The Calgary Sun has dumped Ezra Levant’s column from its paper and website mere weeks after Levant’s Western Standard magazine folded in October.
On October 22, Levant speculated in the tabloid’s pages that a school bus driver’s “Muslim-style” head covering might be to blame for a crash that killed a nine-year-old girl on Crowchild Trail earlier in October. The controversial column was pulled from the Sun’s website shortly afterwards. “They said that there were some complaints (about the column),” says Levant, who’s freelanced for the Sun for more than 10 years. “Well, duh. There’s complaints every time I write…. I’m a little bit confused about it, because I’ve published much spicier things.”
However, Sun editor-in-chief Jose Rodriguez says the column was pulled because of a factual error, not reader complaints. (Levant’s column said the driver had been charged; she hadn’t.) “We don’t generally shy away from controversy or spice,” says Rodriguez. “There was a gross factual error in the column…. We don’t want to expose ourselves to any legal risk.”
Rodriguez confirmed that Levant will no longer write columns for the paper, but would only say it’s an “internal personnel decision.” Levant says he had already decided to stop writing for the paper two months before the column controversy. “I got paid $125 a column, so it was a for-fun kind of thing to keep my profile up,” he says. “If I’m going to write for a living, I’m probably going to have to do better than 15 cents a word or whatever that worked out to be.”
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)