Politicians’ avoidance of press hurts democracy

Doug Ford occupies a unique position in recent Ontario political history. As Steve Paikin, the host of “The Agenda” recently observed, every premier going back to John Robarts has submitted to an interview on TVO. Except Ford.

During the current campaign he has also failed to respond so far to invitations from Global’s “Focus Ontario” program or from CBC Radio. The PC leader’s team only makes him available sporadically and briefly for questions from the media on the campaign trail.

The strategy is both clear and cynical. Ford is leading and his advisers calculate that nothing good can come of submitting him to pointed interrogations from informed political journalists. While his communications abilities have improved somewhat in his time in office, he remains a guy who relies on homey slogans and lacks a sophisticated grasp of policy nuance. It works for him.

There is always a risk that a persistent, prepared interviewer could draw him into a blunder.

The reasoning is that no one cares if reporters complain that the premier is dodging accountability. It is an unfortunate truth, but really all of us should care.

Ford’s media-averse strategy, while the most extreme among recent leaders, is part of a continuum in which the news media has been increasingly sidelined. In the late 1980s, when I started covering Ontario politics, it was not unusual for premier David Peterson to do a lengthy scrum in the morning and then another after Question Period. Our arms were numb from holding microphones under his chin in lengthy scrums.

His successors Bob Rae and Mike Harris were similarly available. In the 2000s, things started to change under Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. Availabilities became less frequent and shorter. Raucous scrums disappeared in favour of the leader standing in front of a microphone with reporters at a distance. More dignified perhaps and easier on our arms but somehow less satisfying as a means of holding a politician to account.

Meanwhile, the broken economic model for traditional news media led to mass layoffs and diminished newsrooms. The Queen’s Park Press Gallery is a fraction of its former size.

Adding to the misery are bad faith players, mainly on social media, but also some prominent politicians, who for their own self-interest destructively feed distrust of the so-called “mainstream media.”

It has had an impact. Proof Strategies’ CanTrust Index shows a precipitous decline in Canadians’ trust of the media from 54 per cent in 2016 to a mere 35 per cent in 2022. Political operatives have noticed.

The distrust is fed by the corrosive effect of more people turning to social media for their news.

A study of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by NYU and Université Grenoble Alpes found that Facebook postings by known purveyors of misinformation were shared six times as much as those from trusted news organizations.

The liars are winning.

It’s a sad irony. A reporter who deliberately misleads is fired, while there are zero consequences for the tin foil hat brigades who gleefully spread misinformation.

To be sure, few politicians enjoy media questions. They’re not supposed to. A vibrant democracy demands that they account for their actions. The public affairs program I hosted for six years, “Focus Ontario,” was once dubbed “F— Us Ontario” by a provincial minister. But still, they always came on the program, including the premier.

Circumscribing Doug Ford’s news media contacts worked in the 2018 campaign when voters were determined to defenestrate the Liberals and he just needed to avoid major screw-ups. Now that he has a record, he should be called to account, but it is not happening as much as it should. That’s a shame for our democracy.