GOLDSTEIN: Two prominent journalists say bias against Conservatives in Ottawa is real

Conservatives who complain the Parliamentary Press Gallery is anti-Conservative and pro-Liberal may be surprised to learn two of Canada’s top political journalists agree with them, to some extent.

Bob Fife, the recently retired parliamentary bureau chief of the Globe and Mail, and Globe and Mail political columnist Andrew Coyne, also a regular on CBC‘s ‘At Issue’ political panel, made the observation in recent interviews with B.C. political broadcaster Aaron Pete, chief of the Chawathil First Nation, on his Nuanced podcast.

Responding to Pete’s observation that from his perspective, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre receives far more scrutiny and critical media coverage than Prime Minister Mark Carney, Fife responded: “You may be right in the sense that there’s an unfair bias against the Conservatives in Ottawa. I think that’s probably true and it’s always been the case, generally speaking.”

He qualified this by adding that even with that, “you cannot deny that what is going on right now is an internal war in the Conservative Party and that Pierre Poilievre is hanging by his finger nails, in my view.

“Mark Carney will get much more critical coverage, for sure, but he’s just been moving so fast on a whole range of areas, that he’s getting the benefit of the doubt, but I think that will change over time.”

Asked whether he agreed with Fife about an anti-Conservative bias in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in a subsequent podcast of Nuanced, Coyne said:

“Yeah, I think that’s probably true … I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that on balance the Ottawa gallery tends to lean a little bit to the left, some might say even a lot, that academia does, that the bureaucracy does, I don’t think that’s necessarily untrue …

“That has more to do with Conservatives typically being the party of the ‘outs’, people who are not part of the central Canadian elite. People who are not part of the Liberal consensus on things are always going to be to some extent at a disadvantage because they’re coming from outside the circle.”

He said the political history of Canada where Liberals have been in power far more than Conservatives (Liberals have been in charge of the federal government 70% of the time since 1900 and are currently on a 14-year run of uninterrupted power starting in 2015, without needing to face voters again until 2029) has “fed into both parties worst instincts.”

“If you talk about the abiding sin of the Liberals it’s arrogance, and … the abiding sin of the Conservatives is a kind of chippy resentment that everyone’s out against them,” Coyne said.

He said a successful Conservative leader must overcome that sentiment and appeal to the professionalism of journalists, academics and judges because most of them “are trying to be fair whatever their initial predispositions, not all of them, you’re going to run into bad apples, but most of them are trying to be professionals. If you appeal to them on that level, most of them will respond.”

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Both Fife and Coyne disagreed with ongoing federal subsidies that were lobbied for by the Canadian newspaper industry (including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Postmedia publications) because of the perception of bias it creates in the public.

“It absolutely harms our credibility” Coyne said. “It’s like any conflict of interest thing that we’re usually the first to point out. If you’re leaving people in the position of credibly wondering whether that is affecting your coverage, then you shouldn’t be doing that.”

Coyne said he “doesn’t think for one second that anybody is thinking, ‘let’s support the Liberal government because they will give us money'” but, by lobbying for and accepting subsidies, “we did that to ourselves, we gave our critics that stick to beat us with and we never should have done it … my broader worry is not that it will align us with the Liberal party, per se, but over time it will align us with the idea that government should bail people out, bail industries out. How do we credibly argue don’t bail out the auto industry if we’ve just been bailed out?”

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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