Party president John Walsh sent an email to the supporters Friday evening that lumped the media together with the Liberal Party as the Conservatives’ opponents.
“Here’s the bad news — the Liberal fundraising machine is in overdrive, and we need to keep up,” Walsh wrote in the email pitch.
“We can’t let Liberal attacks and the media stop us from reaching our goal.”
Walsh’s pitch echoed an email sent supporters in November by Justice Minister Peter MacKay to highlight Justin Trudeau’s stance on the legalization of marijuana.
“We need your financial support so we can fight back against Trudeau and his allies in the media — who are still making excuses for his mistakes.”
(The Citizen received these fundraising pitches after submitting an email address to a Conservative Party website that encouraged users to send Happy Mother’s Day greeting to Harper’s wife, Laureen,)
Conservatives seems to be taking its cues from Sun News Network, a TV channel with close ties to the governing party. Sun hosts repeatedly use the phrase “Media Party” and allege a conspiracy by journalists — other than their own — to attack conservative politicians and bolster the Liberal leader.
While the Harper Tories have long taken an adversarial posture toward the parliamentary press gallery, the notion that journalists are in league against the Tories has featured prominently this year in party fundraising drives.
The Conservative’s director of political operations, Fred DeLorey, made the media the prime focus of email to supporters in October that kicked off, “You won’t believe what the Press Gallery just did in Ottawa.”
DeLorey claimed the media had boycotted Harper’s speech to caucus before the Speech from Throne in October.
“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.”
DeLorey did not mention, however, that the media organizations, save for Sun News, refused to cover the speech because the Prime Minister’s Office would allow only camera operators, not reporters, into the meeting.
Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Ontario MP Paul Calandra, also in joined with a statement in the House of Commons accusing the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of inappropriately paying journalist Glenn Greenwald for work on a story about U.S. National Security Agency leaks.
Calandra described Greenwald as “former porn producer” and alleged that “CBC is trying to justify the violation of its own ethical standards by claiming that Greenwald is a freelancer.”
The attacks on the press come after a year of intense media coverage of the Senate expense scandal, which, ironically, starred two Conservative senators who used to be journalists — Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin.
Duffy’s expenses and the secret payoff by the prime minister’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, were discovered only through reporting by journalists.
The network that broke the Wright story, CTV, was turned down for a year-end interview with Harper, though the network has a long history of Christmastime chats with prime ministers.
Postmedia News, owned by the same company as the Citizen, was granted an interview.
In May, Conservative Senator Marjory LeBreton also lashed out a journalists over the expenses story.
“I am a Conservative and I know more than most that around this town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles, tut-tutting about our government and yearning for the good old days that we are never given the benefit of the doubt and are rarely given credit for all the good work that we do,” she said.
LeBreton later left her job as government leader in the Senate amid questions about PMO interference in an audit of Duffy’s expenses.
A Citizen analysis showed this month that Conservatives have grown even more wary of journalists since the Senate scandal first broke last December. Transcripts of the daily “scrums” outside the House of Commons show that Conservative MPs reporters spoke less often and said fewer words to journalists after question period than they did in any year since 2010.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: Glen McGregor
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