Running head: Personal Voice By Lynne Van Luven

Head: Confession: I adore Christie Blatchford.



Subhead: Confession: I abhor Christie Blatchford.

I'm in the throes of a love-hate relationship with the controversial
shoot-from-the-hip National Post columnist. Before we get any deeper into
this confession, let me hasten to say I have never actually met Blatchford,
never been hired or fired via her auspices, never got drunk with her at the
Canadian Asssociation of Journalists' annual convention.

But Christie Blatchford is heavy on my mind because she's one of the most
visible women in print journalism these days: she has a national forum, her
column, from which to expound her particular tough love, rough-justice
courtroom coverage. Over the past year, she's been in court, for the Post,
at many of the more lurid or headline-grabbing criminal proceedings in the
land.

Which brings us to why I abhor Blatchford: her approach to court reporting
is the antithesis of what journalists have been trained to do. She does not
simply record the testimony given and try her best to shape that into a
snapshot of the crime. She's opinionated, colourful and argumentative. She
speculates, she psychologizes and she personalizes. The credibility of the
evidence in a case sometimes gets lost beneath Blatchford's own beliefs
about the defendants, their lives, their possible motives. Sometimes, the
tabloidization of justice seems to be the main result.

For example, in late October, when she reported the trial of Elaine Rose
Cece and Mary Barbara Ann Taylor, both accused of second-degree murder in
the August 1998 stabbing death of Toronto Police Detective-Constable Billy
Hancox, she reported that the convenience store surveillance video showed
Hancox as a cuddly kind of guy buying a chocolate bar shortly before he was
fatally stabbed. "Whaaat?'' I gasped, reading the column. "This cop's
killing is more reprehensible than usual because the guy was endearingly
chubby and had a weakness for chocolate?" (I find myself having these sorts
of abortive conversations all the time with Blatchford as a result of her
irrelevant asides about actors in the legal dramas she's viewing.)

Yet,I have to admit that sometimes I adore her up-front humanity. Unlike
some of her more self-righteous colleagues at the National Post, Blatchford
is also capable of empathy for the perpetrators of crime. For instance, in
another column on the Hancox case, she wrote: " . . . rare is the accused
who has led a charmed life, who was born into anything approaching love,
emotional sustenance or privilege. Far more commonly, the accused's
background is such a horror show it may seem impossible it could have
produced any other result but the person before the court, when it takes a
hard, hard heart not to sigh and murmur, "Well, no wonder."

Recently, Blatchford left her Toronto haunts and marched West to take a look
at two high-celebrity proceedings in Victoria. Again, her unstinting eye
kept me riveted. Reporting on the two-month licensing hearing into the
practices of the Montreaux Clinic, the controversial facility for anorexics
and bulemics which the regional health board has ordered closed at the end
of January 2000. Blatchford wasted no words. Her Dec. 2 column began as
follows: "Peggy Claude-Pierre contented herself with looking frail and
wounded, kohl-lined eyes dark in that white face.

" To be perfectly fair, it's her best schtick anyway: If one looks like an
angel of mercy, then one must be one. God knows, it worked like a charm with
the great American television journalists at 20/20 whose deference to Ms.
Claude-Pierre on the show that won Montreux early fame, was tantamount to
oral sex."

Zap-Fizzzt! That's Blatchford, nailing down her take on a case in less than
75 words. But again, those personal asides about men also cropped up: She
noted that Medical Health Officer Dr. Richard Stanwick filed a report "as
reasonable as that lovely man is." Ah, Christie . . . .

However, the main course luring Blatchford to Victoria's criminal
smorgasbord was Stephen Reid, that unfortunate man constantly encapsulated
by journalists as the "bank robber turned novelist turned robber again."

And, like the rest of us, Blatchford was enthralled by the Reid case: "The
bank robber Stephen Reid looks like a cross between a worried spaniel and an
old fighter who has gone more than a few rounds in the ring, " she began her
Dec. 2 column, reporting that Reid had been found guilty of one count of
attempted murder in the June 9, 1999, robbery/street chase/shoot-out he and
an accomplice staged. When Blatchford introduced herself to Reid's wife
Susan Musgrave at the Law Courts, the latter said, "Stephen was wondering if
you would be coming out." The result of this "snippet of conversation,"
Blatchford confessed, "was somehow to have put Mr. Reid and I [sic] on the
same side and leave me feeling strangely co-opted; the other thing is that
it captures the paradox of this short and unremarkable-looking man who came
into remand court . . . wearing a lovely navy jacket and greenish shirt -
and, oh yes, shackles."

Finally, in her weekend column, Blatchford put her coverage in full context.
She never did manage to meet the accused during the three days she covered
his case, she reported, but for that she was glad. "Seeing Reid close up,
and talking to him, would have further complicated a case that had quickly
become a rat's nest of emotions for me.

"I feel I know him far too well already. Did from the minute I laid eyes on
him . . . . Stephen Reid is an addict, and so am I. He is addicted to
heroin, I have only ever been hooked on cigarettes (or running when I am not
smoking; and work; and I once feared but was wrong, on strong drink), but
the essential personality is pretty much the same. We share a fundamental
disbelief in our own worth, and I say this without self-pity. . . ."

Stephen Reid, she concluded, "was filling up the empty space inside him. It
doesn't mitigate or diminish what he went on to do, not for a second, but
oh, it makes an awful sort of sense to me, yes it does." Well, I suspect it
does to a lot of us, addicts or not.

As the starchy John Fraser noted recently in his Post media column,
Blatchford "has staked out a territory in court reporting somewhere between
Joan of Arc and Jane Austen." The result is darn fine storytelling, if you
can overlook some of Blatchford's syntax and grammar, and it keeps you
reading. Whether it actually serves the process of justice - or educates the
public about the law's complexity -- is quite another matter.

Lynne Van Luven is a freelance writer and director of professional writing
at the University of Victoria.

Personal voice: My love-hate relationship with the National Post's Christie
Blatchford