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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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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Debating the debates – round two

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

Christopher Waddell

So we are back where we were in 2008 – should Elizabeth May be in the leader’s debates or not?

Of course she should, as her party receives an annual subsidy based on votes and in 2008 collected 937,613 votes – 6.8 per cent of the total votes cast.

The broadcasters’ rationale that only parties with seats in the House should be in the debate is a circular argument – almost no coverage of smaller parties even during campaigns and then keeping them out of debates so they don’t get the visibility that might help them get enough votes to elect an MP – designed to make it almost impossible for any new national party without a strong regional base to get in.  (Where is the Competition Bureau when you need it!) In fact it is an approach designed to encourage the further regionalization of the Canadian political system.

In 2010 as media coverage of elections fractions in a million directions between the mainstream media and everyone else on the Internet, leaders’ debates are too important as the one common media experience open to all voters to assess the alternatives, to remain the personal fiefdoms of the political parties and their broadcast colleagues.

Here are my conclusions from round one of the debate about the debates in the media chapter in The Canadian Federal Election of 2008 – the book Carleton produces after every election.

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Reading the tea leaves

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Political Strategy

Andre Turcotte

There are a few milestones in an election campaign. The milestones are moments when voters begin to focus on what is at stake in the election and start the process towards deciding which party will receive their support. The first few days of the campaign is one such milestone. At that time, voters begin to realize they will be called upon to cast their ballot sooner than later and they seek to catch up on what has happened since the last time they paid attention to politics. It is an important process since we know from the 2008 Canadian Election Study that about one-third of voters (33%) will make up their mind about which party to support during the election campaign – some of them very early on – while close to 20% will wait until Election Day.

In the process of getting up to speed on politics, voters will seek information from families and friends; will pay closer attention to the news and party advertisements or will be visited by local candidates who will distribute campaign literature. Others may turn to polls to get a sense of where the respective parties stand within the public opinion environment. Those voters who are turning to polls for some insights are likely confused at this point.

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Announce now . . . deliver later

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2011, Election 2011 Campaign strategy, Election 2011 Faculty links, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

The Conservative plan to introduce income-splitting for some families but only when the deficit is eliminated, isn’t the first time in recent elections a political party has used the ‘announce now-deliver later’ strategy but nether the Liberals nor the Conservatives want to mention that.

In the 1993 election the first Liberal Red Book election platform document included a conditional plan to spend $720 million in a three-year program that would establish 150,000 new child care spaces across the country.

But there was a catch. It would only happen in the future when the economy was growing at three percent. With 1993 growth at about one per cent , the Red Book projected the new plan would start in 1995-96.

Of course it never happened and that’s why the Conservatives don’t want to mention the concept’s been road-tested in a previous campaign. For the Liberals any mention of it is just reminds people that they have announced but not delivered child care plans before.

Instead of child care, after they were elected the Liberals introduced widespread spending cuts in Paul Martin’s 1995 budget in a plan to eliminate a deficit of more than $40 billion. Sound familiar?

Christopher Waddell is director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He is a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief for the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News. You can follow him on Twitter @cwaddell27

Good politics, lousy tax policy

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

Elly Alboim

There’s a reason finance departments hate policies like the newly announced family income splitting promise by the Conservatives.

First of all, promising something at least five years out is a promise subject to the vagaries of events, to put it charitably. It pre-allocates spending years before fiscal pressures develop and are understood.

But there are lots of other policy issues to think about.

• Tax fairness. It creates two classes of taxpayers (not recipients, the ones tax expenditures like subsidizing hockey sticks target, though those are unfair as well). And it is much more lucrative than any of those. Currently, to be fair, seniors can split pension income, but there are compelling public policy reasons to do that.
• It is divisive: single parents, singles, and the childless are not eligible.
• It is regressive. The more you earn, the more you can transfer at the highest marginal rate. The biggest benefit accrues to the largest earners and where there is the largest income gap between spouses –by definition largely the well-off.
• It rewards those who can afford to stay home. Those who can’t get less and less depending on the income disparity
• It will be horribly complex to administer. What do you do about divorced parents sharing custody? Families with kids over and under 18? Which spouse gets the deductions?
• It will create a disincentive to work among some. For a person with a high income spouse, the attributed income is taxed at the marginal rate in that spouse’s hands..When it is assigned to the low income spouse, the income is taxed at the lowest rate. (the higher the income, the higher the marginal rate savings.) The lower the income of the recipient spouse, and the higher the income of the contributing spouse, the larger the savings. For very low current wage earners, there may well be a net gain from the tax savings versus working part time or at minimum wage. Certainly there will be a curve that shows only a marginal gain to working versus the psychic gain of staying with the kids for many people. Roughly, at highest marginal tax rate of say 43 percent (presumably this has to be followed by the provinces, otherwise you would file jointly in one jurisdiction and separately in another) the tax savings on transferring fifty thousand dollars could be over twenty thousand to the high income spouse which is offset by the tax paid by the lower income spouse (at lower tax rates.) The net tax savings diminish as the lower spouse’s work income increases.

It is a massive structural change in the tax system without consultation or discussion.

Finally, it will come at a time when the demographic crunch is hitting Canada’s health care system. Is this the fairest and best way to spend the first dollars of a surplus? Does it come out of health transfers, for instance?

Elly Alboim is an Associate Professor of Journalism and a strategic communications consultant who has worked on nine federal and two provincial budgets.

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.

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