Town of Newmarket, cancel your advertising contract with the Era for Democacy's sake

Lots of news in the past 24-hours and all of it interesting.

First of all, there was the unexpected release of information by Ward 7 candidate John Blommesteyn on Tuesday afternoon. 

That was followed with news of the Newmarket Soccer Club is paying off its debt owed to the public through the placement of a private mortgage by way of a commercial lender. 

Both of these stories show us that this council, who tried so desperately to keep both of these matters "confidential" from the public, can be swayed to do the right thing when public pressure is applied. 

No wonder the gruesome-twosome, Mayor Van Bynen and his henchman sidekick John Taylor, are bemoaning this new era of "Hyper Transparency" (words actually spoken by John Taylor at Monday's council meeting).

For anyone doubting the reasoning why Kathleen Wynne's Bill 8 is desperately needed, only needs to refer to this week's events to know that public pressure has benefits to ensure that elected officials do the right thing.

We used to rely on the media to keep politicians honest. 

Clearly in Newmarket, the Era is not to be trusted to report the news. 

If you read the Era's reporting of the Glenway memo release, one critical fact is glaringly missing.  There is no mention of the petition that sparked this debate. 

Here are the actual series of events. 

1) Councillor Di Muccio asked at the September 22 council meeting for the memo to made public.  The Gruesome-Twosome argued against.  There was discussion about how this matter would be discussed in camera.  We are left assuming that it was discussed and the majority voted against making the document public. 

2) Ward 7 candidate John Blommesteyn gathered a petition and presented it to council on September 29th.  Council decided to meet in private again to reconsider their decision from the week previous. 

3) Upon coming out of the in camera meeting on the 29th, every speaker made mention of John Blommesteyn's ;petition as being the catalyst for their decision to make the memo public.  In other words, they succumbed to the public pressure. 

But in the Era's story, despite the critical role this petition played (as confirmed by all the speakers on Council), this petition goes un-mentioned.  Instead of playing up the role the public played in getting council to act responsibly (weeks out from an election), the Era is focusing on how the memo got released. 

To give you an analogy of how bad Chris Simon's article is:  imagine if Chris Simon was reporting on Abraham Lincoln's assassination and he didn't mention a single word about the President being killed.  His story would focus on how a gun got smuggled into the theatre instead.  There is no other way to describe it other than bad reporting. 

My blog was created years ago in response to bias reporting in the Era.  Since then I have written 146 posts that generally share one common thread - that is how the Era fails us when reporting Newmarket Council news. 

And I assume, based on my readership numbers, that most of you agree with me.  At least, nobody has ever taken me to task on my Twitter feed or my comments page defending how the Era reports on Newmarket politics. 

I don't know if the Town of Newmarket's advertising budget has "bought" good coverage for the Mayor and his allies.  Experience shows us that this is likely true.  I defy anyone to find any story in the Era that is actually critical of Tony Van Bynen (by mentioning him specifically).  I looked and couldn't find anything remotely close to criticizing the Mayor.

For the sake of our democracy, I am calling on the Town of Newmarket to stop advertising in the Era because it influences the way news gets told.  It is the only way to restore integrity to the Era in its reporting. 

I know this to be true because the Town of Aurora doesn't publish in the paper and the local reporters are actually doing a good job of keeping the Aurora mayor and council honest. 

If we want the type of honest reporting that Aurora residents enjoy then we need to cancel the Town of Newmarket advertising too.