Neil Macdonald licks his lips and pats his hair gently into place. Sporting a slick navy suit, rose-coloured tie, and shiny brown shoes, he paces the room reciting his lines. Macdonald is taping intros and extros for CBC Newsworld's Face to Face, a show that features interviews with passionate American politicos such as conservative queen Ann Coulter. When he's ready for his standup, he crumples the script, stares into the camera through his black-rimmed glasses, and barks, "Let's start."

"Um, can you walk forward while you talk?" asks Ian Hannah, the cameraman.

"You want me to walk? Are you serious?"

"Well, just a few paces."

"How many paces?"

"Just a few."

Macdonald rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "What the fuck is this?" he shouts. "It fuckin' doesn't work."

Marcella Munro, the producer, and Hannah start laughing. So does Macdonald. It all has something to do with a running joke about a missing jib, a portable camera crane.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," he grunts. "Piece of shit."

After his first standup, Hannah nods, "Okay, that's pretty good."

"Pretty good?" Macdonald smirks. "It wouldn't be a problem if we had a fuckin' jib."

The crew is shooting in the decaying Crystal Ballroom of Toronto's King Edward Hotel, which offers a panoramic view of the city, so Munro suggests filming Macdonald in front of a Catholic church that stands in the background.

"Ha!" he laughs and in a cartoonish voice says, "Then the Catholics will complain."

At the end of the shoot, Macdonald comes up with a new title for the show: "It's called, 'Fuck Off, with Neil Macdonald!'"

Everyone laughs.

"It'd sell," he shrugs, to more laughter.

The 48-year-old Washington correspondent for CBC Television News often cracks up his colleagues. Friends claim he's evenfunnier than his famous comedian brother, Norm. He can also be intimidating  he's six-foot-six, with a brawny build, a baritone voice, and a penchant for liberal use of expletives. "Being my size, all you gotta do is growl at people," he says. Fellow reporters once dubbed him "Jaws."

"He likes to stick pins in big, fat, balloon egos," says Garnet Barlow, his longtime friend. Since his start in journalism in the mid 1970s, Macdonald has angered everyone from prime ministers to media moguls to religious communities. In December, for instance, the pro-Israel lobby group HonestReporting Canada (HRC) awarded him an "Israel conspiracy award." Yet none of it has hurt his career. Many of those who despise Macdonald admit he's good at what he does. His fans are even more laudatory. "He has an aggressive, trenchant style of reporting," says David Halton, senior Washington correspondent for CBC News.

And it's that relentless style that gets him into trouble. It's also, some say, what makes him a great journalist.

A rebellious and restless punk from rural Quebec, Macdonald left high school early, joined the military for two years, attended Algonquin College, and then quit that, too, though he was at the top of his class. "I had a real problem with authority," he recalls.

By 1976, the 19-year-old Macdonald had landed a job at the Ottawa Citizen as a copy boy. It came with one condition: that he finish his journalism courses. Still the rebel, he never followed through on his part of the bargain. Former Citizen colleagues described him as a brash rookie with talent. He started on the police beat and made night city editor at 22. "I had no fuckin' idea what I was doing," he says now.

In 1983, Macdonald moved to Vancouver to become assistant city editor at the Vancouver Sun. "I thought he was spectacularly arrogant," says former Sun colleague Ian Gill, adding that Macdonald made his presence known weeks before he arrived. "I was sitting at the city desk one day, and a package arrived from Hong Kong for him. It turned out to be a box of shirts he had ordered from some tailor with his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket. People nicknamed him 'The Shirt.'" And on that first day, The Shirt walked into the newsroom and set about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the staff. "He pegged everybody within 24 hours," says Gill. "He found the Sun very wanting in terms of its vision  it didn't have a lot of hard-hitting reporting. It was a pretty soft place, and Neil was a hard guy."

