The So-Called Problem of Rex Murphy, Holocaust Deniers, and the CBC – Why We Need Free Speech!
Rex in all his controversy...
Photo Credit: National Speakers bureau
As of late anyone reading InformedVote will have noticed the writings of Brian Gordon and his vitriol against Rex Murphy. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are litanies of reasons why I too personally despise the man, but I cannot bring myself as far as Mr. Gordon to demand that he be obligated to report what Brian thinks is the true NEWS.
Before digressing into the whole issue of “what is NEWS”, let us clear up a few things on the topic of Rex Murphy. Like most people from western Canada I find him uncouth, unsophisticated, and possessing of the ranting-ignoramus-fisherman personality us Westerners are often too eager to paint on anyone born east of Riviere de Loop. As unfair as we out West may be at times, the painting of this brush on Rex has, for ontological reasons, been fair. My own problem with Rex is not that he has strong opinions, just that when I look at his analysis it appears that he sets out to take contrarian views (often actually popular minority opinions) simply for the opportunity to intentionally produce a rant that will both offend a predictable opposition, but at the same time not be so extreme as to create any serious blow-back from a unified Canadian front. Let me be clear on this – I believe Rex does this intentionally, calculated, methodically, and simply to be in the spotlight. This is precisely why I, and no one else who takes seriously thought, learning, and writing, can honestly have a soft spot for the man. One cannot purposely be a contrarian; being a contrarian is a burden that one bears BECAUSE one has sought out truth – this is supposed to be an involuntary burden. Now for ontology…
Real scholars and people with real opinions first research and study a subject and then form their opinion as a result of the data – they may not like the data, but they accept it until new and better data come along. I am NOT saying that they don’t scrutinize the data or the methods of collection, in fact people not capable of this may possess an opinion but their reasoning, when examined, will always be laughable and on par with a Mormon history lesson. Rex Murphy, though, despite reading up on his subjects, calculates which position he wants to take and that way he can appear iconoclast and CBC can appear to be diverse. If there is just enough public support for his anti-establishment or anti-icon views he intentionally will clash against them, not due to any sort of passion or belief, but because that is the silly hat he likes to wear.
Now why would he do that? Well there are a number of reasons – airtime being the most obvious. Another is because persons with mental and communicative disorders (and Rex openly admits this) are more likely to want to control the discourses in which they find themselves in. I don’t hold mental illness against Rex, nor do I think that it in itself has the potential to make him either corrupt or credulous, but I do think that an individual who is already fast and loose with research, AND who is anxious by disposition, is likely want to control his environment. Now I could be wrong, but I might not be – just food for thought. Regardless, my picture of Rex is ultimately as a man who likes to fight for the sake of fighting an underdog’s battle but who carefully wagers his popularity prior to entering the ring and also calculates the loss to his reputation should he be on the erring side. Whether stemming from his illness or not I don’t care – this is snake-oil-sleazy.
Now, on the issue of Rex denying the effects of carbon emissions, anyone who can do simple high-school math and introductory statistics can clearly see that the case for global warming is made. I too do not like this fact and would love for alternative data to come in – it would mean I can drive what I like and that we are not killing our species. Still the data are in and I have to accept that. Oppose a mountain of independent data all you want but (I am speaking to Rex AND Ed Stelmach) it just shows that you both can’t read AND can’t do simple math. In the real world, the one outside of politics, such people are not fit for McDonalds. Now, when dealing with people like Rex who are somewhat educated (unlike Stelmach with his animal husbandry degree) who intentionally do not want to read or do arithmetic, the correct response is to call foul! Actually I like to call fraud, charlatan, donkey, and occasionally retard (but not as in ‘born handicapped’, just as ‘mutilated one’s own mind to become so’). You see someone as smart as Rex can only refuse to do math and read because he WANTS TO and this makes him shady, unreliable, and also not a true iconoclast. So there you have it. It is the responsibility of people who read the things that others don’t want to understand to tell people who like their blinders to grow up. Rex Murphy grow up!
