Recently Gary Mason retweeted an interesting Scott McCrae tweet – Shakespeare is spinning like a top in his grave – about the latest Pew “State of the Media” study.
News consumers, Pew observes, are deserting media outlets as quality reporting diminishes in the face of cuts and editorial decisions.
I tweeted back, “That’s me” but heard no more from Mr. Mason.
Today in provincial politics is a perfect illustration of how and why this is taking place.
It all started with a government leak that landed in the pocket of CP reporter Dirk Meissner.
Meissner’s lead conveyed the raison d’etre for the leak: “A set of leaked letters is undermining the credibility of a report to be released today by British Columbia’s auditor general over the provincial government’s carbon neutral experiment.”
Exactly. As has been happening more and more recently, someone in or close to the government used Meissner to undermine the credibility of a supposedly damning audit of Gordon Campbell’s pet project, the Pacific Carbon Trust.
Campbell set up the Trust to be the agent of carbon neutrality for the provincial government. Government institutions with carbon emissions absolve their sins by buying carbon credits from private sector companies that reduce emissions. The Pacific Carbon Trust is the arbiter of and dealer in supposedly legitimate credits.
Here’s how it works: a company or non-profit figures out a way to capture the value of a real reduction in carbon emissions (a reduction that is sustainable and new). The Trust evaluates and purchases those options for resale to public bodies like school boards, hospitals and universities.
Put another way school boards, hospitals and universities are mandated to use scarce public dollars to pay for the private sector’s emission reduction programs.
Hadi Dowlatabadi, of UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, put it another way when he told Business in BC “Why not just regulate this stuff? I don’t see why you have to use public money or market forces to address emissions at all.”
Regardless, the Campbell government decided the carrot was a better instrument than the stick and set up the Pacific Carbon Trust to figure out which were the legitimate projects, then purchase credits and resell them to public institutions.
Questions soon arose about price inflation and bang for the public buck. Earlier this year in response to information released by the Trust through FOI the BC Liberals launched an internal inquiry to determine whether the Trust was paying too much for credits as well as inflating prices in its own interest, both shortchanging schools, hospitals etc…
The Auditor also launched his own independent study that looked not only at the operation of the Trust but at the legitimacy of the credits themselves. Were companies like Encana and TimberWest – all contributors to the Liberals – inflating prices to cash strapped public institutions, all in the interest of fattening their bottom line?
Now the Auditor’s report is complete, the government has read it and according to the Auditor’s press release had it ready for release today.
Word was the report was more bad news
Cue the selective leaks that cast doubt on the report. Dirk Meissner was the willing instrument of the government’s damage control effort. Let’s not kid ourselves, that is what is happening here.
The BC Liberal Speaker Bill Barisoff has spiced up the proceedings with his own bit of improvisation. He’s now delayed the release of the report because the unseemly leak may be a breach of parliamentary privilege.
Barisoff forgets, disregards, laughs off, whatever, Bill Bennett’s leak, just a couple of weeks ago, of a draft page of an Auditor’s report that was subsequently withdrawn because of inaccuracy. Bennett’s actions flaunting this new found privilege weren’t worthy of a peep from the Speaker.
But back to the whole point of this tangled retelling. Why the heck is Meissner doing the government’s dirty work?
Rather than taking dictation to come up with the lead why is he not wondering why he’s been chosen to discredit the Auditor General and his report?
Besides Meissner’s dictation today, we’ve got the Tyee outing maybe, possibly a leaker who exposed ethnogate and a couple of other “let’s corral the public service into our party work,” scandals that keep dropping out of the sky.
Except the Tyee offered no definitive proof when it IDed the Liberal staffer. All they could say was it’s kind of, most likely this guy.
Weak. Very, very weak.
And to what end? To stop the flow of information about how the Liberal government is using taxpayers’ money to do Liberal party work? Thank you for that, Tyee.
Tyee editor David Beers, in damage control mode himself, claimed on-line that the reporter had “deepened” the story.
“Deepened the story”? The only thing deep about this was the gratitude flowing from the Premier’s office.
As someone who wants my newspaper/radio/TV news to tell me the real story, I’m tired of this crap. I’m tired of reading people who don’t represent me and tell me stories that serve their interests, and their friend’s interests but not mine.
It used to be that I had few options, but no longer, as Pew reminds us. I can piece the whole Pacific Carbon Trust story together from other sources on the internet.
True, they aren’t all reliable. But neither is the MSM. And this way I have just a bit more power, as if I’m my own editor of my assembled newspaper/newshour.
***
Day one of the campaign is still more than two weeks away and the Twittisphere is crazy. Besides the tangled web of the PCT there is Kash Heed‘s call for a police investigation of Pat Bell and… the Justice Minister Shirley Bond.
Now do you think this should be a big story? The former West Van Chief of Police, Solicitor General and recipient of his own Special Prosecutor, twice! thinks the current Sol Gen/AG and Caucus colleague should be the subject of an RCMP investigation.
Heed may hate his colleagues but he does have the chops to know who should be investigated and who shouldn’t.
Forget elections, how is it helpful to the administration of justice to have the Justice Minister under attack from her own colleague and predecessor in the job. This is like Canada’s version of Italian politics under Berlusconi. But who’s Silvio?
The guys over at Wazuku have certainly gone to bat for Christy Clark and the BC Liberals.
I met Doug Christie in 1984 and it wasn’t in the best of circumstances. I was at a small meeting of a human rights group that was freaked out – as anyone should be – by the rise of neo Nazi and other associated hate groups in the early to mid eighties right here in BC.
Here’s the guy who should resign along with his boss, the Premier.