Political Perspectives is produced by the students and faculty of Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication, Canada's oldest journalism school.

14th
SEP 2009

Election talk

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

We’ve all been negligent in blogging from the J-School due to the pressures of the first week of classes. Sorry.

Let me offer two little election-related squibs.

First, how is it that the media all missed the NDP’s willingness to strike a deal with the Conservatives in the first days after Michael Ignatieff seemed to set us on a course towards an election? Jack Layton laid out four areas where the NDP would like action from the government, and was careful not to close any doors or to set down maximal objectives for any one of them. He said this wouldn’t be a “backroom deal” because it would all be out in the open.

Layton appeared repeatedly on television saying that he hoped the Conservatives would be reasonable and come to some accommodation with opposition parties (though he also said he did not hold up much hope). But, somehow, Layton couldn’t be heard. I saw him on both CBC and CTV saying he was open to discussions, after which the host would say something to the effect that “there you have it, he’d slammed the door on any deal with the Tories”.

I think the “certain election” narrative prevented some people in the media from noticing that Layton was trying hard to leave a door open to helping the Tories delay. Now that that narrative has got a bit tired, Layton’s openness — which stems directly from his strategic situation, so it should not be a shock — is finally getting some ink.

Meanwhile, let me update you on seat projections. The Tories opened up a small but significant lead in the polls last week, including EKOS’s (we had about a 3 point lead for the Tories). The seat projection based on last Thursday’s poll would be Tories 130; Liberals 102; NDP 26; Bloc 50.

Note that at these numbers, the Tories still fall short of their results last year; the Liberals lose the election but improve their standing considerably; and the NDP suffers a serious drop.

Paul Adams teach journalism and is executive director of EKOS Research Associates

3rd
SEP 2009

Magic Number

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Today’s EKOS Poll for the CBC shows the Liberals tied to the decimal point on national vote intention. Naturally, this slight closing of the race from last week means a slight change in the seat projection for the front runners from my last post. (Last week’s projection in brackets)

Liberals           119 (111)

Conservatives 113 (119)

BQ                    41  (49)

NDP                  35  (29)

Perhaps the most startling element of these relatively small changes is at the back of the pack.

The BQ has slipped because of a Liberal surge in Quebec — something people are not yet paying attention to in the media, even though Michael Marzolini’s leaked Liberal poll earlier this week suggested a similar trend. If this keeps up, it might have a substantial effect on the BQ’s willingness to go to an election.

In addition, the NDP has jumped substantially — back nearly to the level they enjoyed in the last election. This is likely more to do with close “splits” between the two largest parties rather than any gain in support for the NDP which poll-to-poll was infinitesimal.

Why do I find these numbers interesting? Well, add the Liberal number to the NDP number, and what do you get? 154.

And what is 154? Exactly half of 308.

Get my drift?

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and works with EKOS Research on its political polling.


1st
SEP 2009

Some recent polls…

Posted by padams under Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Sometimes when a journalist wants to make a point, he or she refers to “the polls” as if they were a single entity. Of course, there are often times when a number of polls — even with different survey dates, and different questions — show similar trends. Indeed, when this happens, the polls do reinforce one another, and give us greater confidence that the trend they express is real.

But that isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, a poll comes along that tells a very different story than others conducted in a similar time-period. This is what happened last week when a poll by Ipsos Reid showed the Conservatives with an 11-point lead over the Liberals. Other polls by Harris-Decima, Nanos, and EKOS Research (with which I am associated), in contrast, showed a close race, as they have through most of the summer.

I’ve seen this phenomenon of the off-trend poll from the inside as both a journalist and later as a pollster (now with EKOS Research), and it isn’t always easy to know what to do, when you have one sitting in your hands. A poll like that can be the herald of a new trend — exactly what pollsters and journalists are looking for in their polling — or it could be the notorious “twentieth out of twenty” polls: the one that falls outside the margin of error, usually described as plus or minus a certain figure nineteen times out of twenty. Of course, polls may also be wrong because of non-statistical error, which is all that the margin-of-error concept captures.

In the 1993 election campaign, many observers were surprised that Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservatives held up so well early in the campaign — retaining a lead over Jean Chrétien’s Liberals — despite what seemed like a terrible campaign. Then, a Toronto Star poll came along saying the Liberals had vaulted into the lead. That made intuitive sense, but no one was quite sure until a CBC poll that I was involved with came out a few days later confirming the trend. The Star had the better story because it was first with the news, but believe you me, we had more confidence in what our poll said because it confirmed what the Star’s had already reported.

