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The end of the affair

By Kevin Steel ⋅ January 30, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

How Paul Martin’s Liberals lost the love of Canada’s mainstream media

The prime minister’s campaign jet had just touched down in Calgary for an unscheduled fuel stop when Blackberries on the hips of reporters in the media pool started buzzing. Someone shouted from the rear of the plane to the Liberal operatives up at the front, “Your education announcement is on the wires!” There was silence. Then the same voice said, “$7 billion . . . tuition . . . Looks like it’s all there.” The one Liberal adviser sitting among the press, national director Steven MacKinnon, suddenly grabbed his own Blackberry and, with a look of extreme concern, started silently scrolling through the Canadian Press story by Joan Bryden. Prime Minister Paul Martin’s director of communications, Scott Reid, appeared briefly from one of the private cabins at the front of the plane that house the prime minister and his team, and then disappeared. He didn’t look too happy either.

This was a crisis. Martin had been all set to roll out his big education announcement the next day, Thursday, Jan. 5, at a morning news conference in Kitchener, Ont. He and his entourage, including a large contingent of reporters, were flying the rented Starjet 727 late into the evening from Vancouver to Hamilton–and into bad weather–just so he could unveil the new policy at the University of Waterloo with Belinda Stronach, his minister of human resources and skills development, at his side. With CP all over the story the night before, the announcement was sure to be a dud. But more importantly for the reporters who had paid a small fortune to be on the Liberal plane, they were stuck playing catch-up. Their Blackberries were quickly filling up with e-mails from editors looking for some kind of follow-up. Reporters began howling for a press briefing, but none was forthcoming.

“This is intolerable,” groused senior CTV political reporter Tom Clark in a loud voice. “What are we paying ten thousand bucks a week for when we could have stayed home and covered the campaign from Ottawa?”

It was, perhaps, one of the more remarkable moments in the history of Liberal media relations. For years, government critics have complained about what they’ve called a pro-Liberal bias in Canada’s mainstream media organizations. Conservative supporters were livid after the 2004 election, claiming that unflattering coverage of their party had robbed them of the election. In the lead-up to the election, Peter Kent, the longtime news anchor running for the Conservatives in Toronto, had sent a letter to 29 academics at journalism schools across the country asking them to keep a close eye on the tone and balance of the media coverage of the race. He had predicted a festival of Conservative deprecation. “Given my first-hand experience in newsrooms across Canada over the years, I believe that most Canadian journalists are small-l liberals,” he wrote. In September, Harper himself had hinted that the press gallery had it in for his party. “Any Conservative, anywhere, at any time, can, by criticizing other Conservatives, become an instant and enormous media star,” he told his caucus. “That’s just the way it is–we’ll have to get used to it.” Even the former Liberal deputy prime minister Sheila Copps wrote in her Nov. 16 Sun column about the “media bias” favouring Paul Martin, referring to fawning Globe and Mail coverage as a “Liberal love-in.”

But reporters travelling with the prime minister weren’t in a very affectionate mood this day. Their employers had paid for the privilege of having someone on the front lines, to break all the news that needed breaking. And yet, just hours before losing the education policy scoop, the Liberal campaign had screwed them out of another big story. While being interviewed by phone by a Vancouver-area multicultural radio station, Martin offered an official apology for the head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century–a complete reversal from his refusal to offer any contrition earlier in the year. And even though the interview would not air until the next day, no one told the reporters on the bus about the apology, leaving them, once again, completely in the dark when the story broke. Before that, it was another coup by CP’s Bryden, reporting the details of a yet-to-be-announced Liberal health policy. CTV’s Clark would observe ominously to CanWest columnist Don Martin, “Things like this can be a turning point in a campaign.”

He may have been right. Reid would eventually turn up to answer reporters’ questions about the education policy–”on background only,” not on the record. “All I can tell you is that some of the details in the story are wrong and I ask that you hold off on reporting this until the prime minister makes his announcement tomorrow,” Reid said. “Can you tell us what details are wrong?” pleaded a Radio Canada reporter. “We just need confirmation.” Reid abruptly left, refusing to clarify, and refusing to be quoted. The scribes were seething. Whatever love had once existed between this gang and the government was now gone. “I have never seen anything like that in all my years,” says Les Whittington, the veteran Toronto Star reporter. CanWest’s Allan Woods, covering his first national campaign, asked: “Is this what a campaign looks like when it starts to fall apart?”

Few journalists will admit their reports are biased. They all are, in some way, but not every reporter even realizes it. But most aren’t actually rooting for one party or another (save, perhaps, the Globe editors singled out by Copps). Instead, many reporters have long been influenced, not by the Liberals’ policies, but by their professionalism–especially on the campaign trail.

Running a lousy bus tour can be deadly for a campaign. Reporters travelling with former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day in 2000 famously starved on the hustings for lack of catering, forced to beg their handlers to pull off the highway for McDonald’s every so often. The ruthless coverage of Day’s campaign wasn’t strictly the result of several dozen grumbling stomachs–but it had something to do with it. The public may not see it, but things like that can have as big an impact on the tone of coverage as anything. Greg Weston, a columnist with the Sun newspaper chain, says the notion of partisanship in campaign reporting has very little basis in fact. “It’s an idea pushed by those who are trying to cover up the fact that they ran a terrible campaign,” he says.

The Grits have always been famous for understanding the media’s mentality better than any other party, renowned for running the best-organized campaign bus in the business. Reporters have always been well fed and well taken care of. Events have been planned to accommodate reporters’ schedules, allowing them ample time to write and file their stories, and those on the campaign bus are usually allowed to listen in on live feeds of any interviews given by the prime minister so they can be sure they’re always in the loop. There’s plenty of assistance on offer from Liberal aides when there are follow-up questions. But this time, none of that was enough to make up for all the things that had gone horribly wrong.

