What a pleasure to see the paragons of virtue in the gutter press offering their deep thoughts on the still-festering Amanda Lang conflict-of-interest scandale.
Chief among them, Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star, was sorely vexed that Lang and her CBC ilk would dare accept payment for speechifying to rich patrons.
“You don’t prostitute yourself… malfeasance…venal…a trollop of oratory,” quoth Rosie, in her delicate custom.
“Ethics is doing the right thing when people are watching; integrity is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. It is neither an intellectually complex nor morally thorny issue. Just dollars and sense – and a nickel’s worth of integrity.”
As for Lang’s banging of RBC’s Geoff Beattie? “A complicating knot inside a conundrum. The romance is of marginal consequence; appearing to shill for your leg-over’s company just plain dopey.”
Oh, dear, shurely this cannot be the same Rosie DiManno who wrote a foamer in The Star last summer about former Maple Leafs coach Pat Burns’ belated acceptance into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“Shamefully late, this call to the Hall, when [Burns] should really have been summoned back in 2010, when everybody knew he was dying.”
No mention, of course, that Rosie had for years been Burns’ mambo partner and head cheerleader, cranking out countless pro-Pat stories in The Star, never once burdening readers with the knowledge of her horizontal sourcing–a decorous silence she maintained in her 2012 opus, Coach: The Pat Burns Story.
Nor does Rosie divulge her own valuable contribution to the Leafs, who she covered back in the eighties.
Coincidentally, Rosie also managed to pick up some money on the side, editing various in-house publications for the club.
Fortunately, Star management, ever vigilant for conflicts of interests among its hacks, knew all about Rosie’s moonlighting activities.
Well, they do now..