Balance of power

CBC News Supremo Tony Burman weighed in today on how the public broadcaster fared balance-wise during the election campaign. (I added the links, both PDF.)

The good news — for us and, one could argue, for CBC's audiences — is that the major study done by an outside research firm concluded that CBC News was "balanced" throughout the campaign. It also indicated that the "tone" of CBC's coverage toward the political parties and their leaders (negative versus positive) was consistent with its competitors and other media.

This study was done by ERIN Research, a respected independent research firm. It was based on a weekly campaign analysis of our flagship news programs on CBC Radio and CBC-TV, as well as CTV National News as a way of contrast. CBC had no influence over the results. Among the study's conclusions:

* Overall, "CBC's coverage was appropriately balanced"; CBC and CTV were "very close" in their "tone" and "direction" toward each party; and for the first time in memory, debate about "policy" assumed as much importance as discussion about political "strategy" and "the horserace."

A second report — also available through a link below — is CBC's internal "election story logging." This was compiled on a daily basis by CBC staff:

* It quantified the length of stories about each party, their leaders and the issues, and provided a weekly snapshot of the weight of coverage given to the major parties. The final breakdown was remarkably parallel to the popular vote.

The ERIN report is 43 pages long and I admit I only skimmed through them. But, even a cursory look over all the charts and stats lends credence to Burman's claim.

Take that Warren Kinsella.

I am trying to imagine any other news organization going so far to prove it was balanced - and how nervous they must be right now at CBC to commission such a study.

The Northern Shrub

Just because it's funny.

Camp Pain Trail

Here's a condensed version of the Western Standard story I blogged yesterday. It ran on the National Post's op-ed page today.

Reporters on the Martin campaign seemed to become almost consumed with Liberal bungling. They began filing stories speculating that there might be a mole in the Liberal war room deliberately leaking stories to hurt Martin. When Martin did get around to announcing his education plan (it matched the details CP had reported the previous evening), the subsequent news conference was dominated by questions about the leaked story, the possibility of a mole, and then tough questions about the income-trust scandal that had been dogging the Grits since December. Only a few reporters bothered asking about policy.

It was becoming clear that the media pool had been poisoned. The next day, at a Whitby, Ont., seniors' centre, after Martin announced hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for seniors and the disabled, the press was openly hostile to Martin. As Allan Woods of CanWest was beginning to ask for the prime minister's response to breaking news about fresh scandal -- the possibility of bogus billing by a Quebec group called Option Canada -- he was cut off by Liberal handlers. The prime minister walked out of the room, leaving reporters shouting questions at his back.

Interestingly, the Post did not cut out the references to the excellent work performed by the Canadian Press throughout the campaign. Last week, when the Post picked up Warren Kinsella's rant against the media, the complimentary bits about CP were cut.

The Post does not subscribe to CP, although it does use its stories on the website. CanWest meanwhile is a subscriber to CP.

POST-DATED: Post publisher Gordon Fisher suddenly quit his seat on CP's executive committee the other day. (Gerry Nott, CanWest's Ottawa bureau chief, still sits on the CP board.) Fisher's move is causing some to speculate on the Post's imminent demise.

Maple Loose Leaf

Now that the Northern Shrub has ascended to 24 Sussex, Jon Stewart is concerned about how Canadians will be perceived around the world.

But the real question on everybody's mind is, can we still stitch their flag to our backpacks to get through Europe? And I think the answer is this: you can but ... uh ... the flag should be smaller than it was.

Video here: "Disassembly Line."

On the bias

Having shot themselves in the foot, the Liberals take aim at the messengers.

And advisers accuse the media of an obvious bias in favour of Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

They say Liberal promises - such as a $4-billion plan to reduce tuition - went virtually unreported while the Conservatives scored a daily hit with their announcements.

"How many Canadians have even heard about our tuition plan?" one senior Liberal lamented.

But many within Liberal ranks feel no sympathy for those complaints, saying Martin's campaign was dysfunctional from the start.

