Tuesday, July 12, 2005

CBC: clumsy or anti-Grewal?

One of the lesser lights over at Blogging Tories, Conservative Life was one of the first to blog about the new story about Grewal complained that this is another example of the CBC's bias against the Conservatives.

The CBC, it seems, got at least one thing wrong in their original story when they wrote. This is how they introduce the story:
Grewal is already under police investigation after tape-recording his conversations with Liberals about crossing the floor. Now the Mounties are also investigating allegations from some of Grewal's contributors who say they don't know where their money went.
As far as we know, of course, the RCMP are not investigating Grewal himself. I assume that this is a simple mistake--the reporter wants to get to the meat of his story, but part of the story's interest is the fact that Grewal had been so much in the news, and one commonality is an RCMP investigation, one into Grewal and one into the Grewal tapes.

The Edmonton Sun makes a connection a little less clumsily (here):
Grewal is also under scrutiny for secretly taping discussions with the federal health minister and the prime minister's top aide about his future if he were to cross the floor prior to a key budget vote in the House of Commons.
The Globe and Mail write their version of the story without reference to Grewal's tapes.

Update. The Vancouver Province reports on the same story here; they make one point that I hadn't noticed before:
Grewal told CBC he gave his riding association all contributions, but the MP's official agent, John Keith, said he never got them.

The party told CBC two of the cheques went to a supplier for campaign expenses.
This seems to imply not only were contributions taken and not chanelled properly through party machinery, but that expenses were, too.