Mind the Gap #nlpoli

There is no shortage of gaps in politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Regular readers will be familiar with the Credibility Gap.  That’s the space between what a politician says and what the politician does.

Marketers forget that when it comes to reputation and hence lasting, reliable political support, actions speak far louder than words. They talk about brands and branding.  If you spend any time digging into brands and branding you will find really vague definitions that quickly lead you to the revelation that brands are for marketing what dependency theory and neo-liberalism are for left-wing academics.

True in civilian marketing. 

Doubly true in political marketing.

The gap between words and actions may not turn up right away but it does have an impact.

So take a look at the end of four months of Andrew Furey’s premiership at the number of times he has talked about “big, bold ideas”.

Now looked at his actions.

Nothing big or bold about them.

And the ideas are very familiar.  Pour government money into this hole or that.  Hold a government-issue dog and pony show to watch the politicians pouring public money into the hole.

Rinse.  Repeat.

Message Control #nlpoli

Memorial University professor Alex Marland has a new book on the market.  Brand Command is about political communications.  Marland interviewed a lot of people and did a lot of research for this very big book that lots of people should read.

One of the big ideas in the book is that politicians these days are very keen on something called message control.  They have a fetish for consistency so that everyone is singing the same things from the same hymn book, as the metaphor goes. It's an old idea and there are many reasons why politicians like to be consistent.  For one thing,  repetition across many means of communication increases the likelihood the message gets through.

On another level, though,  consistent messaging means ultimately that actions match words.  The message of the words must match the message in the action that makes those words real.

In that sense,  message consistency is about credibility and values and trust. Politicians like to tell people what they believe in and  how they will make decisions. Voters don't spend a lot of time thinking about government so they want someone they can trust to make decisions they agree with or can generally trust are the right ones.  When political analysts talk about "connecting with voters"  that's what they are getting at. 

The real connection voters need to see is the one between the words used to make promises with the actions that follows.  That connection makes the words credible 0 literally, believable - the next time there are words about what the politician will do.

Anything that attacks a politician's credibility is bad and when - as in Ball's case - the wounds are all self-inflicted, then you know there is a huge problem.

So why did Dwight Ball fire John Ottenheimer?

Alarums and Excursions #nlpoli

Dwight Ball is hiding details of his involvement in the decision to give an enormous and unwarranted severance package paid to Ed Martin despite the fact Martin had quit as Nalcor's chief executive.

That became plain in Ball's responses to repeated questions from both opposition politicians and reporters on Wednesday.  They all asked Ball repeatedly if he discussed severance with Martin in either of two meetings the Premier had with Martin in mid-April. Ball's answer was deliberately evasive.  He had clearly rehearsed the wording precisely because he repeated it over and over and over again. The question required a mere yes or no in reply. Instead,  Ball said again and again that the matter of severance was one for the board.  Every word Ball said more than either yes or no confirmed that what he was saying was not true.

Ball also said repeatedly that he only became aware of the details of the severance on May 5. He stressed the word "details" because it is an important word for him.  Ball repeatedly stressed the word as if knowing the details of the severance were more important than knowing about and approving of the fact that Martin had received severance in the first place.

That's the sort of distinction that only comes to a certain breed of lawyers or people who would describe *themselves* political strategists.  They think this sort of thing is clever.  It isn't.  It is merely too cute by half.  Everyone knows the ploy for what it is.  It's as transparent as saying someone has quit an important job to spend more time with his family.  No one believes that one because we have heard the same lie so many times. Had we all played a drinking game with Dwight Ball on Wednesday, we'd be in hospital with acute alcohol poisoning for taking a shot every time he dodged.

Stepping on rakes: #nlpoli version

Premier Dwight Ball has changed his position. 

That’s the first thing.

Here’s the way James McLeod described Ball’s position on cuts to the public service.  It’s from the Saturday Telegram:

“We’ve met with some of the labour organizations and leaders right now, so what we’ve committed to — and it hasn’t changed — is attrition still remains as the primary source for us to see changes in numbers around the public sector, and a fair negotiating process,” Ball said. 

“Once we get into that fair negotiation, we will see then what direction the discussion goes.” 

