Open letter to PM Trudeau & Dr Tam re Covid-19 spread

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau and Dr Theresa Tam,

Critical information about the spread of Covid-19 may be available to you and your colleagues from a cost efficient & relatively quick population survey that can be extrapolated to the general public. In this note, I describe what information can be collected and how it can be done.

 

I am a polling expert with some 50 years experience. I worked at the Institute for Behavioural Research at York U, the CBC, & later ran my own Internet survey research company ViewStats Research. You can check my credentials on http://biasinonlinesurveys.idiary.com/   and   http://www.idiary.com/.

 

Canada has an urgent need for accurate information about the coronavirus outbreak & the scientific survey methodology is perfectly suited to get it. Let me explain how.

 

The coronavirus plague is creating a tremendous anxiety and fear amongst Canadians. Many suspect they have the virus but cannot get tested because the policy is only test those whose symptoms require medical intervention. While we know how many died, we don’t know how many caught the virus. As a result we don’t really have a reliable statistic for the coronavirus death rate.

We know the numerator but have no idea of the denominator.

It is very likely that the 1-2% figure for Canada is a huge overestimate. If it were closer to .1%, the influenza figure, and bad as that death rate is, an accurate estimate could significantly reduce the fear Canadians have of coronavirus.

 

Related to this is that we have no idea of what is the accurate distribution (neither numerical or demographic) of coronavirus spread across Canada. We simply jump from one hot spot to another. The end result is that the country and its policymakers are constantly reactive to the plague rather than being ahead of the wave.

 

Also, if we knew the geographical distribution of the viral spread, it would allow us to distribute medical personnel and equipment in a much more effective manner by identifying areas that are up-and-coming hotspots. This would allow public health authorities to target these areas by social distancing measures to try to flatten the virus’ exponential growth earlier rather than later when the damage has been done.

 

But that is exactly the kind of information that the Canadian government could obtain by undertaking a national in-home survey of  between 10,000 & 12,000 homes randomly distributed across the country and representative of the country as a whole. This in-home survey would provide interviewers with a portable measurement kit much like the Abbott Laboratories system that would assess the coronavirus status of all respondents within a household in situ. It takes between 5 to 15 min per person. The survey would tell us how many Canadians are infected with the virus, whether they are symptomatic or not. There would be a tremendous respondent buy-in from the sample of selected households as the survey would be well publicized across all media beforehand.

 

Who would not want to know whether they are infected the coronavirus or not?

 

In addition for those households in which individuals came up positive, there would be a follow-up questionnaire examining behavioral patterns that may have resulted in their catching the virus. The survey information that would include respondent demographics would be very useful for public health officials in developing behavioral strategies to minimize the infection rate.

 

Thirdly, the survey would provide critical data on what parts of the country may be ready to begin to reengage in the local economy. Different parts of the country have been infected at different rates. There is not going to be one moment when all of Canada is ready to go back to work. With adequate testing procedures in place some parts of  the country will be ready to go back to work sooner, other parts later. At some point people have to stop fearing the virus and start thinking of how to live with it.

 

Perhaps the best group to conduct the survey would be Statistics Canada. Among other surveys, it is responsible for conducting the monthly Labour force survey and has an expert field staff ready to go to work.

But someone has to tell them to go and do it.

Which is why I’m writing to you.

Given the crisis we face, this is an idea that urgently needs to be discussed by those who have green light capabilities at the federal level.

Regards,

Oleh Iwanyshyn

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Articles by Oleh Iwanyshyn in National NewsWatch

Trump’s war on vital institutions of US democracy

Jul 7 2017 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — While news media tends to focus on Trump’s often silly tweets, a much bigger problem gets short shrift. Public confidence in institutions critical to the preservation of US democracy is deteriorating. These include the intelligence agencies, the justice system and the news media. The loss of confidence is the direct result of Trump’s repeated accusations […]

Anatomy of a Fox fake news story

Mar 23 2017 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — How does a patently false claim from the lips (or tweet) of Donald Trump get legitimized to the point where many Americans think it’s true? In one word–Television. Television is how most Americans get their news. Six out of every 10 Americans say it’s their main source of news. Perhaps more relevant, for those over […]

How a Dishonest Trump and a Dishonest Fox Are Destroying Trust in All News Media

Jan 27 2017 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — President Trump seems always on the attack against news media. He claims they are dishonest because they wrongly assert that many of his statements are untrue — that, in fact, Trump is dishonest. The  evidence opposing his claim, however, is overwhelming. When the Toronto Star assigned its reporter Daniel Dale to document Trump’s lying during […]

How Polls, the News Media, and Putin gave Trump the Presidency

Jan 9 2017 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — Did the Putin-inspired hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) tilt the voting results in Trump’s favor? Seventeen US intelligence agencies believe Russia and in particular Putin interfered in the elections.  Republicans are careful to say there is no direct evidence proving it is the reason why Trump won. That may be true. However, from […]

How Donald Trump could become President

Apr 18 2016 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — The Republican Party is petrified.  Not because the leading presidential candidate Donald Trump has declared war on it.  Nor is it because he is not a real conservative.  And it’s not even because of his rash statements that many in the Party see as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic or just plain nuts (like arming South Korea […]

 

Why Donald Trump won’t just fade away

Dec 21 2015 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — Both liberal and conservative pundits are baffled by the resilience shown in Donald Trump’s popularity despite his outrageous statements that would have sunk any other presidential candidate.  A recent CBS/NYTimes poll shows Trump with 35% popularity, more than twice as high as the next most popular opponent, Ted Cruz, with 16%.  Trump has for the […]

How the West (unwittingly) aids Russian propaganda

Aug 27 2015 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — It’s disappointing when Western news media promulgate Russian polls touting the unbelievably high popularity of President Putin as if it was a true reflection of Russian sentiment.  But to see one of the most respected US pollsters add credibility to such questionable results is perverse. Why should we in the West promote Russian propaganda? The […]

What Putin’s 86% popularity says about Russian polls

May 29 2015 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — National Newswatch — Imagine this. You’re Russian. You’re living in a dictatorship. You get a phone call. An anonymous voice on the other end tells you it’s a poll. The question – Do you approve of Putin’s activities as President of Russia. You think to yourself. This guy holds all the power. He is ex-KGB.  And he doesn’t […]

How the Ontario election polls were so wrong yet so right

Jun 23 2014 — Oleh Iwanyshyn — Hill Times — At first glance, it seems like public opinion polls delivered a poor prediction of the Ontario provincial election outcome. On the day of the election, poll aggregator Éric Grenier described the trend as “likely Liberal, possibly PC victory” with “a likely return to a minority legislature.” While admittedly there was a lot of scatter in […]

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How Polls, the News Media, and Putin gave Trump the Presidency

(This article was originally published in National Newswatch on Jan 9, 2017)

Did the Putin-inspired hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) tilt the voting results in Trump’s favor? Seventeen US intelligence agencies believe Russia and in particular Putin interfered in the elections.  Republicans are careful to say there is no direct evidence proving it is the reason why Trump won. That may be true. However, from a purely methodological perspective the unequivocal answer is– yes, they did tip the results in Trump’s favor.

We just don’t know by how much.

The steady drip drip drip of DNC e-mail revelations over 4 months, from July to November of 2016, combined with massive media coverage absolutely guaranteed broad public awareness. The message was one of corrupt political practices employed by the Democratic National Committee,  in particular to undermine Bernie Sanders campaign. It was the same message that Trump repeated about Hillary Clinton regarding her private e-mail server and related deceptions. Undoubtedly for many voters the two messages were conflated into one — E-mails show that Hillary was corrupt.

That was the conditioned association planted in the minds of many Americans from the intense media bombardment.

For many who did not follow politics too closely, there was no distinction that Hillary Clinton e-mails were released by the State Department while DNC e-mails were essentially released by Putin via WikiLeaks. FBI Director Comey’s claim that Clinton did nothing illegal was not helped by her lack of truthfulness on the matter. Also while the DNC e-mails were politically tawdry, they were probably no worse than internal GOP e-mails– if Putin would have released them. To deny that none of this tipped some voters to Trump’s side is to deny that the billions of dollars advertisers spend promoting their products is effective.

Propaganda, whether it’s to sell a product or to sell a candidate, works very well in America.

What makes it  highly likely that this media conditioned association tilted the results in Trump’s favor is how incredibly close the election turned out to be.

While Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 306 versus 232, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3,000,000 votes. Modest Trump victories in critical swing states won the day for Trump. Although polls have taken a drubbing for predicting a Hillary Clinton presidency, their prediction of the popular vote was not far off. Just before the election, a poll of polls average put Clinton ahead of Trump by 52% to 48% in a head-to-head comparison (excluding Libertarian and Green voters) . The actual popular vote was 51% versus 49% in favor of Clinton.

So how did a mere 1% change in popular vote turn an almost certain Clinton victory into a defeat?

Hidden Trump voters were the flies in the ointment. These are voters that none of the polls were able to quantify because they either refused to participate in the polls or would not admit their support of Trump to pollsters. This bias was systemic to all the polls. The only time the country learned of their presence was on election day. Our analysis shows that if only 2 of every 100 persons who voted for either Trump or Clinton on election day refused to participate or did not admit their support of Trump in pre-election polls, that would be enough to turn the tide in favor of Trump. This represents about 2% of all those voting for either Trump or Clinton, or 3 million of a total of about 129 million votes cast for two candidates.

