Did Mulcair really say that? #cdnpoli #nlpoli

According to CBC News, federal opposition leader Thomas Mulcair said that his party would honour a loan guarantee for the Muskrat Falls project “even if price tag goes up.”

But did he actually say that?

The Muskrat Falls Debate (on Twitter) #nlpoli

Over at the Telegram, you’ll find two blog posts that are well worth your time if you want to get more insights into the ongoing discussion about Muskrat Falls.

Political reporter James McLeod goes through the tone of the public discussion about the project.  Geoff Meeker has a post featuring some observations by former premier Roger Grimes.

The two posts wind up complimenting each other and both raise some worthwhile issues.

The Truth Hurts #nlpoli

For those of us who loved the West Wing, we can look forward to his latest effort, an HBO series about news media called The Newsroom. [video link to Episode 1]

And we can be sure that it will be a finely crafted and savagely accurate portrayal of the news business.

We can be sure because a gang of news types at the mighty Ceeb are shitting all over it from great heights.

The Persistence of False Information #nlpoli

In an interview on The Current last week,  Anthony Germain asked Premier Kathy Dunderdale why she wasn’t trying to sell Muskrat Falls to people in Newfoundland and Labrador as Danny Williams might have.

“If we are going to break Quebec’s stranglehold on the province…” suggested Germain, as he cast the project as an exercise in building the nation of Newfoundland. 

Well yes, all that is true agreed Dunderdale, but the project was worthwhile anyway because it gave the people of the province an asset.

Germain didn’t come up with the phrase by accident.  The official Muskrat Falls news release in November 2010 included this quote attributed to Danny Williams:

"This is a day of great historic significance to Newfoundland and Labrador as we move forward with development of the Lower Churchill project, on our own terms and free of the geographic stranglehold of Quebec which has for too long determined the fate of the most attractive clean energy project in North America…” [Emphasis added]

You’ll find variations of the same line  - about breaking the Quebec stranglehold - in most news stories on the project.  Just consider this a sample:  a news story in the Star from April 2012, a CBC online backgrounder on the project from April 2011,  a Telegraph-Journal story from April 2011, a Globe and Mail editorial from November 2010 and a gushing Canadian Business Journal piece from January 2011.

The idea that Quebec is blocking development of Labrador hydro-electricity is very familiar.  In that respect, there was nothing surprising  in the fact that Anthony Germain asked the question he did and that Kathy Dunderdale breezed over it as true and then went on to talk about some other detail of Muskrat Falls.

What is amazing about the idea is that there isn’t a shred of truth in it.

Period.

Not true.

Completely false.

We know that Quebec no longer has a stranglehold on Labrador development because Danny Williams said so.

The time:  April 2009.

The situation:  Nalcor’s sale of electricity from Churchill Falls to Emera in New York, wheeled through Quebec.

As CBC reported at the time:

"It shows that our power is not stranded power," [Williams] said.

"We're not forced to just sell it at the border to Quebec at whatever price Quebec wants to pay for it."

Now one can understand that this sort of reporting happened in late 2010 when people were still covering the events immediately in front of them.  But why has this particular piece of false information persisted in news stories about Muskrat Falls since then?

Partly it’s because politicians keep repeating the false information.  Here’s natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy in the House of Assembly on March 22:

…Gull Island is not possible because we cannot get through Quebec, …

For the mainlanders, you can put it down to the fact they just never heard of the April 2009 deal and know even less about electricity regulation in Canada and the United States.  Add to that the lousy fact-checking in the modern, highly-competitive, under-staffed newsrooms of the 21st century.

As for the locals, though, the persistence of the stranglehold claim is a bit of a head-scratcher.  After all, they covered the April 2009 wheeling deal and reported Williams comments at the time. That didn’t stop them from ignoring it entirely a year later when they covered news stories about  Nalcor’s unsuccessful appeals to the Quebec energy regulator about transmitting Labrador electricity through Quebec.

You can probably explain the locals with the Echo Chamber effect.  As it seems, the local media don’t challenge official pronouncements especially when nobody else in the community is doing so.  They report what others said or did, nothing more.   You can find a similar practice in other places, but the big difference between here and the United States, for example, is the existence in the US of strongly held and publicly expressed alternate points of view. 

- srbp -

All the news that fits the frame #nlpoli

With a couple of discussions about the media and how it covers news, no regular readers of the various scribbles in this province would be surprised to find a column on the same subject from the Telegram’s Peter Jackson.

Go read it.  While you may disagree with Peter from time to time – and sometimes the disagreement is more often than not – Peter brings his considerable experience in newsrooms and that always adds to the discussion.

Right at the start, Peter very accurately describes what the basic problem is for people who toil thanklessly in newsrooms:  too much stuff to fit into the available time and space.  There’s no sarcasm in that, by the way.  They work very hard, no matter what some people think.  As a rule, they are trying to get the story right.  They want to be fair and they want to do what they think is appropriate in addition to meeting the business demands of making money so everyone keeps his or her job.

That said, Peter couldn’t resist tossing some straw into his mix:

The media, say critics, were duped by the Tories into covering their little distraction at the expense of more important news.

Yeah, well, umm, no.

At least, not from this critic.

They weren’t duped by anything.  The way the local newsrooms covered the Bennett story is a function of the way they tend to handle local political stories, especially in the post-2003 era.

Let’s take a look at what Peter says.  He deploys the stock argument about fairness and all that, plus the bit about not “editorialising” that very often crops up in discussions about how stories get covered.

Whether it was a distraction is beside the point. It’s news. In fact, the smoke screen angle is itself part of the story. The reporter can’t conclude as such without editorializing, but the people he quoted certainly can — and did.

The primary goal in all cases is fair and accurate reporting. Keeping a cool head. Otherwise, exuberance can lead some journalists to completely cross the line.

That basically gets us beyond Geoff Meeker’s point about whether or not to cover the story in the first place.  Your humble e-scribbler’s with Peter on this one:  the story is news. 

But now you get to a question that lives just an inch below that first one:  what is the story? 

All the bits that Peter Jackson recites – the call, the message, the kangaroo court in the House, the delay in raising the issue, Burke’s claim of being shaken, stirred or whatever – are all elements of the story. One you get beyond the choice to run the story, you have to figure out what the story is.

News stories tend to follow a pattern. The Big Idea, the thing they want you to remember, goes right up front.  Then you run down through the next most important thing until you get to the end.  That last paragraph is the stuff that first the reporter and then the editor have decided is expendable.  It might actually wind up being tossed between the newsroom and layout, incidentally, but that’s another story. 

The organization of the information in a good news story was always designed to engage the reader’s attention and inform him or her.  You could read the first bit and get the key information.  That imperative is even more important these days:  people don’t read stuff any more.  They skim.  So it’s a bit of a challenge to get a lot of them to last past three or four sentences.  Forget three or four whole paragraphs.

So in this one, would you consider the fact that Jerome made an accusation qualified as the top thing?  Pretty much yeah.  You can encapsulate the main details of the accusation in one sentence.  Try something like:

In the House of Assembly today, the Progressive Conservatives accused Liberal MHA Jim Bennett of trying to intimidate Advanced Education and Skills Minister Joan Burke on February 3.

House leader Jerome Kennedy may have been the person who actually made the accusation.  But no one should be foolish enough to believe that Jerome and Kathy and Joan and all the rest of the caucus didn’t have their talking points sorted out in advance. Your humble e-scribbler would run with the collective attribution for the accusation.

Besides, a news outlet has a obligation to fill in the gaps in knowledge so that people can situate a story in context.  That isn’t editorialising.  It’s informing readers.

Second sentence or paragraph?  Maybe what Bennett actually said along with the context:

Bennett called Burke’s office in early February because he was trying to get help for a constituent who needed transportation from the St. Barbe area to Corner Brook for chemotherapy treatment.

Frustrated that he wasn’t getting results from Burke’s staff, he left a message on a Friday saying if the issue wasn’t settled by Monday, he would call “Open Line,” and “there will be hell to pay.”

