Classic CanWest Distortion

Almost two-thirds of Canadians believe Israeli attacks justified

This is the late afternoon Calgary Herald online headline for the CanWest news service story. The headline for the same story in the Calgary Herald's hardcopy edition this morning - and presumably other CanWest outlets - was even less ambiguous:

Two of three Canadians back Israel, says poll

Well, that seems fairly clear, doesn't it?

But wait, the actual results are that "Almost two in three Canadians believe Israel's military action in Lebanon was either somewhat or completely justified"

Well immediately after Hezbollah crossed an internationally recognized border and abducted two soldiers I was prepared to believe some kind of military response was justified. Very, very quickly the disproportionate scale of the response passed my line for what was justified. So technically I could be described as thinking Israel was somewhat justified, at least on the 20th, which we don't discover until the eighth paragraph in, was when the poll was taken.

Some 'shit', to use a word recently popularized by the leader of the free world, has happened since then.

Can it be accurately said, that someone who on the 20th was feeling enough reservations to think Israel was only 'somewhat justified' could on the 25th be baldly stated to be backing Israel? Obviously not. It was bad enough that even the unspeakably lousy Calgary Herald felt it necessary to change the headline in it's online edition to make it slightly less objectionable.

Bottom line: the Israel right or wrong crowd at CanWest only plays these kind of sleazy distortion games when they think they have to. The real state of Canadian opinion on this subject scares the hell out of them. Enough to want to distort it in the hopes of changing it.

At least now that they've dropped the CP and are using their own news service they don't have to re-write other service's wire copy to make Israel look better and all Arabs look like savages.