The Tea Makers

Frank shitcanned! (For good, apparently – unlike that time when Fabrice Taylor ran it into the ground.) And the Tubby is 10 2/365 years old today. Let’s mix the two up and recall what Chris Cobb wrote in Ego & Ink:

[W]hatever was said in the [Tubby] news meetings, nothing leaked to the satirical press – otherwise known as Frank magazine, which was feeding copiously off misery at the Globe and Mail…. It was indicative of the happy, collegial nature of the [Tubby]….

Other Globeites adopted less-direct methods of communicating with [Richard] Addis, usually via anonymous communication with Frank magazine, which became the forum for Globe and Mail discontent….

He claims the leaks never bothered him, even though they invariably painted him as a nasty, conniving, hypocritical, non-caring cad who treated people like dirt, was panic-stricken about the [Tubby] , and liked to ingratiate himself with the powerful. […]

Addis is retrospectively philosophical about the shellacking he got in Frank. “It’s a shocking thing to say, but life would be worse without Frank…. I felt whoever was leaking to Frank was betraying the spirit I was trying to create and betraying a loyalty that was building. The leaks eventually became less vicious, but I could never quite figure out where they were coming from.”

Michael Bate: “Hacks are inveterate whingers and they love to gossip… The Globe has had 150 years of tradition to develop the backbiting, backstabbing, dissension-ridden culture that makes it such an entertaining subject.”

Now. There is no functional difference between Frank‘s role in the Toronto “newspaper war” and its role in the civil war without end inside the CBC. Well, that is an incomplete statement: In days of yore, Corpsoids could anonymously rat each other out to Alphonse Ouimet. (And Alphonse Ouimet could overhear conversations in the plum elevator.)

Still, in a post-Alphonse mediascape, Frank remained important. Why, its as-yet-unshitcanned Web site reports today that the Tories have a plan to divest themselves completely from public broadcasting and amputate a gangrenous limb $200 million from the Corpse. Accurate? Probably. But where else was that being published? Nowhere.

Now, though, there isn’t a reliable outlet for gossip. Your suspicions are correct: I’m not one of those either. Take, for example, the infamous memo to Hubie signed by 26 journos protesting the shitcanning of Don Murray and Patrick Brown. It got covered in the legitimate press, albeit a corner of the legitimate press that owns a CBC competitor and wants the Corpse abolished.

But isn’t a memo like that one exactly what blogs are for? Any rationally developed Weblog discourse expects such documents to be published more or less immediately. (Denton just automatically expects his employees to run his own memos, for example. He even plays to the audience a bit that way.) Well, even after asking for it, I don’t have a copy of it. I know some people (who) have it, but I don’t know what it really says. Does Frank know?

How will you know?

If detractors are keeping score, this is one chit in their column.