The Black Rod

Somebody must have been spiking the coffee at the Winnipeg Free Press with truth serum this week. How else to explain the confessions that spilled out from reporters covering important beats, declarations that explain why the newspaper has become a worthless read. Legislature reporter Bruce Owen wrote Friday that Question Period, the meat and potatoes of his beat, bores him to tears. (Its) "a great time for me to catch up on email. That’s because, sitting up in the media perch, there’s not that much else to do." he said. "Other reporters check up on the Facebook profiles and one religiously plays BrickBreaker on his Blackberry. He’s gotten pretty good at it." Two days earlier, Owen's colleague, education reporter Nick Martin, made his own revelation on his little-read newspaper-sponsored blog. "I rarely attend board meetings anymore," he wrote. "It’s just not worth my time, or my employer’s time..." Oh? Doesn't the ...

It was juicy and irresistable. How could Michael Ignatieff resist? So he took the bait. Only when the hook pierced his aristocratic lip did the leader of the Liberal Party realize his mistake and begin thrashing about in panic. Winnipeg Free Press reporter Mary Agnes Welch, who had trolled the sweet treat in front of Iggy, tried to save him, but wound up being pulled into the swamp herself. And this just after she had crawled out and dried herself off after her shenanigans during the civic election. Welch was only trying to use Iggy to smear the Conservatives in the byelection in Winnipeg North. Who knew it would backfire so badly? The reporter, whose controversial record of slanted and inaccurate reporting precedes her, asked Ignatieff a leading question, how pundits were saying the wily Conservatives were running a Filipino woman to siphon off Filipino votes from the Liberals to throw the election to the NDP. Iggy bit. "Let's have a straight-up figh...

We've always respected the opinion of former police officer Robert Marshall, now an occasional writer for the Winnipeg Free Press. Which is why his latest column was so sad. And so troubling. Extremely troubling. Marshall wrote how the gang culture has poisoned communities to the point where honest citizens are afraid of helping police. "Snitches should not fear stitches" was some editor's idea of a clever headline for the story, wherein he or she adopted the gang lexicon that anyone who provides police investigators with information is a reviled "snitch". But politicians must not ignore the clarion call of Marshall's column --- police in Winnipeg have lost control of the streets! A spree killer roams the city for an hour, gunning down innocent people, and three weeks later, the best police can do, is beg for help? And that's the best-case scenario. Winnipeg police are actually suggesting that there might have been two or three killer...

How apropos. The cobbled-together deal to finance a new stadium for Winnipeg was announced in the newspapers on April Fool's Day. It's certainly made fools of everybody connected to the devil's bargain, but no one more so than newly elected Mayor Sam Katz. They had barely swept up all the confetti from the victory celebration when Katz broke his only promise to the electorate . Throughout the whole election campaign, Katz and his challenger Judy Wasylycia-Leis were peppered with questions about the (even then) shaky stadium deal. JustJudy (as she wanted to be called) was the more honest of the two. She would, she told a CTV mayoral candidates forum, give David Asper a blank cheque to finish his stadium with the initial design. Spend whatever it takes, she told the public. http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2010/10/caught-redhanded-fp-election-reporter.html Katz chose to play coy, responding to all stadium questions with a packaged answer. The deal was for a $11...

The saga of the new Winnipeg stadium is getting more surreal by the day. Failed businessman David Asper appeared on CTV television Monday boasting," We are building a football stadium as designed." Who's 'we', Kemo Sabe? Asper doesn't have the money to build a doll house. The University of Manitoba, which is sitting on a bridge-financing loan from the province, can only afford to build three-quarters of the proposed stadium. (70 percent, actually.) Sam Katz, the re-elected Mayor of the City of Winnipeg, campaigned for two months on a promise to bring the deal back to council if Asper reneged on covering cost overruns. Instead, his first days back at work are spent in backroom meetings to save a deal that hasn't been approved by council. And unelected Premier Greg Selinger is preparing to spend another minimum of $45 million toward a new stadium without the consent of the Legislature. Literally the day before Asper announced that the cost o...

Two weeks after a spree killer spent his Saturday night gunning people down in Winnipeg's North End, the city has returned to normal . Only, the 'new' normal includes a cold-blooded murderer roaming free to search for new victims. What's wrong with this picture? If a cougar wandered into Winnipeg, killed two men in random attacks and mauled a teenaged girl almost to death, the city would be up in arms and demanding action from the authorities. But when similar carnage occurs in an unfavoured part of town, the authorities respond with a shrug and turn their eyes to bailing out a millionaire who wants to buy a football team but can't afford it , poor boy. Every few days the Winnipeg Free Press has been carrying a small update somewhere in the back pages telling the public that, yes, police are still in the North End in force and, no, nobody has been arrested for the two murders and two or three attempted murders during the spree killer's rampage....

Sam Katz shrugged off everything the NDP and their press allies could toss at him and still trounced their annointed candidate for mayor, Judy Wasylycia-Leis. The NDP machine pulled out all the stops . They managed to boost the anti-Katz vote by almost 50 percent from the 2006 election--- only to see Katz re-elected by a double-digit margin (55 percent of the vote compared to 43 percent for his challenger). In fact, JustJudy's 90,000 vote total was less than Katz garnered in the last election (104,000) and less even than he received when he was first elected mayor in 2004 (99,000). The Winnipeg Free Press, the biggest cheerleader for Judy W-L, was forced to concede "It might even be his strongest mandate ever." And that was despite running the worst campaign imaginable . Katz bolted out of the starting block with a bold declaration that crime and public safety were going to be the cornerstones of his run for reelection. “This election needs to be about ...

We don't know what's more alarming---the unprecedented rampage by a spree killer in the North End or how helpless the Winnipeg police appear. On the one hand you have an armed maniac responsible for three senseless attacks in less than an hour, each progressively more frightening. He started by shooting into a crowd of young teenagers, leaving one critically wounded. Then, with police cars flooding into the area, he shot a man in the back as his victim left a house a short jaunt away from the first shooting. After a short break, he finished his night by ringing the doorbell to a house to lure the homeowner out, then shooting him to death when the man realized the danger and slammed the door shut in the killer's face. On the other hand, you have the wimpiest-ever police chief begging for help to catch the killer because the police have no leads. “This is an awful, awful event and we’re certainly committed to the public to do everything we possibly can to get...

They just can't help themselves. They've become so used to getting away with injecting their political bias into their reporting that they don't even try to hide it anymore. Mary Agnes Welch is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press and a member of their "crack" election team providing (what they claim is) "Winnipeg's most comprehensive in-depth civic election coverage". And, until late Thursday afternoon, she was also a member in good standing of the Winnipeg Citizen's Coalition Facebook group. You know, the left-wing bunch created in 2008 to defeat Sam Katz and any councillor who supports him. To prove the adage of the Internet Age, "everybody knows something", a sharp-eyed reader of the Free Press called Welch out in the comments to one of her recent stories, the one telling how a Free Press commissioned poll found that Judy Alphabet's fight-poverty-not-criminals plan is wildly popular with the public. The spin ...