Monthly Archives: October 2008

Crunching the prediction numbers

As the results finally become known in all 308 ridings (some recounts may occur, but none were apparently close enough to qualify for an automatic recount), the two big seat-by-seat projection websites did a self-analysis to see how they did:

DemocraticSPACE got 25 of 308 ridings wrong, for a 91.9% accuracy rate

Election Prediction got 27 ridings wrong, for a 91.2% accuracy rate

Those sound like impressive numbers, but I wondered how significant that is when so little changed. They both got Edmonton Strathcona wrong, for example, but then again so did all the pundits. They also didn’t predict three seats shifting from the Liberals to Conservatives in New Brunswick.

Looking at the election results (Wikipedia has a riding-by-riding breakdown on one page), I see that the incumbent (or incumbent’s party) won in all but 41 ridings. So if you blindly picked the incumbent to win in all 308 ridings, you’d have an 86.7% accuracy rate.

That makes 91% sound a lot less impressive.

Then again, in an election where only 25 of 308 winners got more than half the vote, predicting anything is a throw of the dice.

Interesting results when you look deep

It was boring, yet fascinating. The big picture didn’t change much, with the Conservatives still just below majority territory, then the Liberals, Bloc, NDP and two independents. But looking at the individual regions, plenty of stories to be told:

I’m sure I missed some other interesting local stories. Feel free to comment below.

Election coverage tonight: 9:30 on TV, 10 online

Thanks to Elections Canada rules about not divulging the outcome of a vote to a region that is still voting, news outlets will have to be careful about their results tonight. That means that CBC Newsworld and other national news networks won’t be providing results until 9:30pm (ET), when polls close in the Eastern, Central and Mountain time zones, and these networks will be blacked out in British Columbia and Yukon until their polls close a half hour later.

For online, unless news outlets want to put trust in geoblocking services, expect no results until 10 p.m., when all the polls are closed and there are no restrictions on broadcasting. This will be a full three hours after the polls close in Newfoundland.

Of course, don’t expect everyone to play by the rules. Some people who are either clueless about the law or unclear on how it applies will no doubt be leaking information early.

I’d be looking at that, plus live-blogging coverage of the vote and analyzing news websites as the results come in, but I’m working tonight as one of the election copy editors. Feel free to use the comments section as a forum to point out anything you notice.

If I notice something late tonight or tomorrow I’ll post it then.

On the picket line

Employees carry signs outside 1010 Ste. Catherine St. W.

Employees carry signs outside 1010 Ste. Catherine St. W.

As Canadians went to the polls today, editorial, advertising and reader service employees at the Gazette staged a lunch-hour information picket line, carrying signs and handing out leaflets explaining the situation to passers-by. The union, which is negotiating with management for a new contract (the previous one expired June 1), received a strong strike mandate but has so far not exercised it. Conciliation talks are scheduled for next week.

Journalists and other Gazette employees hold picket signs to attract public attention.

Journalists and other Gazette employees hold picket signs to attract public attention.

Turnout was pretty good considering there are less than 200 members affected (this includes the entire editorial department). Picket signs surrounded the building on all four sides for about an hour and a half.

Irwin Block gets interviewed by the radio

Union vice-president Irwin Block gets interviewed by a radio reporter. His T-shirt reads "The Gazette is Montreal, not Winnipeg."

Media coverage was very light, considering there’s this whole election thing is going on (have you voted yet?) and all hands on deck fanned out to swing ridings. But a radio reporter and photographer showed up, so you might see a tiny bit of coverage.

The key, though, is that this is just the beginning of the union’s public information campaign (should such a campaign become necessary).

Reporter William Marsden hands an information leaflet to a bus driver

Reporter William Marsden hands an information leaflet to a bus driver

Roberto Rocha: Communist hippie

Roberto Rocha: Communist hippie

Meanwhile, The Link covers the Gazette labour conflict and byline strike, and has an editorial which posits that in the new digital age, quality of journalism becomes key and wire copy doesn’t cut it anymore.

And La Presse also covers the Gazette today, focusing on the Canwest student scab situation. It includes a new explanation from Canwest, that the student freelancers would be needed mainly to provide material to other newspapers to compensate for the Gazette loss (Canwest has no Montreal bureau and relies on Gazette copy for news from Canada’s second-largest city). Of course, such articles would also be available to The Gazette.

