The Black Rod

How far will the Winnipeg Free Press go to manipulate their election coverage to promote the Liberals? We got the answer Saturday when FP columnist Dan Lett went so far as to invent a scenario which allegedly took place at an all-candidates meeting in Winnipeg South Centre, one of the ridings the Liberals hope to recapture in Winnipeg, and which he then used to smear the Conservative incumbent. Under the rubric 'Analysis', Lett, who had been the moderator at the meeting, wrote: "It was all going well until (Joyce) Bateman piqued the ire of the crowd when she starting reading off a list of names from the Liberal campaign -- volunteers, paid staff workers and candidates alike -- who had been identified by the Tories as "enemies" of Israel ." Mission accomplished . The column was gleefully snapped up and reprinted in pro-Liberal sites across the Web.   It was enough to attract the attention of media watchdog Ezra Levant who did a bit of digging ...

The Winnipeg Free Press appears to be gearing up for the next federal election by hiring the most strident hater of the Conservative Party they could find to join their editorial department. We're not talking about FP Editor Paul Samyn, who was the biggest shill for the Liberal Party in Ottawa when he was the newspaper's Parliamentary reporter.  See http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2006/10/fp-admits-bad-reporting-still-says.html for details. This past weekend Samyn announced that "we have a new editor responsible for the perspectives you will be reading both in print and on-line. Shannon Sampert, an expert in Canadian politics and the media, joins our newsroom from the University of Winnipeg...Shannon becomes the first woman to oversee our editorial pages. I think Dafoe would be proud ." Shannon Sampert was no stranger to The Black Rod (more about that in a minute). We more-or-less ignored her in her teaching job at the U of W, but when we learned s...

From the day he announced his run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba, Brian Pallister was getting the same advice from pundits and pals alike. Don't let the NDP define you. Don't worry, he said. I'll fight back. I won't give them a chance. I'll define myself. And for a brief, shining moment we stood and applauded Brian Pallister for doing just that. He fought back. Aggressively. He showed more backbone than his two predecessors combined. And he won. Maybe. Maybe, because it was a pyrrhic victory. He's been defined. Stick a fork in him. He's done. And, if it could be worse, he gave them everything they needed to do it. We all know by now that Pallister just bought a mansion on Wellington Crescent for $2 million. When the story broke last week, he stood his ground. The house was a product of his success in business and in life, he said. He worked hard for his wealth and he was enjoyi...