Category: Canadian Politics
False equivalence in the Robocall scandal – rebuttal
The Citizen’s Glen McGregor sends three points of rebuttal to my post this morning about his story (co-written with Stephen Maher) on rule-breaking election-eve Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding that has been the eye of the storm over Conservative vote suppression efforts in May’s federal election:
- The Valeriote calls did give the Conservatives a new line of defence and did further muddy the water, as evidenced in any Hansard from this week. We didn’t pass on judgment on whether the defence was valid.
- We never equated the Valeriote calls with the faux Elections Canada calls. Both were parts of the narrative of key events leading up to election day that we catalogued in the story. Readers can draw their own conclusions about equivalence or lack of.
- Ottawa Citizen Managing Editor Andrew Potter has been entirely supportive of our continued reporting on this story and has not once tried to influence it in the way you suggest. Your speculation that details about the mechanics of the scandal were “perhaps” relegated to a lower position in the story to reflect his “predilections” is misinformed. Potter didn’t even handle this copy, which was filed on a Sunday (he was off duty). The editor who did made no structural changes to the story.
More false equivalence in the Robocalls scandal
Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, the two Ottawa reporters who broke the Robocall scandal, have a long story in yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen that warrants a close read.
The story leads with an account of Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding on the eve of the May 2, 2011, federal election—calls that expressed dismay at CPC candidate Marty Burke’s opposition to abortion “in all circumstances.”
In a glaring escalation of false equivalence, Maher and McGregor say “revelations” about the automated calls “are giving the Conservatives a new line of defence against allegations of vote suppression and further muddying the events leading up to the federal election in Guelph.”
The Liberal calls did break an Elections Canada rule by failing to identify the candidate whose campaign team produced them. Many people, myself included, dislike receiving automated phone pitches from politicians or anyone else, but such calls are a legal and widespread feature of recent elections. I received some from my friend Ian McNeil’s campaign in the last Nova Scotia election, and for the last two weeks, I’ve been inundated with robocalls from NDP leadership candidates.
Some may criticize as negative calls that attack a rival candidate’s position on abortion, but there is nothing illegal or unusual about highlighting aspects of an opponent’s platform that another candidate thinks may prove unpopular with voters. On the contrary, doing so is a common feature of political campaigns.
To equate this with a concerted campaign to prevent supporters of opposing candidates from voting, by impersonating Elections Canada officials and misdirecting them to bogus, faraway polling stations, is risible. Yes, I realize, Maher and McGregor stop a half-step from asserting that equivalence themselves, but in its tone and copious detail, the piece takes a “Liberals did it too” approach. The headline (for which reporters are not responsible) reads: “Robocalls: Liberals, Tories used hardball tactics in Guelph, Ontario.”
This follows the widespread fasle equation of the Robocalls scandal with the Vikileaks revelations. As if revealing a cabinet minister’s hypocrisy (something the press gallery failed to do) is equivalent to organized efforts to deprive citizens of their vote.
Buried deep in the Maher-McGregor story — really deep, starting at the 21st paragraph — is some impressive reporting on the mechanics of the Robocall scam, based apparently on telephone records. In my view, this stuff should have been the story’s lead.
That it was not perhaps reflects the predilections of the Citizen’s managing editor, Andrew Potter, who, in an extraordinary breach of traditional newspaper church-state separation, took to the Citizen’s op-ed page yesterday to dismiss “hand-wringing” about the robocall flap as so much “hysterias of the pundits.” After all, writes Potter, things are even worse in Russia.
Isn’t that a great standard by which to judge Canadian election fairness, or editorial policy for that matter? (Potter’s dismissal of the latest Harper scandal is cloaked in much solemn chin-stroking about why good people sometimes do bad things.)
One other nugget in the Maher-McGregor story caught my eye. Not surprisingly, officials of Burke’s campaign were upset when calls attacking his extreme anti-abortion views began three days before the vote. As the Citizen story reports:
Later that afternoon, Burke’s deputy campaign manager, Andrew Prescott, took to Twitter to denounce what he said was a “vote suppression” effort aimed at his candidate.
“Anti-#CPC voter suppression phone calls currently underway in Guelph, suspecting #LPC” — the Liberal Party of Canada — he tweeted at 5:22 p.m.
The Liberal calls may or may not be objectionable, and they did break Elections Canada rules, but they are not in any sense voter suppression calls. So why did that phrase spring to the fingertips of a senior Conservative Party campaign official? Is it just possible the Conservative camp had voter suppression phone calls on its mind?
For the record, Prescott has has consistently denied playing any role in the illegal robocalls being investigated by Elections Canada. He declined to speak with Maher and McGregor about the tweets he sent on the Saturday before the election.
