Friends and enemies #nlpoli

Craig Westcott tells a story from his short stint as communications director for the Liberals in opposition in the last days of Danny Williams and the early days of his handpicked successor, Kathy Dunderdale.

"I kept after the very small caucus we had to keep asking questions,"  Westcott said in an email to SRBP, "hoping that even if the media ignored us, some of the folks watching at home would cotton on to how bad the deal was.  That might generate some heat. It kept the flame of criticism and skepticism alive."

"We looked at everything from the lack of documentation to support Nalcor's demand projections, to the big question of water rights, the actual usage of Holyrood as part of the island's power supply for the previous 20 or so years, the free power to Nova Scotia, the privatization of the Labrador to Island transmission line to give [Emera] a cut,  the free block of power to Nova Scotia, the likely cost of Muskrat Falls-generated power, which early on we pegged at over 20 cents per kWh, and on and on. The deal was so flawed it was difficult to find anything positive in it."

One major problem Westcott ran into was that the local media weren't interested. "[CBC's David] Cochrane tired pretty quickly of the Opposition asking questions on Muskrat," Westcott said.  "He complained several times that we weren't asking anything new. Some days he walked out of the legislature after Question Period and made a point [of saying] that he wasn't going to scrum our guys because we were still on Muskrat. The other legislative reporters would follow him out."

Changing the direction. Changing the tone. #nlpoli

A month ago,  a CBC “analysis” by David Cochrane warned against a band of Liberals running the government with too much power.

Two weeks ago,  another CBC “analysis” by David Cochrane told us that Dwight Ball was an “unlikely” fellow to be Premier who now faced an enormous task of dealing with the government’s financial problems based on a campaign platform that was, supposedly, “greeted with enormous skepticism in the final week of the campaign.”

And now we have the latest Cochrane “analysis” that tells us that the public service is liking their new bosses.  The administration has been delivering on “Ball's campaign promises of evidence-based decision-making and to bring [sic] stability to cabinet by ending the practice of frequent shuffles, thereby leaving ministers in place long enough to build command of their portfolios.”

What changed?

Well, it certainly hasn’t been Dwight Ball and the Liberals he led to a substantive victory in the recent election.

The Narrative War #nlpoli

The day after a massive Liberal victory in the general election,  CBC’s David Cochrane posted an analysis piece on the new administration.  CBC distributed it nationally.

Cochrane described Dwight Ball as a man “unlikely” to be Premier:

Four campaigns. Two losses. Two wins.  By a combined 75 votes.

Cochrane’s account leaves out relevant context.  When it comes to describing how the Liberals won,  Cochrane focuses not on anything the Liberals did but rather a string of Tory blunders that  - according to Cochrane  - made it easy for the Liberals to win the election essentially by accident.

And now, as Cochrane’s story goes, Ball The Unlikely will have to face enormous financial problems using a plan that Cochrane claims “was greeted with enormous skepticism in the final week of the campaign.”

Kicking ass in political coverage #nlpoli

The province’s major media outlets have taken different approaches to political coverage in this election from what they did last time.

The result has been one of the most interesting campaigns in recent memory.

First with the political news…

In the second week of the campaign, VOCM has been kicking ass with a series of polls commissioned from Abacus Data.  Tim Power’s firm has been producing poll results with much more interesting and useful data than we’ve seen in the province for a while. Their work so far in the 2015 election has consistently made news.

Invention #nlpoli

The provincial election campaign is barely a week old and already we have seen certain themes and interpretations emerging that are the product not of fact and observation but of invention.

The most striking one is the imagined explanation for the massive Liberal lead revealed through two polls released at the start of the campaign.  Already we have  commentators in local media connect the Liberal lead to the recent federal election.  They call it the “Trudeau Effect.”

Political scientist Amanda Bittner told a CBC audience on Tuesday night that because the poll came on the heels of the federal election “it’s hard to say what is going on there.”  She then talked in the abstract about what potential impacts the poll results might have on voters.

This is a bizarre comment on several levels.

WTF?

There are times you read stuff and you just have to wonder what brought that on.

There’s Telegram editor Russell Wangersky explaining how newspapers are still relevant in the world today. He starts bitching the old bitch about how radio stations in town used to read Telegram stories on the air word-for-word without crediting the folks at the Telly who did the work.

Then he starts in on bloggers for some reason.  Russell tells us the “dirty little secret”, namely that “they depend on us more than anyone else. They couldn’t do without us. They are building their sometimes-flimsy logical constructions on the rock-solid work of front-line reporters. The bloggers aren’t working the phones or holding the digital recorders — as much as private radio used to, and still does, rip and read, online commenters grab and gab.”

