A strong sense of community

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick

Any candidate looking to get elected this year in Ottawa Centre should have a strong community connection, says David Blaine, president of the Centretown Citizens’ Community Association. He says his group wants an MP who will stand up for Centretown in Parliament. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

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

Candidates ham it up

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick

Ottawa Centre federal candidates gave a rare performance at Thursday’s debate in Glebe Collegiate – rather than spending the night clawing each other’s throats, as is often the case among their respective leaders – the local MP hopefuls held a lighthearted, often pleasant discussion. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

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

Health care silence

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Kristen Cucan

When Joan Roseboom answers the phone at the doctor’s office she works in, she’s often taking calls from people desperately looking for a family doctor, and almost every time, she has to turn them away.

“Every day I get requests from people who are almost begging me to take them as patients and we’re absolutely full up,” says Roseboom, a medical secretary for a family practitioner in Ottawa. Roseboom describes how many will even break into tears over the phone when she tells them they can’t accept them as patients. 

Read more…

The not-fast-enough feedback loop…and its problems

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

There is any idea popularized by the wonderful Mickey Kaus, which he has labelled the “Feiler Faster Thesis”, named after the guy he stole it from. Essentially, Kaus/Feiler argue that the modern news environment has radically shortened the news cycle, but that this is not necessarily a bad thing because we are adjusting to this reality. 

Here’s one formulation of the thesis by Kaus:

The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace.

In general, I think there is some truth to this. However, there is a limit to our capacity to identify relevant information, disseminate it through the media, and allow the public to absorb it.

As a sometime pollster and sometime journalist, I have long observed the (relatively) lengthy feedback loop involving polls. Polls are not just snapshots: they are snapshots out the rear-view mirror. Even the quickest turn-around daily tracking polls are looking backward over three or four days. 

So when reporters pick up on trends in the polls, they are starting with information which is already a few days old, at least in part. It then takes another day or so for the reporters to explore the implications of the changes, through quizzing politicians, strategists, voters and so on. And it similarly takes the parties at least a day or two to adjust to the new reality (even if they are relying on their own internal polls). Typically (but not invariably) columnists follow in the rear. 

And then, of course, there’s the public, who actually drop the kids off at daycare, go to work, schlep to hockey practice, and don’t spend their entire lives examining the minutiae of the political campaign. They take a few more days to absorb the information they receive through the media, and then, in the case of so-called “strategic voters”, perhaps adapt their own voting choice accordingly. When they do so, they close the loop, because as their preferences change they start showing up in the polls, and we start all over again.

This all takes at the very least a week. At the very least.

Now, let’s look at this in the context of the polls here in Canada in the last week. There has been, as some of you will have noticed, a somewhat puzzling discrepancy among the polls, which is a topic for another day, But there is agreement on one thing: the Liberals rose somewhat and the Conservatives fell somewhat just after the debates and coincident with the deepening of the international credit crisis last week.

For a few days, the gap between the two leading parties closed  — in all the polls, albeit to varying extents.

But then something interesting happened: the gap started opening up again but the media did not instantaneously react. For example, CBC television was trumpeting Liberal momentum on their morning show today, and the Globe had an editorial cartoon to the same effect even though there is general agreement now among the polls that the gap between the Liberals and Conservatives has been widening in recent days. The disagreement amongst the polls is about the timing and extent of these trends, not their direction.

Who cares? Well, we all should. The EKOS tracking poll last night showed that almost a quarter of respondents think the Liberals will win the election, even though this now seems quite unlikely based on where the public has been moving this week. This growing expectation that the Liberals may win is concentrated among non-Conservatives — in other words, the voters who might potentially vote strategically to stop a Conservative victory if they thought this was likely. It may also influence some voters who would like the Tories on a leash, but can’t see Dion as prime minister.

The value of polls is that they can supply timely and relevant information to the public, which voters may (or may not) choose to consider when they cast their ballots. But in this election, this year, it may be that some voters go to the polls with old information on their minds.

The Kaus/Feiler Faster Thesis is true to an extent. But it has also been articulated in the context of the much, much longer American election campaigns. The news cycle in this Canadian election may actually be turning too slowly for some voters to have the best information available on the inclinations of their fellow citizens before going to vote.

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.

Searching for doctors

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Kate Scroggins

When Michelle Desrosiers felt a dull ache in her neck, she cringed. It wasn’t so much the pain she experienced when she tried to move her head, as it was the thought that she would have to drive about 40 minutes to the nearest hospital to get it checked. 

But Desrosiers knew it was her only option. 

Read more…

New voters

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Ryan Hicks, Ryan Price, Monique Muise

Watch a story about new voters in Ottawa at Centretown News Online.

