{"id":1205,"date":"2009-09-18T07:28:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T11:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=1205"},"modified":"2009-10-02T15:13:25","modified_gmt":"2009-10-02T19:13:25","slug":"viral-senators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=1205","title":{"rendered":"Viral Senators"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Christopher Waddell<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span>A seat in the Senate has long been a reward for those who pitched the Conservative and Liberal parties to corporate donors. With laws now severely restricting corporate funding of political parties, the Conservatives have a new innovation &#8211; making Senator Mike Duffy into a pitchman with personally-addressed emailed video messages soliciting not money (so far), but advice on policy priorities. <a href=\"http:\/\/movingforward.conservative.ca\/vb\/101\/ae9g3\/gordon-hill\">Watch one here.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It is an interesting concept but at three minutes the video is far too long. As polling firms working on the Internet have discovered, people have a limited attention span on the web. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Filling out the list of priorities gets you a brief closing thank you from Mike and a promise he\u2019ll be back in touch soon &#8211; frequently he says. Then you get the chance to forward it to your friends, cleverly structured in a way so that the recipient believes it is coming from you, not the Conservative party.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>With a large enough response distributed across the country and beyond just partisans, it could become a way to circumvent pollsters by going directly to the public much more cheaply than paying for polling as well as a way to spread the Conservative message by completely ignoring the mainstream media.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>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\u00a0editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.<\/em><\/p>\n<div><em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Waddell A seat in the Senate has long been a reward for those who pitched the Conservative and Liberal parties to corporate donors. With laws now severely restricting corporate funding of political parties, the Conservatives have a new innovation &#8211; making Senator Mike Duffy into a pitchman with personally-addressed emailed video messages soliciting not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-media-commentary","category-political-stragegy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1205"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1215,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions\/1215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}