The phenomenon of hidden voters was predicted by the German social scientist and pollster Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. Trained in the art of polling in America, she returned to Germany to practice her craft at the time when the Nazis had ascended to power. She found that respondents generally had a good sense of which issues society approved of versus those they didn’t. In order to avoid social disapproval some respondents would not reveal their true feelings to poll interviewers. Her research on this phenomenon is described in her book The Spiral of Silence.

This is precisely what happened in the presidential election. Trump was clearly a provocative candidate. As a consequence, a significant number of Trump supporters chose not to reveal their voting intentions to pollsters. Some would not participate in surveys. Others would not tell the truth. The nature and magnitude of this bias were only revealed on election day. And it’s not just a reticence to reveal their true feelings to interviewers. A CNN poll reported on November 13, 2016 found that about one of every three Trump supporters expressed concern about revealing their choice to friends and colleagues.

A similar response occurred in the Brexit polls that predicted Britain would remain in the EU while the referendum was won by those supporting Britain’s exit. Leaving the EU certainly did not have social approval of the British establishment or its media. As with the US presidential election, the referendum was won by the slightest of margins. A poll of polls had the remain side ahead by two percentage points while the referendum had the leave side ahead by four percentage points. This extraordinary difference was most likely accounted by the hidden Brexit supporters as hypothesized by the theory of Noelle-Neumann.

While the Putin-inspired hacks and hidden Trump voters were important factors that helped tilt a very close election in Trump’s favor, they were not the dominant factors that produced his victory. There was a powerful reason why millions of voters, many of whom did not like or trust Trump, cast their votes for him. While most Americans perceived both candidates to be highly untrustworthy, Trump was not a politician. Hillary Clinton was. That was the difference.

It was the reason why Republican women voted for him despite prima facie evidence that Trump was a serial sexual abuser. It was the reason why many who were not racist or Islamophobes voted for a man who spoke like he was. It was why many in the military voted for him when the candidate showed himself to be a coward in avoiding military service while criticizing military heroes like Sen. John McCain for service to his country. It was the reason patriotic Americans voted for Trump as he surrounded himself with Putin fans like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Rex Tillerson, and Wilbur Ross. As the nonpolitician candidate, there was little Trump could say or do (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,”) that would deter millions of Americans from voting for him.

The media reaction to Trump had it all wrong. They jumped on every piece of nonsense that came out of his mouth, analyzed it ad nauseam and undertook polls to show the public was appalled. The media thought this approach would make Trump and his followers come to their senses.

They failed to understand that many in the public simply didn’t care what he said. In fact many supporters rationalized his ill-advised comments as rhetorical ploys, something to gain public attention and separate himself from the politically correct class. They supported Trump because as long as he kept being politically incorrect, they knew he wasn’t one of them. Yes, they were appalled by many things he said. But in their eyes, the behavior of the political class was far more appalling.

Unencumbered by any ideological commitment, Trump could say anything, anytime. Whatever it took to win, he was ready to say it. And win he did.

By focusing solely on the nonsense coming out of Trump’s mouth, the polls overlooked the central question of the 2016 election–Why was America so angry with its politicians?

The event that triggered this massive American revulsion to its politicians was the 2008 great recession. That was the same year that Obama was elected president. It was also the same year that Republicans elected to office decided they wouldn’t do the job to which they were elected i.e. to govern. They would simply oppose every legislative action from the Democratic side. It was also the same year that in the face of a mountain of evidence of malfeasance on the part of Wall Street banks, President Obama decided not to punish any of those responsible for the disaster. For all the billions of dollars of fraud perpetrated, no one was arrested, no one was tried and no one did jail time. It’s worth noting that some years earlier in the much, much smaller Savings and Loan banking scandal, hundreds of bankers were arrested and ended up in prison.

Imagine how someone living a comfortable, middle-class life would have felt when the Great Recession leaves them jobless, homeless, and impoverished while those who perpetrated the fraud were protected by politicians who they paid for. Could there be any greater sense of injustice and political betrayal among the millions damaged by this financial disaster?

A Gallup poll in December found that only 8% of Americans rated members of Congress as high or very high on honesty and ethical standards, the lowest of all professions listed. For nurses the corresponding figure was 84%. Even those nasty bankers did better with 24%. Not much on the honesty front has changed since 2008.

For many Americans, it was the straw (brutally big, to be fair) that broke the camel’s back.

Strangely. pollsters forgot about all that. Instead of relying on self-serving questionnaire priorities for their media paymasters i.e. how awful that Trump would deport 11 million Mexicans, or ban all Muslims from entering America, pollsters ought to have engaged far more with the lives and experiences of average Americans and learn what their priorities were. That decision would have created a dramatically different media narrative. It would have revealed the depth of despair among American workers. It may have even changed Clinton’s campaign strategy by paying more attention to the rust belt states that she lost by a whisker.

There have been many explanations hypothesized as to why Hillary Clinton lost. Many blame Clinton herself. Did she lose the election because she was such a terrible candidate? No. In terms of qualifications, she beat Trump hands down. But she was a career politician and it was Clinton’s misfortune in this election to be the symbol of this deep public discontent.

What has been underestimated in Trump’s victory was the news media. Not only did they fund polls that failed to ask the right questions and so deprive the American public of insights on important issues that turned the election, they provided Trump with a bully pulpit from which to galvanize public support.

They gave him air time, he gave them ratings.

The free publicity they delivered for Trump during the Republican primaries combined with media polls that had him leading his competitors made him simply unbeatable. Later, during the presidential campaign, the propaganda power of mass media was able to maintain the unjustified Trump accusation via the leaked emails that Hillary Clinton was too corrupt to be president. Without a doubt, mass media was Trump’s  greatest friend.

It is also most ironic that in this strange election, the one institution that Trump demonized throughout the campaign–news media–was perhaps most instrumental in his being elected as the Republican candidate and ultimately the President of the United States.

What is deeply troubling is that the election has been tainted by the active intervention of Russia in America’s election process specifically for the purpose of electing Trump. For a presidential candidate who has probably lied more than any other candidate in America’s history, a candidate that many Americans do not trust or respect, the potential illegitimacy of his election may be the most damaging revelation.

Trump knows this and he cannot allow the idea to gain traction.

 

Oleh Iwanyshyn has been involved in public opinion polling since the mid-70s, first with the Institute for Behavioral Research at York University, then the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and more recently with ViewStats Research, a company he cofounded in 1997.  He writes on the role of public opinion polls in matters of politics and public policy.  His articles have appeared in iPolitics, The Hill Times, and National NewsWatch. For more, see his blog poll stuff.

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The CBC will run out of money before excuses

(This article was originally published on December 8, 2012 in iPolitics )

Some weeks ago I attended a memorial for Jim Murray.  For many years Jim was the executive producer of the CBC’s The Nature of Things with David Suzuki.  The show won numerous awards for the quality of its programming and, in discovering David Suzuki, gave us one of the world’s most accomplished environmental spokesmen.

As I listened to his many friends offer their fond remembrances of the man, I couldn’t help but reflect on the sorry state in which the CBC finds itself now.  Last week saw the CBC pleading before the CRTC for permission to expand revenue-generating commercial activities.

Downsizing yet again after another parliamentary budget cut and pulling diminishing audiences that now represent only 5 to 6 per cent of the total television audience in Canada, the broadcaster is on the ropes.  Even loyal supporters of the CBC will soon be hard-pressed to justify spending over $1 billion annually on a broadcaster that almost nobody watches.

The CBC could learn a thing or two from Jim about connecting with Canadians.

As a television producer, Jim was unyielding in his drive and determination to create compelling television for the widest possible audiences. This intensity stood in sharp relief to his personal qualities — his humility, modesty and generous humanity.

Getting big audiences was not just a lucky happenstance for Jim. He wanted them. He switched from radio to television for that reason. He engaged big, important ideas that affected the lives of Canadians. Sharing these ideas with as many Canadians as possible seemed like the proper thing to do. After all, the broadcaster that funded his shows was owned by Canadian taxpayers.

He learned as much as he could about the behavior of audiences: what programming ideas worked, what didn’t and, most importantly, why. He was a master at applying this knowledge in a way that held audiences, even when the complexity of an idea made viewing a challenge. Also, he surrounded himself with some of the best people in the business.

Jim was keenly aware of the power of mass media to influence public opinion. A widely-watched television show generates numerous conversations among family, friends and workmates. People hear and read about it in other media. It creates opinions, attitudes, debates, decisions and actions.

A show attracting a large audience becomes a powerful engine of cultural change in society. For a small-audience show, the engine sputters … and dies.

In its heyday, episodes of The Nature of Things often attracted well over a million Canadians. His Midas touch with audiences was also apparent in his eight-part documentary series A Planet for the Taking, where individual episodes attracted over 2 million viewers.

Jim also produced the docu-drama series The National Dream based on Pierre Berton’s book about the building of Canada’s transcontinental railroad. It attracted a weekly audience of more than 3,000,000 viewers.

What makes his achievements even more remarkable is that his shows often dealt with provocative ideas. They included diverse topics like clearcutting in the forest industry, the collateral damage to the environment of extracting oil from tarsands, and safety issues in nuclear power generation.

In Canada’s commodity-driven economy, his programs struck at the heart of our wealth-producing industries. Their CEOs didn’t take kindly to having their operations criticized, especially by a public broadcaster. It took some guts to stand up to the withering attacks of our captains of industry. Jim bore it well, and in the spirit of fairness, gave them an opportunity in his shows to make their case.

Jim had an enduring admiration for the CBC.

For his kind of show, he knew it was the only game in town. Commercial broadcasters would balk at bankrolling a show that was critical of corporations buying advertising on their network. Jim knew very well that given the choice between vapid, formulaic mass-audience programs and equally popular — but provocative and risky — programs like his, a commercial broadcaster would opt for the former without remorse.

