The Smart Affair....Never Mind The Bollocks...

...Here Come The False Equivalencies.

So.

With the media ranks fully closed Monday, VSun OpEd columnist Craig McInnes tried to padlock the barn door yesterday.

Here, as near as I can figure it, is the set-up to Mr. McInnes thesis that CBC Ombudsman Kirk Lapointe's ruling in which he concluded CBC-BC's Legislative Bureau Chief Stephen Smart is in a potential conflict of interest because his wife, Rebecca Scott, is the Deputy Press Secretary to the Premier is hogwash:

....When I left that employer after 18 years to work for The Vancouver Sun, a competitor, my wife was still a free-lance contributor to my old paper. A couple of months later, some bright lights in the computer room decided her system access should be cut off because of the conflict they decided she was in because she was married to me and I worked for the competition. As it happened, the same wizards who decided my wife was a threat had failed to cancel my computer system access when I left, so if I had wanted to snoop or wreak havoc, I could have done so even after she was cut off.

Foolish though that was, the deeper idiocy was the notion that either of us would have risked our professional reputations out of an overactive sense of personal loyalty to each other....

Mr. McInnes then goes on to posit that the fact that he and his own wife were able to work as two journalistic rivals for years without any conflicts means that Mr. Smart and Ms. Scott can do so too.

But here's the thing....

A husband and wife team made up of two competing journos can scoop each other, but neither can control the flow of information from sources, be they people or documents. In comparison, Ms. Scott's actual job is to shape and control the flow of information to reporters. Reporters like her husband.

Thus, any reasonable person who has been paying attenion can only conclude that the rationale for Mr. McInnes' apologia is built on a massive pile ofcodswallop of the most falsely equivalent kind.

But that's not even the worst of it.

Because, despite the fact that Mr. Lapointe's ruling was based largely on the 'potential' for conflict of interest, given the jobs that Ms. Scott and Mr. Smart hold, Mr. McInnes still goes all strawman on said ruling when he suddenly pivots and states:

...No one involved in the Smart/Scott complaint has any examples of the perceived conflict between the two corrupting the coverage of any story by the CBC...

All of which makes me wonder.....

Did the Mr. McInnes not hear the specific example offered up by Mr. Keith Baldrey on Bill Good's radio show last Friday?

In case he didn't, here, constructed from Norm Farrell's audio excerpt, is our transcript:

Bill Good (speaking to Mr. Baldrey): And we should point out that you are a direct competitor of Mr. Smart.

Keith Baldrey: Ya. I mean he's my competitor. And I think it's outrageous to suggest that his job performance has been anything less than exemplary. I mean, we compete for stories.... Here's a great example. Christy Clark revealed that she wasn't callin' a fall election on my television station and a couple of other news outlets, and not the CBC (back in September)... It was, you know, he (Smart) doesn't gain necessarily from the relationship his wife has with the Premier. In fact, I think, if anything he's probably hurt by that.

In other words, a clear potential for conflict doesn't always lead to an advantage for one of the involved parties. Instead, it can sometimes result in disadvantages if, for example, someone is trying too hard to demonstrate that there is no conflict. And if this was the case, as Mr. Baldrey suggests, it would mean that the CBC's ability to gather and report news of significance was, indeed, compromised because of the close personal relationship between Mr. Smart and Ms. Scott.

Enough said?

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