 In the end, the hospital board refused to fire Levine and after about a month, the public anger subsided.In his analysis of the affair, Marlin criticizes the Ottawa media for fanning the flames of protest in their competitive pursuit of higher circulations and audience ratings.He also argues that although Canadians tend to regard McCarthyism as a feature of U.S. political life, the Levine affair contained its basic ingredients -- "a strident patriotism, which reduced complex questions to a simple us-and-them mentality."