Memo to Media: Voters decide the
end of the election story
by
Alan Bass, January 13, 2006
As
I write this, there’s about a week left in the federal
election campaign and it looks like the biggest challenge facing
news media outlets in the coming days will be remembering they
can’t announce the winner until the evening of January
23.
As with so many previous elections in Canada and elsewhere,
public opinion polling is driving a common media storyline that
almost makes voting day seem irrelevant.
It’s ironic, but at a time when the reliability of public
opinion polls is being questioned as never before, polls have
dominated coverage of this campaign to an unprecedented extent.
In particular, the “daily tracking poll” produced
by The Strategic Counsel company for CTV and the Globe and Mail
has provided reporters and editors from all media outlets with
an irresistible touchstone around which to build their election
narrative from day to day.
That’s particularly true now with election day so close
and the polls seemingly showing the Conservatives building a
lead that – should they be an accurate foreshadowing of
election day – would give Stephen Harper and his party
an opportunity to form a government. Of course, the same thing
happened in 2004 and a lot of journalists looked silly when
the Liberals emerged with a minority government. You’d
think the media this time would avoid giving in to the temptation
to proclaim a winner before election day, but apparently the
lessons of history are not as compelling as today’s polling
results. Political journalists are often accused of running
in packs, with some justification, and pack journalism tends
to be most obvious during election campaigns.
ALAN BASS is Chair of Journalism at Thompson Rivers
University in Kamloops, B.C.
His professional experience includes covering national political,
economic and social issues as a reporter in Ottawa for the United
Press and Canadian Press news agencies; working as a reporter
and editor at the London Free Press; and editing a magazine
and doing corporate communications work at the University of
Western Ontario.
Interests include the impact of the Internet on journalism and
communication, political journalism and professionalism in journalism.
Even
if there were no polls, journalists working together on election
campaigns would likely share a consensus impression of what
was happening. Polls, especially when a number of surveys produce
comparable results, make that tendency virtually irresistible.
After all, journalists are storytellers as well as reporters
and they look for narrative structure. Most news reports are
like short stories, with a storyline that begins and ends with
that day’s report. But an election campaign is more like
a novel. As a novel opens, anything is possible. But with every
passing chapter, the story and its characters experience events
and challenges that shape them and push them toward an inevitable
fate.
In this campaign, the storyline as it now stands sees the Liberals
paying the price for past mistakes and the Conservatives flowering
into a governing party. (The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois are
minor characters whose role in the main story is important only
insofar as it impacts the star players.) Check out the tracking
poll graphic being published every day in the front section
of the Globe
and Mail for a nice visual depiction of this storyline.
Of course, there’s only one poll that counts and that’s
the one that takes place when Canadians vote. We know voters
don’t always act as polls predict.
Nevertheless, as we build to this story’s climax, most
reporters and editors will be tempted – consciously or
not – to make storytelling choices that reflect and reinforce
this poll-driven narrative. The urge will be strong for reporters
directly covering the campaign but could be even stronger for
the head-office editors who make the critical decisions about
assignments, visuals and story placement. When a storyline is
already in play at the start of each day, content decisions
come easily.
So far in this campaign, media coverage has had its ups and
downs. To their credit, most media outlets recognized election
coverage must go beyond the leaders’ campaigns. They’ve
published independent examinations into issues and spent some
time and money examining the thoughts and concerns of ordinary
voters - though after several weeks of “Reality Checks,”
earnest interviews with undecided and sometimes uninformed voters,
and segments with actors portraying anonymous “campaign
insiders” (CBC News, you’ve got some explaining
to do), a cynic might dismiss much of this effort as gimmickry
rather than sound journalism.
Still, from the beginning of the election to the first week
of January, the dominant shared storyline permitted some variation
in the storytelling because the polling companies had the two
main parties running neck-and-neck or, in poll-speak, within
the margin of statistical error. Now the polls show some clear
separation, so there’s a much more exciting story to tell,
a real race with leaders and losers. Until the final week of
the campaign, the story was like a mystery novel that goes on
for too many pages before the first murder is committed. At
last, political blood is spilled and the real action begins.