He fully appreciated that the primary responsibility of those working for the CBC was to serve the best interests of the Canadian public. He felt that commercializing the CBC profoundly undermined this central responsibility. The interests of the companies paying for these commercials too often were inconsistent with what was best for Canadians.

This inconsistency bothered him greatly. How, for example, does a viewer of a show about the unhealthy consequences of mass-produced, growth hormone-injected, antibiotic-fed beef rationalize the McDonald’s commercial that cuts through the middle of the message? To suggest it’s a source of cognitive dissonance for viewers is an understatement.

This is not an abstract concern. Some years ago the CBC program Marketplace did a show based on a consumer survey showing a large number of Ford vehicle owners were dissatisfied with how quickly their cars rusted. The company, a major advertiser on the CBC, forced Marketplace to broadcast a humiliating public retraction as a result of the pressure it applied on the broadcaster. The lesson for Marketplace producers was simple: don’t pick on large corporations with deep pockets.

With such conflicts of interest, it seemed just a matter of time before commercialization would start to unravel the production culture within the public broadcaster. Loyalty to both public and advertiser interests cannot coexist. It is a prescription for organizational schizophrenia.

To put it another way, the $300 million or so that the CBC receives yearly from commercial revenues undermines the $1.1 billion investment of Canadian taxpayers. In time, the $300 million tail ends up wagging the $1.1 billion dog.

Jim knew the future of a commercial CBC: it was a terrible deal for the broadcaster and no good could come of it.

Many years later, the prescience of Jim’s insights were brought home when the CBC was roundly criticized for buying Hollywood game shows for the sole purpose of delivering the audiences demanded by advertisers.

Many who defend the CBC argue that the organization suffers from insufficient funding. There is some truth to that. Tim Harper of the Toronto Star recently noted that compared to the 18 industrially advanced nations that have a public broadcaster, the CBC is near the bottom of the list. Its government subsidy amounts to $34 per person, while the average across all the countries surveyed is $87. If the CBC’s budget were raised to the average amount, it would be about $2.9 billion.

In producing his popular shows, Jim had adequate funding. Without it he would not have the production quality — or the audiences.

Adequate funding should be a sine qua non of any CBC strategy to increase its audiences. With the CBC laboring under increasingly reduced budgets, insufficient funding may be the culprit. If senior managers at the CBC believe that is the cause of their failure to deliver bigger audiences, they should say so publicly. They never do.

If they did they would lose their jobs and be replaced by others more amenable to government cuts. What they invariably do say however, is that regardless of the nature of the budget cuts, the CBC will be reorganized to ensure that its programming mandates will be fulfilled. Since popular Canadian programming is not a mandate, guess what’s last on the CBC’s priority list.

One thing is clear: the CBC uses the funding excuse far too often. Surely an annual outlay of nearly $1.5 billion should have delivered at least a few big audience successes over the past few television seasons. One or two CBC shows in Nielsen’s weekly top 10 would be a huge shot in the arm in the CBC’s battle for public support, but the corporation hasn’t delivered.

This inconvenient truth suggests the fundamental problem isn’t insufficient funding, but a lack of leadership.

CBC management is so intent on pleasing the bureaucrats (for the ostensible purpose of ensuring next year’s budget) on the one hand and advertisers (ensuring contractual obligations to deliver audience demographics) on the other, that it fails in its central responsibility — to create popular Canadian programming.

Management’s job is to find talented people like Jim Murray and, once it signs off on producers’ program ideas, to provide them with organizational cover. This gives producers confidence that if a show provokes controversy and external threats, political or legal, management has their backs.

Instead, what we have at the CBC today is a production culture where management encourages self-censorship, ensuring little risk of political censure and resulting in programming of little interest to the average Canadian viewer.

How does the CBC create a more adventuresome management system?

It should do what successful corporations do to achieve their goals: link a significant chunk of senior management’s salary to audience targets. Other targets may be conjured, but at this juncture nothing is as critical as increasing the CBC’s audiences. It’s also relatively easy to measure objectively.

Here’s a plan: If senior managers don’t achieve their audience goals at the end of the year, they only get half their pay. If they haven’t achieved their audience goals by the third year, they’re fired. If, on the other hand, they outperform expectations, bonuses are in order. Follow these three policies and I can pretty well guarantee that in three years’ time, Canadians would see a very different CBC.

If we’ve learned anything from the 2008 economic meltdown, it’s that compensation of senior executives of major corporations needs to be tied to company performance. If, in the case of the CBC, programming outcomes are not tied to salary and job consequences, why should the public continue to have confidence in the broadcaster to deliver the goods? Why should CBC staff have confidence in senior management when their record of failure is rewarded by well-paying jobs and gold-plated pensions?

Of course, linking compensation to performance carries the risk that the CBC will end up producing the same junk as the American networks. This risk, however, is mitigated by the CBC’s legislated mandate. Junk shows are not part of the mandate. What the mandate does require is programming that speaks to Canadians on matters they care about.

The combination of a goal-oriented, responsive management, unfettered by the needs of advertisers, could unlock the creative capacity of many talented CBCproducers who are currently operating in survival mode. Their efforts over the next few years could produce exceptional Canadian programs that will attract mass audiences no one at the CBC even dreams of today.

Whether they know it or not, Canadians need the CBC now more than ever. Media ownership in Canada has reached unprecedented levels of corporate concentration, and with BCE’s pursuit of Astral it may get worse. The conflict between public and corporate interests has become a divide that threatens democracies everywhere, Canada included. Public broadcasters like the CBC have a very important role in presenting the facts of this conflict and ensuring that democratic principles are not undermined by corporate interests.

The fact that the CBC is owned by Canadians gives it a degree of accountability and transparency that cannot be matched by its commercial competitors — a huge reservoir of public trust that money cannot buy. If it’s abused, of course, this reservoir can dry up pretty quickly.

The CBC needs to be shielded from government interference. Constantly threatening the CBC with budget cuts is government blackmail. If it continues it willdestroy an already gravely weakened CBC. Stable, long-term funding with a thorough CRTC assessment of performance goals on a regular basis is a wiser and more efficient approach.

For the CBC’s part, it should stop running from controversy. Provocative programming that stirs up public and media debate needs to be a regular staple of theCBC diet, to boost ratings. Canadians must be made to feel something about the CBC — good or bad, but not indifferent.

At some point in Jim’s illustrious career there were rumours of his moving to a senior management role. He dismissed them. The politics of management didn’t interest him in the least. He wanted his feet planted firmly on the production floor.

I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if he had taken that leadership role. I’m certain he would have been a success, as he had been in everything else he’d done. He’d bring to life smart, courageous, well executed and well-watched shows about important ideas.

And commercials? They’d be history. He was, in that sense, the best president the CBC never had.

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Propagating the Myth of a “Divided America”

(This article was originally published on March 6, 2012 in iPolitics.)

There is a myth propagated by the American political establishment and carelessly disseminated by uncritical media that the American public is deeply divided on how the country should be governed.

The alleged evidence includes polls such as the one recently quoted in the Washington Post showing that about half of America disapproves of president Obama’s handling of his job as president, in particular the economy and job creation.

However, when examining the polling data in their fullness, it is clear that this myth is false.

While it is true that the American public is politically polarized, and has been since George W. Bush rose to ascendancy in the so-called “stolen” 2000 presidential election, the polls clearly show that on important national issues like health care reform, raising the ceiling, and job creation, the American public reveals an extraordinary degree of unanimity. This unanimity crosses partisan differences, showing majority support among both Democratic and Republican voters alike.

In exaggerating division for their own self interest, politicians and the news media have robbed the nation of the strength of common purpose.

President Obama’s “pass this bill now” jobs legislation is a good demonstration of the contradiction between the myth and reality.

A Gallup poll found that a substantial majority of Americans supported five of the six job creation proposals in the jobs bill. These included tax cuts for small businesses as incentives to hire workers (85%), additional funds to hire teachers, police, and firefighters (75%), tax breaks for companies hiring people unemployed for more than six months (73%), and funds for public works projects including the repair of more than 30,000 schools (72%).

While Democrat-leaning voters supported these proposals more strongly than Republican-leaning voters, the latter group expressed majority support for four of the six proposals.  A majority of Republicans (53%) even agreed that funding for the bill should come from increased taxes on corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions.

In spite of its bipartisan public appeal, the jobs bill seems to have foundered at the hands of a dysfunctional and uncompromising Congress.

The debt ceiling debate was another demonstration of polls showing public unanimity on an important national issue. For example, a Pew Research poll found that 68% of Americans felt that Congress should compromise to avoid the immediate consequences of America defaulting on its debt obligations. Among Republicans, a majority (53%) supported compromise.

Again, in spite of bipartisan public support for compromise, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives rejected compromise resulting in America losing its AAA credit rating and world markets losing between $2.5 trillion and $4 trillion in the immediate aftermath.

The hotly debated healthcare reform legislation was yet another example of substantial bipartisan public support for almost all of the major goals of the legislation. A Bloomberg poll from Sept. of 2009 found that large majorities of Americans were in favor of:

  • finding a way to get health insurance coverage for the uninsured (90%),
  • preventing insurance companies from dropping those insured from coverage (85%),
  • preventing insurance companies from refusing to ensure those with pre-existing conditions (83%),
  • requiring all employers to offer health insurance plans to their employees (75%), and
  • holding down insurance costs for those with coverage (90%).

