Reply to Human-Rights Win Coverage

The Journal’s article (June 20) following my group’s press conference focused on me personally, not just on the issue of the stereotyping literature and the arguments over domestic violence. The article did so in a way, employing tendentious historical snippets, which gives the appearance of trying to undermine my credibility. As a trained scientist and an academic of many years’ experience with the issues involved, I surely deserve the right to tell my side of the history. (Liane Faulder’s snotty allegations I will ignore; much more important matters are at stake.)

Ironically, in fact, the original stories from which the snippets were drawn employed the same tactic which lay at the heart of MERGE’s complaint against The Family Centre: serious distortions of the truth, especially through suppression of crucial information.

Deceit through withholding of facts is a serious matter. To cite just the most recent high-profile judicial example, such suppression is what made Karla Homolka’s claims of innocence initially plausible. And it is supposed to be contrary to journalistic ethics. But the stories I tell below can all be documented in detail.

The Edmonton Journal’s coverage of that "shoot the bitch" incident and surrounding ones 10 years ago was infused with such techniques of deceit. Its manifest purpose was to promote the claim, utterly unfounded, that an atmosphere of contempt for women pervaded the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Engineering.

Promoted how? By describing unpleasant events experienced by women while carefully omitting mention of all the precisely parallel events experienced by men; and by withholding information so as to make minor or innocuous events look serious. When I attempted by letter to the editor to detail certain of the suppressed information, it was censored out of the published version, making me appear to be the one with unsupported claims—it was suppressed again.

By way of brief detail, it was The Journal’s scurrilous charges, involving one female engineering student in particular, which raised the wrath of the other engineering students—of both sexes—against that student and against The Journal. It is safe to say that the "shoot the bitch" incident would never have occurred had they not so resented being defamed through her. To voice their solidarity in the matter, a dozen female engineering students (this was reported in the student newspaper but not in The Journal) circulated a petition which was signed by hundreds of the engineers.

At that point I asked to get involved with them, learning much about the actual facts—and especially learning how fully supported and respected by the males the female engineers felt. I urged these young women to bring a press-council complaint against The Journal, and we worked together on that project for some weeks. In the end, a certain university administrator talked them out of it. The grounds? The Edmonton Journal, with its massive power over what the public gets to know, could badly hurt the university, and hurt them individually. (Threats had already been made not to hire U of A engineering graduates over the affair.) They sadly gave up on the desire to clear their faculty’s good name.

At a later date, I did manage to publicize some of the facts by arranging for some women engineers who had joined in the "shoot the bitch" chant to tell their side on the CBC Ideas program. To understand this sad affair, it is absolutely essential to get the whole story; the reader can find a fairly complete account at [the Web address has been changed since this letter was sent to The Journal; the article, One Year in Canada, is posted here].

As for my views on sexuality, the article managed to distill my scholarly publications and my serious moral concerns into some trivia about G-strings and pasties. This complex subject can hardly be treated here. But for the record, our society’s entrained irrational fears involving sex have fueled such horrors as the repressed-memory and satanic abuse witchhunts, which have crippled and taken so many innocent lives. And they have fueled a sexual jihad against males in workplaces, schools and law courts.

The article’s statement on affirmative-action hiring at the University incorrectly described my efforts, which were explicitly directed, not at such hiring itself, but at official cover-ups and hypocrisy over it. The University’s dishonesty was enabled to prevail by The Journal’s power over what the public was allowed to learn, and by its own dishonesty. This long story cannot begin to be told here, but I intend to reveal it yet to the citizens of Alberta.

Returning to spousal abuse, The Edmonton Journal’s treatment of that subject over the years has been unethical in the extreme.

Back in the middle-late 1980’s, major survey-studies of family violence were conducted for the first time in the province, two out of the University of Alberta and one out of the University of Calgary. Like every other published survey asking questions about both major and minor physical assaults on partners, they all found (as reported by the women respondents themselves) that women commit such attacks as often as men.

A newsworthy surprise, one would think. But when a Journal reporter interviewed the main researcher in the first study, she refused to believe that result and would not publish it. (I was told this in confidence by another reporter at the time.) When results from the second study were published as a scientific report—in what one of the two principal researchers later admitted was a "politically correct" move—they left out the half of their data on violence by wives.

THIS time The Journal made big news of the gender statistic—the result that roughly one in nine Alberta women per year is assaulted by her male partner. They repeated the figure again and again, in fact, in further articles over time. Seeing from the scientific report itself that female-to-male statistics had at least been gathered (even this fact was kept out of the news articles), I went and got them from the researchers. The female-to-male number was one in eight.

And seeing the ideological hay being made out of the half-truth by the media and by Alberta’s sexist feminists, I met personally with Journal editor (now publisher) Linda Hughes. I begged her to investigate and publish the whole story; or at least to publish my own write-up (recall that I am a professor of philosophy of science) about the information. She chose to do neither. And the one-in-nine-Alberta-women statistic continued to appear in Journal articles.

The story does not end there. About three years later, I arranged sponsorship to bring to an Edmonton conference a pioneer in the sociological study of wife abuse, Professor Suzanne Steinmetz, who was also outspoken regarding husband abuse. (Elva Mertick, then head of the Alberta Advisory Council on Women’s Issues, tried to get the invitation to her canceled, an attempt at censorship which The Journal whitewashed.) I made sure she included detailed results from all three Alberta spouse-abuse studies in her talk, precisely to pressure The Journal into finally reporting them.

The resulting coverage by The Journal did make reference to her point that over 50 studies had gotten the roughly-50-50 men/women result. But the sub-header implied that Dr. Steinmetz had presented only US data. And the Alberta results were suppressed once again.

Not until about nine years after the original articles, with Conrad Black hovering over the Southam news chain, did The Journal finally publish the other half of the data from any of the three studies. (Smaller Edmonton news outlets, including one TV station, had done so long since.) The Calgary Herald ran a major piece on the 50-50 results, and The Journal reprinted it.

But scores of generic articles (i.e., not just about a specific incident) on spouse abuse have appeared in The Journal over the years, nearly all of them seriously or totally biased in regard to the facts. Compared to those of The Edmonton Journal, the human-rights-violating publications of The Family Centre are penny ante stuff.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. On every other subject pertaining to gender issues, The Journal under Linda Hughes has systematically distorted the truth, mostly through suppression of crucial facts, to conform with sexist-feminist ideology. I have the same kinds of evidence regarding The Journal’s treatment of various other gender issues as I have described here in regard to these issues. Since Conrad Black came on the scene, this behavior has been modified—but mostly, to date, in cosmetic ways.

I submit that even the Alberta Report, with its contemptible antihomosexual views, has been more honest on the facts of that subject than The Edmonton Journal has been on the facts of equality and inequality between women and men. But if The Journal has enough integrity to publish this response of mine, there is hope for the future.

[Editors: This piece of mine may be too long for your letters page—though, without pictures, it might just fit. It is certainly not too long for other sections, however. As I recall, Marie Gordon’s recent anti-father-group article ran around 2,000 words. What is not acceptable to me is that any of its material be removed. I have suffered, as noted above, from too many deletions of crucial facts from my submissions in the past.—FC]