{"id":148,"date":"2008-09-12T10:01:42","date_gmt":"2008-09-12T15:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/election08.cusjc.ca\/?p=148"},"modified":"2008-09-12T11:49:47","modified_gmt":"2008-09-12T16:49:47","slug":"ctv-and-the-power-of-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/?p=148","title":{"rendered":"CTV and the power of three"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Jeff Sallot<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The big story in the first week of the campaign is the way Green Leader Elizabeth May&#8217;s plea for simple fairness ignited a firestorm of a reaction from voters in cyberspace and in talk radio land, forcing the other leaders and the TV news network execs to back down and allow her to participate in the upcoming TV debates.<\/p>\n<p>But you&#8217;ve got to wonder if the producers of two of CTV&#8217;s major news and current affairs programs, Mike Duffy Live and Canada AM, have missed this point. The Duffy show on prime time last night\u00a0 had two separate political panels featuring activists or candidates from the Conservative, New Democratic and Liberal parties.<\/p>\n<p>This morning Canada AM had a panel of talking heads with reps from the three same political parties.<\/p>\n<p>What happened to the Greens? Or the Bloc, for that matter?<\/p>\n<p>You can argue that these CTV programs are national and the Bloc is not a national party. I&#8217;m not even sure if I were a BQ candidate in Quebec if I would think an appearance on Canada AM or Mike Duffy Live would help me get my message out where it counts for my campaign. But I would be very surprised if the Greens wouldn&#8217;t have put somebody up to appear on these panels.<\/p>\n<p>A panel with three guests works on TV. Four is awkward. Five is a real crowd. Photojournalists sometimes talk about the power of three, meaning three people in a picture gives you better opportunities to find interesting compositions. Four or five faces is tough to work with. Nevertheless,\u00a0 during an election campaign journalists have to do more than worry about a crowded frame.<\/p>\n<p>CTV has had Green Party reps on its programs in the past. And CTV no doubt will have many other opportunities to cover the point of view of the Greens as the campaign runs its course.<\/p>\n<p>But the very week that the Greens were forcing themselves on to the political agenda seemed like an odd time to broadcast political panels with only the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>Something wasn&#8217;t quite right with this picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Sallot The big story in the first week of the campaign is the way Green Leader Elizabeth May&#8217;s plea for simple fairness ignited a firestorm of a reaction from voters in cyberspace and in talk radio land, forcing the other leaders and the TV news network execs to back down and allow her to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election2008","category-election-2008-media-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}