Those who fairly address the issues should be commended. Please allow me to commend those who have been fair in their efforts to inform your readers. Two excellent articles by two Leader Post journalists have achieved this fairness.
Last month on December 1, 2006, Murray Mandryk wrote an excellent article on David Karwacki, the leader of the provincial liberal party. It was an in depth perspective on Karwacki’s creative policy ideas he was expected to address in his speech to the recent federal liberal leadership convention.
There is a lot more to David Karwacki than he has been given credit for and it was very fair for Murray Mandryk to acknowledge how Karwacki has matured politically. Good on Murray for giving a struggling leader the attention he has earned. If we credit politicians for the good things they are doing then maybe they will get the idea that it is what they are supposed to do most of the time. Karwacki is more than a faint point of light. Pay attention to David or you may end up being the deer caught in the bright light that David Karwacki is bringing to Saskatchewan politics.
The other excellent article was by Angela Hall of the Leader Post. She wrote about the meager $3.3 million that Mayo Schmidt, President and CEO of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, earned in the fiscal year 2006. Bringing stories like this to the attention of Saskatchewan people can only be summed up as just darn good journalism. These are the kinds of stories Saskatchewan people need to be informed about and Angela Hall penned a top shelve article on this story.
It is not like she got the story in a brown envelope. The information she based her article on was contained in company documents annually made available to the public. The point here is that people generally are not going to line up each year to review the Wheat Pools documents. It takes a journalist like Angela Hall to go over the documents and report the important findings to the public in a format that the general public more readily accepts. Believe me, $3.3 million gets your attention. By contrast the Wheat Pool only made a profit of $500,000 in 2006. You have to ask how Mayo Schmidt can look a farmer square in the eye when he clears more in a year than they can in a lifetime. On the other hand, if the farmers aren’t complaining then why am I? Things are really getting bad when I can’t even answer my own questions.
Not to worry, Mandryk and Hall have it covered. Congratulations to them both on good journalism.
