dvsuk.net

Pooping puffins, Bill Cosby sweaters, and off-colour jokes. Is that really what the media think our federal election campaign is all about?

There is little doubt that the state of political discourse in this country has reached new depths. As this long-awaited, little-loved campaign has taken form, any semblance of a real dialogue about the issues this country faces has been sidelined by an onslaught of coverage about gaffes, attack ads, opinion polls, and other vapid frivolity.

It seems absurd to think that we should struggle to make this election “about something”. The global financial system is in shambles and the economy is struggling to absorb the shockwaves. All of the national parties are offering fundamentally different game plans on climate change. Our intentions in Afghanistan remain as muddied as ever. And then there is the sustainability of our health care system – the issue everyone loves to forget.

Yet, it took only a few short days for the puffin to dominate election coverage. Since then, there has been a steady stream of contrived scandal and intrigue – from sweaters and piano skills to gawkiness and a broken-down airplane, from local candidate gag orders to the Agriculture Minister’s off-colour if innocuous joke about the tainted meat crisis.

From our politicians, the inevitable reactions have become clichéd. Feigned outrage and indignation. Calls for apologies or firings. Negative ads and mean-spirited personal attacks.

But if the politicians have indeed fallen off the wagon, the media are unquestionably their earnest enablers. In this evolving world of political journalism, the politics-of-personality rule.

Campaign 2008 coverage features armies of pundits, party hacks and bloggers, all pontificating on the importance of two-point changes in the daily tracking polls. Columnists analyze the rise and fall of the “party brands” as if they were types of toilette paper. The same tired series of narratives about the leaders are constantly repackaged, relentlessly referenced.

Meanwhile, Canada’s many troubling policy challenges – quaintly referred to as ‘the issues’ – are marginalized and trivialized. Even when the issues are discussed, the focus is on the “politics of policy” – how an issue polls, who it plays to and how it can be sold.

This shallow, scandal-driven media environment has done much to produce the venomous – even juvenile – question-period exchanges amongst our MPs in Ottawa. It’s becoming a vicious circle that worsens the tone of the politics, lowers the quality of public debate and turns people off of both politicians and journalists.

The fourth estate is a central institution in any well functioning democracy – a reality that entails both prestige and great responsibility. Yet, when confronted with this issue of the deterioration of public debate, the reaction among members of the press generally ranges from indignation to denial. They blame the politicians for their viciousness and vacuousness. They lament the complexity of the policies. And they point the finger at us, the voters, for not mobilizing behind any of the issues or, worse, for not caring.

If none of this criticism really hits home, here is one essential truth that might: the politics-of-personality coverage has become boring and repetitive. These days, we’ve been scanning the newspapers rather than reading them. We’ve been changing the channel more quickly than ever before. So a word to the advertisers: it’s the issues that matter, not the puffin.

- André Côté and David Suk are students at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance.