Former journalist, now councillor, Geoff Meggs has put his blog back in motion recently. For those of you who just can’t read enough about city hijinks and deep policy thoughts, the link is here. It was impressive that in a recent post, he took the time to publish a lengthy comment from someone critical of his comments on CTV about Olympics parties and acknowledge a need to improve.
Another interesting recent post is his thoughts on the recent Olympic village coverage.
It’s refreshing to see that kind of reflectiveness and openness, although of course Geoff has his fairly unmoveable ideas on many city issues aside from Olympics parties.
It was a pleasant change, at any rate, from the puzzling citycaucus.com blog, being run by former mayor Sam Sullivan’s chief of staff, Daniel Fontaine, and the mayor’s former website designer, Mike Klassen.
I had been looking forward to seeing what this blog would produce and its potential contribution to debates on the big issues the city is facing. What I enjoy most about journalism is hearing the different arguments people can bring to an issue — it’s a learning experience. And the city has a lot on its plate that can use a full hearing of all points of view.
There have been occasional posts that contribute to that kind of educational debate, but there’s also a substantial amount of what I can only call silly stuff, i.e. “Gregor Robertson had a private party at the Vancouver Club at taxpayers expense” or “More in camera meetings in Gregor’s first two months in office than in Sam’s.” — I’m paraphrasing here.
Yes, Gregor took Olympics guy to the Vancouver Club as part of the city’s hosting duties, just as Sam would have done. It was hardly secret. He held a media availability afterwards to talk about it, for anyone who wanted to show up. Yes, there have been more in-camera meetings as the city deals with the Olympic village issue, just an NPA council would have been doing, given the state of emergency that prevails with the financing there.
It’s not clear whether the bloggers involved actually know what they’re doing is silly but they do it anyway as part of an energetic and negative three-year attack campaign — mobilizing their base and hoping to fool a few dumb people who are easily misled along the way — or if they actually don’t get how things work. In either case, it’s annoying to read such deliberately petty and misinformative stuff.