Protest launched over firing of Globe and Mail’s Rick Salutin

Vancouver writer and activist Murray Dobbin has started a letter-writing campaign to protest the Globe and Mail’s firing of weekly left-wing columnist Rick Salutin.

“I don’t need to tell you how few progressive voices there are in the mainstream media whether it’s TV, radio or newspapers,” Dobbin wrote in a message being distributed by e-mail. “Someone from outside the country observing the media would assume that this is a reactionary country with virtually no progressive tradition.”

Dobbin stated that Salutin told him he was given no reason for his dismissal. Salutin had written a column for the paper since 1991. “If we don’t respond it will be implicit support for the decision—the ideological gate-keepers at the Globe will gloat and claim no one cared anyway,” Dobbin added. “We do care. Rick upheld the best of what Canada has been and can be again.”

Dobbin urged regular readers of Salutin’s column to write to Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse, executive editor Neil Campbell, and national editor Sinclair Stewart: “just say in your own words what you think of the continuing efforts to diminish Canada—in terms of the role of government, our role in the world and the democratic debate which depends on a diversity of views.”

Comments

18 Comments

Corrupt

Sep 29, 2010 at 4:19pm

Our MSM is bought and paid for by far right neo-cons. The MSM actively works against the public interest and in the service of corporations and corporate cronies.

AW

Sep 29, 2010 at 4:57pm

As long as left wingers accuse the press of being right wing and right wingers accuse the press of being left wing then the puiblic are the winners.

Johntor

Sep 29, 2010 at 6:08pm

Salutin was well past his sell buy date, rehashing failed Soviet era leftist thinking.

Morty

Sep 29, 2010 at 9:50pm

I take it Murray Dobbin hasn't actually read the Globe in a while.

martens

Sep 29, 2010 at 10:01pm

"Salutin was well past his sell buy date."

Salutin is more than a jar of milk. Your comment is reductive. It diminishes human complexity and capacity. You've eaten the metaphors of the factories you worship. Drive on, small cog, drive on.

Camero409

Sep 29, 2010 at 11:28pm

I never read it and now for sure I won't. It's just another version of the National Newspaper. Boring and irrelevlant, just like Global, CTV and CBC. Ho Hummmmm!

Ummm...

Sep 30, 2010 at 9:43am

"Our MSM is bought and paid for by far right neo-cons. The MSM actively works against the public interest and in the service of corporations and corporate cronies."

When people like you can actually define what a "neo-con" actually is, I'll start taking you seriously. Until then, they are just words that have no meaning.

Max

Sep 30, 2010 at 10:40am

The Canadian press is a joke. The G + M is a piece of corporate trash, certainly not worth the paper its printed on. All Salutin did, as an intelligent man and a good writer, was give it a shred of legitimacy. Oh Canada! The home of Fox newsies, the Sun, G+M, Nat'l Post. Don't buy Canadian papers, you're only encouraging them. Someone told me that a woman who self describes herself as an Islamic Zionist (her name escapes just now) has taken his place! Great! Maybe we can put some pro-Israel kook on the same page, get Karl Rove to write a regular opinion piece, maybe Newt Gingrich can get in too. And any of dozens of Canadian neo-cons can rant daily about gun laws, Tamil immigrants, terrorist plots, and pampered workers sucking off the welfare state. Let's descend all the way, we deserve it!

Valerie Clark

Sep 30, 2010 at 11:06am

I find it chilling that Rick Salutin has been fired. He was one of the last mainstream journalists to be able to articulate the rationale for the kind of social programs Canada used to be famous for. He was able to take the ideas of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joe Stiglitz and show how shfts in public policy by Harperites were widening the gap between rich and poor. Now we'll continue to see the ideas of allan greenspan and g. bush dominate the mainstream media in all kinds of explicit and /or insidious ways. He is a huge loss to public discourse in Canada.