After only a year on the West Coast, Macdonald returned to the Citizen in time to cover the 1984 federal election. While on the campaign plane, he faced a crucial decision: whether to publish remarks Brian Mulroney thought were off the record. The Progressive Conservative leader was chatting about recent patronage appointments by then Prime Minister John Turner, who had just named Liberal Bryce Mackasey ambassador to Portugal. "Let's face it," the soon-to-be PM said, "there's no whore like an old whore. If I'd been in Bryce's place, I would have been the first with my nose in the trough, just like all the rest of them."

The convention at the time was that back-of-the-plane chats were always off the record. Macdonald, though, chose to report the quote, and was the only journalist to do so. "He recognized that it was the middle of a federal election campaign and the stakes were high," says Tonda MacCharles, who then worked at the Citizen and is now at The Toronto Star. "It certainly set the bar high in that politicians were going to be held to their words, and journalists were expected to report what they said."

After the article ran, Mulroney refused to speak to him for 13 years. Macdonald knew he was risking access, but recognized the value of a good story. "He was always interested in the scoop," says former college friend Dave Buston, who now works for Canadian Press in Calgary. Years later, Michel Gratton wrote a book about Mulroney, devoting a chapter to the incident on the plane. He sent Macdonald a copy and on the first page wrote: "To Neil, who won't let anything stand in the way of a good story… and shouldn't."

On a typical day in Washington, Macdonald wakes up early, scans the city's major dailies and flips through every news channel. BBC Television has the most balanced news coverage, he says. Some conservatives consider the BBC too left-leaning, particularly with what they see as overly sympathetic coverage of Palestinian issues. Macdonald then takes his two children from his second marriage  to Radio-Canada reporter Joyce Napier  to a nearby international French school, and heads to work with his wife.

At the CBC bureau in March 2004, associate producer Heather Loughran sits in the edit suite watching a Macdonald story before it goes to air on Canada Now. It's a report about Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, agreeing to testify publicly before the 9-11 Commission, while President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney plan to do so in private. At the end of his standup, Macdonald says: "In fact, so high are the stakes here that Bush himself has now agreed to appear before the Commission along with Vice-President Cheney, but the President's appearance will have two conditions: It will not be public and the President will not have to swear to tell the truth." Loughran and her editor chuckle. "That is a Neil Macdonald line," she says. "He delivers the news with bite, and sometimes his viewers don't even catch it."

Average viewers may not pay much attention to him, but the subjects of his stories certainly do. In the early 1980s, while with the Citizen, Macdonald spent a year in Germany reporting on Nazi war criminals. "At the time, I was the most heavily litigated reporter in Canadian history," he claims. "I think I still am." At one point, he faced three lawsuits. In a case involving Macdonald's coverage of Conservative defence minister Robert Coates and a brothel in Germany, the Citizen paid approximately $1 million in legal defence fees before the lawsuit was dropped. Clearly, Macdonald's take-no-prisoners style came with a price, but his bosses were willing to pay it.

So were others. In November 1984, on assignment in Florida, he ran into Peter Mansbridge, then parliamentary correspondent for The National. "I was giving him the gears about television," Macdonald recalls. "I said, 'You get paid too much money for reading stuff other people write for you.'"

"You think you could work in television?" Mansbridge responded.

"There's no doubt in my mind."

In late 1987, on Mansbridge's recommendation, CBC offered Macdonald a job on the news desk. He accepted the position, vetting scripts mostly, but hated it and wanted to be a reporter. "I threw a little temper tantrum," Macdonald laughs. "I said goodbye and I quit." The next day, the CBC made him a reporter.

Early in his television career, Macdonald met Napier while covering a story in Ottawa. He tried to impress her by playing classical music and pretending to read Madame Bovary. Truth was, he hadn't read a word of it. (Watching Star Trek is his true passion.) The two got married in 1991 but it would take another few years before Napier realized her husband wasn't really into Mozart. Instead, he's a huge Meat Loaf fan  although during one of his very first interviews Macdonald infuriated the Bat Out of Hell singer so much that Meat Loaf punched a dresser.

While Macdonald enjoyed his time as a domestic reporter, he itched to get overseas. Using a CTV job offer as leverage, he told CBC he was quitting. When his editors asked what it would take for him to stay, he announced: "I want to go to Jerusalem." In 1998, Macdonald began his five years in the Middle East  the period of his career for which he is best known, and about which he says he won't speak. But does.

