Too busy to read

On Wednesday, Ross Wiseman defended his aversion to reading:

"So when I get a notice that the release is about to go out, then I'm fine with that. Maybe later on in my reading file I'll read the content of it, but as a natural course I won't read every single release that gets sent to me immediately," he said.

Today, Himself defended Ross Wiseman’s aversion to reading:

"This comes a across his desk and I don't know how it happened while it was there but he probably glanced at it and said, 'Thank God, at least the information is getting out,'" Williams said.

"To require him to have the detail of scrutiny of every single word of that I think is unfair."

For the record, the eminently qualified and thoroughly competent Ross Wiseman was appointed Minister of Health and Community Services on January 19, 2007. He has thus been in that role for most of 2007, all of 2008, and all of 2009 — so far.

In that time, his department has issued 293 press releases of its own. Of these, eleven were public advisories, while a whopping 129 were media advisories, typically announcing the time and place where anyone so inclined might be able to catch a fart take in a speech or Danny Williams-Government announcement.

The rest, 153 in all, or barely half of the total, were actually substantive political or administrative announcements of some sort or another.

For the statistically inclined, that works out to one press release that Ross Wiseman might have had to review for every four government business days that he’s been in his current job.

Or, restated, a little over one press release per government business week.

Given that he and his comms shop haven’t exactly been snowed under with work of their own meer motion; given that the Eastern Health cancer file hasn’t exactly been an inconsequential little sidebar issue during his tenure; and especially given that, as Rod Etheridge’s CBC reports have revealed, the Minister and Department don’t have clean hands in this matter, what possible excuse could there be for them not to have scrutinized the Eastern Health release, and criticized the communications process and substance before the fact, rather than after?