By: Mark Bourrie

Mark Bourrie — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 18:26:58 +0000

We are now up to four corrections of fact and assertions. Not a good advertisement for the magazine, the school and its students. There are many more that should be corrected. Fact-checking of this piece seemed, to those of us contacted, to be an exercise in trying to save this pathetic article and protect its unfortunate writer, rather than determine accuracy.

By: Mark Bourrie

Mark Bourrie — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 10:01:28 +0000

Let this be a warning to editors who are pitched a piece by a reporter who has decided what the story is long before she has made her first phone call. Ms. Fairbank has written an intriguing piece. Unfortunately, it is a stranger to the truth. Those — like me — who dealt with her in Ottawa found her evasive and rather strange, since she never seemed to deal with anyone in a straight manner or seek a real response to things other people said about the subjects of this mess. Let’s take a walk through this piece and see if we can’t reconcile reality to what Ms. Fairbank wrote.
First, who am I? Ms. Fairbank is deliberately vague about that, since it’s a fact that gets in the way of her version of the truth. I write magazine pieces and op-eds for my journalism. But primarily I’m an author and academic. 1n September, 2004, at the age of 47, I began work on my PhD in History at the University of Ottawa. I defended it in January, 2009. The thesis was on the Canadian press censorship system in the Second World War and was published by Douglas and McIntyre in 2012 as The Fog of War. The book reached No. 6 on the Maclean’s best-seller list. The next year, Dundurn published a collection of Canadian war correspondence that I edited under the title Fighting Words. In 2016, HarperCoillins published my book Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, which was a national best-seller and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year. Three weeks ago, HarperCollins published my book The Killing Game, which is an analysis of ISIS propaganda and communications systems. I teach History at Carleton and Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa as a sessional lecturer from time to time. I am also finishing my second year of law studies at University of Ottawa the and will start working this summer at a firm, helping in online defamation and invasion of privacy cases. Ms. Fairbank knew, or could have know, all of these things but she made sure her readers never did.
I met Mike Duffy in the Press Gallery in 1994. I wrote to the CRTC while he was a CTV journalist with a desk next to me in the Hot Room, asking that the Commission reconsider its decision to keep CTV’s cable news channel on a 15-minute repeat cycle, which prevented Duffy from having a full-length daily show, The Commission did change that policy. Well before he was appointed to the Senate, he had asked me for help dealing with online trolls, a problem that I had on my own Wikipedia page.
When did he do that? When I was teaching full-time at Concordia University, another fact Ms. Fairbank knew, but realized detracted from her thesis that I was a shabby freelancer who whores myself out to politicians. I was teaching journalism at Concordia University in Montreal from 2007 to 2009 (while I was finishing my PhD) and had kept my Press Gallery membership to do work in off-months and a day or two each week. It was at this time that I did the bulk of the Duffy online reputation work. I kept doing it after Duffy became a Senator, knowing that I never covered the Senate and, in fact, in 21 years of being on the Hill off and on, had not written a story about it in this century. I did write two columns about Duffy after the expense scandal broke — neither of them defending his spending — and mentioned him in Kill the Messengers as an example of how insider journalism works.
Ms. Fairbarn confuses the Hot Room with the Press Gallery. The Hot Room is the old newsroom in the main Parliament building. About 40 journalists work there, ranging in age from early 20s to one delightful man in his 80s. We are, of course, aging, but at the same rate as Ms. Fairbank and her over-eager Ryerson colleagues. Another 350 members of the gallery — journalists and support staff — work the in newsrooms off the Hill. The Hot Room is the gallery’s last toe-hold on the Hill. It is not the “press gallery”. Most gallery mkembers rarely, if ever, visit it.
The gallery is not in danger of being taken over by the Speaker or the House of Commons. In fact, the Speaker’s legal counsel have defended the present accrediting system in Ontario Court (General Division) in 1984, the Federal Court in 1985 and 2007, the Competition Bureau in 2007 and 2009, and the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations in 1987. The last time the Speaker’s office weighed in on a Gallery membership issue was in 1979, to support the Gallery’s decision to exclude replacement workers during a strike by Canadian Press journalists. Ms. Fairbarn is deliberately vague about the threat of the Gallery losing independence for the simple fact that there is no documentary proof that this threat exists, and a long history that proves it does not.
I have seen four instances — in, again, 21 years — of people shouting at each other in the Hot Room. The Hot Room is a workplace of competitors. Many of us have won national journalism awards. Right now, everyone is under a huge amount of stress as we see our colleagues lose their jobs. Still, for the vast, vast majority of the time, the Press Gallery, including the Hot Room, is a collegial workplace of successful, bright, eithicalk reporters who work very hard to cover national issues. Ms. Fairbank worked very hard to come up with the story that she pitched to her editors and eventually wrote. She would have done well to listen to the many very good journalists who told her she had no real idea what she was writing about. She should have let the truth get in the way of what seemed like a good story.

By: Nope

Nope — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 01:29:49 +0000

“one balding small-town boy to another”

Wtf? Very professional. And two corrections already issued within a day of publishing? Great work, all around. This piece is being (rightly) torn apart on Twitter. Looking forward to what else unravels in the process.

By: Leon

Leon — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:45:10 +0000

Making reference to Bourrie’s hair loss is offensive to men as it equates the amount of hair they have with their competence and value as a human.

Comments on: Hot Mess

By: Mark Bourrie

By: Mark Bourrie

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By: Leon