Hi. Some of you folks may have seen my tweets during the recent Alberta election.
Some of you agreed with me, some disagreed, but my hope on my posts was to put across my views on what I saw happening during the election. Until the last election I dutifully marched off to the a polling station and marked my X beside the name of a PC MLA. It was an automatic. Vote for the Liberals or the NDP? I think not!! But as happens over 4 decades apples, oranges and political parties tend, first to go stale, then begin rotting. Until Ms Redford, in my opinion, stopped off with a cheque for the ATA. Until the last election there wasn’t another alternative and we, the electorate would have had to swallow that with a smile. But this time the Wildrose Party had come together under Danielle Smith. Now, there was a viable alternative with a good platform, a fresh new face with someone who spoke very well and could get her point across without stumbling over what she was saying.
In addition we had something called twitter which I said I would NEVER have anything to do with. What good could it be other than to tell someone what I was doing at any particular time of day…..which to me was a pretty weak reason to have a twitter account….until the election. Everything that was happening during the election was happening NOW. I found other people such as myself who believed that Wildrose could, if not this time, next time be the new Alberta government without the baggage of the PCAA.
There was one fly in the ointment. It was the print media, the broadcast media and news people who were bloggers. This group had a license to say anything they wanted, as were we, but they had a wider readership and viewership because they were THE MEDIA who could say “hey look at me, read me”. And how can you distrust what a journo (new word they have given themselves….sexier) was telling you in his/her blog or in his/her op ed.
So what I would like to do is to have my own little opinion corner that will start with a short history showing the partnership between the media and the political parties of Alberta, but none like the one started by Peter Lougheed’s AB PC party which has lasted from 1967 to this day. I call it a partnership because as we saw during the last election when there was a very real chance that the PCAA would find themselves sitting in the opposition benches the media from eastern Canada to the West coast came together to help change the course of the election.
|Stay tuned. I hope you’ll find it both educational and entertaining.
