Re yesterday’s “bite me” post here and elsewhere, TVO its own damn self writes:
[The Green Party’s Elizabeth May] made a comment back then that came to the attention this week of the partisan Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor. Taylor took an audio clip of May off this website, and created a 24-second anti-May video, which he posted to YouTube and blogged about (…).
As outlined in this article, the video was picked up and reposted by other bloggers, some of whom quoted May as having said “…I think Canadians are stupid…”.
John Bennett of the Greens insisted that Taylor doctored the audio tape (Taylor denied this) and informed at least one blogger that both the Greens and TVO (not true, see below) were considering legal action if the video remained posted on his site. Bennett told the Tyee that:Stephen Taylor is a surrogate for the Conservative Party…We’re considering legal action. TVO is considering legal action as well.
Jill Javet, TVO’s director of corporate relations, made this statement on the matter this morning:
TVO confirms that the audio of the clip in question is intact. As such, TVO is not and will not be pursuing legal action of any kind on this matter.
I guess it’s no surprise that something called the Green Party would be so into “grassy knoll” conspiracy theories.
The first commenter at TVO’s blog gets it perfectly, even if TVO and others still seem to entirely miss the point of the entire story:
All candidates say stupid things. Gaffes are very entertaining, perhaps occasionally revealing, but essentially irrelevant.
The way her party reacted — immediately firing off a barely literate, vicious, and utterly unfounded threat to somebody who posted the clip in good faith, if not for partisan reasons — is much more troubling.
I can’t take a candidate seriously who is unable to simply explain herself, and apologize, if necessary, and move on. If she wants to be taken seriously, she’d better learn to manage her people a little better than that. (And it wouldn’t hurt to hire a “director of communications” who can put a sentence together.)
(via)