PUT A CONTROVERSIAL MAN IN THE WORLD'S most contentious region, and there's bound to be fireworks. And Macdonald didn't disappoint. His reports from the Middle East, as they have been throughout his TV career, are rife with his point of view. He makes no apologies for it. "All good reporters use some form of editorializing in their stories," he says. "There are people who tell you that you shouldn't judge other cultures  which I have no problem at all doing. That's what you're there for."

To prepare for his new post, Macdonald studied Arabic and read dozens of books about the Middle East from both Jewish and Arab perspectives  he has half a wall of shelves filled with cracked book spines to prove it. When he first arrived in Israel, it was a safer place. He took trips with his family across the country, basking in the desert sun and floating in the Dead Sea. "We could go to Bethlehem for lunch," he says, "and Jericho for supper."

But when the second intifada broke out in 2000, life got more dangerous. His children once brought home an Arab friend, who said she hated Jews. It wasn't easy, and as he learned more about life there, Macdonald's views shifted. "He really is the kind of guy who can go to the story with certain assumptions, do the research, and then change his mind," says Sandro Contenta, former Middle East correspondent for the Star. Macdonald spent hours discussing the conflict with Barlow, his close friend in Ottawa, who recalls, "Neil said, 'Garnet, there is no question that the sympathies of anybody who arrives here for the first time will naturally side with the Israelis. It's just crazy what they have to put up with.' About six months later, he said, 'I realize that the Israelis are such bastards. They're so oppressive.' And he said about a year later, 'You realize it's just an impossible situation.'" His views kept shifting and in a speech at the 2002 Canadian Association of Journalists conference in Ottawa, Macdonald summed up the situation in just one sentence: "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a nasty ethno-religious conflict between two peoples who loathe one another and want the same piece of land. Period."

Whatever his personal feelings about the Middle East, publicly he was accused of taking sides. In a 2001 documentary called "The Two Faces of Gaza" for The National, Macdonald described life in the Jewish settlements as "a beach," and referred to the Palestinian towns as an "open-air prison." While Palestinian Canadians wrote supportive letters to CBC, many Jewish viewers were outraged by what they called an unfair depiction of life in Gaza. One wrote: "How about we see some real balance for once where the suffering on the Israeli side is also finally acknowledged?" Macdonald defends his position by explaining: "In that documentary, we included the family in Gaza whose children had their legs blown off in the school bus. Is that not Jewish-Israeli suffering? I thought it was."

He began receiving hundreds of emails a week from people denouncing his work. Initially, he responded to every one  a friend had warned him never to let a false accusation sit on the record. But Macdonald couldn't keep up. Most of the criticisms came from pro-Israel activists. "Some journalists say one of the ways to gauge whether you're striking the right balance is if you're being criticized by both sides," says Dov Smith, executive director of HRC, pointing to the sustained praise from the Palestinian community. But Macdonald argues that the Jewish community is more vocal than the Arab community. "Arabs have been in Canada for less time," he says. "A lot of them come from authoritarian regimes where if you criticize the state broadcaster, you're going to go to jail." It was the beginning of a storm that would only grow.

THE CBC'S MIDDLE EAST BUREAU IS ON ONE of the most dangerous streets in Jerusalem. A four-lane artery carrying the city's traffic, Jaffa Road is filled with hundreds of city buses and honking taxis. It's also home to some of the most deadly suicide bombings in Israel's history. "You have to be here to tell the story," says Azur Mizrahi, a CBC cameraman in Jerusalem who worked with Macdonald for five years. "Before you report, you have to see what's happening."

In April 2002, following a series of suicide bombings that took the lives of 87 Israeli citizens and wounded nearly 570 others, the Israeli Defense Forces invaded the West Bank town of Jenin, where it believed some of the bombers originated. The news media were initially denied access to the site, but after the Israeli army pulled out, most journalists reported that there had been a massacre of Palestinians  with the number of deaths on the scale of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya.