UPDATE: Michel Dumais looks at the recent labour action around Canadian newspapers, and Le Devoir has an adorable photo of Phil Authier.

UPDATE (Oct. 16): Hour and Mirror both mention The Gazette’s union issues in their editions this week. Hour has a really good article by Jamie O’Meara arguing against the outsourcing of Gazette jobs (and includes one of my photos to illustrate it). Mirror makes The Gazette its insect of the week for Canwest’s attempts to recruit student scab labour.

Two Gazette legends exposed

In the video above, editorial cartoonist Terry Mosher (Aislin) goes behind the scenes as he draws five cartoons of the federal party leaders as sports-themed bobbleheads (you can see the cartoons on the Viewpoints page).

Meanwhile, CBC interviews Red Fisher, who has been covering the Canadiens since the dawn of time.

One day I hope to be able to meet them, and be referred to as something beyond “that kid over there.” But that’s years away.

Hockey Night is dead. Long live RDS

So there you go. CBC’s Hockey Anthem Challenge winner, out of almost 15,000 entries submitted, is Colin Oberst’s Canadian Gold. The one with the bagpipes. Hockey Night in Canada made a big thing about it, with loud congratulations from Don Cherry. And Oberst takes home a $100,000 cheque.

UPDATE: CBC has posted the announcement, new theme and a season intro montage in Quicktime format.

With the new theme comes new intro graphics as well. This season, rather than go the classic route of showing hits, goals and saves, CBC has gotten its computer graphics department on overdrive, recreating classic moves so they could look at them from impossible angles (even simulating Bobby Orr’s Stanley Cup-winning goal, which created the best sports photo of all time). Unfortunately, this kind of computer animation still has a long way to go, and it just ends up looking like they’re showing scenes from EA’s NHL 09 video game.

Meanwhile, on RDS, the original Hockey Theme reigns. They paid a lot more for it, and their re-recording doesn’t sound as good as the most recent CBC version, but it still sounds better. It’s still the one with that special place in our hearts.

Real Canadiens fans have been watching RDS for years now. Even Leafs fans have moved to TSN or Rogers SportsNet. Many people I know turn to CBC to watch the opening theme and switch to RDS for the play-by-play.

Now, with the hockey theme on RDS, does Hockey Night in Canada have any purpose anymore?

Was that supposed to be French?

To the public announcer at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto,

You should be fired. Like, immediately.

Or am I being too demanding in suggesting that someone who works as a public announcer at a hockey game should be able to speak both of Canada’s official languages?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that there were bilingual announcements tonight, but that mockery of the langue de Molière brings shame upon a city that you’d think couldn’t look worse in the eyes of the rest of the country.

P.S. For those watching tonight’s Habs/Leafs matchup, Mike Boone has his liveblog at Habs Inside/Out.

TQS’s bare-bones “news”cast

So everyone Richard Therrien has been talking about the new half-hour weekend newscast that premiered on TQS tonight. So I decided to take a gander.

TQS, you’ll recall, essentially shut down its news operation after it couldn’t find a buyer and decided that amputation was the best way to stop the bleeding. After the CRTC pointed out that providing news and information programming was a condition of license, the two fought it out and CRTC caved, allowing joke newscasts of a few minutes a day.

What we’re left with is this piece of utter garbage produced by an outfit called ADN5 (actually @DN5, cause that kind of typography is cooler).

Here’s the skinny:

  • The “studio” is just some woman standing in front of a green screen, which replaces it with a white background and “1730” going round and round in the background.
  • Most of the news is in the form of voice-overs and B-roll, stretched to the point where it becomes awkward. These things work for 10-second briefs, but not minute-long reports. And the lack of any text on screen only makes it worse.
  • There are standard news packages about fluff local news, one from each of the regions that TQS is supposed to cover: Saguenay, Quebec City, Trois Rivières, Sherbrooke and Montreal.
  • The letters “TQS” are not spoken during the newscast. I’m not quite sure why this is (does ADN5 plan to sell this crap to other media?). The reporters seem not to know whether to sign off their reports with “ADN5”, just their names, or nothing at all.
  • Have you ever been annoyed by the sound of someone tapping their fingers on a table? You know, that sound where all four fingers hit the table in succession, starting with the pinky and working its way up? This newscast seems to be in love with this sound, and uses it any time a super comes up to identify someone during a report. It’s distracting and pointless, but I guess someone thought it sounded cool.

