Heather Mallick has maintained she quit in a huff over principle when she ended her business relationship with the Globe and Mail on Dec. 1, 2005.

eFrank.ca has reposted some of its correspondence between Mallick and "Daphne Merkin" (a real New York writer, but that fact was initially unbeknownst to Frank in its sting correspondence with Mallick)  from those heady times between October and mid-November 2005 (sorry, it's paywalled).

Here's a sample of a Mallick observation about one Margaret Wente (in response to a missive from Merkin):

Please do see if you can run me in Arts and Letters Daily, but I cannot see how anyone that runs “Mags Venty” could run me. She is a horrible woman, by the way, who used to edit a section but she was so hated that section went on strike. So they gave her a column as to avoid severance pay, and she now has the function of giving older women a bad reputation. Every paper has one or two or seven.

There were similar unflattering shots at other big-name Globe personalities like Christie Blatchford and, seemingly, Edward Greenspon, the paper's editor-in-chief.

Recall that Wente wrote the following on Tuesday:

Meantime, I'm not feeling too sorry for Ms. Mallick. She is a sour, narrow-minded writer - the kind of who makes Michael Moore look like a world-class wit. Her reflexive anti-Americanism* is heavy-handed and stale, to say nothing of casually racist. There are many, many ways of dissing Sarah Palin. But Ms. Mallick's naughty, coarse puerility is not among them.

* Note: Wente was born in the U.S., but is now a Canadian citizen.

What goes around, comes around.

It's worth noting Mallick didn't get her facts straight in her shot at Wente. Read this Summer 1999 Ryerson Review of Journalism profile of Wente for background, but Wente's job as managing editor got derailed some time after a harsh memo she authored leaked (I can't track down the exact timing). In it, she called some Globe staffers weak and beyond salvaging. She named names. After the memo came out, some targets defiantly wore buttons that said "weak and hopeless."

I remember being at a CAJ conference in Vancouver in 1999 where Paul Sullivan -- who I believe was still the G&M's western editor at the time -- described Wente as "surely one of this country's finest columnists." No mention of her unfortunate flameout as ME. :)

However, she should be given full credit for writing a usually engaging if occasionally exasperating column.

Anyways, some people have theorized over the years that Mallick left bcause her intemperate shots at colleagues and superiors made an ongoing relationship with the paper untenable (For more on the Mallick-Globe rift, see Heather Mallick and CBC.ca in the Globe and Mail).

In that light, the Chomsky column blow-up should be seen as a face-saving move on Mallick's part, her detractors say.