THERE'S a parallel scandal to Karlheinz Schreiber, Brian Mulroney and envelopes containing $300,000 in cash changing hands in hotel rooms.
This scandal involves the decision by all but a handful of journalists and media over the last decade to ignore, dismiss, even squelch, the story.
The scandal continues today in reams of columns and editorials calling for Schreiber's immediate deportation to Germany and the shelving of both the Commons ethics committee investigation and the promised public inquiry.
William Kaplan is a law professor and author. Norman Spector, now a political commentator, was Mulroney's chief of staff from 1990 to 1992 and then his ambassador to Israel. Lawrence Martin is a Globe and Mail columnist and author. And Stephen Kimber is Rogers Communications' chair in journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax.
All have commented on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair and what it says about Canadian journalism.
In the opening chapter of his 2004 book, A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust, Kaplan writes that he couldn't believe his ears when veteran reporter Philip Mathias read him the story the National Post refused to publish in 2001. Had it been, Canadians would have learned almost seven years ago that Schreiber paid Mulroney $300,000 in three instalments in 1993 and 1994.
Kaplan was equally shocked when Mathias recounted why his story was "spiked."
Mathias gave it to Post editors in early January 2001. Three months later, it still hadn't seen the light of day. Frustrated, Mathias wrote letters to Conrad Black and the Aspers, the paper's co-owners. At a meeting with senior editors, Mathias was told there was no story. He was repeatedly asked why he kept pursuing it -- and why he went over his editors' heads.
That night, Mathias was phoned at home by Kenneth Whyte, the Post's editor-in-chief, now editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine. Whyte told Mathias he also backed killing the story.
Thus, Canadians didn't hear about the cash payments to Mulroney until the fall of 2003. Even then, they were only mentioned in passing in paragraph 26 of one of a series of articles written by Kaplan for The Globe.
In a column last month, Norman Spector excoriated the media for allowing Kaplan's 2003 shocking but buried disclosures about Mulroney to "fizzle out." Here's why Spector thinks they did:
"With the National Post having killed what would have been an extraordinary scoop, Mr. Kaplan's book ended up being ignored by most CanWest newspapers. In Quebec, Mr. Mulroney has always enjoyed the benefit of the doubt, as well as the support of influential friends in command of major chunks of the media. In Ottawa, many reporters were looking for reasons not to write about the book..."
Spector went further in a Canadian Press interview, saying the Mulroney/Schreiber affair "could be one of the great scandals of Canadian history."
Lawrence Martin has written several articles about the Canadian media's rightward migration. In a January 2003 column headlined It's not Canadians who've gone to the right, just their media, he quoted an unnamed European diplomat saying "You have a bit of a problem here. Your media are not representative of your people, your values." Too many political commentators are right of centre while the public is in the middle, the diplomat continued. There is a disconnect.
Martin believes the disconnect began when Conrad Black converted the Financial Post into the National Post, hired a stable of conservative commentators like Mark Steyn, David Frum and George Jonas, bought the centrist Southam chain and turned the entire package into a vehicle to unite Canada's right and retool the country's values to U.S.-style conservatism.
Even further right rests the Quebecor-owned tabloid Sun Media chain. Mulroney was chairman of the board of Sun Media and sits on Quebecor's board.
"The country undoubtedly needs its share of right-wing voices," Martin wrote in 2005. "But how many is too many?... Such is the ideological trend in the print media -- broadcast has more balance -- that the largest segment of the population, centre-left Canadians, are at risk of losing their voice."
Writing in the Halifax Daily News last month, Stephen Kimber asked how and why the Parliamentary press gallery and most major news organizations "managed, for close to a decade, to not only ignore but actively dismiss, what will ultimately be one of the great scandals in Canadian political history."
Kimber answered his question in a telephone interview late last week. "The Ottawa media is small-c conservative and has been for a long time."
He thinks the conversion occurred during the Mulroney era.
"There's a whole group of journalists in Ottawa... who were around during his time but are still powerful... who liked him personally and felt he made them one of the boys.
"Conrad Black's influence on the shift in the media to the right really can't be overstated... Canadians have a right to expect a lot more of their media that what they got in the Mulroney-Schreiber affair."
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