Pierre Bourque (journalist)
- For the former mayor of Montreal and ADQ candidate see Pierre Bourque (politician)
Pierre Bourque, born October 7, 1958, is a Canadian journalist and Internet entrepreneur, who operates the online news aggragator site Bourque Newswatch.
Bourque is also a part-time radio host at Ottawa news-talk station CFRA, and has appeared on several other Canadian radio stations. As well, Bourque has been a race car driver in the NASCAR Busch East Series.
In March 1991, he was appointed to the councils of the city of Ottawa and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton to fill a vacancy, but lost in the election of that November. He ran then for Parliament in the 1993 Canadian election as a Liberal candidate in the Montreal riding of Rosemont, and lost to Bloc Québécois candidate Benoît Tremblay. He subsequently ran for Ottawa city council again in 1994, but was not elected.
His paternal grandfather, E.A. Bourque, is a former Mayor of Ottawa and his maternal grandfather, Marc T. McNeil, is a former sports editor of the Montreal Gazette.
Controversy
Bourque claims authorship of several books, although the Ryerson Review of Journalism has quoted several of his co-authors as stating that Bourque worked as a researcher, not as an author, on most of the titles bearing his name. [1] Further, RRJ reported that the only book bearing Bourque's name as a sole author, Government Online in Canada, is in fact a compilation of work by a variety of journalists, for which Bourque only directly authored the introduction.
RRJ also found that while Bourque has been the first media source to report a number of major stories, including Jean Charest's departure from federal politics to lead the Quebec Liberal Party, the retirement of Gilbert Parent as Speaker of the House of Commons and the 2000 election call, Bourque's exclusive scoops have also been wrong on many occasions. For example, in 2000 he inaccurately reported that Canadian Alliance MP Keith Martin would cross the floor to the Progressive Conservatives after Stockwell Day won the Alliance leadership, that Elsie Wayne and Mac Harb would be appointed to the Senate, and that Mike Harris would retire as Premier of Ontario that year.
Finally, RRJ found it difficult to verify Bourque's claimed web traffic; in a random sample of 6,500 Canadian internet users in September of 2000, not a single one had visited Bourque Newswatch. RRJ also found that almost no major Canadian journalist used Bourque Newswatch as a source, although some admitted to using the site as an aggregator to quickly review the day's mainstream media headlines.
In January, 2006, he became the focus of controversy when his site was found to be selling headline space to canadian political parties. The controversy was revived a year later.