QUILLBLOG

Politics and publicity

The title of the website Angry in the Great White North: News and Opinion is a pretty good hint of what readers are in for, but a recent post by Steve Janke of the “Blogging Tories” takes NDP leader Jack Layton to task for “cherry-picking a book review.”

Jack Layton and the NDP advertise Jack Layton’s books on the party website. That’s fine, except that the review excerpt is misleadingly quoted out of context. Instead of praise for the entire book by a major newspaper, the reality is that one columnist praised the first chapter only.

It’s all very tawdry, really.

Janke is objecting to the fact that the review excerpt “…required reading for anyone who yearns for the optimism of Trudeau-era Liberalism” is only quoted as being from the Ottawa Citizen. His point that the attribution for the quote really should have credited Ottawa Citizen columnist Adam Radwanski is fair, since it was Radwanski’s assessment of the book, not the official position of the newspaper. However, it seems to Quillblog that merely mentioning the name of the publication is a rather common blurbing practice, and readers are unlikely to think that the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board used its column to endorse Layton’s book as Janke implies.

And finally, Janke’s criticism that the publisher picked the warmest line of praise to print also seems a bit ridiculous. That’s what publicists do. And it’s a lot like political rhetoric. Thinking back to the last election campaign and much of 2006, the Tories have been less than precise as they painted the whole Liberal party as corrupt. Hello, Pot? This is the Kettle….

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