I happened to catch a CBC Front Burner podcast last week in which host Jayme Poisson interviewed the inestimable Paul Wells about Pierre Poilievre’s interactions with — some would say roughing-up — of the press. Both the episode and a transcript are available online.

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The interview is preceded by three clips of Poilievre engaged in back-and-forths with reporters. In one the questioner begins: “A number of your own questions and comments have been characterized as dog whistles to the far right …” and Poilievre jumps in to ask, repeatedly, who has characterized them that way, which the reporter is unable to say.

I’m afraid I’m with Poilievre on that one. The term “dog whistle” is itself a dog whistle. Who blows dog whistles? Racists blow dog whistles. Is there a worse thing you can call a person in this society than racist? Pedophile, maybe. Denier, of one kind or another. But racist is still a deep cut, even if its power to wound has been blunted by rampant overuse.

In the usual CBC way, Poilievre’s sometimes brusque press manner is turned into a Big Issue: “When Poilievre talks to reporters, who is he talking to and how big is that group?” (i.e., what’s the dog whistle’s reach?) “And in a country of newsrooms dealing with cuts and layoffs, what could our media look like in the future, including the not so distant future?”

Oh, dear. It must be awfully wearing on CBC’s collective stomach lining to spend so much time worrying about everything.

If anyone should be happy Pierre Poilievre takes on the press, actually listens to their questions, engages them, asks them questions in return, it should be the press itself. For decades now, the Ottawa minuet has involved politicians seeming to listen to whatever questions the press ask, then completely ignoring the question and repeating the talking points they had come to the presser to get into a clip — back and forth for as long as the cameras and cellphones are recording and the press is willing to keep asking.

It’s a form of human interaction, yes, but what it’s most like is a conversation between people who don’t speak the same language — albeit with less use of the hands.

Poilievre, by contrast, actually seems to listen to what’s being asked and responds in the way a regular human being would. What do you mean by that? Why do you say that? Can you defend your premise? It’s a different game the press are going to have to play. If politicians ignore what’s asked, what’s asked doesn’t really matter. But if politicians actually listen to your questions and maybe even come back at you, you have to be better prepared.

In my life, the Canadian politician who did that most was Pierre Trudeau. His impromptu conversation with CBC reporter Tim Ralfe on the steps of Parliament during the October Crisis of 1970 — the one in which he said “Just watch me” in answer to Ralfe’s question about how far he was willing to go in suppressing civil liberties in order to maintain the rule of law — is a classic in the Trudeau genre. Watching the full tape, “Just watch me” is less a pugnacious dare than a simple assertion that what Trudeau does will speak louder than what he says, which is hard to argue with.

That kind of give-and-take requires a politician who’s both confident in his ability to explain things off the cuff and also enough of a risk-taker not to worry about the possibility of unflattering clips resulting from unscripted remarks. You get the sense Poilievre is both.

It also helps if the politician is head of the government (or opposition): cabinet ministers (or shadow ministers) whose clumsy ad libs cause problems in the news cycle have to worry about how their boss will react to their freelancing. You can think of several recent prime ministers or leaders of the opposition who wouldn’t have reacted well. If you’re the boss yourself, however, it’s all on you.

You might think all the power in the press/politician arm-wrestle lies with the politician, who ultimately decides what he or she is going to say. But the medium is the message. The zombie exchanges we have now are determined by the tyranny of the 10-second clip. In the first couple of decades of TV news, clips were leisurely. They’d go on for 30 or 45 seconds, even longer. Politicians had time to either explain or make fools of themselves. The 10-second clip may have been introduced out of commercial considerations, as technology allowed more and more stories to be presented in a half-hour telecast. But it also gave great power to reporters, who could determine what the story was and what tiny part of what politicians said viewers would get to see.

But we have websites now. And cellphones. Just about any encounter anywhere can be recorded and seen by anyone with internet access — which means, increasingly, all eight billion of us. If I’m trying to judge a potential leader, I much prefer a real conversation to a reporter’s opinion of the person wrapped around a 10-second clip.

Financial Post

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