The debates and the Internet

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

While media organizations covering the campaign fall over themselves to hype the importance of the Internet in this campaign, there’s a reason why they are concentrating on the frequently inconsequential (what’s available on blogs and You Tube) and ignoring the web’s real potential. 

For instance treating 10,000 people watching a Stephane Dion clip on YouTube as being significant, misses the point by a mile. There are about 100,000 voters in every urban riding in Canada, there are about 20,000,000 people eligible to vote and the Globe and Mail, for instance, sells about 300,000 copies a day across the country. So how important are those 10,000 hits on a YouTube clip?

More important is the fact that the Internet creates the potential to tell stories in different ways, combining audio, video, still photographs and text. 

But if news organizations focused on highlighting examples of that, they would have to direct their readers, listeners and viewers to innovative work at competitors’ sites that would take those eyes away from their own newspapers, newscasts, programs and web sites. Imagine for instance CBC’s The National highlighting an interesting way to package information and tell a story that’s on the CTV News web site, or the Globe and Mail sending readers to the Toronto Star’s site. It’s not going to happen.

It’s easier to focus “Internet coverage” on blogs and YouTube – often reported with little context about who is producing it or sense of what impact they have on voters.

The Internet is MUCH more than that.

Here’s an example  from the New York Times of the potential for the Internet to change significantly how we see and absorb information. By the way you can watch all the major speeches – Republicans and Democrats – from the two U.S. conventions this way on the Times web site 

My bet is that the Times will do the same thing for the three Presidential debates – the first one is this Friday.

I hope a Canadian news organization will do the same for our leaders’ debates on Oct 1 and 2 – if one does, I’ll bet their competitors won’t mention it. 

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

Journalist hints at possibility politicians will be candid

Posted by jsallot under Election 2008, Election 2008 Faculty links, Election 2008 Media commentary

Jeff Sallot

The politics page at globeandmail.com is featuring a story today headlined: Layton hints at possible Liberal-NDP coalition 

The lead says: NDP Leader Jack Layton refused Monday to rule out the possibility of entering an alliance with the federal Liberals to prevent another Harper government.

How many weasel words and phrases can we find here?

Hints is popular when the people being written about don’t  actually say what the headline writer wishes they had said.

Possible is another qualifier word. What else did Jack Layton hint is possible? I suppose that until the polls close Oct. 14 he can say that the New Democrats could possibly form a majority government.

“Refused … to rule out”  is another weasely formation.

I’ve been tempted to use the same phrase myself when politicians have been performing the dance of the seven veils.  But I prefer to cast the hinted at possibility in a more positive frame.  How about this? Jack Layton left the door open to a possible coaltion with the Liberals. It works better as a lead.

Reporter and editors actually hate these kinds of stories. They don’t deserve the headline play the Layton story got at globeandmail.com today. Yet they can’t be ignored until we start hearing politicians speaking candidly.

Jeff Sallot teaches journalism at Carleton University. He is a former Ottawa bureau chief for The Globe and Mail, a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery,  and has covered nine federal elections.

More fun with numbers

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Last week I blogged about the parties’ different retention rates from the 2006 election, illustrating the Conservatives’ advantage in grabbing half the straying Liberal flock, with the rest of the former Liberal supporters being spread among the other parties.

The Conservatives have another advantage, which is that their support at the moment is more solid than that of the other parties. There’s evidence that the race is now “gelling”, at least up front with the Tory lead, even if there is room for more jockeying behind among the current opposition parties.

Look at the table below, and you can see that 82% of Tory voters say that they are unlikely to change their preference before voting day. The Tory vote, in other words, is the most solid of all the parties. Just 18% of Tory supporters say they are likely or somewhat likely to switch before election day. At the other extreme, the Green Party, whose support has grown the most in the last week, has the most tenuous grip on its support. Almost a fifth (18%) of Green supporters say it is likely they will switch before election day, and another 12% say they are somewhat likely to do so. A total of 30% of Green supporters are still not settled, in other words.

In fact, if you look at the last two bottom rows of this table, you’ll see almost a quarter of Liberal and NDP voters also say they are likely or somewhat likely to change their vote before election day. So that’s a lot of the non-Tory vote still potentially sloshing around. (The numbers are taken from EKOS’s weekend sample of more than 3000 respondents.)