In the 2006 election campaign, at EKOS, we had a surprisingly high number for the Liberals in a smallish (under a 1000) sample taken on a weekend. And weekends, for whatever reason, often produce off-trend results. It would have made a great story — if it were true. If not, it would all turn into a embarrassment within days. We decided to sit on the result to see what Monday’s numbers brought. We and the Star were criticized by some, and even accused of manipulation, but the next night’s results settled back on-trend, and we were glad we had made the decision we had.

At the same time, I am not sure I would argue for that same decision today if I were confronted with it again. People sometimes complain about all the polls being taken nowadays, but the fact that we get so much data nowadays helps us weed out what might be misleading results. In 2004 and 2006, only Nanos had a daily tracking number throughout the election campaign. In last year’s election, Nanos was joined by Harris Decima and EKOS. Because Nanos had increased its sample sizes from the early years, and because EKOS was using a new methodology called IVR which enables much larger sample sizes, the number of Canadians being sampled each night by major national pollsters had increased by many multiples.

The result is that an off-track results gets identified quite quickly. With so many polls in the field, and In the internet age, with information circulating so quickly, I am inclined to think that pollsters should put their polls out, and take their lumps (as they surely will within a very short time) when their poll sounds an off-key note.

In fact, just a matter of hours after the Ipsos Reid poll showed an 11-point lead for the Tories last week, Harris Decima showed the same close race everyone else had been seeing all summer, and a few days lateran EKOS poll said something similar.

There was no fault in putting the Ipsos poll out, I am now inclined to think. The mistake was in trumpeting it as strongly as some newspapers did, and Ipsos did in its own release.

Unfortunately, this poll, unsupported by any other has become something of a “factoid”; witness a line in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen which states that, “some recent polls show a summer swoon for Ignatieff’s Liberals”.

Not some, but one; and all the others tell a different story.

By the way, here’s a seat projection based on the latest EKOS poll, illustrating the close race that most pollsters are seeing at the moment: it suggests that the Tories would win 119 seats, the Liberals 111, the Bloc 49 and the NDP 29.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton

1st

Lessons from lotteries

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

The recent controversies in Ontario surrounding the expenditures of executives of eHealth and now the Ontario Lottery Corporation raise a couple of important issues beyond expensing the cost of a cup of coffee that would benefit from investigation by both the media and parliamentary or legislative committees.

First, how did the belief emerge that senior management of quasi-government agencies need to be compensated as if they were working in the private sector and how can it be justified? The argument was that’s the way to attract top talent in senior management posts. Yet private sector compensation is designed to reflect the degree of risk that rests on the shoulders of senior management. Their decisions will determine whether the enterprise competes successfully in the market, whether it grows or shrink, lives or dies. By contrast, for example what are the corporate risks faced by the senior management of the Ontario Lottery Corporation and the decisions managers must make that will determine whether the lottery corporation, as a government-mandated monopoly, will prosper or fail that justify senior management compensation equivalent to that in the private sector ?

Second, to an extent the public doesn’t realize, government now contracts out an enormous range of services – everything from opinion polling and communications advice to speech and report-writing, the delivery of programs, IT support, economic and issue analysis and options, strategic advice and external oversight of government-funded activities. With governments facing large deficits yet also paying for so many external consultants and services, sooner or later someone will start asking exactly what do all the people who work for government actually do?

While media coverage will properly ridicule expense account excesses and raise legitimate questions of whether taxpayers are getting value for money for the contracts let by government, there’s an underlying issue that also deserves attention but may not get it. Both situations reflect the failure of elected officials in both the government and opposition to carry out one of their prime responsibilities as members of a parliament or legislature – overseeing and questioning how public money is spent.

Christopher Waddell is acting director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He is a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief, national editor and associate editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.


10th
JUL 2009

This reporter….

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

In the aftermath the Michael Jackson media orgy, this reporter finds something pleasantly old-fashioned about a wife writing about her husband on the front page of the Globe and Mail, and referring to him as “Mr. MacKinnon”.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton

7th
JUL 2009

Michael Jackson, the congressman and his Kinsley gaffe

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

The brilliant American journalist and commentator Michael Kinsley once called attention to what later came to be known as a Kinsley gaffe. This is when a politician commits a gaffe by inadvertently telling the truth.

