Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Norman Spector, 2005 – “I’m sure you have very nice permalinks on your site. As to substance, from all indications in this thread, you seem incapable of engaging in serious debate on issues that matter to Canadians. Adn I’ve yet to find your by-line in any Canadian newspaper mixing it up in Canadian debates.”
Norman Spector, 2010 – Editor’s Note: “We have removed the text of an original posting on this blog as it fell short of The Globe and Mail’s editorial standards with respect to fairness, balance and accuracy.”
Plus – What would we do without journalism professors?
That is quite the blast from the past, Kate. Love how the ‘measuring stick’ of success was to be published in the TOStar…heh.
Interesting to see how the morally superior so-called journos are getting their knickers in a knot about this. Delacourt pulled a shocker with that one.
Spector doesn’t seem to have any friends in the PPG. Wonder why…
Two degrees of separation between the Globe and Mail and the other leftist rag …… Toronto Star.
Mischief making by innuendo?
Shaping the news for Canadians.
C’mon Kate, how about a Zinger for old Norm, before the counter turns to twenty million, eh?
Feliz Navidad!
The internal dynamics of a marriage are completely unknown except to the husband and wife.
Marriages often run into difficulties when husband and wife reach early middle age.
Their bodies change, for one thing; and it becomes apparent that they have succeeded or otherwise.
Hence in middle life marriages often show signs of stress. However it is impossible to know how serious that stress is.
Even the husband and wife, absorbed on their unique trajectories through life, cannot tell.
Spector isn’t a journalist and never was. He’s a columnist, and there’s a big difference. In the wonderful world of columns, it’s all about opinion; facts in support are for little minds.
The second thing to remember about columnists, particularly those in the big newspapers is that those like Spector haven’t had an original thought in at least 10 years. The classic example in the past of this was Allan Fotheringham, who for the last 15 years or so of his writing career only had four columns which he repeated with minor word changes over and over. For those who remember far enough back, Richard Needham’s columns in the Globe in the 1970s were hopelessly obsolete. And really, has an original thought gone through Jeffy Simpson’s brain in the past half decade once he got stuck on global warming?
The thing to remember about Spector is that his views ceased to have any relevance whatsoever the day he left the PMO. And no one in any political party has ever been interested in his advice ever since.
The usual reason that columnists get sacked is not because of egregious errors they make, unless they’re libelous. They get sacked because no one reads them. Getting expunged doesn’t help this much, so I would be surprised to find Spector still in print at the Globe a year from now.
If treason Laws ever come into effect, there are a lot of necks waiting to be stretched.
Begging for it, looks like.
JMO
*
quoth spector…
“I found this reasoning to be a bit strange—if the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that
was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions.”
funny… i don’t recall this being the standard journo line even when wee willie clinton was
actually proven to be diddling white house interns… with foreign objects, no less… and then
caught lying about it.
but a mere rumour of discord gets a conservative pol slagged in the nationwide media?
funny how that works, huh?
*
Confirmation, then, that there is no Hoser version of the JournoList./
Susan Delacourt as the voice of reason. Maybe the Mayan were right.
CGH
You fuzzify the mudification.
Using Spector’s logic PET should have been removed from office when Maggie jumped the fence. Does Maggie’s black eye help explain the NEP????
good one joe….a zinger as they say…
your comment should settle spectre’s hash…
That little cybertrip through Shotgun ’05 reminded one of Willem Defoe’s send off in ‘Wild at Heart’…
Gossip IS news if you ask the Red Star.
Merry Christmas.
Norm who?
Journalism is for former English majors who were too lazy to do all the reading and too dumb to write well about the things they did read.
Right you are neo, I remember suggesting that a man who would cheat on his wife and daughter would in all likely-hood, cheat on the electorate and then being told that, after all Larry, “its only sex”.
It doesn’t really matter at this point that the Globe and Mail removed his column, because it should *never* have been published in the first place; the first editor to read it should have called Spector into the office and fired him on the spot – not for being a prurient purveyor of unsubstantiated gossip, but for thinking that it’s okay to hand in for publication something that reads like a Gestetner-ed gossip note from a junior high school queen-bitch with BPD.
Question: has anyone here ever been enlightened or even mildly amused by *anything* Norm Spector has written?
I just don’t get it. It don’t understand why he’s being published anywhere, let alone in a national newspaper.
For years Spector has been trying to claim he was a conservative. Does anyone believe this? Has anyone ever believed this?
The MSM doesn’t suppress stuff about conservatives in difficulty, they SAVE it for release when it will cause the most damage.
Saw the blurb on the Globe site about “not meeting standards”. Thought it was just some mean spirited Xmas eve hacker being sarcastic to the max.
Posted by: syncrodox at December 24, 2010 7:31 PM
My thoughts exactly, Delacourt? Is the sky still blue?
