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.

Election talk

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams teach journalism and is executive director of EKOS Research Associates

Magic Number

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Today’s EKOS Poll for the CBC shows the Liberals tied to the decimal point on national vote intention. Naturally, this slight closing of the race from last week means a slight change in the seat projection for the front runners from my last post. (Last week’s projection in brackets)

Liberals           119 (111)

Conservatives 113 (119)

BQ                    41  (49)

NDP                  35  (29)

Perhaps the most startling element of these relatively small changes is at the back of the pack.

The BQ has slipped because of a Liberal surge in Quebec — something people are not yet paying attention to in the media, even though Michael Marzolini’s leaked Liberal poll earlier this week suggested a similar trend. If this keeps up, it might have a substantial effect on the BQ’s willingness to go to an election.

In addition, the NDP has jumped substantially — back nearly to the level they enjoyed in the last election. This is likely more to do with close “splits” between the two largest parties rather than any gain in support for the NDP which poll-to-poll was infinitesimal.

Why do I find these numbers interesting? Well, add the Liberal number to the NDP number, and what do you get? 154.

And what is 154? Exactly half of 308.

Get my drift?

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and works with EKOS Research on its political polling.

Lessons from lotteries

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

The recent controversies in Ontario surrounding the expenditures of executives of eHealth and now the Ontario Lottery Corporation raise a couple of important issues beyond expensing the cost of a cup of coffee that would benefit from investigation by both the media and parliamentary or legislative committees.

First, how did the belief emerge that senior management of quasi-government agencies need to be compensated as if they were working in the private sector and how can it be justified? The argument was that’s the way to attract top talent in senior management posts. Yet private sector compensation is designed to reflect the degree of risk that rests on the shoulders of senior management. Their decisions will determine whether the enterprise competes successfully in the market, whether it grows or shrink, lives or dies. By contrast, for example what are the corporate risks faced by the senior management of the Ontario Lottery Corporation and the decisions managers must make that will determine whether the lottery corporation, as a government-mandated monopoly, will prosper or fail that justify senior management compensation equivalent to that in the private sector ?

Second, to an extent the public doesn’t realize, government now contracts out an enormous range of services – everything from opinion polling and communications advice to speech and report-writing, the delivery of programs, IT support, economic and issue analysis and options, strategic advice and external oversight of government-funded activities. With governments facing large deficits yet also paying for so many external consultants and services, sooner or later someone will start asking exactly what do all the people who work for government actually do?

While media coverage will properly ridicule expense account excesses and raise legitimate questions of whether taxpayers are getting value for money for the contracts let by government, there’s an underlying issue that also deserves attention but may not get it. Both situations reflect the failure of elected officials in both the government and opposition to carry out one of their prime responsibilities as members of a parliament or legislature – overseeing and questioning how public money is spent.

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.

Cars without GM, and news without the Times

Posted by padams under All

Paul Adams

Read the always-provocative Michael Kinsley’s take on the crisis in newspapers (from the Washington Post).

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton.

Plug-in backscratching

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

Had there been any debate in Parliament about the wisdom of spending $13 billion to keep General Motors and Chrysler alive surely one of the questions an effective opposition would have raised would be will government discriminate in its policies on the auto sector to favour the companies it owns?

Ontario provided an answer yesterday with a subsidy of up to $10,000 for electric vehicles, announced by Premier Dalton McGuinty at a General Motors dealership in Toronto. The only beneficiary on the immediate horizon will be the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in car supposed to begin production in late 2010.

With a  predicted price tag of about $40,000 US – the Volt will be at least $10,000 more expensive in Canada than popular hybrid competitors such as the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight – neither of which would be eligible for the subsidy as they aren’t plug-ins. Not surprisingly Honda and Toyota are unimpressed and being uncharacteristically vocal about it, as stories in today’s Globe and Mail and National Post highlight.

Two years ago Honda engaged in a battle with the federal Conservative government when it introduced a subsidy for fuel efficient vehicles with an arbitrary mileage cutoff that just excluded some Honda vehicles. That program was a failure but not before it alienated Honda which builds almost 400,000 vehicles annually in Ontario.

The length of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meeting with Governor General Michaelle Jean last December to discuss proroguing Parliament meant he missed the official opening of a new Toyota plant in Woodstock, Ont. – the only new auto assembly plant built in the province in the last decade.

The debate might have also asked if governments introduce policies that directly undercut the interests of companies that have invested and expanded in Ontario to favour those that have cut back and closed plants, how tough will it be in future to persuade Honda and Toyota to continue to choose Canada over the United States for future investments?

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.

The PM and big, bad taxes

Posted by ealboim under All

Elly Alboim

The Prime Minister’s musings about there being no “good” taxes have led to a flurry of commentary, particularly in the Globe and Mail and its political blog site about whether he meant what he said and whether his words reveal an attitude towards government that is both cavalier and dangerous.

There is mounting evidence of cavalier decisions by this government. Yesterday’s snap decision to impose visas on Mexican and Czech visitors seems to be leading to potential devastating retaliation by the European Community. The snap decision to shut down the MAPLE reactors without a Plan B is taking on new meaning now that the Dutch reactor is about to shut down as well.

But it is the tax issue that may very well lead to the most significant debate .

The Prime Minister has embraced forever deficits, if need be, rather than accepting the “dumb” policy of raising taxes. There is every indication – including the cynical decision to cut the GST and the incessant characterization of the Liberals as “taxers” – that the PM believes Canadians (or at least HIS Canadian voters) are moved to vote by their distaste for current taxation levels. And most of the various commentators also start from a presumption that taxes are highly unpopular and electoral albatrosses.

But there is lots of public opinion research that suggests that most Canadians actually make the link between taxes and government services. In the years of surplus, reducing taxes consistently ran a poor third to paying down debt or spending on key priorities. Most people understand the power of pooling their dollars in order to accomplish important things. Most would forego what always turns out to be modest personal benefit (because significant tax cuts cost so much money when spread over 15 million tax payers) in order to better fund health care or improved educational facilities. Most believe government is the ultimate guarantor of the services they require.

And unless we suddenly and unexpectedly return to significant economic growth, this proposition is going to be tested once more as future government struggle with the vicious circle caused by chronic, structural deficits and mounting debt. We know Mr. Harper’s answer (or at least this week’s version.) The question for others is whether Canadians will accept increasing taxes rather than lose already weakening government services.

Ultimately, this may come down to choosing between alternate and profoundly differing visions of the role of government and the taxes that support it.

Elly Alboim is an Associate Professor of Journalism and provided strategic communications and public opinion advice on eleven federal budgets