Media coverage of the human rights commission story

Who do you think wrote the following criticism of the CBC's coverage of Canada's human rights commissions censoring free speech?

...it does strike me as a significant gap in coverage that, first, the Levant proceedings were not mentioned, at a minimum, by CBC.ca and were not covered by the national radio and television services. Similarly, there was little coverage of the Steyn complaint [on the CBC] before Mr. Murphy’s opinion piece. Whatever one may think of Mr. Murphy’s opinion, the item clearly highlighted the clash between free expression and the society’s perceived need to protect its citizens from harm.

...Whatever one’s opinion, it strikes me that coverage of these two cases would have enhanced our knowledge of the issues in play."

The author of this criticism, to my surprise, is the CBC's ombudsman, Vince Carlin. You can read the full text here.

Carlin wrote this in reply to a complaint by the anti-Semitic Canadian Arab Federation, which had complained about "Islamophobia" at the CBC. Even al Jazeera doesn't believe that -- they use the CBC as their farm team, hiring away such top CBC talent as Avi Lewis and Tony Burman.

Carlin's reply was written at the end of March, more than two months after the HRC story went big on the Internet, and more than a month after it really broke through into the mainstream media. He points out that the CBC's silence on such an interesting and important subject was strange indeed, and that the CBC had plans to remedy it.

They certainly have, in my opinion. CBC Sunday did a large segment on the matter, which aired twice. The National did at least one story on the subject. And Rex Murphy raised the issue on the year-end edition of The National's "At Issue" panel as the most under-reported story of the year. I think they've made up for their slow start.

I should say that CTV has been excellent on the subject, too, particularly Mike Duffy, who has had Mark Steyn (and me) on his show on several occasions, and Robert Fife did some good digging on the Internet hacking story, too.

To my surprise, Global hasn't done a lot on the issue, and I'm not sure why.

It's summer now, so most political journalists are on a break. But when fall comes and the country's political class goes back to work, I'm sure we'll see plenty more news on the subject -- especially if the Alberta Human Rights Commission announces that they're finally going to take me to trial (after nearly 900 days of investigating and interrogating me.)

h/t LH