So on Sunday night, November 7th, Margo sent yet another email to her new bff, Red River College President Stephanie Forsyth.
She hadn't gotten an email in response to her first one on October 22nd, in which Margo hysterically railed about how the College was "granting (Marty Gold) a daily podium for his rants ... on a student radio station which is training young journalists (and) is unconscionable" and "this had to be kept confidential for the time being".
"Thought I better let you know" that the secret attack on free speech was not kept confidential, and that someone was defending Marty Gold in emails to FP online editor, John White.
That someone was KICK FM station manager Rick Baverstock, and on Saturday November 6th, he had blown Margo's cover.
Forsyth's edict to kill The Great Canadian Talk Show had been delivered by her agents on the Board of Directors of the radio station, when they met with Baverstock the day before.
"Hey John, it's been an 'interesting' week around the radio ranch. The new College president received a call from Margo - evidently Marty criticized Melissa's work on-air - and now the new Prez wants to give Marty the boot. Like, soon."
White and Melissa Martin hosted the Free Press' own show on Kick FM on Wednesdays at 6 PM, right after The Great Canadian Talk Show, and Baverstock asked White :
"... if you have any ideas on how to prevent what is likely to be a strong blowback for the College and the Free Press. I fear this might cause more of a ruckus for all involved than Marty's broadcasts."
"Wow... you best deal with Margo directly on this. It's above my pay grade. Although, stopping the slanderous comments would likely be a smart move." replied White.
Baverstock's reply was to defend Gold's right to free speech -- and White made sure Margo found out about it.
"I've had people publicly critique my work negatively. I did not consider it slander. It's just someone's opinion. If you put your work "out there" you need to accept some criticism along the way and not resort to foot stomping and pouting when things don't go your way."
Margo got the stooge report from White and realized her fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, so she scrambled to wipe it clean:
"As you know, I didn't ask for Gold to be fired; I did want to bring the show to your attention for discussion" wrote Margo, as though she had left any doubt in her first email what she expected Forsyth to conclude from any discussion. ("there is no balance, no fairness, no accountability in Gold's barrage of criticism - all of the tenets of good journalism ... (he is) critical of all, accountable to no one"... "I wonder what your students are learning from this")
Then, to make sure she could rest easy, Margo Goodhand did a drive-by smear on the one person standing in the way of her goal to rid her newspaper of the scrutiny of a campus radio host, his guests, and talk-show callers from the community.
"But it's concerning that Gold's station manager would have so little education that he would consider Gold's opinions to be exempt from any Canadian laws or broadcast standards. That's obviously why Gold has been able to get away with what he's been doing for so many years."
Along with the first email to Forsyth, Goodhand had attached her exchange with the Free Press lawyer, about how she had just finished educating herself by reading over the station licence and Canadian Broadcast Standards Council rules. But Margo didn't want to file complaints with the CRTC or CBSC or even the station. She had the ear of a "higher" power.
Rick Baverstock's education at Confederation College was honed by over 25 years of radio experience including managing a radio station on Vancouver Island and he is accomplished enough as a broadcaster to be featured in a display in the Paley Center For Media (formerly The Museum of TV and Radio in New York City).
His education taught him that if no complaints had been filed with the CRTC or CBSC, he had not let Gold "get away with" anything but exercising free speech, good reporting, and fair comment from the alternative media perspective.
No matter to Margo, as she hammered home the last nail with the help of her other bff, libel chill:
"My hope is to have the radio station adhere to the same journalistic standards that the rest of the media adhere to: principles of truthfulness, accuracy, fairness and public accountability. A radio talk show, of course, is entitled and expected to express opinions. But those opinions ultimately still have to be defensible in court - based on truth, privilege, fair comment or responsible communication."
The next afternoon, the Red River College lawyer drafted a termination notice that said "the Board wishes to ensure the students are exposed to high standards of journalism" and that "the Services of Marty Gold will no longer be required", and sent it to Forsyth and her representative on the Kick-FM board, RRC vice-president Cathy Rushton.
