Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The pettiness of the media, a juxtaposition

I have to agree with BC Blue on this topic.  I just spent the whole afternoon listening to newscasts every half hour where the pompous, self-righteous jackaninny on the radio lead off with this story in that "uh-oh, look what the bad boy did now" gossipy tone.  And in reality, this is as much of a story as a local story in Saskatchewan not too long ago.

Now, it's not a perfect juxtaposition, but the concept is still there.  On the national stage, Mr. Harper is paying the commercial rate for plane tickets for his daughter and himself to travel to Boston for the game tonight.  Of course, he needs to take security with him wherever he goes and as such it's likely cheaper to take the jet that is there for his use in order to haul all of them rather than actually flying commercial.  It's actually entirely likely that the commercial rate that he'll pay would cover the fuel and pilot costs for the 6 hour round trip.

Now, compare that to our story in Saskatchewan, where the Leader of the Opposition was caught with his CVA vehicle in Colorado, where it was driven and left there with his wife and daughter while he flew back to attend the Legislature.  Now he says that he reimburses the province fully using a mileage rate, and that it was perfectly normal for him to use his fuel card to fill up the car, however there is something that didn't sit right with me.  As I mentioned in the post, if that were true, it would have been at least as cheap, if not much cheaper, for Mr. Lingenfelter to just rent a vehicle in Colorado for use down there rather than taking his CVA vehicle with him.

Now the difference between these situations?  The Conservative is smeared repeatedly during news casts all day while not a peep is said during newscasts about the NDP Leader of the Provincial Opposition.  In fact, the only way that I heard about it was through the morning talk show where he replayed the news conference and discussed it for a half hour.  In both situations, the politician was acting within established policies.  The only real difference in the principle was that one was a Conservative and the other NDP.

Gormley was right - it wasn't worth pursuing by the press when it was the NDP Leader in Saskatchewan, and it most certainly isn't worth mentioning with the Prime Minister.

No comments:

Post a Comment