Pubdate: Sun, 02 Jun 2013
Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON)
Copyright: 2013 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact:  http://torontosun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/457
Author: Mark Bonokoski

OF MICE AND 'MAGGOTS'

For those seeking great comedy, Toronto would make a terrific summer 
tourist destination since the affair over Mayor Rob Ford's alleged 
crack smoking and his city councillor brother Doug Ford's alleged 
high-school hash peddling is more fun than a good farce.

The main act, in fact, has even held the top position among Google 
searches world-wide, beating out Barack Obama and Lady Gaga, and 
seems to have more twists than a snake in a rock pile.

And the end seems nowhere in sight now that media supposedly covering 
this freak show is spitting at each other over who has the moral high 
road after Mayor Ford referred to the media as "maggots," and Brother 
Doug qualified it by actually naming a handful of Toronto journalists 
who are exempt from that critique.

It's a laugh a minute.

The main protagonist at the Toronto Star, the newspaper that 
"mainstreamed" an Internet gossip site's "scoop" of a tape allegedly 
showing Toronto's mayor smoking crack with two Somali drug dealers, 
is its marquee columnist, Rosie DiManno.

(For those out West, think of former Calgary Herald columnist 
Catherine Ford on steroids, and you will get a clearer picture of Ms. 
DiManno on a normal day.)

DiManno is now associated, of course, with the worst, if not 
most-insensitive, newspaper lede ever when she recently wrote about a 
Toronto anesthesiologist charged with having half-zonked female 
patients perform fellatio on him while they were undergoing surgery.

"She lost a womb but gained a penis," wrote DiManno of one such victim.

Try to top that one.

DiManno has more recently cited her pride in being among the 
"maggots" called out by the Brothers Ford, and could not hold herself 
back from writing the following:

"If I'd been among the handful of journalists who received an 
approving shout-out from this two-headed beast," she wrote, "I would 
be dying of mortification right now and turning in my press credentials."

One of those journalists cited by Ford, in fact, was DiManno's 
(former?) good friend, the National Post's Christie Blatchford. When 
Blatch e-mailed DiManno on this, DiManno purportedly replied, "Take a pill."

But it only gets better.

There was more hilarity on the radio waves, particularly from Toronto 
640's Bill Carroll, who went to great pains on Monday to childishly 
mock his former employer at CFRB 1010 for bleeping out his name on 
their broadcasts when referring to the journalists cited by Doug Ford 
as not being among the maggots.

What caught my attention, however, was Carroll's on-air conversation 
with Doug Ford when Carroll declared that - forget the hash 
allegations for a moment - he had witnessed some of the 
"hypocritical" media covering the Ford circus today "getting really 
drunk and doing a lot of lines of coke" back in the heady days of the '80s.

In one ear and out the other? Not mine. Doug Ford, in fact, actually 
accused, on air, some of the journalists still in the media that are 
now "chasing down" himself and his brother of being "cokeheads."

Don't believe me? Then go to Toronto AM 640's website and listen to 
the tape of that interview. But who was Carroll referring to? And Ford?

These are serious allegations, so let's have their names since both 
Carroll and Ford castigated the "anonymous" sources in the Star's 
Mayor Ford crack-pipe epic and The Globe and Mail's equally epic 
follow on Doug Ford allegedly peddling hashish as a teenager. So 
cough them up, boys.

Now, truth be known, I wasn't exactly a wallflower back in the '80s, 
my drug of choice being copious amounts of alcohol (the cork now 
plugged for years), but never at any of those many "media parties" 
did I see any journalists doing lines of coke, and certainly none who 
are still in the game today and who would be "chasing down" Rob or 
Doug Ford over drug allegations.

Anyone with any media experience who listened to Bill Carroll's 
interview with Doug Ford on Monday, however, would see it for what it 
was - lickspittle.

There is no other way to describe it.

To soften up Ford, the often holier-than-thou Carroll "confessed" 
(naughty boy) to growing marijuana with friends in a farmer's field 
while in high school, and sharing it with others, but not doing drugs 
today and barely even taking a drink.

It was, in a word, hilarious.

Toady, yet funny.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom