The Political Editors’ Blogs

I’m really enjoying both Colin’s and Audrey’s blogs. I suspect they are enjoying the medium also where they can be more direct. Take Colin’s today:

Now, National’s leader John Key, always ready with a finger in the wind, has judged that this silly ban is probably heading for the dustbin and has leaped to the side of the media. He’s saying that the rules need to go back to the Standing Orders Committee for further revision, and that the satire ban should be dumped.

That’s great…but…um…where was National’s stand in favour of the Fourth Estate last week, when the rules were being debated? …

I put this to John Key’s press secretary this morning and he said Key was away in Washington DC last week when the vote was taken and had not put his mind to the issue before now. Fair enough, but I would have thought National was still capable of making decisions without its leader for a week. Or as Michael Cullen drily observed last week, was Key’s cat Moonbeam really in charge?

So he credits National with changing its mind, but also applies some deserved sarcasm to the timing.

But he then does the same to Labour:

And speaking of matters unrelated, the Prime Minister’s office has been shamelessly peddling this little gem from an online environmental website this morning. It seems that all one has to do to get a mention as one of the 15 greenest politicians on the planet is to make a totally unachievable pledge to become a carbon-neutral country at some nebulous and entirely undetermined point in the future.

Now if this was covered in the newspaper, all one would get is a gushing headline over how Clark is one of the 15 Green political leaders. But on the blog Colin can make the obvious point that she has actually done little except make a “totally unachievable pledge to become a carbon-neutral country at some nebulous and entirely undetermined point in the future”

So the political editor blogs are turning into quite a nice medium for them to expose some of the spin, and share their cynicism (generally deserved) with us.