Ya – Bourque thought it was news worthy so he posted it on his blog. I went to it, read it and thought – “shit – it really is a slow end-of-the-year kind of time.”
What a crap article – the kind we’ve come to expect from Sphincter.
After Iggula promised to give Bourque a new job, like Patty and Navin in The Jerk, a blow job, Bourque will say anything to slag PMSH. Bourque and National Newswatchs headlines are all I look at, they are hilarious in their hatred of Harper, I expect to see” Harper Bites off Kittys Head”, anytime soon, and poor old Spector is another in a long line of brown bag urnialists who suck on liberals for the stolen money. Nothing else. Why have the liberals not paid back all the stolen money, and why does the press never talk about this? Convienient, get another job Spector.
// “I found this reasoning to be a bit strange—if the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that
was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions.”
funny… i don’t recall this being the standard journo line even when wee willie clinton //
Sure it was. He was accused of bombing the Sudan in order to take attention away from his pecadillos.
And with Trudeau it was, in your words “the standared journo line”
One pompous journalist asked him just this in a TV interview. Trudeau gestured “Well, your know [sideways shrug], suppose you had a bladder control problem etc etc surely we would be concerned only if it became evident that it affected your job [shrug] etc while the interviewer turned a fine shade of purple.
Pure coincidence this story resurfaces the same day Brian Tobin’s son is arrested for some messy business?
the aptly named dizzy:
“funny… i don’t recall this being the standard journo line even when wee willie clinton //
Sure it was. He was accused of bombing the Sudan in order to take attention away from his pecadillos.
Yes, Clinton was accused of a “wag the dog” strategy – but it was not the “standard journo line” – it was attacks by some Republicans, not by the MSM. Nice revisionism attempt, but if you’re not prepared to substantiate it with citations, it’s not going to fly.
As for Trudeau’s response, it was a typical lawyer’s argument – full of irrelevant details and imperfect analogies, but obfuscating the salient point. It is not that we should be concerned “only if it became evident” that it affected his job. Prime Ministers are not like hockey stars; you can’t judge their jobs the next morning. It takes years. But let’s look back at the time line, shall we? Problems with Margaret began shortly after the birth of their third child, and by 1977 – just six years into the marriage – they were separated. In the next two years, Trudeau led – or was it mostly watch? – the Liberal polls fall badly, leading to his defeat by the Tory equivalent of Stephane Dion, Joe Clark. At that point, he announced his attention to retire. Do these sound like the actions of a man unaffected by the dissolution of his marriage?
Then, after Clark’s bumbling attempts to govern “as if he had a majority” (critics of PMSH might consider that this was an object lesson learned well) led the Tories to defeat, Trudeau had a political resurrection. He then threw himself entirely into the Constitution portfolio, obsessed in the view of many with his “place in history”, resulting in the hurriedly cribbed together, and incredibly flawed 1982 Act. Again, I ask: do these sound, in retrospect, like the actions of a man UNAFFECTED by his marital breakup?
So, the rejoinder to Trudeau by the un-named pompous journalist you quote (given the state of Canadian journalism then and now, I accept your description unreservedly) should have been “Sir, your decisions today may affect the nation for years, if not generations, to come. Why should we risk waiting for it to become evident that your personal marital problems are causing flawed national political decisions?”. I should have liked to have seen the thin-fingered one squirm out of that.
Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all, even beagle and BTJ!
“I found this reasoning to be a bit strange—if the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions.”
If we take his word for it and assume Spector’s point applies to the PM as much as old washed up PM advisors, than judging from this article, Specter isn’t getting any and probably fallen into cruising pock marked jittery crack whores.
Norman thinks he’s another Gordon Sinclair, problem is he wouldn’t even qualify to fill the ink well or sharpen the pencils on Sinclair desk!
Some people are giving kudos to Delacourt for her article. In my own mind Delacourt was serving her own self interest by keeping the rumor going and giving it publicity so she would be happy. Her article wasn’t done by her for altruistic reasons. Best way to treat a false rumor is ignore it rather than give it life.
Interesting,
To justify his rumour mongering, the author of the disappearing article summons the help of certain professor, no less.
He builds him up:
…is President of The Historica-Dominion Institute….an Associate Professor of Journalism at Carleton University….has a long and distinguished career as a journalist himself…, before he gives him a slap, … once worshipped at the feet of Pierre Trudeau…
Who are you people to question an ubermensch? What is it with you, having a thought about anything, leave it to the fine people of far superior socialist aristocracy. If he knows, he knows. No?
Now that he established superiority of his source, he gets creative, imagination running wild:
…I caught wind of “rumours”…I checked out the “rumour” with two “journalists”…I got the sense that it was “likely” true.
Does that qualify as an opinion or as a rumour mongering? Perhaps best left to The National Enquirer, they are severely equipped to handle the “truth”.
For cgh at December 24, 2010 6:58 PM:
You misspelled “communist”.