Category Archives: Media

May 22 2013
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Culture, Government, Media

Driven by their distractions

The political process as we know it in Canada

The political process as we know it in Canada

Political commentators are, as a rule, enormously fond of the sound of their own voices, especially when handed the opportunity to contextualize a galloping controversy. I should know. I can’t count the number of times I’ve used the word “distraction” to describe some office holder’s goof-up.

But, I’m beginning to think we who observe-cum-scribble for a living are coming perilously close to spraining our backs for all the bending over we do in our attempt to perceive the bigger pictures in public life.

Yesterday, my esteemed colleague Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, deployed the word, “distraction” twice in one paragraph. “For a government already adrift at midterm, the Nigel Wright-Mike Duffy affair, coupled with the resignation from caucus of another Conservative senator, Pamela Wallin, represents an unwelcome distraction,” he wrote. “It’s doubtful that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech to his caucus on Tuesday – in which he declared himself ‘very upset‘ – will quickly end the distraction.”

In this, he may only have parroted Mr. Duffy, himself, who had characterized his contretemps as a “significant distraction” to his Tory caucus colleagues, before resigning to sit as an Independent.

Still, I’m left wondering: From what, exactly, is all this stuff a distraction? A good government? A sound economy? A functioning Senate? A ribbon-cutting ceremony somewhere near Nowhereville, New Brunswick?

Why can’t we see Senategate for what it is? To wit: A damn good news story that cuts to the heart of democracy in Canada, demanding all the remorseless attention to detail for which the Cosa Nostra of our craft is famous.

I might pose the same question to members of Hog Town’s Ford Nation whenever they cluck disapprovingly at the Toronto Star’s coverage of their man, Mayor Rob, whose talent for landing himself in hot water is downright promethean.

How the burgermeister of Canada’s biggest city manages to survive his days and nights at the cutting edge of contention is one of the great mysteries of the modern age. But survive he does, despite headlines that would reduce most in his position to a quivering pool of gelatin.

“Five days after two media outlets published reports on a video that appears to show him smoking crack cocaine, Mayor Rob Ford again offered no explanation on Tuesday,” thestar.com reported this week. “He did not say whether he has smoked crack while in office. He did not say whether he used an anti-gay slur. Despite an expression of concern from the premier and renewed pleas from council allies, he did not say anything at all.”

Meanwhile, American late-night TV was having a ball at hizzoner’s expense. “Both Jimmy Kimmel and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart discussed the controversy at the tops of their shows,” thestar.com observed. “Jay Leno also mentioned Ford on Monday’s Tonight Show, joking that if the allegations are true, he’d still be qualified to be the mayor of Washington, D.C.”

In her commentary, Star columnist Heather Mallick noted, “There have been 42 low points in Ford’s mayoralty. . .from sexist and racist slurs, to drunken arguments in public, to a chaotic home life, to repeated court hearings on alleged financial wrongdoing, to, oh dozens more, a relentless sordid drip. I’m worried that unless he resigns, he’s going to punch a baby in the face or run himself over. I’m waiting for spontaneous Ford combustion, right there on the sidewalk.”

None of this, it’s safe to say, is a “distraction” from the business of running a major metropolitan area. In fact, in a palpable sense, it is the business of running a major metropolitan area. At least, it is lately.

The comportment of one’s mayor – or Senator – speaks volumes about the condition of one’s public institutions. It also points a fat finger at the electorate who, either directly or indirectly, play a role in selecting those for high public office.

By suggesting otherwise, well. . .the only thing from which we distract ourselves is the truth of our frequently flawed systems of government.

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May 21 2013
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Media, Politics

How B.C.’s pollsters got it right

Seeing the forest for the trees in public opinion research

Seeing the forest for the trees in public opinion research

Public opinion pollsters are, to many, nothing more than contemporary augerers, gauging the effects of political rhetoric to predict which way the wind will blow on election day – something akin to reading a dead muskrat’s guts to divine the moment of Julius Caesar’s murder on the steps of the Theatre of Pompey.

No segment of society, it is safe to say, maintains a more disingenuous relationship with survey masters than the Fourth Estate. Journalists would be lost without the Nik Nanoses, Angus Reids and George Gallups of the world. We hang on their every word, dutifully parrot their findings and usually concur with their conclusions.

