We are not the Opposition

To understand the current flap between the prime minister and the press gallery, in all its triviality and its pettiness, tune in sometime to the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner. (They used to be off the record; lately they have been televised, or at least videotaped.)

The dinner is an occasion for le tout Ottawa to get together for a night of riotous good fun. The party leaders are expected to give amusing, self-deprecating speeches making light of the controversies of the day. The guests, for their part, are supposed to shed their partisan or professional affiliations for the night and share a cup of good cheer, rather like professional wrestlers after a bout.

The whole thing, in short, is one big collective wink. Yes, they seem to say: we pose and pout for the cameras, as if we had real conflicts or disagreements. But in fact we’re all on the same side, aren’t we? We’re all carnies, in the end, each dependent for his livelihood on convincing those yokels in the public he can save them from the others.

Life, said Frank Zappa, is just like high school, only with money. Ottawa is like high school with other people’s money. It’s immensely cozy, and nowhere more so than in the tortured relationship between those two eternal codependents, press and politicians. That’s what’s so ridiculous about this spat: not just the triviality of it -- who gets to pick whose name from what list zzzz -- but the unreality of it.

To hear the press gallery tell it, there is a vital principle at stake. If the prime minister’s people get to choose the order of questioners at press conferences, they maintain, they could pass over those reporters they feared might ask “tough” questions, in favour of softballs from “friendly” scribes. As various gallery hacks have explained, this puts the cherished independence of the press at risk.

(Yes, yes, I know, there are other issues, as well -- the famous hallway access dispute, for instance. But it’s the press conference issue that has attracted the most ink, and it was at a press conference that the gallery chose to take its most dramatic stand, walking out on the prime minister rather than submit to his dictates.)

Let’s leave aside the question of how much investigative reporting really goes on at a press conference or hallway scrum, or whether these bits of street theatre serve any useful purpose other than to provide the networks with useable clips. It’s certainly possible that Stephen Harper could try to evade scrutiny in such a transparent, obvious way. Of course, he could also just not hold a press conference at all. (Would the press gallery deny him that prerogative, too?) If he wants the public to conclude he has something to hide, either approach will do.

But the truly ludicrous part of the gallery’s argument isn’t the suggestion that a minor change in press conference procedure is somehow a threat to its independence. It’s the suggestion that the gallery has much independence to begin with. Most of what passes for reporting on Parliament Hill -- aside from rewriting press releases, taking notes off the CPAC feed, and gossiping about who’s “hot” and who’s “not” -- consists of retailing leaks that have been fed to reporters from various self-interested sources. Sometimes these contain genuine news. More often they are simply bits of spin, slagging an opponent or puffing some pet project, always under cover of anonymity.

I don’t want to shock you, but I’m told these leaks go disproportionately to reporters considered “friendly.” (Perhaps the gallery should take charge of the leaking process, too.) And what gets a reporter counted as friendly? In part ideology, either that of the reporter or his news organization. And in part a dedicated and sustained campaign of flattery, including sympathetic coverage: what’s known in the business as “cultivating your source.”

Were they not fed such a consistent diet by their political and government sources, many of these reporters would be out of work. And indeed, the “independence” they are asserting now is mostly a demand that the government keep them supplied with clips and quotes in the usual way. It is the independence of the junkie from his pusher.

Well, fair enough. The press has interests like any other industry, and is entitled to defend them. What we’re not entitled to do, however, is to dress up our complaints as some sort of constitutional crisis. It is not the responsibility of the government to make our jobs easier. And it is not our job to serve as the Opposition.

The task of holding the government to account, in a parliamentary democracy, is assigned to members of Parliament. Were the government to presume to decide who could ask questions in Question Period, or in what order, that would be an outrage. This is a lovers’ quarrel.