What about the NEWS? Is it the responsibility of the NEWS to tell the truth? I sure as hell hope not! You see if people like Brian Gordon had their way the NEWS would be dictated to us by condescending bureaucrats who feel that it’s their obligation to tell the truth. God forbid this ever gets legislated. If it ever did I would leave the country! I agree with the CBC execs (as much as I personally hate the CBC) that they have no responsibility whatsoever to report the truth. The only obligation they have is to report the perspectives of individuals, and the observations of their staff, and to ensure that those perspectives are fairly represented. That is what NEWS is. NEWS is not academia, it is not an outlet for science, and it is not a means that you want official voices to be communicating with “the masses”. What Brian Gordon advocates, despite how incredibly absurd Rex Murphy is, is the end of the reporting of the common observations of people and independent staff supplanted by a dictatorship of the “correct”. I don’t care how right science is, this is not the place of science. People who are scientifically educated have the responsibility to respond to the NEWS and so does everyone else. What stems from Brian’s suggestion, and I do not think that he has thought this far ahead (and if he has shame on him) is the end of public critical analysis. Well Brian, I think it is good to live in a society where I can not only tell people why they are wrong but also to be in a society where I may be wrong in doing so! It is up to the public to weigh and decide what they hear, and up to them to accept or reject, or to comment further. This is also the burden of anyone participating in academic discourse. The fantasy that there is massive consensus amongst academics is false. There is often general consensus – like for evolution, global warming, and gravity, but considerable debate on the inflections. Your suggestion is so creepy and authoritarian as to make me hope that you are nothing more than a zitty twenty-something with a bachelors degree, an entry-level-job, and an X-Box. God forbid you have any responsibility managing people (at a McDonalds or otherwise). All I can say is please stay away from Grad-school, and tax-supported NSERC funding, until you understand the importance of debate.
So as much as I dislike Rex Murphy, and I have for a long time, I especially despise the notion that NEWS somehow has to be true. It was said sneeringly, and with much sarcasm by Mr. Gordon that maybe we should give broadcast time to Holocaust deniers. Well I am not a Holocaust denier (just to set that straight) but David Irving, who is one of the greatest scholars on the Nazi regime, is and I would give time for his views. Is he terribly wrong on that point? Yes I believe so. Does that mean that he is a crackpot? No it does not. In fact Irving wrote the best account to this day of the Dresden Bombing, was the first to debunk the Hitler diaries, and is a foremost expert in Nazi Germany’s wartime archives. Why would you want to listen to this Holocaust denier? Well in the very least because there is a lot that can be learned from why a smart man came to believe that there was no Holocaust. Is it a case of cognitive dissonance, a case of human error, or did he empathize with the wrong side? These three off-the-cuff questions are interesting in and of themselves. More so, the debates between Irving and his critics have done, in my opinion, the Jewish community and Holocaust affirmers (a.k.a the general consensus) a tremendous service because this discourse has forced them to quantify and assert their position – and they did, and they won the debate! Had this all been squelched on account of historical emotionalism and radical streams in the Zionist movement there would be a great deal more room in the world today for Holocaust denying and the possibility that such a position could have become mainstream. Perhaps this is why so many Rabbis and Jewish scholars, despite their own personal offense, have carefully immersed themselves into Irving’s work. So yes of course we should listen and give air-time to every opposing and deviant opinion – even those of Holocaust deniers! If we do not, how do we gauge the strength of our own positions? And if we do not, how are we to understand how it is, or why it is, there are people who think differently?
To close I want to say that I do, at some level, have a degree of empathy for Brian Gordon’s suggestion. I do get terribly irritated when people ramble on about intelligent design theory, magic bridges built to Sri Lanka by the monkey god, or by pitiful, sad attempts by Mormons to revise American history. But, at the same time, as irritating as these all are, I have to give these flakes and intellectual neonates their time to speak. It is only when people speak can their voices be heard. Does this mean that debates go on longer than they need to – yes, we will always have people like Ben Stein (who supports intelligent design), David Irving (a Holocaust denier), and Mormons in our midst. What NEWS can and should do is give everyone their minute so that we can dialogue, debate, and if need be exercise our constitutional rights to differ, no matter how wrong or backward we are.
the views expressed in this and related posts are those of the authors only
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Tags: cbc, free speech, rex murphy
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December 21st, 2009 at 11:42 pm
I don’t agree with everything you’ve written here, but at the very least, it is nice to have some sound logic in response to Brian Gordon’s baseless rants.