Bennett also said, “I will absolutely trash your minister and say what a bunch of idiots she’s got working in her department. You fix the problem and fix it today or there will be lots of trouble.”

That’s from the Telegram story on March 9, incidentally.  The structure we just used is essentially a variation on the “he said, she said” format some people like.  You’ve given all the necessary details of what the whole thing was about.

Interestingly, though, that information about what Bennett said and why (according to him)  is paragraphs four, five and six of the Telly story.

Here’s what they thought was more important.  The accusation was the second thing.  First was the sexed up version of the basic story as the Tories framed it:

Liberal MHA Jim Bennett was in the hot seat Thursday, after he was accused of threatening a government minister.

And before you got to what Bennett said, the Telly wanted you to know that the Premier thought it was ““absolutely appalling” and that the opposition House leader thought the Tories were grandstanding.

Now you don’t have to be a dupe or a partisan to write the Telly version of the story. You’d goose the story so that the drama – as forced as it was – might draw readers in. This could be what Peter referred to at one point:  “making grey stories a little more colourful, is integral to the business of journalism.” 

All legitimate points – journalism is a business as much as we might like it to be otherwise.

All news outlets get to decide a bunch of things about a story.  They get to decide whether or not to cover something at all.  And when they run a story, they get to decide what to do with it.  The people who put news together have lots of choices and they face lots of pressures.

There were plenty of ways the local media could have tackled the Bennett story.  The Telegram did it one way. They could have put a lot more information – facts – into their story at the front end that would have given readers a very different impression than what someone would have gotten if they didn’t make it beyond the third paragraph of the Bennett story.

Just think about it:  in the Telly version, you could have gotten three paragraphs in without knowing what Bennett said.  That information is important if you want people to be able to follow the simple formula:  “We report, you decide.”

Without it, you get to decide, but you could decide wrongly.

It all depends on the frame.

It all depends on what someone decided to tell you about a particular story. 

– srbp -

What makes news? #nlpoli

Sometimes you have to wonder why does one story make the news while another doesn’t.  Good example:  Jim Bennett’s asinine telephone call to Joan Burke’s constituency office.

Telegram blogger Geoff Meeker smacks the local media for covering the story in the way they did:

It wasn't even a valid news story. It was manufactured. The PCs sat on Bennett’s voice message for five weeks, until it was advantageous to toss out the bait. They played the media like a fish. 

And this is a criticism directed at all media, because they all played it at the top of their news, whether it was TV, radio or print. Meanwhile, as a direct consequence, more important stories – such as NDP Leader Lorraine Michael’s vital question about mercury poisoning in Lake Melville – were pushed back, diminishing their importance.

All fair comment.

In this case, the discussion is about what newsrooms chose to cover.  The usual comment from the people in newsrooms – editors and reporters alike – is that there is way more stuff going on than they could ever print or broadcast.

Sure.

But that doesn’t get at the question of why they might chose one story over another.

And what about cases where newsroom didn’t cover a story at all? 

There have been a couple of those stories related to energy policy that we know about:  one from April 2008 and another from September 2009.

But then there was another type of story, the one where the locals didn’t report it as news until the mainlanders did it first.

This is a story like the one about an education minister mixing and meddling in the appointment of a new president for the university. Until the story appeared in a national newspaper, no one locally reported it.  Sure there were columns in the Telegram about it but no one reported the story as news.

It’s not like the mainlanders got the story first and scooped all the locals.

Or how about the deliberate breach of the province’s privacy laws in the case of the Craig Westcott e-mail. Telegram editor Russell Wangersky brought up the e-mail in his Saturday column. The context was a discussion of the way the current provincial government selectively interprets the access to information and privacy law in Newfoundland and Labrador.

All the news media in the province had the story at the same time.  As Wangersky recounts the episode:

But first, a little history: Craig Westcott was hired in late 2010 as the communications spokesman for the provincial Liberals, a move that generated considerable ire inside provincial Tory ranks. 

In fact, such ire that a provincial cabinet minister, Municipal Affairs Minister Kevin O'Brien, went on VOCM to denounce Westcott, and to reveal that Westcott had written an intemperate email to then-premier Danny Williams' communications chief, Elizabeth Matthews, in February 2009. O'Brien said the email had been discussed at the cabinet table. 

The email questioned whether Williams had mental [health] issues, and, after O'Brien's VOCM comments, was released in its entirety.

Every newsroom went first with the e-mail story, exactly as the government intended when the Premier’s Office decided to release it.

One of the reasons why the current provincial government can get away with its selective application of the law has an awful lot to do with the consequences.  Basically there aren’t any. 

Sure they might be on the receiving end of a few sharp words in an editorial or a column.  The thing is, though,  that fewer people pay attention to news media these days than they used to.  And the ones who do likely don’t scan all the columns to finds tidbits of information like ones about the latest illegal actions by their own government.  They just don’t see the news that might wind up on the opinion pages instead of the news pages where they belong.

What the public gets instead are stories like the Bennett or Westcott ones where the government’s interpretation of things often appear  unfiltered.

What makes it into print or on the air isn’t always the story, let alone the whole one or the real one.

- srbp -

The Origin of Information Species #nlpoli

The Globe and Mail has decided to launch a new website that will give subscribers financial news and opinion and analysis pieces that aren’t available to other readers.

The Globe isn’t alone in heading down this road:

Publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have had success with putting financial news behind a pay wall. The move toward digital subscriptions goes beyond niche content as well: in March, The New York Times Co. launched a metered website for its flagship paper. That system allows readers a certain number of free articles per month before readers are prompted to buy a digital subscription. In October, the company instituted a metered system for another paper it owns, the Boston Globe.

The Globe’s management hasn’t figured out how they will operate the paying part of the service.

This isn’t the first time the Globe and other media outlets have tried to lure readers to pay for content over and above the free material or the stuff they get with a subscription.

The rationale for the move is familiar because it’s the same one that has been at the heart of these sorts of efforts by conventional media outlets in the past:

The media industry has been looking for ways to maintain readership, as well as revenues from both subscribers and advertisers, as more readers access their content beyond the traditional newspaper and on websites and mobile devices.

The challenge facing conventional media – the big information aggregators like television networks/channels and newspapers – is that their usual audience is looking all over the place for information. People don’t rely on the big exclusively on the Big Ones any more to find out things they want to know.  They look in lots of places and increasingly those places are online.

You can get a sense of what that looks like in the introduction to Making it in the Political Blogosphere:  The World’s Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success, a new book on political bloggers by Tanni Haas.

There are about 1.3 million political blogs out there, as Haas notes in the introduction.  The people who write them run the gamut of types and interests. They write original news stories, comment on stuff other people have written, advocate for their causes and do all the other things you’d expect of political blogs.

And they are not just talking to themselves:

The incredible growth in political blog writing is mirrored in the number of people who read them. While an impressive 44% of all Americans have read political blogs,
tens of millions do so daily. Studies show that political
blog readers spend more time reading blogs than do readers of any other kind of blog (five blogs a day, up to 10 hours a week) with many political blog enthusiasts spending several hours daily in the blogosphere.  [From the introduction;  footnote numbers removed]

All that blogging – for one type of online information type -  hasn’t replaced the conventional media entirely.  They have fragmented the audience, as it were, spreading the same eyeballs over many more sources.

Political blogging though, has had a particularly significant impact, at least according to Haas.  “Studies have found that political blog readers consider such blogs more trustworthy sources of information than they do any other mainstream news media, including online and online newspapers, television, and radio.”

While some of the bloggers that Haas interviews are making a considerable amount of money from their online publishing, the majority of those 1.3 million bloggers aren’t making much – if anything – for their work. 

But they are having an impact.

They are having a substantial impact.

And yes, very much as advertised, putting the ability to publish in the hands of those with something to say has made a truly profound difference in the universe. 

