Brian Mulroney (right), in his Memoirs, talks about relations with the press. This excerpt comes from an entry he made into his personal journal on Feb. 24, 1990. Funny how this sounds so, erm, contemporary:
I had not returned to their “press theatre” since January 1987 — over three years. For a while, the gallery thought I would return on bended knee and sent me summary resolutions reminding me of my obligation to “openness” and “respect for freedom of the press,” all of which I discarded. After a year, they began to sound more reasonable and after another year, during which we wond another commanding majority, the actually sounded somewhat contrite. What eventually got to them, however, was their realization that they had deprived themselves of regular exposure to the head of government, thereby doing a substantial disservice to their readers/viewes and serious damage to their own reputations, because of their progressively limited access to real decision makers in town.
I had always accept the notion of an adversarial relationship with the media. Indeed, while I found it personally disagreeable, I even tolerated a period of great personal hostility and quite evident unfairness and bias without any response, believing somewhat naively that eventually they would find their professional moorings and rediscover the basic tenets of journalism that they had so demonstrably abandoned. Where I drew the line, however, was the deep disrespect and malice showed by some gallery members, without the slightest repudiation by its executive members — indeed when silence and qualified grins suggested nothing less than complicity and approval. So I withdrew from the offensive farce they staged and refused to attend a press conference, in the certain knowledge that whatever obligation I had to meet regularly with the press did not extend to condoning juvenile delinquency by its members. Moreover, I knew that whatever contempt they had for me was completely irrelevant, if the Canadian people granted me their confidence, which they did in impressive and historic fashion on Nov. 21, 1988. Somehow that night in Baie-Comeau, the unrelenting attacks by the media over the previous four years were dealt with by the voters as I watched another strong majority government being formed under my leadership. The Canadian people were telling me and many others that they had paid little attention to the members of the Ottawa gallery.
From Brian Mulroney, Memoirs, Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2007 (p. 728)
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