Anything that makes Fox News – blow off steam – is well worth checking out !!

At the moment they are the official Palin police force – driving up and cautioning and or attacking any would be Palin critic. As Palin would call them – “haters.”

Heather Mallick, an opinion columnist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Web site, is known for her use of humorous exaggeration. But last week after removing a column by Ms. Mallick, which said that Gov. Sarah Palin has “a toned-down version of the porn actress look” and suggested that Republican men were sexually inadequate, the government-owned CBC ruled that its opinion writers had to stick to the facts even when they were joking around.

Although the broadcaster’s Web site, http://www.cbcnews.ca, has relatively few readers in the United States, Ms. Mallick’s comments became an issue last month on the Fox News Channel, which, because of Canadian cable TV rules that limit its distribution, has relatively few viewers in Canada. Greta Van Susteren, the host of “On the Record,” condemned the column as “beyond vicious” and repeatedly referred to Ms. Mallick as “a pig.” A right-of-center columnist for The National Post, of Toronto, also criticized the column.

The CBC ombudsman, Vince Carlin, said in a report that his office had received more than 300 complaints about the column.

In an e-mail message, Ms. Mallick said she believed that the complaints had been “orchestrated” by Fox News and came largely from Americans.

“My problem is that I have to write with a certain kind of reader in mind, and that person is always going to be my vision of an intelligent Canadian,” Ms. Mallick said. “I don’t write for Fox viewers.”

Fox viewers are all morons or the manipulators of morons.

In his report, Mr. Carlin said that after the column had been mentioned in at least three Fox News broadcasts, his office and Ms. Mallick had “received an alarming number of truly vicious and vituperative messages.”

“vituperative messages” oh..those are the Christian Evangelical Right – they get like that around election time – they would kill for pro-life.

Mr. Carlin said that parts of the column broke internal CBC News guidelines requiring that “even in a work of opinion, facts should be respected and arguments should reasonably flow from these facts.”

Ms. Mallick, Mr. Carlin wrote, was unable to present evidence to support her suggestion that that Republican men were deficient sexually or that Ms. Palin’s supporters were “white trash.”

After receiving Mr. Carlin’s report, John Cruickshank, the publisher of CBC News, removed Ms. Mallick’s column from the network’s Web site (it is still available at http://www.heathermallick.ca) and promised in an online posting to improve the editing of opinion items.

Both Mr. Cruickshank and Mr. Carlin said that the column would have worked if it had been labeled as satire, but Ms. Mallick disagreed.

“It wasn’t satire though; it was straightforward political commentary, admittedly with jokes,” she said by e-mail. “I had no idea anyone would take the remark about sexually inadequate Republican men literally!” IAN AUSTEN

Have the Republicans all of a sudden become a race – of course they all have problems in this respect !!

Source: NYT

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