Duffy's lawyer lambasts media in Michael Harris interview

Michael Harris writes in iPolitics:
"The lawyer who bested the combined might of the Ontario AG’s office and the RCMP in the criminal trial of Senator Mike Duffy says he was shocked by the uniformed media “maelstrom” that formed against his client — a bias which he says continues to this day.
"Donald Bayne says that the entire experience has convinced him that something has to be done about elevating news coverage of the courts from vaudevillian info-tainment to accurate reporting — and that something might even be the creation of a 'press judge', as the Canadian Bar Association suggested in a 2016 article.
"The stakes couldn’t be higher: the public’s right to get the facts rather than emotional rants from the media — and an accused’s right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
"When asked by iPolitics if he had been ready for the media gauntlet both he and his client had to run for nearly three years in a case that pitted his client against public opinion and the PMO, Bayne didn’t beat around the bush.
“'Absolutely not. I expected one-quarter of what the actual media experience was like. When I got involved, one of the reasons I didn’t expect the maelstrom was that I believed that anyone looking at the same emails would come to the same conclusion I had, and that Justice Vaillancourt did — that Duffy wasn’t behind this affair, the PMO was. I was shocked by the avalanche of charges and the coverage.'”
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