(ಠ_ಠ)
2014-12-16 00:39:19 UTC
He's taking no chances with his inarticulate and sometimes right nasty MPs
making statements that the media then passes on to Canadians. From now until
election day, expect the control freak we know as Stephen Harper, to demand
every MP toe his line and to speak from prepared scripts. Should be fun AND
funny to watch . . . .
_____________________________________________
http://www.hilltimes.com/ Monday, Dec. 15, 2014
Harper clampdown, media cuts make for staged, predictable Hill news: Bourrie
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s clampdown on Hill media access, combined with
newsroom cutbacks over the last 25 years, has led to an “arm’s length
sycophantic media,” with “staged” news coverage focused on the “the bogus rage
and fake indignation of Question Period” and based on government-fed “pap,”
says Mark Bourrie, author of the upcoming book, Kill The Messengers: Stephen
Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know.
The federal government doesn’t answer questions anymore, there’s less money for
investigative journalism, and the Hill media have lost every battle they’ve
fought, which is destroying democratic institutions, including Parliament, he says.
“Reporters aren’t covering politics to pry into other peoples’ business.
They’re covering politics to pry into the nation’s business,” Mr. Bourrie says.
“We only have one democratic institution that represents all Canadians and
that’s the House of Commons. If Canadians don’t know what it does, and if it
doesn’t function effectively, then we don’t have a national democracy anymore.
It’s as simple as that.”
Questions about limits on government power, Parliamentary debate and scrutiny,
and information control need to be put to candidates in the 2015 election, said
Mr. Bourrie, before irreversible damage is done to the Parliamentary system.
“We’re down to the bottom of the ninth. If people want to have a democratic
system, they better figure that out now,” he said.
Shortly after finishing a book about media censorship in Canada during the
Second World War, Mr. Bourrie—a history PhD who teaches at Carleton University
and a longtime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery (he’s written
extensively for The Hill Times’ Power & Influence magazine)—turned his thoughts
to the Harper government’s information control.
The idea for Kill the Messengers, to be released Jan. 27 from HarperCollins
Canada, was crystallized in a memo he came across from the war’s chief press
censor.
“After six years of working as press censors, the ones who were involved in the
Second World War press censorship decided that you really couldn’t censor the
press itself, you have to control information at the source,” he said in an
interview last week.
“In other words, it’s almost impossible to put smoke back in the fire or the
genie back in the bottle. If you want to keep information from getting to
people that you don’t want it to get to, you have to make sure it never leaves
the government offices or the other places where you have control over it.”
Mr. Bourrie spent the next two years working on the book about Prime Minister
Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) approach to information control.
Though it devotes a good deal of attention to the government’s media strategy,
the messengers in the title also include people like former Parliamentary
budget officer Kevin Page and former veterans ombudsman Pat Stogran, and
institutions such as the Security Intelligence Review Committee that oversees
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the CBC board of directors.
“All of those people at one point or another have been either done in by Harper
or put into a situation where they’re so controlled that they really can’t do
their job anymore,” he said.
Mr. Bourrie is critical of both the government’s control and the Hill media’s
response, and he describes what’s led to what he considers a largely defanged
press gallery.
The interview has been edited for style and length:
Q: You open the book with a proverb, “In a city that has no watchdogs, the fox
is the overseer.” Can you explain that choice?
“It came from a Time Life book that I found left at a cottage at the time I was
putting together the book proposal. It was one of those things, one of those
really serendipitous moments where I found this cute little quote. It basically
means that when you have no functioning media, which we’re headed towards—we’re
not there yet, of course—where you have no functioning Parliamentary watchdogs,
where you have even an apathetic public that doesn’t watch what’s happening,
and nobody has any ability to find out what’s going on anyway, governments can
do what they want. That’s where I’m afraid we’re going, is a situation where
governments are the only people with a real grip on reality and everybody else
lives in an artificial world created by a weakened, celebrity-obsessed media,
and just basically fed pap by governments.”