Yes, b’y Russell and we all live in our parents’ basement, never get out of our pajamas, and rock and roll music is the spawn of Satan.

The Manipulation Manipulation #nlpoli #cdnpoli

/What a difference 36 years makes.

There’s  New Democrat strategist Robin Sears in a National Post piece complaining about the way the Liberal are running their guy named Trudeau in lots of situations that give him good visuals.

“He isn’t running to be a boxer or a canoeist, he’s running to be Prime Minister, which is a different set of credentials,” said Robin Sears, who spent several campaigns in the war room for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent.

Now jump back to 1979, courtesy of the National Film Board’s documentary about the federal election in which another guy named Trudeau figured prominently.

The name they fear #nlpoli

Cast your mind back to April 2007

In his ongoing penchant for fighting with everyone and for small-mindedness,  Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams decides he will only refer to the new Prime Minister as “Steve”.

Williams made no bones about the fact his decision was very personal and intended to be insulting.

The Fourth Party #nlpoli

A Telegram editorial on Wednesday contained a curious comment.  

The subject was news that broke this week about the provincial government;s energy corporation.  Two senior corporate officials are refusing to testify in a court case in Quebec over contending interpretations of the 1969 power contract between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation and Hydro-Quebec.

Nalcor is refusing to respond to the Quebec court’s order, insisting that the order must come from a court in this province.  Now the entire court case is extremely important because it is crucial to Nalcor’s entire scheme for Muskrat Falls.  The fact that Nalcor is thumbing its nose to a legal process that it is a party to, through its majority ownership of CFLCo is both troublesome and needlessly offensive.

But that’s not the curious point from the editorial.  Whoever wrote the commentary added this bit toward the end:

It’s possible they are simply mirroring the intransigence of their Quebec counterparts to co-operate with actions in this province — as, for example, Hydro-Québec did in refusing to participate in PUB hearings on the water management agreement.

The problem with the statement is that it simply is not true.

Lighter and Lighter #nlpoli

Three separate stories over the past three days highlight changes to the local media world.

On Saturday, Telegram editor Russell Wangersky slammed the publicly funded CBC Radio for turning its morning show into the sort of light, fluffy morning program heard on commercial radio.

(Is "We're broadcasting from Tim Horton's" really that much different than that old private radio staple, "We're broadcasting live from L&M Carpeting, your best carpet buy in the tri-state area"?)

There are stupid host and guest tricks: let's make the mayor of Mount Pearl, Randy Simms, wear a party hat for that city's 60th birthday. Let's make him blow on a party horn. Let's Tweet the pictures. Let's dress someone up as a turkey and film them doing tricks.

He’s right.

But Russell is also wrong.

Opportunity knocks #nlpoli

CBC’s David Cochrane took a break from his parental leave Thursday evening to let the world know that On Point is dead as of next June.

Predictably, a bunch of people expressed their great regret but this is far from the end of the world.  Cochrane hinted elements of the show will survive.

Frankly, the best thing to do with the show is kill it now and start revamping in January. Put political reporting and longer form interviews back into the weekly evening broadcast.  That would go a long way to bring back the news into what too often seems like one gigantic weather forecast with periodic interruptions. Make no mistake.  Snodden’s forecasts are great but there is also such a thing as too much.

Things that raise alarm bells #nlpoli

As it becomes more clear that the two recent murders of Canadian soldiers had less to do with terrorism and more to do with people who are otherwise screwed up, the RCMP commissioner issues a media statement claiming the police have a video that links one murder to “ideological and political motives.”

But they can’t release the video and may never release it.

Right.

Getting On Point back from No Point #nlpoli

For years, the only public affairs show on television or radio in Newfoundland and Labrador was Issues and Answers.  NTV’s Sunday morning staple has long been ponderous and boring and it remains so. 

CBC’s On Point promised to add some life to the political world.  But while it was interesting early on and it’s had some big moments since then, the show quickly became yet another venue for government talking points or – even worse – the same tired talking heads.

The talking heads on any given panel seldom say anything insight or useful.  And, if you look at the people on the panel, they never seem to make sense.

Much media ado about not very much #nlpoli

On the face of it, anyone even passingly familiar with political events in Newfoundland and Labrador for the past decade would look with some justifiable scepticism on an announcement from justice minister Darin King on Monday that the provincial government was going to have another look at building a new provincial prison to replace one built in 1859.

