The Blind following the Blind

Most Canadians who watch or read the news know about Prime Minister Harper's attempt to muzzle the press. What many may not know is that he is exactly aping what President Bush did in the US...in fact, almost issue for issue, Harper is becoming a clone of Bush...with all that implies. And the US media has started picking up on this too. Check out this paragraph from the Huffington Post:

The parallels to the relationship between President Bush and the Washington press corps are almost too obvious to point out: a conservative leader who thinks the national press is out to ruin him; a communications strategy designed to manage all information out of the administration (including a prohibition on photographing coffins carrying deceased soldiers); a preference for local news outlets, which are perceived to be more sympathetic to the government, for disseminating information; and, indeed, an apparently larger strategy aimed at starving the media beast and thereby rendering the press irrelevant to the process of governing.
Ankush Khardori - Eat The Press (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/a-lesson-from-canada-for-_b_22062.html)

What we see now is a cross boarder attempt to muzzle the press at worse, or the Canadian Prime Minister following the lead of the US President at best. Both are troubling to Canadians.

As most people know, the Press is vitally important to the running of an open, democratic country. The first step in turning a democratic country into a totalitarian state is overt management of the media. In fact, the closer a country is to a dictatorship, or small "Politburo" who hold absolute power, the more control the government exerts over over the media. Without the media, Canadians would never have known of the "Sponsorship Scandal", Americans would never have heard about Watergate. And those are just two of the biggest, best known incidents where the media has helped keep the government honest. Without the media, there is no way to hold up the ugly truth to the electorate, and the only good electorate is an informed electorate.