There’s a growing frustration about the lack of media access to the PM which resulted in some Parliamentary Press Gallery members refusing to send cameras into a photo-opportunity of Mr. Harper’s speech to the Conservative caucus on Oct. 16 because no reporters were allowed.
Hill reporters say the PMO’s move to limit reporters at last week’s speech in Centre Block’s grand old Reading Room is “unprecedented” and “will not end well for the Tories.”
Press gallery president Daniel Thibeault, who works for Radio-Canada TV, told The Hill Times that bureau chiefs in charge of cameras and photographers raised concerns the evening before the caucus meeting took place when they received an advisory stating that Mr. Harper would be addressing the Conservative caucus at 9:30 a.m. in its regular meeting room, 237-C Centre Block, the Reading Room. The advisory stated it was a “photo opportunity only (cameras and photographers only)” and that media should arrive by 9 a.m.
Mr. Thibeault said he doesn’t consider what transpired a “boycott,” but rather the gallery members “responding to an invitation” that was different in past practice.
“In the end, no one was invited in. If you saw what happened the doors were never opened, they never let anyone in, they never asked if camera people wanted to come in. It was one member who decided to send his camera in and they used the side door to get him in so they wouldn’t have to deal with the group of us that were assembled by the door where we usually go in for those kinds of moments,” he said.
Mr. Thibeault said the Prime Minister’s Office offered to allow a pool reporter into the meeting at 9:45 a.m.
Mr. Thibeault also noted that having a pool reporter in the Reading Room would break with past practice. Normally, pool reporters are used when there physically isn’t enough space for many reporters to cover the event. In this case, the gallery’s pool rules would go into effect, which means that a Canadian Press reporter would be inside the meeting and reporting to other members. In this instance, however, there was enough physical space for several reporters and cameras, as has been done in the past for several other photo-ops at caucus meetings for all parties.
“It’s important because how can you report if you’re not there? A reporter’s job is to witness, to listen, to watch. There’s a lot of sense you get when you’re in a room about the reaction to the speech and the way the speech is given, about the tone. I mean, this is what reporters do. They go on location, they witness something, and they report it back to the best of their ability. To be told that you’ll get the script later on by email and that should do it is not the way reporters do their job,” said Mr. Thibeault.
National Post columnist John Ivison told The Hill Times that Mr. Harper likes to “divide and conquer,” and that previously, this strategy worked because at the end of the day, all media outlets are competitors.
“He likes to be on one side of an issue where the other parties are on the other side. He knows on the media front, the bottom line is we’re competitors, it’s not a trade union here, so in which case, it always worked because there would always be somebody who would take the bait and put their name on the list or whatever the issue du jour was,” Mr. Ivison said. “This one was different. The only people who broke that boycott were Sun Media. Without disparaging Sun Media, that’s not really what the Prime Minister wanted to kick off the day of his Throne Speech. I suspect he wanted pictures of him rallying the troops without any inconvenient questions from journalists.”
Mr. Ivison said despite the PMO offering a pool reporter into the photo-op, gallery members did the right thing in standing together to refuse to go along with the PMO’s terms.
“There’s a principle at stake … that reporters are allowed in to these affairs to do their job,” he said. “Normally reasonable people decided that this was beyond the pale, and I think they were quite right to do so. It’s maybe a fight that the PMO is ill-advised to take on.”
And if the Conservatives are deliberately picking a fight with the media to rally their base, Mr. Ivison said, it “will not end well” for them.
“There seems to be some resolve on the part of the bureau chiefs. I’m an observer in this. I’m not involved in this, I don’t send camera crews anywhere, but as an observer it seems to me that picking a fight there you’re going to get less coverage and at the moment they need all the positive coverage they can get,” he said.
Sun TV was the only media outlet that went into the caucus meeting and reported last week that it had “exclusive” video of Mr. Harper’s speech to the Conservative caucus.
David Akin, Sun Media’s Parliamentary bureau chief, tweeted: “So it appears Harper photo-op has started in the CPC caucus room. Long story but many media outlets refusing to cover this photo-op.”
In a follow up, he tweeted: “PMO refused my request to attend photo-op, but allowed an SNN cameraman in. We’ll find out later what the big secret was.”
And later: “I’d like to dispel the notion that there was a ‘boycott’ by the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Only some orgs decided to ‘boycott.’”
He later posted the link to the video footage with the tweet “The @PMHarper caucus speech we dared to film and broadcast!” and chastised reporters for going over to the NDP caucus meeting. “Same reporters and cameras [went] right across the hall to record ‘propaganda’ from NDP caucus. No questions asked!”
Mr. Thibeault said the point of allowing reporters into the Conservative caucus was not to ask questions, but to do their jobs.
“Access is important to us. A reporter needs to report. To report, you need to see what’s going on,” he said. “We walked in and no one was looking to ask questions that I know of. No one came up to me and said I want to ask a question to Prime Minister Harper. We went into the NDP caucus for the same kind of photo-op. We walked in, there was a speech, we walked out, that’s the way it works.”
In a blog post, Mr. Akin said that news organizations should do what’s best for their audience and Sun News believed it important to cover Mr. Harper’s speech.
“One other reason I preferred to avoid participating in a boycott was because I believed the PMO was looking to pick a fight with the Parliamentary Press Gallery to help with fundraising and to rally the Conservative base. In my view, it’s probably not a helpful thing for a group of journalists to be any party’s fundraising foil. Make no mistake: The PMO picked this fight. But I, for one, would rather find other ways to fight for more access and transparency than provide a politician with an excuse to mobilize a political party’s base,” he said. “And sure enough, this evening, the Conservative Party of Canada is out raising money for re-election thanks to the Parliamentary Press Gallery.”
