This article was last updated on May 25, 2022
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USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…“Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys? A fight breaks out in the CBC newsroom when reporters discover CBC management has hidden a human rights story for two years.
Wayne Thibodeau and Donna Allen have won journalist Stephen Pate’s human rights complaint against CBC and Transcontinental,” court reporter Brian Higgins gleefully told the May 1st 2013 meeting.
Cheers and laughter broke out in the CBC Newsroom on University Avenue in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Higgins waved in the air a copy of the Supreme Court application for a judicial review that had just been served on the PEI Human Rights Commission.
On April 4th, 2013, after two and half years of investigation and legal wrangling, Human Rights Chair Nicholson said there was enough evidence of human rights discrimination against internet journalist Pate to call for a panel hearing.
Higgins, a protégé of CBC producer Allen, was greeted with cheers and applause around the newsroom until the questions started.
CBC reporter Kerrie Campbell, married to Guardian reporter Teresa Wright also named in the human rights complaint, smiled from ear-to-ear.
Wright had been worried about her reputation if the human rights panel went public.
“Who will pay damages? ” Wright worried when she heard the Commission was forwarding Pate’s complaint to the public Human Rights Panel.
Now the pressure was off, he thought, at least for a while. Maybe the stall would work and a judge will send Pate packing, Campbell commiserated with Wright.
Maybe Pate will get sicker and not be able to go through the grueling panel process.
Campbell’s smile faded when another reporter asked “What human rights case?”
Campbell thought about his own role in the discrimination against Pate. He voted with his wife and the majority at the fateful Press Gallery meeting in October 2009 when 11 press gallery members met for the first time.
Only Pat Martel and Jim Day voted to keep Pate in the Press Gallery. It was feeding time in the press gallery and the sharks were in the pool. The disabled seemed like easy prey.
Why are we fighting against a human rights case in court?” asked a reporter.
“Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys, fighting against Human Rights abuse?”
The newsroom fight that followed had scenes right out of the movie “All The President’s Men” about the Watergate cover-up.
Forty years ago two reporters – Woodward and Bernstein – fought their bosses, other reporters, the FBI, the CIA, the President’s office and the US Republican Party to expose the official and un-official cover-up of a “third-rate burglary”
CBC reporters and members of the Press Gallery wanted to know why Pate was kicked out of the press gallery.
“Was it just the Guardian being vindictive,” asked one reporter.
“Wasn’t this all just Thibodeau’s personal vendetta against Pate,” another said.
CBC buries a story about it’s alleged human rights abuse of its employees
CBC news producer Donna Allen fought doggedly to keep the story under wraps. Allen is named in the October 2010 Human Rights complaint by Stephen Pate for discrimination on the basis of disability and association with a disability advocacy group, PEI Disability Alert.
Also named are Wayne Thibodeau, Teresa Wright and the Press Gallery of the Prince Edward Island Legislature (Supreme Court of Prince Edward Island SIGS 25540). According to sources, Allen never wanted the story to see the light of day.
The battle to cover the human rights court case raged on all day. While Allen would, by CBC policy be off the story due to her conflict of interest, she worked openly and behind the scenes to kill it.
By the end of Wednesday station manager Jim Ferguson refused to talk about it anymore and went home, sources say, with a massive headache. He deferred all decisions to Andrew Cochrane, his boss in Halifax.
“Two guys from CBC were here yesterday,” the house painter told Pate on Thursday morning. “They wanted to see you and one of them looked dead serious.”
Cochrane, CBC’s Managing Director for the Maritimes, barely got off his Thursday flight back to Halifax when his Blackberry was buzzing with emails and voice mails from everyone, including Stephen Pate.
Pate suggested he and Cochrane have lunch mano-a-mano and sort out the mess.
Cochrane huddled with local CBC management and the crew in Charlottetown before he intoned with solemnity that CBC would not be covering the story.
CBC was in effect burying their alleged human rights abuse with a brief press release to be posted late Friday afternoon, in the faint hope it would all went away like a bad case of indigestion by Monday.
The “Friday afternoon press release” has become the staple of politicians trying to bury a story, a political gambit CBC had reported on a regular basis.
“As a courtesy I wanted to call you back personally,” Cochrane said in a call to Pate at 3:30 in the afternoon. “We can’t meet. I can’t talk with you. There is nothing I can do, sorry.”
By nightfall Thursday, CBC producer Tracey Lightfoot was in tears, her hopes of maintaining the formerly high standards of CBC journalism dashed on the rocks of politics and insider intrigue.
Cochrane intoned, “Do your job.”
CBC would not interview Pate. They would try to kill the story.
NJN Network offered the Cochrane, Ferguson and the CBC Newsroom in Charlottetown an opportunity to comment or correct anything is this story. The story was embargoed for 3 hours. CBC declined to comment.
For more media reaction to the original story, see Eastern Graphic – Media Wrong in Pate Gate
From multiple sources.
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