Stephen Taylor has begun to document the flood of gratuitous comparisons between Stephen Harper and Darth Bush’s Rethuglamericans.
Stephen – that’s a job for a team of bloggers.
Definition: Drive By Media
The perplexing part about this growing trend to tie Harper’s policies to those of Bush is that it’s taking place in the duly diligent world of fact-checking, editor supervised, professional journalism. WaPo, 2003;

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the military-wide policy [barring media from covering return of “flag-draped coffins”] actually dates from about November 2000 — the last days of the Clinton administration […] Dover Air Force Base, which has the military’s largest mortuary, has had restrictions for 12 years, others “may not have been familiar with the policy,” the spokeswoman said. This year, “we’ve really tried to enforce it.”

“Harper’s policies on Afghanistan sounding increasingly Clinton-like”. Somehow, I doubt we’re going to see that in the headlines.

Just a little cursor problem. Nothing here to see, people.

full text
You could see the offending video clip for yourself, but the pro-transparency-in-government public broadcaster has forced its removal under threat of legal action.
Screencap (via a predictably dismissive, anonymous CBC employee blog Tea makers).

Near the end of this lengthy and contentious comments thread arising from the Aaron Harris photo post, “Tony” suggests that my criticism of the “mainstream media” arises from …. jealousy.
Hell hath no fury like a wanna-be journalist scorned, goes the theory.
It’s not the first time that accusation has been floated, nor am I the only blogger who’s been confronted with it. After I’d addressed that question, Tony repled;

Like hundreds or thousands of other people (and like dozens of MSM types) I enjoy your blog, even if I don’t always agree with your take on things, and like the vast majority of your readers I’m grateful that you take the time to do this and am glad you’re doing well enough to find the free time.
Thanks for addressing my note.
But I thought your post on Aaron Harris was ill-informed and unfair.
There are plenty of reasons to find fault with the MSM and your blog serves a valuable purpose in challenging its approach sometimes.
But please excuse some of us for reacting angrily when you paint the entire fourth estate with one brush, and malign a whole institution under imagined or erroneous pretenses, which is what I believe you have done in this case.

Because this goes to a broader issue, and because I believe I can speak for at least some of my readers – I’ve decided to reply here instead of continuing the comments thread.
I’ll plead guilty to generalizing about the “mainstream media” insofar that I assume most readers know (or will figure out) that I’m referring to the general inclinations of the major players in the industry and the liberal “default setting” through which most of our news is filtered.
The generalization is mostly a result of the brevity required of blogging and not intended as a wholesale indictment of every individual practicing journalism.
However, as he is a self-described member of that fraternity, my response to Tony about his “angry reaction” is this: you have a lot of work ahead if you hope to undo the slow-motion suicide of the news industry – and don’t bother protesting the validity of that premise. The decline in newspaper and magazine circulation, and the ratings numbers of the major networks speak for themselves..
We may agree to disagree on whether the Aaron Harris “serial crownings” at the Empire Club are worthy of a closer look and open questioning. Again, that’s the nature of blogging. Sometimes people agree, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t care. Sometimes they think it’s unfair. I would point out that this is the nature of news reporting as well.
Unlike the news industry, however, when I present a topic, the readers look at the evidence, hash it out, bring new information to the debate, and sometimes I even change my mind. (As a footnote: the Aaron Harris post was originally prompted by an ordinary reader who directed me to the CBC item privately, in the belief that the photo had been willfully defaced. That should be a signal that something might be wrong.)
But in this case, what isn’t in dispute are the growing list of examples in the “mainstream” media of manipulated news “reporting”, reporter editorializing, and altered/staged photos. These examples are contributing to a significant problem with consumer cynicism about integrity and possible political motives within the MSM. The blogosphere has enabled comparison and criticism – and with that an unsettling realization that media sleight of hand and sleight of word are hardly new practices.
If members of the industry can’t withstand open scrutiny on this lowly blog without turning to rationalizations that I’m nothing more than a would-be journalist with a chip on her shoulder – then, you haven’t gotten it yet.
I’m not a competitor. I don’t want your job. I’m a frustrated news consumer. I’m sick of being spoken down to by people who can’t pronounce words correctly. I’m fed up with reading transcripts that reveal that reporters have quoted people out of context to support a pre-ordained script. I’m tired of having speeches and statements “explained” to me by pundits after I’ve listened to them.
I’m not interested in news stories created by polls commissioned to create news stories.
I’m tired of reading that wire services have stringent “ethical guidelines”, and that to suggest that a photo might be altered is well, just the realm of tin foil hat conspiracy mongering .

