By arthur Weinreb
Tuesday, June 7, 2005Last week the Conservative Party released the tapes that Tory MP Gurmant Grewal had made. The BC MP had stated that he had taped conversations and meetings that he had held with Liberal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Tim Murphy. according to Grewal, the Liberals were offering incentives to him and his wife Nina, also a Conservative Member of Parliament, if they would either cross the floor to sit as Liberals or abstain from voting on a motion to bring down the government.
Naturally the Liberals are denying that either Dosanjh or Murphy ever offered anything to induce the Grewals to vote a certain way; an offence under the Criminal Code. after the tapes were released they revealed that even if no firm offer was made, the conversations went on for too long to be dismissed with the argument that the Liberals were then making; that Grewal had approached them. So the Liberals then started to argue that the tapes had been either edited or tampered with.
after the Liberals raised the argument that the tapes were edited or tampered with, it didn’t take too long for their friends in the media to jump on the bandwagon. What CFRa, News/Talk Radio in Ottawa did, was shocking.
CFRa had two of their producers give their opinions that the tapes had been doctored. Not only were these "producers" not qualified as forensic experts to examine tapes and render a proper opinion but the radio station even admitted this fact. a warning was issued with the opinions of these non-experts that stated, "The following are the opinions of the producers and are not being presented as proof. Our producers are not forensic investigators". One of these illustrious investigators said that background noise in one of the tapes "could be proof" of an edit.
Well, if CFRa were not offering these analyses of the Grewal tapes as proof of the fact that the tapes were edited, then just why were they reporting them? There can only be one answer — to smear Gurmant Grewal and the Conservative Party of Canada. and how can these non-expert opinions; opinions that are clearly stated by the media reporting them, not to be capable of proof of anything, possible considered to be news? They can’t.
CFRa went well beyond the normal bias that is common in the media and amounted to really bad journalism, assuming that what CFRa does can be considered journalism.
What more respectable media outlets did was to go out and hire their own experts to give opinions on whether or not the tapes had been altered. at least the opinions of experts are worth something and can be used by the public to help them decide exactly what did happen. and of course the Liberals are having their own experts analyze the Grewal tapes. Whether Gurmant Grewal did or did not edit or tamper with these tapes, will ultimately be decided by experts.
The CRTC will undoubtedly take no action against CFRa for their smear on Gurmant Grewal like they did on radio station CHOI in Quebec when one of their disc jockeys made politically incorrect comments about africans, people with disabilities and women. after all, there is nothing politically incorrect when the victims are Conservatives.
Would CFRa have offered a couple of employees’ non-expert opinions had the tapes been made by a Liberal and it was the Conservatives who were claiming that there had been editing and/or tampering? Not very likely.