By-Election Coverage
Shorter John Robson:
"I can't write about the by-elections because no-one else in the mainstream media has written about them. Of course why should we be expected to work that hard when those communities were so thoughtless as to have long hard-to-pronounce names. [Or have so much of their news in french.] Hence these races must be boring."
For the take of someone who's taken the trouble to follow them: L. Ian MacDonald in this morning's National Post.
"I can't write about the by-elections because no-one else in the mainstream media has written about them. Of course why should we be expected to work that hard when those communities were so thoughtless as to have long hard-to-pronounce names. [Or have so much of their news in french.] Hence these races must be boring."
For the take of someone who's taken the trouble to follow them: L. Ian MacDonald in this morning's National Post.
Labels: Nov 9 2009 By-elections
posted by The Pundits' Guide at
5:37 AM
6 Comments:
well they will get more attention on monday , everyone is more interesting in finding out who wins than to cover the actual race . i have noticed though they seem to be some of the more unpredictable by-elections we have seen in recent years and its not yet clear who will win them .
Gotta agree with you, Anon.
But there were a lot of great stories out there. If I didn't have to go to work full-time every day, I would have tried to pull it all together a bit better for people.
There are a lot of local news outlets in those ridings that have been providing great coverage of the campaign.
Mr. Robson needs to introduce himself to Google News and Google Translate, and get to work.
Folks who are interested in politics are amongst the few remaining people actually reading daily newspapers. You think they would make a bit more effort to research and write about what's going on for that audience.
To be fair, two of these ridings were really safe for their respective parties and it would take an electoral earthquake for another party to capture them. Polls indicate no really major shifts in support since the last general election.
Only CCMV was, kinda sorta, a government riding. Governments tend not to gain seats in by-elections. That they gained one and a half is a big story.
But electoral trends in Quebec don't translate to the anglophone provinces and vice versa.
Hi Ed, and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.
People also started off the by-election campaign assuming that MIKR was safe for the Bloc. It wasn't. The concept of "safe seats" if based exclusively on past performance, to the exclusion of incumbency, candidate recruitment, demographics and other issues, needs to be quietly put out of its misery.
In my view, anyway.
I meant that Hochelaga was safe for the Bloc. My two safe ridings were Hochelaga and CCMV. CCMV voted independent in the last election but I counted it as a safe Conservative riding based on its electoral history. The independent MP had been elected as a Conservative.
I agree that its unclear when to call a riding "safe" and just looking at the margins of the last election is too crude. Plus the BQ has only contested six federal elections. My metric is some combination of electoral history plus performance over the last three federal elections.
Fair enough, Ed. I agree with that approach.
[And I've put that Cialis comment spam between our two comments out with the trash. Piss off you guys!]
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