A puffin pooping on Stéphane Dion’s shoulder, Stephen Harper’s sweater, and a couple of candidates getting kicked off the ballot are among the more memorable hallmarks of election 2008. Polls, too, will be remembered, if only for their repetitive reporting of who’s up, who’s down, who’s flirting with the female vote, the urban vote, and the Québécois vote. As Kim Campbell so famously said during the 1993 federal election, “An election is no time to discuss serious issues.”
The lone-woman prime minister got a lot of flak for the line, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true, says Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists. She has covered numerous elections though the years, and although the problem isn’t new, this election does stand out for its petty attacks.
“This is the bummer about elections,” she says. “When you have an interesting idea, love it or hate it, like the Green Shift, there really isn’t much of an opportunity to explain it because you get bogged down in the vast amount of bumps from the campaigns.”
Welch’s inbox this election averaged 30 e-mails a day from the various political parties, very few of them dealing with substantial issues, most of them “he said, she said” stuff. In the recent Manitoba election, which the former Edmontonian covered for the Winnipeg Free Press, she found herself running from press conference to press conference, unable to step back and evaluate her paper’s coverage, or delve into broader issues.
“As a reporter,” she says, “I always hunker down and think: ‘Awesome. We are going to have an election. I’m going to be able to write big stories about all the big policy issues.’ But you never do it.”
During this federal election, she has devoted a lot of her time to a local candidate Lesley Hughes, whom the Liberals dropped because of a column she wrote saying Israeli businesses were warned in advance of the 9/11 attacks. The other newspapers in Winnipeg have run a story about the imbroglio every day, she says, and so the Free Press feels the pressure to do the same.
“You can’t go back to your boss after the press conference and say, ‘I know everyone’s covering this weird, goofy thing, but there’s this whole other story here that’s more substantial,’” Welch says. What’s the editor going to say, she asks, especially after the six o’clock news has the story? In the hypercompetitive news business, reporters and editors can’t pass on splashy stories, and that does mean less room for substantive investigative writing.
"Newspaper coverage depends on the big announcements of the day, and it’s not as if the party leaders have gone a great job of articulating high ideas of national interest," Welch says.
"What we’re not talking about but that could be part of the plan", says Roger Graves, a University of Alberta professor who specializes in rhetoric.
Elections with no central, unifying issue, such as free trade or separatism, tend to have lower voter turnout, he explains, which favours the status quo. Graves also argues that the whole arts funding debate that has arisen this election has more to do with what Harper is not talking about — social programs and the GST cut — than his opinion of artists.
And his criticism is based on dollars and cents, not left or right, he says. The arts funding cuts are a $45-million issue, whereas the GST cut is a billion-dollar issue that affects government funds, which in turn affects health care, child care, retirement, and all kinds of issues that are far more fundamental to Canadians than arts funding.
“We get Margaret Atwood talking about it in Edmonton,” he says. “That’s news that gets out there. Everybody is interested in that, and everyone knows her. That makes the news.”
Considering the pressure on journalists to get the same story that other papers are running, can you imagine any media outlet ignoring the arts funding issue this election?
The Tyranny Of Polls
For Duff Conacher, co-ordinator at Democracy Watch, a national advocacy organization working for democratic reform, the answer to the problem is simple: stop investing so much time and space to polls during the election.
He’s quick to point out that many news outlets provide excellent political coverage, but he argues that the proportion of media space given over to reporting polls is completely out of line with their importance.
Instead of reporting a poll each day, he urges editors and reporters to cover one issue a day and summarize polling data once a week. Not only would that create a more accurate snapshot of the country because it would be based on more than one poll, it would also free up space, time, and money for delving into broader issues. “We have had a ton of media space dedicated to polls that said voters have not changed their minds,” he says. “That’s a twisted way to cover politics.”
According to his research for Democracy Watch, more than 200 polls have been reported since the last election, and you can count on one hand the number of polls that have shown the parties have gone up or down more than the margin of error, which is generally three to five per cent. When a poll appeared in the middle of the election showing Harper up a couple points, and subsequent headlines said Harper’s Conservatives could form a majority government, Conacher was outraged. The margin of error was within a couple points.
The focus on national polls also downplays the importance of the local races, which are ultimately where voters’ primary concerns lay, he says. “We don’t elect the prime minister directly like they do in the United States,” he says. “So you can vote for who you think is the best prime minister, but you may end up actually helping the person who you least want get elected because your vote is only counted in your riding.”
Welch understands the journalistic impulse to print the latest polling data, but she argues that newspapers have gotten much better at reporting the margin of error and letting readers come to their own conclusions. “We have a responsibility to tell readers … how the campaign is shaping up in the rest of the country,” she says. “If we totally neutered polls, we wouldn’t have any sense of how the campaigns are going, and that doesn’t do anyone a service.”
And certainly, puffins, pullovers, punted candidates, and polls are all part of the story of the 2008 election. Whether any of it influences the way people cast their ballot will be revealed on Oct. 14.
