Ten lessons

Posted by padams under Election 2011, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

Susan Delacourt has learned ten lessons from a mere eight election campaigns!

I especially like #4: Reporters will make “fit to govern” judgments based on how well the tour buses perform  in the area of feeding and accommodating the media. Campaign buses that get lost or break down or fail to provide three square meals a day to reporters will be pronounced abject failures at political leadership/competence.

Paul Adams is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton. He is a former Parliament Hill reporter and worked in the polling industry. You can follow him on Twitter @padams29

What’s on your mind?

Posted by jsallot under Election 2011, Election 2011 Faculty links, Media Commentary

JEFF SALLOT

Vote Compass is a nifty online survey put together by CBC and a group of political scientists to try to help you determine what political party best represents your views.

The survey covers a wide range of issues, from the economy and the environment, through gun control and mercy killing – 30 questions in all.
Log in, answer the questions, and see where you fall on the graph in relationship to where the major parties are.

A national panel of political scientists wrote the questions and plotted party positions on the basis of what the parties themselves say they would do if elected.

The survey launched Saturday. Within two days more than 300,000 people had participated. (I hope this is a sign voter turnout will be high May 2.) Read more…

The trouble with online polls

Posted by padams under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Media commentary, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

The redoubtable tcnorris has a post on the methodological issues with online polls and the reason that many, perhaps most, reputable news organizations in the United States give them a wide berth.

Online polls, especially those based on “opt-in” panels — that is, those that poll respondents who have signed up to be polled rather than being recruited by a random process — have a very checkered record in elections. Angus Reid, for example, produced an excellent result in the last Canadian election, but blew last year’s British election badly.

There has been considerable confusion about the conflicting “stories” told by the polls recently. Some have the Tories in the mid-thirties and others in the low forties.

However, if you exclude the online panels (Angus Reid and Leger), what you find is that all but one of the polls conducted by phone show the Tories at the lower level.  Nanos, Harris-Decima and EKOS are telling similar stories, with the Tories very much in minority territory. Among phone polls, only Ipsos joins the online polls in showing the Tories with a majority-territory lead.

Paul Adams is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton. He is a former Parliament Hill reporter and worked in the polling industry. You can follow him on Twitter @padams29

Iggy Coalition Climbdown Watch: Ding!

Posted by padams under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Media commentary, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

That didn’t take long: just one day longer that it should have. As I predicted yesterday, Ignatieff’s views on a coalition have “evolved” under withering pressure from the media, some Liberal commentators, and the government. There was no reason why this shouldn’t have happened yesterday other than political naivete.

As Stephen Harper walked into Rideau Hall this morning, Michael Ignatieff issued a release saying that, “We will not enter a coalition with other federalist parties”. (Before you panic, the statement also says, “We categorically rule out a coalition or formal arrangement with the Bloc Quebecois.”)

Ignatieff and his advisors have made the tactical judgement that his continued obscurantism was going to dog him through the campaign, and help the Harper Conservatives to fully realize the coalition bogeyman. They cleverly released the statement just moments before Harper’s prepared remarks that went heavily on the coalition that Ignatieff has now flatly disavowed.

So they think this is what is best for the Liberal campaign.

Read more…

Iggy Coalition Climbdown Watch: Day One

Posted by padams under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Media commentary, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Moments after the government fell this afternoon, Michael Ignatieff gave his first press conference in full election mode.

When he had been asked about the possibility of forming a coalition government earlier this week, he parried the question, saying that there is only a Red Door and a Blue Door in this election.

The issue is important because the Liberals want to argue, as Ignatieff did today, that a vote for any party but them is a vote for the continuation of Stephen Harper’s government. If Ignatieff allows that he might form a coalition with the NDP after the next election, then that seems obviously untrue. In that case, the election of NDP members could also contribute to the cause of ousting Harper.

If Ignatieff admits he might entertain a coalition, he undermines this central appeal. If he flatly denies he would consider one, however, he will discourage some of his own supporters, alienate potential Green and NDP switchers, and most importantly limit his strategic options after the election.

Read more…

Responsible communication

Posted by cwaddell under Media Commentary

Christopher Waddell

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a welcome updating of laws regarding libel that should ensure more stories are pursued and published or broadcast as the media no longer will have to prove independently the accuracy of everything contained in those stories. Instead the Court has established the concept of responsible communication under which the media can obtain protection  from libel “if it can establish that it acted responsibly in attempting to verify the information in a matter of public interest.”

The media has never been keen on shining any light onto how it does its work, yet that’s what this decision seems likely to produce.

