Monday, July 25, 2005

Rachel Marsden pulls a fast one?


No, I'm not going to eviscerate this piece by la Marsden for the mouth-breathing, hate-filled screed that it is. If you're not suitably offended by it, well, you are so reading the wrong blog. No, that's not what's so curious. Given how thoroughly vile this piece is, I was a bit surprised that it would have made it into print (even in the National Post). Or did it?

Marsden apparently reproduces her Post pieces here (an interesting arrangement) and, starting with her June 1 Post debut ("Don't Call Guantanamo a Gulag"), you can see the apparent dates of Post publication. For each and every one of those pieces, you can scroll to the bottom where you will read something like:

PUBLISHED: NATIONAL POST (June 1/05)
COPYRIGHT 2005 RACHEL MARSDEN

Except for the aforementioned piece. Scroll to the bottom -- no publication date. No copyright notice.

An oversight? Perhaps. I don't have that edition of the Post in front of me, and their web site makes it devilishly hard to track down her previous columns. So maybe I'm reading too much into this.

On the other hand, if that column never made it into print, then Marsden seems to have snuck something over on her readers -- sliding a non-published column into the midst of her published work, perhaps to give it a little more, shall we say, gravitas? I could be completely off-base here, so I'm sure a reader with way too much free time will set the record straight, one way or the other.

AND WHILE I'M HERE ... It's also curious that Marsden isn't listed as a Post columnist here. Everyone else seems to be. How odd.

And for my American readers who are sitting there thinking, "Who the fuck is Rachel Marsden?", well, I can't think of a better intro than this. Enjoy.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You should email the Post and follow up. And if you discover that she's lying, call her and the Post on it. And tell me if you do.

CC said...

If (and I stress, if) the aforementioned column wasn't actually published in the Post, I don't think this would represent any injustice against the Post. Marsden may have every right to post non-Post pieces on her blog.

What it would seem to represent is a bit of sleight-of-hand against her readers. The only reason I noticed this apparent discrepancy is that that column was so loathsome, I couldn't believe it would have been published, even in the Post, and that's saying something.

In any event, it would still be nice if someone had that issue of the paper (July 13) to verify this one way or the other. Come on, folks -- you can't all use your copy of the Post to line the litter box, can you?

Anonymous said...

Marsden writes for U.S. outlets too so I'm guessing the column was printed in the U.S.A. Whether it was in the Post or not who knows and who really cares

Anonymous said...

If you follow his links, you'll see that Canadian Cynic implies that Marsden claims a column that never appeared in the Post did appear in the Post.

That's not my reading of her web page.

The column in question, according to a search of Factiva, never made it into the Post, true. But her columns have also appeared on Canada Free Press and elsewhere.

In the past, she has posted columns on her web page that have also gone nowhere.

So Cynic, I think you're pushing it too far here.

CC said...

My followup here.