While Democrat voters expressed greater support than Republican voters for these goals, Republican support was very high – about 80% for all but the employer health plan which had 64% support. The only goal for which there was a significant difference between the two groups was in the personal mandate (82% Democrat support versus 46% Republican).

Yet for Republican legislators in Congress, a broad-based, bipartisan yearning for a better health care system meant nothing. After resorting to every delaying and scaremongering tactic they could muster, Republicans had to accept defeat after the healthcare reform legislation was passed in both houses of Congress. But the ink was barely dry from President Obama’s signature when Republicans renewed their assault on the legislation by threatening to repeal it.

So if the media were not reporting about what united Americans on these important public issues, what were they reporting?

For each of these nationally galvanizing issues, the media focused on poll questions that purported to show a nation divided.

In the case of Obama’s jobs bill, the media narrative, as noted earlier, was that half of America disapproved of his handling of the economy and job creation. By association, these stories wrongly suggested that Americans disapproved of his jobs bill. As noted, the polls clearly demonstrate that nothing could be farther from the truth.

The blunt fact is, these were terrible questions. They reveal nothing about the public’s knowledge of what President Obama may or may not have done to remedy the jobs crisis.

The public admits as much.

When asked whether or not they are in favor of the jobs bill, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that almost half of Americans (44%) felt they were insufficiently informed on the subject to comment. But how credible would any response from the 44% be of President Obama’s handling of the jobs crisis?

It was quite telling when, in a follow-up question, respondents were briefly described the broad strokes of the jobs bill, public support for the legislation doubled – from the initial 30% to 63%.

One is left wondering how respondents would answer the Obama approval questions if they were asked after the jobs bill was described.

That same poll found that 64% of Americans thought it was a good idea that in order to pay for this legislation, taxes should be raised on the wealthy and on corporations. Republicans in Congress strongly opposed this idea.

Unfamiliar with specific details, the evidence shows respondents answered the Obama approval questions along party lines.

For example, in the case of Obama’s handling of his job as President for which a recent CNN poll found 51% disapproved and 47% approved, that same poll found that 90% of Republican voters say they disapproved while 79% of Democratic voters approved.

The inconvenient truth is that the Obama approval questions have become completely politicized. In effect they became surrogates for whether respondents favor Republicans or Democrats, and have little if anything to do with what President Obama actually did.

The potent brew that makes all this possible is a large number of ill-informed respondents combined with a complex issue. In all three examples the number of ill-informed respondents was very high, ranging between 40% to over 70%, the depending on the poll. Public opinion then becomes highly susceptible to suggestion.

Here’s how it works.

Politicization of poll questions starts with the debate in Congress. This debate creates partisan messages.

The media dutifully and uncritically disseminates these opposing perspectives in a tsunami of stories across the country. It is essentially a propaganda process in which a relatively uninformed but partisan public is conditioned to associate specific phrases as Republican or Democratic Party positions. For Republican voters, Obama’s handling of “the economy” and “job creation” is equated to negative, “unfavorable” descriptions; for Democrat voters the association is equated to positive, “favorable” ones.

This partisan phraseology is used by pollsters to cue the respondents so that they can easily answer poll questions on matters they often know very little about.

Politicizing polling questions is not an isolated phenomenon. The jobs bill is but one example. It also arose in the recent debate about raising the debt ceiling as well as the healthcare reform debate.

During the debt ceiling debate, the media became fixated with a polling question that showed that half of America was opposed to raising the debt ceiling and were willing to risk default. The other half was in favor of raising the debt ceiling so America could pay its debts and avoid financial instability.

As before, it was an ill-conceived question that completely misrepresented the majority will of the American public. It wasn’t until near the end of the debate that the press recognized that most Americans were in favor of compromise, and were so from the very beginning.

By that time, a great deal of political and economic damage had been done.

During the healthcare reform debate, the media were fixated on a question that purported to show that half of Americans disapproved of President Obama’s handling of health care reform. This perception originated from a fractious debate in Congress in which a fear mongering Republican leadership claimed the reforms would lead to such things as government death panels, socialized medicine and widespread funding of abortions.

As with the previous examples, this was a terrible polling question.

Highly politicized through widespread media reporting of the debate in Congress, this question seemingly pitted Americans against one another.

In fact it was the politicians who were pitted against one another. They used these misleading polling results to justify their inability to work with one another by claiming their differences were simply a reflection of the divisions in the country.

The truth was that most of America just wanted a healthcare system they could rely on – not one that would financially destroy them in their moment of greatest need.

To this day, this approval question continues to be used by critics of President Obama’s health care reforms as proof that the man is trying to force feed healthcare into a country bitterly divided on its merits.

What these examples amply demonstrate is not that these were simply bad questions; it’s that they give the impression that the American public is divided on important national issues.

While such misapprehension certainly suits the Republicans in this election year, in the longer term it has the potential to hurt the party.

The polling data clearly show the Republican voters favor many of President Obama’s public policy options that are opposed by the Republican Party. For many voters, this inherent conflict may sow the seeds of future dissatisfaction. If the Republican Party they support does not offer alternatives that satisfy them, the party will begin to experience an erosion of popular support.

But why is so much media attention focused on such flawed questions?

In part, it is because a narrative of conflict sells copy. Stories about a nation divided on a contentious issue is dramatic. Stories that the nation is united, not so much. The conflict theme also parrots the divisive debate in Congress. So while they completely miss the mark, these stories are an easy sell.

Secondly, all these flawed questions are repeated in poll after poll to measure public opinion trends. This presents multiple opportunities for the media to run stories about them, thereby greatly enhancing their propaganda effect.

Often the trend changes are not statistically significant.  Yet that doesn’t stop media from heralding the “news” from a fresh poll, even when it’s not news or even true. Of the 31 Washington Post/ABC News polls conducted between February 2009 and December 2011, 20 of the poll to poll changes in Barack Obama’s approval were less than the reported statistical margin of error.

One is reminded of that cynical line from Hitler’s chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start believing it.

Clearly the news media has not done a good job in advancing an accurate narrative of public opinion as reported by polls.

So, what should it do?

For starters, it needs to stop taking its cues from the self-serving political debate in Congress. This is not where it will find an accurate portrayal of public opinion.

It needs to occupy the narrative.

For example, if in the course of a TV interview a Republican legislator states that a majority of Americans do not support President Obama’s initiatives on things like job creation, or securing reliable health care, or raising the debt ceiling, the journalist conducting the interview should challenge the misleading assertion right then and there.

For some reason, TV news reporters generally do not challenge the politicians at the time these misleading claims are made, or not at all.

Sometimes a news network like CNN will run a fact check feature after the interview to point out which “facts” were true and which were untrue. But by then it’s too late. The horse has left the barn.

The interview becomes a conduit for inaccurate information to the public. The politician ends up scoring a point when in fact the point should go against the politician.

This is not just bad journalism. It betrays the trust the public has in the profession. Coddling politicians by not challenging their false claims harms democracy.

Comparing how American TV reporters interview politicians with how it’s done by the Brits is quite revealing. For example, in a BBC program called HARDtalk, a well prepared interviewer like the unrelenting Stephen Sackur with evidence in hand, seldom lets politicians escape with evasive answers.

In America, reporters seem to be more intent on preserving a friendly relationship with politicians, possibly as a trade-off for future interviews and intel. As a consequence, half-truths and outright falsehoods are allowed to pass unchallenged.

A more troubling explanation for this chumminess may be that 90% of media ownership in America, including that of the most popular TV news networks, is concentrated in six conglomerates. Thirty years ago, 90% of media ownership was concentrated in 50 companies. This is a massive erosion in news competition.

Today, these large corporations invest in both Republican and Democratic politicians in their re-election campaigns as well as in lobbying efforts for regulatory changes to benefit them financially. It is hardly in their interest to encourage their reporters to put their politicians on the hot seat.

This is not to suggest there is a written policy that restricts how zealously the reporters can pursue politicians when they lie. Quite often these things are learned by reporters as part of the corporate culture. If they want to advance in this culture, they know exactly how they need to self-censor themselves.

In the case of the BBC model, some degree of self-censorship probably exists. However since the BBC is funded through viewer subscriptions, there is not that corporate influence on behavior that exists in America. Programming decisions do not have to curry favor to corporate interests as they do in America. Hence, politicians are often given a much rougher ride.

Whatever new direction it takes, it should be apparent to American TV news media that the current modus operandi doesn’t work. Americans and democracy are getting shortchanged. The press is helping to divide the country when polling evidence suggests the opposite is true.

The origin of this contradiction is the political system in Washington. Each party manipulates polling information solely for the purpose of political advantage. Neither party has any interest in presenting a balanced assessment of the pros and cons of important national issues. As a result of this narrow, self-interested approach, only one in 10 Americans trust Congress, an incredible drop from how things were but a decade ago.

American political leadership has been profoundly corrupted by its unrelenting pursuit of power. In this pursuit, minor inconveniences like the facts or the truth are irrelevant.

It can be argued that the biggest problem America faces is not the deficit in its budget. It’s the deficit in truth and trust of its government institutions.

Yet this is a moment in history when American journalism can make up for its past failings. It can reclaim the leadership that the country so desperately needs.

It can begin to do so by holding politicians accountable to the facts.

Can news organizations like Fox news, CNBC, CNN, and others rise to the challenge? Can they grasp this moment and rescue America from political abyss?

Given their corporate ownership and interests, it’s difficult to see how.

But after seeing tumultuous events like the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Arab spring, why not?

If Americans truly believe they are an exceptional people, why not?

