September 15, 2003
The small "l" and large "L" liberal bias of much of the mainstream media is alive and well during the campaign for the October 2 Ontario provincial election. Shocked by early polls that show the Tories neck and neck with their beloved Liberals, some sources make no bones about who they want to win the upcoming vote.
On September 8, Toronto’s all news radio station, 680News, which really should be renamed ‘the all liberal news station,’ ran a segment about the upcoming American style attack ads that the PCs would soon be airing. After hearing a one-sided argument from experts who said that the public gets turned off by the ads, the piece concluded with mentioning what was probably the worst attack ad in history--the ad run in 1993 by the federal Tories which implied that Jean Chrétien was unfit to govern because of his facial deformity. That ad had absolutely nothing to do with the provincial Progressive Conservatives, but 680News wanted its listeners to make the link. The worst current attack ad says that Dalton McGuinty is still not up to the job. And the station did not attempt to explain how the hated Mike Harris obtained a second majority government in 1999 by using the attack ad that said Dalton McGuinty was not up to the job.
Caroline Mallan, the Toronto Star’s Queen’s Park Bureau Chief, is covering her paper’s boy, Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty. Mallan manages to inflict her pro-Liberal bias in her early columns. Although Mallan can’t be blamed for headlines, one of them read:
Won’t answer election call 5 Tories, 1 NDP
3 Liberals retiring
The way that the sub headline was spaced, it seemed to suggest that the Tories and the NDP were somehow afraid to answer the election call, while the Liberal MPPs who weren’t seeking re-election were simply "retiring."
The omission of an essential fact or facts connotes bias in an article. In a September 8 piece by Mallan, entitled: Taxes won’t go up, Liberals say, Mallan leaves out the fact that the Liberals have promised to rollback tax cuts that the Progressive Conservatives have already implemented. This may just be semantics, but there is no difference between a tax increase and a rolled back tax cut--they both result in the taxpayer paying more money in taxes. The Liberals, of course, don’t want to equate the two and neither, apparently, does their scribe, Caroline Mallan.
In her article that was published the next day, McGuinty pledges to stay on ‘high road, she quotes the Liberal leader as saying: "We want to take the high road for the people of Ontario. That’s our ambition for our province. We’re not offering some small-minded gimmicks."
Mallan conveniently left out that the seeker of the high road, just a few days before, had referred to Ontario premier Ernie Eves as a used car salesman, and had asked people if they would buy a used car from him.
Another illustration of bias in favour of the Liberals is to publish irrelevant information as if it’s relevant. Obviously, Mallan was upset to learn of the Tories’ surge in the polls, so she wrote an article entitled: Undecided may be decisive. The Star quoted an Ekos poll that found that 14.3% of those polled were undecided. It is hard to understand how Mallan could think that the fact that 14.3% of voters were undecided during the first week of the campaign could possibly be relevant, except as a way to rationalize the loss of support for the Liberals. She also fails to state that the undecided vote, which is only significant right before the vote, usually breaks down the same way that the total vote does.
The award for creative use of bias against the governing PCs goes to CityTV’s "political specialist," Adam Vaughan. During his daily reports on the campaign, Vaughan always emphasizes that Tory leader Ernie Eves spends very little time in Toronto. When reporting on Paul Martin’s visit to the campaign of Liberal Michael Bryant, Vaughan joked that Paul Martin has spent more time campaigning in Toronto than Eves had. This is Vaughan’s little way of telling his audience, mainly residents of Toronto, that the PCs don’t care about the city and that they should vote for another party.
If City was a real news source, Vaughan’s musings would be serious. Like most of City’s news broadcasts, Vaughan is good for a laugh.