Today’s Province:
HORRORS!
Scary!
Perhaps they are priming their readership for Halloween and getting in the spirit of all things ghoulish by presenting three unrelated stories about various bad people who are ON TRAIL, ON TRIAL or ARRESTED as noted above. Why are these three individuals lumped together and slapped on the front page of one of the city’s daily newspapers?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is because fear sells. Or it could be more prurient than that — there is a fascination with bad people and The Province is simply tapping into that for the public’s benefit. Certainly, there could be no news actually worthy of the front page in an urban area of two million people and a province of over four million, so it’s understandable the paper would have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, as it were, to put this motley crew front and center.
Speaking of the public, it’s time to poke into the brackish depths of reader comments on cbc.ca’s website again to see what nuggets of wisdom are being passed along by the people who voted the BC Liberals into power three times in a row.
In a story titled Tory logos on federal cheques draw fire we learn that several disbursement cheques of the novelty oversized photo-op variety were presented with not the Government of Canada logo but the Conservative Party logo. This is a no-no as it’s not money provided by the Conservatives but the federal government. Now, the common sense take on this is the Conservatives have demonstrated a penchant for what might be called sleazy, American-style campaigning and tactics, with an emphasis on negativity and doing things like this in the hope that they won’t be caught outright so that little logo can do its subliminal thing of associating the Conservatives with “free” money. This is a cynical line of thought but not particularly conspiratorial. They’re basically seeing what they can get away with and willing to shrug off whatever fallout may occur. Heck, they’re leading the polls, after all.
Here is one of the cheques in question:
The story dutifully notes the expected outrage from the opposition parties and the Conservative pictured above is unrepentant. But lo, look at the first reader comment from “CAN_Becket”:
I am getting really sick of the childish behaviour from both the Liberal and Conservative Parties….in fact, ALL parties.
If you ever watch Parliament it’s like watching a bunch of 5 year olds fighting with each other.
There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!
Sick of the childish behavior. Well, that seems reasonable enough. Politicians are never the most best-behaved people around, that’s for certain and Parliament does resemble a playground during Question Period (or circus, depending on how your preferred analogies skew). But then we get to the last part:
There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!
And here we see the typical knee-jerk reaction, the abandonment of critical thinking. Yes, there are more important things to worry about. The beauty of a news website is that it can accommodate stories of varying importance rather than arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t worthy of public discussion. There is a disconcerting use of the ellipse here, as if it was having babies, and an all-too-predictable three exclamation points, all the better to convey the reader’s apparently agitated state. “get back to work!!!” implies that someone (the story writer? The novelty cheque maker? The Tory MP? The opposition MPs? The investigating ethics commissioner?) is doing “this” (whatever it is) instead of some kind of work. In other words, this story is a trifle and should be ignored, which is exactly what the Conservatives would have wanted. Instead, our estimation of elected officials has dropped yet another notch and I’ll tell you, there ain’t a lot of room left for more notches.
This is not a grand scandal but it is something the governing party should be held accountable for. It’s a legitimate news story and the fact that the first person (and second and others — have a read) to respond wants to dismiss it in favor of more “important” things demonstrates how far politicians have fallen from grace, that we apparently no longer need to bother with the little stuff. Boys will be boys or something. As noted above, I am prone to being a tad cynical myself but there are still lines that must be respected.
Mostly I just wish people would think more and care more. And that the people we elect wouldn’t be such self-serving, power-grabbing scumbags.
And that The Province would get drummed out of business.
And that the world would be filled with puppies and rainbows.