Conservatives are preparing to battle with reporters
Ex-Harper spokesperson says Tories’ plan meant to energize supporters
OTTAWA— The Conservative party appears to be gearing up for a fight with news outlets as part of its 2019 electoral strategy.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s office has revamped its communications team to provide a more rapid-response, war room-style operation. And it has not been shy about calling out reporting it doesn’t like.
At a rally in downtown Ottawa last Sunday, Scheer said he would stand up to “the media” and accused journalists of siding with the Liberals in the carbon tax debate.
“We don’t always get the same kind of coverage that (Trudeau) gets in the mainstream media. Have you noticed that?” Scheer asked supporters.
“(Trudeau has) got the media on his side, he’s got the pundits, he’s got the academics and think-tanks, everyone who wants to lecture you on how to spend your own money and how to live your own life.”
Members of Scheer’s caucus, too, have joined in. On Thursday, finance critic Pierre Poilievre called a journalist for the Bloomberg business wire a “Liberal reporter.”
The same day, Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos accused Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells of being a “liberal” masquerading as an independent journalist. Earlier this year, Michelle Rempel, the party’s immigra- tion critic, suggested the Canadian Press newswire took marching orders from the prime minister’s office. Andrew MacDougall, who served as director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper and who now writes columns for Canadian newspapers, said these attacks on the media are a deliberate strategy to energize the Conservative base.
“(The 2019 election) really will be an elite, or an establishment, or an opinion-forming establishment against the Conservatives (and that’s) what they’re trying to gin up,” MacDougall told the Star.
The relationship between Harper and the national press was notoriously chilly. And Scheer appears to be taking the feud a step further as he approaches his first election as Conservative leader.
“The carbon tax being the ultimate issue, where this is kind of a policy that’s almost universally supported by academics, economists, pundits ... the Conservatives are betting that there’s more of a commonsense crowd who still have to gas up their car, who will be open to a message that this is elitism ignoring your concerns,” MacDougall said.
Former Conservative strategist Jason Lietaer also referenced the carbon tax debate, saying it’s a sore point for Conservatives that most of the reporting on the issue puts the Liberals’ plan in a positive light.
“It’s obviously born out of some frustration,” Lietaer said. “And as an observer, there’s essentially 100 per cent consen- sus on the carbon tax (that) has probably exacerbated that frustration.”
Politicians taking issue with those who cover them is nothing new, and there’s nothing improper about correcting the record when journalists get things wrong.
But with the current climate in the United States, where President Donald Trump has accused the press of being “enemies of the people,” some in the media and beyond have expressed dismay at the Conservatives’ apparent anti-press turn.
But Brock Harrison, Scheer’s director of communications, said the Conservatives’ focus on media is meant to point out specific inaccuracies or to counter columnists’ criticisms, not to broadly demonize journalists as the Trump administration has done.
Harrison told the Star, the party will not let “instances of inaccurate reporting or attacks on our record (go) unchallenged.”
Jacqui Delaney, Scheer’s di- rector of media relations and a former Sun News Network anchor, echoed that sentiment in a September tweet, writing she goes “for the jugular” of media organizations that think they can “throw around labels and accusations without challenge.”
But MacDougall warned there is a danger if the Conservatives go too far. On Wednesday, CNN’s New York offices had to be evacuated after a suspected pipe bomb was found in the mail.
A second improvised explosive sent to CNN contributor and former Obama administration official James Clapper was discovered on Friday.
And there are other journalists and pundits who have been similarly threatened or attacked in recent months.
For years, Trump has viciously criticized CNN and other media organizations as “fake news.” On Friday, a Florida man who drove a van with a “CNN sucks” sticker, among other pro-Trump paraphernalia, was arrested in connection with the crimes.