After all,  this project has been on the go for a lot longer than 2008, the year mentioned in the news release. The current crowd running the place have been trying to get the federal government to pay for the prison pretty much since they took office.

The favoured location for the new prison for most of past decade has been Harbour Grace.  That’s in the district recently vacated by Jerome Kennedy.

There’s another reason to be on your guard with this announcement.

Veracity #nlpoli

Not so long ago one of the frequent claims people in the conventional media used to make about “blogsters” was that you couldn’t trust what they wrote because it might not be true.

You don’t hear that sort of thing as much as you used to.  But  whenever the idea comes up, you have to wonder why some people believe that the Internet is uniquely vulnerable to harbouring untrue things.

After all, just this past weekend the Globe and Mail had a story by Jane Taber that was just nonsense.

Lots of people believed it.  People in the provincial government circulated it widely.

But it was false.

Nut up or shut up #nlpoli

The Liberal leadership is not even a couple of weeks old and already reporters are getting inundated with the suggestions from anonymous turd-mongers wondering why they are not covering this angle or that aspect of one candidate

The Telegram’s James McLeod wrote a blog post about it on Tuesday, rattling off some examples of the stuff he’s been getting.  McLeod offers a few simple explanations of why reporters don’t cover the sort of crap that these tidbits of excrement.

In the process, he actually gives publicity to the stuff he says wouldn’t be covered for journalistic so there is a bit of a contradiction in there.  For the most part, what you can see are the sort of small-minded points offered up by people who have nothing much to say and on top of that don;t even have the stones to identify themselves.  The world is full of those sorts of sorry specimens of humanity;  politics just makes it seems like there are more of them attached to political parties.

Telly exclusive on SNC Lavalin???? #nlpoli

Screaming headline across the top of the front page of the Saturday Telly:

SNC-Lavalin shut out of Hydro-Quebec projects

And right underneath,  the claim that it is a Telegram exclusive.

That would be right except for the fact someone else reported it months ago.

The problems first surfaced in April, as reported by Radio-Canada.

And La presse had the specific Muskrat Falls angle in early May. The recent decision on the Romaine project reported on Saturday by the Telly is just the same as the La Presse story…only much later.

Where’s the exclusive?

-srbp-

VOCM more like Fox and Sun #nlpoli

VOCM’s newsroom is taking a massive step downward with a headline on the Liberal leadership.  On Friday, Dwight Ball stepped down as interim leader.  The caucus will decide his replace – officially – at a meeting they’ll hold in a couple of weeks.

The entire VO story consists of these few sentences under the headline “Liberal Party Leaderless”:

Dwight Ball has submitted his resignation as lnterim Leader of the Liberal Party.  Ball is joining business leaders Paul Antle and Cathy Bennett, MHA Jim Bennett, and former MHA Danny Dumaresque in the race. Party president Judy Morrow says the process should ensure a strong, united party in the next general election.  Voting will take place in November.

So either VO is now openly employing the Sun and Fox News stylebook in the newsroom or someone at VOCM is applying for a job as a government communications director. 

-srbp-

Inquiring Minds? You don’t want to know. #nlpoli

Denial and evasion, wrote Andrew Coyne last week, are only making worse three political scandals. He’s referring to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and allegations of substance abuse, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Mike Duffy Affair, and former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and a police investigation into McGuinty’ s staff, missing e-mails and a gas plant.

Coyne is his usual insightful self.

What’s more, added Telegram editor Peter Jackson, these three have made matters worse by making “false or misleading statements”. Not a good idea, sez Peter, since people “are naturally suspicious.”  You can’t have a good conspiracy because people will sniff out the foolishness.

And in some cases, people will even make stuff up. Peter points to the 9/11 Truthers and the Obama birthers as examples of people who will connect the unconnected.

In short, it’s bad enough when irresponsible rumour-mongers start the ball rolling. 

The last thing politicians should do is feed the flames with fibs and subterfuge.

Wonderful stuff, that, if only we could all safely rely on those inquiring minds to quickly ferret out the truth. 

Talking Point Politics #nlpoli

The Telegram’s Saturday front page story on Tory efforts to manipulate online polls and comments garnered two equal and opposite reactions over the weekend in that political echo chamber called Twitter.  [The story isn’t free.  it’s in the online subscriber edition]

Some people got into a lather over it.

Some other people tried to blow it off as something we’ve known all along, something everyone does everywhere, and no big thing.

Equal and opposite, if you will, but the big issue here is in the middle of these two opinion poles.