The looming debates

Posted by ealboim under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary

Elly Alboim

Now that the debates are a week away, debate teams within the camps are getting ready for the final push on preparations. The leaders will probably end serious campaigning by Saturday and head into intensive rehearsal.

From a vantage point of having covered quite a few national and provincial leaders’ debates, having been on three debate preparation teams and having done real time public opinion research of debates along with friend and colleague David Herle, here are some observations over time.

The audiences

There are two very different audiences for televised debates during an election campaign.

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No news for the NDP

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2011, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary, Media Commentary

Christopher Waddell

Week two and are we seeing the first glimpses of the NDP’s nightmare? The party complained in the last two elections that it and leader Jack Layton were being ignored in much of the campaign media coverage. Prior to this campaign there were rumours that some media organizations in a bid to cut costs would only travel with the NDP part of the time.

Last week CBC, CTV and Global nightly national newscasts all featured stories on the NDP campaign almost every night but this week has started out very differently.

Only CBC led with the election – Global led with Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 problems and CTV focused on the sentencing in adult court of the two young offender murderers of an 18 year old girl in BC.

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Red Book reality check: Libs campaigning from the left?

Posted by padams under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

One thing Stephen Harper and Jack Layton were able to agree on in the hours after Michael Ignatieff’s launch of the Liberal platform on Sunday was that it had stolen a page or two from the NDP. The platform — an admirably long and detailed document — was filled with commitments to education, health, day care and elder care. It was a liberal document, albeit encased in a pledge to bring down the deficit over time, in part by returning corporate taxes to their 2009 level.

The question for the voters about this platform — as for that of any other party — is how seriously to take it.

Jack Layton remarked that the Liberals are famous for using a Xerox machine to copy the NDP’s policies during an election, then using a shredder to dispose of them later.

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Launching Week Two

Posted by ealboim under All, Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary

Elly Alboim

The Liberal platform launch was unusual. It was part game show and part infomercial, putting Mr. Ignatieff at centre stage directing traffic, taking questions and delivering substance in bits and pieces. It was somewhat surprising because normally a platform launch is the occasion for something more sober and austere that emphasizes the agenda for government as its centerpiece.

But the current Liberal task is more complex than that.

Mr. Ignatieff’s constellation of leadership attributes has been weak and he must be seen to be an alternative prime minister before the Liberal party can be taken seriously as an alternative government. Today’s launch seemed to be driven by that underlying thesis. It was another – and much more important venue – to showcase his performance skills. As journalists have been reporting, he was very fluid, and comfortable. He handled questions apparently without specific preparation and did so off the cuff. More importantly, he structured his answers to questions very well using value propositions, anecdotes and accessible language. His summary attacking Mr. Harper’s governing style and its implications for “democracy” was a harbinger of the character debate that will underpin the Liberal narrative for the next four weeks.

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Storyline alert! NDP campaign in trouble…

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

Paul Adams

Jack Layton had a press availability in Sudbury this morning after his event-of-the-day, on recruiting and training more doctors to practice in smaller centres. The questions showed that there is a new storyline emerging among reporters on the NDP plane.

Reporters who had been on Layton’s previous campaigns pointed out that he has not been speaking to large crowds as he has done in the past, and that he is doing fewer events each day than the other leaders.

What they are probing for, of course, is whether Layton’s health — he is suffering from prostate cancer and a recently fractured hip — is inhibiting his capacity and performance on the campaign trail.

Now, it seems extremely unlikely that anyone outside the NDP campaign bubble will have noticed this, assuming the journos’ assessment of his campaign is correct.

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Every picture tells a story

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

The best television shows viewers the story rather than telling it to them.

That’s why it is difficult to understand the Conservatives’ initial media strategy. Leaving aside the concerns of journalists about the number of questions they get to ask Mr Harper (the public really doesn’t care about reporters’ working conditions), the visual impression left from yesterday’s visit by Mr Harper to a container port reinforces all that his opponents are saying about him every day as they campaign.

Yesterday’s images shouted aloofness and isolation – standing all alone in an empty container port marshaling yard behind a podium with containers in the background appearing to be lecturing a polite crowd sitting a respectful distance away. The TV wide shots give it all away, magnifying that distance in what seems a visual metaphor for the campaign’s early days. It’s the pictures that matter much more than the words and those shots were featured prominently in last night’s television stories about the Conservative campaign.

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Iggy’s – so far – excellent adventure

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

Paul Adams

During the last week of the 2008 election campaign, a news photographer caught a humorous scene. Stéphane Dion, whose campaign was foundering, was sitting on a television news set. Behind him was a weather graphic: five days of unremitting dark clouds and pouring rain ahead.