If there is the possibility that deep in their hearts all Americans, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, whether they’re the 99% or the 1%, whether they’re Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, whether they’re Latino, black, or white, really do care about American democracy, can their news media choose to ignore the challenge?

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Why Canadian TV drama avoids gut issues

“Why Canadian TV drama avoids gut issues”
(The article was originally published on March 17, 1992 in the Toronto Star)

[AM Edition]

Toronto Star – Toronto, Ont.
Author: Oleh Iwanyshyn and Carl Knutson
Date: Mar 17, 1992
Start Page: A.19
Section: OPINION
Text Word Count: 1274

Document Text

IMAGINE SEEING THIS drama on TV: constitutional negotiations break down, Quebec declares independence and, a week later, a protest by frustrated English Montrealers turns into a riot. Brutal suppression by police, fully captured by TV cameras, results in the deaths of some rioters. English Canada is enraged. The feds send in the army to restore order. Army loyalty splits along language lines. Instead of order we see what may be the beginning of a civil war . . . .
An absurd scenario? Perhaps not.
But will we ever see it portrayed on TV? Not a chance. Why? Because it’s provocative. It exposes contentious political realities. In a TV industry kept afloat by government subsidies, portraying our country’s political realities is simply not done. Little wonder that English Canadians have yet to see a TV movie dramatization of the 1970 FLQ crisis.
But how can you ignore politics when the government is a major player in just about every important conflict in the country? Conflicts like: the antagonism between French and English; U.S. domination of Canada; the destruction of our environment; corruption and cover-ups in our national institutions; the struggles of native people.
These are among the most divisive issues on the minds and lips of Canadians today. Dramas can confront the fears underlying these divisions. They can offer the experience of the other side. They have a great capacity to heal, to bring Canadians closer together. But such dramas have no credibility if they avoid the political dimension of our Canadian reality. They cannot avoid being provocative.
For instance, what if one were to script a fictional drama about a native blockade, not unlike Oka. Do you ignore the role of the provincial government, the feds, the PMO, the relationship between the various levels of government, police and army? If you did, the result is not provocative drama. It’s a fairy tale.
Some would argue that we already have provocative drama. Recent CBC dramas like Love And Hate, about convicted murderer Colin Thatcher, Conspiracy Of Silence, about the killing of native teenager Betty Osbourne, and Justice Denied, about the wrongful imprisonment of Donald Marshall, dealt with extraordinary criminal events which occurred a decade or two earlier. They were exciting dramas that attracted millions of viewers. But all were about events of the past.
All three were based on court records and, if anything, were cautiously provocative. This caution is rooted in an experience the CBC had with a docudrama called Tar Sands in the 1970s.
The drama attributed certain dialogue to former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed which he found libelous. He sued and won. The lesson was not lost on CBC management. When you do a provocative drama: stick to the public record.
But the price of this approach is crippling. How many important conflicts in this country are we ignoring because a convenient court case hasn’t provided us with “safe” testimony? Will a drama about possible Quebec separation have to wait five years after separation occurs? Aren’t we straight-jacketing ourselves by tying our dramatic myth-making only to historical fact?
Our cautious approach has made us prisoners of the past. Let your TV serve as the litmus test. If a Canadian drama is set in the present, it won’t be controversial. If it is controversial, it will be rooted in the past.
The way to break out of this straightjacket is to do what dramatists have done for thousands of years: fictionalize events.
There’s only one problem: Most Canadian TV dramas are subsidized by the government. For cultural bureaucrats who dispense these subsidies, it’s far safer to greenlight a comedy, a romance, or a drama whose parameters are defined by public record, than to go out on a limb with something controversial. Particularly if the source of controversy is an issue being debated at the political level.
A cultural bureaucrat who “greenlights” a politically controversial TV drama risks his job. An agency dispensing government funds (CBC, Telefilm, OFDC) risks its budget.
But it’s not just the cultural bureaucrats and agencies to whom these concerns apply. Writers, directors and producers – all of whom depend on government subsidy – are put in a position of self- censorship. It’s not just fear. It’s being practical. Why pitch a project you know will get turned down?
The problem is endemic to the system. TV drama in Canada will always be dependent on government funding. Cultural bureaucrats will always feel the pressure of being accountable to the government. But for the Canadian public the current system is nothing less than a betrayal of trust. We expect exciting contemporary drama but we almost never get it.
Therefore, we propose a new accountability for our TV funding agencies: accountability to the Canadian public. The means of accountability? TV ratings. After all, it is the Canadian public who pays for our TV industry. It is the Canadian public who watches its product. Let us tie the fate of our cultural bureaucrats to the popular success of the shows that they approve.
The demand that TV drama be popular will force the cultural bureaucrats to take risks. Of course, the natural tendency will be to choose a popular genre which is least controversial, like a romance or historical piece. But the pressure to create at least a minimal number of popular dramas will force cultural bureaucrats to look at every genre capable of attracting large audiences.
On that score, provocative contemporary dramas are attractive candidates. There’s strong evidence Canadians are attracted in large numbers to provocative themes. Conspiracy Of Silence drew almost 2.5 million viewers; Love And Hate, almost 3.5 million. The audience potential of dramas set in the present is clearly high.
Most Canadian dramas fall in the range of 600,000 to 1.1 million. We can afford to have some Canadian dramas that appeal to smaller audiences. But when all we can show for our TV season is one or two hit dramas, we’re losing the struggle for culrural sovereignty.
Putting a premium on popularity is also a recognition of a blunt reality: as a medium for affecting national values and identity, TV is most powerful when it’s popular.
When a drama captures the imagination of a broad cross-section of Canadians it creates a mass shared experience. It is this experience which then serves as the basis for participation in our culture. We think about it, we talk about it, we may argue about it. For better or for worse, that’s how TV weaves our cultural fabric. Dramas low in popularity simply do not have the critical mass to set this mechanism into play.
Critics argue that if we pursue popularity we’ll just end up making American dramas here in Canada. Nonsense. If we try and parrot the Americans they’ll beat us hands down. We can beat them when we offer Canadians something the Americans won’t.
Americans won’t create provocative dramas about the struggles of our native people. Or the hostility between the French and English. These are our issues. There are dozens of them. They give our dramas a home-field advantage. For the same reason that we choose Canadian over American news programs, we will choose dramas that are relevant and important to us over the foreign competition.
Let’s make TV ratings readily accessible to the public, as they are in America. That way programming decisions will become a public act. No more secrecy. No more excuses. No more post-facto rationalizations. Ratings will give our cultural bureaucrats tangible goals. And Canadians will be the judge of whether the millions of tax dollars invested in our TV industry are worth it.
* Oleh Iwanyshyn and Carl Knutson are Toronto-based screenwriters.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

 

 

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The problem with Canadian TV

“The problem with Canadian TV”
(The article was originally published Dec 10, 1991 in the Toronto Star)

The ‘Can-con rule’ is supposed to foster better homegrown television. It does just the opposite.
[FIN Edition]

Toronto Star – Toronto, Ont.
Author: Oleh Iwanyshyn and Carl Knutson
Date: Dec 10, 1991
Start Page: A.19
Section: OPINION
Text Word Count: 1141

