by arthur Weinreb
Thursday, august 24, 2006
Earlier this month, CBC aired a news item from a Conservative caucus meeting that was being held in Cornwall Ontario. The piece showed a woman dressed in a chador outside of the building where the Tories were meeting. Referring to the war in the Middle East, she said that the burning of children and the killing has to stop. Her clip was followed by one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at a press conference, saying that he was not concerned or preoccupied with reactions to his policies within certain communities and that those actions were predictable. The logical inference that rational people would draw by the placement of these two clips was that Harper was saying he wasn't concerned about the deaths of innocent civilians in the Middle East or what certain communities thought about those deaths. What Harper was actually responding to was a question posed by a Toronto Star reporter who asked him to comment to the fact that some members of the Jewish are going over to the Conservatives while he's losing some support in the arab and Muslim communities. Harper's answer, in part, was that he wasn't preoccupied or concerned with what these communities think when policy decisions are made.
Conservative Stephen Taylor recognized that Harper's statement was taken out of context and put both the video of the CBC segment and the entire question and answer that was given at the press conference on his blog. The CBC's actions became the subject of many other blogs and Internet sites and were discussed on some talk radio shows. The mainstream media that fiercely goes after every industry except their own completely ignored the CBC's manipulation that put words into the prime minister's mouth.
after Stephen Taylor and others exposed what had happened, many outraged Canadians sent letters of complaint to the CBC. This led to a so-called "apology" earlier this week. at the conclusion of the news, Diana Swain talked about the two clips being juxtaposed and expressed "regret" that the CBC did not make it clear that Stephen Harper's comments were not in answer to the woman's statements about burning children and killing innocent people.
There was a glaring omission in Swain's recounting of the original CBC segment. The two clips were not merely shown one after the other without comment. after the woman's comments but before the Harper clip was shown, reporter Christina Lawand said, "Stephen Harper clearly wasn't swayed". What wasn't he swayed about — his wife wanting to have a dog at 24 Sussex? The only logical interpretation of Lawand's voiceover was that Harper clearly wasn't swayed about what the woman had said about stopping the killing of innocent civilians.
Swain's statement at the conclusion of the news was not an apology. Swain, on behalf of the CBC expressed regrets that they did not make it clear (that Harper's statement was not in answer to the woman's statement). There was no acknowledgement of any error, especially when it came to Lawand's role in linking the two video clips. By expressing regrets that the CBC did not make it clear was in effect saying that the network feels sorry that their viewers were just so dumb that they automatically assumed that Harper was responding to the woman's statement instead of something completely different. The mainstream media is the only business in the world where the customer is always wrong.
Expressing regrets is not the same as apologizing for a mistake. as once time presidential candidate al Sharpton said on U.S. television, if you accidentally step on someone's foot, you apologize — you don't express regret that the person's foot hurts.
It was disheartening to see some comments that were left on Taylor's blog to the effect that the Swain comments were better than nothing and a pretty good apology coming from the CBC.
The statement of regret was done is such a way as to completely ignore Lawand's statement that "Stephen Harper clearly wasn't swayed". No matter how you look at it, it simply wasn't a sufficient acknowledgment of what the CBC did.
We should be demanding nothing less than an apology for the original piece.
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