From: A Toronto Reader [Email him]
Yesterday's blog posting by James Kirkpatrick about The Guardian closing comments on immigration, reminded me of a Toronto Globe and Mail story I read last November about the Canadian Broadcasting Company “suspending" comments on indigenous (Canadian Indian) stories. There was one passage in the article stuck out:
“We’ve noticed over many months that these stories draw a disproportionate number of comments that cross the line and violate our guidelines. Some of the violations are obvious, some not so obvious; some comments are clearly hateful and vitriolic, some are simply ignorant. And some appear to be hate disguised as ignorance (i.e., racist sentiments expressed in benign language).”In other words, the CBC is not just censoring bad language or openly hateful comments. It is saying certain ideas are not acceptable no matter how carefully they are expressed. In this case, the CBC is censoring dissent on aboriginal (Canadian Indian) issues, but you can be sure they have the same attitude towards comments on immigration and race. For example, many of the opinions put forward by VDARE.com would be unacceptable to the CBC. After all, this is the network that did more than 500 stories on the Oregon occupation while barely mentioning the mass New Year's Eve sexual assaults by Arabs in Germany.CBC uses third-party moderators to monitor comments. Still, Mr. Fenlon said in an interview, “We do see people who use language that, on the surface, if you’re a moderator and you’re not familiar with the story, it might not stand out to you as a racist comment, but in the context of the story it becomes obvious what it is, even though it’s almost disguised.” [CBC suspends online comments on indigenous stories, By Simon Houpt, The Globe and Mail, November 30, 2015]
I wonder what the late David Yeagley would have made of this story.
See previous letters from the same reader.