Within an hour, a revised version was being read, but not handed over, to Marty Gold by the RRC Dean of Business, Graham Thomson, in front of Baverstock and another witness, Bob Axford. Thomson was asked 3 times, if there were any complaints about the program, and 3 times Thomson said "no". He was asked what Margo Goodhand had to do with the cancelation, and he said "no comment".
The urgent rush to get Red River College to silence TGCTS, was rooted in Margo Goodhand's accusation that Melissa Martin had run crying to her about Marty Gold wrongly criticizing MM's non-reporting of complaints that the Ross Eadie civic election campaign was receiving illegal funding from the NDP.
Time then, for:
A Lesson in Journalism.
Let us apply Margo's standard for TGCTS -- "principles of truthfulness, accuracy, fairness and public accountability" -- to her own newspaper:
1) - Martin has confirmed that Goodhands' accusation was not truthful.
" I never “complained about Marty Gold” to Margo… that doesn’t even make sense. I only talked to her about anything related once, the first day I saw the Eadie thing going around on Twitter. This was maybe a week before I heard about it being on TGCTS, in that ballpark.
I was worried and wanted to explain the story to her in case she started getting letters making accusations about my ethics. It was a brief conversation but she reassured me that they trusted me and knew how seriously I took my work – that discussion was about ME.
I really don’t remember if there was “crying involved.” It’s possible, I’m a total crier, which everyone knows, haha."
2) - Martin's Twitter feed from the Mynarski ward forum proves the inaccuracy of her reporting, as she completely missed the Eadie admission of NDP financial support:
DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@
@riseandsprawl You did good. Eadie knew he was pushing it. Started the last leg of the race off interesting!
28 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
»
DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@
@stateofthecity haha. My apologies. I've usually experienced them as synonymous.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@
@stateofthecity I actually thought he nailed a lot of answers in debate... Info and specific ideas. Has to learn to respect debate though.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
Wow. Ross Eadie at Mynarski kept going way over time... Refused to listen to mod Rob Galston reqs to give floor. Galston stormed out.Drama!
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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kentonlarsen Kenton Larsen
by DoubleEmMartin
My mother went for a pedicure. Says they scraped her feet with a "pedophile." Something's gone horribly awry at Giselle's.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
Mynarski candidate Trevor Mueller, on what mayor candidate he supports: "I support anyone who's actually going to do something" #wpgelection
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@stateofthecity @policyfrog I love you guys! I promise I am smart about many things. Municipal issues are not ten of them.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@
@stateofthecity thx. I am taxation stupid so couldn't tell how that went down.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@stateofthecity eadie calls for tax based on land value only, not market assessment. Thoughts?
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@stateofthecity jenny motkaluk has been reading your blog? She's repeating your prop-tax post word for word, heh.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
@
@ChrisDca Motkaluk has some renown, if only yet for her pink campaign signs.
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
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DoubleEmMartin Melissa Martin
Motkaluk just showed up at Mynarski debate. This may be interesting. #winnipegvotes
27 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply
3) City hall reporter, Bartley Kives, got an email days later from an eyewitness with details about Eadie's admission of NDP financial support, but there has yet to be a syllable about it in the Free Press -- or about the officially filed complaints made with the Senior Elections Officer. So much for fairness.
4) Had anyone at the Winnipeg Free Press bothered to investigate the story the way TGCTS did, by speaking with at least 7 sources, and interviewing an eyewitness on-air -- which refutes Margo's dismissal of our journalism as "reporting third-hand knowledge" -- then maybe the public would be able to hold the Selinger NDP government accountable, for an election law so weak that SEO Marc Lemoine claimed it did not give him the ability to investigate Ross Eadie's statement and the resulting complaints.
As Margo wrote to Stephanie Forsyth on October 22nd:
" We're the big newsroom in town and deserve to be held to account for our many weaknesses... we believe in freedom of speech".