I wish there was something good I could say about it. It could have been much worse. At least it wasn’t a trainwreck.

And it makes Global Quebec’s newscast look professional by comparison.

Tories win again in newspaper endorsements

In 2006, with the central issue of the vote being the sponsorship scandal (or at least that was what the media was telling us was the central issue), many newspapers who had previously (but begrudgingly) endorsed the Liberal Party switched sides and said the Conservatives deserve a chance to govern.

Most newspapers in the Canwest, Sun and Gesca chains backed the Tories, as did the Globe and Mail. The two main dissenters were the Toronto Star, which continued to support the Liberals, and Le Devoir, which steadfastly stood behind the Bloc Québécois.

This year, not much has changed, except for the reasons behind the endorsements. Talk of Gomery, Gagliano and Guité has been replaced by acknowledgments of apologies and discussions of steady hands that can guide us through economic difficulties.

Here’s how it breaks down this time:

Endorsing the Conservatives

The National Post, unsurprisingly, hits on just about all of the conservative talking points in endorsing a Conservative Party majority. Taxes, national defence, Canada-U.S. relations, and the avoidance of “large-scale Trudeauvian social-engineering schemes” (i.e. health care, education and other spending) and having no plan for the environment that might adversely affect the economy. It talks about Harper’s management of “the Quebec file,” which as a Quebecer I find somewhat patronizing.

The Globe and Mail takes a softer approach, endorsing Harper but also giving a list of demands for the next term. Though it doesn’t specifically say Harper should lead a minority government, it suggests that this is inevitable, and seems to be comfortable with that. Again, lots of talk about steadyhandedness and how Dion is “not a leader,” a phrase right out of the Tory handbook. The Globe also, laudably, defended its endorsement to readers in a live Q&A session. Both pages also include links to previous endorsements, which other newspaper websites either forgot or were too lazy to do.

The Winnipeg Free Press spreads the blame around, and in fact talks about Harper’s failings at length before turning around and endorsing the Conservatives. The reasons for this aren’t particularly clear, but seem to have to do with Harper’s steady hand on the economy. It also suggests that a Harper win would cause some major shift in Canada’s political system, with Dion getting kicked out as leader, the left deciding to unite and maybe the Conservatives splitting into two parties. I’m not sure what they’ve been smoking, but that’s a pretty bold prediction.

The Ottawa Citizen‘s endorsement is mainly about respecting Harper for formal apologies in the House and his decision not to go to Bejing. Interestingly, it also endorses the Liberal Green Shift plan, and suggests that Harper essentially steal it and use it to fill the giant green gap in the Conservative Party platform. I think this part might touch a lot of Canadians who don’t think Dion should be prime minister but who don’t want the Green Shift idea (taxing carbon and offsetting it with other tax cuts) to die with Dion’s political career.

The Toronto Sun and the Calgary Sun and the Winnipeg Sun run identical national editorials prepared by Sun Media, ridding everyone of any suggestion that these newspapers have some sort of editorial autonomy. The piece itself describes Harper as a strong leader, and describes Dion’s Green Shift as “inexplicable” (really? I figured it out pretty quickly), but also makes mention of the fact that Harper has no environmental plan to speak of.

The Ottawa Sun at least writes its own editorial endorsing Harper, for much of the same reasons, and includes the same criticisms. It declares this to be the most important election in recent times, which I think is a bit of a stretch.

The Edmonton Sun also writes its own editorial, this one from an Alberta perspective. It endorses Harper, while blasting the Conservatives for ignoring a province whose seats are all in the bag for them already. It also makes it clear that they ain’t gonna let no carbon tax prevent them from pollutin’ whatever they want.

The Edmonton Journal says Harper is better on the economy and Afghanistan, but also suggests that if Alberta ridings were more competitive, the Conservatives might not ignore them as much as they are currently.

The Calgary Herald focuses mostly on foreign policy and the economy, with mention of Harper’s record on China, Gaza, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

The Vancouver Sun (which, unlike the other Suns, is owned by Canwest) focuses on the economy (see a trend here?), and specifically endorses a majority Conservative government.

