My letter to Irwin Block, the Montreal Gazette journalist who penned the article hyperlinked above by Unionist:
Mr. Block,
I am glad that Judge Cadieux didn't buy the bridge blockers' line of argument.
But I was shocked that The Montreal Gazette could print a sentence such as "Leroux said outside the court he's been barred from visiting his 8-year-old daughter in the U.S. for the past six years because his estranged wife won a civil protection order after he failed to make child support payments."
Doesn't the grammar of this sentence, even as an attributed quote, tend to establish as fact a highly debatable assertion?
Getting slapped with a protection order simply because one isn't making child support payments? I don't think so.
I intuit that there must have been threats against the estranged wife - if not worse - that were taken into account by the judge who rendered that order of protection.
Leroux doesn't have to volunteer that information, of course, but The Gazette should not give that much credibility to his biased account of the matter, even if the woman who won that order of protection isn't available or willing to complete the picture.
It seems to me that a journalist who hasn't accessed the record of a judicial decision ought not to let himself be used to convey a partial, misleading version of it simply because - in this case - the woman who obtained a protection order may demur from antagonizing her abuser further by justifying the decision to the meda in an attempt to counter his self-serving accounting of the decision. I think such a criterion ought to be standard practice whenever people try to use the media to establish as fact their version of a contested issue where an evidence-based decision has been rendered.
What do you think? Am I being overly sensitive here?
Thanks for your attention to this matter.
Martin Dufresne