Ball said job cuts in the government will be tied together with contract negotiations.
“They’re all connected, because it’s all where you save money and expenses,” he said.

The Top 10 SRBP Posts of 2014 #nlpoli

People love to read posts that contain nothing more than lists. 

You know this is true because every self-appointed guru of the Internet will give you a list of simple things to do online that will make you an instant success and somewhere on the list is the advice to always produce lists.

Who are we to argue with such collective wisdom?

In any event, and in keeping with a long tradition of lists around these parts,  here is the list of the top 10 SRBP posts for 2014.

Premier Davis and the Dead Children #nlpoli

Paul Davis will get a lift down to Government House this afternoon and swear the oath of office so Tom Marshall can finally get out of politics.

It’s been about two weeks since Davis won the Conservative Party leadership and that’s a fairly typical period of time between election and taking office.  What hasn’t been normal is that Davis has been doing something in the Premier’s Office since last week.  He’s been standing in for the real Premier and we don;t know for sure what else he has been doing.

Davis doesn’t have a cabinet yet.  He’s going to name the cabinet and get them sworn in next week.  As for office staff,  Davis has named a chief of staff but there’s no sign yet of other names for other jobs.  One of the key jobs that is going begging is the person to run Davis’ public communications. 

There’s talk Davis will run a national competition for someone to take the job.  What would happen in the meantime – if he really goes that idiotic route – is anyone’s guess.  By the time they find someone to take the communications job, Davis’ political goose may already be cooked.

HVP controversy deepens #nlpoli

[In a hole with a jack-hammer update  at bottom]

The controversy around Humber Valley Paving got worse for the provincial Conservatives on Monday as transportation minister Nick McGrath confirmed that he actually released $19 million in performance and goods bond’s supplied by the paving company despite the fact they failed to complete the tender as original awarded.

But that’s not all.

Put McGrath’s comments in the House on Monday together with media reports last week and you have a pretty clear picture of the pretty sweet deal McGrath cut with HVP.

Legitimacy and Credibility #nlpoli

In the crude, modern way of putting things, shit got real for Premier-in-waiting Frank Coleman on Friday.

The Telegram’s James McLeod tweeted Coleman’s response to a question about whether Coleman planned to do this year what he normally does on Good Friday and participate in the anti-abortion march in Corner Brook.

Here’s what McLeod tweeted:

And then Twitter exploded.

And then magic will happen: Kennedy #nlpoli

Corporate Research Associates obscures what little useful information there is in its quarterly polling by converting party choice numbers to a share of decideds instead of a share of all answers.

Nowhere has this been more obvious lately than in its second quarter polling in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Report the numbers as CRA released them and you get what CBC and the rest of the conventional media will tell you:  big Conservative drop; Liberals and the NDP in a tie, with the NDP down slightly, but within the margin of error for the poll. Liberals up a bunch

Yeah….well…no.

Damn the finances! Full spend ahead! #nlpoli

We don’t know precisely what economist Wade “the Can-Opener”  Locke is doing to earn his loonie from the Newfoundland and Labrador taxpayers.

Finance minister Jerome Kennedy hired him this year to give advice on how to manage the province’s financial mess.  According to the Telegram his contract caps of his pay at $75,000 for a couple of months work.  Locke says regardless he’ll only bill a dollar.  That’s decent of him given that the university is giving him 80% of so of his usual paycheque now that he is on paid research leave from his usual job.

Locke has given the provincial government advice before on everything from Equalization to the annual budget to Muskrat Falls.  We don’t know what, if anything, he got paid for those other stints, but that’s really neither here nor there.  The thing is that Locke is closely tied to the current administration and to what they are doing.

We may not know what else he has been doing the past few weeks but Kennedy released a short memo Locke sent him on March 25, the day before the provincial budget.  It’s a telling little document in many ways.

What they said…Part Deux #nlpoli

Basic public relations problem.

Say one thing.

Say another thing.

A few weeks later, do something else, twice over.

For starters, here’s the what Premier Kathy Dunderdale said in the House of Assembly in March about job cuts and the provincial budget:

And she believes this crap is brilliant #nlpoli

Arguments are so much more convincing when claims match with the evidence.

