late-night data dumps and the bloggers who love them

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper’s instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen‘s David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)