Our esteemed Prime Minister Harper* has taken it upon himself to declare war on the press corps, who he has decided are biased against him. Forget for a second about how laughably stupid his claim is, considering this is the same press corps that openly mocked Paul Martin in a live press conference when the former PM made a disingenuous remark. No, forget that. The bigger issue here is that Harper is trying to divide the country much as his Republican counterparts in America have done since 2000.

By declaring war on the media, in the long run Harper sets up a strategy of spinning any negative commentary on the biases of his media enemies. This has been established in the US with great success by Harper’s ideological counterparts, where the news is completely split between some organizations that report the news and other organizations that report what the Republicans would like the news to be.

In trying to establish similar success, Harper needs to convince his supporters that the media is out to get him — so when a real scandal breaks he can just revert to his previous statements and suggest that the problems are just illusions of Liberal spin. Canada already has CPC friendly media outlets in newspaper and television form, and Harper is attempting to give them an excuse split from reality much like their US counterparts.

We will all pay for this in the long run, I suspect.

* saying that still makes me puke, in case you’re keeping track