Fourth Estate

A large group of reporters walked out of a Stephen Harper news conference in protest of the PMO’s insistence on choosing who got to ask questions. Pre-selecting questioners is very dangerous because it can become a favour that the PMO can use to buy the opinion of the press. Take the situation in the U.S. for example, press access is granted only to those who work as enthusiastic mouth pieces of the government, chief amongst them Fox News. If this becomes the case in Canada, we will only be reading government propaganda on our newspaper. And that is not a situation most Canadians want to find themselves in. It, however, may not have to be a bad thing entirely. For too long many of our journalists have gotten a bit lazy and the news have become mainly what people said rather than what happened. Quotes are more important than events. Now that access to quotes has been controlled, journalists are forced to choose between propaganda and real journalistic work. I hope most of our journalists choose the latter and start working hard on finding out and learning about issue and stories that they are reporting and not just telling us, so-and-so said this and so-and-so said that. If the PMO insists on their course of action, it may just be the shock that takes the news media back to their position as the Fourth Estate, the counter-balance of the established power. Let’s hope it does not go the other way.