Kinsella (second from left): lawyer, author, punk-rock acolyte

“ A weak counter-campaign,” is what former EYE WEEKLY columnist Warren Kinsella called a Scrolling Eye piece published just prior to the Good Friday weekend, drawing attention to his call for his blog readers to attend a meeting at the offices of the Daisy Consulting Group, where a boycott of the publication would be discussed. A belated CBC Radio news report on the four-month-old advertising of cigarette brands by JTI-Macdonald prompted Kinsella’s outrage.  

Well, by the standards of a counter-campaign, of course it was weak: counter-campaigns usually don’t quote from and point readers to criticism and ridicule of the product being marketed. A counter-campaign would’ve also thrown in a plug for the JTI brand that appeared in the current week’s issue of EYE WEEKLY in place of the Less Smoke Smell (LSS) technology claim of Mirage: Fusion, whose Filtra Smooth Taste represents a fusion of taste and smoothness. The advert features a package with the warning label: “Where there’s smoke there’s hydrogen cyanide” and a Health Canada warning on the bottom of the page that cigarettes leave you breathless. All this falls in line with standards upheld last summer by the Supreme Court of Canada, and the other advertising stipulations.

Kinsella has a score to settle, though, a familiar refrain for readers of his daily online bluster that has no doubt enhanced his reputation as a consultant to people, corporations, associations and governments — and punk-rock acolyte.

While his highest-profile loyalties have been to the Liberal Party, cultivating close relationships with Jean Chrétien and Dalton McGuinty, it seems Kinsella is on a tear against media outlets whose owners remain supportive of the federal party he’s been ambivalent toward ever since their coronation of Paul Martin flopped.

These days, his blog is dominated by diatribes against Maclean’s for their defiant attitude toward being called before the Human Rights Commission for publishing an except from Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, and the National Post for supporting Steyn and Danish cartoon re-publisher Ezra Levant in their respective bureaucratic battles. Kinsella served as a media columnist in the National Post for a couple of years prior to being demoted to their Full Comment blog — then quit in February for reasons he cryptically described as “complex and various.”

And now Kinsella has some kind of problem with Torstar, a company he never fails to mention when referring to the cigarette advertising in EYE WEEKLY, even though editorial polices at Toronto Star headquarters have never dictated the content of the alternative weekly published by the same firm since October 1991.

The relationship provided a platform for Warren Kinsella to contribute an anonymous column called Feds, which ran about a dozen times from November 1998 through June 1999. The idea was to provide a Parliament Hill counterpart to The Park, written since 1991 by an un-bylined insider who had been serving up the dirt during that tumultuous time in provincial politics. Both columns were killed off in mid-1999, when editors agreed it wasn’t the greatest idea for EYE WEEKLY to become a platform for people to settle scores without accountability.

This affiliation would have remained a secret, perhaps, if Kinsella didn’t own up to it in his criticism of Torstar: first for running adult classifieds that he assailed for being morally wrong (especially for their depiction of young Asian females).

Kinsella now asserts that he was not “fine with Torstar’s fondness for deriving revenue from the exploitation of women and girls.” OK, but whoever agreed to write Feds had no complaint about getting paid to rant anonymously in the front pages — even if he claims that a remark about the back pages was edited out.

The archive of Feds — unfortunately, not currently searchable on the main EYE WEEKLY site — reveals that Kinsella ended his run cordially when summer recess arrived in the House of Commons: “We may come back in the fall, we may not. We may come back in an entirely different format. We may come back in an entirely different publication, for goodness' sake. We will let you know.”

Which kind of contradicts his more recent recall of the break: “I was soon after fired by them because Torstar disapproved of my criticism of Paul Martin.” (Those sentiments were outlined in the debut column, which can be read here.)

Gregory Boyd Bell, then editor of EYE WEEKLY’s News section — and now Toronto editor of the Globe and Mail — sent this response to Scrolling Eye: “I do recall that we had concerns about Warren, as a Chrétien loyalist, using the cloak of anonymity to make partisan attacks, but my recollection is that Warren was aware of this concern and kept the column fairly free of such bias. Aside from that, I do feel that I'm being smeared professionally by Warren's assertions that his accusations of editorial meddling in his old columns are ‘facts’ yet without offering the barest FACT as proof. Repetition does not make it true.

“For a sophisticated person, Warren is being surprisingly disingenuous when he declares that ‘Torstar’ was and is making editorial decisions that I suspect would actually rank in the corporate consciousness somewhere around the level of the Duplicate Bridge results.

“Can he show that the board of directors or senior executives of Torstar even READ, let alone expressed an opinion about, his columns in EYE WEEKLY? I doubt it — although as a professional journalist I would happily change my opinion if the evidence required it. Can Warren say the same?”