The Vancouver Province (also owned by Canwest) says the Tories need more B.C. representation, and the answer to an economic crisis is not more taxes, as they say the Liberals and NDP would institute.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Record is all-economy, and comes out strong for Harper. It criticizes Dion’s Green Shift, calling it a “leap of faith” that we can’t afford in tough economic times. (For all the criticisms of the Green Shift, this one actually makes sense – its weak point is that it’s unpredictable how the market will react.) It also says that there hasn’t been any evidence of a Tory hidden agenda. Of course, the Conservatives haven’t had a majority government yet, and there have been Tory threats to arts funding and abortion rights.

My own newspaper, The Gazette (which didn’t consult me before making its endorsement), talks a bit about how Conservative policy is best but focuses mainly on telling people to cast ballots strategically to defeat the Bloc. Since the Bloc has no hope of being in power, and sovereignty is not on our doorstep, it seems a strange position to take. The big question is whether the Tories will have a majority or minority government, and lumping the federalist parties together ignores that issue. In fact, if anything I’d think many Quebecers are for the first time considering not voting strategically for this very reason. At the end, it also endorses individual candidates in Montreal-area ridings, basically naming all the star candidates (with Gilles Duceppe being the notable exception): Dion, Michael Fortier (C), Thomas Mulcair (NDP), Irwin Cotler (L), Marc Garneau (L), and Justin Trudeau (L).

Finally, The Economist, which sees the need to meddle in our affairs, endorse the Conservatives, but also Dion’s Green Shift (or some form thereof), saying Harper’s dismissal of a carbon tax shows a lack of leadership. The magazine also, notably, says that a minority Conservative government is probably the best bet for Canada.

Endorsing the Liberals

The Toronto Star just doesn’t know when to quit them. Canada’s liberal voice spends much of its endorsement blasting Harper with the usual left-wing talking points, using scary terms like “neo-conservative.” Its endorsement of Dion’s leadership abilities is weak at best, and it talks about the Liberal team to make up for it. The Green Shift, of course, also gets lauded, as the only Liberal platform point anyone can recite from memory.

Endorsing the Bloc Québécois

Le Devoir‘s endorsement of the Bloc, a foregone conclusion for about a decade now, almost forgets to talk about the party or its leader. It spends most of its time attacking the Liberals and Conservatives on their many mistakes. When it comes down to giving people a reason to vote for the Bloc, it gives the usual vague point about how the Bloc represents the interests of Quebec first, without giving any supporting evidence that they have done so.

No endorsement

La Presse, which signs all its editorials and endorsed the Conservatives last time, has taken the cowardly populist position that no party is good enough to lead this country. It rakes the Liberals and Conservatives, though André Pratte points out that Dion’s campaign wasn’t as awful as had been predicted by everyone but him. Instead of endorsing a national party, the editorial suggests people look at the individual candidates in their riding and choose the one which best represents their interests. It doesn’t name any specific names.

The Victoria Times-Colonist breaks from the Canwest bloc by refusing to endorse a candidate, with the cliché statement that it’s the voters who should decide. It then goes around stating the obvious (Dion can’t speak English very well, Layton’s chances of becoming PM are slim).

Have I missed any? Link to others (big media or small) you find in comments below.

But are they biased?

Newspaper endorsements are worth the paper they’re printed on, and usually only given attention by the candidates they endorse. Certainly Stephen Harper and the Conservatives will make a point of all the endorsements they’ve received in order to reassure voters that they’re not evil or scary.

But the thing with these endorsements is that they’re written by owners and managers of large newspapers, who are usually quite well-off. They’re worried about the economy, but not about whether they’ll be able to put food on their table. They care about the price of a car, but not the price of a bus ticket. They’re not so out of touch that they don’t know what the price of milk is at the grocery store, but there’s clearly a bias here. Opinion polls put the Conservatives in the lead, but still well below 50%, meaning most Canadians don’t support the party.

I don’t know if there’s an easy solution to this. Perhaps newspapers should take votes of all their staff, or stop endorsing candidates. Or just leave everything to me.

UPDATE: J-Source points to a piece by the Star’s public editor about the nature of newspaper endorsements.

Journalism, politics sink together to a new low

I was busy dealing with real news tonight, so I completely missed the broohaha over this incident with Stéphane Dion and ATV News.