Q: What does Harper have against the media? You trace some of it back to
treatment of the Reform and Alliance parties and the early Conservative days.
“Part of it is that and part of it is that it’s a lot easier to function when
you’ve got the media under control.
“The really interesting thing about Harper is that he had one of the best
opportunities, I think, that any modern Prime Minister had of building good
relations with the press in 2006. In 2005-06 he was doing a fairly good job of
making himself available to media, connecting with media. He gave a fabulous
speech at the press gallery dinner before he was elected Prime Minister and
then it was really him that started it with the media. It wasn’t a situation
of someone like Richard Nixon who got pounded and pounded and pounded and
pounded by reporters.
“This was a guy who was on good terms with the media at the time that he turned
around and shut them down—froze them out of information coming out of the
government, put a lock on his own MPs and Cabinet ministers, brought in the
list system for press conferences, stopped having meaningful press conferences,
and put himself into a bubble, which I think was probably ill-advised.”
Q: When did his approach start to change?
“It started fairly soon after the 2006 election. I would say that the list
system after the 2006 election, where they decided they were going to make
reporters put their name on a list and have the Prime Minister’s people decide
who would get to ask questions rather than follow traditions of the gallery,
was an insult to the gallery’s own traditions and it really didn’t, I don’t
think, make life any better for the Prime Minister. But it did really alienate
the gallery.
“But it wasn’t just the press gallery. It was the media’s decisions about
coverage about Ottawa that really fed into this thing and made it a sort of
feedback loop. At the same time Harper’s clamping down on the gallery, there
are all these cuts of bureaus from small newspapers across the country. We
lost a lot of people who were in print on the Hill. It became where you had a
weak media up against a Prime Minister who had decided to reshape the way prime
ministers would deal with the media and I think that has probably reshaped the
way all prime ministers will deal with the media forever.
“I think the most interesting thing I came across was [Carleton professor and
former CBC and Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief] Chris Waddell’s work on the
connection between shutting down media bureaus and voter turnout in places.
That blew me away. You had papers in Hamilton, in London, Ont.—when they closed
their bureaus here, you could actually see a reflection in voter turnout in
those communities. They had always been higher than the places that didn’t have
their own reporter here covering local issues and when they closed the bureaus
they went back down to the same levels as everybody else. That knocked me on my
ass when I came across that. When you can actually see the change in voter
turnout in ridings, not just in one place but in several places, that’s
astounding.”
Q: I think it’s an interesting point you made, too, about papers traditionally
having reporters from the community here to reflect Ottawa back to the
community that they know.
“You look at somebody like [Halifax Chronicle Herald Ottawa bureau chief] Paul
McLeod. He’s really the last one, and his interactions with MPs are so
different from the national media interaction with MPs because they’re talking
about local issues to a local guy who knows those local issues as well as
anybody else would, probably better than most, writing for a local audience.
The discussion that they have, the coverage is so different from the national
horserace coverage. That’s what we’re really missing.”
Q: What led to this weak media? Part of it is economics.
“A lot of it is economics. The recession in 1990 was a big blow to the media, a
lot bigger than media people understand. I talk a lot in the book about how the
changes we think are post-internet are really changes that have continued since
the 1980s as we’ve seen newsrooms shrink and journalists age. We have an aging
group of reporters speaking to an aging group of readers which is smaller and
smaller and which makes up a smaller percentage of the population.
“About 30 years ago, young people just tuned out of newspaper and most media in
general and have never got on board of reading them. By the time we have the
internet come along, the media is already in very bad shape in this country by
a whole series of mergers and acquisitions that end up saddling most of the
major media in this country with huge amounts of debt.”
Q: You write about Harper facilitating the “creation of arm’s-length
sycophantic media” to help messaging, float trial balloons, etc. Who are you
referring to and how did this happen?
