Media

Stéphane Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on December 2nd 2006. Few people expected his victory. He arrived at the Montreal leadership convention as the fourth placed candidate with only sixteen percent of elected delegates and his campaign spent a million dollars less than Bob Rae’s. On top of that, his convention speech ran over time and his microphone was cut off before he reached the end.

Dion won, it turned out, by being everyone’s second choice. Front-runner Michael Ignatieff was polarizing while Bob Rae was considered dead in Ontario. Stéphane Dion was a candidate everyone could live with. He was also a candidate delegates could feel proud voting for, because his personality stronger morally than politically. Choosing Dion was a slap in the face to all those like Jack Layton who had claimed a few months earlier that Dion was "a man of principle and conviction and therefore almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal party."

Stéphane Dion was not the first choice of Liberal MPs, the majority of whom supported Michael Ignatieff. His strongest supporters in the months leading up to the Montreal leadership convention were in the Press. Dion was officially endorsed by the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail, who described him in an editorial as “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation.” Newspapers who chose other candidates all recognized his courage and integrity. Even Le Devoir, a Québec paper with sovereigntist leanings, wrote that “Dion is the candidate who, in the course of the leadership race, made among the strongest contribution of ideas.” Their only reason for choosing Michael Ignatieff over him was his sympathy to Québec nationalism.

In late January 2007, less than two months after Stéphane Dion’s leadership victory, the Conservative Party rolled out a series of now infamous attack ads portraying Dion as a weak leader. The ads featured clips of Michael Ignatieff and Ken Dryden criticizing their party’s environmental record in a leadership debate. Dion was shown answering “This is unfair!” and “Do you think its easy to make priorities?” The ads were unfavourably received. A Harris-Decima poll published on February 7th at the end of the ad blitz showed that fifty-nine percent of Canadians who had seen the ads found them unfair, while only twenty-two percent found them fair. The media were unanimous in their criticism. Even journalists at the National Post found the ads morally questionable.

Polling agencies detected a small shift in voting intentions from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the aftermath of the campaign. Nanos Research and Harris-Decima put the two parties in a statistical tie, while Strategic Counsel gave the Conservatives a slight lead. However, considering that the nearest confidence vote was at least a month away and that the Liberal Party still enjoyed higher levels of support than in the last election, if would have been difficult, at the time, to call the negative advertising campaign a success.

It turned out that the real effect of the ads was to redefine Stéphane Dion for the media. In a few short weeks, he went from being “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation” to a weak intellectual unable to lead his party. The Conservatives succeeded at creating a new Stéphane Dion that had little to do with the one who had been in politics for the previous ten years. Journalists, obviously, claimed that Dion had been redefined in the eyes of Canadian, but the public opinion polls mentioned above clearly demonstrate that they were the only ones whose opinion had been swayed.

From then on, everything Dion did was reported through the lens of “weakness” and “lack of leadership”. His refusal to make personal attacks in Question Period became a sign of his inability to lead. His attempts to put forward progressive public policy for debate, as he did with the 30-50 plan against poverty, were dismissed by the media as “too intellectual” and “difficult for average Canadians to understand”. Journalists started finding problems that no one had ever considered before. For instance, they decided that Canadians could no longer understand his English, even though they had managed fine in the ten years he spent as a cabinet minister. When Dion he published his Green Shift, that economists largely applauded, he was, predictably, decapitated.

All that time, Stephen Harper was acting like a bully and running into situations that seriously put in question his morality. Everyday, in Question Period, his party handpicked ministers to dodge questions and insult opposition members. In the short slot before Question Period reserved for MP statements about issues affecting their riding, Conservative backbenchers were instructed to read vicious statements about Dion to destabilise him. In May 2007, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had given all its MP chairing House of Commons Committees a 200 page handbook on obstructing and manipulating proceedings.

Yet none of these things did him much harm to Stephen Harper’s public image. Actually, his viciousness in the House of Commons, and, most strangely, his well documented control over the media, seemed to contribute to his image of “competence” and “strength”. Even when Conservative Party headquarters were raided by the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada, the media seemed to conclude that the any illegal scheme only highlighted the Prime Minister’s strategic intelligence and desire to win.

The hypocrisy is startling. Journalists never miss an opportunity to complain about demagoguery, the lack of decorum in the House of Commons, the paucity of intelligent political debate and the lack of a long term vision in government. Yet when the Conservative Party releases negative ads, they are the first to fall for them. When Stéphane Dion, the one politician who meets all their moral criteria, is elected Liberal Leader, rather than praising him and supporting him, they decide that Canadians will not understand him.

When Steven Harper, who is exactly the type of politician journalists claim to hate, acts like a bully in the House of Commons, they simply decide that it’s just part of his driven, strong personality. When his party’s shifty financing mechanisms are picked up by Elections Canada, or when Donna Cadman, one of his candidates, claims that his party offered a one million dollar bribe to an MP, journalists decide that these issues just demonstrate of Harper’s Machiavellian strategic intelligence.

The fact is that those in the media can say whatever they want. If they want Stéphane Dion to be seen as an aloof academic, they can claim that “Canadians have a hard time understanding him”. If they want Stephen Harper to be seen as an unethical politician, they can say that “Canadians find his posturing extremely distasteful” or “Canadians won’t be impressed by this blatant show of partisanship”. Journalists never know what Canadians are thinking, unless they use scientific opinion polls. Usually, they simply, speculate on what the public believes as if it were fact, and end up influencing the public.

It is clear that the media have a tremendous influence on the way the public interprets political events. On the night of the last election, a University professor actually demonstrated on Radio-Canada that the media weight of the various party leaders was almost identical to the score they received.

Since the media have such a large political impact, they also have a duty to cover politics in a morally right way. They should never let politicians get away with dishonourable behaviour in the House of Commons. They should never let budgets that are condemned by all economists be defined by spin doctors. They should work to explain to Canadians complicated political measures, rather than complain about the “30 second modern media culture” that they are themselves responsible for. The media, at the moment, claims to want honourable, sincere and cerebral politicians, but the way they cover politics encourages demagoguery. They are failing us.