From the subhead to Andrew Coyne's commentary in Maclean's: "Politicians learn from their mistakes, sometimes. The media keep repeating theirs."
Every election is different. Each has its own rhythm, its peculiar melody, its unpredictable barks and squeaks. But 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.
We can't help ourselves, it seems. 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. Why, next time we might not even go on those ridiculous leaders' tours.
And then we go out and do it all over again.
I don't know whether it's learned behaviour, or whether it's instinctive, responding to some deeply recessed part of the journalistic brain. I only know that we — the media: naturally I exempt Maclean's entirely from this critique — are hurting democracy. We aren't just missing an opportunity to help the public make sense of things at a critical time. We're making things worse. We're actually getting in the way. ...
Read the coverage in any major daily on any given day. Watch the television. It's not about the election — it's about the campaign: who's ahead, the minutiae of the day's staged events and, above all, the strategy and tactics behind it all. Among other ills, this requires us to give over acres of space and time to the deep thoughts of one or another of the many thousands of smirking strategists with which this country is apparently endowed. Understand that these are paid manipulators, people who spend their entire working lives thinking up ways to twist the truth to their clients' advantage. ("Spin," we call it, which is itself an example of it.) This is probably unavoidable, possibly even necessary, but it is certainly nothing to be encouraged, let alone admired. (They are tedious enough on their own. They are lethal in panels of three.)
But here's the thing: in his secret heart of hearts, that's who the journalist wishes he was — one of the players, the guys in the room, and not one of those legions of drudges who must forever stand and wait outside the door. We write about the horse race, the polls and the strategy, not because it matters to our readers, but because it matters to the pros, the people we cover, the people we idolize. We parrot their language, even as we absorb their values: the latest campaign ad is analyzed from any number of angles — Will it work? Is it on-message? — except the most obvious: is it true?
To my mind, you need two tracks to coverage during an election -- policy and politics.
You need to understand what party might win and why, but you also need to know what exactly it is that party plans to do if it gains power.
On the narrow issue of the Green Shift, many journos have complained that it's complex and that Canadians don't understand it (journalists may well be substituting themselves .
Could someone please point me to the articles and reports broadcast or published during the campaign so far that do a thorough job of explaining and analyzing the Liberals' plan to impose a tax on carbon and cut income taxes?*
* Here's one that gets partially there: Jeffrey Simpson's column today on why the Green Shift is good policy and bad politics
Now, if there aren't very many of those articles, then how is it that everyone seems to think it sucks and how did they come to that opinion?
In the meantime, there's been precious little coverage of the Conservatives' or NDP's climate plans this campaign.
How did that come about?
The Globe and Mail has devoted a story a week to looking at a particular issue. I'm still waiting for the look at climate.