Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Olympics that keep giving and the business of bad journalism

The Olympic village is draining another $22 Million out of our coffers http://tinyurl.com/mpzjou . The opening ceremony will cost $8.3 Million more than originally forecast.

The security amount at $900 Million is five times the original budget. Makes you wonder whether the original budgets were artificially rosy to try and convince the sheep (us) to buy in.

With 220 days to go, you can expect the estimates for cost 'over-runs' to keep going up, and revenues to keep going down. I expect big cuts, at the the city and Provincial level, post Olympics to deal with the shortfall.

Bet PyeongChang and Salzburg are breathing a big sigh of relief to have failed in their bid.

.....................................................................

Now a perfect example of why we need to break up Media monopolies like Canwest. Canwest owns all most all the newspapers in BC, and in fact most newspapers in Canada, as well as Global and other Tv and radio stations.

They keep trimming down their staff (whom they have just asked to take a 5% paycut) and have debased journalism.

Here is an excellent example picked up by the gang at Vancouver Condo. The title blares out "Vancouver area prices UP 16% from last May". The truth is they are DOWN 6.6% from last May.

This newspaper cannot tell the difference between PRICES and SALES! That's assuming the mistake was not intentional. Lets wait and see if they publish anything correcting their mistake.

http://vancouvercondo.info/2009/06/province-prices-up-16-yoy.html

Little wonder the group is near bankruptcy. (in fact it would be if the bond holders insist on payment of interest which the company has been unable to meet)