Citizen’s McGregor defends his MP marital gossip piece

Feeling the heat from his journo peers, the Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor wrote a lengthy “defence” of his embarrassingly sordid blog post detailing the private lives of some Conservative MPs.

One particularly interesting point for me was that McGregor confirmed my question about whether his editor ok’ed this TMZ-style of journalism as Melanie Coulson refused to answer me when asked and looks to have erased a Tweet on her acceptance of the word “slut”. (see here)

Update: I finally did hear back from Coulson but only to ask me to remove her photo as “property of the Ottawa Citizen”. I have asked her to get the legal department to make that a formal request from Citizen/Postmedia.

This is becoming a regular censorial occurrence from the journos at that newspaper (see here).

Media circle wagons to protect NDP Pat Martin for Twitter F-bombs

Predictably, many Ottawa Press Gallery members have either intentionally ignored or worse, defended NDP MP Pat Martin’s foul language outbursts sent from his MP Twitter account @PatMartinMP while he was sitting in the House of Commons.

My favourite example so far comes from the Globe and Mail’s Tabatha Southey who tells all to:

“Chill the fuck out, Canada. It’s Twitter. #cdnpoli #fuckingcdnpoli”

Southey’s warped ideas of Parliamentary etiquette and manners doesn’t include social media. To follow through on this logic, it is perfectly acceptable for a MP to tell people to F-off  on Google, Facebook, MySpace or any of the litany of other on-line platforms.

How anyone (especially a journo who covers Parliament) can believe a MP  Tweeting foul language from their seat in the House is not the same as yelling it across the floor is beyond me and by using the specious argument of  “I would defend a Conservative for doing the same” only confirms their bias and lack of professionalism.

Sometimes a freaky thing must happen on Twitter, a shift in the tectonic plates 2 release the tension. Last night @PatMartinMP was our Kanye