Battle of the Star Chambers

The Vancouver Sun is a hugely influential vehicle for public policy, and they know it. All other media follows the lead of our dailies. When you turn on the radio in the morning, it is more likely that the story of the day reported by news or program hosts will arrive from the front pages of the Sun and in rare cases the Vancouver Province.

Same goes for TV news. While they occasionally scoop other media, a vast number of stories that lead the newscast mirror the front pages of these papers. It probably helps that they are owned by the same media companies.

The editorial pages are less widely read, but what is written is observed by business and people that shape public policy. It could be argued that the editorial positions of a large newspaper are as critical to the fortunes of the region it serves as the decisions made by its political leaders. If you need evidence, look at any tin pot dictatorship and you'll see that he or she controls the levers of big media in their country.

The Vancouver Sun takes issue with how the decisions of this BC government are being arrived at, by claiming that important policy is being shaped without sufficient public consultation. In my experience no one has yet been able to define what "sufficient" public process is, but don't let that blur the Sun's argument for you.

The Sun comments:

Developing policy in secret not only denies the public the right to see how government operates, but deprives history of public records that explain how things come to pass and identify those who participate in the decisions that shape our society.

On its own this argument makes sense. We do need records of what kind of consultation and assessments were provided to influence decision-making in government. There is no evidence that these records do not exist. Furthermore, there have been many accounts of Premier Campbell meeting with stakeholders in an effort to create the Climate Action Plan. Time will be the judge whether the Premier made the right decision or not. At least he will be publicly accountable for it.

The irony of the Sun's editorial on secret decion-making is that we will never know who wrote it. Sun editorials are not signed (nor co-signed) by those that penned them. The editorials are like, and not much more credible than, anonymous blogs because they do not let readers see how they operate and how their decisions came to pass.

This wordy explanation tries to describe by whom the editorials are authored, and why they are not signed:

The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The Vancouver Sun newspaper. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper's editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper. The members of The Sun's editorial board are editorial page editor Fazil Mihlar, editorial writers Harvey Enchin, Craig McInnes and Peter McKnight, editor-in-chief Patricia Graham and publisher Kevin Bent. Columnists Stephen Hume, Jonathan Manthorpe and Barbara Yaffe are advisers to the board.

You be the judge as to whether this is a very satisfactory explanation for their stealth.

For the newspaper editors to ask that the government to lay all their cards on the table, when they are not prepared to do so themselves, makes for a very hollow argument.

Other big newspapers have ended the policy of "unsigned" editorials. The Vancouver Sun and Province should end them, too.