The Montreal Gazette headline is ‘NDP accuses Tony Clement of doctoring Hansard’.
Wow, thinks the reader, that’s a pretty serious allegation, accusing someone of deliberately distorting the public record of Parliament is a big deal. But look, the headline just says he’s just accused of it, so if its just a case of he said, they said… what’s that?
He unambiguously did it? The Gazette article itself confirms he did in fact request that two times he answered in the affirmative to a direct question and said ‘Sure’ when asked if he would release records about G-8 be removed leaving a blank space in the record?
So then, wouldn’t a more accurate headline actually be ‘Tony Clement doctored Hansard’?
In the US, Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney lies about his own name and also releases a campaign commercial featuring Obama quoting a Republican – without including the few words before the quote saying that it was a quote. That’s unambiguously lying. ‘Mitt’ Romney is a liar. But don’t bother looking for articles in the American mainstream media printing the simple fact that ‘Mitt’ Romney is a lying liar who tells lies.
Because, as an exasperated Washington reporter once said, the mainstream media now “believe that being “balanced” means giving the same weight to a lie as you give to the truth”
And if that’s the case, what possible use are they?