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:06 am
My opinions of Rex are a matter of taste and observation – the Canadian Aesthetic if it could be said as a culture we even have one. My opinions of David Irving I know are not politically correct but there are merits to defending him because he has at times produced reliable work (personally I don’t see him twisting history any more than Chomsky but that is a massive debate in and of istelf). To the news, you wouldn’t like the consequences if it were being dictated to us for our “own good” (thanks but no thanks big brother), and as for Gordon – well I don’t really think he knows that a pundit is just a person, misinformed, ill informed, and occassionally informed, who just rants about what he thinks and feels without any obligation to cite sources or read a book. Rex is a Pundit, a popular, often misguided one, but not nearly as threatening or harmful in his untruths as is the suggestions that only “correct news be reported”. I’ll take a lying strait-jacketed Newfie loony over government approved news anyday; better to criticize a man that realize that you ahve to criticize an entire rotten system. Can you imagine what criticizing the news would be like under la regime de Gordon? You would have to first blame some useless undergrad who was given the job of editing, then you would have to blame the cheif editor, and the chief correctness officer blah blah blah read wikipedia’s article on Chinese CCTV 9 if you want to know what a screwup that would be. Besides I would loose the right to say things like la regime de Gordon (in the feminine no less) and probably loose the right to hurt the feelings of voters and everone lese who pays for the system – mind you that is already happening with the CBC but hey I intend to enjoy my free speech before the Liberals come back and take more of it away from me by ironically section one-ing my right to expression using that absurd toilet-paper-useless charter of rights and freedoms that was so idiotically composed by them.
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
“…if people like Brian Gordon had their way the NEWS would be dictated to us by condescending bureaucrats…”
Yet another misinterpretation of what I said.
First, I don’t know or care why Rex Murphy takes the fantasy-based positions he does. Second, Murphy’s positions are generally pro-establishment, not anti.
Third, my original complaint to the Ombudsman was that Murphy’s segment, regardless of its title, appears during the news and contains wrong and dangerous information – and his segment should be fact-checked the same as the rest of the news.
From this, various people concluded that I wanted a bureaucrat dictating the ‘news.’ Au contraire. I want facts/truth/reality on the news. That’s it. But in these politically-correct days, it seems ‘fair and balanced’ is more important than “truth.”
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:58 pm
So you are saying that first and second that Rex takes a fantasy-based pro-establishment view. Interesting but no Rex takes the largest minority he can find and uses it to rail against the status quo – again this is what pundits do, and Rex is actually a rather boring one because his positions are predictable – so much so you think that they are majority.
Now as to your complaint to the Ombudsman. Lets talk about what such a person does. An ombudsman is a generally useless individual appointed to take complaints from the public or within an department to management. They have no authority, then generally have no real idea or means to assess the validity of complaints they just record them and push the paper along as far as they go. These are functionally one of the most useless and irrelevant (and thus also very Canadian) positions that we waste taxes on. Think of them as emasculated gratuitous lawyers to make ignorant people feel good – that would be a better way to view them. People with real complaints and grievances get lawyers. People who want to bitch about thinks that they don’t understand go to Ombudspersons. As such I am not in the least bit surprised that you went to an ombudsman. You see if you had a legal point you could launch a compliant, but instead you just wanted to whine and let your voice be heard so you went to the government appointed ear-tard and gave him or her some sense that they are not as useless as everyone else thinks they are. Congrats. If you had a real complaint, by the way Mr Gordon by using an Ombudsman you would have forewarned the CBC of the potential for action and they would have lawyered up and initiated action first catching you off your feet. Tactically an ombudsman is a stupid move every time.
Now no one said that you wanted a bureaucrat dictating the news. This is the part where I point out both your inability to write clearly AND understand written text. I said clearly that there was no evidence that you thought so far ahead but rather that you seemed unaware that if you got what you want – what you call the truth in news – that the result would be some government measure of truth assurance that would require supervision and monitoring (how else could you assure the truth?). The result would be bureaucratically dictated news. My statements to this effect are clear and it is both sad and amusing that I have to explain them. As for misinterpretation, you were judged for what your wrote. If you really just meant that you wanted Rex to somehow just magically work for public funded broadcasting without government intervention or bureaucratic control be OBLIGATED to tell the truth then you should have just said so. If that really was your position all along you and I both know, or at least you should by now, that such a position is only worthy of being heckled and laughed at. To be fair, as per my article I will listen to it, but after hearing it, have to put it in the same pile as Mormon history, gateway drugs, and 2012 conspiracy theories. To your credit though, if you really have clarified your position with the above reaction you made with my post, I am glad you are just horribly naive and not a fascist.
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:48 am
…oh and sorry for the typos, its Christmas, and for the faithless like me that means excessive drinking without anyone more sober than I to edit
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