Macdonald was one of the first Canadian reporters to enter Jenin. And he was one of the few who exposed the Palestinian attempt to manipulate the media. "I could smell death," he recalls.

Then some people approached him and said, "You must see, there is a lot of killing!"

"Show me!" Macdonald said.

The people showed him.

"Well, that's a dead dog. And that's a dead goat. Where are the dead people?"

The mukhtar (or mayor) of the refugee camp said to Macdonald, "We are standing on a mass grave of bodies."

"Okay," Macdonald said. "Let's get some shovels."

Eventually, the people led him to a school where he found sand-covered body bags. They told him children were inside.

"Open the bags!" Macdonald demanded.

There were dead bodies inside, but they were Palestinian fighters, not children.

That evening, while other journalists described a mass slaughter, Macdonald reported that there had been no massacre in Jenin. Three months later, the United Nations and Human Rights Watch listed the final fatalities as 26 Palestinian fighters, 26 civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers. CBC ombudsman David Bazay says, "It took the UN team investigating several months to come to the same conclusion that he did by going in there for a single day."

When Macdonald finishes a piece, he must send it to Toronto for vetting. Then the debating begins. "There's an eternal tension between journalists and editors as to what constitutes editing," he says, "and how far editing should go."

Macdonald often called senior producer Greg Reaume, now his producer in Washington, from Jerusalem and said, "Reaume, you prick!" Pleasantries over with, they would argue about the script. On one occasion, a writer asked Macdonald to inject the term "terrorist" into his piece to make the story clearer. Sitting in his Jerusalem office seven time zones away, Macdonald sighed in exasperation and removed his glasses. He then angrily explained that as a reporter with 27 years of experience, he felt he was in a position to decide whether or not to use that word. "I had been out seeing people get shot all day," he says. "I'm the one who's doing the writing. I'm the one whose face is on the piece. I'm the one who just came back from what's going on here."

Macdonald never used the term "terrorist" in his reports from the Middle East. "Everybody's a friggin' terrorist!" he says. "The word has lost all meaning. It has been misused so often." But pro-Israel activists complained when Macdonald refused to call Palestinian suicide bombings terrorism. And when he questioned whether the Hezbollah was a terrorist organization  even after the Canadian government declared it was  it didn't sit well with his critics. That's when the fight became a national brawl. CanWest launched an editorial campaign against Macdonald and the CBC, accusing them of biased reporting against Israel. In the end, the Asper editorials were an embarrassment because they misquoted him. Some days, defending Macdonald must seem like a full-time job for CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman, but the boss doesn't mind. "Our role at the CBC is to probe and challenge and inquire," says Burman. "Neil does that. He's not satisfied with the pat answers to really important questions. In spite of the controversies, he's highly respected by our viewers."

Not all viewers. Though he wasn't reporting at the time, Macdonald stoked the usual passions with a putative slight of Ariel Sharon. Each year, the Israeli prime minister holds a news conference and reception for the Foreign Press Association. In January 2003, Macdonald sent an email to his colleagues urging them not to attend because he believes reporters shouldn't mingle with politicians. The Canada-Israel Committee and HRC got wind of his email and accused him of organizing a boycott against Sharon and attempting to publicly embarrass the leader. "I did no such thing," says Macdonald. "I have no intention of having a drink with Ariel Sharon any more than Yasser Arafat." When it comes to schmoozing with politicians, Macdonald says: "I just don't do it."

For his critics, Macdonald's stint in Jerusalem couldn't end soon enough. And even the reporter wanted out. Early in 2003, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside his children's school. The bomber's head landed in the schoolyard and a caretaker quickly covered it with a garbage bin. Not long after, there was another bombing close to Macdonald's home in west Jerusalem. "We had an imaginary line," explains Napier, who was born in Montreal and raised in Europe. "These bombings crossed that line." But it was really the impending war in the Persian Gulf, and preparation for biochemical warfare in their children's schools, that convinced Macdonald and Napier to leave.

By March, the family moved to Washington. And Macdonald was more relaxed: a joker by nature, on slow news days he'd sometimes just start dancing around. "Or he'd say, 'You want me. You think I'm sexy,'" Loughran says, laughing.

