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So, how’d we do this time?
October 14, 2008
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Ivor Shapiro Part 1 - So, how'd we do this time? Part 2 - The year of the blog Part 3 - Enter the truth squads Part 4 - Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet Part 5 - Style 2.0, substance 1.0 Take Our Poll - Who had the best coverage?  Andrew Coyne said it best, blogging half way through the campaign:"In one respect every election is the same: the press coverage. It's always an embarrassment, and always in exactly the same way. Politicians learn from their mistakes, sometimes. We just go on repeating ours. … After every election we retire, defeated, to our newsroom post-mortems, and each time we vow: never again. Never again will we sit up and beg for our "Gainsburgers," the little meaningless morsels of news the parties dole out each day to keep us complicit in their charades. Never again will we chase after every fleeting poll, salivate over every minor "gaffe." Never again the gotcha question, the silly photo op, the constant search for "defining moments" and "turning points," the investing of trivial campaign mishaps with symbolic import — as if the great river of events were just naturally teeming with metaphors for us to fish." Six short weeks ago, J-Source launched its campaign coverage page by asking, “How'd we do last time around?”We went back at the recriminations and resolutions following the 2006 federal election and highlighted challenges such as the media’s addiction to horse-race coverage (especially poll stories), and our habitual failure to subject party platforms and promises to rigorous analysis. This time, it could be different. Mainstream media were faced by a continuing slump of audiences, and a heightening realization of the Web’s huge potential to win those audiences back through interactive journalism that put politicians directly under voters’ own microscopes. Global warming was targeted by the official opposition, a minority parliament’s alleged dysfunction by the government, and a worldwide economic crisis arrived from nowhere mid-campaign. There would be the usual flood of polls, sure, and the inevitable spin of photo-ops and sound bites. But this time, maybe, substance would rule. This time, maybe, reporters would sniff out more stories that politicians had no interest in leaking; this time we would probe the backgrounds of people who wanted our votes, and subject their promises to the test of hard analysis. Newsroom executives sounded optimistic notes in the early going. "Welcome to Election 2.0," wrote Globe and Mail EIC Edward Greenspon at the bell. "Our political website will … be able to dig deeper and tell stories through text, photos, interactive graphics, podcasts and video. But the part that excites me the most is that the reader gets to participate: with the journalists, the newsmakers and with each other." “The horserace polls will, I hope, be few and far between,” wrote J-Source contributing editor and Vancouver Sun ME Kirk LaPointe , more cautiously, a week later, “but I have hoped for that for six or seven campaigns now and somehow, with weeks to go, journalism gets drawn into the breathless vortex of who might win…. But the next number of weeks will be instructive on the degree to which Canadian journalism is adopting available tools to reach audiences immediately and deeply.” No one thought the transformation would be easy. J-Source commenter Claude Adams expressed the challenge this way: "Why do mainstream news organization abandon their essential news principles when an election is called? … Every major party leader's speech of the day is news. The airplanes they fly are news…. Their cooked-up squabbles, and their televised debates, are 20-point headlines, content notwithstanding. Editors struggle to achieve "balanced" coverage for the parties, which means a rough equity in column inches or newscast minutes. Reporters are assigned to campaigns; that's an expensive enterprise, so the expectation is that they file every day. Often, they are reduced to taking dictation: what did Stephen, Stephane and Jack say today, how many were there, and how does it square with what they said yesterday?...." Well, now another campaign has come and gone, and it’s all over bar the navel-gazing. So the time has come, yes, again, to ask: How did we do this time? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For those interested, here's a link to "Incremental Man":
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081004.whapercover04/BNStory/politics/
I would like to nominate the huge Harper profile by Jeffrey Simpson and Brian Laghi that ran in the weekend Globe and Mail's Focus section. It was called Incremental Man and for sheer breadth and depth of reporting, I think it was one of the best stories I read throughout the election period. This kind of story, with many, many sources and careful, solid writing offers voters a chance to stop and think about candidates and issues, rather than simply jumping from news bite to news bite, gobbling up information, but with little time for reflection and synthesis.
Kudos to the reporters and to the Globe.
Paul Benedetti
Perhaps it's just me and this happens every election, but I thought this campaign was especially focused on coverage of the leaders. Tracking their movements and repeating their speeches were sometimes the only campaign news of the day, and precious little space was devoted to other candidates.
Also, I remain astonished that issues such as the war in Afghanistan received so little play. Given how polarizing it can be and how much analysis has been devoted to it since the last election, I thought it would be a major issue. Not even the NDP or Greens tried to make hay of it in a significant way.