Then, when they turn out to be wrong (as they often do), we abandon them faster than a tourist does a passenger cruise infected with stomach flu. “If the B.C. election induced even a smidgen of humility into practitioners of our craft,” wrote the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson last week, “and made them less reliant on suspect polls and got them to stop yammering about polls (which the general public doesn’t much care about anyway), it will have served a useful purpose.”

Perhaps, but the general public does, in fact, care about polls, because we make them care about polls, especially the “suspect” ones. And if the B.C. election does serve a useful purpose, it will be the degree to which it nurtures a finer appreciation of the role polls play in the peaceful transition of democratic power.

Or, at least that’s John Wright’s and Kyle Braid’s hope. They are, respectively, senior vice president and vice president of Ipsos Reid Public Affairs, which bills itself as “Canada’s market intelligence leader, the country’s leading provider of public opinion research.” In an unprecedented examination of “what happened and why” in British Columbia last week – when the provincial Liberals defied every prediction and marched to victory over the NDP – the pollsters declare:

“In Canada, polls cannot be released on Election Day so it often leaves people guessing at what happened and produces lots of finger pointing. In the United States and other jurisdictions, polls that interview voters are harbingers of the outcome but most importantly help explain why things have turned out the way they have.”

In fact, they say, they nailed the results at the last minute, but because they weren’t allowed to release their election day findings, no one, apart from themselves, was the wiser.

“In British Columbia, we interviewed 1,400 voters on Election Day and, as you’ll see, the numbers virtually matched the real outcome in terms of voter preference,” they write. “But it also tells a story as to why this happened right down to the last minute. The reality is that one in 10 (11%) BC voters decided in the voting booth on election day to mark their ballot for their candidate – and with one of the lowest turnouts in provincial voting ever (52%) it was motivated voters, Liberals, who bested the NDP in the voting booth. . .This was a hand-to-hand combat campaign and it deserved close scrutiny to the final ballot – and that’s why we did what we did by doing this special poll but because of the rules we couldn’t release it.”

The bottom line: “After an event like this – which in Canadian politics has been few and far between – there are lots of people who say that the ‘polls got it wrong’ when in fact it’s voters who upset their own applecart based on everything they’ve seen, read or heard.”

In other words, B.C.’s pollsters got it right to the final moments when the public revolted against what they read about their voting intentions in the media.

The question, of course, is: If Ipsos Reid had been permitted to publish the results of exit polls on voting day, would that have changed the outcome of the election? A better question, perhaps, is: Does it matter?

The final prerogative of citizenship in a democracy defies prediction. A voter, after all, is still permitted to change his mind.

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May 13 2013
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General, Media

Truths my father told me

Penny Bruce and her husband of 59 years, hanging loose at the Atlantic Journalism Awards

Penny Bruce and her husband of 59 years, hanging loose at the 2012 Atlantic Journalism Awards

The document, handsomely framed in some sort of gilded metal, certified that the holder  had received the gold award for “excellence” in the category of “lifetime achievement”. And a thought began to stir.

If one could qualify for a gold in such a competition, then, logically, others could merit a mere silver or bronze. How, I wondered, would it feel to receive an honourable mention for a lifetime of achievement in one’s chosen field of endeavor?

Close but no cigar, pal. You were good, but you weren’t that good. Better luck next time around on this mortal coil.

These are the sort of weighty issues the mind considers when the body is stuck in a chair for three hours watching two dozen people mount a podium to snatch their well-deserved trophies.

Only one, of course, earned the golden lifer’s nod at Saturday’s Atlantic Journalism Awards. And, in my thoroughly biased opinion, it couldn’t have gone to anyone other than my remarkably talented father, Harry Bruce.

Measuring professional achievement is usually a chump’s game, especially for people in our business. We’re not supposed to care about awards, which have a disturbing way of distracting us from tending the noble underpinnings of our craft, which are – for lack of  more original exhortations – to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (courtesy of Finley Peter Dunne, American scribbler, circa 1867).

