The CBC does this all the time at their fake town halls, where they filter and choose the questions.

Oh, good grief – what a pathetic statement. I don't know about Duceppe, but both Ignatieff and Layton do town halls and respond to whatever questions are thrown at them.

You get to vote out the ruling party, and hence the Prime Minister. You don't have that luxury with the CBC…yet you still have to pay for their "services".

Thus I'm way more concerned about a fake town hall put on by the CBC than one put on by Harper. I expect that from Harper, and from virtually any politician, for that matter. Politicians are in the propaganda business. But the CBC?

"taxpayers should have a right to expect a certain degree of accountability and responsibility on the part of that broadcaster."

Reaalllly, now. Accountability and responsibility, you say. Taxpayers even.

So, 'taxpayers' should expect a certain level of both of these from their publicly mandated broadcaster, but shouldn't expect either from their elected government? While, the former is certainly true, an argument for the latter is ridonkulous.

Open Mic vs. Fat Mike. Qualitative difference Keyword: Open.

Iggy crossed the country for several weeks early this year, attending a dozen or more open Q&A's … this got next to no coverage.

Harper can't blink without a friendly, hand-picked audience an assurances that he won't have to take questions.

Curious.

These "town halls", wherever they occur, and whoever puts them on, are so damn bogus anyway. Anytime I come across one of them, I watch for a couple of minutes, and then my eyeballs just start rolling, they're so cheesy and obviously not what they purport to be. If you had a REAL collection of REAL people, these town halls would look way different. For instance, if you had a town hall in Vancouver, you would have, among others, real street people. In grubby clothes. Jabbering insanely. Asking other audience members for spare change. So they could go buy crack. But you look at the audience of "typical Canadians" in one of those CBC town halls, and there's obviously been a selection process that has gone on, so that that the audience is decidedly sterilized, antiseptic and quite non-threatening. They're all polite, well-dressed, well-groomed, etc. As Holden Caulfield would say, it's phony.

They used one of their own former employees, current working in the Ignatieff OLO, as a "man on the street" without disclosing who he was to criticize federal H1N1 response.

They used a failed Liberal candidate who heads up an organization to remove Stephen Harper as merely an "interested viewer"

They disciplined their own reporter for improperly colluding with the Liberals to question Brian Mulroney at the Schrieber hearings. They told us the reporter colluded with 2 Liberal MPs improperly and never disclosed who the MPs were.

They were caught deliberately juxtaposing an answer Harper gave onto a different question to make it appear that Harper did not care about the suffering of the Lebanese during the Hezbollah conflict. Despite being a clear violation of their journalistic standards no one was ever disciplined for it.

There is an article on the CBCs website to this day that calls Stockwell Day the "tar baby" of Canadian politics at the same time that they joined in the criticism of Pierre Poilievre for using that term as a racist epithat.

You wanted examples? There are 5 off the top of my head. Without even bringing up Frank Graves. These are just the ones we know about. All the while, never have they perpetrated such journalistic malpractice to benefit the Conservatives or hurt the Liberals, which would seem to rule out "honest mistake" as an excuse. In the only example I can think of, a Radio Canada reporter penned an open letter to Canadian troops expressing support for the mission. CBC's response? They suspended her.

Do you really think that Astroturfing a town hall is beneath them?

Real street people in grubby clothes… C'mon! What would that solve? Of course there is going to be screening, but there should still be real questions. The process is phony only if the questions and answers are phony.
This is why we need real journalists to challenge governments to provide the substance behind superficial talking points
Since Mr Harper avoids media scrums, real journalists and voters with unscripted questions, where do we get the opportunity to see him work without a net?
It seems we have to wait for the election debates to see him ready to "take a punch," and I don't find that holds with the spirit of accountability we've been promised.

I don't see why you think I'm a Harper apologist. I don't even like the guy. I never supported him. I disagree with a rather significant number of his and his government's policies.

So Holly, here's some unsolicited advice. If you want to go rip into a Harper supporter, then go find a Harper supporter to rip into. Doesn't that make sense?

Or do you get your rocks off by imagining that people who aren't Harper supporters are Harper supporters and then criticizing them for being Harper supporters? If so, you should really get some therapy.

I agree with you that that sort of coccooning is wrong, for all sorts of reasons. But I'm reminded of that old saying that we get the govt we deserve. I'd love it if Harper waded into random scrums and took unscripted questions and all that. But he doesn't do it partly because he's an avid, rabid student of politics and he has concluded that information control is like a supreme good. And think about it — as many have pointed out, in politics , a "gaffe" is really a synonym for an unscripted moment of raw truth. Remember what happened to Kim Campbell when she gave a totally honest — and accurate — account of Canada's unemployment situation in 1993? She was crucified. Journalists on the one hand whine about Harper being an information control freak, but on the other hand, journalists are merciless in their wolf-pack attacks on any politician who makes "gaffes". I agree that what Harper is doing is wrong, but unfortunately he's responding in a somewhat logical and understandable way to the system as it is.