So, if those voters were to start moving, where would they go? We know that in past elections, as voting day approached, many Canadians have taken a look at the polls and decided to “vote tactically”, that is to go with their second choice party thinking that it is better placed to win. In both 2004 and 2006, this enabled the Liberals to grab some NDP support in the last days of the campaign, though their weakness in this election so far might make that a harder sell. And then, we have those wavering Green supporters. Will they hold, or will they bolt as they close in on their final decision?

Here’s where the second table tells a bit of the story. First of all, look down the first column. If the Tories slumped, that would help the Liberals the most, but since significant numbers would also go to the other parties, it might not actually turbo-charge the Liberal campaign. Anyway, we don’t need to concern ourselves so much with where the Tories might go, because as we saw above, they are less likely to move anyway.

More interesting is the second column. If the Liberals slumped further, where would their vote go? Last week, we saw that to this point, about half the Liberal defectors have gone to the Conservatives; the other half have been dissipated among the other opposition parties. What the table below shows us is that if Liberals continue to stray, the pattern will likely be different. Only about a fifth of Liberal voters (18%) say their second choice is the Tories. The rest go mainly to the NDP and the Greens. Another way of thinking about this is that the Liberal Party has already lost a big chunk of its traditional centre-right support, and it is down to its centre-left core.

On the other hand, if the Liberals were to begin climbing out of the hole they are in, it looks like they do have potentially fertile ground to their left. A third of NDPers and a quarter of Green Party supporters see the Liberals as their second choice. The Liberals’ best hope in this election remains becoming the most viable champion of the anyone-but-Conservative (ABC, as Danny Williams calls it) vote, which was important to the party in both the 2004 and 2006 elections.

The NDP, meanwhile, still have potential themselves to become that ABC champion since they are the second choice for many Liberal and Green supporters. However, they probably need to close or eliminate the gap with the Liberals in their overall party support before they can benefit from this kind of tactical vote nationally, and at this point they don’t show any sign of getting closer that 7 or 8 percentage points of the Liberals. Still, in some regions, notably British Columbia and the West, they are clearly the Tories’ main opponent at the moment.

The Greens now have two tasks. They have some potential to continue growing, as they have done since the campaign began. But more important to their success may be their ability to consolidate the support they already have. They have the wobbliest support of all the parties and although they are now neck and neck with the Conservatives for the lead among voters 25 and under, this is a notoriously hard group to turn out on election day.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Centretown News campaign coverage

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Follow the federal election campaign in Ottawa Centre at Centretown News Online  and meet the candidates.

Centretown News and Centretown News Online are publications of the students in the Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Journalism programs at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

A terrible mistake or . . .

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Matthew Pearson

Terrible mistake or terribly mistaken? When it comes to Vancouver’s safe injection site, Insite, politicians and advocates continue to be divided.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani inserted himself into the debate last week during a visit to the city. He called Insite a “terrible mistake” and said the clinic would encourage the use of illegal drugs.

Read more…

Be the change

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Kristen Cucan

A handful of Green party supporters met in their local Ottawa riding last night donning green-coloured clothes and accessories, and hopeful that Canada might see its first green MP elected to Parliament.

Read more…

The three-pillar approach

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Kate Scroggins

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion gave supporters a glimpse of his party’s platform at his campaign launch in Ottawa yesterday, saying he wants to make Canada “richer, fairer and greener.”

Read more…

Fear, greed and other economic fundamentals

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Karim H. Karim

“The market is never wrong,” a student insisted in one of my classes several years ago. His statement came to mind frequently during the course of the last week’s roller coaster ride in the stock exchanges.

It exemplified the almost unquestioned faith that some have in the workings of the markets.

Industrial societies have made them integral to our economies. Traders’ daily choices determine the monetary value of the materials that are vital to our well-being.

Whether it is speculation about the price of petroleum or about financial stocks, we seem to leave it to a relatively small percentage of the population to decide what turns and twists our collective fortunes will take. The best we can hope is that the traders’ decisions are guided by rationality.

But CBC TV’s morning show business reporter, Marivel Taruc, appeared to think otherwise. She commented that bear markets are driven by fear and bull markets by greed.

Are the stock exchanges, and by extension the economy, primarily driven by raw emotions? It would seem that we are leaving too much to how a few unelected individuals may feel on a particular day.