Document Text

Every year Canadian taxpayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on our TV industry. That’s the price, we’re told, to help foster a national identity distinct from that of our American neighbor.
Yet, despite this investment, our primetime TV viewing is dominated by American shows. Eighty per cent of primetime viewing in English Canada originates in the U.S. Worse, it’s rare to find a Canadian drama or comedy series in Canada’s Top 20. As a mass appeal medium, Canadian TV has been a failure.
Ironically, the root cause of this failure has been the 60 per cent Canadian content rule. The rule is supposed to be a bulwark against the U.S. onslaught. In practice, however, it is nothing more than a cultural Maginot Line.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) requires Canadian TV stations to fill 60 per cent of their schedule with Canadian programs. The emphasis is on volume. The well intentioned assumption is: if you offer Canadians a large enough choice of Canadian shows, they’ll find what they need. They won’t have to choose American.
However, by emphasizing volume ahead of popularity of programming, the 60 per cent rule fails to recognize the inherent unifying power of popular television.
When millions of Canadians watched Paul Henderson score the game- winning goal on Sept. 28, 1972, the nation felt more than just pride in hockey. TV turned that hockey game into a mass shared experience. The resulting conversation, debate, and emotion helped engender a sense of cultural unity.
Mass appeal television can do that. It can offer viewers a common experience, the basis for a relationship. It gets people talking about what they have shared.
By creating TV that isn’t popular to Canadians we are stripping the medium of its power. We’re robbing Canadians of the opportunity to share their common values – or create new ones.
This is not to say that all Canadian TV must aim for high ratings. We’re talking about balance. For example, no matter how well done, information shows tend to get lower ratings than popular dramas because they demand more of the viewer.
Of course Canadian broadcasters would love to fill their schedules with popular Canadian shows. But TV is expensive. Having to fill 60 per cent of their schedule with expensive-looking Canadian shows, to compete with U.S. products, puts broadcasters behind a financial the 8-ball.
Their solution? Co-productions, involving one or more foreign partners, usually for a drama. But the result, as many a story editor will tell you, is the disemboweling of the drama. Because the target marketplace is no longer just Canada, the content must shift to universal themes whose meaning remains unchanged across borders.
So, for example, if a Canadian series producer wanted to do a story about an English cop during the FLQ crisis who tries to walk the fine line between legitimate democratic protest and the need to preserve law and order, a U.S. co-production deal would reduce the story to a cop fighting terrorists.
U.S. producers would argue that the particular historical context would have no dramatic impact outside Canada. Yet for Canadian viewers this foreign editorial input would disembowel the true guts of the drama. It would surrender the drama’s ‘home field’ advantage – the same quality that attracts Canadians in huge numbers to Canadian rather than U.S. news shows.
Examples of the problem with co-productions abound. The classic is Night Heat, now in syndication, which was set against a backdrop any Torontonian would recognize but was intended to look like ‘Anybigcity, U.S.A.’ Danger Bay and My Secret Identity were also generically North American.
In drama, home field advantage lies with themes that we read, talk and think about every day, like the fear of being dominated by the economic might of the U.S; environmental degradation; the anger at our politicians; animosity between French and English; the suffering of native peoples. These would give Canadian dramas an edge over the U.S. competition. Yet, these are the sort of themes co- productions generally avoid.
Another unfortunate consequence of drama series co-productions is that they can be very successful financially, yet remain unpopular with Canadians. This is because the Canadian market provides only a fraction of their cost. The rest is covered by sales abroad, government subsidies, and tax write-offs.
In the ’89-’90 season a series needed 1.4 million viewers to break into Canada’s Top 20. Most Canadian drama series, however, fall in the range of the Canadian ratings ghetto – 600,000 to 1,000,000 viewers.
Ghetto existence is depressing. It diminishes self-esteem and dreams of success. That’s exactly what’s happened to the Canadian TV industry. How can we break out of this ghetto? We offer two solutions:
Get rid of the 60 per cent rule. It’s an albatross. It creates a massive amount of TV product for which there is little demand. Instead, require networks and stations to produce a minimum number of popular shows each season. If they fail, penalize them. Force them to spend more next season. If they fail again, withdraw their license.
Stop government subsidies for drama series production. Instead, redirect the money into TV movies and mini-series.
Series are expensive. Depending on the number and length of episodes, a season can cost $10-20 million. That’s why they need co- production deals.
TV movies generally cost $1-3 million. With money redirected from series, they can be financed totally in Canada. Their content can be directed toward serving the unique needs of Canadians, not the international market.
Canada’s biggest successes, both critical and popular, in the last decade have been movies and mini-series – Anne of Green Gables, Love and Hate, Riel, Chautauqua Girl. Tracking their performance over the years reveals they have substantially higher average ratings than weekly series.
Choosing movies over weekly series minimizes the risks and maximizes the chance of popular success. If a series fails, its failure continues over a season’s worth of episodes or longer. If a movie fails the next one represents a brand new start.
More importantly, concentrating on TV movies will increase the creative pool in our industry. Instead of the dozen or so groups creating series, we could end up with a hundred doing one-time movies and mini-series. The chance for a ratings breakthrough increases immensely.
There is a downside. Producing more movies and fewer series will reduce volume. We won’t have 60 per cent Canadian content.
What will we have? Event television. Every week of our TV season, two or three original movies that represent the best of Canadian drama. Movies about characters and situations of interest to Canadians. Movies with the potential of attracting a large Canadian audience. Movies that help foster our uniquely Canadian identity.
* Oleh Iwanyshyn and Carl Knutson are Toronto-based screenwriters.
[Illustration]
Caption: Drawing (Tim Young): Man watching Canadian television his sets is dwarfed by one with an American flag
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

 

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NSA spying, Edward Snowden, and the Polls: Misrepresenting public opinion

(This article was originally published on August 24, 2014 in iPolitics under the title “Spying blind: How polls provide cover for domestic espionage”)

Using inappropriately vague and misleading questions, polls have found an American public evenly divided in their support of NSA domestic espionage — and on whether Edward Snowden’s role in revealing the breadth and depth of it makes him a patriot or a traitor. Closer scrutiny indicates these divisions are more likely the result of systemic methodological biases in the polls than an expression of genuine opinion. This points to a far more troubling problem: Bad polls subvert a fair and balanced public debate on mass government spying, resulting in potentially anti-democratic remedies.

And Canadians shouldn’t tell themselves this is just an American problem. Testifying before a Senate committee, Canadian intelligence agencies seem to feel that mass spying falls nicely in their bailiwick, legal constraints be damned. Regrettably, there is no Canadian Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on these operations.

A poll conducted by Pew Research in July of last year is a good example of this built-in bias. It asked respondents if they “approve or disapprove of the government’s collection of telephone and Internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts”. The results showed 50 per cent approved while 44 per cent disapproved.

If a respondent didn’t know much about the issue, spying on some phone calls that could lead to exposing terrorist plots would seem like a reasonable trade-off between protecting privacy rights and fighting terrorism.

In fact, many knew very little about the issue. When Pew asked if respondents had heard about this government spying program, about 50 per cent indicated they heard little or nothing at all.

But what if, before answering the question, respondents were given the background to make an informed choice? What if they were told that it wasn’t just “some phone calls” but all phone calls? And what if they were told this monitored phone traffic wasn’t just among legitimate terror suspects but included family members, friends and associates? And not just phone calls but all emails, texts and other Internet communications, including website visits, over a period of years?

And what if they were told also that for all the years that this spying system has been in place, it was almost completely ineffective in thwarting terrorism? By the NSA’s own admission, of the 54 terrorist activities that were intercepted, only one or at most two relied on mass telephone spying (most intercepts involved non-telephone spying such as the PRISM Program). Would the average American see any economic sense in the government continuing to spy on the telephone calls of all of its citizens?

That mass telephone spying is ineffective in deterring terrorism was, in fact, the conclusion of President Obama’s own review panel on NSA spying. It recommended that the telephone spying program be significantly curtailed and provided with much more oversight than before. It also was sharply criticized by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency which concluded that NSA telephone spying had “minimal” counterterrorism benefits, is illegal and should be shut down. In another rebuke, a Federal Court judge also questioned the constitutional legitimacy of the program.

Prior to all these revelations, a Pew poll reported that 53 per cent of Americans said they believed that “the government’s collection of telephone and Internet data has helped prevent terrorist attacks.” That was the administration line. But the evidence does not support the claim.

Had the public known of the shortcomings of the spying program — and had poll respondents been more fully apprised of its invasiveness and ineffectiveness in the wording of the questions — those poll results suggest that support for the program likely would  have dropped significantly.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Pew using vague and misleading wording. Other pollsters were equally to blame. A CBS News poll used phrases like “… to reduce the threat of terrorism … (by) collecting phone records of ordinary Americans”. ABC News/Washington Post used the phrase “…extensive records of phone calls … to try to identify possible terrorist threats”. A Time poll mentioned the need “… to prevent terrorist attacks by collecting data on telephone dialing records of U.S. citizens”.

Ironically, the sensitivity of the response to question wording was revealed by a parallel methodological study conducted by Pew Research. It found that support for NSA spying was very much dependent on the wording of poll questions. For example, if the NSA spying program was described as collecting “data such as the date, time, phone numbers and emails … with court approval as part of anti-terrorism efforts”, the study found the program had 41 per cent in favor and 49 per cent opposed. However, if the program was described as “collecting recordings of phone calls or the text of emails (of nearly all communications in the U.S.), with no mention of either courts with the goal of fighting terrorism”, the level of support dropped to 16 per cent in favor and 76 per cent opposed — an increase in opposition of 27 per cent.

Armed with this information, why wasn’t Pew Research more careful in its choice of wording for the questions?

Perhaps the central reason was that the program’s lack of an impact on terrorist activity only emerged clearly after the Pew survey was conducted. Prior to Snowden’s revelations about mass telephone spying, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress under oath when he stated that U.S. intelligence agencies did not collect telephone data on millions of Americans. After the revelations, the chief of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, assured Congress that this mass spying program helped thwart 54 terrorist operations. Later, he was forced to admit that the actual number of terrorist operations disrupted by the program was closer to … one.

The other important revelation that has emerged since the survey was taken is that most of the program operated in a de facto warrantless search environment. NSA analysts could spy on anyone, whenever they wanted.

This is crucial in understanding Snowden’s concern with the spying program. Spying was never the issue; the question was and is whether it is done in accordance with the law. Commentary from independent judges and constitutional lawyers casts the program’s constitutionality in doubt, and questions whether the role of FISA, the secretive oversight court, was to be nothing more than a rubber stamp for all forms of NSA snooping.

That said, it’s hardly surprising that a large segment of the American public regards Snowden as a traitor (49 per cent, according to an Angus Reid poll). The U.S. has been subjected to a massive vilification campaign against Snowden for his leaking of NSA spying documents — a campaign driven by the establishment in both the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as the White House. It’s one of those rare national issues that unites both traditional Democrat and Republican voters but finds less support in an odd mix that includes Independents, Tea Party types, conservatives and voters under 30.

This campaign portrays Snowden as a traitorous criminal bent on endangering national security by revealing confidential state secrets in a way that aids terrorists. The reality is that, in the absence of warrants and in an environment of secrecy and deceit, the truly dangerous crimes were committed by NSA. This is an organization that both parties had a hand in creating. It has become a rogue operation that now needs their protection.

In light of this, the ongoing debate as to whether Snowden is a patriot or a traitor seems silly. It simply demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate public opinion when the electorate is ill-informed, the subject matter is complex and terrorism is on the table. That word seems to elicit the most irrational fears — a sort of national hysteria — among Americans. Polls show that year after year (CBS News poll, June 9-10 2013 in PollingReport.com), between 40 per cent and 70 per cent of Americans believe the country will “likely” suffer a terrorist attack in the next few months.

Snowden’s decision was clearly motivated by a desire to see the NSA function within constitutional constraints.  Its failure to do so, and its willingness to have its officials lie under oath before Congress, make the organization liable to criminal prosecution.

