Thursday, December 01, 2011

Spam-A-Lot Revisited....Why Won't The proMedia Follow The Money?

AllTheNewsThatDoesn'tQuiteFit
MissingLinkVille


Look.

I like Doug Ward's stuff in the VSun.

A lot.

He's a hard-nosed guy who clearly digs and then often writes hard-boiled stories that are anything but boilerplate.

But I, for one, was pretty disappointed with what he didn't write about in his (otherwise excellent) piece on Peter Ladner's criticism of the NPA's recent election campaign and, more specifically, its PropShop in the Bloggodome.

Regarding the latter, here is what Mr. Ward did write:

"...The former city councillor wrote (in his editorial in Business in Vancouver) that the NPA has to stop treating every political opponent as “evil,” and linked that negative approach to the citycaucus.com blog, which attacked the Vision Vancouver council throughout Robertson’s first term.

“It’s a tiresome, downer strategy borne of three years of citycaucus.com blog’s partisan put-downs — hilarious to family and friends, but tedious and irritating to anyone who cares more about the city than about hating Vision and COPE (RIP).”

The anti-Vision blog was run by Mike Klassen and Daniel Fontaine, strong supporters of former NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan, who was defeated by Ladner in the party’s bitter 2008 nomination battle.

Klassen, an unsuccessful NPA council candidate, said after the election that he hasn’t decided whether he will continue to operate his blog..."



So what's missing from that passage?

Well, the fact that Mr. Ladner also asked a question that many, ourselves included, have asked for sometime now.

Which is......

Where did the money come from to fund the long running PropShop in question?

And, more pointedly, did it, in whole or in part, come from the massive war chest that was amassed by the PropShop proprietors former boss before he was bounced from the 2008 mayoral race by Mr. Ladner himself?


______
And for those who think that these are petty, partisan questions do not forget how hard the PropShop in question went after a counterspinning Propagammon arm when it was revealed that the latter received funding from the other side, which, for the record, I also think stinks.


.

3 comments:

spartikus said...

Not that Mike and Daniel are my favourite people in the world (cough) - but the cost of a website isn't significant, even one with the traffic of City Caucus. According to Go Daddy, CC is hosted at Hostgator - the "business plan" of which runs at $10-11/mo.

It would be the time commitment to write the articles that would be the main thing. From experience, it's hard to come up with something every day, but not impossible. Between 2 people?

It's within the realm of possibility.

RossK said...

spart--

I agree.

It is the time, time, time ticking in a guy's head that costs money.

But.

Don't forget, this was not set up as a single site/node in the beginning.

I would reckon there was likely some pretty big backing for a panUrban rightsided push back then.

.

RossK said...

Regardless....

Based on what Mr. Ladner wrote in his piece about the war chest, which, if Mr. Tieleman is correct, followed directly after the quote used in the VSun piece, I was surprised that Mr. Ward didn't get Mr. Klassen on the record one way or the other.

.