Tuesday, May 27, 2008

They come in multiples of three...

So far this month with the provincial government:

1. Continued damning testimony about the Eastern Health Board.
2. The premier and justice minister made an ill-advised and doomed attempt to try and cower the inquiry a bit before things got too humiliating.
3. The deputy premier quit in a snit about road funding.
4. Several cabinet minister were revealed to have a spine with the same consistancy of Jello by refusing to stand up to his "bullying", thereby making themselves and the government look like idiots.
5. The premier vocally "blacklisted" a senior CBC reporter in a media scrum.
6. A cabinet minister announced a lawsuit against Quebec and the federal government over the Upper Churchill.
7. The same cabinet minister, several hours later, had to walk back that statement saying she "misspoke" about the lawsuit.
8. We might have seen the beginning of the end of talk radio's influence on the public as people finally, finally begin to clue in just how much the government uses VOCM to spin their position with surrogates.

So yeah, that's a bad month. And hey, there's still time left yet. At the rate things are going, I'm waiting for a governmental sex scandal. We haven't had one of those yet (well, federally, kinda. But not locally). Lord knows there's one there ready to break at any time. Maybe this will be the month.

Now, as a former reporter, I enjoy a little government chaos. And this month must be the gift that kept on giving for local reporters. Even the blacklisting was good headlines. But the downside to all of this insanity is that it happened while the House of Assembly was sitting. Government's tend to get in more trouble when the House is sitting. Just the nature of the beast. It's why, as provincial government's have become more concious (or paranoid) of the media, they've slowly begun restricting the number of days the House is in session.

This was the first time the House was in session since the last provincial election, what with the premier decided to skip a fall session. So they were pushing nine months or more. And if this is the kind of craziness that the premier can look forward to every time the House opens, you get the feeling he isn't going to be in a big rush to reopen it anytime soon.

Seriously though, it's only the 27th. Surely something else can go spectacularly wrong in the next couple of days.

2 comments:

Megan said...

I missed the Open Line developments. What happened? It's Open Line, right, not the news staff?

I think it's dangerous for any station to turn over so much of its programming to anyone who wants to call. There's too much opportunity for organised groups to skew the results.

Anonymous said...

Talk radio??? I missed that one ...