FEDS: A LOOK BACK IN ANONYMOUS ANGER
For longtime readers of warrenkinsella.com, the tone of Feds probably rings familiar — although it’s a quaint throwback to the pre-social media age when such efforts could be published with no accessible platform for scrutiny. (Kinsella also stealthily wrote a roman à clef, Party Favours, under the name John Doe around this time — a forgettable attempt to mimic the success of Joe Klein’s anonymous Bill Clinton-inspired book, Primary Colours, although Kinsella initially denied writing his version.)

A letter from reader Will Taylor, published in April 1999, probably reflects the decision to end Feds: “I feel that eye seriously compromises its integrity by publishing this kind of Liberal propaganda. I want my eye to retain its independence and objectiveness, not to become a bootlick paper for the Grits. Please can the ‘insider’ and give us a break from free campaign ads.”

Kinsella also used the column to rail against the CRTC’s landmark decision not to regulate the World Wide Web: “The single bureaucratic entity with the legal mandate to regulate harmful content on the Internet, concluding — for itself — that it will do nothing of the sort. Neo-Nazis, violent pornographers and pedophiles rejoice! You no longer need to ‘worry,’ to use [chairperson Françoise] Bertrand's own word, about a pesky government agency sticking its nose into your business. You now have license to do what you do best!”

Oh, and who remembers when he anonymously tore a strip over newly minted provincial Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty? No one, really, but McGuinty is now the premier gladly filling his coffers with cigarette taxes.

Tobacco sponsorship of cultural events — the method through which cigarette brands were promoted in order to abide by regulations in the late 1990s — also supported Kinsella’s opportunity to be published, and paid.

A decade later, it’s a different media universe — not that Kinsella hasn’t gotten that memo, since he’s been making noise online dating back to when few even knew what a weblog was. Whether these dust-ups are a genuine reflection of feelings, or pugilist exercises meant to show off his mastery of media spin to prospective clients, remains the subject of much fascination.

But too much scrutiny of Kinsella’s motivation makes one prone to a legal threat from his lawyerly hand. A post responding to recent events, “Tobacco, Racism & Hookers: The Hypocrisy of Warren Kinsella” on the blog Enjoy Every Sandwich was penned by a blogger who will only dare identify himself as “Skippy Stalin."

“Just because Huggy Bear talked to Starsky and Hutch didn't make him any less of a pimp, Warren,” he writes. “But there were no calls for a governmental boycott when Eye was merely promoting what he describes as kidfucking, were there?

“Far be it from me to pass judgment, but the big orange fuzzy hat of a pimp speaks far louder your protestations of sex slavery. As you yourself admit, you didn't leave Eye voluntarily, you were fired because of political differences. You seemed to be fine living off of the proceeds of prostitution under your definition. It's tragic that Paul Martin ruined it like he ruined so many other things.”

Kinsella has his ultra-slim baton picked up by other anti-smoking advocates, though. A thread on Stillepost titled "Cigarette Ads in EYE WEEKY – EYE wants you dead” encouraged people to file complaints with publisher Peter Burke and editorial director Alan A. Vernon, along with Torstar president/CEO Robert Prichard. The responses unanimously ridiculed the hysteria.

The ownership Torstar was also emphasized in the Facebook group “EYE WEEKLY wants you DEAD,” currently boasting 28 members. The group’s creator did not respond to a message requesting further comment.

Kinsella didn’t respond to my messages last week, and seems to have gotten too preoccupied with other issues — like the recent white supremacist showdown in Calgary — to make tobacco advertising his ongoing obsession, although Kinsella’s meeting to organize a boycott is allegedly still on.

Reader comments pre-approved for publication by Kinsella refer disparagingly to the model attacked by a lion during a cover shoot for Torstar publication Desi Life (a story and video that was featured on thestar.com), the carbon footprint created each week by the Saturday Star and, of course, “How do I effectively boycott a publication I stopped reading years ago because it just plain sucks?”

Still unclear is why a CBC Radio newsroom — the one in Saskatchewan, based on the byline of the transcript of the report, re-posted on Yahoo and Sympatico but generally tough to find online — decided this was a story worth covering last Thursday after the cigarette ads ran all winter long. The report then aired locally during a newscast on the top-rated Metro Morning.

Vancouver weekly the Georgia Straight is running the same JTI-Macdonald adverts as EYE WEEKLY — along with the Montreal Mirror and the Canadian edition of TIME — and covered the conversation in their pages, too: “Conservatives hesitant to prohibit tobacco ads.”

Previously on the Scroll: Warren Kinsella's standards 

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