So far in the election campaign, none of the political parties has presented much of an economic strategy responding to the current financial upheaval. They appear to act as if we are going to be sheltered from the havoc taking place south of the border.

The parallel drops and rises in the New York and Toronto exchanges last week were clear indications that we are not immune to the financial blowouts in our largest trading partner.

It may be too much to ask if anyone is thinking about how to protect the economy from the whims of stock traders, but does anyone at least have a made-in-Canada plan to minimize the ill-effects of the widely-expected downturn?

Perhaps the idea is to react with rescue packages worth billions of dollars after the damage has already occurred, just like Washington is doing now.

Add sloth to the list of economic fundamentals.

Karim H. Karim is the director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He formerly was a Canadian correspondent for Compass News Features (Luxembourg) and Inter Press Service (Rome).

Election techniques and the effects question

Posted by iwagman under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Ira Wagman

Although it takes place in public the act of voting remains a private matter.  Like other moments that occur behind drawn curtains, voting carries an air of mystery. We never really know how individuals voted, do we?  Someone can say that they voted for one party, but who knows if they really did?   What people tell a pollster what they were thinking when they voted, how do we know they are telling the truth? The fact that we don’t know what drives voting behaviour on decision day should give us pause to interrogate the various techniques we use during elections to predict or influence that mysterious moment when the “X” marks the spot.

Polling seems to attract the most attention, but there are also advertising campaigns, Facebook groups, blogging and microblogging activities, town hall meetings, and newspaper coverage.  Then there are those campaign strategies.  Last weekend, Michael Valpy’s article in The Globe and Mail outlined how the Conservatives maintain a database containing electoral data that is used to generate character types so that the party can craft its message.  The architect of this strategy is Patrick Muttart, the PM’s deputy chief of staff for strategic planning.  Muttart has drawn inspiration from tactics used in John Howard’s political campaign in Australia by developing a roster of character types to help the party focus its message.  Who are these character types?  First, there’s “Zoe”, an urbanite who eats organic food.  She is not on the Conservative Party’s radar. Also unreachable for the Tories: “Marcus and Fiona”, a couple of double-income, no kids professionals who likely live in urban areas.  With Zoe, Marcus, and Fiona out now of the picture, who should the Conservatives talk to?   Enter  “Dougie”, the tradesman in his 20s who and is more interested in hunting and fishing than crime or welfare abuse; “Eunice”, a 70-year old widower on a fixed income; “Steve”, a small business owner, and “Heather”, a women in her 40s with three children (For more on this approach, see this article from The Hill Times, which is available from the website of a polling firm. The file is in PDF form).

While it is easy to be impressed by the diverse communicative weaponry and creative energy of Canadian political parties, taking a measure of the overall effects of these strategies on the end result is hard to determine.  Do they attract attention?  Yes.  Is it part of the internal cultures of political campaigns?  Sure.  Does it help the parties craft their messages?  Probably.  Do the controversies that take place in the blogosphere detract from serious issues?  It’s not clear, since the parties seem fairly successful at releasing policy statements on a daily basis.  If the media chooses not to interrogate them, whose fault is that?   But these effects are reasonably obvious, aren’t they?   However, when it comes to the big question – whether a pooping puffin, a message crafted to Dougie, an uptick in the Green Party’s national numbers. or a paean to Stephen Harper on YouTube actually impacts upon the final decision, your guess is as good as mine.

What, then, can we make of these techniques of electioneering?  For starters, it helps to keep in mind that such measures are self-promotional in nature.  Polling firms use election work to attract corporate clients; advertising firms work with political parties to get more business; and the world of political strategists no doubt has its own celebrity cultures grounded in aspirations for consulting work for various powerful interests.  During the quiet time after elections, most of the people involved in the process would probably agree  — of the record, of course – that their work is more of an art than a science.  And it would be wise for us to see it this way.

However, imprecise the methods may be, there is the still the inherent belief that some, if not all of these techniques, may have an effect on the final outcome.  Where does this come from?  Blind faith may be one place, but another is our continued fascination with the legend of the Pied Piper (image via).

We remain fascinated by the belief that some people have the power to redirect traffic. In the case of politics, the traffic is not made up of rats, like in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but of voters. We are fascinated by the potential (or more precisely, the belief in the potential) to move people in a certain way through the mastery of some kind of instrument, be it a flute or a podcast.

