The Tories Target the Media

The Tories' top senator thinks the media dropped the ball during election coverage. Didn't anyone tell her the Tories won?

The Conservative party has decided that with the Liberals thoroughly trounced and a wet-behind-the-ears NDP opposition posing little electoral threat, the media are now public enemy No. 1. Tory Senator Marjory LeBreton, writing in Policy Options, analyzes how the mainstream media's predictions – particularly those of reporters on the leaders' tours – about the election turned out to be so wrong. “A good portion of their time was spent talking to or tweeting each other and regurgitating what this pollster or that pundit said,” writes LeBreton. Campaign journalists asked “trivial” questions and wrote “distorted reports” about the leader's tour, leading LeBreton to conclude the public would be better served if the media weren't slavishly committed to the bubble of the leaders' campaigns.

It's a fair point, and one that media organizations rich enough to pay for access to the tours ought to consider. But LeBreton also claims the campaign was “error-free and efficient” (less the security screw-ups, obfuscating the nature of a leaked G8 report, complaints from riding associations over the candidate selection process, and candidates who refused to attend debates), that questions about ex-PMO staffer Bruce Carson's past weren't worth asking (dude's a convicted fraudster), and that five questions a day is more than generous (the other leaders had no such limits) – a case that could only be made if the leader had deigned to speak in anything beyond talking points about "reckless coalitions."

Further, LeBreton suggests that the 84 one-on-one interviews Harper held with local and multicultural news outlets yielded far better discussions than the touring coterie's inquiries. That ignores that these smaller outlets hardly have the resources to commit to sustained political reporting ­– it's akin to letting Jose Bautista swat away underhand pitches on a tour of the minor leagues – nor the impetus to ask questions that a national audience would want to know the answers to.

What, then, does LeBreton propose the media do for the next campaign? Stay at home until the leader rolls through Ottawa to give each outlet a one-on-one? Hope they have capable reporters in each and every hamlet the leader visits? This country is vast, and the only way the mainstream media can access the leaders during a campaign is by jumping on their planes. All we ask is that before someone chastises the media for being inaccurate, they ought to make sure they're not rewriting history themselves.