Columnist Heather Mallick. (Random House)
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is reviewing complaints from both Americans and Canadians about a Web site columnist who recently described Sarah Palin’s supporters as “white trash,” compared the vice presidential candidate to a “porn actress” and called her daughter’s boyfriend a “redneck” and “ratboy.”
The incendiary column by Toronto-based writer Heather Mallick appeared on the CBC News site on Sept. 5, after the close of the Republican National Convention. On the same day, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published another column by Mallick in which she trashed Palin’s home state of Alaska as a “frontier state full of drunks and crazy people.”
In the CBC story, Mallick wrote that John McCain’s running mate “added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote.”
She proceeded to write that the Alaska governor “has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favored by this decade’s woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression.”
She also questioned why the Palins were allowing Levi Johnston — 17-year-old Bristol Palin’s boyfriend and father of her unborn baby — into the family.
“What normal father would want Levi ‘I’m a f—-n’ redneck’ Johnson prodding his daughter?” Mallick asked.
“I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the irrational, but why don’t the Palins? I’m not the one preaching homespun values but I’d destroy that ratboy before I’d let him get within scenting range of my daughter again, and so would you. … Turn your guns on Levi, ma’am.”
CBC Ombudsman Vince Carlin told FOXNews.com that he has gotten “quite a few complaints about [the column], both from Canada and the U.S,” and said he’s reviewing its contents to see if it meets CBC’s journalistic standards and practices.
But he noted that Mallick is a “columnist not a journalist.”
CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said Mallick’s column does not reflect the views of CBC or the Canadian government, which owns but does not directly control CBC.
“She’s an opinion columnist. I think by definition they can be expected to occasionally use provocative language,” he said. But in this case, Keay said the column “could be perceived as excessive or offensive to some people.”
Mallick also wrote on the CBC Web site that Republican men, whom she called “sexual inadequates,” must think that women would vote for Palin just because she’s a woman.
In her Guardian column, Mallick claimed her own small-town credentials are just as solid as Palin’s, writing “Palin cannot out-hick me.”
But she said Palin should have stayed in her hometown of Wasilla, writing, “Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home.”
Mallick also blasted Alaska as Canada’s ugly stepchild.
“We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as it melts … but Alaska is different from our north,” she wrote. “We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape.
“Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.”