“There are ones that are outright controlled by Harper, like the [PMO video
series] 24/7, which doesn’t seem to have really got off the ground very well.
That was a try anyway. Most media are much more deferential to power than it
used to be, much more. You have a few reporters who are working very hard to
investigate stuff but, by and large, a lot of coverage on the Hill these days
is just coverage of really non-news.
The Sun News Network is almost like a parody how pro-Conservative government
they are. Those are the two that are really obvious.
There’s a lot of work that’s been done with ethnic media to really put them in
the pocket of the Conservatives all across the country.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Whether or not they’ll stay in the pocket of whatever party’s in government
remains to be seen.”
Q: Can you elaborate on that work?
“It was work that was done by Jason Kenney. He and people who were media
strategists in the Conservative Party realized that the ethnic media, which was
really considered to be in the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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pocket of the Liberals, was open for business and that if they met and
connected with ethnic publishers, and ethnic editors and reporters, they could
get a lot of positive coverage.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
They’ve used that very well. They’ve been able to set up Stephen Harper in
interview situations that have given relatively minor publications access to
him that really large media organizations in Canada would envy. In return [the
Conservatives] have been given stellar coverage in urban ridings in ethnic
media that have allowed them to break through in places like the 905 and
Vancouver.”
Q: You make the distinction between journalists and insiders, or “information
mongers,” and later characterize Hill journalists as “ciphers” getting reaction
to manufactured issues. How did that happen?
“It’s always existed where reporters were used by politicians, but I think what
really got it going was this close circle of TV coverage and reliance on
Question Period. Once access to real information got cut off—in other words
once people stopped getting interviews with public officials like Cabinet
ministers and senior bureaucrats and experts—they still had to keep writing
stories. People turned to the old familiar, which is the scrum.
“It’s become something that has to be gathered cheaply, that has to be gathered
without access to a lot of expertise—people like Cabinet ministers, MPs that
are in the know, senior bureaucrats, and experts and government lawyers, all
those people who used to be good sources of news and would keep reporters
well-informed of what they were writing about. At the same time, the goat has
to be fed and because stories are shorter and news clips are shorter, really
the best way of feeding the goat is the worst way of gathering news and that’s
the scrum—relying on Question Period, picking out two or three issues from
Question Period, raising issues on those, and then looking to the media to sort
of feed this again for the next day. The news has become very predictable, very
staged. The fake indignation is so fake that people really do understand that
it’s fake. It doesn’t fool the public when you see the bogus rage of Question
Period and it really troubles people to see the way, I think, governments don’t
really answer questions and don’t really give people much information anymore.
“Things like the staged announcement, which we’re seeing a lot more of now and
we’re going to see this build up as we head toward an election, this sort of
stuff used to be done in Parliament. The idea that government now is a
travelling road show, a sort of Santa Claus handing out goodies with local
media writing their thrilling stories about it, it’s become a cliché and it
doesn’t make for very good government and it makes for terrible media.”
Q: What do you think the Hill media should be doing to fight back and are they
doing enough?
“I think the Hill media’s working as hard as it can. There are only so many
hours in the day. You have a core group of Hill media who break pretty much
every political story going—people like Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, Mike de
Souza, Dean Beeby, David McKie at CBC. We’ve got probably like 10 reporters on
Parliament Hill who are the best reporters we’ve ever had on the Hill, who are
not sucking up to Cabinet ministers for little snippets of information, who
aren’t insiders in the way I describe insiders in the book—I think people would
be surprised at how I describe insiders in a very sort of contemptuous way in
the book—and who share what they find out with the public. But there’s only so
many of those people. The government of Canada is very huge and the media that
they work for gets smaller and smaller and smaller all the time. There’s less
money for investigations and less space to run their stories. Unless there’s
obvious public interest in those stories, which are quite expensive to gather,
the media managers may not really think that this is a worthwhile way of
spending their money.”