The same day, after the Throne Speech, Conservative Party director of political operations Fred DeLorey sent an email to Conservative supporters saying the boycott was a “new low” for the media.
“You won’t believe what the press gallery just did in Ottawa. Some media decided to boycott an important speech by our Prime Minister—one where he laid out his vision for our country, before today’s Speech from the Throne,” he wrote. “Rather than send cameras to cover the Prime Minister’s speech, they attended the NDP’s meeting, and were welcomed with cheers and applause. We knew they wouldn’t give us fair coverage—but this is a new low for the Ottawa media elite.”
Mr. DeLorey then included a link to Mr. Harper’s speech—“Since you won’t see this speech on the evening news,” he told Conservative supporters.
In response to Mr. DeLorey’s email to supporters, Mr. Ivison tweeted: “They’ve just put out a fundraising letter saying ‘Ottawa media elite’ didn’t give them fair coverage. Letter says media attended NDP meeting, not ‘important speech by our PM.’ ‘This is a new low.’ No mention that reporters were barred! This is so misleading, so egregious.”
Mr. Ivison told The Hill Times last week that he was “insulted by that letter which suggested that we were all yucking it up with the NDP and we ignored the Prime Minister” and that he was likely not alone in feeling that way.
“I mean, clearly that is not what happened. The doors were barred for the media to go into the Conservative Party and across the hallway, the door was open. What did they suspect was going to happen?”
Mr. Thibeault agreed, saying, “I think anyone who was there [Oct. 16] would clearly see that Mr. DeLorey’s interpretation is far from what really happened. As far as what you decide to do for partisan political purposes with incidents like that, the Conservatives have their way of doing that, other parties do other things. I think if you were there, it’s not the way it unfolded.”
CTV News reported on the letter on its new blog and posted a photo of the closed doors to the Conservative caucus meeting, saying, “The media did enter the NDP caucus for a couple of minutes to shoot leader Tom Mulcair. I can’t speak for the gallery, but it seemed more resourceful than staring at this door.”
Mr. DeLorey did not return an email to The Hill Times by deadline last week asking whether the Conservative Party was indeed looking to “pick a fight” with the media.
Meanwhile, Jason Leitaer, former head of the Conservative Resource Group, tweeted in response to the day’s events: “I remember an election where the media reported relentlessly on the amount of questions and how they were asked. We won. Handily.”
There have been a series of run-ins between the press gallery and the Prime Minister’s Office since Mr. Harper took power in 2006, ranging from no longer announcing Cabinet meetings and eliminating “Cabinet outs” where reporters could scrum ministers, to forcing reporters who wanted to ask him questions to go on a PMO-approved list at press conferences and then limiting the number of allowable questions and to Mr. Harper not taking any questions on the Hill outside of when foreign dignitaries are in town. One of the few opportunities for access to Mr. Harper is travelling with him to foreign countries at trade and economic summits, and even then, Hill reporters, who pay thousands of dollars to get on the plane, say the questions there are often limited to two per day and can also vary from none to four.
OMNI Ottawa bureau chief David Battistelli told The Hill Times last week that the latest event was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and the gallery collectively decided to push back.
“No reporters, whatsoever. It’s a bad precedent. It’s in the Reading Room, there’s been a lot of events in there, a lot of times reporters have been in there to cover special caucuses or speeches, or what have you, and the exclusion of reporters was just something that wasn’t acceptable to the gallery collective,” Mr. Battistelli said, noting that what likely brought the PMO to this decision was because of two recent incidents where reporters and a cameraman tried to ask questions during photo-ops.
In the first incident, reporters were allowed into the caucus meeting in which Mr. Harper was addressing the Senate expenses scandal and, at the end of it, reporters attempted to ask questions from the back of the same room. In the second incident, while travelling with Mr. Harper in New York, CTV cameraman Dave Ellis asked a question during a photo-op about former Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.) being charged for violating the Elections Act. Mr. Ellis was accredited to go to Malaysia on Mr. Harper’s plane on a subsequent trip, but CTV said it was later told by PMO that he was no longer allowed to go. In the end, he did go on that assignment.
“I can only assume that the PMO did not like that and they did not want to recreate that situation in this instance,” Mr. Battistelli said. “People have called it a boycott, but it was really the gallery as a collective saying, ‘We can’t live with those terms.’ I think it is something that I perceive as a growing frustration within the gallery that the PMO is exercising control that people are feeling. … I think it’s just a byproduct of that.”
Mr. Thibeault said he believed that what happened last week was an isolated incident.
“It wasn’t an organized protest, and there hasn’t been a discussion on what do we do in the future. It was about this incident,” he said. “I see it as a one-off, at this point. I wasn’t there when they [the PMO] took that decision. I can’t tell you what was behind that decision. I’m assuming this is an isolated case. I don’t read anymore into it than that.”
PMO communications director Jason MacDonald was travelling with Mr. Harper last week and could not be reached for comment on whether reporters would be allowed to cover future photo-ops.
Mr. Ivison agreed it was a “one-off” but that the gallery would remain united if it happens again.
“If that’s now the modus operandi of the PMO, that there’s going to be even more limitations on access to the Prime Minister, then I think there will be a push back,” he said. “I thought it was justified on this occasion, for sure. It depends what the PMO does in the future. Are they going to decide this is the way things are going to be forward? I certainly think that it would set a bad precedent. Access is pretty limited as it is.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
No comments:
Post a Comment