Otherwise you wind up with a credibility gap.  It’s bad enough for ordinary people, but when you are – for example – the Premier of a province, having people doubt that what you say is true, you are pretty much headed for disaster.

Now Kathy Dunderdale has had a problem with getting things straight before, so, for many readers of these e-scribbles, this latest episode will come as no shock.  They can just look at this as more evidence of the problem the Premier has with figuring out a whole bunch of things lately.

The Popcorn Calculation #nlpoli

From the Telegram’s editorial on Wednesday:

The problem is that, when the proposed appointment first came to light, Premier Kathy Dunderdale and Natural Resources Minister Shawn Skinner fell all over each other claiming that they — not Williams — were responsible for the appointment. …

Problem is, the only way to keep the glare from falling on Williams was to deliberately dissemble and mislead, and it appears that the politicians who remained in office were completely up to the task.

At the very least, the letter shows Dunderdale and Skinner have a facility in being less than candid.

That’s really the crux of the story that dominated political news coverage for the first three days of this week.

And you have to put that fact against a group of politicians who claim they came to office on a platform of openness, accountability and transparency.

What they’ve done is the opposite of what they’ve claimed they were about.

Skinner and Dunderdale opened up a huge credibility gap for themselves.  That’s bad news for politicians. 

Danny Williams managed to maintained credibility even when he said some absolutely incredible things.  People believed him no matter how big – or how obvious –the whopper.  And he told whoppers a lot more often than people admit.

Kathy is no Danny, not by a long shot.

So when she heads into an election  - even against the Liberals and the NDP as weak and disorganized as they both really are,  taking a blow to your credibility is never good.

Lots of people already have questions about Dunderdale.  The CRA polls, as fundamentally skewed as they are, still aren’t so crude that they missed the huge drop in leader support for Dunderdale compared to Williams.

What’s worse is the drop in party support.  It now stands at a mere 44% of respondents to the last CRA poll, once you take all the CRA torquing and massaging out.  In other words, it wouldn’t take much to put the Tories into a serious election problem.

How do people respond to claims about Muskrat Falls, for example, when the person who is telling them the whole thing is great is also the person who dissembled and misled – in the words of the Telegram editorialist – about something as comparatively trivial as Danny Williams’ role in the Liz Matthews nomination?

People looking at the current provincial government will also start looking at other examples like the Dunderdale Skinner performance.  Joan Burke on the MUN president, for example. 

Dunderdale on Joan Cleary and the Public Tender Act.

Kevin O’Brien.

Kathy Dunderdale and the Tories stand on the edge of the Gorge of Eternal Peril.  Dunderdale’s credibility is weakened. More people than before will think twice when she says something now.

The Tories aren’t likely to be swallowed up by the political chasm as a result. 

Amateurs think winning a campaign is about having a star leader.

It isn’t.

It’s about the ground game.

The logistics.

That’s still where the Tories have an advantage.  If the party district organizations hold, that alone will pull through seats the Tories might otherwise lose.  District level organization beyond one or two spots has been the traditional NDP weakness. If they’ve added some strength, they could have a stronger showing.

The Liberals have atrophied at the district level over the past couple of terms.  They’ve rebounded in a good few but overall the party is still far weaker than it ought to be.  You can put that all down to neglect of the basic party organization by the people right at the top.

And organization on the ground is what wins campaigns.

But if the internal splits and schisms evident in the Danny Williams outburst this week got wider…

Well, that might be a different matter.

Stay tuned. 

The election is only just starting in earnest. this could be a real Ginger- get-the-popcorn kinda show.

- srbp -

The political uses of talk radio

From a story on the front page of the Wednesday Telegram:

Open-line has little impact on the formation of big-picture public policy, but does have a strong effect on government behaviour, with political actors paying "considerable attention" to what is said on VOCM. 

That has translated into partisan efforts to control the frequency, as it were - intense monitoring of open-line programs for rapid reaction to issues that may arise; promoting party positions through stacking the lines to suggest grassroots support; and using the airwaves to avoid answering difficult questions from other media outlets.

Sadly, it isn’t available online unless you are a Telly subscriber.

