This week the Ombudsman got an earful from outraged Whitby residents after columnist Rosie DiManno, never one to pull her punches, criticized the town where she has been covering a lengthy court trial.
DiManno’s tale of a late-night excursion for a pack of cigarettes riled many, including the town’s mayor.
She made no secret of her feelings calling Whitby “one vast landscape of strip malls and fast-food outlets and auto body garages, box stores, and subdivisions of faux Tudor houses. . .”
It seems DiManno, a non-driver, had to venture out on foot at 11 p.m. for food and cigarettes since her motel had no diner and she’d been told she’d have to drive to the nearest one.
Once outside, she found “no roads, as the civilized world knows them, in Whitby, only the endless ribbon of highway.”
Next she described what seemed to me to be a hilarious and self-deprecating tale of an aborted attempt to cross the highway, with DiManno stumbling in the night, finally seeking refuge in a bowling alley.
But many readers found no humour in the column at all.
They were so upset, we took our own trip to Whitby. It did cast a bit of a different light on the events.
For had DiManno left the Whitby motel and turned right she could have hit a bar and restaurant a 15-minute walk away – admittedly at night in the cold. But because she headed the other way after trying to cross the highway she faced a longer trek to the bowling alley, which was actually in Oshawa.
Compounding readers’ confusion about the events, we ran a photograph with the column of a stretch of “highway to hell” which was, in fact, nowhere near Whitby.
Though I disagree with DiManno’s description of the motel as Bates-like, I agree the service road strip where the motel was located is pretty isolated and must seem more so at night. But it is not unlike many similar strips near major highways in other parts in and near Toronto.
Still, this is not really the point. Readers were upset because they thought DiManno unfairly trashed the entire town based on what they felt were limited experiences.
Whitby Mayor Marcel Brunelle points to the older downtown core, the movie houses, the theatre, sports complex, museum, pubs, restaurants and yacht club and waterfront as examples that Whitby “has a lot happening.”
He calls the comment that there were no roads in Whitby, just highway “patently false.”
“There’s a lot of pride here and to have it denigrated is hurtful,” he said, calling the column a “cheap shot.”
Reader Karen Paul of Pickering accused The Star of having an anti-suburban bias.
That the picture was wrong and that the column and headline specified Whitby when some of the events took place a few blocks away in Oshawa somewhat undercut DiManno’s work in my mind. And frankly, I found much to like about Whitby.
But let’s not forget DiManno, though a bit of a stranger in a strange land, did spend weeks in Whitby. Columnists by definition express opinions, and in my mind, good ones like DiManno stir up controversy.
I wish every column could run with this tag line: “We do not always and should not always agree with what a columnist says but we must respect their right to say it.”
Was DiManno taking a cheap shot? Yes in part, I say, because she trashed a town of 90,000 based on some subjective experiences.
But what really disturbs me is that the strong words obscured, at least for some readers, the well-crafted humour and the way DiManno was able to poke fun at herself. Both are hallmarks of a great columnist, in my mind.