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky tries to claim the opposite in a recent column.  He talks about the demise of a single website that’s been around for 13 years. Then Russell notes the number of blog writers who stopped writing. Then he pulls out this comment:

Here’s a sample of five active blogs from a daily media site, listing the last times they were updated: Nov. 15, 2011, Oct. 27, 2011, June 29, 2011, Feb. 18, 2011 and Nov. 28, 2010.

He could easily look at the blogs on the Telegram and see a spotty publishing record.

But so what?

Just look at Newfoundland and Labrador and you’ll see a blog world that is thriving.  For every one that bites the dust after a spotty publishing record measured in weeks or months, there’s another one that has sprung up about writing or parenting.

That’s the same thing you see across the globe.  If only a fraction of the number of blogs that start every day are still publishing one, five or 10 months after they started, there are plenty of people around who start new ones. It’s a bit like fish spawning:  billions of eggs at the start, but even with predation, disease and just plain bad luck there are millions that survive.

While Russell is often right about a lot of things, on the impact of the Internet and self-publishing, he’s just wrong.  Haas’ book  - complete with the statistical evidence he cites – is one source of evidence.  The other is the Globe and Mail’s, Boston Globe’s and New York Times’ persistent efforts to publish more material in more places and offer all sorts of premiums and advantages. 

These bastions of the old media wouldn’t be constantly changing, as they’ve been doing for the past decade, if it wasn’t for the competition.  A significant chunk of that competition is coming from the online information sources that Haas is writing about or even the quirky ones like the website Wangersky starts off with.

Think about it this way.  That website – The Obscure Store and Reading Room – lasted 13 years.  Considering the Internet is not even a couple of decades old, that’s an amazing accomplishment.  There are newspapers in this province that have barely lasted 13 weeks or 13 months from the time they started, let alone 13 years.

The Obscure Store grew out of a small  - a niche – print publication that likely struggled to stay afloat.  The Internet gave that obscure publication access to an audience it could never have reached otherwise. The Internet offered free distribution and the Internet offered a format that was infinitely flexible.  Its author didn’t have to worry about cutting down to 750 words once a week or bulking together  a bunch of small items to pad out the same space.

And in the political blog world, the authors – like opinion columnists in a conventional media outlet – don’t have to also meet the constraints of the newspaper’s editorial board.  Sure some have proven to be quite brave, but in a world of stiff competition and tight profit margins, people who have money and who don’t like a columnist or a story can successfully squeeze a conventional media outlet where it hurts most – in the ad revenue department.

The more significant result, though, is that many of those online information sources – especially the blogs Haas is writing about -  have taken not just readers from the Big Ones. They’ve also taken eaten into something far more significant:  influence. News junkies probably don’t even notice any more the number of stories that wind up in the conventional media after they started life online. 

But that happens.

A lot.

And then think about the number of stories that the online information sites take and develop with considerably more depth and detail than the conventionals could.  They can offer analysis, for example.

It’s no accident that the Globe’s premium site will hold out analysis as one of its main drawing cards.

The Internet and the ease with which people can distribute information and opinions profoundly changed the world.  It changed who controlled access to information and ideas. 

And while some people find it easier to share family photos on their facebook page now instead of their blog, there are a whole mess of other people for whom blogging is the way they can make their ideas available to people who – quite obviously – value them and who wouldn’t get them otherwise.

You can tell those online writers have an impact. 

You can tell because all those conventional news media outlets with their editors who know what they are looking for and what skills they’d like to see brought to a job keep trying to find what it takes to compete with all those websites that supposedly aren’t living up to expectations.

You can read all about that in the Globe and Mail.

- srbp -

She hasn’t heard? Part Deux #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale claims she hasn’t heard “any substantive argument that contradicts any of the analysis or research or even the process that we’ve used to get us where we are as we move on.”

Truth is there are plenty of arguments against her plan – left over from Danny Williams - to double the provincial debt, drive up electricity prices and all so that the provincial energy corporation can deliver discount power to Nova Scotia and anywhere but Newfoundland and Labrador. 

The problem isn’t a lack of arguments against the scheme.

The problem is that Dunderdale  - like her predecessor - refuses to pay attention.

Well, when she’s through reading Shawn McCarthy’s fluffier than usual puff piece in the the Newfoundland nationalists’ favourite newspaper – the Toronto Globe - she can wander over to a real newspaper – the Gazette -  that reports real news.  Dunderdale should prepare to have her ears blown off.

Hydro-Quebec forecasts it will have an electricity surplus in the coming decade. Lower-than-expected  demand and lots of supply from natural gas.

That means electricity prices will be down. 

Sounds like something the rest of us have heard before, like say most recently from David Vardy.  He’s the Princeton-educated former Clerk of the Executive Council in Newfoundland and Labrador who is just the latest to chime in against the Muskrat falls scheme.

If Kathy Dunderdale hasn’t heard of any reasons not to pursue Danny Williams’ hare-brained scheme maybe she could read a few instead.

That way she could really distinguish herself from her predecessor.  Scrapping Danny’s Muskrat insanity would be a damn-sight better for the people of the province than the fight-with-Ottawa from McCarthy’s piece as an example of how Dunderdale is not like her predecessor.

He never fought with Ottawa, did he?

- srbp -

Dunderdale in tweet debate with opposition leader… or was she? #nlpoli

CBC has a story online about a Twitter exchange that supposedly took place between Premier Kathy Dunderdale and opposition leader Yvonne Jones.

One small problem:  is it really Kathy Dunderdale and Yvonne Jones?  Sure the Dunderdale tweets have all the arrogance of the Premier, but can anyone be really sure it’s Kathy herself?

And what about Jones:  Is it really her tweets?

You see it’s not like Dunderdale’s twitter account hasn’t sputtered out some odd tweets along the campaign trail, the kind of curious spellings that would make you very suspicious about whether or not Dunderdale is really clicking her thumbs for the account.

Someone toss up a picture of Dunderdale typing her own tweets and we can put this one to bed. Assurances from her publicity department – the people most likely to be ghost-tweeting for her, along with her personal aide – just won’t cut it.  Some enterprising young reporter should have a go at Dunderdale in a scrum.

Otherwise, let’s keep a healthy dose of scepticism about Dunderdale’s use of technology. After all, it’s not like there haven’t been a string of ghostwritten tweets that have popped up in the news and that’s from people a lot more tech savvy than Dunderdale:

• Guy Kawasaki
• Mark Davidson

As for the subject matter for the exchange – Muskrat Falls – Kathy Dunderdale (or her fake Tweeter) is the last person who should be talking about other people’s ignorance.

-srbp -

Banging around the echo chamber #nlpoli

Last week’s top post was about media coverage of Jim Bennett’s decision to carry on his law practice  - albeit not full-time – while he sits as a member of the legislature:

What’s so striking about this is that it is a complete non-story.  As you’ll see part way down the page, the conflict of interest section of the House of Assembly Act quite rightly exempts ordinary members from the restrictions on carrying on with another job or outside business interests while serving in the legislature.

So why single Bennett out?

The post prompted a few tweets an e-mails, some of which pointed out other Liberal backbenchers who were likely also going to carry on businesses while in the legislature.

But here’s the thing:  the question wasn’t about why media reports singled out a Liberal member of the legislature. That includes the West Coast Morning Show that led into a discussion of the rules of the legislature using Bennett as the lead-in to a story they ran on October 28.  The Western Star ran a story a couple of days later, as did the Star’s sister paper, the Telegram.

The question your humble e-scribbler posed was about why the story picked out any one member of the legislature given that carrying on a business or practicing a profession is commonplace and has been for decades.

The answer is not some great conspiracy.It’s really another aspect of an issue we’ve batted around before at SRBP:  the echo chamber.  Today we have fewer media outlets than we had in the province a couple of decades and those fewer outlets are providing content to more platforms with fewer people. 

The answer to the problem is repackaging.  A few decades ago, you’d only see some of the smaller newsrooms lifting someone else’s news, rewriting it and pushing it out as their own. Now it’s par for the course. The people putting news together are no less intelligent than their predecessors, no less ethical, professional, dedicated, committed or anything else.  They are just coping with the pressures of their business.

