"Unfortunately the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government," Harper told London's A-Channel.
"They don't ask questions at my press conferences now.
"We'll just take the message out on the road. There's lots of media who do want to ask questions and hear what the government is doing."
Over two elections with Harper's crew, the one refrain they chimed the most to party workers on the media can be summed up as "suck-it-up and suck-up."
They all knew that the media - both national and local - were against the very thought of anything Conservative. Local media being slightly less so and more inclined towards fairness due to their lack of supermassive egos of Neil McDonald proportions.
The very concept of journalistic neutrality is one often debated to even exist by Conservatives. Going to enough Tory rallies that were massive successes, only for them to get reported as insinuated failures tends to lead one to such a conclusion. If that wasn't enough, certain Tory candidates would get letters and emails from certain enlightened media pretty much confirming what they suspected. But the final nail came when Liberal strategists admitted the obvious in books...
But what could done? Nothing. There was no way of sending out the message that most media outlets were biased without detracting from the issues, or that quite frankly people would believe... Remember, they said, the media will twist that message and would never report on their own bias.
The party needs the media and nothing can be done about their secret Marxist-Leninist tendencies. So even if they were slaughtering you and your guy, you had to be nice and not kill nobody.
Nope, Harper's office always seemed to stress at every opportunity to "suck-it-up and suck up" when it comes to the media. And they also seemed to live by it.
So this latest move by Harper seems perplexing. Why the change in tact now? Is it that they feel now that they are in government they can make a better case about media bias that's believable?
I think in all likelihood, the change in strategy has really been brought on as a response to the medias child like spaz of recent weeks. Unhappy over new rules brought in by the PMO, the enlightened super beings in the media decided they weren't going to take it anymore.
Now Harper's decided to take his message to local media outlets in an effort to circumvent the national filter. This isn't much different than what he attempted to do later on in Harper's first attempt to be PM which failed, or when previous Liberal Prime Ministers did the same.
So the effectiveness of this move is questionable, but I think it may be the last recourse for Harper. If the media won't report, there's not a whole helluva lot he can do.
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