As Dean Jobb notes in today’s Globe and Mail, “In essence, the law is holding journalists to the standard expected of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. ” With those standards also come responsibilities.

While the decision will benefit the media and its readers listeners and viewers, it leaves open a lot of  questions that will likely be determined by lower court rulings and perhaps in future by the Supreme Court itself.

How many independent sources must a news organization have for a story to qualify under the protection of responsible communication? How much time should a news organization give someone to respond to a reporter’s questions about a story – an hour? Four hours? A day? Two days? How many calls must a reporter make before he or she can conclude there will be no call-backs? How should news organizations use anonymous and non-identified sources and quotes? What is and isn’t responsible here?

News organizations that have codes of conduct will have to ensure they are enforced and prove that point before the courts. Those that don’t may find judges dictating the rules of journalism for them and that could end up forcing changes on those codes of conduct too.

While the court decision also appears to apply to bloggers, will they be held to a different standard than news organizations and if not, why?

For a public that has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the standards and accuracy of reporting in mainstream media this could all be very good news. Light will shine where it has only rarely shone before.For news organizations though, it seems destined to compromise and even undercut the independent decision-making they have always protected in deciding what and when a story is a story.

Pucks and bucks

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary

Christopher Waddell

The announcement that the cbc,ca will provide sports content to the National Post while the Financial Post will provide business news content to the CBC, while making for curious bedfellows, is part of a cost-cutting trend of contracting out parts of newspaper/TV news operations to those with more expertise or specialists on staff. In theory the result is fewer reporters and voices but in reality both CBC’s business coverage and the Post’s sports section are anemic at best, so it is hard to see that the outcome will be fewer reporters covering stories. Those cuts were made a long time ago.

In some ways this arrangement is similar to the deal announced earlier this week for additional foreign correspondents and coverage between CBS News and GlobalPost, a Boston web-based international news outlet staffed larger by former foreign correspondents for U.S. news organizations who lost their jobs as their employers retrenched.

It’s a time of uncertainty in the media, so innovation and different approaches are welcome. Some will work and turn out to be great ideas while others will be disasters but that will only be determined by trying them.

The interesting question is whether the deal will moderate the Post’s frequent attacks on the CBC and/or the CBC’s status as PR machine for the National Hockey League.

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 editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

Viral Senators

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

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 – making Senator Mike Duffy into a pitchman with personally-addressed emailed video messages soliciting not money (so far), but advice on policy priorities. Watch one here.

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.

Filling out the list of priorities gets you a brief closing thank you from Mike and a promise he’ll be back in touch soon – 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.

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.

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 editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

CBC and product placement

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary

Christopher Waddell

The commercialization of public broadcasting continues this time though through product placement of TD Canada Trust bank branches and signs in CBC dramatic and comedy series. Read all about it here.

As the news release states:

“In the hit comedy series Being Erica, Erica’s (Erin Karpluk) GF’s BF Anthony (Mark Taylor) manages a TD CanadaTrust branch and speaks at a TD corporate function. And on Little Mosque on the Prairie, William Thorn (Brandon Firla) blows into town as the new reverend and visits the local branch in Mercy to determine whether the church has enough funds to throw a bash for the townspeople. On the family drama Heartland, the bank makes cameo appearances in three episodes.”

And what are the differences and distinctions between public and private broadcasting in Canada?

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 editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

When the poll fits the story….

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

We’ve all done it, but that doesn’t make it right…Cherry pick the facts, that is, to make them fit a smooth journalistic narrative.

Talking of the NDP, this morning, an article in the Globe and Mail comments that, the party has “slipped to 12 per cent in the polls, according to one recent opinion survey…”

Well that doesn’t even make sense. Slipped in the polls, plural, according to one survey?

Many reporters are having trouble understanding the exact motivation for the NDP’s lack of enthusiasm for an election, so they have seized on one poll, that produced by Ipsos Reid this week, which shows the NDP at just 12%, a whopping one-third below their support in the last election.

However, every other recent poll  — and there have been lots of them — put the NDP in the 15-17% range, only slightly below their 2008 performance.

Of course, Ipsos may be right. Generally speaking, the consensus of polls is a more reliable indicator of what is happening in the real world than one outlier, though it is undoubtedly true that occasionally outliers prove to be more accurate than the consensus.

What we can say for sure, however, is that one poll can’t be many, just for the sake of bolstering a journalistic narrative.

A good rule of thumb: if your sentence doesn’t make literal sense, give it a re-think.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and is executive director of EKOS Research Associates, a polling firm.