Ryan Hicks, Ryan Price, Monique Muise are students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Wrestling with poverty

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Ryneisha Bollard

A debate held in a Centretown church Monday about the issue of poverty in Canada became a squabble between audience members and federal election candidates from Ontario and Quebec. Read the details in Centretown News Online.

Ryneisha Bollard is a student at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Web of mystery

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

Bill Fox, who was once Brian Mulroney’s communications advisor, has had some of the sharpest insights into the media’s role in this campaign in his contributions to the Globe and Mail.

In today’s column in the Globe he talks about the role that the satirical video by Michel Rivard about the Harper culture cuts has played in the cratering Tory campaign in Quebec. (Now available on You Tube, by the way, with English subtitles.)

Fox notes quite rightly that the Rivard video exploded virally into the election campaign in Quebec before the mainstream media could react. Nonetheless, its full impact was not felt until traditional media picked up the story and ran with it — spreading the news of the video to a much wider public. If the Conservatives fail to get a majority in this election, it may well be because they don’t get their coveted breakthrough in Quebec, and that the Rivard video will be viewed in retrospect as the pivotal event in that failure. But the mainstream media echo chamber was crucial to disseminating the story.

CBC Montreal reporter and current Carleton grad student, Amanda Pfeffer, has pointed out to me, that despite all the attention that the English mainstream media have lavished on the internet in this campaign, they were slower than the francophone media to recognize the impact of the Rivard video, despite its national implications — but that’s another story. In general, in English Canada we have seen the same pattern as in Quebec of the internet having its full impact only by reverberating through the mainstream media. Most of us learned about the puffin pooping on Dion and the NDP candidate with the mouth full of reefers not directly from the net, but from TV and newspaper coverage of those stories.

In a survey we did at EKOS, released earlier this week, we found that television remains the most important source of election information for Canadians, followed by newspapers, radio, and only then online sources. More people cited the leaders’ debates as an important source of election information than cited the web.

It is reporters, of course — and people like me who are personally or professionally pre-occupied with election news — who are most deeply embedded in the online world. We are the ones who obsessively sweep through the net looking for information, stories, gaffes and good ideas. Of course it is journalists (and journalism students and professors) who also obsess about whether the new media will displace the old, distort professional principles, and maybe most importantly, change or eliminate jobs.

But as Fox points out, this history has been that new media elbow their way to a place at the table without actually displacing the old. This is what happened with newspapers after the advent of radio and television.  (Though, admittedly, it has been a while since I have seen a movie newsreel, or heard a traveling minstrel singing about wars in the Holy Land.)

The internet is a new and important element in election campaigns, but it is not quite as instantaneously transformative as we may sometimes be tempted to think.

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.

Dueling debates

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Faculty links

Andrew Cohen

In one of those magical moments brought to you by television, Canadians could watch their leaders debating each other at the same time as Americans were watching theirs. The contrast was illuminating.

The candidates spoke in different countries on different topics. But if you opted for the split screen, you could learn something sad about politics in America.

And if you’re Canadian, you could feel superior about your country. Smugness comes too easily to Canadians, yet this time with reason.

Consider the vice-presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Actually, consider Ms. Palin.

After her performance, commentators drew liberally from a fund of flattering adjectives. She was “feisty”, “quick”, “resilient”, “aggressive”, “combative.” She was also “folksy”, “colloquial”, and “populist”.

The normally sensible David Brooks of The New York Times was sympathetic while Rich Lowry of National Review was smitten. Others were more neutral. Beyond the paid partisans on CNN, few dismissed her out of hand.

And yet, to other eyes, her performance in the debate in particular – and her candidacy in general – is a farce. Opéra bouffe. An absurdity. Only a few conservative commentators (such as David Frum and Charles Krauthammer) have had the courage to say so, most choosing more genteel words.

Perhaps they worry about alienating the folks who love Ms. Palin. Perhaps they worry about being seen as elitist. They don’t want to call her what she is: incurious, untutored and unready — Annie Oakley without Annie Oakley’s virtues.

But in the dominion of the dilettante, Sarah Palin is queen. She isn’t just the descent of politics; she is, in a sense, the end of politics – a conventional politics of standards, rules and minimum expectations.

Up to now, candidates for the vice-presidency have had credentials. Since 1960, they have included Henry Cabot Lodge, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, Sargent Shriver, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, Robert Dole, Geraldine Ferraro, Jack Kemp, Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman.

 Some would become president. Most would not. All were persons of distinction, both in politics and in life. Even those who were failures – the corrupt Spiro Agnew and the dense Dan Quayle – could be seen as credible, if unorthodox, running mates when they were chosen.