For those who haven’t heard of it, you’re lucky to have limited exposure to the echo chamber of political gossip reporting. Here’s the deal: ATV (an Atlantic TV network owned by CTV and rebranded CTV Atlantic) had Stéphane Dion on for an on-camera but pre-taped interview. Host Steve Murphy asked Dion a question about what he’d do about the economy if he was prime minister today, and Dion started answering before realizing he didn’t quite understand the question. It was an awkward exchange with a few false starts.

Dion asked if they could re-start the interview, and Murphy agreed. Murphy also, according to CTV, “indicated” that the bad part of the interview would not be aired.

Except later, after the interview, people at the network huddled and decided to go back on their word and air the outtakes, deeming them to have some news value.

Thanks to Stephen Harper’s decision to devote a whole press conference to this “gaffe,” it’s been analyzed from all angles:

I don’t have much to add, so I’ll keep it brief:

  • CTV’s transgression was not a breach of journalistic ethics. There was no promise of confidentiality, no pre-agreement, and no information was gained through deception. Murphy did, however, go back on his word by airing the outtakes after he “indicated” he wouldn’t.
  • Dion’s campaign is right when they say the purpose of airing this was to embarrass Dion. It’s a secret every journalist keeps, even to the point of deceiving ourselves. Political campaigns so ruthlessly control the narrative, that latching on to something they don’t want you to talk about gives us a thrill. It’s not that CTV is biased against Dion. It’s simply biased against politicians and in favour of scandal.
  • CTV wasted minutes of airtime putting this interview out there. This time could have been spent on news, and the interview outtakes posted to a blog somewhere. Had that happened, we would not be discussing journalistic ethics here, but the clip would have gotten just as much traction online.
  • The clip has little news value. It shows that Dion is a logical thinker, perhaps to a fault, in trying to wrap himself around the exact hypothetical situation. But that’s not why CTV chose to air it. The fact that they did not specify what news value it contained is a good indication that there was none.
  • Some have mentioned that Dion has a hearing problem and that may be related. It’s not. The question was clear and the room was quiet. It was a logical comprehension question, mixed in with some grammar issues.

Conclusion: Steve Murphy and his cohorts at ATV are douches, and Stéphane Dion a human francophone who can be annoyingly professorial at times. And it’s just a matter of time before someone unearths an interview outtake of Stephen Harper that makes him look bad.

Now can we get back to the issues?

UPDATE (Oct. 24): J-Source looks back on this story with some interesting background on what happened at ATV and CTV News offices.

Pat’s back; the new RDS; Hockey special section

Gazette Habs beat writer Pat Hickey, who disappeared for a month to get his knee replaced, is back in time for the beginning of the regular season (this is how hardcore he is – he schedules major surgery around the Canadiens’ playing schedule). His first Standing Pat column back on the beat explains his recovery process and mentions the sympathy he now feels for athletes who have to keep themselves in shape.

Pat also participates in the first episode of the Habs Inside/Out PuckCast, which returns for a third season.

Meanwhile on another page, Stephanie Myles (who with Dave Stubbs has been covering the Canadiens in Hickey’s absence) has a feature on the RDS guys, Pierre Houde and Benoit Brunet, the latter replacing Yvon Pedneault as the play-by-play analyst. Near the end it goes into Pedneault’s dismissal:

But both Houde and Brunet said they were surprised Pedneault got the axe.

“I didn’t know it was in RDS’s plans,” Houde said. “That’s what’s happy and sad about our line of work, we’re all freelance workers who work together. And as Benoît has said, it’s like a hockey team. Your linemate is traded, or retires, or he becomes a free agent. You stay and work with someone new.”

Given the superhuman ratings during last year’s playoff run – close to 3 million viewers – Brunet also didn’t see the decision on Pedneault coming.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” he said. “But the phone rang. I always said I’ll wait, and when they give me the sign I’ll be there. It happened this year. I was surprised.”

The article also goes in depth about technical and programming changes for the new season.

Myles Someone who may or may not be Myles, what with this byline strikyness, also writes a sidebar about anglo Canadiens fans watching French broadcasts (and vice versa).

Finally, today is the first appearance of The Gazette’s new roughly-monthly Hockey Inside/Out special section, which includes in-depth coverage of the advertising goldmine very popular Canadiens. Eight of them will be produced over the coming centennial season.

The special section includes an article from Mike Boone on how the Habs Inside/Out site was born (it was an idea of Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips), as well as the usual season-preview fare.