The Jan. 30 edition of the Western Standard has a scathing piece ''The End of the Affair: How Paul Martin's Liberals lost the love of Canada's mainstream media.'' (It's not yet available online.) It is an on-the-buses-and-planes look at how the Liberal campaign collapsed, mostly because the Martinites had not developed a sound media strategy.

Many Canadians throughout the campaign - myself included - have accused the media of getting on the Harper bandwagon. To some extent that's true. The proof is, that so many conservative blogs were easy on the media.

But campaign plane-embedded reporters can only report what they see from their very restricted viewpoints. The truth is, the Cons had it together and caught some lucky breaks. The Liberals did not.

The Liberals barely had a campaign before the holidays while the Conservatives were rolling out their policy a day. They were counting on the Harpies to do a face plant like they did in 2004. Their war room was shooting blanks, if it was shooting at all. There was the beer and popcorn gaffe. The income trust scandal. The notwithstanding clause surprise. The platform leaks. The military attack ad. And last, and not least, the sponsorship mess and how the Martinites chose to deal with it. It didn't help that most of these stumbles were hooked up to legitimate policy issues - e.g. childcare - and, as a result, gained more media traction.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives had a tightly disciplined and focused team, aided and abetted by the NDP's nuclear team which kept dropping bombs on the Liberals from its war room.

All this conspired to make the media look less than balanced - a tilt exacerbated by the nearly unanimous editorial endorsements of the newspapers. And yeah, I still think CBC's Peter Mansbridge went relatively easy on Harper who, it must be said, really didn't give him much of an opening.

But bias?

Nah.

In any case, I wouldn't define the Conservatives' win as a win. Just as an un-loss. As James Bow notes:

The Conservatives have broken the previous record of infamy for being the least popular party to receive the most votes in an election: 36.3% being slightly lower than the 36.7% set by Paul Martin’s Liberals in 2004 (though still higher than the 35+% picked up by Joe Clark’s short-lived minority). Also interesting to note that the Conservatives STILL haven’t equalled the vote totals achieved when the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives were separate parties.

Please release me

It's the battle of the network news releases.

Well, not quite. Still haven't heard from CBC. But CTV put out bumph about its election night victory at the People Meter polls:

Once again, Canadians made CTV their broadcaster of choice for the historic Federal Election. Nielsen Media Research Canada confirms that CTV drew the most viewers of any network with 1.48 million viewers, 18 per cent more viewers than coverage on CBC (1.253 million viewers) and 92 per cent more viewers than Global (771,000). The numbers reflect the overall duration of all three network's prolonged coverage (292 minutes for CTV and Global; 296 minutes for CBC).

Meanwhile, as I posted in the comments last night, Global issued a release boasting that it was the first to call a Conservative government. This ''at 7:30 PM ET to Maritime audiences." This was reported today by CanWest papers, as if (a) it was newsworthy and (b) it was a good thing.

TV networks the democratic world over love the bragging rights that come with being first to call the winner on election night but still, the speed with which Global anchor Kevin Newman announced a Conservative win Monday night must have set some kind of record.

While being first in the news business is considered important by people in the news business, the swiftness of Global's declaration was a shock and, frankly, a bit deflating for those who like drama on election night to last more than 4 1/2 minutes.

Did Global's brave declaration show remarkable confidence in their new, never-before-seen Internet exit-polling tool orchestrated by pollster Darrell Bricker? Or was the result simply a no-brainer from the start?

Whatever, elections are horse races. First past the post wins.

Today another Global release claimed primacy in BC.

CanWest's Decision Canada joint national and regional election coverage was the leading broadcast in British Columbia last night as an average of 292,400 British Columbians tuned in to watch the Conservatives win the 2006 elections. Global was also the first network to call a Conservative government at 7:30 p.m. ET to audiences in the Maritimes, based on Ipsos-Reid poll results.