Sarah Palin is neither credible nor distinguished, and she hasn’t the humility to see it. Her audacity is breathtaking. Once upon a time she would have been disqualified from consideration, even if she were from a strategic vote-rich state, which she isn’t. No serious nominee would have named her.

But the standard has so fallen so far that it is now acceptable – indeed laudable – to invite an ingénue like Sarah Palin to run with a septuagenarian who has had four bouts of cancer.

It doesn’t matter that she has been governor for just 18 months. Or that she attended five colleges in six years. Or that she cannot name the magazines or newspapers she reads. Or that she has travelled nowhere. Ideology trumps everything.

In the debate she struggled stringing together a sentence –Eliza Doolittle before Henry Higgins taught her to talk. Droppin’ the ‘g’s”, exclaiming “doggone!” she was like a jumped-up cheerleader in pompoms running for Student Council. She mangled words, mispronounced names. She consistently ignored questions, which the weak moderator allowed to go unchallenged.

Predictably, she “exceeded expectations.” She stood and spoke and neither drooled nor fainted. That was good enough.

Against her, Joe Biden was reserved, authoritative, polite and polished. She called him “Joe” and he called her “Governor.” He responded coolly to her volley of misrepresentations and veil of lies – deceit being her currency, from bridges to earmarks to Russia. She cannot even quote Madeleine Albright correctly.

Now, intoxicated with self-importance, she barnstorms around America tying Barack Obama to a terrorist and suggesting Mr. Obama is unAmerican. This is now the strategy of slur and smear. And if you wondered, John McCain approved this ad.

So, if you needed some relief the other night, you could turn the channel to Stephen, Stéphane, Jack, Gilles and Liz. Their discussion was barbed and stormy, but also useful and intelligent.

In terms of education, experience or intellect, no one could say the leaders of the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats are imposters. They spoke in both English and in French, over two nights, gamely accepting that a second language is a requirement of leaders in Canada.

All three have earned their stripes in the politics. None is charismatic or inspiring or Ms. Congeniality, though each has some humility.

Whatever their views, they spoke well of us and our politics. No, none is Barack Obama. But none is Sarah Palin, either.

This column first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on Oct. 7

Andrew Cohen, a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University, is the author of Extraordinary Canadians: Lester B. Pearson. 

Confidence

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Christopher Waddell

Confidence or the lack of it is the reason why governments in the United States and Europe have had to bail out their banks. In Canada it’s confidence – or lack of it – in the economic future that seems set to determine the outcome of the federal election.

Economic policy has dominated many elections but the debate has been about the economic conditions at the time of the campaign. This election is different as the economy is in good shape now but every day reveals more and more evidence that conditions are going to get worse – perhaps a lot worse – in the months to come. No one knows how bad it might be and that’s what undermines confidence, particularly when economic shocks arrive on a daily basis.

It’s that lack of confidence that Stephane Dion tapped into with his five-point plan to address future economic problems announced at the start of last week’s French language debate. The plan isn’t much beyond initially scheduling a round of meetings to assess the situation and so Stephen Harper attacked it at the opening of the English-language debate, suggesting Dion panicked and criticizing its lack of specifics.

The Conservatives missed the point. The public didn’t want specifics perhaps because no one knows what is going to happen. They needed the confidence that their political leaders were aware of the pending downturn and were prepared to asses the situation and act as needed. Dion’s statement seems to have met that test. Liberals have new confidence and suddenly the Conservatives are playing catch up with growing doubts about whether they can get a majority after all.

Stephen Harper’s speech today in releasing his party’s platform was all about how the Conservatives have seen the problems coming for a year and have taken measured steps in response that will ensure Canada does not face the economic crises now rolling through the U.S. and Europe. In other words, he’s now playing to the same need to build confidence that Dion did last week. 

But he is somewhat constrained in what he can say and do. On the campaign trail he is talking as leader of the Conservative party but to the rest of a nervous world, when he speaks, he is talking as the Prime Minister.  So every thing he says will be dissected internationally for any hints of problems in Canada.

Last night in Quebec the Conservatives started a renewed attack on the Liberal Green Shift (which Dion has conspicuously stopped talking about) arguing that an unpredictable economic future is no time to impose new taxes (while omitting that the Liberal plan includes significant income tax cuts the Liberals say will offset new carbon taxes).

Having misread the public mood and with just a week to go in the campaign, the question is whether the Conservatives have the time to convince enough Canadians both that they care too and that their calm, measured response is the right one for an uncertain future. If they can’t do it, it looks like their best hope is another minority government.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.