The Winnipeg Free Press, with its' vaunted journalism standards, did not report on the NDP civic election funding scandal, and attacked our right of freedom of speech to criticize the newspaper for failing to uphold their own standards under editor Margo Goodhand.
She asked for her attack to kept confidential, and then kneecapped Rick Baverstock to the College president for defending our reporting and work, when ultimately it was defensible in court - based on truth, privilege, fair comment or responsible communication.
Margo addressed the RRC Creative Communications class in a seminar, the day before she started her assault against free speech on KICK-FM.
One of the students took her to task for a story that morning in the Free Press that mocked the effort of journalism students to cover the civic election.
By the next day, Margo wanted to end student participation on The Great Canadian Talk Show, where discussions about the FP's biased stories against Mayor Sam Katz, MP Vic Toews, and about the newspapers' unrelenting support for the scam pet projects of millionaires like The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and The Friends of Upper Fort Garry, had found traction with the community.
Here are a mere handful of the other stories in 2010 where we exposed the errors, biases and incompetence of the Winnipeg Free Press:
* In March, the Free Press finally published a story about the threat of expropriations for the Disraeli bridge, 8 days after we interviewed a guest who raised the alarm and said his worries had been dismissed by the MSM including the FP:
New Disraeli bridge= expropriations: Free Press breaks 8 day old news, misses real story
* The Free Press gave lots of space to the official spin of Manitoba Hydro officials and refused to publish an open letter from the Hydro Whistleblower defending herself. But, the public got to hear her side for over an hour in an exclusive broadcast interview last April 1st on TGCTS:http://tgcts.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-loud-whistle-blowing-drawing.html
* In July, when FP columnist Lindor Reynolds tried to stir up controversy at Mayor Sam Katz dating a younger woman, we called it as it was, a cheap shot and a gutter-level swipe. Lindor got calls from angry readers all day but it wasn't till one of our listeners expressed his disgust that she finally posted a meek apology online.
http://tgcts.blogspot.com/2010/07/this-week-more-exclusives-bike-lane-war.html
* Also in July, TGCTS took the Free Press to the woodshed for regurgitating Manitoba Public Insurances' happy assurance that they had received no criticism from the public for giving away a building they claimed was worth under $100,000. The story was 3 weeks late and failed to mention what the real value of the $1 Million giveaway was to an organization that recommended the building be given to themselves.
http://tgcts.blogspot.com/2010/07/free-press-reports-on-half-mpi.html
* Only after a lawsuit was filed in September did the the Free Press finally cover the debacle of the Assiniboine Avenue bike lane - yet the story ignored
1) how area businesses are cut off from deliveries,
2) the impact on a social service agency that serves clients in immediate crisis,
3) pollution from gridlocked rush-hour vehicles choking residents of Edmonton Street and the loss of transit service for hobbled seniors,
4) the dangers to pedestrians caused by cyclists using sidewalks and frustrated drivers careening about like mice trapped in a maze.
All of which were covered on the Great Canadian Talk Show by unpaid reporters in the field.
http://tgcts.blogspot.com/2010/09/lawsuit-spurs-msm-reporting-on-bike.html
* In October, while the FP spun fake polls into news, we pointed out that Bartley Kives and the rest of Margo's election team were chasing stories that the alternative media had broken and were now big election issues.
http://tgcts.blogspot.com/2010/10/tomorrow-in-your-fp-chasing-2-tgcts.html
Reporters at the Free Press look to Margo Goodhand as their role model.
In Wednesday's Editor's Bulletin, previewing the Thursday print stories, she wrote:
Why Matty mattered
Sportswriter Jack Matheson was an inspiration to Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair Jr., and he explains why he never failed to tell Matty that when he ran into him around town. (For the record, I called Matheson ‘Cactus Jack’ yesterday, and I have a good reason for it. I’m an idiot. I was obviously thinking of Cactus Jack Wells.)
She'll find no argument here.
Still to come: Red River rep fabricates complaints to poison the KICK-FM Board against TGCTS.