Dion was a complete innocent in this embarrassing photo of course: a hapless victim of a clever photographer. Even Robert Stanfield actually had to fumble the football before his cringing-inducing moment was plastered on the front page of the Globe and Mail. What the photographers had done in both cases, though, was to find a symbolic pictorial representation of a broader media perception about the success of the candidates and their campaigns.

This morning I arrived a little late to see Michael Ignatieff make an announcement on his day care policy at a pre-school in Winnipeg South (the constituency I grew up in, as it happens). I had not seen Ignatieff at a political event in person for about a year, and what surprised me was his obvious comfort and self-confidence. He seemed like he was enjoying himself, which has not always been a given for Ignatieff in his time as leader.

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Emerging Narratives

Posted by ealboim under All, Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary

Day six of the campaign and media narratives, many of them predictable, are emerging.

Journalism loves narrative, especially at election time. One of the great classical story lines is “the surge of the underdog.” The other is the ”comeuppance of the prideful”. Both are equally attractive as dramatic narrative. For Michael Ignatieff at the start of the campaign either was possible as a framing narrative.

On another level, political journalists love a contest – it adds dramatic tension and makes you feel that getting up in the morning in yet another city is worth doing. Every election campaign begins with the journalistic hope for a meaningful contest.

There are signs that we are seeing both story lines emerging. Although it is all impressionistic – as these things are – there is a sense that coverage of Michael Ignatieff is clustering around the “underdog beginning to surprise” and in doing so, turning what seemed a probable rout into a possible contest. It is early days and there will need to be more evidence to sustain the story line over time if it is to be viable. But today’s poll showing for the first time that the Liberal number starts with a 3 will be seized upon. If there are others showing that, or a narrowing of the gap, the media dynamic will change substantially and accelerate.

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Spinning Compass: you’re not just nuts, you’re Liberal!

Posted by padams under All, Election 2011, Election 2011 Media commentary, Media Commentary

Paul Adams

The CBC’s Vote Compass feature, which claims to help you figure out which of the five political parties most closely aligns with your views and values, has been a phenomenal box office success. Almost 700,000 people have already used the interactive feature on the CBC’s website as I write, and the number is growing by more than 100,000 a day. While the growth may settle down as we move into mid-campaign, you’d expect another surge as voters get closer to having to make their final decision on May 2.

Like anything popular — Justin Bieber round my house for example — it has critics as well as enthusiasts. Today the Ottawa Sun ran a story headlined CBC Vote Tool Flawed: Prof, quoting a Queen’s political scientist, Kathy Brock, as saying she used several strategies —  giving the same answer to every question (e.g., “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree”) — and always came out Liberal. Similarly, someone (obviously a Tory) has posted a video purporting to illustrate that the Vote Compass is “totally rigged” towards the Liberals.

The Sun quotes a researcher who worked on the project as saying that since the questions are deliberately split between the left and the right of the spectrum, if you give the same answer to everything you end up in the middle. In other words, if you strongly agree that Canada should get out of Afghanistan immediately and that military spending should be increased, that the problems with oil sands are exaggerated and that there should be a carbon tax, you are not only nuts, you’re a Liberal!

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Here we go again

Posted by ealboim under All, Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Election 2011 Media commentary

Elly Alboim

The decision by the networks to exclude Elizabeth May from the Leaders’ Debates goes to the heart of the media’s sense of hubris in election campaigns.

Elections always feature a continuing struggle between media and political parties for control of the agenda. Media take on for themselves the role of arbiter of the truth and organizer of the hierarchy of importance of issues. In doing so, they work under two often contradictory values – loudly proclaiming the importance of accessibility and transparency and insisting on what they call news value in determining what they cover. Implicit in their narrow definition of news value is that the issue be interesting and/or entertaining to their audience, a judgment they insist is their excusive purview to exercise.

In the debates (and I’ve been party to those discussion many times), media organizers and producers worry first and foremost about the “watchability” of the debates and how to make it “good TV.” Although they cloak the discussion in high-minded discourse of making it accessible and interesting to viewers to foster increased democratic participation, it really is about applying game show and sports entertainment values to the process. They prize direct confrontation and angry conflict. Boring and incremental discussion doesn’t cut it – hence the rules on thirty second answers and the reportorial focus on “knock-out punches” and winners and losers in the coverage of the debates themselves. It isn’t really clear why that is important to them – after all there are no commercials to sell and no inter-network competitive urges to satisfy. But they can’t seem to stop themselves from being driven by production values because that is what they do every other day of their professional lives.

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