In Print

Whistler-ed out of work

By Kevin Steel ⋅ June 5, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Working as a freelance reporter for the Western Standard has its risks

Working as a freelance reporter for the Western Standard doesn’t pay much, but it has benefits. Risks, too. As Alan Forsythe discovered, contributing to Canada’s only independent newsmagazine means you’re free to write critical stories about powerful people other news outlets won’t, for fear of losing access or advertising. Sometimes that means making influential people angry. And if you happen to work in a job where they can get to you–like one of those other news outlets–you’re taking your job into your hands.

Until March, Forsythe was a reporter and columnist for Whistler, B.C.’s Question. Thanks to his in-depth understanding of the Winter Olympics preparations there, he agreed to report for the Western Standard on the stalled construction of an athletes’ village and a sledge hockey arena (”Olympic meddlists,” Feb. 27). The delays, it turned out, were the result of the anti-development policies of Whistler Mayor Ken Melamed. Melamed didn’t like the story, and before long, Forsythe was out of a job.

Question editor David Burke says he can’t discuss the reasons for the termination, but he acknowledged “that the Western Standard article did contribute to it.” Forsythe says the official reason given was “insubordination.” Technically, true: he wouldn’t agree to apologize to the mayor in print for writing a story that was fair and accurate.

On March 5, shortly after the story ran, the writer bumped into the mayor at a social function. “He told me he didn’t like what I had been writing and that he was going to speak to my editors about it,” Forsythe says. On March 6, Burke and his publisher, Stephanie Matches, met with Melamed. Immediately after, they demanded Forsythe apologize in their paper for the unflattering Standard piece. “I said, ‘Go to hell,’ and then they said, ‘We have to go our separate ways here; you’re obviously not willing to toe the party line,’” Forsythe says.

Melamed admits he confronted Forsythe, and that he later met with Burke, but in a “regularly scheduled meeting, whereupon he [Burke] raised the issue of Alan,” Melamed says. He says it was the editors who were “concerned,” and any suggestion he pressured them to act on Forsythe is “categorically untrue.”

The writer insists this was no regular meeting; it was specifically to discuss him. Forsythe says he was asked to take part, but refused. Still, while the mayor was angry after he suddenly found himself profiled in the Western Standard, a news outlet he couldn’t influence, Forsythe says that what really did him in was daring to challenge the legendary environmental orthodoxy of Whistler’s town council. “With left-wing environmentalists, it’s never a debate about environmental policy, it’s a sermon,” says Forsythe. Sometimes, it’s a pink slip.

[This article appeared in the June 5, 2006 issue of the Western Standard.]