Sunday, February 16, 2020 ~ NATIONAL
by Mary P Brooke ~ West Shore Voice News
The coincidence of two prominent women who were stars of the Canadian journalism world dying of aggressive forms of cancer within days of each other, and both only in their 60s, caught the attention of media across the country this week.
Both Christie Blatchford, 68, and Anne Kingston, 62, were trendsetters for women in journalism. Both with long strident careers, neither was married or had children. Blatchford was the first woman to report on professional sports news with locker room access and Kingston took on society as her muse.
While known more so in Ontario but with a national following, these journalists set a high bar for their untiring observation, review and analysis of leading issues of the day.
Christie Blatchford took on tough assignments in crime, war and politics and wrote riveting pieces that developed huge followings enjoyed by her publishers. Her mission was to speak truth to power.
“She was magnificent: unshakable integrity, generous-hearted, completely unpretentious, the perfect journalist,” said media mogul Conrad Black in a column in The National Post on February 14. “She distinguished reporting from comment, never over-wrote stories,” commented her one-time employer, saying she was “uninterested in indulging in any kind of deception, or guile, or anyone more professional”.
“Her perspective was unswayed by popular opinion and unvarnished. Sometimes you liked it, sometimes you didn’t. But the one thing you could not do is ignore it,” said criminal defence lawyer Marie Henein.
Her final column was right after the October 2019 federal election, marveling (though not necessarily pleased) at how an embattled Trudeau had been re-elected and how Scheer’s performance was unremarkable to the other degree.
At about the time of her cancer diagnosis, Blatchford was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in November 2019.
Anne Kingston’s writing was “clear-eyed, unsentimental and startlingly original”, as described by Maclean’s Magazine on February 14. And Kingston simply worked until the job was done: “I will never forget listening to Anne on the phone with someone who didn’t want to give her a straight answer. By the time she hung up, she usually had what she was looking for,” said one colleague this week.
Kingston’s own words of just last summer speak volumes about the overview and breadth of her thinking: “How do we foster compassion within systems designed to reward those who aren’t compassionate?”
She covered politics with a bent for women’s issues, including the Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi trials, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for US president, and Justin Trudeau’s feminist record.
Kingston scaled the realms of social justice issues, but with nuance and original contributions to thinking of the day. In The National Post on February 13 she was described as “a passionate writer who skewered modern culture and highlighted violence against women”.
“She was determined that she add intelligence and subtlety to the conversation, simply writing what everyone else was writing was of absolutely no interest to her,” wrote Alison Uncles, editor-in-chief of Maclean’s.
Kingston was the author of The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the 21st Century, and also penned an insight piece into corporate influence called The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President’s Choice and the Making of Popular Taste.
==== NOTES:
This article was first published on page 3 in the February 14 to 16, 2020 weekend digest of West Shore Voice News.
Editorial: “Words are not enough?” – by Mary P Brooke, February 14, 2020