Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas

She was the matriarch of White House correspondents — until a few ill-considered sentences from the side of the camera lens to which she is less accustomed landed her in hot water late last month and forced her abrupt resignation from a career she loved and through which she’d done yeoman service.

Helen Thomas left her front-row seat in the White House briefing room under a cloud. Would that she’d had a more honorable exit, given the body of work she’d amassed in questioning 10 American presidents, most recently for Hearst News Service.

Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC Radio’s Q, got it right in his opening monologue to yesterday’s program: “There are so many rich angles and ironies to this story. A political observer and witness to scandals and lies from multiple administrations undone by her own scandal. A reporter who sought the truth and balance undone by personal opinion. And perhaps most of all, one of the great symbols of old media being undone by the new. After her thousands of meticulously crafted reports and columns over the years, she was tripped up by a cheap camcorder, a couple of off-the-cuff questions and the power of viral video.”

Thomas issued an apology this week through her former employer: “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Her resignation marked the unfortunate end of a long and distinguished career. Thomas will turn 90 on Aug. 4.

Ottawa bureau chief-designate John Ibbitson

Replacing Laghi in Ottawa will be columnist John Ibbitson, who former editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon sent packing to Washington several years ago, despite Ibbitson’s dazzling work in the nation’s capital, where he frequently set the agenda for Question Period with his incisive and provocative columns.

Ibbitson has done yoeman service in Washington, covering American politics through the second term of George W. Bush, an intense and scrappy primary process and the historic election and inauguration of Barack Obama. But his posting to the U.S. capital seemed, to me at least, never to have generated the buzz or impact of his earlier stint in Ottawa, where he was a daily must-read. His return there bodes well for national political journalism.

Here’s editor-in-chief John Stackhouse’s memo to staff today:

I am sorry to announce that Brian Laghi, our Ottawa bureau chief, is leaving The Globe and Mail next month to pursue a new career.

Brian was hired in Edmonton in 1995 where he was the Journal’s legislative bureau chief. He was The Globe’s reporter in Edmonton and the north, specializing in politics and the creation of Nunavut. His experience as one of the first journalists in the country to understand and appreciate the grassroots Reform movement served him well when he moved to Ottawa and shone as an expert in the conservative movement. Along with politics, he covered federal-provincial relations, immigration and other issues. He has been bureau chief since 2004, helping direct coverage of two elections, budgets and major assignments and explaining federal politics to our readers. He won a National Newspaper Award in 2002 as part of a team on bank mergers and was nominated with Jeffrey Simpson last year for their profile of Stephen Harper.

Brian will start a new job in September as director of communications and public affairs for the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

At the same time,  I am delighted to announce that John Ibbitson will be the next Ottawa bureau chief. In this role, he will report to Sinclair Stewart, the new national editor.

For nearly two decades, John has been a front-row observer and writer of Canadian and U.S. politics. Along with his deep knowledge of politics and government, he will bring to his new role boundless energy and enthusiasm for our coverage of national affairs.

John started at The Globe in 1999 and has been Queen’s Park columnist, Ottawa political affairs correspondent and, since May 2007, our Washington correspondent and columnist. He’s also the author of the just-published Open and Shut: Why America has Barack Obama and Canada has Stephen Harper.

Born in the  Ontario town of Gravenhurst, John graduated from the University of Toronto in 1979 with an Honours B.A. in English and from the University of Western Ontario in 1988 with an M.A. in Journalism.

Before joining the Globe, John worked as a reporter, columnist and Queen’s Park correspondent for Southam papers. He’s also published three works of political analysis: Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution; Loyal No More: Ontario’s Struggle for a Separate Destiny and The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream. In his spare time, he writes plays and young-adult novels. His latest, The Landing, won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. John’s writing has been nominated as well for the Donner Prize, the National Newspaper Award, the Trillium Award and the City of Toronto Book Award.

John and Brian will be in the bureau together for a formal handover early next month. Please join me in thanking Brian for his great contributions to the Globe, congratulating John on a brilliant run in Washington and wishing them both well in their new roles.

John Stackhouse

Lieutenant William Calley Jr. became the central figure of the My Lai massacre

Anyone old enough to remember the Vietnam War will recall the infamous My Lai massacre. It was a seminal event in the history of that war because of its effect on public support for U.S. involvement there. Millions of Americans who, until My Lai, had supported or wavered in their support for the war turned against it — so stunned were they by the atrocities committed by American troops.

The destruction of the village and the massacre of its Vietnamese inhabitants occurred on March 16, 1968. Although the official U.S. tally puts number of dead at 347, other estimates of the death toll exceed 500. Most were women, children and elderly people. Many were raped, tortured and mutilated. The soldier in charge of the U.S. Army platoon that invaded the village was Lieutenant William Calley Jr.

The events of My Lai may have escaped media and public attention entirely if not for the fact that several U.S. soldiers were so shocked and disturbed by the conduct of their own troops that they wrote letters to President Richard Nixon, the joint chiefs of staff, officials at the Pentagon and others about the incident. The horrors of the My Lai massacre surfaced publicly more than a year later, when, despite official secrecy about the letters, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story on Nov. 12, 1969. In the months that followed, My Lai remained a major story in newspapers, radio and TV. Calley and more than two dozen of his men were charged, but only the lieutenant was eventually convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison, but served only three and a half years under house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Ga.

Since then, Calley had remained silent about My Lai. Until yesterday.

At a Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Ga., he offered an apology. Read the Associated Press story here; the Telegraph story is here.

