Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Sorta Political: the media party

The premier of Ontario has resigned only one year after winning re-election. He is not a terribly bad leader by Canadian standards but , let's be honest, when someone resigns one year into a four-year mandate it's not because things are going well.

He is not uniquely or unusually bad and and many of the problems on his watch predate his coming to power. They are also big, big problems. For the benefit of non-Canadians, Ontario has long been the economic powerhouse of Canada and it's now in serious decline. And the worst is yet to come. Dalton McGuinty might have been an okay premier had been elected at some other time but he just wasn't up to the challenge. And now he is gone.

But the really fascinating thing is the media response. Guy resigns suddenly and unexpectedly from a position where he has been embroiled in scandal. This is not a good news story. So how does the press respond? By asking him if he has plans to run for an even higher office:
When asked specifically if he was interested in the federal Liberal leadership race, Mr. McGuinty said he "has no plans whatsoever." However, he did not specifically rule out entering the race, insisting only that he has no plans beyond serving as premier until a new leader is in place.

Mr. McGuinty was pressed repeatedly on the federal leadership race but only smiled and said he has "no plans."
You'd think he'd been a great roaring success. And he wasn't. He leaves behind him a number of huge steaming piles that will take years if not a generation to clean up. The province is heavily in debt and the  structural debt looming in the future will be crushing. It's economy is in decline and the government has massive debts because of social services it cannot afford to deliver. Public education is a disaster and McGuinty made it worse and discouraged any efforts to make more alternatives to public schooling available to parents.

The media, faced with the failure of its darling, has simply refused to report on his failures. As if it wasn't real as if they didn't report it.

It's hard to figure out why the Canadian media are so enamoured of the Liberal party but they are and have been for decades now. It's not a left versus right thing. The media are unquestionably left of centre but that doesn't seem to drive this love story. It's primarily cultural. The media look at the Liberals and see "people like us".

And they are going down. People like them I mean.

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