I’m not suggesting public opinion surveys should be ignored
in the waning days of the election. I’m not advocating
banning election polls. Personally, I find polls that claim
to show what’s going on in people’s minds to be
quite fascinating. But I would urge news decision-makers, especially
in the final days of the campaign, to consciously resist the
urge to over-hype their poll results.
Here’s why. We know most people interact with news media
intermittently and for short periods of time. They scan a front
page now and then and catch a bit of a newscast whenever they
can. Their knowledge of the campaign so far is likely forged
by a haphazard series of impressions from front-page headlines
and photographs, radio and TV news clips, and the opinions of
friends and family.
However, many people who intend to vote will devote more time
and pay more systematic attention to the news media as election
day draws closer. The news media needs to serve the interests
of this important new audience. That’s why (other than
risking egg on its face) the news media has a special responsibility
during the last days of the campaign to avoid letting a dominant
storyline determine the tenor of its election coverage.
A few suggestions:
In covering the leaders’ campaigns, editors must fight
the inclination to select only photographs in which Stephen
Harper looks prime ministerial and Paul Martin looks frazzled
and defeated. They must strive to ensure that every campaign
story isn’t built on a plot foundation of Liberal desperation
or Tory glee.
In fact, in the final days of the campaign, I’d like to
see the news media consciously take a step back from emphasizing
the day-after-day staging of the leaders’ tours on their
front pages and put more emphasis on providing content and perspective
specifically designed to help inform voters who have not been
following the campaign every day.
How to do that? Obviously, there should be summaries of important
issues and party policies and an effort made to estimate the
price of each party’s commitments. After being published
in print, they should be posted to the web but pointers to those
web pages should be printed every day.
Thoughtful reviews and perspectives on the campaigns and the
important events that influenced them should also be published.
It would also be useful to see some analysis of what Liberal
and Conservative governments would look like – who would
be contenders for cabinet positions and what interest groups
could be expected to have influence over the government and
its backbenchers?
Let’s also see some analysis into the options facing each
party should it form a minority government. How would a Liberal
or Conservative minority achieve stability? (This is where the
NDP and Bloc come back into the dominant narrative.) What would
the price of stability be? We already have some sense of how
the Liberals would act in a minority situation but the Conservatives
should not get a free pass on this issue. In particular, the
potential impact of a Conservative minority government that
depends on Bloc Quebecois support should be explored.
Not all of this should be written by journalists. Let’s
find out what other community leaders – partisan and non-partisan
– have to say about the potential consequences of the
choices facing Canadians on election day.
News outlets should also review their coverage to date and work
to clarify issues or events that may not have been explained
as thoroughly or fairly as possible.
A good example would be the RCMP’s mid-campaign announcement
it was investigating allegations that someone in the finance
ministry may have leaked information about an investment tax
policy change to some investors.
If Harper does win the election, this will likely be seen as
a turning point in the campaign. In many people’s minds,
the dramatic news of this investigation confirmed opposition
party accusations that the Martin government was just as corrupt
as Chretien’s. It certainly cut Martin off at the knees.
Yet one of the first things cub reporters learn is that police
investigations in themselves mean nothing. Investigators first
have to determine if a crime has actually been committed and
then they work to identify the innocent as well as the guilty.
I’m not convinced the reporting of this particular investigation
has made that point clear enough to be fair to the Liberals
Last, but not least, all news outlets should be sure to provide
lots of information about the local candidates whose names will
actually appear on their readers’ or viewers’ ballots.
And wouldn’t it be nice to see broadcast outlets acknowledge
their news formats simply can’t match newspapers for depth
and breadth of coverage and urge voters to spend a few days
before the election reading newspapers and web sites? This even
gives CTV and Global a legitimate reason to promote their print
partners.
Let’s hope, in these final days of the campaign, that
Canadian journalists make a real effort to give Josephine Q.
Citizen the information and insight she needs so that as she
marks her ballot she feels confident the immediate future of
the country is truly in her hands and not already pre-determined
by polls and media storylines.
