By the time the "show trial" against Mark Steyn and Maclean's began on June 2, 2008 the case had become a cause celebre in the formidable U.S. conservative media network of blogs and talk radio.

Four heavyweight pundits -- Jonah Goldberg, Robert Spencer, David Harsanyi and Pat Buchanan -- rebuked the censors of "Soviet Canuckistan" on the very same day.

But Canada's liberal mainstream media more or less shrugged.

(...)

Columnist David Warren bluntly explained:

"Among the spookiest aspects of these cases is the silence over, and indifference to them, on the part of journalists whose predecessors imagined themselves vigilant in the cause of freedom. As I've learned first-hand through email, many Canadian journalists today take the view that, 'I don't like these people, therefore I don't care what happens to them.' It is a view that, at best, is extremely short-sighted."

(Read the rest here. Or you can just read the whole thing and more, in my new book, The Tyranny of Nice: How Canada crushes freedom in the name of human rights -- and why it matters to Americans. It features an Introduction by Mark Steyn and everything!)

(Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury.com)