CTV also called today to let me know that I missed an interview with Brian Mulroney (from West Palm Beach) just after it was the first network to announce a Conservative minority government at 10 ET. That said, CTV has to be congratulated because, as one commenter on this blog noted, it was the only network that included a Blocster on its panel of opinionators. Overall, its coverage was no frills, no fuss, very fast-paced and very aggressive.

As for CBC, despite what was, to my mind anyway, far superior political analysis, it did get beat. Maybe it should forgo efforts to lure youth with George Stroumboulopolos and other gimmicks, and stick to its knitting: reporting and context. I don't think Canadians needed to hear from that collar-that-blowhards-like-a-man Don Cherry, nor did they need another promo for Rick Mercer's Tuesday Report, as great as he is. In any case, these guys were totally irrelevant as the evening wore on. It was the old political warhorses Ed Broadbent, Hugh Segal and John Manley who gave the telecast its weight.

Over on Global, Kevin Newman overtorqued the unsubstantiated suggestion that Paul Martin would not concede, practically rampaging through the studio as he tried to get support for this non-story which may have started with Mike Duffy and a BlackBerry on CTV. It's hard to confirm any of this without lining up all the telecasts, in synch, and running them at once. The show jolted out of the box with an emphasis on the Liberal scandals and lurched along from melodrama to melodrama, Fox News style, throughout the night. Or at least every time I flipped to it.

Two things about all this. I hate these releases because they take up way too much time to verify and cross-check and ensure that you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. And to what end? To satisfy TV network egos? The numbers don't necessarily speak to the quality of coverage anyway. People flip around. They search for news and views relevant to them. They look for results.

With all the networks looking ahead to licence renewals and other regulatory manoeuvrings -- and CBC now staring into a potential Conservative abyss -- maybe they just want blurbs to stick into their CRTC presentations showing how fantastic they are.

Or maybe I am just crabby from staying up so late at this computer.

Foreign matter

CBC has a round-up of some foreign media reaction to our election results here.

In covering the Tory minority victory, the New York Times described Harper as a "free-market economist who expressed strong support for Washington at the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq."

Here's the word from the Washington Post:

Harper also is seen as ideologically closer to the Bush administration than is the Liberal Party, which balked at joining the invasion of Iraq and refused to sign on to the U.S. plan to develop an antiballistic missile system for North America. Harper has suggested he might revisit the missile defense decision and has said Canada would reject the Kyoto accord on global warming, as the Bush administration has done.

But some Canadians said they believed Harper would still try to enact a conservative social agenda.

"I would do anything to stop the Conservatives," said Phillip Clarkson, 53, a costume designer in Toronto. "I am gay. I want to be married someday. And I want there to be the opportunity to do it."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's right-wing Opinion Journal seems disappointed:

...Canada Isn't a Red State Yet

The surprising thing about Canada's election yesterday was the extent to which the country's ruling Liberal Party was NOT decimated. Beset by scandal and running a sloppy campaign that never saw it come out on top in any single 24-hour-news cycle, the Liberals nevertheless won 31% of the vote, only about six points behind the winning Conservative Party.

And, from the conservative blogosphere south of the border, much of which is celebrating, there's this

Ok, so maybe not a major "sweep", but a huge beginning. Dont' let US liberals or the MSM delute this story, it's huge.

You are seeing the beginning of the death of liberalism world-wide. Not a minute or century too soon.

and this

Remember those liberals who said they were going to move to Canada after President Bush was elected to serve a second term? Assuming they kept their word, where will these disgruntled liberals go now that they have a conservative government in Canada now as well as in the US?

Speaking of cross-border defectors, David Frum of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute delivers this:

Unlike Martin, Stephen Harper truly does know the difference between one's neighbour and one's nation. His foreign policy will be guided not by his feelings about America's domestic policy, as Chretien and Martin too often allowed theirs to be, but by his assessment of Canada's enduring international interests. That's the way mature countries comport themselves. After years of childish self-indulgence under two old men, this young prime minister will at last lead Canada back to the grown-ups' table. That change will be welcomed in Washington. It should be even more strongly welcomed where it matters most: in Canada.

So far, Michael Moore has not weighed in.

