I was mooing like a Holstein in the lobby of a Toronto hotel in 1984 when it struck me that there had to be a better way to cover a political campaign in my home and native land. Actually, we reporters following Prime Minister-in-waiting Brian Mulroney struck just the right note with our barnyard chorus of cow sounds.
Forget pack journalism, this was herd journalism.
Penned in the campaign plane with Mulroney and his royal entourage, Canada’s national press corps was left with little choice but to follow the king to his carefully scripted coronation.
In every town from St. John’s to Tofino, Mulroney, who won two elections for the Conservatives before stepping aside in 1993, gave a set speech referring to Canada as a “nation of small towns and big dreams.”
The mumbled response from the media table — that Canada was really a “nation of small fries and Big Macs” — was an adolescent exercise in journalistic impotence. At the end of the campaign, I suggested to my editor at The Chronicle-Herald in Halifax that we abandon the campaign planes in the next election in favor of issue reporting. Less expensive, I argued, and more filling. (This was neither an heroic nor an original idea; most reporters who covered the '84 campaign felt the Mulroney team got the best of us.)
The Chronicle-Herald, along with a few other small publications, did scale back coverage of the leaders in 1988. And in the last decade, several larger newspaper and TV networks have started to pull their journalists off the campaign planes and put them in the streets. In this year’s election campaign, even Canada’s national wire service and some of the nation’s bigger newspapers followed suit.
Terry Wills, the Ottawa bureau chief for The Montreal Gazette, said the Southam newspaper chain bought a single seat on the campaign planes this year. Reporters filed to about 20 Southam client papers, most of them owned by the chain. (Traditionally, both The Gazette and The Ottawa Citizen had staffed the leaders' planes in national elections.)
“Southam took one seat on the planes and rolled reporters through it,” Wills said in an interview. “The file went to all the papers in the chain. There is some question whether sticking on the planes is the best way to cover an election. You get sort of managed ... and divorced from reality up there.”
The Gazette, he said, diverted its coverage this year to ridings in Quebec. Wills called this a “better use of resources.”
Gerry Arnold, The Canadian Press Bureau Chief in Ottawa, says the decision to deploy his best reporters on the ground saved money and resulted in better coverage of the issues in the weeks leading up to the June 2 vote.
“Frankly, I think you can make better use of political reporters if you don’t trap them in a steel tube for 18 hours a day,” Arnold said in an interview. “It freed up our specialists to look at issues like social spending and gun control-issues that really mattered to Canadians .... I don’t have a final figure, but our savings from covering the campaign this way were easily in six figures.”
CP had to take a serious look at its spending in the campaign after barely surviving a financial crisis in 1996.
Staffing campaign planes is an expensive proposition in Canada. A seat on a leader’s jet plane costs about $15,000 (Canadian), and the Balkanization of Canadian politics has upped the ante.
A decade ago, Canadians voted for one of three traditional parties: the centrist Liberal party, which has formed the government since 1993 under Prime Minister Jean Chretien; the right-of-center Conservatives, the ruling party between 1984 and 1993; and the left-leaning New Democratic Party.
In this decade, however, two new parties have emerged as major forces in Parliament: the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which formed the official Opposition in 1993, and the Western-based, right-wing Reform Party, which finished second to Chretien’s Liberals this year.
Arnold put a reporter on the prime minister’s plane for the entire campaign. “We took a lot of heat for this from the other parties,” he said. “But we had to be with Chretien in case a big international story broke. If Princess Di or Mother Teresa had died during the campaign, the world wouldn’t have been waiting for what [Reform party leader] Preston Manning had to say.”
CP denies that it “risked anything” by refusing to staff all planes. “We covered every event on the ground,” Arnold said, “using our bureau reporters.”
Jim Travers, the Executive Managing Editor of The Toronto Star, called CP’s decision to staff only the prime minister’s plane “unfair” to the other leaders. Travers said in an interview that Canada’s biggest newspaper will push CP to provide beginning-to-end coverage on the leaders’ planes in the next election. (The Star’s circulation ranges from 475,000 on weekdays to 715,000 on Saturdays.)
“We’ll say to CP, this is the ideal thing for you to do.”
The Star staffed all the planes in the ’97 campaign, but might not do so again if it can get what Travers called “consistently high-quality feeds” from CP in the next election. “What we want to do is provide more value to our customers than our competitors. Spending $150,000 to travel all across the country to fixed events doesn’t do that.”