You can see the pattern in this case.  One outlet runs a story.  Someone else repackages it, dropping an aspect or changing the emphasis, and runs the thing. That story with a local angle winds up going across the province, but no one else who repeats the story adds anything to the original piece.  They don’t have the time or the inclination. 

Such is the pressure to get stuff out there that tone newsroom just takes what’s there and runs with it.  Eventually it winds up as fodder for the province-wide radio talk shows. And by the time it gets there, the story has taken on a couple of new angles.  The morning show deals with it – and the politician – based on the simple question of what the guy is doing.  The afternoon show maybe puts a bit of spice on it but – and here’s the crucial bit – without the wider context of how many people are doing the same thing.

The original story isn’t wrong.  It’s factually accurate.  The subsequent versions are actually pretty accurate as well.  But because the stories  are missing the depth of information they need, the audience winds up misinformed or with a misleading understanding. All you get is the original ping and the echoes as they bounce around inside the confined space.

The people who have read SRBP have a different perspective.  They know about some of the other MHAs  - from all three parties in the House – who will be working another job besides their one in the legislature.  

But the people who rely on the conventional media have only heard about Jim Bennett.  They haven’t heard – and in all likelihood will never hear – about the others.

This sort of thing happens quite a bit.  Stories tend to stay inside the  lines set by the first version of it.  The House of Assembly spending scandal theme that credits Danny Williams for fixing it all came right out of the first news release.  None of the conventional media ever took a second look at it despite the fairly substantive evidence that piled up that the Conservatives didn’t do anything to correct the problem until the Auditor General’s people stumbled across it.

Fast forward a few years and you can see the same effect in Danny Williams’ claims about “Quebec” and hydro-electric transmission. What the Quebec energy regulator was deciding on – let alone what it actually decided – came from an initial ping from the political spin machine. 

Whether the ping comes from the politicians or the media itself, the echo chamber still functions the same way.

- srbp -

Working stiffs and lazy ones #nlpoli

For some reason, TransCon papers carried a story on newly elected Liberal member of the House of Assembly Jim Bennett and his plan to carry on a law practice while he sits as an opposition member in the legislature.

The Telegram even put the thing in its Saturday paper.  Here’s a link the version carried by the Western Star.

What’s so striking about this is that it is a complete non-story.  As you’ll see part way down the page, the conflict of interest section of the House of Assembly Act quite rightly exempts ordinary members from the restrictions on carrying on with another job or outside business interests while serving in the legislature.

So why single Bennett out?

Good question.

The story turned out to be a bit of fodder for at least one of the local radio talk-shows.  But there again you have to wonder why they singled Bennett out for comment and, in some instances, for criticism. It’s not like others haven’t done the same sort of thing in the past or aren’t doing it now.

For example, Paul Oram carried on several businesses while he served as a backbencher in the Tory caucus.

New Democratic Party leader Jack Harris carried on an active law practice the whole time he sat in the legislature. Other backbench lawyers have done the same thing.

St. John’s South MHA Tom Osborne runs a music promotion business called 5th String Entertainment. On the right, you’ll find the online registration for the company with Service Newfoundland and Labrador.

Nothing odd about politicians and entertainment:  once upon a time, not so very long ago,  another Tory ran a popular downtown nightspot while he sat in the legislature.

Enterprising young fellow that he is, Steve Kent used to have a small consulting company. 

Since he’s been in the legislature, though, Steve’s been running a driver training business with his wife as partner.

Steve also serves as chair of the board president and chief commissioner of Scouts Canada.

There is nothing unusual about backbench members of the legislature carrying on with private businesses or a career while they are also in the legislature.

So why did some local media single out Jim Bennett?

Hopefully it was nothing more than laziness and sloppiness.

If they weren’t lazy and/or sloppy, they could have done a quick check and turned up all sorts of people.  And the list here contains only the ones your humble e-scribbler noted over the years. 

Undoubtedly ,someone going through the individual member’s disclosure statements could find other businesses or professional practices backbenchers are still carrying on.  The cabinet ministers will all have their stuff in blind trusts  But backbenchers can continue to work a second job.  There’s no legal or ethical reason for them to stop unless the second job interferes with their ability to do their elected job.

More to the point, though, there’s no reason why any of us should expect backbench members of the legislature to give up their other interests. That’s especially true for licensed professionals who would have to stay current in their profession in order to stay licensed.

It’s interesting to note that while Chief Justice Green spent a considerable part of his report discussing the idea that holding a seat in the legislature to become a full-time job in itself. Green discusses the issue at some length and makes the following observations:

If one can tease an underlying legislative policy from this subsection [27 of the House of Assembly Act] , and extrapolate into the broader arena, it is that the life of an MHA does contemplate other non-political activities; and where there is a conflict between those other activities and the Member’s duties, the test for determining whether the Member is properly fulfilling those duties is not a quantitative one (i.e., not defined by reference  to numbers of days or weeks, vacation entitlement, etc.) but a qualitative one (i.e., to use the words of ss. 27(4), “… so long as the member, notwithstanding the activity, is able to fulfil the member’s obligations …”).

The issue under discussion is not theoretical.  In the 1970s, a Member attended university full-time outside of Canada for the better part of a year.  In the 1980s a Member continued to act as a deputy mayor of a municipality.  More recently, since my appointment,
two issues have entered the public domain relating, respectively, to certain Members who were  allegedly “moonlighting” by carrying on the practice of law
and a Member who allegedly was unavailable to deal with a public issue in her district because she had been working outside the province as a nurse. [p. 9-28]

In the end of that section, Green recommended, among other things that:

To eliminate confusion on the point [full-time versus part-time] , the legislation should also state that a Member, qua Member, is not prohibited from carrying on a business or engaging in other employment or a profession, provided that the nature of the business, work or profession is such that it does not prevent him or her from attendance in the House when it is in session and from devoting time primarily to the discharge of his or
her duties as a Member when the House is not in session.

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Politics, polls and news media #nlpoli

For the past 65 years,  public opinion polls have been an integral feature of news media reports on politics and elections.

The reasons are pretty simple to understand.  Most public opinion polls are conducted by professional firms using scientific methods.  As such, they are considered to be inherently impartial, accurate and fair representations of what the public thinks about candidates and parties. 

The firms that poll during an election are usually independent of the political parties.  This gives the news media a source of independent information about the campaign.  Polls, especially ones exclusive to the news organization, can give the media outlets a direction for coverage.

When news media commission polls, they also gain a marketing boost.  Don’t discount the business imperative in news.  Tom Rosenstiel is executive director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.  Rosenstiel began a 2005 article on political polling and news media by recounting a meeting at the Los Angeles Times in 1991 to plan coverage of the 1992 election.

“Polls are a form of marketing for news organizations,”  Rosenstiel wrote. “Every time a Los Angeles Times poll is referred to in other media, the paper is getting invaluable positive marketing for its name and credibility.”

Presenting information in an entertaining way has always been a part of news. Poll results typically come in a form that lends itself to an horse-race story format.  That injects some energy into what might otherwise be a dull story of numbers.  .

Reporters usually have an easy time summing up a poll report.  That’s an increasingly important factor in newsrooms operating on tight budgets and facing heavy demands for content.

Rosenstiel marked that pressure in 2005 as a key feature of modern newsrooms.  But in truth, the need to produce news stories quickly has always been a feature of news media for some time now, especially electronic media. Political scientist Everett Carl Ladd wrote in 1980:

For the most part, the press… must work quickly to do its mandated job.  This observation obviously applies a somewhat less to magazines than to the daily newspaper or the nightly television news broadcast, but it holds generally. The story must be promptly brought to the audience.

What’s changed more recently is the increased demand for content as smaller numbers of news organizations produce material for print, radio, television and the Internet, sometimes from the same newsroom.  Often this is simply the repackaging of material, as Rosenthiel noted.  And that makes apparently simple stuff – like reporting a horserace poll – that much more attractive.  if the news organization commissions a poll of its own and delves into more than just the “who’s on first” question, they can generate new content for days.