Reminded of his remark about the missed scoops–followed by Reid’s failure to control the subsequent damage–marking a campaign “turning point,” Clark says that while he may have been a bit flip, “I think every campaign ultimately defines itself among the journalists as being a competent campaign, or a campaign that’s falling apart, or a campaign that’s gaining momentum,” he says. “What we’ve seen this week is a series of missteps and responses that were inadequate, creating a mood that this campaign is running on half a cylinder. They’re off-script, off-message, and they couldn’t seem to get it back.” He remembers a similar turning point in the 2004 election. Someone on the Harper campaign had issued a rather tasteless press release accusing Paul Martin of supporting child pornography because the Liberals had refused to back opposition motions aimed at strengthening child porn laws. That was bad enough, says Clark, but what was worse was the way the Tories handled it: they froze. Reporters were unable to get comments from anyone on the bus or in the party’s war room. “They had no communications response to their biggest screw-up of the campaign,” says Clark. On the day the news release went out, June 18, 2004, polls showed Harper’s support rising to neck and neck with Martin at around 31 per cent. By June 22, the Tories had sunk by at least six points, and never recovered.

Clark says that reporters joining the campaign tours do so with some wariness to begin with. “You walk into this knowing what they are trying to do is manipulate you every single second of every single day; you try and resist that as much as you can,” he says. “When you are manipulated to an extent where it hurts your credibility as a journalist, that’s the line in the sand.” When reporters find themselves faced with a wall of silence, as with the Conservative response to the press release, or faced with the inexplicable leaks of Liberal strategy, they get riled. “There’s no answer forthcoming, then you have to open the possibility that this is an extra layer of manipulation,” says Clark.

Reporters on the Martin campaign seemed to become almost consumed with the Liberal bungling. They began filing stories speculating that there might be a mole in the Liberal war room deliberately leaking stories to hurt Martin. The spectre of campaign workers turning on each other wasn’t much more flattering to the Liberals than the more banal explanation–that the Martin campaign was being poorly managed. When Martin did get around to announcing his education plan (it matched almost exactly the details CP had reported the previous evening), the subsequent news conference was dominated by questions about the leaked story, the possibility of a mole and then, tough questions about the income trust scandal that had been dogging the Grits since December. Only a few reporters bothered asking anything pertaining to education policy.

It was becoming increasingly clear that the media pool had been poisoned. The next day, at a Whitby, Ont., seniors’ centre, after Martin announced hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for seniors and the disabled, the press seemed openly hostile to Martin. There were more questions about the possibility of a Liberal saboteur, and about the apparent troubles in the Martin campaign. To make matters worse, as Allan Woods of CanWest was beginning to ask for the prime minister’s response to breaking news about fresh scandal–the possibility of bogus billing by a Quebec group called Option Canada–he was cut off by Liberal handlers. The prime minister walked out of the room, leaving reporters shouting questions at his back. Those in the audience at the seniors’ centre were left to sit there, unaware of the story behind the scenes, wondering what exactly was going on.

By Jan. 7, it was the Liberals who were complaining about journalistic bias. In her “Election Notebook,” Globe and Mail reporter Jane Taber quoted senior party workers describing the media coverage they were getting as “brutal.” Said one: “We just can’t get a break.”

What happened to the Big Red Machine and its ability to run the kind of campaign that could keep happy reporters reliably filing upbeat stories? Some suggest it was the victim of its own success. The Liberals have become so used to problems being something you’ll find only on those other campaign buses, that they were unprepared when they found themselves having to work damage control.

To be sure, up until now, the Conservatives have been running an impressively smooth race, with a campaign bus as impeccably run as that of their rivals. A steady diet of policy announcements through December had given scribes on the Tory bus plenty of front page fodder. Meanwhile, those on the Liberal bus, watching Martin sleepwalk through the first few weeks of the campaign, were left wondering when they’d get a chance to see their byline above the fold. Martin’s team may have been gambling that they wouldn’t need the kind of policy rollouts and jackrabbit campaign stops that Harper was busy with. They’d need only wait for the Tories to shoot themselves in the foot. So far, that hasn’t happened (though there’s still time), and the wager has cost the Liberals severely.

The Martin team has never truly proven itself on the hustings, notes Sid Noel, professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. Last year’s victory was really just a gift from the Tories. “Martin only managed to pull out a minority victory in 2004 . . . campaigning from coast to coast very hard in the last three days of that election while Stephen Harper stayed at home in Alberta,” Noel says. “The Martin team ran a terrible campaign in 2004, and they seem to have learned nothing and are running an even worse one in 2005.”

Paul Martin and those around him had spent the last several years focused entirely on another rival: former prime minister Jean Chr?tien, whom they succeeded in forcing out in December 2003. But in clearing out Chr?tien, and with him, all his crack strategists, the Martinites hadn’t prepared themselves for fighting a real election campaign, let alone two in as many years. “They were focused on leadership campaigns and replacing an incumbent leader,” says Noel. “They proved themselves very adept at that. But when it comes to the national campaign, they stumble about like rank amateurs. Facing a negative media, they don’t appear to have a communications strategy to deal with it.” Judging by polls which had them leading at the election’s start, the Liberal party has convinced large swaths of the voting public to forgive them for 13 years of financial cock-ups, such as the gun registry and the human resources boondoggle. They even got folks to pardon them for the sponsorship scandal, which revealed some of the worst charges of corruption ever seen in this country. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the only thing that appears poised to undo Canada’s once-natural governing party, may be their complete cluelessness in appeasing a less-forgiving constituency: a busload of betrayed reporters.

[This article appeared in the January 30, 2006 issue of the Western Standard.]