The wise men who drafted the American Constitution understood the purpose of the Fourth Amendment — which guarantees privacy rights — was not to protect individuals who may be doing something illegal. Its intention was to limit the powers of government and the potential for abuse. When a government decides to override Fourth Amendment rights, it is the government that is behaving in a criminal manner, not the citizen. That’s where Snowden and the U.S. government parted company.

An ill-informed public is easily swayed by propaganda. Pollsters need to help information-challenged respondents. One traditional approach is to provide a short but accurate preamble that provides crucial and relevant information a respondent would need to know in order to meaningfully answer a question. Pollsters don’t like to do this. It makes questions wordy, slows down the survey, and reduces response rates. Nevertheless, it’s the price they need to pay to get reliable data.

Given what we know today about NSA spying, these polls simply cannot be relied upon. Polling firms need to go back into the field with properly tested questions — and do it right this time. Otherwise, it’s just a question of whose propaganda is more compelling.

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Putin’s Invasion Plan for Ukraine

(This story was originally published on April 7, 2014 at the National NewsWatch site.)

While there has been a huge amount of conjecture on what motivated Putin to invade Crimea and where his expansionist ambitions will take Russia, precious little evidence to support such conjecture is offered.  Was this a strategic action planned long in advance, or was it an opportunistic, tactical decision capitalizing on the turmoil of the Maidan revolution?  Is it an invasion that for historical reasons is limited to Crimea, as suggested by Putin, or is it a precursor of an invasion of mainland Ukraine (also ominously suggested by Putin).  It’s safe to say the West is completely at a loss in trying to figure out Putin’s game plan.

Historical precedents to Putin’s game plan

However, what we do know about Putin is that the man is a student of history.  While Western leaders may have very different interpretation of some historical events e.g., the collapse of the Soviet Union, other events provide a common ground of understanding.  It is here where we can discover the calculus for his actions.  As much as Putin wishes to re-create the power and the glory of Russia’s past, he has every intention of avoiding the disasters that brought the country to its knees.

Some would argue this would make Putin fearful of economic sanctions. That’s missing the point.  Sanction losses have already been baked into the territorial decisions.  However severe they might become (so far they’re inconsequential), they will be temporary.  The world needs Russia’s energy.  The economy will bounce back.

Nor is Putin concerned whether the Russian army will be successful in defeating any conventional military opposition in Ukraine.  The fraudulent Yanukovych regime managed to do this for him by reducing the Ukrainian Army’s fighting capability to 6000 troops.  With between 40,000 to 80,000 well-trained, well-equipped troops positioned on Ukraine’s border, the country would be overrun within a week.

But Ukraine isn’t a Georgia or Chechnya. It’s a country of 46 million with a land mass  that is the second largest in Europe. Putin’s main worry is not whether the Russian army is successful in invading Ukraine — it’s whether it can hold it.

Memories of Afghanastan

The bitter experience in Afghanistan is still freshly etched in Russian leadership of how easy it was to invade the country and how difficult it was to hold it.  The hostile locals exacted a heavy price on the invaders . Over the course of the 10 year war, Russia, then the Soviet Union, suffered about 15,000 military deaths and over 50,000 soldiers who were maimed or injured. The total cost of the war was over 80 billion dollars. The economic consequences were instrumental in the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In spite of these sacrifices, it became apparent to Russia then, as it is for America in Afghanistan today, that victory was impossible.

The central question to which Putin needs an answer is: Will the local population be welcoming or hostile to a Russian invasion?

The case in Crimea

In the case of Crimea the answer was simple.  With approximately 60% of Crimea being Russian ethnics who in large part regard themselves as Russian citizens, the Russian invading force would be guaranteed a welcoming public.  To ensure that this would happen, Russian thugs and criminal elements in Crimea were organized into local militias that would physically threaten any dissident voices from the Tatar or Ukrainian ethnic minorities.  Secondly, communication with the outside world was restricted to Russian propaganda informing the locals that the Kiev revolutionary government was controlled by fascists who were intent on subjugating Russian ethnics.

The case in Ukraine

The situation in Ukraine and specifically in eastern Ukraine, however, is far more complicated .  A Russian military invasion there has a much greater chance of following the Afghanistan script than what happened in Crimea.

That assessment is based on Ukrainian public opinion polls which  strongly suggest that regardless of whether Ukrainians are from predominantly Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking regions of the country, a large majority in both the east and west of the country support an independent Ukraine, not annexation to Russia.  Polls conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KMIS) show that support for Ukrainian independence steadily increased from below 60% in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, to over 80% today.

A more recent poll conducted  by the Razumkov Centre from December 2013 (after the Maidan protests began), showed that 95% of all respondents (including 88% in the South) perceived Ukraine as their motherland, and 85% considered themselves patriots of Ukraine.  When asked specifically whether they supported the separation of their region (Western, Central, South-Eastern) from Ukraine and uniting with Russia, the poll found about 80% were opposed to this idea That hardly seems like data showing the country so divided it is on the verge of civil war, as Russian propagandists would have you believe.

The myth of linguistic differences

That’s not to say there aren’t important ethnic/linguistic differences in Ukraine.  In Western and Central Ukraine a majority speak Ukrainian.  In Eastern and Southern Ukraine a majority speak Russian.  But then, things quickly get complicated.  Many ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian.  Some speak both Russian and Ukrainian.  Some ethnic Russians speak Ukrainian.  Some speak Russian at home and Ukrainian at work, or vice versa.

Over the years there has been a great deal of intermarriage and socio-cultural integration between Ukrainian ethnics and Russian ethnics.  While Ukrainian has the constitutional sanction as the official language of the country, the Russian language is protected by that same Constitution.  On a practical level, both languages have equal standing in the country.  In business, Russian is often the preferred language.  Somehow over time the two languages have managed to find a peaceful coexistence with each other.

So in spite of the fact that only about 17% of the population consists of Russian ethnics, the number of Ukrainian citizens who speak Russian at home or at work is much higher (ranging from 29% to 46%).  These linguistic/ethnic differences were often exploited by political parties during elections.

It is therefore not at all surprising that when looking at color-coded election maps of Ukraine one sees a country that is politically divided — just as color-coded maps of Canadian and American elections also show the countries are politically divided.  Regrettably, these popular vote distributions have too often been used in Western media accounts to demonstrate a country so divided, secession or a highly decentralized central government (a splintering “federalization” in the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov) are the only ways to prevent civil strife.

While this “color-coded” division very much plays into the Russian propaganda motif it is, as the above polls attest, simply the wrong conclusion. The reality is that to their credit, Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking citizens have been able to overcome potential divisions related to language differences and achieve a sense of Ukrainian nationhood that rises above linguistic differences.

The myth of fascist extremists

Nevertheless, Putin and his Russian propaganda machine have decided to take these ethnic/linguistic differences one Orwellian step further.  Without any evidence that could be verified by independent journalists, Putin has claimed that the Maidan revolution was taken over by fascists and nationalist Ukrainian extremists whose intention was to rob ethnic Russians of their constitutional rights — which was exactly what he did to the Tatar and ethnic Ukrainian minorities in Crimea. The only surprise was a bogus referendum showing 97% in favor of annexation to Russia and not 100%.

These extremist fabrications were spread by Russian government agitators in eastern and southern cities with high ethnic Russian concentrations like Donetsk and Kharkiv.  The resulting fear and anger among ethnic Russians has produced demonstrations that have led to violence and death, exactly the pretext Russia was looking for to justify military intervention in these regions to protect the ethnic Russians .

A real problem – economic stagnation

While language issues can be easily manipulated by politicians and propaganda to inflame nationalistic or secessionary fervor, Ukrainians in both the east and the west are deeply troubled by something that can’t be easily manipulated — the country’s lack of economic growth since it became independent in 1991.  Over this span of time, Ukraine’s per capita GDP has increased by only 40%, while Poland, a neighbouring country starting at a similar GDP level, has increased its per capita GDP by almost 400%.

The country’s economic quagmire has led some to suggest that a proxy for the deep divisions within Ukraine is the desire of eastern Ukraine to join the Russian Customs Union while those in western Ukraine to favor the EU.  A KMIS poll from February of 2014 shows that given the choice in a national referendum, a large majority in eastern Ukraine would favor the customs union while a large majority in western Ukraine would favor the EU.

Forcing Ukrainians to choose between EU and Russia, however, is a misleading polling strategy. For many Ukrainians trading with Russia and with the EU is not an either/or choice. To flourish economically it needs both.

This sentiment is confirmed in a recent poll by the market research company GfK that found 56% in eastern Ukraine who wanted the country to align itself equally with Russia and the West.  In western Ukraine the figure was 44% and 52% across the country.

Opinions such as these are anathema to Putin.  Russia has managed to maintain Ukraine as a colonial state for several hundred years.  If the Maidan revolution gives it the freedom to develop economic ties with Europe and the rest of the world, it’s game over for this relationship.  That perhaps more than anything strikes fear in Putin’s imperial plans.

Which brings us back to the question that gnaws at Putin –What price for a military invasion and occupation of Ukraine mainland?

The rise of patriotism in Ukraine

The invasion of Crimea has stirred a patriotic nerve among many Ukrainians who previously would not have even imagined they would volunteer to fight to keep their country free.  Little did the Russian-trained secret service snipers at Maidan appreciate the events they would set in motion when they started killing the young protesters.  With Ukrainians willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom, there is a very good chance of an insurgency rising to battle the Russian invaders.  This would create a substantial drain potentially for many years on the Russian treasury which itself would be greatly humbled in its largesse by Western economic sanctions.

