Posted by: Ingmar on http://PEJ.org Saturday, June 25, 2005 - 01:58 PM
743 Reads
With Enough Rumours to End His Career, How Come the Media Leave Him Alone
The Republic - by Kevin Potvin:The media establishment in British Columbia is infamous for its vicious aim when it comes to public figures caught in the headlights of scandals. Or rather, it used to be. In the past, politics in BC was universally regarded as a blood sport, and that blood—usually that of whomever the sitting Premier of the day was—was largely spilled down the blades of grinning media hacks. But during the last four years, despite a thick odour of scandal wafting over the province, Gordon Campbell and the Liberals have miraculously escaped the slightest nick.
Premier Bill Vander Zalm and his Social Credit regime were left for the vultures even before he was spotted at the Bayshore Hotel slipping that famous envelope into his vest pocket. The media stalwarts fired away at the crumbling smile to the point where collateral damage spread to his wife, Lillian, crucified wearing a crown of terrycloth. There was no let-up on successor Rita Johnstone. The gangland-style execution had been so thorough, the Socred party looked like Bonny and Clyde’s car by the end.
NDP Premier Mike Harcourt, caught up in the Bingogate party financing scandal, foolishly fell on his sword rather than swinging with it, but that’s only because he was savvy enough to know the media, smelling fresh blood creeping under the door of a Nanaimo bingo hall, would not cease their hounding till he walked the plank or till his party was destroyed. He made the ultimate sacrifice on the media’s alter and got out while the getting was good.
He knew better than his successor, NDP Premier Glen Clark. The attack by the media on Clark was on a higher plane yet, involving a prime-time raid on Clark’s home with the television cameras inexplicably arriving before the police. The sight of the shaken Premier, pacing the floor of his kitchen while detectives raided his files, played live and was reproduced on the front page of all the papers, utterly destroying him, his government and everyone associated with it.
Up-and-comer Liberal party leader Gordon Wilson’s career was smashed like a bowl of eggs when the establishment media caught the whiff of his extramarital affair with fellow MLA Judi Tyabji. The coverage was daily and included packs of reporters intercepting the children coming home from school to get their immediate reaction to news their daddy was spending time with a woman not their mom.
Vander Zalm was ultimately found not guilty. Harcourt is regarded today as a noble innocent. Clark was exonerated of all criminal charges. Wilson has justifiably claimed he was the victim of a purging. But it never mattered to the establishment media whether these leaders were innocent of the rumours spread about them or not, and none of these men were ever publicly apologized to. If you’re a public figure, you’re fair game, that’s been the long established rule here.
Compare this history, then, to the behaviour of the establishment media the last four years. There is no shortage of very damaging rumours surrounding Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell and senior members of his first-term government. The rumours are certainly as corroborated and substantiated as those the establishment media seized on in the past to destroy his predecessors. But none of these rumours get anywhere near the play in the establishment media that similar rumours concerning other leaders in the past received.
Consider, for example, rumours concerning the details of Campbell’s drunk driving conviction in Hawaii. The Maui police report from the early morning when Campbell was arrested indicates he was stopped going not in the direction of his own hotel, but in the direction of other hotels on the other side of the island. There have been no speculations in the media about where he was headed. But there could have been.
Lara Dauphinee became Campbell’s Executive Assistant in 1996 at the tender age of 25. She has since become a senior political figure in Campbell’s government and arranges all his appearances, controls all media and public access to him, and hires all administrative staff in the powerful Premier’s office. She is also reputed to be deeply involved in policy discussions with him in her added capacity as Chief of Staff. It is unclear whether she was in Hawaii at the time of Campbell’s arrest, but she is noted for never being far from his side. This was a working holiday, as all are, Campbell’s handlers impressed upon the media after his arrest. The media have never pursued the question of whether Dauphinee was in Hawaii at the time and whether this was where Campbell was headed that fateful night.