Q: What about the press gallery itself as an institution? It passed a motion
recently about “the right to ask questions in all photo-ops and availabilities”
etc.
“It’s been pretty weak. The gallery has lost every battle that it’s fought. The
gallery operates in a way that reflects how the media used to be.
“The letters and meetings with Harper’s communications directors haven’t
worked. I can’t think of a single instance where the gallery’s diplomacy has
succeeded in reversing something that the Harper people have done. I guess they
have to look at litigation, or being more connected to people who fight for
access to information might help.
“They’re fighting on a battlefield where they’ve already lost and they haven’t
won anything back. There’s a belief among a lot of people in the gallery that
if Stephen Harper loses that everyone will be fine, that Justin Trudeau or Tom
Mulcair would come in and turn the clock back to 2005 and everything would be a
lot better, but I don’t believe that that will happen. I really believe that
what Stephen Harper’s done is so tempting to anybody else who gets in and so
efficient in the way it’s sidelined the press that no politician would really,
unless their arms are twisted, would ever turn the clock back.”
Q: What has been the long-term effect of Harper’s media and communications
strategy on government and the media?
“The long-term effect is to change the way the media works and it’s redefined
the media to a lot of Canadians as sort of more gadfly than important factors
in democracy. I think that’s something that the media’s going to have a hard
time shaking. It’s something that Obama’s White House has done too, to create
this idea that the press does not have a role in the system. It’s basically a
bunch of spectators trying to make some money off of prying into other peoples’
business. Reporters aren’t covering politics to pry into other peoples’ business.
“They’re covering politics to pry into the nation’s business. We only have one
democratic institution that represents all Canadians and that’s the House of
Commons. If Canadians don’t know what it does, and if it doesn’t function
effectively, then we don’t have a national democracy anymore. It’s as simple as
that. If we have a house that is completely controlled by one party to the
point where bills can’t even be debated and committees can’t even be given
realistic consideration, where reporters don’t cover the debates even when they
happen, where people have no idea of how the bureaucracy works and what it’s
doing, we could just turn the government and the country over to some company
and let them run it because it’s not democratic anymore.”
Q: How can the messengers be resurrected?
“I think that people in the next election, voters, should ask that question,
and ask that to politicians—say, ‘What limits are you willing to put on your
own power? How much scrutiny will you accept from a Parliamentary budget
officer or a veterans ombudsman or a police complaints commission or whatever?’
I think the press has to, through the next election campaign, also ask that
question to candidates and spread the answer. I think people need to get behind
the media that we have, if they care about democracy. It’s not really clear
whether people do anymore and that’s scary in its own right. It’s going to cost
whichever party gets into power a lot of energy and a lot of political capital
to rebuild democracy in this country. We need to have that discussion about the
democratic deficit again and do something about it.”
Q: We saw that a bit in 2011 when the election campaign started over the role
of Parliament and contempt of Parliament. Wasn’t that a lesson for parties to
not go that way?
“It started off that way and was brilliantly reframed into the threat of a
coalition government as though the majority of members of Parliament working
together was somehow a bad idea. Every time that political parties get hit with
this kind of remade truth, the opposition parties haven’t handled it well,
haven’t really been able to come out and say, ‘This is just crap. This is not
reality.’ I think the opposition parties went into the last election thinking
it would be about contempt of Parliament and what did that last? Two days? That
was shot down and it was about solid, stable majority government.”
Q: You think there’s enough interest in 2015 to make the importance of
institutions a campaign issue?
“We’re down to the bottom of the ninth. If people want to have a democratic
system, they better figure that out now.
If you have a couple more election cycles like this with a weakening of media,
of Parliamentary scrutiny, of Parliamentary debate, where you have a decay in
voter turnout which is partly caused by the collapse of the media, then I don’t
think people have much choice anymore.
