Tom Popyk ( who is also running an election blog)just posted this interesting tidbit up on the CAJ-List:
McGill University's Observatory on Media and Public Policy is tracking news coverage and bias [for the June 28, 2004 Canadian federal election]:
“Each day, a team of coders will scrutinize the main news sections of the Globe and Mail, National Post,
Toronto Star, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun, La Presse and Le Devoir. They will note all articles relating to federal politics, including reportage, analysis, opinion, and editorials. This content will be coded for mentions of issues, parties, and leaders, as well as positive or negative (or neutral) tone. The precedence of these mentions and their prominence within the paper will also be recorded, along with other factors.
The Globe and Mail is analyzing the raw data, and generating graphics, as part of its coverage.
But OMPP is also posting daily roundtable discussions of the data, featuring participants like: Barry Cooperr (U. of Calgary), Donna Logan, (Director UBC Graduate School of Journalism); Lydia Miljan, (U. of Windsor), Hugh Segal, Michel Vastel (Columnist, Le Soleil), William Watson (McGill University), Paul Wells (Columnist, Macleans).
I've got a couple of methodological nit-picks with the Observatory's mission.
First: The Observatory is watching the trends of seven daily newspapers and will try to extrapolate from that survey some ideas about the media's influence on the current election. Well, there's only roughly a million Canadians watching CTV National News every night. Global National, depending on the night, is clocking real close to 900,000 viewers a night. And between its national and local radio and television programming, CBC is about as dominant a voice as it gets when it comes to media in this country. So if you were serious about wanting to study media bias and the election, why wouldn't you include broadcasters? (And who cares about Le Devoir? Do they even sell 100,000 papers any day of the week? Why not track TVA instead or Le Journal de Montreal?)
Surely the media observers at McGill can't have missed all the studies that indicate that fewer and fewer Canadians get their news from newspapers.
Second: There's that panel. Wow. Talk about the establishment elite talking about themselves. Cooper, Miljan, Segal, Watson, and Wells are all former or current National Post/Fraser Institute/conservative commentators. That's five out of seven (and I don't know Donna Logan or Michel Vastel's work well enough to put them in a cubbyhole) all coming from or associated with one very blue side of the political spectrum.
If you were running an “Observatory” on media and politics — wouldn't it make sense to have a panel that might include someone — anyone! — from one of the four provinces east of Quebec? Where's the perspective from the independent and alternative media? How about media unions?
(And why Cooper and Watson? Cooper is a historian/political scientist and Watson is an economist. Both of those are great occupations if you want to be a columnist but they're lousy qualifications if you want to be a media critic. )
In fact, I'll bet that none of those could say who the single most influential reporter in this campaign is. Would it be Jeffrey Simpson? Peter Mansbridge? Mike Duffy?
None of those.
Instead, I'd suggest that it would be none other than my colleague Peter Murphy.
Peter is a Toronto-based CTV National News reporter but for this election, he's charged with filing the daily DNS report on the election. DNS in the CTV world stands for Domestic News Service. This is kind of like our in-house wire service. National news reporters routinely file a different edit of pieces that will end up on the national newscast for the dinner-hour local TV news shows.
Now, on our national newscast we might have three or four items a night on the election. (We've got one reporter each with the Liberal, Conservative and NDP campaigns and other reporters filing issue-based pieces and yet more producers and reporters on the CTV election bus)
It's Peter Murphy's job to boil all that down into one two-minute news item that can be aired on the noon-hour and dinner-hour newscast in all of CTV's local markets across the country.
All of which means Peter's reportage on this federal election is seen daily by — I'm guessing here — two, and maybe, even three million Canadians (CFTO in Toronto alone gets a million viewers I understand for its 6 pm news) right across the country — from Halifax to Vancouver.
With those kind of numbers, I think you could make a fair claim that Peter is this election's most important reporter.