Lilley Unsourced: You Never Sausage Drivel!

A rare peek beneath the smart hair of Brian Lilley, as the Sun newsboy acknowledged on his socials the widespread ridicule of his latest exclusive, to wit: Melanie Joly would tootle off to Paris in a major, post-Guilbeault-alypse cabinet shuffle.

Actual body count? One pasty fella from Quebec out of the Carney cabinet, an even pastier one back in. But just because it’s not true yet…

“I’ve had a few senior politicians say that my reporting this past week wasn’t accurate,” tweeted the Toastmedia twatwaffle. “Let me explain how I don’t put these stories out there without verifying them and ensuring there is accuracy.”

Shurely nobody is impugning Mr. Ivana Yelich’s meticulous sourcing for the column (“Speculation out of Ottawa is…”)

Okay, maybe the National NewsMedia Council of Canada might look askance. It was the NNMCC which, readers may recall, whacked Lilley’s willy for making shit up in his 2020 opinion piece headlined: “NDP MPP’s sing and chant as dead terrorist honoured.”

Lilley claimed that Marit Stiles and Rima Berns-McGown had attended a rally in front of the US consulate in Toronto, to mourn the death of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general assassinated in an American military strike.

The NDP members squawked that it was a peace rally and there was no proof that they were anti-American or that they were mourning Soleimani’s death.

The NNC found that Lilley’s column failed to accurately characterize the MPPs participation and upheld their complaint.

Despite the knuckle-rapping, the nosestretcher, like his Joly joker, remained on the Sun website alongside such classics as Sue Ann Levy’s notorious exposé of refugees-of-swarth slaughtering goats in hotel bathrooms.

All yesterday’s fake news! Onwards! The ex-Rebel Newser offered a primer on his own brand of investigative fabulism at brianlilley.com:

“Everyone likes to know how the sausage is made, even if they don’t want to look. For me, I literally spent many of my early years in the back of a butcher shop and I watched the sausage be made. As my mother would work the counter, I’d be playing hide and seek with my friend Andrew among the beef and hog carcasses hanging in the fridge.

“Opie’s Meats on Concession Street in Hamilton served the British expat community and my ‘Uncle’ Danny, meaning he wasn’t really my uncle but we treated him like one, was the proprietor. My mother worked there on evenings and weekends and I’d get the front row view to how the sausage, and the black pudding, was made.

“Some people get turned off by being this close but I don’t.

“I relate this story to you as I prepare to tell you how the political sausage is made. There are so many ways that I could pivot here and tell you different stories, but I’ll tell you how a political story comes together. (We’d rather hear about “Uncle Danny” and your mother–ed.)

“One of the things that I hope to do, as a way of saying thank you for being a paid subscriber and to give you a value added experience, is to pull the curtain back a bit on how journalism works and how stories go from idea to a finished product–at least from my perspective.

“You may have heard that Melanie Joly is denying my reporting that she could soon be exiting politics and be appointed Canada’s Ambassador to France.”

Alas, that’s all the sausage we’re going to get because, unlike the réalité-challenged Gaines-burgers Bri’ cranks out for Sun lip-movers, the rest of this premium journalistic insight is pent up behind the paywall. A credit card number required, even for a seven-day free trial.

Hide the sausage, indeed!