Just hours after Prescott’s tweets, as Maher and MacGregor detail in their story, the first of several calls from a pre-paid Virgin Mobile phone somewhere in Guelph, to an Edmonton-based automated calling company, laid the groundwork for the illegal robocalls that targeted Liberal and NDP supporters on election day. Calls that really were designed to fraudulently suppress non-Conservative votes.
Separated at birth?
I am one of what I think must be a small number of people who met both of these guys, which may be why I was struck by the resemblance when I saw the photo on the left in the Ottawa Citizen.
They weren’t separated at birth, because the man on the left was born 26 years after the man on the right. I wonder if they ever met. Mr. Manning?
Harper’s bucket defence of illegal robocalls
The Harper government has mounted a classic bucket defence* against charges it illegally steered opposition voters to faraway, fake polling stations in a deliberate attempt to discourage them from voting. Their defenders say: 1. Nothing serious happened. 2. It happened to us too. 3. There’s no proof we did it. 4. In fact, it was the Liberals who did it. 5. The calls didn’t work anyway. 6. Voters don’t care about it. 7. It’ll blow over in a day or two.
Some of this commentary is just the predictable party-line pandering from pro-Harper media, but a Globe and Mail story purporting to show that the robocalls failed to reduce voter turnout rests on a surprising abuse of logic and statistical analysis.
Globe reporter Éric Grenier compared ridings with robocall allegations with ridings that had none. He found slightly higher voter turnout in robocall ridings. He also found that turnout in those ridings had increased more over the 2008 federal election than it had in non-robocall ridings
From this Grenier concluded that the robocalls “failed miserably” (the words of the headline) and that “Turnout was not much affected” (his own words). His data justifies neither conclusion. The turnout-suppressing impact of the robocalls may simply have been overwhelmed by one or more turnout-enhancing factors, such as what he acknowledges were tighter contests in the robocall ridings, or keener interest in what voters saw as a landmark election. The pertinent question is not whether voter turnout was higher or lower than other ridings or previous elections, but whether it would have been higher still without the robocall campaign.
That question—what would turnout have been without the robocall campaign?—is counterfactual and therefore not susceptible to proof. The flaw in Grenier’s reasoning is so basic and so obvious, it’s a wonder no editor caught it.** Given the “failed miserably” headline, however, it’s perhaps more likely his editors were egging him on.
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* The bucket defence, a Paul Wells or possibly George Will coinage, is akin to Freud’s Kettle Defence. That’s when a neighbor returns a borrowed kettle with a hole in it. Confronted, the neighbor responds, “The hole was there when you lent it to me. I never borrowed the kettle. Besides, I returned it in perfect condition.”
** Grenier backs off his claim that “turnout was not much affected” ever so slightly in this subsequent blog post.
Virgins in the whore house – updated
Remember the Ottawa Press Gallery’s rending of garments over the “despicable“ violation of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s privacy when Vikileaks30 revealed seamy details from the public record of his divorce proceedings—details that called into question the minister’s personal adherence to the family values he used to denigrate gay Canadians and oppose their exercise of equal rights under the law?
The view that embarrassing details from a cabinet minister’s private life are off-limits, even when they conflict with his sanctimonious public pronouncements, has suddenly acquired unanimous support among Canada’s major media organizations. Why, suppressing such details is practically a sacred duty.
Parliamentary reporters from Sun Media and the Ottawa Citizen were particularly vociferous in their denunciation of those, including Contrarian, who criticized the gallery’s conspiracy of quiescence around Toews’s hypocrisy.
Now check out the list of intervenors who successfully appealed against a sweeping publication ban this year in divorce proceedings brought by the wife of David Russell Williams, the former Canadian Forces colonel convicted of murder and rape.
I think the media were right to appeal that ban, and three justices of the Ontario Court of Appeal think so too. For the same reason, the press gallery were wrong to play down or ignore public evidence of Toews’s hypocrisy, and I take that journalistic failure as a sign that the Harper government’s bullying approach to the media has achieved some success.
[Update:] Anticipating the response of my friends in the press gallery, I will add that, of course I am not analogizing the hon. minister to a notorious sex murderer. The publication ban they successfully opposed here was not about Williams or sought by him. It was sought by his estranged wife, who must be presumed an innocent party. It covered:
- Her name, address, and contact information;
- Her photograph or likeness in any report of the divorce proceeding;
- The name, address, or contact coordinates of her employer in any report of the divorce proceedings;
- Her social insurance number, date and place of birth, and address; and
- Her assets and liabilities, except those transferred to her from Williams after February 2010.
As I said, they were right to seek to overturn this ban. They were wrong to treat a family-values thumping, gay-hating Harper cabinet minister with kid gloves.