Did Peter King, the conservative Republican congressman commit such a gaffe when he commented on the media’s “orgy” of Michael Jackson coverage? King referred to Jackson as a “pedophile” and a “pervert”, and said more attention should be paid to firefighters, police officers, and soldiers in Afghanistan that to the self-styled King of Pop, whose personal behaviour was infamous and shameful.

I think he came close. There does seem to have been a willful refusal by the media to balance their wall-to-wall coverage of his stardom with an open acknowledgement of his extremely troubling pattern with regard to young boys. In almost every other context, the sexual exploitation of children has been elevated by the media and society more generally to the highest of crimes. Jackson, true, was found not guilty in his one trial for such behaviour, but remember also that a previous criminal case fell apart after Jackson reached a $20 million settlement in a civil case which resulted in the boy himself clamming up to authorities.

Gosh, Jackson’s own sister publicly denounced him for his relationship with boys (not children, as media reports often have it, but almost exclusively boys).

For some reason, the allegations of Jackson’s illicit drug use are fair game — the subject of extended coverage — while the equally well established pattern of improper relations with boys is glossed over euphemistically when it is mentioned at all.

Representative King’s aggressive tackling of the Jackson’s all-but-overt pedophilia triggered a defensive reaction in the entertainment media. Even CNN treated the story as if it was covering another outrageous Fox-News type claim by a right-wing screwball.

As I write, 16 channels on my TV are airing the Jackson memorial live, hour after hour of it, with barely a word of critical commentary — and this includes the BBC. If this isn’t a media orgy, and an uncritical one at that, I don’t know what is.

Jackson may be the most lamented pedophile since Socrates. Judging by today’s coverage his cultural contributions have been much, much larger.

The one way in which Rep. King’s comments may fall short of the classic Kinsley gaffe is the issue of whether they were indeed inadvertent. King, who after the furore caused by his initial remarks said he would not comment further on the day of the Jackson memorial out of respect for the dead, may have intended to create a stir, but maybe just not as big a stir as he eventually did, according to the Washington Post.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton

22nd
JUN 2009

Twitter patter

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

In its Sunday edition, the New York Times had the best explainer I have seen of the special significance Twitter has had in the recent events in Iran. I would still appreciate a more granular technical explanation of why it is more difficult for a government to block Twitter than, say Facebook, but this story at least alludes to the basic difference between Twitter and other social networks, or old-fashioned email for that matter. It also puts Twitter’s journalistic usefulness in perspective.

The article is worth the substantially more than 140 words the NYT devoted to the topic.

19th
JUN 2009

Libs grip slipping?

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

The Liberals have enjoyed an edge in the polls throughout the late winter and spring, and that advantage has been even more marked when you project the poll results onto seats, largely because the Liberals have been gaining in Ontario and Quebec since the last election, where every vote may count towards winning more seats, while the Conservatives have been increasing their stranglehold on Alberta and parts of the rural West to no additional advantage, since they already own these regions.

However, the race is tightening.

This morning EKOS Research (with which I have an association) released a new seat projection based on its most recent weekly poll. It shows the Liberals leading with 123 seats, but the Conservatives only a smidgen behind with 111 seats. The NDP have 30 and the Bloc 44.

If you look at the THREEHUNDREDEIGHT website — a site whose name is an homage to the legendary American polling site FiveThirtyEight — which does projections based on a number of polls, they have the race even tighter.

Now, here’s the thing. The Liberals nose-dived on the last night of EKOS‘ weekly poll, which was Tuesday, presumably on the news that the Liberals were prepared to force an election if certain demands weren’t met.

The Liberal-created crisis received huge publicity — in the teasers on The National, for example, and on the front pages of newspapers. The resolution of the crisis on Wednesday received no such attention. It played prominently on the news channels, but if you wanted to watch the story on The National, you had to wait (until after the first commercial break if I recall correctly), and it was buried in the front section of the Globe and Mail.

This could meant that the Liberal loss from the election threat will endure past the resolution of the crisis and the end of the parliamentary session today.

Even if the Liberals do rebound from their slump, it is an indication of how tenuous their grasp is on their current support. Right now it appears to be based more or less exclusively on hostility to Harper and economic uncertainty. We know that some of the higher income groups (which the Liberals have been successful at wooing from the Tories lately) are influenced in their economic perception more by the stock market and broad measures of economic growth. These are the economic indicators most likely to improve first (indeed the stock market has already rebounded very substantially since the beginning of the year).

