Klees on Referendum
This front page story in the Sept. 28 Era-Banner caught my eye. The headline reads, “Klees votes against new voting system. Will you?” (note: the online version of this story has the less provocative headline, “Klees casts his vote, attacks referendum.”
I’m not really suprised that Mr. Klees would favour the current, unbalanced system which allows majority governments with a minority of voter support, it has served him well since 1995 after all. I am a bit shocked at the tenor of the article though.
It highlights Mr. Klees reasons for objecting to MMP (more on those later) as it should. It describes, in a factual way, how the MMP system works. Yet it offers no counterpoint.
To be fair, Ms. Grech sought the position of Liberal candidate Christina Bisanz, unfortunately all she could elicit was that Ms. Bisanz had yet to make up her mind.
It gets better.
Mr. Klees, not content to rely on a front page story to get his message across, took out a quarter-page ad, (appearing on p. A11,) to reiterate his position!
It must be nice to have money!
Am I really against the article or the ad? By themselves, not really. Although I feel that the article was a bit slanted, it certainly did not overstep the bounds of reporting, and I’m not at all against a Candidate spending his money to inform the electorate of his position. It’s the way one reinforces the other, without there being a balance that bugs me.
Obviously the individual journalist has no knowledge of what ads are going to run, just as the advertising dept. has no idea which stories will appear. The editor, however, does. And I think that it is incumbent upon the editorial staff of any newspaper to keep information balanced. There are several candidates in who support MMP, and a quote or two from them would have sufficed.
There are a lot of misconceptions about MMP that are put forward by Mr. Klees in both the story and the ad, but I think that I will take the time to refute those in another post.