Since I’m not a retarded ape, I can’t help feel as though the reporters and editors and publishers of the Canwest-owned Vancouver Sun are actually in high dudgeon—remorseful—that Iraq is turning into such a good news story. Why else would they put the story of Iraq’s current democratic, peaceful, free election on page B-12—the last page of the second section?
So let me set the record straight for you: this is one of the pre-eminent, historic, global success stories of our time. The Vancouver Sun knows all of that, because when things were going badly in Iraq (and by extension for George Bush and America), the Vancouver Sun couldn’t stop talking about it on page A-1, A-2, A-3, and every page they could fit that story and its accompanying gory photos—oh yeah and Bush malapropisms.
And the story happens to also reflect on a positive aspect of the historic legacy of an ex-president, George W. Bush, “neo-con”, under whose leadership and tenacity that country, Iraq, with a population almost the same as our own, was literally given its freedom. And the world was freed from the dangers of a savage, insane, tyrannical dictator. As if I have to point this out to you: the media hates Bush and his doctrine with such a passion (or even a derangement syndrome) that they will actually adjust the news to deprive him of any rehabilitation of his unearned disrepute.
Of course the whole story is also in direct conflict with their slobbering love affair with their political messiah, The Great Obama, liberal-leftist. This point is not insignificant.
So it’s not the journalistic choices I would have made as an editor or publisher. Today, as Iraq is literally rising from the ashes, rather than putting the utterly disgraced (well-earned disgrace) socialist party ex-premier of British Columbia, the infamous Glen Clark, on the front page of the paper, under the huge smiley-face heading “RISEN FROM THE ASHES”, I’d have gone another way. 
This blatant, suck-up, reputation rehabilitation effort from the Vancouver Sun is complete with a two full page spread— on pages A-8 to 9 (complete with the word “disgraced” in tendentious quotation marks in the sub-head). It’s a huge story about how the actually disgraced premier who was deservedly dumped from office, was later rescued from scorn and ridicule and the dog house (if not the poor house) by none other than a benevolent capitalist who sympathetically hired him and paid him big capitalist bucks. Clark undeservedly won the lottery.
Yes I think I would have featured a story on Iraq rising from the ashes instead.
I can’t help think that the Vancouver Sun and most of the media may have something of an agenda. Do you think that’s possible? Gee. Let’s ponder that for a moment …OK yes they do.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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