The Tea Makers

It has to be difficult to come up with non-Irish, non-soccer, non-Doyle stories to write about. They must be tangentially related to Canadian television, if at all possible. It’s hard! If only one were left alone to write columns full of seemingly self-deprecating jokes that in fact make one feel a bit superior, or about a (possibly) imaginary brother. If only there were such a place!

Oh, but there is: Blogs. Which as it turns out is another good place to get story ideas.

The E-mail has been floating online for a few days and yesterday made its way to this paper’s Ottawa bureau, whence it came to me.

Wait, wait! John Doyle did NOT get this E-mail from a blog, and certainly not the Tea Makers blog, which was the only blog to write about this E-mail until Medium Close-Up wrote about it, but John Doyle never reads any of these! Remember the trouble he got in last time over stealing from blogs.

No, you see, it was floating. Then it made its way to Ottawa. Still unseen by John Doyle, mind you. Until, finally, whence it came to him.

Where can you, the reader, read this E-mail? Doyle does not say.

There follows a poorly written, grammatically challenged litany of complaints about “management structure,” personal attacks on managers, gossip…

What reader of the Globe and Mail would ever want to read that original letter?

Now, Doyle is not an journalist. He’s a columnist, and more of a “journalistic entertainer” at that. He might not be susceptible to any rules the Globe and Mail has on journalistic integrity. And he never pretends to have any responsibility towards his readers vis-à-vis informing them on matters. And forget that there are plenty of bloggers out there who are writing about Canadian TV, and could give interesting opinions and facts in the same column that would inform and enlighten readers of the Globe and Mail. And there are plenty of people who could do it who don’t have a blog at all!

Forget about all that, and the fact that if these people had his column, after two days we would wonder how the hell the Globe put up with John Doyle for so long, and why I paid a dollar for it every day. Forget about all that.

All right, I forgot my point.

Oh, yes! I sometimes feel sorry for John Doyle.