For many Canadians the real measure of economic recovery, however, will be a falling unemployment rate, which isn’t likely to come for quite a while, and so far the Liberals have not had the traction they need among the economically vulnerable middle and lower classes, and the youth.

If one strong puff of wind can blow the Liberals off their perch, as it did, at least momentarily earlier this week, they do not yet have the grip they need to win in the long run.

This could be a tough summer for the Liberals. The absence of an election allows the Conservatives to use their huge advantage in money and organization. And there are all those infrastructure projects to announce (and re-announce and re-announce). This forces a strategic dilemma on the Liberals: do they respond with short-term expenditures on advertising, for example, to meet the challenge? If they do so, it will slow down their efforts to re-invest in their fund-raising and organization — crucial elements in their longer term success.

Canadians may not have wanted an election this summer, but they are going to get a campaign anyway, and it is one in which the government party has a definite edge.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton. He is also executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

17th
JUN 2009

Harvey Cashore on lawsuit chill

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

Check out this You Tube clip of the fifth estate’s Harvey Cashore discussing the effect of lawsuits on the the Airbus story.

Thanks to Paul Hunter for drawing my attention to this clip.

16th
JUN 2009

Stéphane Dion, Bugs Bunny, and a dead cat

Posted by padams under All, Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

A small, but significant corrective to Andrew Cohen’s column in today’s Ottawa Citizen.

I sympathize with Cohen’s view that CTV, and in particular, Mike Duffy, gave Stéphane Dion shabby treatment when they aired his repeated false starts in an interview just five days before last October’s election.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council recently criticized CTV for breaching the industry’s code of conduct for airing the false starts even after it had told Dion that it would not. (CTV has strongly defended its decisions in the incident.)

However, is it also true, as Prof. Cohen argues, that for Dion’s campaign, the broadcast may have been “decisive”? His argument appears to be based on a misreading of the polling data.

“It was late in the campaign and polls suggested the Liberals were gaining on the Conservatives,” he writes. And later: “Last October, the polls suggested the Liberal Party’s ascent stalled after the interview. While we cannot say if Dion’s momentum would have brought his party victory, it isn’t impossible.”

Well, almost anything can happen in an animated cartoon, as Bugs Bunny trenchantly observed. But the idea that Dion was riding some “momentum” that might have carried him to victory until the release of the interviews is mistaken. The evidence of the polls is not what Prof. Cohen suggests.

The daily tracking polls that appeared in the last campaign all used a variation of the “rolling poll” system, whereby a published poll includes three, or in some cases four, nightly samples rolled into a single number. Each day, the oldest day is dropped and a new day is added. That means that the published numbers are to a degree retrospective. A number published Thursday, for example, would normally include samples from Monday to Wednesday, or even Sunday to Wednesday.

In other words, there is a delay between moves in public opinion and their capture in the polls. Moreover, I would say from my general observation that it takes two or three days after that for the media to internalize the news of significant shifts contained in the polls and incorporate it into their narratives of the campaign.

At the time of the CTV release of the Dion interviews, there was certainly a media perception that the Liberals were gaining, but this was old news. In fact, all the tracking polls had begun to show the Liberals dipping once again by then.

Mr. Dion had been fairly effective in the leaders’ debates the previous week. The Liberals did indeed get a bump in the polls in the days afterwards, running through the weekend. However, once the last full week of the campaign began, the Liberals slumped back to the dismal numbers they had suffered mid-campaign and which they carried through to election day.

I remember tearing my hair out the very morning of the day the Dion tapes were aired when I saw a headline on the CBC morning program trumpeting the Liberal revival. The revival had been over for several days, and by that time a careful reading of the polls made that evident, notwithstanding the inevitable delay created by the rolling poll system. The problem was, if I may be allowed a gratuitous comment on the media, that the “tightening race” narrative was a better story, and only reluctantly shucked off.

You can check the daily tracking numbers for yourself here.

In fact what had happened was something different.

The Liberal bump after the debates was a dead-cat bounce which was already over by the time of the infamous interview.

The CTV-Dion incident might have been the last nail in the coffin. It may rightfully be described as a final ignominy.

But decisive, it was not.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton. He is also executive director of EKOS Research Associates, a polling firm that published a daily-tracking poll in the last campaign.