A footnote: The My Lai massacre occurred one month after Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett filed a story, on Feb. 7, 1968, in which Arnett reported, “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a U.S. major says.” The town in question that day was a Vietnamese provincial capital, Ben Tre. Since then, this type of statement has become known as “Ben Tre logic.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kory Teneycke

The resignation of Kory Teneycke as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s director of communications brings to at least five the number of people tasked with managing the information flow between the Prime Minister’s Office and the news media since early 2006. All have had remarkable short tenures.

Teneycke says he’s leaving the PMO in order to spend more time with family. He’ll step down as soon as a replacement is named — which should be soon, given the possibility of an election campaign as early as this fall.

Clearly, however, the job of handling communications and the media for Harper is not for the faint of heart. The Prime Minister has now had more communications directors than there were press secretaries in the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations combined (a total of 16 years).

Harper is well known among journalists, political observers and even his own caucus as one who tightly controls media, messaging and information flow. At a conference in London, Ont., shortly after the swearing in of the Conservatives’ first minority government in February 2006, CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge labelled the new prime minister a “control freak” who was determined to change the fundamental relationship between the PMO and the news media. Evidence of that manifested itself through new rules of engagement established by the PMO early that year that dealt with scrums and news conferences (see CBC producer Ira Basen’s piece for Pressthink on the controversy). Many experts see the Harper strategy, when combined with the party’s own inventory of websites, new-media tools and consultants, as an effort to “decertify” traditional news media as agents of communication between government and citizens. According to those who work closest to Ottawa’s inner orbits, the working relationships between the news media and the Prime Minister remain delicate and mercurial.

Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler

Whenever the matter of communications and government comes up, I can’t help but remember the impossible task of White House press secretary Ron Ziegler during the final years of the Richard Nixon administration. Ziegler had the unenviable job of managing media relations through the Watergate years and the many headlines that eventually led to the president’s resignation. Contemptuous of the Washington Post, which was constantly on the leading edge of the story, Nixon held the threat of dismissal over Ziegler’s head, should he allow any reporter or photographer from the Post onto the White House grounds.

The ultimate embarrassment for Ziegler, however, came during a visit to New Orleans on Aug. 20, 1973. As Nixon was about to enter a convention centre to make a speech, he grabbed Ziegler by the shoulders, turned him around and shoved him in the direction of nearby reporters, who were shouting questions about the unravelling Watergate affair and Nixon’s role in it. The incident was captured on film by CBS cameraperson Cal Marlin, and it aired on the national newscast that evening. Dan Rather set up the clip by saying, “What you are about to see is a rare glimpse in public of presidential irritation. . . . The president’s aides deny he is nervous or testy or anything.”

Ziegler was the communicator who invented the term “photo op,” tried to dismiss the Watergate scandal a “third-rate burglary” and had a penchant for declaring previous statements, proven to be misleading or untrue, as “inoperative.” He died in hospital near his home in Coronado, Calif., in 2003 at the age of 63.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Holmes, 45, has become the latest poster child for Americans hoping to stave off Canadian-style “socialized medicine.” She has appeared at press conferences on Capitol Hill and been interviewed on CNN and Fox News. She has repeatedly told the story of how she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and eventually had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Ariz., when it became apparent that the wait for treatment in Canada would take months. She remortgaged her home to pay the clinic’s $97,000 bill and is suing the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) to recoup the costs.

(Holmes certainly isn’t the first media darling to be featured on U.S. networks on the issue of Canadian health care. British Columbia businessman Don Neufeldt, who went public earlier this year about lack of timely access to a cardiologist in Canada, forcing him to seek treatment in Oklahoma City, Okla., is another).

As one might expect, Holmes’s case is slightly more nuanced than powerful lobbies or ratings-driven newscasts care to reveal. In today’s Globe and Mail, columnist André Picard offers a piece that provides some background, balance and clarity. Holmes’s tumour was not malignant; it was a benign cyst that, yes, was impairing her vision, but was not life-threatening. Frightening as vision loss would be for any patient, Canadian doctors believed it to be temporary and reversible. They were doing what, in the Canadian and British systems, doctors must do: prioritize patient care.

Meanwhile, Holmes has come under personal attack by defenders of the Canadian system, including bloggers and Facebook users, who are giving the family mediator a little more grief than she’s accustomed to.

Having lived and worked under both systems, I don’t understand the overheated rhetoric deployed by both sides of the health-care debate. Each system has strengths and weaknesses. In the U.S., thanks to competition among hospitals and an abundant supply of health-care professionals, care is often more immediate, especially when specialists are involved. For those with health insurance, most trips to the doctor or operating room carry a cost in the form of a deductible or co-payment. For those without, the quality of care is less robust or comprehensive. Depending on the condition, it may even be absent. Long-term catastrophic illness, for either the insured or uninsured, can spell financial disaster.

In Canada, taxes are substantially higher to bear the massive burden of a national health-care system, but illness is seldom financially catastrophic. Everyone working in the system — from nurses to doctors to specialists — must ration and prioritize care, and that can mean long waits. (See CBC News correspondent Neil Macdonald’s open letter to Americans in the wake of the Neufeldt story.) The system is imperfect at best. Sometimes, wait times can get so long that they threaten Canadians’ right to personal security, as specified in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Remember the case of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General [2005] in the Supreme Court of Canada? “Delays in the public system are widespread and have serious, sometimes grave, consequences,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice John Major, as part of a split decision. “Inevitably where patients have life-threatening conditions, some will die because of undue delay in awaiting surgery.”

Picard’s final observation is a salient one, brimming with irony: Given her medical past, Holmes is now in a position where she would find it nearly impossible to buy medical insurance in the U.S. In Canada, she will continue to be covered and will get the same access to the system as any other Canadian.