The jungle isn't neutral

News Media and Federal Politics

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

To claim Poilievre is a liar just because he disagrees with a reporter’s cherished personal beliefs or when he says - openly - he’ll have to think a bit more about one aspect of a question is not merely childish on Richard Harley’s part, it is a fundamental rejection of one of the key tenets of Canadian democracy.

Around the time that writers like Paul Wells pointed out the Prime Minister’s Office has been lying to reporters about Justin Trudeau’s itinerary and playing favourites with the press gallery, an editorial appeared in an obscure Niagara region news website that called Pierre Poilievre a liar.

“Here is a leader who at first might seem informed, capable of holding rational arguments, and making good points,” wrote editor-in-chief Richard Harley, someone so serious about news the picture on his by-line shows what is apparently him in a newsboy soft cap, “But what [Poilievre’s] really the best at is pandering, lying and misleading.”

Harley’s real name is - apparently - Harley Davidson and the paper is one he started in 2020 having left a journalism school in 2015, diploma in hand and crusading in his heart. Those of us outside Niagara Now’s target audience and maybe a whole lot more inside its region found out about the paper and the editorial because Liberal partisans online started to share links to the editorial. They wondered why the traditional media wouldn’t just say what they saw as the truth about Poilievre’s lying nature just as Harley had done. Eventually Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff shared the link on Twitter/X with the same message as all the others and even a few reporters got in on the act.