But the transfer didn't reduce the scrutiny of his work. In May 2004, he filed a story on the Abu Ghraib scandal. At the end of the report, he quoted Eugene Bird, president of the Council for National Interest, who suggested that Israeli intelligence was responsible for the prisoner abuse. However, Macdonald didn't mention that Bird is a pro-Palestinian activist, nor did he present evidence to support the accusation, which later proved to be false. Smith wrote on HRC's website: "Macdonald brings no facts or sources to substantiate these grave charges. Further, by including Bird's statement, Macdonald manipulated two unrelated stories in a way that only a journalist with an anti-Israel agenda would have even considered." The reporter says he never wanted to include the comment, but his producers insisted. "Had I known Eugene Bird was also fronting a pro-Palestinian group, I would have said so," he concedes. "Anyway, I didn't see HRC complain when we aired comments from pro-Israel activists without identifying their bias."

Burman admits it was a case of sloppy reporting. Within a week of airing the report, CBC made two on-air apologies. "There have been times when I've found fault with Macdonald's work," Bazay says, "but no reporter is perfect." In his report, the ombudsman wrote: "Editors and producers must not only avoid bias; they must avoid the appearance of bias. And, I agree, the May 4 report did expose The National to the appearance of bias."

And the feud rages on. "When Macdonald moved to Washington, people exhaled," Smith says. "Here, he still manages to show his bias." In December 2004, HRC presented Macdonald with a "Dishonest Reporting Award" and Smith wrote an op-ed piece in the National Post entitled "Neil Macdonald must go."

The controversy doesn't seem to faze the reporter, though. "I've got a skin as thick as a rhinoceros," he boasts. "If I had five dollars for every time somebody called me an asshole, I'd be pretty rich." In fact, Antonia Zerbisias, longtime friend and Star media critic, wrote in a column, "I suspect he enjoys the attention." Either way, CBC is intent on keeping him around. "He does high-quality work," says Burman. "Canadians are lucky to have Neil reporting on their behalf."

At his suburban Maryland home in November 2004, Macdonald paces around the kitchen, talking on the phone: "Well, I don't fuckin' care," he growls. "Look, I've got someone here. I'm going to have to call you back." Bobbie, the family dog, maniacally licks my leg while I wait in the dining room. Macdonald returns, walking stiffly. Fresh from heart surgery that doesn't seem to have affected his energy level, he sits at the head of the table, kicks his feet up, and pops an olive into his mouth. When Macdonald talks politics or journalism, he gets all worked up. He bangs his fists on the table, pounds his knees vigorously and smiles a boyish grin, while his cheeks turn rosy red.

"Canadians have internalized liberal, pluralistic, and democratic values," he begins. "And that, of course, is an editorial slant. If you remove that from your reporting, it would be horribly boring."

As he's talking, I notice a cordless phone sitting on the table. The display screen reads: "I am sexy." After a few moments, the phone rings and Macdonald leaves the room to take the call. When he returns, he dims the lights, hovers over me, clears his throat and says, "You know, I Googled you."

Here it is: the confrontation I've feared.

"I take it you are the Keren Ritchie who participated last year in a conference sponsored by the World Zionist Organization," he says, making a cappuccino.

I start babbling ineffectually in my defence. I tell him I just went to the conference for the free trip to Israel. My political position on the Middle East isn't close to the WZO'S, but I feel caught nonetheless.

"Look," he cuts me off. "If you're going to write a story on somebody surrounded by controversy for his Middle East coverage, you're going to have to pause at some stage and tell your readers that you participated in this conference."

I'm at a loss for words.

"I'm not saying that in a judgmental fashion," he continues. "You know, the French Canadians considered me biased against French Canadians. The Liberals considered me pro-Tory. The Tories considered me pro-Liberal. The Israelis considered me pro-Palestinian. And I can assure you there are Arabs that deep down consider me to have bought far too much into the terminology propagated by the establishments." But as Macdonald later tells me, "It's a rough-and-tumble business."

I figure that's why he loves it.

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