Media organizations are seen by many to be the puppet masters of public opinion,  but so are public relations firms, polling operations, and anyone else who acts as a consultant to political parties.  The authority of these actors may derive from a hopeful place, that someone or something can help this or that party gain the edge needed to succeed by connecting in some way with a savvy or disenchanted electorate.   But from that place comes a stubborn and long-held belief, one that sees the use of this or that tool as having an “effect” on voter behaviour.  Such an argument may be persuasive enough to generate work for the service providers of the election industry but the question of whether these things actually work – and how — is conveniently left hanging in the air.  Perhaps this is because political cultures are a lot like our own environments, where we hire friends and people we like or trust to do things we can’t do or need done and endow them with capabilities that cannot be tested or proven.   If that is the case, we should see the various attempts at measuring or reaching out to us not as acts of manipulation but as symbols of desperation, and, furthermore, as a reflection of the rhetorical and audiovisual landscape that now forms part of our political culture.

In the end, this should provide us with some solace. This is because it is just as likely that the people who put a party into power may not be “Steve” or “Zoe”, but those real people who aren’t usually counted: the one who tells people she or he is voting for a party, but votes for a different one instead; the one who has a personal grudge against one of the candidates, and votes for a different party in an act of revenge; or the person who votes in a way consistent with those in his or her social world.  The fact that some of these character types — the venal, the conniving, and the lemming — slip past the keen eye of political observers may have to do with the fact that they bear such a striking resemblance to the people we have to vote for.  Such things are often hard to see from close range.

This should serve as a reminder that although we may often feel as though elections are pre-determined or “modeled”, what remains pristine is the mystery of what we really do in that moment, protected only by a cardboard box, where we mark the ballot, drop it in the box, and slip effortlessly back into the rhythms of regular life.

Ira Wagman is an Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Issues versus gaffes

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

Andrew Coyne has an interesting column in this week’s Maclean’s, quite critical of how the media is covering this campaign. His point is a good one – most voters want to know as he says about party leaders and candidates: “Who are these people, and what are they going to do to us?”

Yet, as Coyne argues, the media want to concentrate on gaffes, polls and strategy and that’s certainly what is happening two weeks into this campaign. The evidence seems to bear him out – newspaper coverage so far is much more like that in 2004 than in 2006 with a heavy focus on strategy and the horse race supplemented by daily poll coverage. Left on the sidelines are issues.

A review of  the election stories published since Sept. 7 in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and National Post suggests about one-third of the 420 stories in the three papers focus on campaign tactics and strategy strategy.  That comes from a newspaper-coverage database we are building again this campaign for the post-election book Carleton’s journalism school always prepares.

By comparison in the 2005-06 campaign, only about 20 per cent of the stories in the three papers dealt with strategy. With the Conservatives making a campaign promise a day, the media responded that time with a much stronger focus on the issues – analyzing what the Conservatives were proposing and how the other parties responded.

In 2004 more than one-third of the campaign stories in the three papers centred on strategy and tactics. As Coyne says after every election, news organization say they will do things differently next time. In 2006 they did but so far it’s back to old tricks this time around. 

So what are the issues no one’s covering? Here are just a few:

• Defence spending – what’s real and what isn’t of what the Conservatives have announced over the past few years and what would the other parties do?
• Canada’s relations with the U.S. – with a new U.S. adminstration on the horizon what do the parties think Canada’s stand should be on the possibility of reopening NAFTA? Should our economic and political relations with the U.S. change and what can be done about the growing problems at the border? How should Canada prepare for the economic problems that will face the new U.S. administration?
• Climate change – there is a post-2012 climate change conference in Denmark next year. What do the parties think Canada’s position should be?
• Party financing and the Internet – how are the parties in Canada using the web to raise money and how are the Liberals financing their campaign?
• Cities – most Canadians live in urban centres yet urban issues – from transportation  to housing to homelessness get short shrift. Are there any innovative approaches out there to these problems?
• Civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism – What do the parties think the proper balance should be and if it isn’t right now, what has to change?
• Afghanistan – Canadians are fighting in their first war in more than half a century and it’s not an election issue?

There’s still half the campaign left. Lots of time to replace the search for “gaffes” with a grilling of the parties and the leaders about their positions on the issues facing the country, whether they want to talk about them or not. 

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.