Columnists

November 2cd, 2008. As can be seen This piece was written some time ago, however in my opinion it is still pertinent and is now probably worse.
March 18th, 2007
Recently, I crossed swords with a Toronto Star columnist, Rosie DiManno. She had written about the Conservative Campaign College which was being held at Toronto. After being denied admittance she hung around the entrance trying to get some scuttlebutt and failed. Presumably having been detailed to attend by her editor she was stuck with the job of writing about the event but having no knowledge of what was occurring. "Making bricks without straw" as the saying goes. Anyway, being the good Toronto Star employee that she is, her column is made up of liberal coffee room slang and snide observations that postmodernistic reporters/columnists believe to be the "cool" way to do their job. What is sad, is she lost an opportunity to comment on how political parties have become so regimented that they are in danger of damaging our parliamentary process. The Campaign College is an occasion to train, inspire and network and all parties do them.
Their value is obvious to the parties but they may well be part of what is wrong with our political system. It is a manifestation of centralized control by the party and the regulation of the electoral process by a bureaucracy that is attempting to have a "fair" electoral system. Both these efforts may well strangle our parliamentary system which is already not well understood by the voting public.
The media always has had two goals. One was to disseminate a political viewpoint and two to make money for the proprietor. The first goal requires more than an attitude and as reporting has become the art of the "news bite" the challenge to even good reporters is how to be bright and light, the consequent loss of intelligent content has reduced most media to reporting fluff and churning it over in an attempt to capture the attention of the public. To educate or lead the public on political issues in this way dilutes and to some extent perverts the message. The second goal has become extremely difficult to maintain as "the media" now embraces so many different mediums each competing for revenue, and the fixed costs and expenses have risen extremely high. These costs have had a considerable bearing on the effectiveness of the media to provide proper coverage of political events.