Dear ABMInsider,
In late December last year, I received an unsolicited op-ed with a request to publish it on our website. I read it and immediately began my “thanks but no thanks” response.
There were several reasons to justify the ‘no’.
As a journalistic publication, our official policy is to not publish unsolicited content. Too often, it’s an offer of a story or guest column that inherently promotes the knowledge or expertise of the columnist—if the columnist has something to gain from the exposure, that makes it marketing and puts them in a conflict of interest, which is why we turn it down.
I also disagreed—most emphatically—with the premise of this particular op-ed. The author argued that Canada should accept Donald Trump’s offer to join the United States… and that Nova Scotia should lead the way as the 51st state. I am a Newfoundllander. Even though Newfoundland flirted with American union in the 1940s, and despite a substantial segment of the population who felt the Dominion was railroaded into Confederation, I am also a proud Canadian with proudly Canadian values.
I believe we are a liberal country—not in the capital L political sense, but the more meaningful lowercase definition of liberal as generous and open-minded. From universal healthcare and free public education to neighbor helping neighbor, I see Canada as a country whose citizens believe in giving each other a helping hand-up. We don’t always, or nearly often enough, fulfill that promise, but it is an aspirational goal that I believe speaks to the soul of what it means to be Canadian. I could, of course, be wrong. It’s my personal opinion, after all.
Suffice to say, I find Donald Trump’s smirking mockery of Canada as the 51st state beyond insulting.
Again, that’s my personal opinion and if there’s anything the latest U.S. election showed, it’s that there are a lot more diverse opinions out there than you might realize. For years, I’ve been encouraging readers to keep an open mind, to recognize that many of our thoughts and opinions are formed by bots and algorithms feeding us what they think we want to hear. In the same way that a web search for a particular product gets us bombarded with advertising for that product, so too are we inundated with content that reinforces a one-sided point of view.
So, when I received an offer of a guest column advocating acceptance of Trump’s offer to join the United States, a part of me recognized I didn’t want to publish it because I didn’t agree with it. But after researching the contributor, and reviewing the content—recognizing it didn’t contain defamatory or offensive language, that it had some factual basis even as I felt some of his opinions were erroneous, I believed I would be doing a disservice to our readers and journalistic ethics if I did NOT publish. Which I did (you can read it here).
In the further interest of fairness, I invited readers to respond with a rebuttal, one of which was published on our website this morning. There is at least one more to come, and you can read even further commentary on LinkedIn if you’re so inclined.
I’m still opposed to Kennedy’s recommendation that Nova Scotia ‘scexit’ for the U.S., but I’m all for curated content that presents opposing sides. That, I have always believed, is the basis for informed debate.
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Dawn Chafe Executive editor & co-owner dchafe@atlanticbusinessmagazine.ca |
