Angry in the Great White North

Update: Read about another time Richard Brennan switched back and forth between reporting on the news and making the news.

Richard Brennan is a reporter for the Toronto Star's Ottawa bureau.

As a reporter, Brennan has a responsibility to maintain a certain level of even-handedness. That doesn't mean a reporter has to like everyone, but there has to be an attempt to present an image of fairness.

One thing is to avoid the propaganda used by politicians.

So when Richard Brennan allows himself to be interviewed by the hard-left online website Harper Index, why does he sound like an NDP attack dog?

HarperIndex.ca: What do you think of today's story in the [Toronto] Star that the PM is planning his own media centre and why?

Richard Brennan: It comes as no surprise that PM Stephen Harper would take a page from the Republican handbook and want set up his own media studio where he could produce unfiltered messages disguised as news.

It comes as no surprise? You can sense the tired resignation in Brennan's answer. Just the sort of thing we have to put up with since the Conservatives accidently got themselves elected.

HarperIndex.ca: What are reporters saying to you about it?

Richard Brennan: Reporters are appalled, but again not surprised. The reporters on the Hill are used to the PM's bully tactics by now.

I'm amused that Brennan doesn't add even a token "I wouldn't presume to speak on behalf of my colleagues..." at the beginning of his answer.

I don't know if the Toronto Star has clearly defined policies on this sort of thing. But at the very least, you would expect the following sorts of rules:

1. Reporters are not to be interviewed by other publications.
2. Reporters are not to become news stories unto themselves.
3. Reporters are not to make statements that undermine their ability to present themselves as unbiased reporters.
4. Reporters are not to act in a manner that would undermine the ability of the Toronto Star as a whole to deal with politicians on all points of the spectrum.
5. Reporters are not to provide sound bites that could be used by one political party or another in partisan material.

In case you're not aware, the Harper Index that interviewed Brennan is a publication of Straight Goods News, which describes itself to be Canada's leading independent online magazine. It is, of course, a socialist rag:

Welcome to Straight Goods' Future of the Left homepage. This is an ongoing project to promote on-line discussion of the future of social democracy and Canada's democratic left. The project is sponsored by the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and Straight Goods.

The Douglas-Coldwell Foundation?

If you were asked to name two great leaders of Canadian Socialism, it is likely that Tommy Douglas and M.J. Coldwell would come to mind. Their life-long contributions to social democracy in Canada and around the globe are well celebrated.

One dream they shared was to create a Canadian equivalent to Britain's Fabian Society, an independent left-wing group unobligated to any other organization or political party.

In 1971 this dream became a reality with the establishment of the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation with Tommy Douglas as it's founding President. In the words of Tommy Douglas, the foundation would be "a gadfly to provoke discussion…to keep the movements on the left-whether the co-operative movement, the trade union movement or the political movement- from getting in a rut."

Now does being a socialist mean not being allowed to run a newspaper? Of course not. But you would think a reporter like Richard Brennan would know better than to publicly present himself as a hard-left demogague, then show up for work the next day, knocking on the doors of the offices of Conservative ministers, asking for an opportunity to present their point-of-view in a news article.

You might wonder if the editors at the Toronto Star might be worried that this sort of partisan language used in a published interview in a socialist newspaper hurts Brennan and, by extension, the Toronto Star itself, making it more difficult to pursue stories.

Indeed, with reporters like Richard Brennan, is it no wonder that the Conservatives once considered building its own media centre?

Update: Read about another time Richard Brennan switched back and forth between reporting on the news and making the news.