FROLITICKS

Toronto Councillor Doug Ford, the brother of the city’s controversial Mayor Rob Ford, has accused the media as practising [Soviet] Stalin-era Pravda journalism and has blamed a left-wing “media conspiracy” for the Mayor’s continuing problems. What does this say about the relationship between the media and today’s politicians? It’s no surprise that certain political leaders, such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper, try to stay clear of media scrums. In Harper’s case, any regular media events are strictly controlled and orchestrated to publicize the ruling party’s objectives. Let’s face it, the media can make or break political careers. Like his career, Rob Ford’s recent handling of the media has been a mess.

One must remember that reporters or journalists are put in place to represent the public. They’re trained and obligated to ask the questions that people would ask if they could speak to the leaders directly. After all, when the Fords and Harpers refuse to answer reporters’ questions, they’re refusing to answer the people’s questions. Some politicians even attempt to bypass the media either through their own talk shows as in the case of the Fords or through the practice of holding press conferences without taking questions. Such efforts to bypass the media speak to an alarming trend of addressing voters without the checks and balances that journalists are meant to provide. One important reason why we have freedom of the press is because we want politicians’ statements to be subjected to intense scrutiny. So what is lost (when politicians speak directly) is that needed scrutiny of those statements. Good journalists do their homework, and are usually better prepared to ask those tough questions.

In Canada and the U.S., there is little doubt that many people have become suspicious of the press in recent years, labelling some media representatives as either too “leftist” or “right wing”. For this reason, the “blame the media” strategy has worked to an extent. In some cases, such as in the Rob Ford situation, supporters of a particular viewpoint can easily lump the media in with the so-called “elites” — who supposedly don’t care about the average person. What people fail to realize is that the media is simply reporting the news, normally with as many facts and careful objective scrutiny as is required.

Of course, the media itself can be manipulated by politicians themselves. Indeed, Rob Ford has offered photo availabilities with his family in the past for his own political reasons. When things began to turn bad in the media (claiming an expectation of privacy) he immediately lambasted the press for approaching or indirectly referring to his family. Sorry Mayor Ford, you can’t have it both ways! If he were, at any point, to ask the media to refrain from taking photos of his children or his wife, the media would very likely have respected that and stopped. However, he never did.

Then there are those crazy off-the-cuff scrums before the media. Mayor Ford could have and should have made himself available for more real press conferences, with one question and follow up at a time. You see President Obama doing these all the time. Or he could have done more longer sit down interviews with one reputable media outlet which could ask follow up questions and broadcast or show the entire video of the interview. Either way, the public would have been able to see and judge his answers to every question still unanswered. From this example, one can only conclude that he and numerous other politicians should relearn all about media relations and stop blaming the messenger for each of their faux pas. After all, the free press thankfully isn’t going away any time soon.