Controversy

None of the media’s use of polls is has come without controversy. 

In the run-up to the spring general election, the seemingly wide variation in poll results generated news stories about the reliability of polling.

At a conference on the May federal election, people representing eight polling firms debated the impact of polls on the election.  Opinions varied – as they did – on what impact poll reporting had on the public.  According to a Canadian Press story, Frank Graves of Ekos Research said that post-election polling found that Canadians didn’t believe poll reporting affected the outcome of the election

Environics' Kevin Neuman was doubtful.

"People may say that (polls) don't influence, but it would influence the media and how the media cover the story and frame the story," he said, adding that the CROP poll "may have completely changed the media coverage."

In the recent Ontario general election, some pollsters complained about the publication of polls from different sources, often without any apparent concern for their accuracy.

“We are distorting our democracy, confusing voters and destroying what should be a source of truth in election campaigns — the unbiased, truly scientific public-opinion polls,” wrote Darrell Bricker and John Wright of Ipsos Reid.

…

Bricker said most research firms are accurate. But some are “so ridiculously inaccurate” he wonders how they got into the business. And elections bring out the carpetbaggers or those trying out untested, and dubious, methodology.

Still, the biggest question for him is not research firms. “I have to ask the question, what are the media thinking?

Closer to home, Corporate Research Associates’ Don Mills complained in the Telegram on Saturday about the accuracy of some polling released during the recent provincial election campaign. MQO released two polls during the campaign that relied on a combination of telephone polling plus online surveys:

“There’s a lot of people who say online research is just as good as telephone research. That has not been proven to be true and we have recent examples in Atlantic Canada where a competitor of ours has used an online methodology and have not got it within the margin of error they quoted,” he said.

“They are not even supposed to quote margin of error in online polls.”

Industry critics

Not all pollsters are as enthusiastic about the proliferation of polls and the increasingly close relationship between the media and opinion research firms.

In April, Allan Gregg – perhaps the country’s most famous researcher – and Frank Graves of Ekos spoke out in an article by Canadian Press.

There’s broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media.

Start with the methodological morass.

“The dirty little secret of the polling business . . . is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada,” says veteran pollster Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima which provides political polling for The Canadian Press.

The increased use of cell phones and changing lifestyles have made traditional telephone surveys less reliable, according to Gregg.  Online polling may produce more reliable results in some instances but not in others.

Still, according to Gregg, polling firms are producing margin of error calculations “as if we’re generating perfect samples and we are not anymore.” 

Pollsters continue to generate horse race polls for their marketing value, according to both Gregg and Andre Turcotte, a pollster and communications professor quoted in Joan Bryden’s Canadian Press story from April.

Turcotte says political polls for the media are “not research anymore” so much as marketing and promotional tools. Because they’re not paid, pollsters don’t put much care into the quality of the product, often throwing a couple of questions about party preference into the middle of an omnibus survey on other subjects which could taint results.

And there’s no way to hold pollsters accountable for producing shoddy results since, until there’s an actual election, there’s no way to gauge their accuracy.

Not surprisingly, the association representing polling firms disagrees.  The Market Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) took out a full page ad in newspaper’s across Canada when the polling controversy first sprang up in February.  The ad affirmed the association’s “confidence in the results of our polling and the value that we provide to Canadians.”

Politics, polls and the media

The 2011 provincial general election in Newfoundland and Labrador brought with it both an unprecedented number of horse race polls and a certain level of controversy.

In the second part of this series – on Tuesday -  we’ll take a look at the polls, the polling firms, what they reported, and what the polls measured.

- srbp -

The Series:

• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”
• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”
• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”

Related:

• “Playing the numbers”
• “The media and the message”
• “The perils of polling”
• “The Danny Brand”

Motivation and demotivation #nlpoli #nlvotes

“Complacency is your greatest enemy in an election,” Progressive Conservative Leader Kathy Dunderdale said Sunday.

“When it's hard to motivate people to become engaged to get out and to cast their ballot, then you have a concern about that.”

That’s a quote CBC used out as part of a story that focuses, curiously enough, on how one political leader and only one political leader is responding to an issue in the election:  lack of apparent voter interest.

The story casts Kathy Dunderdale in the role of impartial election commentator not as the leader of a political party who is – quite obviously – failing to motivate people to vote for her and her fellow Tories.

The story also mentions poll results to make sure no one forgets what election reporting is really all about.  There at the post… yada yada yada

Dunderdale’s not alone. All three leaders have that problem – failing to inspire voters positively -  but it varies from party to party.

Dunderdale is the one whose inability to find any energy in  her campaign stands in stark contrast to her slogan.

Now when news media do this sort of reporting, there’s no giant conspiracy.  It’s just a sign of how much reporting in this province has become an adjunct of the political system.

The political story of the parties struggling against voter disinterest or the Tories and Dippers fighting in St,. John’s is is part of the real story of this election and, right up until the end,  CBC and every other news media outlet in the province has ignored it.

Why are people so unmoved by the politicians?  And if they are moved, at least in St. John’s, why is it to move from the Tories to the NDP?

Fascinating stuff.

But you’ll never find it in the conventional media.

There it’s all horse races and Kathy Dunderdale and others with an interest in the campaign framing their stories for themselves.

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Telelink releases campaign’s only independent poll #nlvotes #nlpoli

NTV and Telelink released the only independent poll of the campaign on Monday and with a week to go in the 2011 general election, things are on track for a historic election.

For starters, let’s look at the Telelink party support numbers:

• PCP 35%
• NDP 15%
• LIB    08%
• UND 42%

These numbers are ones you can trust for accuracy and reliability.  In fact, once you read along here and look at 2007 you’ll understand the real reason why CRA and other numbers are pure crap on a cracker.

Next, let’s take a look at the 2007 poll numbers.

In 2007, Telelink’s election poll turned out these numbers:

• PCP 42%
• LIB    08%
• NDP 3.5%
• UND 31.7%

The actual poll results on election night, as a share of eligible voters was:

• PCP  42%
• LIB    13%
• NDP  05%
• DNV  38%

By comparison, CRA’s August 2007 poll (adjusted to show  percent of all responses) was:

• PCP  62%
• LIB    14%
• NDP  06%
• UND  18%

All opinion polls in this province survey eligible voters. The polling firms don’t report their figures that way.  They make it seem like they are talking about share of popular vote. But if you look at it, they simply talk to anyone eligible to vote.  That means you have to compare their poll percentages to the share of eligible votes a party got on voting day.

Incidentally, if you looked at the popular vote numbers and the ones CRA actually reported (as a percentage of decideds) their accuracy doesn’t get any better.

So compared to CRA, Telelink was almost spot on for everything, except the Liberal vote.  

And with all that in mind, let’s look at what we can see in 2011.

Record Low Turnout

For starters, we can expect a record low turn-out at the polls beating the previous record set in 2007.  Given the way the Telelink numbers compared to actual then, we could be looking at half the population not bothering to get out to vote.

In patronage-addled political cultures like Newfoundland and Labrador, voting is one of the ways people pay the patron back for his benevolence. They also need to turn out to vote to show their continued loyalty to the Boss or to signal their allegiance to a new one.

Not surprisingly, in the 18 elections from 1949 to 2007, turnout was above 69% in all but three. Turnout in 1949 was 95%.

So in years when the turn-out was low, you have to wonder what the heck was on the go.  What do 1956, 1966 and 2007 have in common with 2011?  One thing they don’t have in common is overwhelming satisfaction with the party in power at the moment.

Tory support high but dropping

Conservative support sits at 35% and that’s likely where it will hold.  What’s most interesting over the past four years is the way even CRA polls have picked up a decline in Tory support.  When you take out the misleading twist of giving the numbers as a share of decideds, the Tory support has dropped dramatically since early 2010.