More recently (just this month in Esquire magazine, in fact), actor-activist Robert Redford mused on the meaning of achievement, telling writer Scott Raab, “We’re all heading to the same station. There’s a great line by T.S. Eliot: ‘There’s only the trying. The rest is not our business.’ Just keep trying. Do what you can, but don’t stop, and particularly don’t stop at that sign that says success. Run that light. Run that light.”

Fair enough. But, sometimes, we may permit ourselves the time to yield just long enough to recognize what true excellence looks like. Call it an exercise in Platonic reasoning: We become what we admire most.

Or, that’s the theory.

Growing up, I was aware that my father’s reputation in Canadian journalism was enormous. He was one of the true heavy-hitters on the field. He could write about anything – politics, business, sports, knot-tying – and make it sing. But if journalists of his calibre were as rare as snow in Hawaii, those of his character, his fundamental decency, were virtually extinct.

More often, those possessing a promethean skill with words had attended the Evelyn Waugh school of social comportment. For most of his working life, that famous, 20th Century, English novelist and essayist travelled through the stratosphere of his profession. And yet his son, Auberon, once wrote that his father was such a bully that, despite his short, physical stature, “generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quailed in front of him.” Another contemporary described him as “the nastiest-tempered man in England.”

In contrast, my father was almost absurdly generous with his patience and praise. Perhaps that’s because he realized – as did his own father Charles Bruce, the Canadian Press journalist and Governor General’s-Award winning poet – that life is too damn short for anything else.

During his acceptance speech the other night, he touched on this basic truth when he reflected on his 59-year union with my mother, which, he said had “flashed by like a long weekend on a soft beach by a warm ocean.” (A classic Harryism, which had the predictable effect of animating every married woman in the room as they turned to their hapless husbands: “Why don’t you ever say things like that to me?”)

As he stepped down from the stage with his handsomely framed certificate, I had to smile, thinking about his “achievement” and whether the real gold in his hand had anything to do with his journalism, after all.

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May 07 2013
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Media, Society

Social bonding: Give till it works

No political ties bind the moral authority of non-partisan giving

No political ties bind the moral authority of non-partisan giving

Those of us who bother to vote maintain a defiantly imbecilic relationship with the governments we elect. We require them to provide us with all the services we’ve come to expect even as we castigate them for spending our hard-earned dough.

Less government is good government until, of course, we want more. This is the dance public officials perform for us as they attempt to balance their responsibilities to making sound public policy and the more practical consideration of surviving the next rush to the ballot box.

Given the truly wretched condition of many western governments’ balance sheets these days, it’s not surprising that a “third” way is emerging or that Ottawa is taking a good, hard look at it as a way to underwrite program spending and, in the process, save a few bucks. It’s called social investing and, according to the Center for American Progress, it works a little like this:

“In the social impact bond model, a government contracts with a private-sector financing intermediary we’ll call a ‘social impact bond-issuing organization’ (SIBIO) to obtain social services. The government pays the bond-issuing organization entirely or almost entirely depending on whether it achieves performance targets. If the bond issuer fails to achieve the minimum required target, the government does not pay.”

Meanwhile, “The SIBIO raises operating funds by issuing bonds to private investors who provide upfront capital in exchange for a share of the government payments that will become available if the performance targets are met. The bond issuer uses the operating funds to contract with service providers to deliver the services necessary to meet the performance targets.”

The Center concludes that the model is probably not a silver bullet. Still, it observes, “any new tool with the potential to accelerate solutions in even a subset of our most pressing social problems is an important breakthrough – one that deserves careful consideration from the policymaking, philanthropic, and investment communities.”

Certainly, that’s what the Conservative government of the United Kingdom thinks. It is widely credited with getting the ball rolling for social impact bonds in 2010 when, according to an item in theguardian.com, “a pioneering plan announced by the government. . .could eventually (transform) the way much welfare work is financed. . .

Private investors will pay for a project to rehabilitate prisoners and receive a return on their money if reoffending rates drop.”

Now, the Globe and Mail reports, the Government of Canada has issued a list of works that it believes are suited to this type of programming-cum-funding, including those “to build housing for people with disabilities, reduce recidivism among young offenders or encourage more young aboriginals to learn a skilled trade. Ottawa said it will work with interested groups toward launching projects.”

