No movie reviews featuring strong women, newspaper publisher tells movie critic

You'll often hear people lamenting that journalism just ain't what it used to be. You'll also hear folks claim that sexism and misogyny are alive and well. But it's not every day that you get such a stunning example of both the decline of journalism and the vitality of woman-bashing wrapped up in a tidy package.

Sadly, the story of Niagara Falls Reporter publisher Frank Parlato and his refusal to publish reviews of films "where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females" is the perfect example of said package.

This is just one line from a long, rambling, scarcely punctuated diatribe about "manliness" that Parlato emailed to his then film critic Michael Calleri. Parlato was trying to explain why film reviews portraying powerful women would not be published at the paper.

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At the time Calleri wrote the now viral email, Parlato had only been at the helm of the Reporter for a matter of months, and during that time, Calleri, who had been writing for the paper for decades, was curious as to why some of his reviews were making it onto the web and others were not.

The email response he received from Parlato was off-the-wall enough for iconic critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times to run it on the newspaper's website.

Here's an excerpt from the email (all punctuation is Parlatos):

The email was enough for Calleri to make a hasty exit from the Reporter, and more then enough to inspire the wrath of the internet.

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It would seem though, that this incident between Parlato and Calleri takes the writer-publisher conflict to a whole new level.

Not so, says Suanne Kelman, associate chair at Ryerson University's School of Journalism.

"There is nothing new about unreasonable publishers — in fact, this strikes me as very traditional. Evelyn Waugh's publisher from hell, Lord Metroland, was clearly based on Lord Beaverbrook. So this isn't a decline. It's just the latest step in a great tradition of barking-mad publishers."

She suggests that while this is an extreme example, this issue extends well beyond movie reviews.

"How long would a journalist last in Rupert Murdoch's or Pierre Karl Peladeau's empires after a favorable column about a left-wing politician?"

"Many critics these days are being nudged to tone down reviews of movies, plays, books — whatever -- to keep advertisers happy," says Kelman. "It's common for publishers to try to get their critics to focus more on populist products."

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Numerous blogs, social media sites and newspapers have picked up the story of Parlato and Calleri, and though there was the odd commenter that sided with Parlato, the majority have sided with Calleri.

One example, commenter "Bob" on the Chicago Sun-Times piece.

"Masculinity/manliness does not stem from controlling the women around us, or hating them, or yearning for a (mosty non-existent) golden age when women/gay people/"minorities"/foreigners/"others" knew their rightful place under the watchful gaze of a benevolent white male society… Great (yet depressing) editorial."

Parlato, of course, felt compelled to share his side of the story, in an editorial in the Reporter titled "Movie reviewer upset with Reporter, airs private email." In it, Parlato goes to great lengths to discredit Calleri as a paid journalist, and then defends his email.

"For the record, if I knew Calleri was going to publish my off-the-record and, in parts, tongue-in-cheek email, I would have added capital letters and a couple of commas, but I wouldn't have changed what I wrote. In fact I might have made the language even stronger."

Right.