TORONTO—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Watson said Wednesday, July 8, that he quit the country’s largest newspaper so he could get the truth out about last year’s successful search for Sir John Franklin’s lost ships in the Canadian Arctic.
In a blog post, Watson said he submitted his resignation at a meeting July 7 in Vancouver with Toronto Star editors over “the newspaper’s refusal to publish a story of significant public interest,” an allegation the Star denied.
Watson said resigning was the only way he could resume that reporting and fulfill his responsibilities as a journalist.
“My reporting is an attempt to give voice to federal civil servants and others involved in the gruelling, High Arctic search for British Royal Navy explorer Sir John Franklin’s lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror,” Watson wrote.
“For months, these individuals have been angry at what they consider distorted and inaccurate accounts of last fall’s historic discovery of Erebus in the frigid waters of eastern Queen Maud Gulf.”
A “peripheral” member of the expedition, who he said has access to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office as well as editors at the Star, was the source of those accounts, he alleged.
Watson did not respond immediately to a request for comment. However, he told the website Canadaland that the Star ordered him six weeks ago to stop reporting on the story—which he called a “gag order.”
In an internal email to the paper’s employees Wednesday, July 8, Star publisher John Cruickshank dismissed Watson’s allegations that the Prime Minister’s Office had a hand in persuading the Star to “constrain his reporting.”
“Let me publicly deny this extremely odd idea,” Cruickshank said. “There is no truth whatever to the suggestion.”
