Public security minister Jacques Dupuis has been seen on the television quite a bit, but for some reason the Journal de Montréal hasn’t been able to secure an interview. Rather than accepting that newspapers simply aren’t as cool as television, the Journal is whining about it, and has published a list of questions for the minister about Sunday’s riot and the relationship between police and citizens.
The questions are pretty standard reporter questions, but as a fellow journalist pointed out to me, and as I now ask the Journal:
Doesn’t publishing a list of questions in advance of an interview go against most newspapers’ journalistic policy?
I dunno, I can think of a bunch of times I’ve seen this kinda thing. Never for someone as relatively unimportant as Dupuis, but in advance of visits by American Presidents, for example, I’ve seen columnists do the I’m-not-going-to-get-one-but-if-I-had-an-interview-here’s-how-it-would-look… thing.
I don’t really think the word “journalism” or anything related to that word should come anywhere close to anything related to the Journal de Montréal.
Call me cynical, but if I were a minister (provincial, federal, Baptist) I don’t think I’d give the Journal an interview, either. Even if the topic were banal I’d be afraid of hyperscandalization — they’d probably send me the Anglo-sounding reporter and then accuse me of only ever speaking English (Elle me parlait en anglais, tabarnac!).