They’ll be so clued out about what’s going on that the political debate will be
about as useful as a bunch of old guys in a Hortons jawing away about Ottawa,
not knowing what they’re talking about and not being able to do anything about
it anymore.”
making statements that the media then passes on to Canadians. From now until
election day, expect the control freak we know as Stephen Harper, to demand
every MP toe his line and to speak from prepared scripts. Should be fun AND
funny to watch . . . .
_____________________________________________
http://www.hilltimes.com/ Monday, Dec. 15, 2014
Harper clampdown, media cuts make for staged, predictable Hill news: Bourrie
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s clampdown on Hill media access, combined with
newsroom cutbacks over the last 25 years, has led to an “arm’s length
sycophantic media,” with “staged” news coverage focused on the “the bogus rage
and fake indignation of Question Period” and based on government-fed “pap,”
says Mark Bourrie, author of the upcoming book, Kill The Messengers: Stephen
Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know.
The federal government doesn’t answer questions anymore, there’s less money for
investigative journalism, and the Hill media have lost every battle they’ve
fought, which is destroying democratic institutions, including Parliament, he says.
“Reporters aren’t covering politics to pry into other peoples’ business.
They’re covering politics to pry into the nation’s business,” Mr. Bourrie says.
“We only have one democratic institution that represents all Canadians and
that’s the House of Commons. If Canadians don’t know what it does, and if it
doesn’t function effectively, then we don’t have a national democracy anymore.
It’s as simple as that.”
Questions about limits on government power, Parliamentary debate and scrutiny,
and information control need to be put to candidates in the 2015 election, said
Mr. Bourrie, before irreversible damage is done to the Parliamentary system.
“We’re down to the bottom of the ninth. If people want to have a democratic
system, they better figure that out now,” he said.
Shortly after finishing a book about media censorship in Canada during the
Second World War, Mr. Bourrie—a history PhD who teaches at Carleton University
and a longtime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery (he’s written
extensively for The Hill Times’ Power & Influence magazine)—turned his thoughts
to the Harper government’s information control.
The idea for Kill the Messengers, to be released Jan. 27 from HarperCollins
Canada, was crystallized in a memo he came across from the war’s chief press
censor.
“After six years of working as press censors, the ones who were involved in the
Second World War press censorship decided that you really couldn’t censor the
press itself, you have to control information at the source,” he said in an
interview last week.
“In other words, it’s almost impossible to put smoke back in the fire or the
genie back in the bottle. If you want to keep information from getting to
people that you don’t want it to get to, you have to make sure it never leaves
the government offices or the other places where you have control over it.”
Mr. Bourrie spent the next two years working on the book about Prime Minister
Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) approach to information control.
Though it devotes a good deal of attention to the government’s media strategy,
the messengers in the title also include people like former Parliamentary
budget officer Kevin Page and former veterans ombudsman Pat Stogran, and
institutions such as the Security Intelligence Review Committee that oversees
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the CBC board of directors.
“All of those people at one point or another have been either done in by Harper
or put into a situation where they’re so controlled that they really can’t do
their job anymore,” he said.
Mr. Bourrie is critical of both the government’s control and the Hill media’s
response, and he describes what’s led to what he considers a largely defanged
press gallery.
The interview has been edited for style and length:
Q: You open the book with a proverb, “In a city that has no watchdogs, the fox
is the overseer.” Can you explain that choice?
“It came from a Time Life book that I found left at a cottage at the time I was
putting together the book proposal. It was one of those things, one of those
really serendipitous moments where I found this cute little quote. It basically
means that when you have no functioning media, which we’re headed towards—we’re
not there yet, of course—where you have no functioning Parliamentary watchdogs,
where you have even an apathetic public that doesn’t watch what’s happening,
and nobody has any ability to find out what’s going on anyway, governments can
do what they want. That’s where I’m afraid we’re going, is a situation where
governments are the only people with a real grip on reality and everybody else
lives in an artificial world created by a weakened, celebrity-obsessed media,
and just basically fed pap by governments.”
