More Dishonest Reporting from the CBC on Grewal: Tom Parry Feeds Falsehoods to Listeners

Having been caught inflating the credentials of the “expert” it paid to discredit the Grewal tapes, the CBC has now passed the hatchet to another reporter. The replacement spinner is veteran radio reporter, Tom Parry. But this morning, he only added to the CBC’s dishonesty on this story.

In his previous reporting career, Parry was often careful to appear unbiased, but sometimes his true feelings slipped out. An example came last month, after Stephen Harper spoke on a Commons motion. You can read the speech in Hansard here (scroll down to about the 16:30 mark). It’s a long condemnation of Liberal misdeeds, couched in the usual parliamentary language.

Read it for yourself. Lot’s of stuff about Liberal wrongdoing, but that’s the Opposition Leader’s job. Nothing very remarkable, these days.

But that’s not how Parry spun the story the next morning on the World Report. According to him,

Harper’s speech was pure venom.

As you read these words, you can imagine the tone Parry used to deliver the line. It’s not the kind of thing that can be said in neutral tones. No, he spit out the words just like they sound, dripping with derision. But there was no real story there – the only real poison in the speech is in Parry’s spin. He used this emotional, inappropriate, biased language on purpose, to create an intentional effect — to try to take the focus off the content of Harper’s speech, pointing instead at its alleged style.

The CBC and the other pro-Liberal media do it all the time, trying to change the subject to anything other than Liberal corruption. It’s the old misdirection play, and they pull it again and again: They control news content to point audiences in the direction they want – almost always toward the Conservatives and away from Liberal corruption.

So now, having proven to be a reliable Conservative-basher, Parry has been handed the Grewal file. On this morning’s radio news, he tried to play the same game – the same misdirection play. He just ignored the content of the tapes and quickly sidestepped the question of the authenticity of the corrected version. Instead, he just rehashed the old news about previous versions.

So far, just the same old pro-Liberal CBC spin. But then, Parry crossed the ethical line from routine spinnage into deliberate dishonesty.

Here’s how his story concluded:

The tapes the Conservatives first released were missing large portions of conversation. The Conservatives blamed technical glitches. On Parliament Hill yesterday, Conservative Deputy Leader Peter MacKay wasn’t saying much about the tapes. [cut to MacKay audio:] “You know, I don’t want to get into the nuances of what does ‘altered’ mean.” [cut back to Parry:] The RCMP is looking at whether to open an investigation. The federal Ethics Commissioner is looking at whether any rules were broken. And Gurmant Grewal remains on stress leave. Tom Parry, CBC News, Ottawa.

These words carry the inescapable – but false – implication that the sole focus of investigations by the RCMP and the Ethics Commissioner is on Grewal, his acts of recording, and his edits. But that’s a lie, and Tom Parry knows it.

If you’re a political blog reader, you know – but the average radio listener does not – that Parry’s message is untrue. You know that the focus of investigations is on alleged vote buying by Tim Murphy, acting on behalf of the PMO, and by Health Minister Ujal Dosanjh. But their names are nowhere mentioned in Parry’s story. His story is meant to hide the truth – that the Liberals are the primary focus of all these investigations.

Tom Parry knows with absolute certainty how the average listener will interpret his words. He knows fully well that the half-attentive public will believe from his story that only Grewal is under investigation. Tom Parry knows that it’s untrue that the primary focus of the investigations is about what happened to the tapes — that in reality it’s what’s on the tapes that’s the real story. But his version — the false version — deliberately encouraged listeners to believe something that’s factually untrue.

The primary focus of the investigations is the content of the tapes, not the act of recording them. The primary focus is on Tim Murphy, the PMO and Ujal Dosanjh. Tom Parry deliberately misled his audience by consciously trying to plant a false story in their minds.

By trying to pull off the old misdirection play once again, Parry overplayed his hand and strayed into deliberate dishonesty. Another day, another dishonest report on the Grewal story from the CBC.

Strike two, CBC. This time, it’s one of your veterans who’s doctoring the news. Don’t you have anyone there who can tell an honest story?