Harper Rankles Media by Limiting Questions

The prime minister refuses to take more than five questions at any campaign event.

Apparently $10,000 doesn’t buy much time with Stephen Harper. That’s how much media outlets have forked over to get their reporters a spot on the prime minister’s campaign bus, but members of the media are becoming increasingly frustrated with how unresponsive Harper is to their requests. The Conservative leader takes only five questions from reporters at each campaign stop: two in English, two in French, and one from local media. At an event staged on a Halifax pier Thursday, reporters were kept in a steel pen a dozen metres from the prime minister. Harper’s relationship with the media has always been tense, and he has in the past said the country’s news outlets have a liberal bias.