The Race for Second Place and Other Bullshit

While plenty of people in 2011 will be talking about the low Liberal number in the Telelink poll, you already know it’s exactly the same number the Liberals turned up the last time out in the Telelink poll.

On voting day in 2007, the actual Liberal share of eligible vote turned out to be almost double that number.  And as a share of popular vote, the Liberals turned out three times what turned up in the polls. They held three seats at the end of the night and picked up another one later on.

The polls don’t tell the story and the media reports on those polls sure don’t tell the real story.

You can also see that when you consider that the NDP polling number in 2011 (15% to 18%) is roughly what the party had in the mid-1980s.  They had two seats.

The final seat count will depend very much on what happen  on the ground this week. 

The Conservatives have undoubtedly dumped as many bodies as they can into the seats where they are under pressure.  Some of those seats are in St. John’s and others are spread across the island and into Labrador.

If the Liberals and New Democrats learned anything from the last time, they are pushing back hard as well.

There is no race for second place.  That’s a fiction invented by the media.  The real election race is being played out in those pressured seats – as many as a dozen or so – across the province.  The Liberals pose the bigger threat to the Tories because they are potentially viable in more seats.  That’s just a function of the electoral math.

What you will see Tory partisans doing is pushing hard on the theme that the Liberal Party support is collapsing.  They want people  - especially Liberal campaign workers -  to become demoralised and stay home. 

The Tories are getting plenty of help from Liberal gaffes.  They are also getting help from the news media who report fiction – like the race for second place or the importance of debates - as if it was fact.

What is really happening and what the news media often report are two very different things. 

And what happens next week after all the voting is done, well that won’t look much like the media projections to date and it may well be a lot less dramatic than people are assuming.

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Do debates matter? Part Deux #nlvotes #nlpoli

Last week ended with a wonderful bit of insight into where televised political debates figure into an election campaign.

Before you go any farther into this post just stop for a second and think of all the media chatter last week about the debate, what the strategies were supposed to be and then what the fall-out was after the whole thing was over.

Now with that load of crap firmly in front of your mind’s eye, look at some of the results from Market Quest Omnifacts’ poll released last week.  look at the bit about the election.

Only one third of those polled actually watched the debate.  Some news media played up the fact that 36% thought Kathy won, 22% picked Lorraine and some small percentage thought Kevin Aylward came out on top. The rest thought no one came out on top.

What likely slid by most people was the fact that only about one third of those polled actually watched the debates at all.  MQO then presented the picks as if 100% watched. 

That’s a fine an example as you can get of how some pollsters mislead people when they ignore the undecideds in their poll results on party choice and tell you only what the decideds said.

You see, two thirds of those polled had something better to do than watch the debates.

That’s the real story for that question:  66% were combing their armpit hair or something else that was more pressing than listening to the province’s three party leaders discuss what they’d do if they got the chance to run the province for the next four years.

A mere 12% of those polled thought Dunderdale won the debate.  Lorraine impressed the bejesus out of seven percent and Kevin picked up two percent of respondents.

13% thought neither of them won.

The debate itself was not some sort of major event for most people in the province. As a result, the debate itself was just one more thing they might see as part of the campaign’s communications alongside print ads, a brochure,  radio and TV spots and stuff that is cropping up on social media.

You’d have to dig into some hard numbers on audience share for the broadcast to get a better sense of how the debate stacks up in impact compared to the others.  Based on experience, your humble e-scribbler would say the debate itself mattered a lot less than other stuff including, incidentally, the media hype, torque, spin and general bullshit that surrounded it.

Include in that general bullshit the way Nalcor’s pollster reported the results:

When asked about the leaders’ debate, 34 per cent of those polled said they watched the televised leaders’ debate on Wednesday, September 28. Of those respondents who watched the debate, 36 per cent felt Kathy Dunderdale won the debate, while Lorraine Michael was seen as the winner by 22 per cent, and six per cent said Kevin Aylward came out on top. The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner of the debate.

That got into news stories almost word for word.  Here’s the way the Telly reported it, for example:

Thirty-four per cent of those polled said they watched the televised leaders’ debate on Wednesday. Of those who watched the debate, 36 per cent felt PC Leader Kathy Dunderdale won, while 22 per cent saw NDP Leader Lorraine Michael as the winner, and six per cent said Liberal Leader Kevin Aylward came out on top.

The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner.

Nothing, as some famous politician once said, could be further from the truth.

But you can bet lots of people last week were misled into believing Kathy Dunderdale emerged the clear winner of the debate last week in the opinion of other ordinary voters.  They’d get that idea as a result of the way the poll results wound up in the news fare.

And that message, carried by the province’s news media as if it were true,  likely had a much bigger impact than Kathy Dunderdale’s comments on the night.

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The Imaginary Centre of an Imaginary Universe #nlvotes #nlpoli

Town and Toronto start with a “T”.

Some Townies can be like some Torontonians sometimes.

Yes, yes.

Settle down.

Hold it down with the other “t” words, like twit, twillick, and twaddle monger. 

You are getting ahead of the story.

Townies, like Torontonians sometimes seems to think that all that matters in the world orbits the tight pucker of their collective arsehole.

The news media in this province are dominated by the townie-based daily crowd.  Lots of things that happen beyond their usual watering holes in the downtown or their homes in the east end of Town can go sailing past them and hence their audience.

If you wanted an example of just how much gets missed, take this media commentary on a recent poll and what it supposedly means.

Like it or not, the bulk of the wealth in this province is in St. John's and that's where parties have the most luck raising cash. The Liberals had money problems long before they started musing about "diverting oil money" to rural areas (presumably at the expense of St. John's), and when Liberal candidate Danny Dumaresque slammed the idea of giving any extra cash to St. John's, the sound you heard (over the collective gasp of the endangered urban Liberals) was the thump of every chequebook in the capital city slamming shut.

A look at the most recent financial statements from the province’s electoral office shows pretty clearly what’s been going on in the province over the past while.

The picture isn’t pretty and it also is nothing like that paragraph would lead you to believe, either.

The provincial Conservatives rake in the lion’s share of the cash compared to all other parties, bar none. Government parties usually do in this province. People like to curry favour.

What’s noticeably different since 2003 compared to previous years is that the companies that give to the “in” party no longer give to the “out” parties.

There’s a reason for that and the reason is more likely related to the attitude the Tories have displayed to political pork and electoral districts than it is to the Liberals alienating the townie money pits.

No one should be surprised if donors quietly got the message that the powers that be would look unfavourably on donations to the other guys, in the same way voters have been told bluntly they needed to vote Blue if they wanted their grandchildren to know what pavement looks like for real instead of just in pictures.

Another noticeable characteristic of the Tory political cash is that it comes primarily from corporate sources, not individuals.

That’s been especially true for the people who have made quite a haul the past four years from the boom in provincial government capital works contracts over the past couple of years.  The construction industry both in the province and on the mainland gave more than $230,000 to the provincial Conservatives in 2010.

The argument in that media commentary is that the Liberals haven’t been able to raise money because they have turned their back on townies.

Now if that were true, then we’d expect to see the New Democrats, who are pretty well all- townie-all-the-time, would have more luck with donations.

Guess again.

The Dippers get lots of small donations from individuals, most of whom live in and around Capital City.

But there isn’t really a lot of cash in their bank accounts.

What’s more,  their biggest single donor is a Toronto-based union that for the past two years dropped 20 large on the NDP in this province.  Before that it was a Washington DC union that ponied up 10K.

That’s because, as much as anything else, political cash is tied to at least three things.

First is incumbency.  You have to be in power or likely to be in power to warrant attention from donors in these parts.  That’s an old connection that the politicos themselves drew decades ago and the  connection has persisted over time.  There are companies all over the province, not just in Sin Jawns

Second is the political culture.  Individuals don’t seem to give much to parties, relatively speaking, over time.  2010 is no exception. Take a look at the analysis by labradore and you can see the extent to which this is true.

