Why yes, I did already mention him today.
Now, he testifies as an expert witness in libel cases concerning journalism’s standards of practice.
Whereupon Dr Miller …actually, I’m not sure he is a doctor: He calls himself “The Journalism Doctor”, but the title seems to be entirely self-conferred. Anyway, at this point, Doc Miller, Prof Miller, Herr Baron von Miller or whatever he is got interested in the case and asked the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal if he could intervene. Silly ol’ me assumed that he wished to intervene to argue the cause of free speech. But no: he wanted to intervene to argue that I was not a “responsible journalist”, and so it was entirely appropriate for the state to censor me. (…)
That’s the great thing about the self-appointed “Journalism Doctor”: When he diagnoses you, he provides his own second opinion. (…)
“There is no Blue Book”: Thus saith the J-School Professor, and he surely wouldn’t make such a baldly definitive statement if he hadn’t fact-checked himself with the rigor Signora Fallaci and I are so deplorably lacking in.
Okay, I’m going to try to explain things very slowly for Doc Miller and M J Murphy, and with pictures, too. (…)
So I wonder what it is Professor Ethics-Bore thinks I should have “checked”. That the Ayatollah disapproves of post-coitally chowing down on your barnyard sex partner? Check! Indeed, check mate. On the other hand, the E-Bore didn’t check anything – not my original book review, not Oriana’s original quote. He pronounced magisterially on the non-existence of any such “Blue Book” without checking a thing.
…why would a prissy PC drone like Prof Miller be so cavalier as to expose himself as entirely ignorant of the subject he’s loftily pontificating on?
Could anything be more ludicrous than the tenured Ryerson bore presuming to lay down the law on Ayatollah Khomeini to the last western writer ever to interview him?
I wonder if he has any idea quite what a Ryerson-atrophied pansy he sounds wagging his finger at Oriana Fallaci? “Writer-provocateurs” don’t “deal with primary sources”? Well, her “primary source” on Ayatollah Khomeini is Ayatollah Khomeini. What have you got, Finger Boy? When she was hurling her chador at him in 1979, what were you doing? Retyping press releases from Ed Broadbent?
Oriana Fallaci is a hundred times the man John Miller is. Read her interviews with Arafat or the Shah and ask yourself whether she needs any posthumous lessons in “journalistic ethics” from an unread parochial poseur.
And, if you are considering a career in journalism, think about what you’d like to be looking back on in 40 years’ time: Oriana’s resume or Professor Miller’s.
