Ford’s fake news hardly an exclusive
NDP, Liberals once ran the same playbook
Mercifully, it is not every government that deploys its paid political staffers as clapping, barking seals.
This appears to be a genuine first for new Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford, and he’s been rightly mocked for using said clappers to cut short press conferences and reporters’ questions by applauding and cheering his every pearl of wisdom.
If it weren’t such a nakedly dopey spectacle, it would be seriously disturbing.
And it may be on the decline; when senior ministers Vic Fedeli and Caroline Mulroney held a press conference Monday to outline the government’s plan for cannabis sales, there was no clapping.
But though many would love to believe that the Ford crew are also the first to indulge in demonstrably fake news — with the Ontario News Now “network” on social media, fronted by a former reporter-turnedformer Ford press secretary Lyndsey Vanstone and paid for by PC Caucus Services, which is to say, the taxpayer — it ain’t so.
In fact, citizens with working memories will remember that the last time one of these little-known caucus services bureaus — every recognized party gets special funding for such ill-defined research and communication activities — came to widespread public attention, it was in connection with the gas plants scandal that dogged the provincial Liberals until their recent demise.
Just earlier this year, David Livingston, the former right-hand man to former premier Dalton McGuinty, was criminally convicted of two charges in the deliberate destruction of documents in the notorious case. Livingston was the chief of staff in McGuinty’s office during the then-premier’s turbulent last months in office in the fall of 2012.
McGuinty himself wasn’t implicated in what Ontario Court Judge Tim Lipson described as a scheme to ensure “no records (about the gas plants) could be retained.”
Livingston was convicted of attempted mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer. His former deputy, Laura Miller, was acquitted on the same charges. It was Miller’s boyfriend, Peter Faist, who actually came into the former premier’s office in early 2012 to wipe the hard drives. He was paid $10,000 to do so by the Liberal Caucus Services Bureau.
It was also a former McGuinty aide, former journalist Ben Chin, who created and read TV-style video reports called the “Liberal News.” Chin is now a senior adviser to federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau.
But in truth, a party making its own propaganda, using direct appeals to voters as an effort to bypass a critical media, dates back even further.
In recent Ontario history, it appears to have begun with (insert shock and horror here) the Bob Rae New Democratic government.
I pause here to thank the great reporter Rick (Badger) Brennan, the former longtime Toronto Star stalwart at Queen’s Park and former president of the QP press gallery.
When the Tories’ Ontario News Now network was first making headlines earlier this month, Brennan tweeted, “… you will recall the Bob Rae NDP gov’t published its own newspaper — looking very much like the Star — because they complained the media was unfair to them and needed their own voice.”
I didn’t recall that, and Brennan didn’t remember much more, but researcher Kirsten Smith found a couple of copies at the Legislative Library at Queen’s Park.
In fairness, it’s unclear now who paid for the paper — public funds or the party’s — and how many editions were ever published.
All the papers say is that they were “a special edition of the Ontario New Democrat” and were “published by the Ontario New Democrats.”
But no wonder Brennan remembered it.
It was an obvious copy of his newspaper, the Star — a broadsheet with the same typeface, same sorts of pages, same sorts of labels (“analysis,” “special report,” “your health,” “news in brief,” “darts and laurels” on the editorial page, etc.) All that distinguished the Ontario Star from the real Star was that the banner was green, not blue, and there were trilliums (the official flower of the province) bookending it.
And burbly; Lyndsey Vanstone had nothing on the good (and anonymous) writers of the Ontario Star.
The first edition is dated “Winter, 1994”, by which point the Rae government was in deep trouble.
Yet in the paper, the good news didn’t stop, from the front-page headline (“Rae government is leading Ontario to new prosperity”) to stories about the information highway, hospital wait lists being slashed, “32,000 fewer households receiving welfare cheques,” and jobs everywhere you looked — 63,000 here, 175,000 there, 50,000 in transit alone.
Lest a sleepy reader have missed the point, there was a sober editorial (perhaps not so different from some that appeared in the real Star) reminding people of the coming election and that Rae’s leadership was “working for Ontario.”
The cherry on the top was a full-page exclusive interview with, guess who, Rae himself, in which he listed his accomplishments and pronounced himself good at the premier’s job and feeling positive about his chances.
By Feb. 21, 1995, with that election about four months away and pollsters predicting a Liberal win, the Ontario Star had shrunk (amusingly) to a Toronto Sun-sized tabloid, though the content remained upbeat and super-happy. Another editorial urged readers to give Rae a second mandate.
He didn’t get it: Harris and the Conservatives swept into power, the Liberals in second and the NDP in third, with only 17 seats.
Happily, whether via social media, as is the fashion now, or old-school fake newspapers, voters know s-t from Shinola.