Better to ask yourself why so many of your former customers like myself – news “junkies” – no longer accept your stories and images at face value.
Call it the “fool me once” approach to news consumerism.
You’ve lost our trust. The question is now thrown back to you, Tony – how do you propose to earn it back?

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Related: “Does the country really need 370 journalists to cover 308 MPs?”

The cool thing about the net is that it’s no longer necessary to subscribe to five different papers to find out how the news is presented differently from city to city;

Wow, we said. The Canadian military says the Liberals were foisting equipment “considered lemons or irrelevant” on them. They want to scrap “questionable” Liberal projects and replace them with equipment the military “needs.” Why wasn’t this on Page One?
Or was it?
Maybe it had been covered properly in other cities, we thought. We went looking. And we discovered, instead, a textbook case of story spinning.
It seems, as far as we could find, that this story was printed in four newspapers–The Winnipeg Sun, the Ottawa Sun, the Toronto Sun and the Edmonton Sun. And it was rewritten depending on where it appeared.
To begin with, the headlines were better in Edmonton and Ottawa.
Tories and military are in tune (Edmonton Sun)
Liberal promises put on ice (Ottawa Sun)
Forces may ice ships (Toronto Sun)
The leads varied from paper to paper:
OTTAWA — The military is set to scrap major equipment purchases announced by the former Liberal government. (Ottawa Sun)
OTTAWA — The Canadian Forces is reviewing its shopping list to find extra funds to pay for expensive Tory priorities. (Toronto Sun)
OTTAWA — The military is set to scrap major equipment purchases announced by the Liberals that are considered by brass to be lemons or irrelevant. (Edmonton Sun, Winnipeg Sun)

That’s only scratching the surface, as it turns out.

Because, you know, it’s not – especially when you work for a billion-dollar-a-year corporate media welfare case that’s about to have its mandate reviewed.


(Click image for link)
Now, compare this with the juxtaposition of the logo in two other photos taken during the Harper speech Friday. The crown portion is well above Harper’s head, in one it doesn’t even appear;


So what was Harris doing when he took that shot – lying on the floor? And if he was indeed, shooting from a lower angle, why is the microphone at the same height relative to Harper’s tie in all three images?
(And back to the original point, – what do CBC employees think they’re accomplishing with cheap stunts like this? Beyond adding “coffin nails” to Bev Oda’s shopping list)
This isn’t the first time photog Aaron Harris has “found” this clever angle at the Empire Club. Looking more closely at this older CTV story on the Gov.General, I captured the two images, and resized the smaller one to loosely match that of the Harris credited “crown on head” shot;

Note that the two are taken from nearly the same height comparable to Governor General, but that the Harris photo places the viewer a little more to the left (based on the positioning of the microphone relative to her face). Yet, miraculously, the backdrop with the maple leaf logo not only drops lower, but it also takes a sudden lurch to its right.
So, what does that suggest about how Harris may have achieved his unique image capturing “King Stephen” yesterday?

Apr 23 Update: Steve Janke has found yet another Harris “crown on head” photo, this one apparently taken last November.

Discussion in the comments suggests that the Harris would be capable of aligning these images with the assistance of camera technique and technology. I’m willing to consider that explanation, of course – that Aaron Harris has, on at least three different dates, purposefully chosen the lenses, settings and camera angles required to place the crown portion of their logo atop the speaker’s head during speeches at the Empire Club. As was pointed out in the comments;

“the defense goes that a professional photographer with an excellent rep orchestrates using zoom lens and f-stops the same juvenile “bunny ears behind head” photo on three different occasions. Okay. What do you need to do to get a bad reputation in the news photo business?”

*AaronHarris.com
(Flashback: A reminder for those who protest that photo alteration “never” takes place.)
April 24 followup