It is interesting that some leftists excoriate the press for their lack of serious critiques of govt. policies yet in the US there are complaints that the press has a "liberal" bias and now Harper thinks that the press is always out to criticise him! I think that having a liberal bias is not inconsistent with the lack of a serious critique of policy. COverage of the Iraq war or Iran's nuclear policy are good examples.
Spin class: Harper's attempt to exorcize the press corps CBC News Viewpoint | May 26, 2006 | More from Ira Basen -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ira Basen joined CBC Radio in 1984 and was senior producer at Sunday Morning and Quirks and Quarks. Among his other accomplishments include his involvement in the creation of three network programs The Inside Track (1985), This Morning (1997) and Workology (2001). He has also written for Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus. He has taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson. He is a co-author of the Canadian edition of The Book of Lists. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rule No. 1 of the political communications handbook is "don't pick a fight with the press because you'll never win." The logic behind the rule is rather simple: no matter how much a politician might try to spin and control the press, it is ultimately reporters and their editors who determine what the public sees and reads. And the chances of your message being reported positively are much greater if you make nice to the beast, than if you attack it. Although Harper is hardly the first politician to break The Rule, it is rare indeed to see someone do it quite so loudly and proudly. On Wednesday, in London, Ont., he proclaimed that the Ottawa press corps was biased against him. He believed it had decided to set itself up as the unofficial opposition and as a result, he would have nothing more to do with it. In the future, he would find other ways to get his government's message out, including a reliance on local, rather than national media. It's a safe bet that at some point, every prime minister in Canadian history has wanted to say out loud what Harper said this week in London. Most of them had far more compelling reasons to be angry over their press coverage than Harper does at this point in his mandate. And yet none has so openly and strategically violated communications Rule No. 1. And since Harper is not a man normally given to intemperate outbursts, we are left with the conclusion that he has chosen to pick a fight with the national political media because he has determined it is a fight worth waging, and one he can win. Is he right? Why does Harper think he can succeed where so many others have failed? In the first place, the prime minister undoubtedly understands that the Parliamentary Press Gallery is not the institution it once was. It has declined in both numbers and prestige over the past 20 years. Most major news organizations have cut back on their Ottawa coverage, often dramatically. The Canadian Press contingent in the gallery, to cite one example, has shrunk by about two-thirds since the 1980s. Covering the Hill used to be what the best and the brightest Canadian journalists aspired to. That is no longer the case. Moreover, the prime minister's long-term goal is to reduce the role the national government plays in the day-to-day lives of Canadians. That will inevitably mean that the news that comes out of Ottawa will also matter less. So in picking a fight with the Parliamentary Press Gallery, Harper has chosen an opponent that is already on the ropes. The Conservatives also understand that they do not need the national media to get their message to the voters. A local supper hour TV newscast or a local morning radio program will give the Prime Minister more airtime and often a larger audience than most national radio or TV programs. And, the questions will usually be confined to local, rather than national or international issues. In Washington, particularly under George W. Bush, seeking out local media at the expense of the national press has proven to be useful both as a divide and conquer strategy, and as a means of controlling the news agenda. Earlier this year, when U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his hunting companion in the face, it took more than a day before he considered the event sufficiently newsworthy to inform the public through the press, and when he did, his call went to the news desk of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, rather than the New York Times. In defending his decision, Cheney explained to Britt Hume of Fox News, "I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting." When the national media suggested that Cheney's decision stemmed more from a desire to bury the story than a concern about accuracy, the vice president dismissed their complaint as jealousy. Shutting out the national media is not the only part of the Bush strategy that appears to have caught the attention of Canadian Conservatives. Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, has been observing the dysfunctional relationship between the Washington press corps and the Bush administration, and has been writing about it in his excellent media blog, PressThink.org. Rosen argues that in the Bush White House, the administration's operating principle has gone from "meet the press to be the press." He writes: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." The Bush administration has secretly paid columnists to write articles favouring government policies, and has produced "news" videos where public relations people masquerade as reporters and put a positive spin on administration initiatives. All of this is done in the interests of de-legitimizing the press, of removing its special place in the information food chain. The press becomes just another special interest group, with no real constituency beyond itself, and with no more or no less claim to informing the public than the government itself. And once the power of the press has been "rolled back," the field is wide open for other sources of "news". The Economist magazine described it this way: If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything including dressed-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a new distributor in its own right . In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down. Ironically, governments' efforts to get their messages to their audiences without ever having to go through the filter of the press have been facilitated by changes in the media itself. Twenty-four-hour news stations, desperate for live content, are only too happy to turn their airwaves over to a presidential or prime ministerial address, provided it meets their rather porous definition of "newsworthy." And then there is the internet. Anyone wishing to see how a modern prime minister can bypass the media filter altogether and turn a government information site into a broadcast platform can simply go to www.pm.gc.ca, the prime ministerial page of the official government of Canada website. There, you can learn everything about where Stephen Harper has been and what he has said and done, and in both content and appearance, it is virtually indistinguishable from the site operated by the Conservative Party of Canada. Early indications are that Stephen Harper is following the lead of the Bush administration in trying to marginalize and de-legitimize the national press corps. Rather than "feeding the beast" as other Canadian governments have done with the gallery, it seeks to starve it. It is trying to restrict access to its usual sources of nourishment cabinet ministers, political aides and senior bureaucrats and also deprive the beast of an important source of its oxygen: the leak. In some ways, this could be a positive development. Reporting from Ottawa has probably gotten a bit too easy, a bit too clubby over the past 20 years. There is nothing wrong with reporters having to dig a little deeper and work a bit harder for their stories. But there are worrisome trends that go beyond the issue of who decides who asks the questions at prime ministerial news conferences. Senior gallery reporters complain that requests for even the most rudimentary pieces of information about Harper's official travel plans are met with suspicion. "Why do you want to know this?" officials in the PMO will ask, in an eerie echo of Dick Cheney's view that the press has no legitimate reason to be asking questions about what government officials are up to. And therein lies the significance of Stephen Harper's decision to break Rule No. 1 and take on the national press corps. Convinced that the press will never give him a fair shake, he will work around and over them to get his message out, try to develop his own channels of communication to reach the public directly, and in the process, he will implicitly and explicitly call into question the very notion that the press serves as a proxy for the public and its right to know. These will be interesting times.
