I love these paragraphs in an article this moring at the Star Phoenix (Saskatoon) by John Gormley because they reflect much of what I say all the time, meaning of course that they’re right on the mark:
Harper won’t dance to media tune
[…] Harper learned that the national media’s self-appointed job is not to make government leaders look good. Quite the opposite is true.
There are diligent, bright and decent journalists covering Canadian politics, but many others prefer the pack mentality, playing “gotcha” and generally making life miserable for politicians.
Compounding things is the justified suspicion of political bias—bolstered by several studies in the past 25 years—that journalists vote Liberal and NDP in greater proportion than the general public.
This is best manifested by the media’s congenital need to fix labels on politicians, particularly Conservatives who don’t measure up to the mainstream media’s self-prescribed standards.
Since the 1960s, the political media have jotted down simple sticky notes on the foreheads of conservative leaders. To the political media John Diefenbaker was a thin-skinned, paranoid Prairie radical; Bob Stanfield was clumsy and boring; Joe Clark needed idiot strings for his mittens; Brian Mulroney was a slick liar, Preston Manning a geeky neophyte, Stockwell Day was portrayed as a radical religious nutball, and on the list goes.
Once the label is affixed, it is easy to shape the interpretation and presentation of facts to carefully fit the stereotype.
[…]But, ironically, the roles of politician and media have been reversed this time, as now certain reporters are behaving with the petulance of scorned lovers being ignored. And this has ratcheted up the labelling of Stephen Harper.
The chosen media label in recent days—at least among the usual suspects at the CBC, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail—is that Harper is pro-American or “George Bush Lite.”
[…]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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