I ONCE heard journalist Gwynn Dyer claim that the media are singularly responsible for the spread of democracy across the world. He said tyrannies fall when the people know their options and know what’s really going on.
That might be so, but only when the media actually tell us what the options are. In that sense democracy has had a rough go the last six weeks.
Like it or not, during an election every public mention of a party or candidate is a promotion or an attack. There isn’t much political “news” in the usual sense.
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At those times the media have a particular responsibility to be objective and fair-handed. We can only make an informed choice among all the options if the media provides equal national coverage for all parties that have fielded candidates across the country and equal local coverage for all candidates in each region.
But it hasn’t happened in my city. I did a quick personal survey. The day following the French language debate, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe or the Bloc were mentioned on the front page of my local newspaper five times. Layton or the NDP came up nine times, Harper or the Conservatives 22 times and Martin or the Liberals 28 times.
After the English language debate, the Liberals got 15 mentions, the Conservatives 16, the NDP five and the Bloc three.
One might assume from the coverage that the NDP and Bloc had little to say, but it seemed to me that their participation was as vigorous and extensive as the others.
Even more disturbing is the behaviour of the media’s watchdogs. McGill’s Observatory on Media and Public Policy has been monitoring election coverage since before the writ was dropped. It has counted the amount of negative or positive coverage in the media and the key issues parties have raised. In all its analysis there is only one mention of Jack Layton and the NDP, none of Duceppe or the Bloc. This is from a university group located in Quebec. And the Green party, which has gathered enough popular support to field candidates in every Canadian riding, hasn’t even shown up on that or the media’s radar. It’s disgraceful.
Even if one allowed the media to cover only the parties most interesting to Canadians, that would mean the NDP, Conservatives and Liberals ought to receive equal billing in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. That certainly hasn’t happened.
How do we account for such abysmal reporting? Perhaps journalists assume that since all Canadian federal governments have been Liberal or Conservative (other than Borden’s flirtation with the Unionists in 1917-20) those are the only real possibilities for our future.
I’d like to decide that myself. It is our job, not the media’s, to decide which of the solutions being offered for Canada’s problems might work.
Unfortunately their coverage robbed us of that opportunity. Media reporting becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. By covering primarily the two largest parties, the media virtually insures that one of them will form the next government. They end up functioning as PR firms for the Grits and Tories.
Once every five years in Canada we get to decide who will dictate life for us. That’s as close as we get to the “rule of the people.” To have that slim choice dramatically reduced by the media to the largest parties and most flamboyant candidates makes a mockery of democracy.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
