[Sust-mar] CBC lockout

[Terry Mulcahy]

Ok, I phoned the CBC telephone number 1-866-306-4636, spoke to a person, and left my name and phone number.

I explained that there was an inherent flaw with a journalist on contract. The problem is that if someone didn't like what the journalist was reporting 
or took offense to the coverage they gave to a sensitive topic, it would be easy to get rid of that person by not renewing his or her contract.

With contracts, there are no messy and sensational grievance tribunals, just "poof," the person is history. This is a particular concern for those of us who live in the peripheries of Canada, or "the regions," as some like to 
call it.

It may seem a tad paranoid, but an excellent example is Peter Milewski. He is a CBC journalist who got himself in the wringer over the APEC controversy in 1997.

As you might remember, the Mounties started hosing everything that walked or crawled with pepper spray during the APEC summit. There was great concern 
that protestors would endanger President Suharto of Indonesia, among others. 

Mr. Milewski reported on a possible link between the actions by the Mounties and the PMO.

The point is, would Mr. Milewski have a job today had he been a contractor?

Here is a link to the CBC archive on Milewski's case:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/Canada/national/1999/03/23/milewski990323.html

If you want to go a step further with this, the irony is that most of the players have been disgraced, censured, or deposed. For example, Suharto was deposed, Jean Carl, who was a heavy weight in the PMO has been censured and disgraced.

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Terry Mulcahy
PO Box 425
23 George Street
Sydney, NS
Canada B1P 6H2

Murphy's First Law:
If anything can go wrong, it will
Murphy's Second Law:
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse 
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