Over the past three federal elections, few top Conservatives have spent as much time sharing a campaign glass house with the parliamentary media as veteran senator Marjory LeBreton.
Since 2006, the Senate House leader has been a constant presence aboard Stephen Harper’s election tours, often acting as intermediary between the front and the back of the plane.
In an opinion piece published in the post-election edition of Policy Options, LeBreton uses that unique vantage point to cast stones at a media she describes as disconnected from the very story it purported to cover in the lead-up to the May 2 vote.
One of her underlying contentions is that the parliamentary press largely missed the big story of the last campaign because it was too busy drinking its own bathwater through the social media to look a looming Conservative majority in the face.
There are well-documented risks attendant to stone-casting from glass houses and this commentary is not immune to them.
LeBreton’s primary subjects are the journalists who manned Harper’s tour, a media contingent subject to daily ministrations at the hands of Conservative spin doctors.
Her thesis suggests that access to the unvarnished truth is part of the package that is included in the prohibitive price of a media seat on a leader’s tour.
If I have learned anything from covering more than 20 federal and provincial elections, it is that nothing could be further removed from reality.
LeBreton devotes much space to the gap between the expectation of the many journalists on the tour of a minority government and the majority outcome of the vote — a gap she attributes to a collective blind spot toward the Conservatives that distorted the coverage of the Harper campaign.
Full Article
Source: Toronto Star
Since 2006, the Senate House leader has been a constant presence aboard Stephen Harper’s election tours, often acting as intermediary between the front and the back of the plane.
In an opinion piece published in the post-election edition of Policy Options, LeBreton uses that unique vantage point to cast stones at a media she describes as disconnected from the very story it purported to cover in the lead-up to the May 2 vote.
One of her underlying contentions is that the parliamentary press largely missed the big story of the last campaign because it was too busy drinking its own bathwater through the social media to look a looming Conservative majority in the face.
There are well-documented risks attendant to stone-casting from glass houses and this commentary is not immune to them.
LeBreton’s primary subjects are the journalists who manned Harper’s tour, a media contingent subject to daily ministrations at the hands of Conservative spin doctors.
Her thesis suggests that access to the unvarnished truth is part of the package that is included in the prohibitive price of a media seat on a leader’s tour.
If I have learned anything from covering more than 20 federal and provincial elections, it is that nothing could be further removed from reality.
LeBreton devotes much space to the gap between the expectation of the many journalists on the tour of a minority government and the majority outcome of the vote — a gap she attributes to a collective blind spot toward the Conservatives that distorted the coverage of the Harper campaign.
Full Article
Source: Toronto Star
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