anonymous sources, reported that Ford insulted the 911 operators when they didn't react quickly enough to his call. The Mayor denied the story and the Chief of Police, who listened to the 911 tape, publicly declared the story was false.
Faced with the evidence that the CBC story was made up to attack Ford, the CBC's ombudsman Kirk Lapointe reached the only conclusion he could---he cleared the CBC of breaching its journalistic standards and practices. Which tells you all you need to know about CBC's journalistic standards and practices, doesn't it.
Lapointe used the Dan Rather defence. Rather, who was once a respected journalist with CBS, got caught redhanded using forged documents in a 60 Minutes II story on George W. Bush, a story intended to damage Bush's chances in the 2004 presidential election. Rather and his producer argued that they didn't have to prove the documents were authentic, their detractors had to prove the information in the forged documents was false.
Lapointe said CBC didn't have to prove its story was true. Ford had to prove the anonymous sources, which CBC refused to identify, were lying.
So, Sun News was found to have conducted a fair interview in which their subject was treated aggressively but with respect and was given ample time to make her case.
CBC, on the other hand, ambushed the Mayor of Toronto outside his own home, then invented a story to slander him, then cleared itself by relying on "anonymous sources" that likely don't exist.
And Heritage Minister James Moore attacks Sun News and thinks the public needs the CBC to the tune of more than one billion dollars a year.
The real question is 'does the public need Heritage Minister James Moore'?