Editor:
To weaken Winston Smith’s spirit and resolve, the antagonist O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984 chillingly proclaims: “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” This grisly imagery illustrates what an increasing number of your readers feel when they encounter Tom Fletcher’s writings.
The lines between journalism, opinion, and advocacy are elusive and hard to draw. Most journalists are professional and attempt to report news, issues, and events with a commendable degree of objectivity. Mr. Fletcher, however, blurs these lines in an utterly unprofessional manner.
The Northern Gateway Pipeline is one of the most ambitious and risky policy proposals in Canadian history. Mr. Fletcher’s "reporting" on the proposed pipeline routinely distorts the economic, social, and environmental concerns of a majority of British Columbians. These citizens are, for Mr. Fletcher, a mere handful of radical environmentalists and agitators.
Recent polls indicate the public’s views on the pipeline proposal are shifting: opposition by British Columbians has declined from roughly four-to-one to two-to-one. Yet polling experts have identified notable biases in some of them. The handful of polls that suggest British Columbians are “equally divided” excluded the word “bitumen” – the hazardous substance the pipeline would transmit – in the survey questions.
Even if British Columbians are equally divided over Northern Gateway, half the province’s population surely is not a minority. Mr. Fletcher is promoted by this newspaper as a “legislative reporter” in his opinion columns. Is he a reporter, or a columnist? Black Press readers wish to be sufficiently informed about important news and issues in our communities. Mr. Fletcher’s “wedge journalism” is at best disingenuous and at worst dishonest.
Darin Nesbitt