{"id":1680,"date":"2011-04-27T11:34:44","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T16:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=1680"},"modified":"2011-04-27T14:59:20","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T19:59:20","slug":"outing-a-tory-dirty-trickster-helmets-off-to-sun-media%e2%80%99s-peladeau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=1680","title":{"rendered":"Outing a Tory dirty trickster: Helmets off to Sun Media\u2019s Peladeau"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Sallot<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Sun Media Corp., which now includes the Sun News Network on TV, likes to mix some fun with its political coverage.\u00a0 So it wasn\u2019t any great surprise that the flagship Toronto Sun ran a Photoshopped picture of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff on its front page last week to go with a story inside the paper.<\/p>\n

Labeled (in small print) a \u201cphoto illustration,\u201d the picture showed Ignatieff wearing a desert camouflage army helmet. It might not have been immediately apparent to readers the photo was a spoof, a digital equivalent of an editorial page cartoon.<\/p>\n

The accompanying story suggested that Ignatieff was in bed big time with the Pentagon and the Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq invasion by the U.S. Ignatieff has always acknowledged his political support for the invasion. But the Sun story suggested Ignatieff, who ran a Harvard think tank at the time, helped with Pentagon war planning.<\/p>\n

The story didn\u2019t have the kind of legs it needed to become an election issue last week. But in a strange twist that could change with Sun Media\u2019s acknowledgement today that the story was peddled to the news organization by a Conservative political operative, Patrick Muttart,\u00a0 who used to be Stephen Harper\u2019s deputy chief of staff.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the package of info included a compelling digital photo showing someone looking a lot of like Ignatieff \u201cin American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002,\u201d says Pierre Karl Peladeau, the president of Sun Media.<\/p>\n

Muttart passed along this package, including the spurious photo, to Kory Teneycke, a Sun Media executive, three weeks ago, Peladeau says in a piece posted to the Toronto Sun web site<\/a> this morning.<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s the same Kory Teneycke who was once Harper\u2019s director of communications. (The political right in Canada is a small world.)<\/p>\n

Peladeau says Sun Media journalists did their due diligence and couldn\u2019t establish the provenance of the photo Teneycke provided. So they didn’t run it.<\/p>\n

\u201cBad information is an occupational hazard in this business,\u201d Peladeau says.\u00a0 \u201cAnd fortunately our in-house protocols prevented the unthinkable. But it is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians. It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whew. When right-wing romances are over they are really over.<\/p>\n

As refreshing as it is to see a news organization out a political dirty trickster, Sun Media isn\u2019t entirely off the hook. Sun Media could do more to make sure its Photoshopped \u201cphoto illustrations\u201d are better labeled as being a spoof.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Sallot The Sun Media Corp., which now includes the Sun News Network on TV, likes to mix some fun with its political coverage.\u00a0 So it wasn\u2019t any great surprise that the flagship Toronto Sun ran a Photoshopped picture of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff on its front page last week to go with a story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18,19,20,11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-2011","category-election-2011-campaign-strategy","category-election-2011-faculty-links","category-election-2011-media-commentary","category-media-commentary","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1680"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}