Election Coverage

Even before this's Spring's Canadian election campaign officially kicked of a variety of media outlets started framing the campaign as a competition between various parties. While this horse race/game frame makes election coverage easier for media outlets, it is of limited utility for voters, particularly because it focuses on the back and forth of partisan debate and various campaign strategies instead of anything that is actually substantive.

Another problem with much of the media coverage that I have seen since the beginning of this campaign period is that it cedes a huge amount of control to the party holding the event that is being covered. It seems that what is happening is that parties are holding 'events' and inviting journalists and then getting coverage of these events and having some component of their message transmitted to the public as a consequence.

This practice seems particularly important when events are held that are not open to the public and serve as nothing but an excuse for coverage in the coming new cycles. It is particularly troubling that the fact that these are partisan get-togethers, in many cases, is not prominent in the coverage of these events. An observer would not necessarily know that these events were either just for the press or partisans and the press.

The more I think about these events the more I think that the media should consider not covering events that are not open to the public. Something seems wrong about the fact that a party can campaign in a way that is so removed from public scrutiny. Not only does a stacked audience allow a misleading sense of the popularity of the proposals to be presented, but it also allows politicians a way of avoiding engaging with the public about matters of the campaign. How is an active and informed voter really supposed to get a sense of a party leader through nothing more than a snippet in the media coverage of an event?

So I guess my point would be that many media outlets are complicit in creating a style of campaigning that allows politicians to largely avoid speaking to a mass audience. Media outlets are also helping parties get their message out without ever having to present it before voters. If media outlets decided to step up and somewhat collectively agree to not cover such things I think a great service would be done for public discourse in Canada. No longer would newscasts just reiterate the key points of a speech given by a political figure earlier in the day.

Of course this is unlikely to happen. Media outlets will continue to go to party events that present the leader or a candidate in the way that the party wants that person presented because they want to fill space with election coverage. Such a change would also mean that the media would actually have to do a little work when figuring out which events to attend - no longer could they just jump on a campaign bus or plane and file reports from each stop.

Hopefully at least a little of this makes sense.