The story discusses an article by Memorial University political scientists Alex Marland and Matthew Kerby who conducted a detailed study of politicians and talk radio in the province.  As part of the research, Marland and Kerby compiled statistical analysis of callers, frequency of calls and dates as well as a series of in-depth interviews with politicians, political staff and journalists.

Regular readers of this corner of the universe will recognise the discussion, for example, in this section of the Telegram story about planted callers,

Marland and Kerby found that the limited pool of callers to open line presents "a very serious credibility gap," with line-stacking so prevalent it is believed that the lines are monopolized by a pool of just 30 to 100 callers. 

"The prevalence of political calls questions whether the openness and spirit of talk radio is supplanted by parties' efforts to control the shows' content," the MUN researchers note in their paper.

There’s also a section on poll goosing, that is timing announcements and open line activity to coincide with CRA polling periods.

And the bizarro attention paid to VOCM Question of the Day? Here’s a tiny bit of the Marland and Kerby take on things:

One respondent provided us with tabular data of efforts to influence the outcome, which involved hundreds of automated repeat votes that were critical of Williams, and which almost instantly provoked an apparently automated response supporting the premier. This occurred only during the workday and not in the evening (one minister told us that party staff‘go crazy’ clicking during the day).[Note:  Marland and Kerby here are referring to political staff working in government offices]

The one thing they really don’t make clear is that the level of this sort of activity since October 2003 dwarfs anything that went before.  Some people may like to think otherwise, just as some people like to deny this sort of stuff goes on at all. The evidence speaks loudly for itself, however.

“The audience is listening: talk radio and public policy in Newfoundland and Labrador" is available in the November 2010 issue of Media, Culture and Society, a peer-reviewed journal of research on communications and society. Individual articles are available for purchase online or through your local library. 

The Memorial University Library subscribes to MCS for those who can access it.

- srbp -

Lemme get this straight…

The guy who liked to recycle expense claims (in one case three times) and who serves in an administration renowned for recycling announcements (in some cases as many as eight times) is criticising another politician for supposedly recycling announcements.

Oh yeah and to make it even funnier, this same guy campaigned not once but twice for the guys he now criticises and he’d-a-been out there a third and fourth time if his boss hadn’t told him he couldn’t.

Can you say “credibility gap”,  boys and girls?

Maybe he’d have been waving around a signed contract for the feds to help pave the Trans-Labrador Highway.

Speaking of HMV, where exactly is that lawsuit against Roger Grimes, John Hickey?  If memory serves, Hickey was suing Grimes for something Danny Williams actually said.

Now there’s a brilliant law suit for you.

By the by,  who is stunneder in that case:  the guy who gave the advice to sue or the guy who took it and wound up paying the bill out of his own pocket?

Tough call.

Oh yes, and this latest release recycling news release is itself recycled.

-srbp-

Revisiting the Gorge of Eternal Peril

An e-mail from a seasoned political observer prompted a second look at a post original made at Persuasion Business in the summer of 2007.

The e-mail exchange centred on the political implications of sudden discoveries of e-mails previously not thought to exist or of the question of what the Premier knew of the Eastern Health crisis and when he knew it. The notion of credibility came quickly to mind since it is a core concept in public relations and it is certainly a core concept in the entire Eastern Health debacle.

The whole idea is the focus of a post titled "The Gorge of Eternal Peril."

One of the examples cited is a pair of comments made on George Tilley's resignation.  In hindsight, it is remarkable to see how consist Eastern Health and the health ministry have been in trying puffery and palaver when simple straightforward statements would do.  Tilley's replacement taxed the ears of her audience on Thursday with her endless talk of stories being told at the end of the day.

Leaving out crucial facts damages cred and rep

One of the things that undermines any marketing or public relations effort is the gap between claim or statement on the one hand and fact on the other.

It's called a credibility gap and when it comes to the provincial government's triffids brand cum "brand signature", the credibility gap keeps opening wider.  The business ministry issued a "news" release on Wednesday claiming that "[t]he brand signature of Newfoundland and Labrador is fast gaining international recognition."

The basis for the claim is that the "animated television spot featuring the brand logo captured a prestigious Silver London International Statue in television at the world-renowned London International Advertising Awards November 12 and also earned a finalist award in the animation category."

