Intellectual Prostitution: Coming Soon to a TV Near You!

Sun News Network finds itself on the wrong end of a journalistic beatdown.

Sun Media has been on the warpath of late, calling out the CBC for its Vote Compass tool that purports to help voters determine which party best represents their values. The Sun and others have claimed the Compass has a Liberal bias, and several stories in the media chain’s papers have claimed the source of this bias is Peter Loewen, who wrote policy papers for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in 2006 and helped design the tool. Brian Lilley said as much in this piece a week ago, and Ezra Levant even insinuated Loewen could be feeding information collected over the CBC website to Ignatieff. “Who gets that voter data?” Levant asked. “Loewen does. Has he shared it with his former boss, Ignatieff? Does the CBC even know? Or care?” In Levant’s espoused opinion, the CBC is essentially campaigning for the Liberals and should therefore be deprived of public funding.

But as the Globe and Mail’s Simon Houpt points out, while Loewen did do some work for Ignatieff, he also worked on Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s 2004 campaign team and for Nova Scotia PC candidate Bill Black, which is pretty strong evidence the man is hardly a political hack. Loewen’s bipartisan career experience is well-known and the Sun editors were surely aware of it. That the attacks on the CBC come two weeks before the launch of the Sun News Network is hardly a coincidence, Houpt concludes.

The final word on this issue should be this scathing piece by Andrew Potter of Maclean’s, in which he completely eviscerates Levant and Lilley with considerable and fiery eloquence. Potter says he doesn't know if the Vote Compass is biased, but everything we know about Loewen confirms he certainly isn't. “It’s amazing what sort of character assassination you can get away with through chickenshit use of question marks (in Levant’s case),” he writes. “Or in Lilley’s case, through the deliberate withholding of facts.” The Sun may be attempting to hype its news network, “[b]ut I actually think something more basic is at work here: Intellectual prostitutes like Brian Lilley and Ezra Levant are so used to selling their brains on the cheap in journalism’s back alleys, they find it literally incredible that everyone else’s intellect is not similarly for sale.”