RIP: Rex Murphy's fans and critics respond to his death

'Rex Murphy was one of the most intelligent and fiercely free-thinking journalists this country has ever known,' said Stephen Harper
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/rex-murphy-tributes

Murphy’s writing, which appeared for more than a decade in National Post, was always fierce, often controversial, and liberally peppered with the sort of language that has the feel of an age gone by.

In countless TV appearances, radio interviews, podcasts and YouTube videos over the years, he spoke in full, occasionally meandering, paragraphs.

Murphy also appeared on the CBC’s flagship nightly news program The National until 2017, leaving the same year as long-time host Peter Mansbridge, who awoke in Scotland Friday morning to news of Murphy’s death. “He was such a special character unlike anyone else in journalism. I will always remember Thursday nights with At Issue and Rex as some of my favourite moments in Canadian television,” wrote Mansbridge.

In his columns, Murphy inveighed against green activism — Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was a semi-regular target — and the politics of the modern left.

Both earned him considerable enmity, and, at times, considerable controversy, though Murphy understood that no opinion writer is doing their job if everyone likes them. In a 2006 column about Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and the publication of satirical Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, he wrote, “Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone.”

After a career with CBC that stretched back to the 1970s, Murphy became one of the most caustic critics of the public broadcaster.