Give it up, National Post

 
The second national daily in Canada is always reaching new lows and is an affront to journalism itself

 
by kevin potvin
 
The Republic has only warily tread into the already over-trodden field of mainstream media criticism. And especially with the National Post, I mean, what’s the point? It’s like complaining that politicians always use rhetoric.
But the front page of the Friday, February 24 issue of the National Post was so far and away an outrageous affront to the crafts and traditions of journalism and publishing that we cannot let it pass without scorn.
On that day, 113 Sunni mosques had been attacked in Iraq, and 120 Iraqis killed in the worst and most alarming sectarian violence in the Middle East since America stepped into it three years ago, mobs of Christians had killed 40 more fleeing Muslims in Nigeria in revenge for Muslim violence sparked by European press reprintings of offensive cartoons, both events pushing the price of oil back up into the mid-US$60 range, and nationally, Canada enjoyed a record day for medals in Turin and Canadian business and technology phenom BlackBerry faced extinction by lawsuit.
But National Post editor Douglas Kelly instead featured over the entire top half of the front page a massive twelve-inch-by-six-inch colour photo of an even more massive US$2.5 million yacht cutting through glistening waters under clear blue skies, with the headline “Canadians stuck in Havana.”
The breaking story begins by breathlessly reporting on how four Canadians on a trip from the Virgin Islands got hit by a storm, sank, and fled in lifeboats to Cuba, only to be arrested and jailed for illegally entering the country, and remain 12 days later still captive there.
Later in the story we learn that they had been rescued by Cuban officials; that they remained in police custody for only a couple hours until their story of innocently sinking came to be understood; that their passports were seized only until insurance was arranged to cover the cost of their yacht wreckage spoiling the beach of one of Cuba’s most important resort towns; that they spent the time in a hotel; and that by the time of the story’s publication, two of the four had returned to Canada and the other two were perfectly free to leave anytime.
Parts of the story and quotes of the Canadians read like a classic from the satirical weekly The Onion. “The Atchisons say there are under virtual ‘house arrest’ [the origins of the ‘captive’ angle of the story] at their hotel because it is not safe to venture out without their passports. It took Mr Atchison an hour to buy shorts in the hotel without his identification, his wife said. ‘I’m calm . . .’ said Mr Atchison . . . ‘There are worse prisons to be in.’” We can picture the rotund and wealthy Mr Atchison, forced to hole-up in the downtown Havana Hotel, can’t we, haranguing the poor clerk as he tries to buy shorts probably two sizes  too small, then relating the hardship to his disbelieving wife over martinis and cigars in the bar later.
But how, you might ask, does this story end up in any newspaper at all, much less a national one, and on the front page to boot?
It so happens one of the Canadians is Jim Beatty, advertising executive with . . . The National Post.
Is there any reason to pay attention to this newspaper at all? If anyone still harboured the delusion the National Post spoke with any credibility and authority, surely this puts the kibosh to that.
There was, however, one intriguing and unexplained character in the story. The Yacht’s owner, the one on the hook to pay the Cubans for spoiling the important beach with wreckage and spilled fuel, is one Luigi Boschin, apparently a Canadian businessman reached while in Switzerland, and who hosts a radio show in China. That profile certainly cries out for closer scrutiny, doesn’t it? The next issue of The Republic may well feature a profile of Mr Boschin.