Okay.

Bravo to the creative crew at Target Marketing.

But the rest of the release is just puffery, rehashing the entire brand signature/brand logo mythology that's been spewing from every government orifice since the $1.1 million plus farce was unveiled last year.

The London International Awards recognize excellence in various aspects of advertising and design. It's a big deal for any company to be a finalist, let alone win a silver or gold award as the best in the category. The creativity involved in the project had to stand up against some stiff competition and to be sure, anyone familiar with target's projects over the years will recognize that the pitcher plant logo thingy is by no means even close to the best work the company has done.

But at no point did the logo receive international recognition of the type the provincial government claimed.

Check it out for yourself.

Target won an award for a specific aspect of a specific component of the project.

That's nowhere the same as saying the "brand signature... is fast gaining international recognition,"  since that implies the logo itself won recognition.

The video created for the launch - the one with the wailing banshee voice - garnered an award in the Television/Cinema category for original music with lyrics.

That's it.

It also finished as a finalist in the cel animation section of the same category.

Congratulations, Target.

And a giant raspberry to a release from a government department that first of all isn't "news" of any sort, and second of all, tries to claim credit that properly belongs to the creative talent at Target. A new minister and a few other changes and the department responsible still hasn't learned from the mistakes of the launch.

-srbp-

The Persuasion Business: Actions speak louder than words

If public relations is fundamentally about relationships, there are two words that are crucial to any relationship: reputation and credibility.

The two are linked, but let's take a look at reputation.

Reputation is an attitude held by an individual about another individual or an organization. An attitudes is set of beliefs, a sets of feelings. It will have positive and negative qualities: good versus bad, for example.

Attitudes are important because at some point they will drive or influence behaviour.

Behaviour is important because, at some point, the behaviour contained in our definitions of public relations is support.

If that sounds like your last undergraduate course in psychology or in political science, then don't be surprised. We are talking about human interactions - relationships between and among human groups.

While we all can have and likely have had short-term relationships, for most of us relationships tend to last over a long time. Some are constantly important, like say a relationship within a family. Others are intermittent, becoming important at some points in life while being in the background during other times. Inherently though, relationships tend to last in one form or another over a long time.

Relationships - like attitudes - are therefore likely to be dynamic. That is, they are likely to change over time based on any of a number of factors.

In another post, we'll discuss attitudes and behaviour in greater depth, but at this point let's stick with the catch-all term reputation and the connection to behaviour.

Attitudes are linked to behaviour in competitive situations, like the choice between one bottle of soft drink or another. Most of us are so familiar with these ideas that they seem obvious. But what about in a monopoly, like health care?

In the example used in the first post, we discussed at some length a current problem facing a health authority involving problems with important medical testing and public disclosure of information. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the health authority is a monopoly or part of a larger monopoly. If someone gets sick in eastern Newfoundland, and, like most of us, lacks the money to jet off to some other part of North America for care, it's not exactly like he or she can go to another health care provider to show displeasure in the way the testing issue was handled.

Absolutely correct.

But...

This is a democracy and health care is provided from public funds controlled by politicians who periodically have to go to the polls. Those politicians need votes and those votes are held by people who will need health care at some point. If you doubt the connection, consider the 1997 federal election results in Newfoundland and Labrador. As much as anything else they were driven by public concerns over access to health care.

Now health care is entirely a provincial responsibility in Canada, but that didn't stop voters from making health care a major issue. The election results, translated into provincial votes by the nervous political operatives sent a disconcerting message to the provincial government. A provincial health minister was replaced. New funding turned up. Government organized a forum to discuss the issue and propose solutions. It was all very public and very obvious.

The problem didn't go away, although there was a decline in the very vocal criticisms of the health care system. Flip ahead to January 1999. Brian Tobin went to the polls looking for a second majority and his campaign launched on the heady promise of economic prosperity from offshore oil and the Lower Churchill. Everyone else was talking health care. Major shift in campaign communications including the hasty production of new television commercials highlighting social programs, especially health care.

