WhenNothing'sMovin'Ville
According to today's press reports the RailGate trial will not resume until Oct 12th.
But here's the real thing......
It's not even clear what the hold-up is this time.
Is it injured jurors?
Is it sick defendants?
Or......
Is it that a certain witness is unavailable?
And here, Mr. Keith Fraser of The Province and Mr. Neal Hall of the Vancouver Sun appear to disagree.
Here is Mr. Fraser's take on the unavailablity of the illustrious witness Mr. Brian Kenning:
"The judge said that as a result of the scheduling problem with former B.C. Rail board member Brian Kenning, they would be unable to conclude the defence cross-examination of Kenning until Oct. 12."
Hmmmmmm.....
Apparently, there were no 'scheduling problems' when Mr. Kenning showed up at all those board meetings, for years, to collect his fat-fee while he continued to 'advise' a business that no longer had any business after the assets were 'leased' to Mr. David McLean and Co. in 2003.
But I digress, because I what I really wanted to do here was point out what Mr. Hall had to say about Mr. Kenning's 'unavailability':
"The judge explained that, through no fault of his own or the fault of anyone, the trial would not be able to complete the cross-examination of Brian Kenning."
So.
Which is it boys?
Is Mr. Kenning unavailable until just Oct 12th?
Or.
Is he, as is implied by Mr. Hall's statement, unavailable forever?
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And I would remind readers that someone purporting to be Mr. Hall came on this site not long ago and essentially called us nincompoops (and worse) who get everything wrong.....Was it really Mr. Hall of the VSun that came by and made a fuss?.....I dunno for sure....The way the comment was written was suggestive, but Mr. Hall himself flat out refused to respond when I contacted him through his VSun Email account....However, it is worth recalling that this kind of thing also came up over at Mary's when Mr. Hall made a fuss because one of the members of the Supreme Court Press Accreditation Committee was misidentified by a blogger...
Unfortunately, in this particular case there may not have been a proMedia tie-breaker in the room as it appears that The Globe no longer has someone in the courtroom on a daily basis....Perhaps a Citizen Journalist could fill us in?
Update: Citizen Journalist, Robin Mathews, writing over at Mary's place, has some interesting speculations regarding the 'unavailability' of the good Mr. Kenning.....
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6 comments:
RossK,
Seems that Kenning wandered off to his son's birthday party ... in Toronto.
Can you beat that?
Just went to a party. We should be thankful, I suppose, that he didn't take a slow boat to China.
The aura hangs over Courtroom 54, of an understood set of backroom circumstances ... while the rest of us labour under a Publication Ban.
I hear talk of pickets at Vancouver Court House ... and mass protests on the Legislature lawn ...
.
RossK
No Globe journalist most of last week and early this week.
Interesting that Mary.
Don't know if it's true so, unlike some other Media Morans round here (see: breathless discussions of a rumoured 1% cut to the Hunter S. Thompson tax), I didn't attempt to Wurlitzer it.
But.
It sure set me to wondering if Mr. Kenning ever missed out on a board meeting fee for a birthday party?
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Thanks Ian--
I surmised as much when, suddenly, their coverage was based on CP stuff.
.
As Robin and I were walking out of Court room #54, a regular, Globe and Mail reporter was walking in, after all it was only 10:20, the judge is usually late by ten minutes, the most he could be missing was ten minutes. As it turned out, for him, the judge had called for another break after only fifteen minutes.
And then the marching orders were given by the judge and we all left.
Its interesting though, there's been a Canadian Press reporter on site, all of last week, and yesterday, two different reporters for each week. The one from last week, Sonny Dhillon, his report ended up in the Globe and Mail last week, I saw it myself. As to yesterday's Canadian Press reporter, I haven't seen anything in the G and M, but then again I haven't been looking either.
As to all this past fuss about Accreditation, the REAL Neal Hall writes down every word for his report, whereas Kieth Fraser, puts his tape recorder on the seat beside him and it does it for him.
Now we all know that the tape recorder is there to ensure that those fine accredited individuals get the story right for their newspapers. Mr. Hall is an excellent reporter, so too for Mr. Fraser, but the fact is the Jury were in their ante-room, not the court room, therefore the Publication Ban was in effect.
With the jury present, Dave Basi wasn't (ill with a note), Mr. Kenning wasn't either (note???). So how did Mr. Kenning know not to be present if the Court didn't know that Mr. Basi couldn't be.
It could be that the court, the judge, and the lawyers, had other plans for that day, and the rest of the week till next Tuesday.
If you want to know what's going on in Court Room #54 you have to take the time to be there.
Publication Ban is in place till the jury is sitting in the court room.
If you want confirmation, a third MSM opinion of what was really said, you can check out if the Canadian Press had her story published today.
Thanks tons NVG.
Very, very helpful.
To be straight-up about it, I'd be willing to take very short odds if I were going to bet on the possibility that it was a copy editting mistake/omission/removal that led to the weird syntax in Mr. Hall's piece.
Thing is, when we make small mistakes like that we do all we can to correct them (including providing 'update' notices on the original post itself)...I have watched the different editions go by on Mr. Hall's piece and have seen nothing of the sort....Now, given the way he decided to rip us a new one on at least one occasion (and perhaps two), I find that pretty ironic....
(which, of course, is why I noted it)
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Regarding recording devices and those super Jimmy Olsens of the REAL world of journalism - especially device dependent Mr. Fraser........ if Mr. Fraser should mis-lay his tape recorder - replete with BANNED proceedings and it were picked up by another human (and listened to) - who would be in violation of the Publication Ban? - Official, genuine reporter Mr. Fraser or the unsuspecting finder of misplaced tape (or digital) recording device who accidentally then hears whatever itis that J-Mac so kindly protects us from having to hear or know.......
I find it richly ironic that the so-called real journalists and even the retired one who gets far too much credit for excellence regularly accuse the blogosphere of
complete lack of regard for accuracy and just reading their coverage of things leads one to make a random selection of which "journalist" to accept as gospel that day. Listen to the same story on subsequent airings of GlowBull and then tell me how to decide which set of facts to consider true. On occasion the figures describing a payment, or a cost, or the value of the HST will be one value at noon, something else for the Early News at Five, something yet again at Six and different currency entirely for the late news. PostMedia and CeeTeeVee and GlowBall seem to have forgotten what a fact checker even is, much less actually use such a person - or perhaps a fact checker is what they call the PAB dude they call for the facts..........
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