When the referees don the uniforms

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Ira Wagman

There has been a lot of attention devoted to the media consortium’s decision to exclude Elizabeth May from the national leader’s debates. To be sure, there are a number of issues to be dealt with concerning the arcane rules about participation – rules that should be debated in another forum, as Paul Adams indicated below. Clearly there are political implications, too. However, there is a deeper issue here – one that has to do with the position of Canada’s broadcasters, which have gone from simply covering the story to becoming part of it.   

Remember Stockwell Day and the Reform Party’s decision that they would no longer participate in the scrums outside of the House of Commons, only to take questions in the controlled environs of a press room in the basement? What happened then? Many major media outlets said thanks, but no thanks and, as a result, the folks downstairs came upstairs – because that is where the coverage would be.   

The same thinking should have applied here. The Consortium should have taken the position that the debates will take place as scheduled, whether some, all, or none of the parties wish to participate. After all of the posturing and blustering, I can assure you that most, if not all, of them would be on the air that night. Who would pass up a chance to reach a national audience?  The decision around participation should have been left for the political parties to decide.  

What happened here was not just a case of the broadcasters being intimidated by the political parties, as my colleague Chris Waddell noted here earlier. It was something even worse. By threatening not to participate in the debates the various political parties forced the broadcasters out their position as referees and onto the playing field. In other words, they politicized them. This now gives the parties additional ammunition about how the media are biased, it also re-circulates images of media cabals, and undercuts the credibility of the organizations charged with covering the elections as a public service, however we would like to define that term. The fact that the Consortium has not come out with the details of its decision-making process doesn’t help to shed the image that there may be other things going on behind closed doors. If the press expects openness from the political parties in the name of Canadians, why shouldn’t they be as up front about their process as well? Now that the Greens are threatening to take a complaint up to the CRTC and to the courts, it runs the risk of politicizing them too.  If you think this kind of thing won’t have an effect on the election consider what happened when the RCMP announced they were investigating Ralph Goodale about income trusts during the last election. It draws attention where it doesn’t need to be. The bureaucracy and the press need to stay on the sidelines.

This is an awful position for Canada’s media to be in at the beginning of an election. Considering that many of these broadcasters now own many of Canada’s largest newspapers and radio stations, there are already issues about the extent to which Canadians can expect comprehensive media coverage from the mainstream media outlets.  

By not getting caught in political issues around the debates, the Consortium would have made a bold statement about its own position in this election — as broadcasters interested in acting as equitably as possible in the public interest. With their involvement in the Green Party decision, they have, regrettably, become part of the story. 

Ira Wagman is an Assistant Professor, Mass Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton.