This is not a criticism of the craft of journalism.
It merely is a reflection, triggered by the role media scrutiny, impatience and agenda-setting have played in the demise of Stockwell Day and likely the Canadian Alliance as an effective alternative to the Liberals.
Day as a potential national political leadership candidate last year was a creation of media desperate for an alternative to what they saw as the tired and arrogant Liberals. He was telegenic, muscular, provincially experienced, vaguely bilingual and camera friendly.
Now, he is federally inexperienced, shallow, uneducated in the nuances of complicated national politics, barely functional in French and untelegenic. To the camera, he is a deer in the headlights.
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Modern media have an insatiable appetite for breaking stories, conflict, hypocrisy, newness and wounded animals.
Last year, Day benefited from those media personality traits. This year, they have killed him, fuelled by his own inexperience and ineptitude.
In an earlier age with less immediate and aggressive media coverage, would he have had time to learn on the job, gain experience and emerge as a leader?
Perhaps, although Day’s lack of judgment, peculiar leadership style, lack of national experience and a seeming inability to learn from his gaffes may have doomed him in any age. It simply is happening faster now.
Still, it seems clear that the media demand for instant answers and rapid developments, not to mention camera-friendly faces, has changed the national political discussion.
Had this culture of media aggression and immediacy been around though history, it would be a different country.
Canada would not have been created in 1867 if the Fathers of Confederation had been subjected to the intense media demand for instant answers that today’s politicians face.
“Mr. Macdonald, aren’t you selling out to the French? Aren’t you a drunk? Mr. Cartier, won’t the French be lost in the English Canadian sea? Mr. Tupper, Mr. Tilley, won’t the Maritimes lose their status within Canada?”
Tonight at 6 on CBC: The cost of Confederation. Why the people, business, shipyard workers and the churches don’t want it.
Tomorrow night, the poll results: Why Macdonald’s scheme is doomed to fail.
Or imagine wall-to-wall coverage of the 1919 Liberal leadership convention, Canada’s first true political leadership spectacle.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier was dead.
William Lyon Mackenzie King, now universally feted as Canada’s greatest prime minister but then a political loser denounced by contemporaries as an odious, oily character with bad breath, was the main contender to replace the saint.
He turned out to be the master of nuance and delay, leading Canada through tumultuous change and a war while healing the Liberals’ most brutal schism between French and English in 1919-21.
But at the time?
Mr. King, didn’t you lose your seat in 1911 and leave the country to work for American millionaires fighting unions? Didn’t you oppose conscription in 1917 when Canada needed soldiers? Why won’t you take a position?
Under the glare, he would have been toast. Like Stockwell Day.
