Saturday, August 2, 2008

Apparently Bernier hurt, tarnished or caused no damage to our reputation, I assume.

By now most Canadians have seen the headlines that Foreign Affairs has released it's security review into the classified documents being left by Bernier at his girl friends house.

For the record you can read the online report here. It is a concise, detailed report prepared by the Departmental Security Officer and two outside security consultants from BMCI Investigations.

Since we already knew most of the details about the scandal, what intrigued me about the Friday release (Tories always release bad news on Fridays) was the various headlines used by our national media.

There seems to be some confusion about whether the "Bernier Affair" hurt our country's reputation or whether it tarnished our country's reputation.
  • CBC - Country's reputation tarnished over Bernier document loss: report 
  • Macleans- Federal report says Bernier document loss tarnished Canada's reputation
  • CNEWS - Bernier affair tarnished Canada's reputation
  • CTV - Bernier hurt Canada's reputation: gov't report
The Globe and Mail decided to go with both descriptions and threw in a new twist that the report puts more blame on Couillard. Somewhat true when you read the report.
  • Globe - Bernier's loss of documents hurt Canada's reputation: report 
  • Globe - Bernier's loss of paper tarnished Canada's reputation, report says
  • Globe - Ottawa faults Couillard for lost dossier
However the National Post, apparently Canada's version of Fox News had a completely different take.
  • National Post - Bernier caused no 'significant injury' to nation: report
The Montreal Gazette had a slight problem. Since they are part of the Canwest, National Post family, they decided to play it safe and just announce the report.
In case you do not have time to go through the report, here's the two sentences in the conclusion, that our main stream media are quoting from.
While the possible unauthorized disclosure of the contents of the classified briefing notes, would not have caused significant injury to the national interest; it has to be acknowledged that the incident itself was injurious to the national interest by tarnishing Canada's good reputation within NATO circles for safeguarding classified information.

At the same time, it is considered probable that the incident will be perceived by external observers as the result of careless handling of classified information by an individual rather than a systemic failure of the Government's regime for protecting classified information.
In my opinion having Harper and his arrogant alliance representing Canada, both hurts and tarnishes our country's reputation.

But hey look where I post.

This somewhat shorter Saturday post has been brought to you by the New Fair and Balanced Willy Loman.


Have a great long weekend.

1 comment:

Alison said...

Good job tracking those headlines to their biases. We should be doing a lot more of this.

I guess Mound was right

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