Walking the climate change dog
Climate change deniers like to seize on instances of unusually cold weather to debunk the scientific case for climate change. This video, from the Norwegian infotainment program Siffer, explains the fallacy.
H/T Nathan Yau
Maher critiques Contrarian
PostMedia’s Stephen Maher, whose blog post on the Toews contretemps I featured moments ago, has weighed in with a critique of Contrarian’s first two posts on the subject. Here’s what he wrote (and then let’s close the subject for now):
In your post on the Parliamentary Press Gallery, you say the gallery met @vikileaks30 with a “frenzy of denunciation,” but provide no examples. You do not accurately describe the gallery’s reaction to @vikileaks30. The journalists I know found it to be a matter of lively interest. Nobody reacted with anger, fear or embarrassment.Also, to point to the failings of the gallery, you point to Toronto Star stories about Adam Giambrone and the Citizen story that identified the IP address of @vikileaks30. Those stories were not produced by reporters in the gallery. The gallery did, in fact, report on Toews divorce, just not as extensively as you would like, and did not report on Giambrone, which is a municipal story.It seems normal to me that media outlets in Winnipeg and Toronto would approach questions of privacy differently. That has nothing to do with the gallery, however.You may be able to argue that the gallery is too timid when it comes to the private lives of cabinet ministers, but you would need to do more research for it to be persuasive.
Another view on why reporters gave Toew’s infidelity a pass
Parliamentary scribe Stephen Maher, formerly of the Herald and now with PostMedia, offers a different view on why the Press Gallery all but ignored Vic Toews’s infidelity prior to #vikileaks30. (Previous views here, here, and here.)
Maher’s blog post is the more refreshing for its inclusion of updates from people who disagree with him. It rewards reading in full. I actually agree with most of what he says. Generally, I have little stomach for exposing the private lives of public figures, let alone their sex lives. But unlike Maher and his colleagues, I think there are clear grounds for an exception in Toews’s case.
Maher wrote:
If [a] secretly gay cabinet minister started mouthing off hypocritically about family values, I would write that story in a minute.
To which I say, substitute the word “philandering” for “gay,” and you have the nub of my argument for serious coverage of the Public Safety Minister’s extramarital monkey business.
- – -
One defense I have not heard from any press gallery member is: “I didn’t know about Toews’s infidelity.”
If no one was writing about it (beyond a few, fleeting references), how come everyone in the press gallery knew about it? Likely because they were talking about it, among themselves.
They found it interesting enough to talk about, but judged that we, as mere consumers of journalsim, did not have a need to know.
Reporters should be awfully careful when placing themselves in the position of censor. It’s a slippery slope, one all to easily greased by such considerations as future access to official sources and the political orientation of the news organization that writes the reporter’s pay check.
A more thoughtful rebuttal from the Parliamentary Press Gallery
In response to my critique (here and here) of the national news media’s handling of the @vikileaks3o dustup last Friday, CBC’s Kady O’Malley has offered a more thoughtful rebuttal (more thoughtful than this):
Here’s the major flaw in
@kempthead‘s thesis re: “Hill journos” allegedly enraged at having “the news cycle snatched from their grasp”… He appears to have mistaken journalists for communications flacks, who *do* attempt to control a news cycle… Journalists just want news to report. We have no desire to dictate the news cycle, we just hope it takes us someplace good.
To which @DavisvilleHabit tweeted:
That’s a sweeping statement [...]
O’Malley again:
Any journalist who aspires to control the news cycle has lost the plot…. Seriously, most of us are chaos junkies. We *love* it when things go exactly the opposite as expected. Especially if it’s pear-shaped…. In fact, if we have a vague kind of raison d’etre, it is thwarting those who DO attempt to control a news cycle…. That’s why the
@Vikileaks30 story was covered so heavily, for heaven’s sakes. It was Something Different And Unexpected And Unknown.
[Note: For readability, I have combined several tweets, rather than reproducing them as screenshot. Elipses indicate separate tweets. The order and text are unchanged.]
The Press Gallery responds with lofty dudgeon
Press gallery’ tweets in response to this and this (best read from bottom to top):
My favorite response was Glen McGregor’s question, “Do you know any journalists?” Yes, Glen, I have two National Magazine Awards, one Michener Award (out of three times as a finalist), and when I left journalism, I had more Atlantic Journalism Awards than the province of Prince Edward Island. No offense, though. I’d never heard of you, either.
And for the record, I did not call Kady O’Malley anything. My criticism was directed to the Ottawa press pack generally, and neither attempted nor purported to assess any individual reporter’s role. But on the behavior of the pack, it was right on the money.
Also for the record, I have been enduring very spotty internet connectivity for several days, and my ability to engage these colleagues in real time last night was sharply limited.