And that’s likely because – third – the parties aren’t organized and interested in individuals.  Old habits die very hard and parties like the Liberals and Tories that got used to corporate cash have just kept looking for corporate cash. 

Besides, they, like the NDP, also aren’t built around individual members who actually run the party.  It just wouldn’t occur to them to try and build the party on appealing to individuals to get out an participate.  Even if it did occur to someone, they’d go at it half-heartedly if they went at it at all.

The fundraising problems the Liberals have come from some chronic problems over the last five or six years.  The biggest one is basically a lack of focussed effort.  That’s also what’s caused the lack of general preparedness and the problems in candidate recruiting as well. 

On a local level, in some districts, they are doing quite well and likely will do quite well.  Candidates have been raising money and they have volunteers and a momentum going. There might even be some surprises. That’s all taking place well outside of Sin Jawns, though, and as a result, the details won’t show up in daily media in the province.

Consider that to be the reverse of the NDP where their usual sort of campaign – not much cash or workers – comes across as amazingly gigantic in news reports because it is so close to reporters they can’t see the wider details.

And all that sort of skewed reporting and commentary is pretty much what happens when the frame of reference is the imaginary centre of a largely imaginary universe.

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CBC torques poll coverage #nlpoli #nlvotes

Think of it as another form of poll goosing.

As an example of how news media can take a piece of information and make a false statement out it, consider CBC’s online version of the story about a poll released Friday by the same company that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation.

“Liberal support in free fall” screams the headline.

The first sentence is less dramatic:

A public opinion poll released Friday suggests that Newfoundland and Labrador's Liberals have lost even more ground leading into the last half of the Oct. 11 election campaign.

There’s even a graphic that uses the numbers from the news release.  They show a drop of five percentage points in decided Liberal support, according to the poll.

The only problem for CBC is that the headline and the lede are false.

The combined margin of error for this poll and the one before it is more than the five point drop shown in the report numbers in the two polls..  Therefore, the actual numbers for the Liberals fall within a range of 4.5 or 5 points above or below the figures given.

This is why polls with such large margins of error tend to be useless for most meaningful purposes.  And for detecting trends, you’d have to see a huge drop between polls – like more than 10 points -  in order to get something that could conceivably be called a significant change.

What would free fall look like? 

Well, certainly a hell of a lot more than what is shown.  10 points or more would be a likely candidate for such dramatic language, especially over the course of a mere 10 days or so.

It’s also interesting that while CBC mentioned a relationship between MQO and advertising company M5, they didn’t mention that MQO is also Nalcor’s pollster because it is owned by M5. The advertising company is Nalcor’s agency of record.

CBC also said MQO was “affiliated” with M5.  That’s not even close to correct either. 

According to the provincial registry of companies, the same three men are the only directors of M5 (above), MQO (right)and all the companies within the M5 Group.

MQO is owned by M5. 

That’s factually correct.

“Affiliated”? 

That would be misleading bordering on deceptive.

- srbp -

Related:

• cbcnl using Nalcor lobbyist as election commentator
• Taking your brain out of neutral

Do debates matter? #nlpoli #nlvotes

Debates matter but not in the way some people think.

For starters they have nothing to do with knock-out blows.  That’s a media invention they use along with horse-race reporting in order to cover campaigns.  it’s a simple enough idea full of potential drama, but the fact is that debates are seldom if ever about the telling blow or the fatal wound to a campaign.

The evidence speaks for itself.  In the past four decades, only one American presidential debate produced a significant switch in a candidate’s polling numbers. 

In Canada, there have been a couple of points that stand out – Mulroney and Turner in the 1980s – but for the most part, people would be hard-pressed to find a debate moment that dramatically lifted one campaign or destroyed another in a national election.

Strategy is about deploying assets as part of a co-ordinated plan to reinforce your strengths and exploit your opponents’ weaknesses in order to win. 

Debates are part of the tools strategists in a campaign use.

Period.

Everything else is for the punters and for amateurs.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the three political parties will take part on a raft of debates.  The parties will decide which to take part in and who to send on behalf of the party based on a bunch of factors. 

The leaders often don’t turn up for anything other than the NTV televised debate.  That is the major event that offers plenty of free advertising – via news coverage in the run-up and especially in the time afterward.  The debate gives the leader a chance to stream prepared messages and toss out a couple of lines that may snag some media attention.

These days debates like the NTV leaders’ gabfest are about as risky as breaking wind.  The parties spend so much time negotiating the rules in order to avoid running any risk that anyone can do anything.   The whole thing is theatre and campaigns work hard to agree upon a format that protects their main player from anything even vaguely approaching a campaign-losing gaffe or death blow by an opponent.

Risk?

Confrontation?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Other debates offer similar value – for their advertising spinoffs – and unless the event has some sort of amazing potential previously unforeseen in the history of human civilization, major parties will send substitutes. 

A health care forum will get the party’s health care critic or rising star. One on the economy will get the finance critic or the development guru to give him or her the chance to score a bit of a profile.

The fact that Lorraine Michael is attending all the debates tells you, by the by, just exactly how thin the NDP candidate pool is and how important it is for them to get as much free media for Lorraine as they can.  Campaigns with cash and other resources don’t need to pack everything into the one candidate and a minivan.

As for Aylward and the Liberals you really have to wonder two things.  First, you have to wonder why the Liberals sent Aylward to debate health care when they have a couple of subject matter experts as candidates. Second, you have to wonder why the Liberal backroom gang left Aylward in the Board of Trade session until the last minute so that the last minute substitution of Dumaresque looked foolish.  Hint:  he didn’t pull out because he suddenly noticed Kathy wasn’t there.

If the number of debates proliferate in future campaigns, they will get to be like the begging letters from every special interest group on the planet.  They will become yet another incredible drain on resources that serves only to give the interest group some free publicity, convince their members the group is working, or both.

The punters and the media pay attention to them – think about Danny’s begging letters to Ottawa – but the letters usually get pro forma statements of the party platform rather than personalised attention.

In general, campaigns will send someone along to a debate unless the thing is a drain on resources and can be chopped without costing anything. Even the risk of a couple of hours of bad news stories can be worth it if the debate does not serve the campaign’s strategy.

Starting in 2003, the provincial Conservatives made it a policy to refuse to take part in any district debates, full stop. They did that largely because avoiding these small events cuts down on the potential that one of the lesser lights in the campaign firmament trips up in his or her own ego and takes the campaign off its pre-planned message track for a day or two.

And every other claim about debates is for the punters, the amateurs and people with airtime to fill.

It’s like the idea that somehow the election outcome is a foregone conclusion,  Kathy Dunderdale needs to stand pat and the debate is a big deal for Kevin Aylward and Lorraine Michael in the battle for second place.

The idea there is a race for second is entirely a media fiction.

It doesn’t exist. 

Never did.

The NDP got a huge boost from the media in the election run-up.  But the editors and producers were just looking for a convenient – read simple - narrative they could build a story thread around. 

They ate up the NDP’s federal election boost and then, when a couple of polls appeared to show a surge in NDP popularity provincially, off reporters went to the horse-race.

But look at what the NDP actually turned up with in the days since the campaign began. They obviously have no money.  Their radio spots are the stuff of a St. John’s municipal election campaign – done badly on the cheap -  not the usually polished and effective NDP provincial election fare.  The backdrop for the platform launch was a painted piece of sign board propped against a wall.

Lorraine Michael traveled outside St. John’s once so far.  That was to one of two seats outside Michael’s own seat where the Dippers stand a chance of any success.  She might make it to Labrador but the party simply lacks the money and organization to mount a campaign that threatens to do any more than grab headlines.

And don’t forget, the NDP are only polling around 18% – at best – in any of the recent polling.  That’s only slightly better than the 14% the NDP garnered in the late 1980s when they held two seats in the province.

Nothing points to any radical NDP anything, least of all the chance that Lorraine Michael might pull off a magical Jack Layton and vault into the opposition leader’s job.  Lorraine ain’t Jack by a long shot and the provincial NDP aren’t their federal cousins.

