Media-bashing
If they hate you, you must be doing something right. I don’t know if that’s good reasoning, but a lot of reporters fall back on it to explain why politicians and political activists seem to despise harmless little scribblers like me with such gusto.
All politicians and political parties like to bash the media, but recently I got to see a particularly virulent example of media-bashing at the Reform party’s Vancouver convention, where a condemnation of the media appears to have been a condition of party membership.
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When it came time to discuss what had gone so wrong in the party to lead it into so much trouble, the answer, given by Manning and many other Reformers, was: Blame the media, but keep your mouth shut so we don’t get in trouble again.
For four days the attack on the media continued, as reporters watched bemusedly. It seemed quite strange, sitting beside openly right-wing journalists from Saturday Night magazine and Alberta Report, to hear “the media” described as a liberal conspiracy to sink Reform.
But no stranger than hearing Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and many NDP activists frequently attack the media. In 1995, Romanow summed up well how political bosses like him see reporters. He compared the politician-reporter relationship to that of the characters in “The Defiant Ones.”
In that film, two prison convicts who hate each other escape, but are chained together and are forced to learn to live together or end up back in the can.
I don’t know if any of us despised Romanow as much as he was suggesting he despised us, but maybe he was right about one thing. Politicians and journalists are chained together.
While journalists seem used to the idea, Reform’s political neophytes are not. So stop whining. You’re supposed to be a grown-up party now.
