Correction

In my post this morning about John Miller, I made an error. I wrote that John Miller was a PhD in journalism. It was an assumption on my part: he calls himself a "doctor", his website's address is thejournalismdoctor.ca, and he was the head of journalism at Ryerson's school of journalism for some years. So I assumed that he was, in fact a PhD.

He's not. In the sixties, he got a B.A. in English. That's it.

You can see his full CV here, taken from his website.

I think this is delicious. For a year, "the journalism doctor" has been lecturing mere bloggers like me (and mere international best-selling authors like Mark Steyn) about not being real journalists. We aren't responsible; we're not competent; we're not professional. What a hoot to learn that he's not a doctor at all -- nor does he have a master's degree, or even a degree in journalism itself. But he's so snobby about his "craft" that he pretends to have one.

Now don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against folks who aren't official "experts" or who have no formal education. I don't have a journalism degree myself -- and I'm not sure how J-school could teach anyone to be a critical thinker, or to have a sense of curiosity or skepticism. And trust me: having spent seven years in university myself, I can testify that plenty of students there are either on a leisurely holiday from real life, or are pursuing some useless pursuit that should properly be called a hobby, not an academic field. My point is that you just don't usually have Miller's kind of righteous preening from folks whose formal education is an English degree earned at London, Ontario 43 years ago.

I skimmed the rest of Miller's CV, and I had to laugh out loud. I think it's great that he listed every damn lunch talk he's ever given, including to the Rotary Club. They're good people. It's just a little, uh, light for someone pretending to be a "doctor".

This great writer has published one book in his career -- a self-serving whinge about how right wing journalism has become. Fair deal -- that's Miller's niche. But it's pretty sad when the best publisher he could muster was Canada's socialist imprint, Fernwood Publishing. I love their mission statement:

In an era when the restructuring of capitalism seems to be threatening to erase many of the gains that have been made by the oppressed in society, we think that our books have a part to play in bucking the trend.

On second though, I think Miller picked just the right publisher for his mush.

I did learn one more useful thing from Miller's CV: he's part of the taxpayer subsidized grievance industry. I don't see any cash flowing to him directly from any human rights commissions, but he's received about $150,000 of our money for various politically correct projects, including a "survey" of ethnic media in Canada. Nice work, on top of his other taxpayer-funded salary as a professor. He even got $10,000 from the race-hustlers at the Race Relations Foundation to develop a website for them -- who knew he had such talents? You might recall the CRRF; their chief, Ayman Al-Yassini, has his own CV that boasts that he was:

visiting professor at the University of Riyadh (King Saud University) in Saudi Arabia. He published extensively on the relationship between religion and state in Islam, religion and development and religion and foreign policy.

Nice fit. I wonder if the two of them kick back and watch some Al Jazeera together.

Anyways, this blog post is a correction. I suppose Miller's accusation was right: a better journalist than me would never have taken Miller's pretense to be a "doctor" at face value without double-checking to see if it was spin. My apologies to my readers. Despite his propaganda, Miller's no doctor.