People say there is a race for second even where there isn’t one for the same reason some politicians talk about “a go forward basis” or “files” or “piece” this and “piece” that. They think it makes them sound like they know what they are talking about.

So when you watch the debate tonight, err, if you watch the debate tonight, ignore the political analysts.  If you hear words like “risk”, “race for second place” and so on blow raspberries at them and laugh.

Just watch the three leaders.  Notice what they say, how they say it and how often they say it. 

Then on Thursday, we can have a chat about the campaign strategies of the three parties and what is really going on out there in this dull-as-dishwater affray.

- srbp -

Taking your brain out of neutral #nlvotes #nlpoli

He said.

She said.

Claim.

Counter-claim.

Simple conflict.

Simple news story.

No problem?

Problem.

Well, maybe. 

You decide.

Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at New York University.  He doesn’t like “he said,she said journalism”.  In a recent post at his blog Pressthink Rosen writes about his recent experience with a complaint to National Public Radio (NPR) in Kansas about an NPR story on new state regulations for abortion clinics.

Clinic operators say the regulations are a form of harassment aimed specifically at abortion clinics with the intent to close down the few remaining ones in the state.

The state says the regulations are just part of the normal state government business of regulating things.

He said.

She said.

Rosen complained to the NPR ombudsman about the story.  He complained specifically about NPR’s failure to provide any additional information in the story that would help readers evaluate the contending claims. Rosen accused the NPR of using its style of reporting to shield the organization from attacks on a controversial subject, thereby doing its listeners a disservice.

NPR replied that to do what Rosen argued would be to take an editorial stance on the issue, to take sides.  And there’s just no way NPR would violate its professional ethics in that way. From NPR:

We forwarded Rosen’s criticism to the reporter, Kathy Lohr, who responded:

“I’ve covered the abortion issue for 20 years. My goal is to be fair and accurate.

“It would be inappropriate to take a position on an issue I’m covering. So, I don’t do that, with abortion or other issues.”

In another exchange with Rosen, Lohr made her point more emphatically;

Me [Rosen]: Why does NPR throw up its hands and tell its listeners: we have no idea who’s right? Is that really the best reporting you can do? Is that the excellence for which NPR is known?

Kathy Lohr: You want me to take a position on a public controversy. You want me to editorialize. To pick a side. What you don’t understand is: That’s not my job!

Rosen gives more detail in the post than he may have in the twitter and other short exchanges with the gang at NPR Kansas.  As Rosen points out in the post, he thinks that going a step beyond the mere reporting of the superficial controversy is actually part of the business of reporting, of informing the audience.

He bases that position on a set of bullet points he laid out at the front end of the post:

The conflict that sits at the heart of the story goes unexplored even though evidence to evaluate the contending claims is readily available. As a result, the news organization remains – ostensibly – neutral.  in effect, people are invited to join the reporters in putting their brains in neutral.

You can see the same sort of he said, she said story in recent coverage of the Liberal’s idea of giving government pensioners a small increase in their pension every year.

The Liberals said, then CBC got the “she said” controversy going with the comment from the provincial finance department that seemed to criticise their idea. The provincial Conservatives chimed in to take up the criticism and so the thing carried on for a day or two.

At no point did CBC actually explain the pensions issue on any level at all.  They certainly didn’t explain what the Liberals were trying to do and then compare it to the idea of what Conservatives were driving at. Hunt around the CBC’s online election web space and you will find exactly squat on the pensions issue beyond what they covered at the first.  None of the other conventional media have stepped in to explain it either.

The evidence to evaluate the contending positions is readily available.  The provincial finance department officials could explain what they meant.  The Liberals could too.

Nobody asked either of them.

Interesting idea: you can have a news report that doesn’t actually inform anybody about anything beyond the fact that one side said one thing and another said something else.

Forget the limitations of the electronic media like television and the format that gives maybe a couple of minutes for a report.  There are plenty of ways to get at the issue, including a longer piece on the same television news casts that carried the first story.

Now CBC is not alone in this.  Look around and you’ll find plenty of news reports that follow this sort of approach.  What makes this one stand out is that the CBC story winds up fitting the Conservative political narrative about supposed Liberal fiscal irresponsibility now and in the past. While the “he said, she said” story format is supposedly neutral, this one didn’t turn out that way. 

The pensions story as CBC covered it did a disservice to the audience in another way, beyond leaving the substance unexplored or having CBC’s story effectively injected into the campaign.

Fundamentally, the pensions story is about the kind of basic policy choice that the wonks out there think political debate ought to be about.

The pension liability exists.  The provincial government must deal with it.  In effect, they are already dealing with it by paying what the provincial government owes.  They pay it out of current account funds, the cash the government has every year to pay all its usual bills.

What the Liberals proposed to do is add a small percentage to the spending every year.  The end result would be that what is now costing a little over $500 million this year would cost about $750 million 20 years from now.

The Conservatives hung their hat on the idea that the Liberal plan would increase the unfunded liability.  It would.

What they didn’t explain is that the notion of unfunded liability is basically an accounting calculation. It is based on how much money you’d have to salt away in order to cover the debts in the event the government stopped operating tomorrow.

No one expects the provincial government to stop operating tomorrow.  The government gets to chose what to do.  They can put cash away in investments and pay the pensions out of the interest or pay it out of current account money. 

Either way will work.

What any government might do depends, as much  as anything else, on what revenue forecasts look like.  If things are going to be good for a long while, it might be better to pay the liability out of annual budget money.

If the forecasts say times will be tough or unpredictable, then it would be prudent to salt cash away.

A couple of decades ago, the unfunded liability was roughly what it is today:  three maybe four billion.  The total provincial government income in any one year was the same number, or less. The total size of the economy – the gross domestic product – was about double the unfunded liability.

No one had a choice. about salting cash away because there was no leftover cash to bank.  Liberal and Conservative governments did exactly the same thing and they did it for exactly the same basic reasons.  When people like Shawn Skinner talk about Liberal fiscal irresponsibility, they are simply full of shit. They don’t know what they are talking about. 

These days, the provincial government has enough cash in the bank today to cover all the unfunded liability in one pop. You don’t even need to notice that the total unfunded liability – even with the Liberal extra bit – is less than 25% of the GDP.  It’s about half the total government annual budget.

So how come the provincial Conservatives haven’t done anything about the unfunded pension liability yet? 

Good question.

The good answer is that they did what all governments do:  they made a choice.

They decided it is better to commit years of windfall oil cash to a whole bunch of extra spending and hold pretty well all of extra cash in reserve to help pay for Muskrat Falls.

How many of you knew about the pile of cash the provincial government has today sitting in temporary investments? 

How many knew what they were planning to do with it?

Odds are, that number is pretty close to zero.  That isn’t surprising. Somebody decided not to tell you that.

Avoiding any debate today on the pensions issue and how to pay for it means that people won’t ask uncomfortable questions that people who made decisions in government don’t want to answer.

Notice the way the Conservatives have framed their idea on pensions, incidentally:

… Addressing public pension plan liabilities and other postretirement liabilities will be a priority.

• We will develop a long-term plan to reduce
  our unfunded public pension plan liabilities
  in a responsible manner by making set
  periodic payments.
• At least a third of any surplus will be
  invested in the pension funds

They promise that they whatever they do will happen in the future.

But you shouldn’t forget that they crossed their fingers a wee bit earlier in the campaign platform:

Implementation of our priorities will be phased, if necessary, to accommodate fiscal constraint.

In other words, if things go south financially, if there’s another recession, then all bets are off.

When governments of the past didn’t have a choice, they paid pensions out of the cash on hand.

When a government has cash, they elect to do something else with the money rather than reduce the unfunded pension liability. They criticise someone else for the unfunded liability and make a promise that they will do something in the future.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

And in the meantime, very few voters have enough information   in the middle of an election to make an informed decision on which idea – the Liberal or the Conservative – is the way they want to go.

But they do have he said, she said.

- srbp -