Q: What does Harper have against the media? You trace some of it back to
treatment of the Reform and Alliance parties and the early Conservative days.
“Part of it is that and part of it is that it’s a lot easier to function when
you’ve got the media under control.
“The really interesting thing about Harper is that he had one of the best
opportunities, I think, that any modern Prime Minister had of building good
relations with the press in 2006. In 2005-06 he was doing a fairly good job of
making himself available to media, connecting with media. He gave a fabulous
speech at the press gallery dinner before he was elected Prime Minister and
then it was really him that started it with the media. It wasn’t a situation
of someone like Richard Nixon who got pounded and pounded and pounded and
pounded by reporters.
“This was a guy who was on good terms with the media at the time that he turned
around and shut them down—froze them out of information coming out of the
government, put a lock on his own MPs and Cabinet ministers, brought in the
list system for press conferences, stopped having meaningful press conferences,
and put himself into a bubble, which I think was probably ill-advised.”
Q: When did his approach start to change?
“It started fairly soon after the 2006 election. I would say that the list
system after the 2006 election, where they decided they were going to make
reporters put their name on a list and have the Prime Minister’s people decide
who would get to ask questions rather than follow traditions of the gallery,
was an insult to the gallery’s own traditions and it really didn’t, I don’t
think, make life any better for the Prime Minister. But it did really alienate
the gallery.
“But it wasn’t just the press gallery. It was the media’s decisions about
coverage about Ottawa that really fed into this thing and made it a sort of
feedback loop. At the same time Harper’s clamping down on the gallery, there
are all these cuts of bureaus from small newspapers across the country. We
lost a lot of people who were in print on the Hill. It became where you had a
weak media up against a Prime Minister who had decided to reshape the way prime
ministers would deal with the media and I think that has probably reshaped the
way all prime ministers will deal with the media forever.
“I think the most interesting thing I came across was [Carleton professor and
former CBC and Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief] Chris Waddell’s work on the
connection between shutting down media bureaus and voter turnout in places.
That blew me away. You had papers in Hamilton, in London, Ont.—when they closed
their bureaus here, you could actually see a reflection in voter turnout in
those communities. They had always been higher than the places that didn’t have
their own reporter here covering local issues and when they closed the bureaus
they went back down to the same levels as everybody else. That knocked me on my
ass when I came across that. When you can actually see the change in voter
turnout in ridings, not just in one place but in several places, that’s
astounding.”
Q: I think it’s an interesting point you made, too, about papers traditionally
having reporters from the community here to reflect Ottawa back to the
community that they know.
“You look at somebody like [Halifax Chronicle Herald Ottawa bureau chief] Paul
McLeod. He’s really the last one, and his interactions with MPs are so
different from the national media interaction with MPs because they’re talking
about local issues to a local guy who knows those local issues as well as
anybody else would, probably better than most, writing for a local audience.
The discussion that they have, the coverage is so different from the national
horserace coverage. That’s what we’re really missing.”
Q: What led to this weak media? Part of it is economics.
“A lot of it is economics. The recession in 1990 was a big blow to the media, a
lot bigger than media people understand. I talk a lot in the book about how the
changes we think are post-internet are really changes that have continued since
the 1980s as we’ve seen newsrooms shrink and journalists age. We have an aging
group of reporters speaking to an aging group of readers which is smaller and
smaller and which makes up a smaller percentage of the population.
“About 30 years ago, young people just tuned out of newspaper and most media in
general and have never got on board of reading them. By the time we have the
internet come along, the media is already in very bad shape in this country by
a whole series of mergers and acquisitions that end up saddling most of the
major media in this country with huge amounts of debt.”
Q: You write about Harper facilitating the “creation of arm’s-length
sycophantic media” to help messaging, float trial balloons, etc. Who are you
referring to and how did this happen?
“There are ones that are outright controlled by Harper, like the [PMO video
series] 24/7, which doesn’t seem to have really got off the ground very well.
