I'd prefer to title this: Some Sun Media Reporters Produce Copy Not Worthy of Ass-Wipe but that's too many words to fit across the top of the column. I don't want to suggest that every journo working for Sun Media is a nasty biased hack. There are some good journalists working for Sun Media. Really good.

Unfortunately their hiring standards are not evenly applied. The crap to cake ratio is arguably higher at Sun than at any other major media outlet in the country, and they wear that trait proudly like a badge of honour. It may be that the crap layer at Sun isn't as thick as perceived, but it blocks sunshine and perfume just the same.

An excellent example of crap reporting would be Sun Media's senior parliamentary reporter Brian Lilley. Bizarrely judging by title alone he appears to work for Parliamentary Bureau Chief David Akin and Akin is well known for accurate and balanced reporting. It'll be interesting to see how that relationship plays out. My guess is Lilley has at best a dotted line reporting relationship, if any at all, because he ought to have already been hauled out for a public whipping by his bosses if they actually gave a damn about fair and accurate reporting.

It is pretty unusual for one reporter to lambaste another but here we have Andrew Potter of Macleans calling out Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley, both of the Sun chain, as chickenshit liars over the CBC Vote Compass controversy which Sun Media largely engineered on their own. Beyond the excerpt below, Potter well summarizes the faux issue's chronology - the link is worth exploring.

Sun family values (April 6, 2011 - Andrew Potter, Macleans.ca)

It's amazing what sort of character assassination you can get away through chickenshit use of question marks (in Levant's case). Or in Lilley's case, through the deliberate withholding of facts. As Peter Loewen himself told Lilley when Lilley interviewed him for his March 31 story, Loewen did the same sort of work for Harper in 2004 that he later did for Ignatieff. Loewen was also a staffer for a Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative leadership candidate in 2005. And he once donated money to Pierre Poilievre's nomination campaign.

This information was available to Brian Lilley, his editor, and to Ezra Levant. It is thoroughly despicable that it was not included in the stories that were published. What is going on here? In yesterday's Globe and Mail, Simon Houpt suggests that Loewen just got caught up in a broader anti-CBC campaign by Sun Media, as it prepares to launch its new television station.

if the parties take turns at damning the CBC ... isn't that more or less the way it should be?

From CBC's Inside Politics blog please consider Seeing double in Ottawa, by Terry Milewski, the intrepid CBC reporter who garnered all of our attention during the "pepper-spray" APEC summit in Vancouver back in 1998:

[The cannons roar anew] over the alleged wickedness of the CBC. As the Conservative government launched another broadside at the supposed Liberal bias of the Mother Corp, the Globe and Mail found itself in need of a picture for its story. How to illustrate a boring press release and grab some eyeballs for the Globe website?

A cunning editor found the solution: Brian Gable's deft cartoon of a Darth Vader figure in a CBC News studio, stamping scripts as "defensible" or "indefensible" while telling the anchorman, "Please, just carry on as if I weren't here."

That cartoon was so good, they used it twice. And they didn't have to change a thing. But greybeards at the CBC recognized it.

First published on Nov. 13, 1998, the cartoon originally lampooned the Chretien government's attacks on the Liberals' supposed enemies at, yes, the CBC. Reduce, re-use, recycle: the Globe goes green!