In interviews after his drunk driving escapade, Campbell claimed he had never been driving drunk before. That would indicate either that he is a bald faced liar, or that the night of January 9 was a highly unusual night. During the evening, he had been pouring back several stiff martinis at the home of friend and radio personality Fred Latremouille before deciding well after midnight to take a drive. There is evidence a struggle ensued: Latremouille later blurted out to television cameras, talking about that night and why he let an obviously drunk friend drive, “What are you going to do, tackle the guy?” He was immediately elbowed and shut up by his wife, Kathy Baldazzi.
The media, willing to believe Campbell’s assertion he got caught the first time he drove drunk in his 54 years, has strangely refrained from asking what brought on this uncharacteristic behaviour. Had Campbell received some terrible news earlier in the day to cause him to get very drunk, throw off his friend, and go speeding in his car late into the night? In retrospect, we know there was no alarming political news or corruption scandals that month. His wife did leave earlier in the vacation, but that was routine: she needed to prepare for a new school year as vice principle of a Vancouver school. We do know that around September 2003, roughly nine months later, Dauphinee appeared at a political function attended by much media visibly pregnant. Had this been any other leader in the past, the questions would have been front page and non-stop—as well as the photos. But the establishment media in this case has never speculated on whether there is a connection.
Campbell was spotted by Maui police the early morning of January 10 2003 going down the wrong side of the road and swerving into and off the shoulder. Pulled over, the Premier of British Columbia opened his door and fell to the ground. At the police station, he tested at about three times the legal limit for blood alcohol. He spent the night in the drunk tank passed out on a bare urine-soaked mattress. In the morning, he called a local drunk-tank lawyer his jailer suggested to him. He made an unshaved court appearance by noon and struggled back to his hotel. The strangest part of this story is that it seems never to have occurred to him for well over a day and a half to get in touch with any political staff and seek advice or to let anyone know what had happened.
Since then, his wife has reportedly separated from him and has reverted to using her maiden name. Campbell now lives alone in a condo on Vancouver’s west side. Dauphinee, his assistant, was subsequently promoted to Chief of Staff, a public service position that pays in the neighbourhood of $120,000—a considerable raise for her. She has also racked up the largest travel expense bills of anyone, elected or un-elected, in the entire BC government. This story looks similar enough to the Wilson-Tyabji incident to at least merit comparison and similar media scrutiny, but there has been none.
The scandals do not end there. During the present election campaign, the Liberal Party has twice been caught collecting money illegally, once from municipalities and later from charities who were led to believe they were paying the government for access to Campbell, but whose fees were in fact illegally channeled to the party coffers. This scandal looks remarkably similar to the Bingogate scandal that ensnared and destroyed Harcourt, but there has been scarcely little media follow-through this time.
A billion-dollar Liberal-government deal to sell BC Rail is currently under police investigation with allegations swirling around the case involving illicit drugs and influence peddling. RCMP took the unprecedented measure of raiding legislature offices of senior cabinet members to seize evidence in the case. All three senior cabinet members linked to the scandal—Attorney General Geoff Plant, Deputy Premier Christie Clark, and finance minister Gary Collins—have since resigned from office and, despite budding careers, have quietly and inexplicably left politics altogether. There are close correspondences in this story to the one involving casino licenses that brought Clark down, but there has been no similar media attention.
Add it up and you have the makings for the most damaging set of scandals amongst BC’s pantheon of record breakers. Campbell’s government is linked to rumours involving illicit drugs, influence peddling, party finance corruption, out-of-control drunken sprees, tainted resignations, criminal investigations, court convictions, illicit sexual affairs, and who knows what else of the salacious kind. While in the past any one of those merited a public hanging by the media scribes, Campbell, with all of them and possibly more, slips away with no one in pursuit.
Campbell has as many scandals of the real and significant kind swirling around him as all the media-hyped ones his predecessors had thrown at them, combined. And yet, where the establishment media cut all his predecessors down at the knees, for some reason, none of them are touching this Premier. It almost looks like there’s a larger picture here coming into focus, and that Campbell, soaked in sex, booze, drugs, and party money, is some kind of “made man” with the owners of the establishment press. He does appear to be unaccountably untouchable in a media environment famous for exactly the opposite behaviour.
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http://republic-news.org/archive/113-repub/113_potvin_media.htm