The Knives of the Long Night

Don't lie on the sofa hiding under a blanket all alone tonight!  Step into my blog-o-den and share your hopes, dreams, fears and frustrations at the TV, radio, online and blog coverage of the election results.

I won't be live blogging because it's too hard to flip around and track all the channels while surfing the blogs while taking notes while moderating comments while writing while coping with the technology. (What's more, I may have to come up with a treeware column too, depending on what happens.)

So please don't leave me here all alone. I'm a-scared!!!

Here's the deal: This will be an open thread type of discussion. Post away, and I will be putting my two bits as we go along. I am especially interested in how the networks do their thing.

Two things to remember:

(1) Please just hit ''publish'' once. It may take a few minutes for me to see and approve your comment.

(2) You will have to hit your ''refresh'' button to see the latest comments.

Hope you can join in! 

Cherry on top

Some viewing notes for tonight's coverage:

CBC-TV is being criticized for juicing up its coverage with the likes of Don Cherry and Ron MacLean, local rapper Kardinal Offishall and Da Vinci's City Hall star Nicholas Campbell. But, at the same time, it's getting no credit for scoring the guys who may turn out to be the political panel MVPs of the night, Senator Hugh Segal, the former Mulroney-ite who helped shape the Harper campaign, outgoing NDP MP (and former party leader) Ed Broadbent and, last but not least, one of the guys being touted as a successor to Liberal leader Paul Martin, former finance minister and deputy PM John Manley. My guess is that anchor Peter Mansbridge will ensure that the more sober coverage dominates the show.

CTV has former Liberal cabinet minister and ex-Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin. Conservative campaign co-chair John Reynolds and former leader of the B.C. NDP, Joy MacPhail. Allan Gregg of the Strategic Counsel will be there defending his polls.

As for Global, among those on tap are pollster Darrell Bricker, former Liberal party president Stephen LeDrew and Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard.

Competition between CBC and CTV is really stiff. Just look at those full-page colour ads in all the papers today. You can bet that CBC does not want to get beaten tonight of all nights. Not just in the ratings, which are crucial, but also in terms of who calls the election first.

I have watched these things professionally for years and I can tell you this: Whether they admit it or not, the networks like to boast about who was the first to accurately call the winner.

Anyway, if it turns out that we have to wait until the last vote is counted on Vancouver Island for the results, even I may be grateful for Don Cherry's musings.

Zoned out

Further to my post about that pesky Section 329 of Canada's Elections Act, which news organizations fought because it's a pain and throwback to a paleolitic media era ...

(To review: No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district.)

Turns out cable and satellite companies must block signals all over the country. So, for those of us with digital TV that gives us timeshifting capabilities, that means no early results, say, from the east coast broadcasts. That takes care of that.

But what about the Internets, all you sages of the courts?

A couple of Canadian bloggers have indicated to me that they will defy the ban. Maybe they figure they're small fry and won't end up blogging from behind bars as Calgary Grit fears he will? They had better watch out because Tod Maffin will be keeping tabs on the outlaws.

Even if they do chicken out, at least one U.S.-based blogger -- who shall remain nameless because I am not interested in going on the Martha Stewart spa plan myself -- plans to get the jump on the Canadian media, as he did last spring during the Gomery Commission.

Makes the whole ban even more difficult to enforce -- if not a total joke.

Ooops! It's not a joke! Not! Not! It's a fine Canadian law that we should all follow and respect. Run it up the flagpole and salute it.

So what's the alternative?

Make people in the west get up at the crack of dawn to vote so all polls close at the exact same time. But then we'd hear about how Westerners feel irrelevant because the elections are already decided in the east and yadda yadda.

It just never ends, does it?

UPPITY DATE: Lawyer guy Rob Hyndman has more. Some of you potential lawbreakers might want to get his card.

OUR DATE TONIGHT: Note that I will be moderating all comments tonight and deleting or postponing the approval of any or all that break this ban before 10 p.m. Toronto time. I don't care how much I can afford to lose 10 pounds.