To the editor,
Re: Ex-premier’s record can be questioned, Letters, Aug. 1.
“In today’s celebrity-driven age,” wherein the words of politicians are observed as sanctified scriptures by adoringly deferential newsreaders (the world of political and media celebrity often being symbiotic, and, sometimes, even incestuous), the subsequent pity is that the questioning seldom takes place anywhere but on the letters page – the letters page wherein the ‘art’ (artifice, if you prefer) of an editor can easily reduce fact to assertion, thus preserving the sanctity of the abutting opinion section’s banal contentions.
The fourth estate as ‘watchdog’ being the sham of modern commerce – if only there were some manner of public enterprise, some constitutional merging of the ethos of ombudsman and auditor, some sort of fifth estate charged with the task of exposing, at every instance, the merest hint of mendacity connected to public office and agency, perhaps thus to shame the fourth estate from its perniciously venal ways. Ah! there again, the rub: the celebrity entourage having complete constitutional control of Canada’s colonial-era-designed chicken coop.
David S. Dunaway, South Wellington