Fast forward to 2007, another election year. Questions about breast cancer screening led to the appointment of a public inquiry headed by no less an authority than the most senior justice of the Court of Appeal (in terms of years on the bench) , the highest court in the province. In an unrelated matter that cropped up at the same time, health officials were given a mere two weeks to re-evaluate almost 6,000 radiology reports when concerns were raised about the competence of a radiologist at a rural hospital.

To forestall unwelcome voter behaviour - i.e. voting for the Other Guys - the governing party took swift action.

Action.

Implicitly, the politicians involved knew that attitudes wouldn't be adjusted merely by words. It wasn't good enough to say that things were fixed. Well, they tried that initially, along with some actions that likely dealt with the entire matter as far as the health care authority was concerned.

The problem was that the important attitudes aren't those of the senior managers of the authority. They like themselves anyway. Ask any of them how they do their jobs and they will tell you what a marvellous job they do, working long hours for little pay.

The problem lay in the simple fact that the attitudes that were important were patient attitudes. Those attitudes shifted, as we noted before, once it appeared that the health authorities had held back important information. More action - very obvious action - was needed.

Actions speak louder than mere words, especially when it comes to influencing behaviour.

Next time we'll look at credibility and what happens in the gap between what you say and what you do.

- srbp -

Requiem for The Sunday Independent

The Sunday Independent is no more.

Actually, that paper died when it was bought out by local entrepreneur Brian Dobbin.

Now its successor newspaper, The Independent, is out of business as of yesterday when the last number went to the printers.

The official reason - repeated ad nauseum by Dobbin and managing editor Ryan Cleary - is that the paper ran out of money and time.

The official reason is a crock.

Dobbin and Cleary had two full years to do whatever was needed to make the paper viable. That's plenty of time. There was also plenty of cash, evident from the page three picture in the last number showing the staff members. By a rough count, the final staff was at least double the complement of the old Sunday Independent and may well be closer to triple the band that got the paper off the ground in the fall of 2003.

The magnitude of the bleeding will never be known publicly, but it was obviously enough to push Dobbin into abandoning the paper. The Current estimated last fall that Dobbin was losing about $10, 000 per issue; the real figure might well have been much higher once one considers how much of the Spindy's ad revenue came from Dobbin's other companies.

The real season the Spindependent died had nothing to do with time and money. No one can blame Trans-Con Media for this loss, either.

Nope.

The Spindy died because it simply never matched the grandiose claims its publisher and managing editor continued to make for it right up to the interment. In the whole twenty-odd months of its life, there was rarely anything in the Spindy you couldn't live without reading on Sunday when the paper came out; nothing that couldn't wait until Wednesday when you could get the paper online for free.

As we put it here at the Bond Papers a year ago:

the more Ryan slags everyone else and claims that his paper is somehow superior, the more I know it is just spin; pure unrefined shite. Every week, I look through the Indy and I have yet to see any story that isn't covered just as well if not better in any other news outlet in the province. Well, almost any. I don't read The Monitor any more.

And when I see recycled flatulent crap, as I did this week yet again, on the Indy front page, no less, I can explain to you why your circ sucks. It has nothing to do with CBC refusing your TV spots.

The basic problem is that you claim to be the newspaper for thinking people. You claim to be informative and a whole bunch of other things. Anybody who has looked at the paper knows that it isn't any of those things. Your ad campaign sets you up for a gigantic credibility gap when they hear the ad and then look at a paper that is more like the Spindependent or, this week, the Windypendent than the newspaper for thoughtful people.

If you want to boost your circulation, Ryan, stop telling me how great you are. Try writing a story that proves it. Stop with the grandiose and go back to the basics. Give me solid research, a novel approach, some background and good writing. No one is really interested with the stuff they can get anywhere else, including Open Line. And they obviously aren't really interested in pseudo-nationalist rantings in place of well-researched stuff that draws its conclusions from the evidence, not picks evidence to fit the preconceived conclusions.

In the long run, you'll find that approach is actually less expensive than the in-house ad campaign and it will be more effective in boosting your audience. Boost the audience and you can sell enough advertising to pay the bills.

To be fair, in the past year - especially in the past six months - the Indy generated better stories. The Melina and Keith series is an example, but sadly it was a rare example of the potential the Indy had but never came close to attaining consistently enough to make the paper financially viable.

