Election Hysteria Grips Media

All of a sudden interest in Canada's federal election seems to have caught fire, after a lacklustre and moribund start that had most Canadians yawning with disinterest.

The story 'du jour' is Jack Layton's ascension in Quebec and media coverage has been hysterical and the frenetic pace of coverage has led to a bunch of stories that should never really have seen the light of day.

First, the polls, which are all over the map, leaving me to believe that we are in that statistical anomaly, the mythical 19th out of 20 polls that the pollsters keep in their back pocket as an excuse for a completely botched prediction.

With supposed margins of error of 3½%, it's hard to understand how two different polls are more than 7% apart, but no matter.

 There's almost a nine point difference between the EKOS and NANO polls and considering that according to the two pollsters own combined self-declared margin of error, there shouldn't be more than a 5.3% difference at worst. Hmmm.....

It reminds me of what our 13th Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, once said about polls.
"....dogs know best what to do with polls."

Worse than that was the outrageous predictions of projected seat counts. The difference between certain news organizations calls into question whether they have any clue at all.
Here's what Threehundredeight.com predicts. I like this website a lot more than the individual polling firms because it aggregates the lot of them.
This is how they see the actual seat count as of a couple of days ago. Close, but still not a Harper majority.

The Montreal Gazette gets the cake for the stupidest most outlandish prediction of all and one wonders what the editors were thinking when they published this drivel, last Friday.

"According to a mathematical analysis of the poll, the Conservatives' majority could be huge, at 201 seats, the largest majority in the House of Commons since Brian Mulroney's record 211 seats in 1984, and in Quebec, the Bloc Québécois could plunge to the unheard-of depths of four seats." Montreal Gazette

....HaHaHa!!!!

While polls show national and provincial trends, one of the most difficult things is predicting the actual riding by riding impact of polling numbers. In Canada, our federal election is comprised of 308 individual elections and while national numbers are an important key to predicting what will happen, when things are close, as in many ridings, all bets are off as the force and magnetism of the individual candidates does make a difference.

When reviewing polling numbers, mathematics make it easy to spot reporting blunders, but it's more difficult to spot bias. That being said the slant in some news organizations is hard to miss, with two prime examples being Canada's largest web news aggregators,  Bourque and National  Newswatch both of whom have become Liberal party shills during the election.

In Tuesday's National Post, (a huge Conservative booster) a giant front page story tried to paint Michael Ignatieff as a bullshitter, who  changed his story in regards to some old war story
A rather naked and blatant attempt to smear his reputation in the waning days of the campaign.

Read:Ignatieff rewrites an old war story

Or there's always Radio-Canada who got some mileage out of a story that Harper’s communications director, Dimitri Soudas, interfered to shill for Robert Abdallah ­ as a candidate for board chairman at the Montreal port authority. Harper was forced to defend himself against the charge of undue influence

See:Harper defends aide over meddling allegations

Trouble is, the story is TWO YEARS OLD and was dredged up to specifically hurt Harper.
Here's the original story published in 2009! LINK{FR}

Last week, SunTV launched it's news channel which Liberals have sarcastically dubbed FOX NEWS North. The station has predictably taken up the causes near and dear to conservative Canadians, much to the howls of derision from political opponents.

To my eye, the launch hasn't been a rousing success. Short on content and long on moral outrage, viewers won't be satisfied with long-winded rants like that of Ezra Levant who lectured us for much to long on the evils of visiting Cuba.

Aside from Charles Adler, the talking heads collectively seem horribly ill at ease, but hopefully things will improve. First change needed is a decent 6PM newscast, without which the channel is hard to take seriously as a national news force.

SUNTV- Hard to compete with FoxNEWS!

Changes are sure to come. The first time I watched the morning show with Pat Bolland and Alex Pierson, I was not only struck by the  stilted banter and horrifically amateur content, but the off-putting image of the not so perfect bare legs of the otherwise lovely Ms. Pierson.

The next time I tuned into the morning show, the co-hosts were mercifully ensconced behind a desk instead of a couch. PROGRESS!

As for charges in the National Post that the network is home to bimbos wearing sleeveless dresses, all I can say is that the High Def version of the channel is not particularly kind to any of the on-air personnel and so in summation, all I can say is that SUNTV is no Fox NEWS, personality-wise, leg-wise or content-wise.

But I remain hopeful.......