That was a try anyway. Most media are much more deferential to power than it
used to be, much more. You have a few reporters who are working very hard to
investigate stuff but, by and large, a lot of coverage on the Hill these days
is just coverage of really non-news.
The Sun News Network is almost like a parody how pro-Conservative government
they are. Those are the two that are really obvious.
There’s a lot of work that’s been done with ethnic media to really put them in
the pocket of the Conservatives all across the country.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Whether or not they’ll stay in the pocket of whatever party’s in government
remains to be seen.”
Q: Can you elaborate on that work?
“It was work that was done by Jason Kenney. He and people who were media
strategists in the Conservative Party realized that the ethnic media, which was
really considered to be in the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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pocket of the Liberals, was open for business and that if they met and
connected with ethnic publishers, and ethnic editors and reporters, they could
get a lot of positive coverage.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
They’ve used that very well. They’ve been able to set up Stephen Harper in
interview situations that have given relatively minor publications access to
him that really large media organizations in Canada would envy. In return [the
Conservatives] have been given stellar coverage in urban ridings in ethnic
media that have allowed them to break through in places like the 905 and
Vancouver.”
Q: You make the distinction between journalists and insiders, or “information
mongers,” and later characterize Hill journalists as “ciphers” getting reaction
to manufactured issues. How did that happen?
“It’s always existed where reporters were used by politicians, but I think what
really got it going was this close circle of TV coverage and reliance on
Question Period. Once access to real information got cut off—in other words
once people stopped getting interviews with public officials like Cabinet
ministers and senior bureaucrats and experts—they still had to keep writing
stories. People turned to the old familiar, which is the scrum.
“It’s become something that has to be gathered cheaply, that has to be gathered
without access to a lot of expertise—people like Cabinet ministers, MPs that
are in the know, senior bureaucrats, and experts and government lawyers, all
those people who used to be good sources of news and would keep reporters
well-informed of what they were writing about. At the same time, the goat has
to be fed and because stories are shorter and news clips are shorter, really
the best way of feeding the goat is the worst way of gathering news and that’s
the scrum—relying on Question Period, picking out two or three issues from
Question Period, raising issues on those, and then looking to the media to sort
of feed this again for the next day. The news has become very predictable, very
staged. The fake indignation is so fake that people really do understand that
it’s fake. It doesn’t fool the public when you see the bogus rage of Question
Period and it really troubles people to see the way, I think, governments don’t
really answer questions and don’t really give people much information anymore.
“Things like the staged announcement, which we’re seeing a lot more of now and
we’re going to see this build up as we head toward an election, this sort of
stuff used to be done in Parliament. The idea that government now is a
travelling road show, a sort of Santa Claus handing out goodies with local
media writing their thrilling stories about it, it’s become a cliché and it
doesn’t make for very good government and it makes for terrible media.”
Q: What do you think the Hill media should be doing to fight back and are they
doing enough?
“I think the Hill media’s working as hard as it can. There are only so many
hours in the day. You have a core group of Hill media who break pretty much
every political story going—people like Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, Mike de
Souza, Dean Beeby, David McKie at CBC. We’ve got probably like 10 reporters on
Parliament Hill who are the best reporters we’ve ever had on the Hill, who are
not sucking up to Cabinet ministers for little snippets of information, who
aren’t insiders in the way I describe insiders in the book—I think people would
be surprised at how I describe insiders in a very sort of contemptuous way in
the book—and who share what they find out with the public. But there’s only so
many of those people. The government of Canada is very huge and the media that
they work for gets smaller and smaller and smaller all the time. There’s less
money for investigations and less space to run their stories. Unless there’s
obvious public interest in those stories, which are quite expensive to gather,
the media managers may not really think that this is a worthwhile way of
spending their money.”
Q: What about the press gallery itself as an institution? It passed a motion
recently about “the right to ask questions in all photo-ops and availabilities”
etc.
