Reporter Jill Winzoski. Photo by Jim Mosher.
iPolitics reports, “Up until October 19, Jill Winzoski was a reporter with the Selkirk Record in rural Manitoba. Now she is unemployed. …Jill knows how she lost her job. It was politics, in the person of her local MP, the Conservative member for Selkirk Interlake, James Bezan. …Stories like the sinister shutdown of Canada’s world-famous Experimental Lakes Area got her attention. Her readers, including card-carrying Conservatives, liked her spunk and enjoyed her writing. James Bezan, not so much.” The MP complained about her articles and pulled his advertising from the Selkirk Record. “(But), the people who asked Jill to forgo writing about federal politics had forgotten to tell her that sending or signing petitions … was also forbidden. And that’s how the federal MP got back on her case. Jill sent a petition. …And she didn’t just send her petition against the China/FIPPA treaty to her member. She sent a copy to … the PMO.”
MP James Bezan.
The Vancouver Observer adds, “(The owner of the Selkirk Record told Winzoski) it was unacceptable for her to keep reporting the kinds of stories she was reporting… Also, she was a biased reporter, he said. He cited her email petition to Bezan’s office. …She thought back to the stories that she’d written in the last year, the ones that made her a little nervous before she wrote them, the ones that caused people to write letters to the editor. The stories about the Canada-Europe trade agreement. The protest outside a Conservative MP’s—not Bezan’s—office protesting the omnibus budget bill C-38. The stories she wrote about robocalls during the 2011 federal election. She had also written two op-eds, one of them critical of the Conservatives’ dismantling of the Wheat Board.”
The article concludes, “Winzoski pauses when asked what she hopes Canadians can learn from her experience. Advertising money was a powerful force in shaping the news agenda in the case of The Selkirk Record, she said. That, and Bezan directly contacting her employer because her reporting did not align with his interests.”
The articles can be read at http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/11/05/conservative-mp-insists-he-didnt-want-reporter-fired/ and http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/fired-speaking-truth-power-journalists-shocking-tale.
