INDEED: Eugene Volokh points to this story with the jokey headline “Blame Canada:”
The 17-year-old Bucks County boy charged with having bomb-making equipment in his bedroom and threatening to blow up his school is a Canadian who hates Americans, prosecutors say.
Obvious headline. On the other hand, the CBC, according to a just-released Fraser Institute study, is engaged in what sounds a lot like paranoid hate speech:
The CBC’s television news coverage of the United States is consistently marked by emotional criticism, rather than a rational consideration of US policy based on Canadian national interests, according to The Canadian released today by The Fraser Institute.
This anti-American bias at the CBC is the consequence of a “garrison mentality” that has systematically informed the broadcaster’s coverage of the US. Garrison mentality was a term coined by Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. He used it to describe a uniquely Canadian tendency reflected in our early literature, a tendency, as he put it, to “huddle together, stiffening our meager cultural defenses and projecting all our hostilities outward.”
One hopes that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will review its stance before any more innocent schoolchildren are threatened. . .
UPDATE: Reader Chris Buchholz emails:
I must say I don’t buy it. It reminds me of when the liberals were blaming Tim McVeigh on Rush Limbaugh. It wasn’t Rush’s fault McVeigh was crazy.
Well, yes. The presence of ellipsis is generally a tipoff that I’m tongue-in-cheek here, you know. Canadian reader David Peer, meanwhile, emails: “I tried to detect the satire in your concluding remark about the CBC and ‘anti-americanism,’ but I just can’t see it.” Look harder!
I guess I should put that Andrea See quote about my dry sense of humor back up.