Spare Me the Wisdom, Bill
......and Hold the Condescending Attitude!

This afternoon intrepid "investigative journalist" Bill Tieleman weighed in among the comments at BC Mary's invaluable blog where she tries to shed some light on the shadowy occurrences surrounding the infamous Legislature Raids. Now if the lapdog media in this province treated this raid and the resulting legal action (or lack of same) as important as say.......when an NDP premier had a neighbor help him build a deck, perhaps neither Mary or I would have been inspired to start our blogs in an effort to generate interest and flush out information. But for some reason issues like, what is happening to BC Hydro, what happened to BC Rail, why are BC Ferries rapidly becoming water hazards and oh yeah, why did the RCMP spending most of a day during the holidays of 2003 rolling evidence out of the legislature on dollies seem to fail to meet the test of being of interest to the public.

Now Bill starts his comment at Mary's with this:

Folks - I appreciate Mary's blog and your following this case greatly - but you have to be more accurate on the Courts.

Or what Bill, will you go pout in the corner? The only inaccuracies I've run into on Mary's blog, or by her commenters are due to the difficulty of actually finding accurate information. Of course when Can(o'crap)West reporters actually attend the court hearing only to have their editor at the holy Times-Colonist (of which more later) decide not to publish the submission due to its lack of importance, one source of information is kinda cut off at the pass right there. This happened in the case of an earlier meeting of counsel at the Courthouse, see Mary's archives for details. Specifically see From the Editor-in-Chief, Times-Colonist and Some things did happen on Sept. 18, '06.

Editor-in-Chief Chodan of the T-C was extremely displeased and almost threatening towards BC Mary for having the temerity to share with her readers her (Chodan's) statement regarding coverage of and lack of importance of the day's hearing in question. I have publicly (well, as public as this blog) asked Ms. Chodan to answer a question or two myself. But I guess as an important newspaper figure Ms. Chodan's mandate has little or nothing to do with sharing facts or information with the public. Indeed, maybe big time newspaper folk have to take an oath (like joining the CIA) swearing to never allow a fact to enter the public realm without the proper application of spin. Silly me to even think otherwise. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the circulation of the Sun and Province is currently below that of 1957, at which time less folks lived in the whole province than the Fraser Valley today.

Or here at the Infamous House you could check out Almost Secret Hearing Held Yesterday from May 14.

Then you could follow that up with its sequel
? Anonymous ? Questions ? ? ? ? ? from May 16.

Maybe you could talk to Wally Oppal too, if anybody is spreading inaccurate and inappropriate statements about a matter before the courts - I nominate him. Oh yeah, Wally is the TOP law enforcement officer in the province and rumor has it he even went to Law School, so he should know better.

Then Bill gets even more condescending and says:

This article ran in the Victoria Times-Colonist on October 22, 2006 regarding the defense disclosure application. It clear (sic) states for all to read that the hearing for Basi and Virk would be held on October 30 - see the third from the last paragraph.

Bill, I know it ain't your fault, but I live over 500 miles from Victoria and never even SEE a Times-Colonist, much less have any reason to buy it. Perhaps you forgot, the trial is in VANCOUVER, or am I making a rash inaccurate statement again? When I am expecting news of something like say the Basi-Virk trial, I overcome my natural reluctance to buy the Vancouver Sun* and scour it for relevant information.

* I'm used to receiving P.R releases free in the mail or picking them up free. If I'm looking for fiction, I tend to prefer novels or short stories, clearly labeled as fiction. - kootcoot

I consider (however wrongly) the Sun to be the provincial paper of record, and the least it could do would be to provide information about such an important trial taking place in the very same city it supposedly serves. I guess I was being obtuse though. I should have known that this information would be in a paper published in a city about an hour's drive and a long ferry ride away from the courthouse and conveniently placed in paragraph 6 on Page ???, and that this easy to find information would be published over a week before the court date. I'm so dense and retarded, I never thought of that. Maybe next time I'll check the Fort Saint James paper a week or two before the trial date, though that is also a long way from my house and the courthouse.

Perhaps I wasn't being truthful and/or accurate above, Maybe I shouldn't consider you an investigative journalist. Perhaps you are more of a whatever they call folks like Baldrey and Palmer. Maybe you aren't a reporter at all, and you write "opinion" pieces (NewsViewsAttitudes?), I guess that would mean you are a pundit?

There's another thing that annoys me about this case and its coverage. How come there aren't any news articles that basically state what happened in court, without the spin or the attempt to minimize the importance of the issue. How come as far as I've been able to find the only coverage, in the Sun, of the recent few days of court has been sporadically in Keith Baldrey's "opinion" column. Doesn't this qualify as news? By the way Bill, whose opinion is it that you express?

By the way Bill, in light of your chiding, in the interests of accuracy I will correct some previous assumptions and statements:

On October 30, David Basi, Bob Virk and Aneal Basi, their counsel and Special Prosecutor Berardino were originally scheduled to deal with issues regarding discovery and disclosure in the Vancouver Law Courts. Apparently this had to be set back in order to accommodate some really important legal proceedings involving John Doe and his distant relative John Does.

Just to help keep this all in perspective, I would like to close with something from a couple years or so ago from either Reporter Bill or Pundit Bill.

" ... But we do know that there are connections between a police investigation into drugs, money-laundering, and organized crime, two privatization deals worth more than $1 billion, and allegations of breach of trust and fraud by top provincial government officials who have extensive connections with the federal Liberal party and the campaign to make Paul Martin leader and prime minister."

But "we do know"........we do, do we, Bill?