Later in the interview, Travers said it cost “at least $150,000” to staff all five campaigns, “but it’s not the cost, it’s the value you get out of it. [In the next campaign] we will take our money and decide when to be on the planes, and we’ll devote more time to grassroots coverage and issues .... You don’t have your best people locked up on a plane captive to the political parties.”
The Globe and Mail, the only Canadian paper distributed nationally, agonizes during every campaign about “whether we need to be on the buses,” said Hugh Winsor, until recently The Globe’s National Political Editor. (This fall, Winsor went “back to” column writing.)
In the end, “The Globe decided we had to be on the [leadership] campaigns because we are The Globe — the national newspaper. In fact, we dropped off the NDP and it was a mistake. We missed the fact that they were coming on.” (The NDP made an historic breakthrough in Atlantic Canada this year, taking eight seats in a region where it had never held more than two.)
Winsor said The Globe recognized the limitations of leadership coverage. “The reporter knows all the jokes. You hear the same arguments and the same accusations every day. We recognize that who said what and where on the trail quickly loses its currency. But we could not afford not to be there.”
The solution, “sometimes frustrating,” for reporters: The Globe often packaged a single story from five reports from leadership campaigns. In addition, it published comprehensive stories on several issues.
Like CP, Canada’s five major television networks launched a concerted effort to downplay leadership politics in the ’97 campaign. For the first time in history, Canada’s networks pooled resources and personnel on the campaign jets. Each network placed one crew (two camera operators, one audio technician, one editor and one producer) on a single campaign.
“If a network wanted to place a reporter on any campaign, he worked with the crew assigned to it,” said Christopher Waddell, CBC-1V’s bureau chief in Ottawa.
Waddell said the decision to put a crew on one campaign jet, instead of five, saved the network $300,000 in payments to the political parties.
“That’s a lot of money to give political parties to run their campaigns,” Waddell said in an interview. “Our coverage was not captive to what the leaders were saying. Not only that, but we had to actually think of what we put on the broadcast each night. When you have a reporter and a crew on every plane, that tends to dictate what you put on the air.”
The CBC diverted its resources from the leaders' campaigns to coverage of town hall meetings and comprehensive issues reporting.
It also moved away from the “eight-second sound bite” by staging daily 15-minute news conferences every day with a Member of Parliament from each of the five parties. These events, broadcast on CBC’s all-news network, “tried to answer the criticism that we never cover what politicians actually say.”
Waddell said the election coverage strategy may change in the next campaign. The focus might be diverted back to the leadership tours, for instance, in a close race. (Opinion polling made it clear Chretien’s Liberals would be returned to power this year.)
Klaus Pohle, a journalism professor at Carleton University, doesn’t share Waddell’s and Arnold’s enthusiasm for the coverage of the campaign this year.
“I agree that there must be a better way to cover a campaign than to report the same rubber chicken speeches given every day by the leaders,” said Pohle, who also works part-time as a copy editor for Southam News. “But the coverage this time was hijacked by non-issues like national unity. The polls showed clearly that people cared more about jobs.”
Arnold denied this, saying CP “packaged material on jobs and the economy when the campaign began. In fact, we covered the issue a lot in the campaign. But we can’t control what the papers use, though. And everyone knows a campaign has a dynamic of its own. I’m sorry, but when [NDP Leader] Alexa McDonough started talking about the ”road to civil war,“ national unity was the story. The media can’t control that.” (McDonough accused Reform party MPs of making inflammatory statements about Quebec separatism during the campaign.)
Pohle was also critical of CP’s decision to staff only the prime minister’s plane throughout the campaign. “What it presupposed is that the PM will always have the most important things to say. That isn’t always the case. It minimized the voices of other leaders and the decision smacked of elitism.”
Dan O’Connor, chief of staff to McDonough during the campaign, said the party’s policy on certain issues like taxation were poorly understood by most reporters.
“And that had something to do with the fact that there were fewer people covering the campaign day in and day out,” O’Connor said in an interview.
Be that as it may, election coverage in Canada isn’t likely to return to the bad old days. In the first federal campaign I covered, in 1979, news organizations paid early and dearly for coveted seats on campaign planes.
That media feeding frenzy probably paved the way for the kind of slick, photo-op-per-day campaign Mulroney ran so successfully in 1984, my year of dangerously imitating Holsteins.
By the way, my editor called my bluff in the ’88 and ’93 campaigns by assigning me to the small eastern province of New Brunswick. In 1993, I reported on the family ties between a Liberal candidate and the province’s most powerful industrial group, and the improbable geography of a gerrymandered riding that was more than 200 miles long and only a few miles wide at its narrowest point. It was lonely work for a former herd reporter, but someone had to do it.