Naturally, many will worry that the approach gives governments too much control over the social agenda – that they will cherry pick their worthy causes, filtered through their ideological sieves. But, in fact, that’s what governments do anyway.

A more practical concern involves the precise definition of “performance targets” and how this incentivizes the assumption of risk among investors. As the Center for American Progress observes, “Contractors may require large fees in order to accept performance risk, or they may decline to bid altogether. These systems create strong incentives to manipulate outcomes measures or to focus excessively on those aspects of performance that are rewarded in the incentive-payment system.”

On the other hand, “because the bond issuer spreads the risk across its bond holders, it will be substantially more risk tolerant than would be a non-profit service provider in a direct performance contract.”

All of which may only mean that social impact bonds aren’t for everyone or, more accurately, for every social problem.

Still, it is heartening that these instruments are attracting support from people and organizations on all points of the political spectrum, suggesting, for once, that governments do occasionally get things right.

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Apr 30 2013
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Media

Fare thee well, sociable media

Adieu to the feeding frenzy that is social media

Adieu to the feeding frenzy that is social media

My on-again, off-again romance with social media is off-again. This will be my first trial separation from LinkedIn and Twitter, my second from Facebook. I’m even reconsidering the role my blog plays in my newly simplified life.

I’ve deactivated my accounts for a couple of reasons: First, I’m genuinely interested in discovering the degree to which I have become hooked on these seamless communications platforms. But, mostly, and in the words of Greta Garbo, I just want to be alone. It’s time to leave the cocktail party that never ends, at least for awhile.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I have grown to dislike my online friends, followers and contacts. On the contrary, I’m quite fond of them (from a distance, naturally, as I don’t know most of them personally). It’s simply that I can’t get myriad updates and “timelines” and status reports – theirs and mine – out of my mind. The busy work of social media is taking over.

It wasn’t always this way. As a tenderfoot in the online world, I was happy to ignore the dozens of ways I could use it to distract myself from the actual business of making a living (or, simply, living). I was happy because I was ignorant. I didn’t really understand how Twitter worked, or what distinguished it from Facebook.

The more I learned, however, the more determined I became to wield these instruments of my virtual identity as they were designed: with near consuming attention to detail and timeliness, regardless of need or import. (Does the world really need me retweeting somebody else’s observation of a junior league hockey game?)

In fact, I am not alone in hooking off. About a year go, just prior to Facebook’s initial public offering, CNN reported, “With a website that boasts 901 million active users,  it seems unlikely that once you get on Facebook, you’d ever leave. But deactivating from the social networking site is not that unusual. Close to half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. More and more people are stepping away from the technological realm and de-teching. There are even sites where they can pledge to delete their Facebook accounts.   And tech writer Paul Miller from The Verge decided to leave the Internet for a year to reassess his relationship with it.”

Regarding his decision, Mr. Miller explained on his blog last April, “I’m abandoning one of my ‘top 5’ technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. . .By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I’m so ‘adept’ at the internet that I’ve found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I’m pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn’t belong.”

I’m, not especially “adept” at any of this stuff, but I appreciate his point. Just as I do Jonathan Minton’s. According to Dahlia Kurtz, Sun Media’s social media columnist, in a piece she wrote in January, Mr. Minton, “calls Facebook mental junk food. He twice de-activated and re-activated his account. ‘It became a mind-numbing and addictive distraction,’ says the 31-year-old. So why did Minton return? ‘Because it’s a mind numbing and addictive distraction.’”

As for Mr. Miller, now that his year-long hiatus is nearly up, what has he learned? In his latest column (a colleague posted it for him) he writes, “Leaving the internet was so great. . .at first. It was the relief of pressure that I’d wanted for years. No more push notifications, no more calendar invites, no more reply-all’d email threads, no more retweets, friend requests, text messages, or rabbit holes. I was alone with my thoughts. . .But then old habits reared their ugly heads. Time-wasting habits like video games and pulpy sci-fi novels, and then more disturbing signs like a general avoidance of social activities.”

So, then, maybe there is no solution, no real escape from the inescapable. Technology is not the enemy. As American cartoonist Walt Kelly once wrote, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’ll mull this over in the weeks ahead, while I’m not updating my Facebook status.

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