Rumour has it that Teignbridge MP Richard Younger Ross is shadow minister for culture, media and sport. Shame on the Lib Dems if this is true, ’cause old Four-Mirrors Ross (as we’re increasingly likely to call him) seems incredibly out of touch with culture and media, and has insisted on showing a preference to printed media, which keeps the weekly column of what he’s been up to behind its own paywall.
That means if the good voters of Teignbridge need to find out what their MP is up to they need to subscribe to the Dawlish Gazette, or Mid-Devon Advertiser, whose track record on putting the Rt Hon Ross’s words online, even before their paywall was constructed, was shaky at best.
Not all Lib Dems are so narrow minded though, the Torbay MP Adrian Sanders sends his press releases out often before they appear on his own site, and the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates for South West Devon and Plymouth Moor View Anna Pascoe and Stuart Bonar are practically fizzing with ideas, social media and accessibility. And we hope to carry a column from Central Devon Lib Dem hopeful Phil Hutty any time soon.
Of course, we could get RYR’s column from his website – but he hasn’t got one – despite being able to claim funding for one to… you know… keep his constituents who don’t want to buy a paper informed of what he’s up to and has done. Or you could pick it up on his Facebook site, but then you’d have to friend him… and remember to look… and hope that it was updated… (06 January was the latest article we saw).
And what does that say of Ross’s attitude towards younger voters – Tindle, the erstwhile proprietor of said papers, has said he doesn’t want younger readers, and whereas the jury’s still out on how young people access the web, at least with our Google juice and feeds to Bebo, Facebook and Myspace we could inadvertently pick up some youthful eyeballs.
It could be that RYR is just chasing the amounts of money that Newton Abbot Tory hopeful Anne Marie Morris has thrown at the papers.
Which leaves us with a dilemma – we don’t want to condone the media-myopic Younger-Ross – he has dissed us after all – and yet, not even his beloved printed media is covering his press releases, so we don’t want to blacklist him either – we kinda see it as our duty to keep these things as accessible as we can, and where else are you going to find out with such consistency what politicians get up to?
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