Cleary's only big project - the much ballyhooed rack of Confederation six-parter - was an utter flop. He did not pull in "every brain" as he claimed in the last number of the paper. Instead he grabbed two refugees from radio talk shows, neither of them known for sticking with facts. By the looks of it, he did grab the janitor to cobble together something that didn't challenge the local orthodoxy. The Spindy series merely repeated it.

They had a conclusion and by God the facts would be chosen to conform to it. When problems occurred, the Indy management was quick to claim information actually in the public domain couldn't be found or was being withheld. In Newfoundland public life, the most common of barnyard animals is the scapegoat.

Not only did the Spindy fail to live up to its self-promotion, it also missed in another crucial area as well. In his final column, Dobbin writes of wanting to put in print what he had heard over a beer or while sitting at the dinner table.

There are two problems with that. First, what is heard over a beer is seldom better than the stuff Cliff Claven spouted. People don't quote barstool know-it-alls except to laugh at them. Second, and more importantly, what is evidently heard around the Dobbin or Cleary dinner table is not some radical new thought. It is very much the view of the local elite on everything from Danny-boy to Confederation.

For a supposedly brazen newspaper, being an Establishment mouthpiece is deadly. Upstarts need to be anti-Christs. They need to challenge orthodoxy, reject the conventional. They need to get in your face and stay there so that as much as people might publicly denounce you, your broadsheet is their secret, guilty pleasure.

The stuff they pull up the covers and read with a flashlight so the husband...or wife...wouldn't catch them at it.

The stuff they will need to go to confession about.

"Forgive me, Fahder for I have sinned. I read it in The Independent."

The Indy under Brian and Ryan was entirely conventional and totally orthodox. The audience they were shooting for already knew just about everything the paper printed and if they needed reinforcement, then surely they could get it by tuning in five days a week to Bill Rowe...for free. Without eyeballs, a paper can't attract readers. And without readers, there are few if any advertisers - the source of cash for all publications.

With all that said, mourn the loss of The Independent. This province needs another media voice, not because the rest is bland or suppressed, but because there are stories here to tell that aren't being told by anyone else.

Mourn the loss - hopefully a temporary one - of talent like photo editor Paul Daly and senior editor Stephanie Porter. They remained my only real reason for buying the paper each week. Sadly, they could not keep the venture afloat on their talents, as considerable as they are.

Above all else, mourn the loss of potential. If just for a moment the Indy had ever come close to what it ought to have been, we'd be sitting here on a Sunday with jaws on floor. We'd be gobsmacked at the latest revelation.

Instead, I am typing an obit I never wanted to see, let alone write.

I sincerely wish it were otherwise.

No contest in the TV spots

Check out the Conservatives' first TV spots - a series of three 30 sec spots built around the fake concept.

Here's Steve appearing to be interviewed by someone who is obviously not a real TV presenter. There's a screen in the background on which people who appear obviously to be actors are reading obviously scripted bits in an obviously 'I am reading a cue card or teleprompter' kinda way.

The people are referred to by first names, like "Joan", so we get the impression really quickly that these are generic Canadians. They are not real - even though there are obviously a few million real people across the country who would have been prepared to participate in some Conservative Party advertising.

Then Steve recites a bit of dialogue in a obviously stilted way. Aside from the obviously stiff approach and the obviously fake nature to the spots, the messaging is pretty heavy handed, as in crudely executed.

Then there are the first Liberals spots.

A soft approach featuring real people, with real names in real places across Canada telling you why they are voting Liberal. Since I had a small part in identifying people to participate, I can tell you they are real.

Then there's another one with a series of headlines praising Liberal policies over the past couple of years.

There's a big gap here in the quality and the execution of these TV spots on just about every level, from creative on down through the list. To be fair, the Conservative spots match their first week of campaigning in tone and message, but - and this is a big but - there is a sophisticated way to run political advertising that the Conservatives have just missed. They missed it in the flight they ran in August as well.

If the context and appearance - the look and feel - of the advertising lacks credibility, then the message will lack credibility as well.

But just so that everyone understand what the standards are for this type of advertising, try surfing through this site, The Living Room Candidate. I dare you to find a recent political television ad as lame-assed as these Conservative ones.