Rafe Mair, Common Sense Canadian, 26 June 2012
Pasted hereon is one of the funniest clips I have ever seen. It’s a spoof of an Enbridge pipeline video ad by Vancouver Province cartoonist, Dan Murphy. It’s brilliant and was on the Province’s website last Friday. It was pulled a few hours later after an enraged call to the Province by Enbridge.
I go back a long way with Dan, he and I both having drawn and written respectively for the late and much lamented Equity Magazine.
I have, over the Campbell/Clark years, complained that Vaughn Palmer of the Vancouver Sun and Mike Smyth of the Province were self-censoring with respect to the Liberal government. I could not believe that these two fine writers had not noticed the Liberal governments consistent egregiously bad behaviour on environmental issues like fish farms, rapacious private rivers, BC Hydro and, yes, the proposed Enbridge pipeline. I have always made it clear, as I do now, that if I were supporting a family I too would take care not to submit columns that displeased my boss.
A year or so ago, Wayne Moriarty, the publisher of the Province, phoned me and complained about remarks as I described above and seemed to alternate between anger and tears. His parting question, where I thought I detected tears, he asked “do you really think I order my columnists what not to write, Rafe?” to which I replied, “Wayne, you don’t have to – that’s the point.”
Watch the above marvellous spoof – several times because it’s that funny – and remember that when the Province got its marching orders from Enbridge, the Province immediately pulled it!
Then ask yourself, doesn’t this demonstrate, beyond any doubt, why the Postmedia papers, especially the Sun and Province, have flooded their op-ed pages with industry propaganda and have avoided like the plague anything critical of this government in the environmental field? (One also must ask whether the full-page ads Enbridge has been running in the paper of late influenced the pulling of Murphy's cartoon).
Does it not tell you that the only logical conclusion one can come to is that Postmedia papers, in Vancouver at any rate, do indeed censor and that in all probability their columnists self-censor?
This is, I admit, a delicious moment for me for all I have been saying, no doubt ad nauseum to many, about censorship in the media, has been amply demonstrated.
To continue the Latin, you may remember in high school math, after demonstrating the truth of a theorem, you would write QED.
For proving my theorem I feel I also have the right to say Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
“Thus has it been demonstrated.”