“It’s been pretty weak. The gallery has lost every battle that it’s fought. The
gallery operates in a way that reflects how the media used to be.
“The letters and meetings with Harper’s communications directors haven’t
worked. I can’t think of a single instance where the gallery’s diplomacy has
succeeded in reversing something that the Harper people have done. I guess they
have to look at litigation, or being more connected to people who fight for
access to information might help.
“They’re fighting on a battlefield where they’ve already lost and they haven’t
won anything back. There’s a belief among a lot of people in the gallery that
if Stephen Harper loses that everyone will be fine, that Justin Trudeau or Tom
Mulcair would come in and turn the clock back to 2005 and everything would be a
lot better, but I don’t believe that that will happen. I really believe that
what Stephen Harper’s done is so tempting to anybody else who gets in and so
efficient in the way it’s sidelined the press that no politician would really,
unless their arms are twisted, would ever turn the clock back.”
Q: What has been the long-term effect of Harper’s media and communications
strategy on government and the media?
“The long-term effect is to change the way the media works and it’s redefined
the media to a lot of Canadians as sort of more gadfly than important factors
in democracy. I think that’s something that the media’s going to have a hard
time shaking. It’s something that Obama’s White House has done too, to create
this idea that the press does not have a role in the system. It’s basically a
bunch of spectators trying to make some money off of prying into other peoples’
business. Reporters aren’t covering politics to pry into other peoples’ business.
“They’re covering politics to pry into the nation’s business. We only have one
democratic institution that represents all Canadians and that’s the House of
Commons. If Canadians don’t know what it does, and if it doesn’t function
effectively, then we don’t have a national democracy anymore. It’s as simple as
that. If we have a house that is completely controlled by one party to the
point where bills can’t even be debated and committees can’t even be given
realistic consideration, where reporters don’t cover the debates even when they
happen, where people have no idea of how the bureaucracy works and what it’s
doing, we could just turn the government and the country over to some company
and let them run it because it’s not democratic anymore.”
Q: How can the messengers be resurrected?
“I think that people in the next election, voters, should ask that question,
and ask that to politicians—say, ‘What limits are you willing to put on your
own power? How much scrutiny will you accept from a Parliamentary budget
officer or a veterans ombudsman or a police complaints commission or whatever?’
I think the press has to, through the next election campaign, also ask that
question to candidates and spread the answer. I think people need to get behind
the media that we have, if they care about democracy. It’s not really clear
whether people do anymore and that’s scary in its own right. It’s going to cost
whichever party gets into power a lot of energy and a lot of political capital
to rebuild democracy in this country. We need to have that discussion about the
democratic deficit again and do something about it.”
Q: We saw that a bit in 2011 when the election campaign started over the role
of Parliament and contempt of Parliament. Wasn’t that a lesson for parties to
not go that way?
“It started off that way and was brilliantly reframed into the threat of a
coalition government as though the majority of members of Parliament working
together was somehow a bad idea. Every time that political parties get hit with
this kind of remade truth, the opposition parties haven’t handled it well,
haven’t really been able to come out and say, ‘This is just crap. This is not
reality.’ I think the opposition parties went into the last election thinking
it would be about contempt of Parliament and what did that last? Two days? That
was shot down and it was about solid, stable majority government.”
Q: You think there’s enough interest in 2015 to make the importance of
institutions a campaign issue?
“We’re down to the bottom of the ninth. If people want to have a democratic
system, they better figure that out now.
If you have a couple more election cycles like this with a weakening of media,
of Parliamentary scrutiny, of Parliamentary debate, where you have a decay in
voter turnout which is partly caused by the collapse of the media, then I don’t
think people have much choice anymore.
They’ll be so clued out about what’s going on that the political debate will be
about as useful as a bunch of old guys in a Hortons jawing away about Ottawa,
not knowing what they’re talking about and not being able to do anything about
it anymore.”
