Media Decoder: A Case of Mistaken Identity

 

OTTAWA — Shortly before the start of Canada’s current federal election campaign, which concludes on Monday, the governing Conservatives had something they believed would seriously undermine the credibility of Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party.

Adrian Wyld/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Michael Ignatieff, head of the Liberal Party in Canada.

They came across a photograph on the Internet that showed six men wearing Santa Claus hats and American battle gear posing with weapons in front of an American military helicopter in Kuwait prior to the Iraq war. One of the men resembles Mr. Ignatieff, who directed a human rights center at Harvard before returning to his native Canada to take up political life.

To the Conservatives, the photograph, combined with other bits and pieces, suggested that Mr. Ignatieff had not only supported the invasion of Iraq when he was at Harvard — a position he has subsequently retracted — but also that he had been directly and secretly involved with the United States military in planning the attack. If true, this information would have been a setback for Mr. Ignatieff, who leads a center-left party in a country where the war in Iraq had little support.

Rather than release the information, the Conservatives passed it along to Sun Media, a Conservative-friendly tabloid newspaper chain, which started a television news channel in April that is sometimes compared to Fox News.

But although Mr. Ignatieff and the man in the photograph both have bushy eyebrows, they are not the same person. And ultimately the leak ended up harming the Conservatives’ credibility and souring the party’s relationship with Sun Media.

In an extraordinary move last week, Pierre Karl Péladeau, the president and chief executive of Sun Media, published a lengthy editorial in his newspapers that exposed the Conservatives as the newspapers’ source and condemned the party for the attempted smear, which he said was apparently intended to damage Mr. Ignatieff as well as Sun Media’s new television channel.

“It is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians,” Mr. Péladeau wrote.

The material, Mr. Péladeau revealed, had been passed along on behalf of the Conservatives by Patrick Muttart, a former senior aide to Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister. Mr. Muttart now works at Mercury Public Affairs in Chicago and is no stranger to Sun Media. Last year, he was retained through Mercury to help develop the Sun News channel, and during his time in Canada he worked with Kory Teneycke, Mr. Harper’s former spokesman who is now vice president of Sun News.

In an interview, Mr. Péladeau said that Mr. Muttart repeatedly failed to deliver a high-resolution version of the photograph to Sun Media. When that clearer image finally arrived, hours before The Toronto Sun was about to go to press with the photograph on its front page, it was apparent that the man in the photo is not Mr. Ignatieff.

Given the nature of the source, Mr. Péladeau said that he had a responsibility to expose the Conservatives, even though his news media outlets had not ultimately claimed the man in the photo was Mr. Ignatieff.

“It’s unusual,” Mr. Péladeau said about his editorial. “This specific situation was also highly unusual. Standing on this issue was particularly important.”

Mr. Muttart, who had been one of Mr. Harper’s key campaign organizers, left his campaign last week.

In an interview, Mr. Muttart said that “never, ever did we say that we had positively identified the individual in question as Michael Ignatieff.”

He recalled telling a Sun News producer: “It’s yours; do your due diligence, and see what you find out.”

As for the delay in delivering the high-resolution version of the photograph, Mr. Muttart blamed a clerical mix-up by the campaign.

Mr. Muttart said he is puzzled by Mr. Péladeau’s suggestion that he and the Conservatives set out to undermine the news channel he helped create.

“I’m completely baffled,” Mr. Muttart said. “For whatever reason, Mr. Péladeau wanted to make an example out of somebody to assert the editorial independence of the Sun Media organization.”