Confusing Russian polls

Russian public opinion on invading Ukraine is conflicted. A recent rally in Moscow protesting the military action against Ukraine drew 50,000 participants. Polls show there is no appetite among the Russian people to start a war with Ukraine — 73% of Russians in a VCIOM poll believe Russia should not interfere in the internal affairs of Ukraine.

Yet for many, stealing Crimea somehow is not perceived as an internal matter but merely correcting a historical mistake committed in 1954 by Khrushchev. Putin’s popularity in correcting this mistake is riding at an all time high. According to the Russian polling company Levada it’s at 80%, although I’m not sure what this enthusiasm really means when polling a dictator in a totalitarian state. But how long would this popularity last once Russians started feeling economic pain from the sanctions and a drawn out insurgency?

In what demonstrates the utter unreliability of the polling exercise in Russia, the same firm in its latest survey finds that 75% of Russians would support its government’s war against Ukraine and 77% think it’s all Ukraine’s fault.  So what happened to the 73% from the VCIOM poll two months ago who said Russia shouldn’t interfere in Ukrainian affairs?

It’s clear that much of the Russian public has been completely blinded by a massive government propaganda campaign in which most independent Russian news media outlets have been shuttered.  Whatever democratic progress Russia may have made since the fall of the Soviet dictatorship has simply vanished within weeks.

Understanding Putin

While the Obama administration has been publicly coy about providing military aid to Ukraine so as not to escalate tensions, there is little doubt that if it happened, an insurgency would be fed by weaponry from the West to conduct its defensive military operations.  No one need remind Putin what happened in Afghanistan when the mujahedin acquired Stinger missiles from the US.  It was the beginning of the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

For all his pompous theatrics as the new czar of Russia, attempting to portray Putin’s actions as those of a man out of touch with reality is borne more out of frustration than fact.  His sense of reality may not be what Chancellor Merkel (Putin is in “another world”) or President Obama agree with, but it needs to be addressed.  They need to figure out what part of that reality is rhetorical BS, what could be negotiated, and what crosses that proverbial line in the sand.

Sage advice from Jimmy Carter

On the latter point, former President Jimmy Carter in a recent interview offered President Obama some unsolicited but sage advice on how to deal with Putin’s aggressive behavior.  Carter was confronted with a very similar situation when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan. To prevent any further military incursions, Carter “sent Brezhnev a direct message that if you go any further, we will take military action and would not exclude any weapons that we have.”  That’s a line in the sand you could trip over.

Putin is acutely aware of the nationalistic sentiments in eastern and southern Ukraine noted earlier.  He knows it won’t be a Crimea cakewalk.  He knows what happened in Afghanistan.  A military invasion of Ukrainian mainland, while an excellent threat to extract negotiation advantages diplomatically, is simply not an acceptable long-term strategy for Russia.

Unless events in Ukraine go terribly wrong, it is a mistake Putin will not be tempted to make.

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Why U.S. polls are better at predicting election results

(This article was originally published on December 2, 2013 by the Hill Times.)

Why are American polls more successful in predicting election results than Canadian polls?

The question isn’t merely an attention-getter. Soon there will be general elections held in Quebec, Ontario, and nationally. Polls, as usual, will play a big role in how the media cover the elections, and, ultimately, how people vote. If the polls prove to be as inaccurate as they have been recently, the Canadian electoral process is in big trouble.

The latest Canadian blowout was this year’s B.C. provincial election where the polls predicted an easy NDP victory only to see the incumbent Liberals returned to power. Equally memorable were the missed calls in Alberta last year and the federal election in 2011.

In an effort to explain (here and here), pollsters trotted out the usual suspects like response rates, negative ads, voter turnout, sample representivity, weighting, etc. But it’s clear the exercise was a fishing expedition. There is no consensus on what is the cause of these failures.

American pollsters, on the other hand, have for the most part managed over a similar time frame to avoid any such humiliations.

In the search for the culprit, no Canadian pollster seriously investigated the possibility that voters would mislead polls on their voting intentions, quite possibly without even meaning to do so. And yet, strongly suggestive evidence to support this hypothesis begs examination.

There’s a good reason why pollsters are not enamoured of this hypothesis. If true, it undermines the legitimacy of any if not all their prediction polls. How can polls reliably predict if the voting behavior of a significant number of voters contradicts their expressed voting intentions?

For news media, the implications are equally unpleasant. If polls cannot reliably predict election outcomes why do news media continue to run stories about who’s winning the horse race when the prediction tool is broken?

The unpredictability of voting intentions

The evidence of a fundamental disconnect between what the public admits to pollsters versus what it does in the voting booth is based on a revealing voter intention study undertaken by Todd Rogers and Masa Aida at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The study included 29,000 people and compared their response to six pre-election surveys mostly from the 2008 U.S. presidential election, with actual voting behaviour.

Rogers and Aida looked at a question all prediction polls ask: How likely is a respondent to vote in the upcoming election? The question is important because only a little more than half of eligible voters get out and vote.  (In the 2008 presidential election, the turnout was 62 per cent; it dropped to 58 per cent in the 2012 election.) Pollsters use this question among others to help identify those likely to vote and base their election day projection on this group. Voters who indicate they are not likely to vote are excluded from the projection.

The study found among those likely to vote (“almost certain to vote” and “probably”), 14 per cent did not vote. Among those who indicated in the polls they were not likely to vote (“chances are 50-50” and “don’t think I will vote”), 63 per cent were found to have actually voted on election day. This was true regardless of whether the polls were conducted just before election day or earlier.

Also, polls tend to significantly under-represent the number who for one reason or another indicate they are not likely to vote. That’s understandable. Prediction polls aren’t interested in non-voters. But given that many in this group will vote, they should be.

For the polls used in the voter intentions study, the estimate of non-voters was about seven per cent. However, on election day of the 2008 presidential election, non-voters represented 38 per cent of all eligible voters. Based on the data from this study of how respondents actually voted (from both the “likely” and “not likely” groups), non-voters would total less than half of 38 per cent. This is a significant polling bias in favor of those who say they are likely to vote.

For pollsters, the consequences of ignoring voting behaviour of the “not likely” voters and underestimating the size of the group creates a fertile ground for producing inaccurate voting projections.

The conflicted unhappiness of those not likely to vote

The reason? Many who classify themselves as “not likely” voters do so because they are deeply disappointed with the conduct of U.S. politics. Evidence of this comes from a poll of “not likely” voters conducted by USA Today/ Suffolk University during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign.

The poll found that a majority (59 per cent) complained that they weren’t interested in politics because nothing ever gets done—“it’s a bunch of empty promises.” Many (54 per cent) justified their lack of interest on the belief that politics was corrupt. Their cynicism included not only politicians, but also political institutions like the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidency.

For pollsters, the consequence of this disappointment is manifested by a wholesale rejection of the political candidates queried in their polls. Many expressed no interest in even participating in election polls.

But why do so many among them end up voting on election day?

The USA Today/Suffolk University study found respondents were deeply conflicted on the question of to vote or not to vote. Most (79 per cent) felt the federal government played an important part in their lives and many were bothered by the fact that by not voting, others will have selected the president. A large majority also indicated that they would go out and vote for their candidate if they felt their vote would count.

Hence, on election day, whether stimulated by civic duty guilt or campaign propaganda, many among the “not likely” group cast a ballot. A large block of voters who the polls reported were not aligned with any candidate is found on election day to be distributed among these candidates.

The consequences of this behaviour can be enormous.

Consequences of voters voting when they said they won’t

If, by luck, the choices on election day of the “not likely to vote” group are similar to those who say they are likely to vote, then the ability of polls to predict election results is not undermined.

But if their preferences are different, the poll prediction model is broken.

For example, many of the dissatisfied, “not likely” voters may be displeased with the performance of the incumbent party but not enough to switch to another party. They show their dissatisfaction by not aligning with any of the candidates polled. On election day, perhaps influenced by the election campaign or choosing the lesser of two evils, they vote in favor of the incumbent party. Seemingly out of nowhere, the incumbent party ends up with a bloc of voters that is not accounted for in any of the polling.

Polls projecting a regime change can be a manifestation of this behaviour—a projected polling defeat turns into an election day incumbent victory.

Alternatively, this dissatisfied group could side with the rival party due to the party’s more persuasive campaign. For the rival party, this could mean the difference between a projected polling defeat or, at best, an uncertain outcome, versus a substantial election day victory.

As evidenced by the low election turnouts in Canada, it’s fairly safe to assume we Canadians share much of the same disappointment in politics as do American voters. Hence the polling biases measured by Rogers and Aida are likely relevant in a Canadian context. In fact, they may be more significant for Canada. For example, polls predicting a modest victory may augur a minority government whereas a more substantial victory prediction would suggest a majority government. These differences would have significant consequences on the campaign narrative in Canada.

But for pollsters, all this falls completely under the radar. What is on the radar are vote projections that too often completely are at odds with the popular vote on election day. The misfiring election prognostications in Canada are striking demonstrations of this phenomenon. In all three elections, the polling results differed from election day figures far more than any sampling error estimate could account for.

Canadian polling blowouts

In the case of the B.C. election, the polls were showing the NDP with an eight per cent to nine per cent lead just before election day. However, on election day, the winners were the incumbent Liberals with a five per cent popular vote advantage. The weak Liberal numbers during the campaign were an expression of voter dissatisfaction with political missteps of the incumbent party such as the HST flip-flop and other political scandals. On election day, many of the Liberal voters decided to return to the incumbent fold, making a mockery of the polling predictions.

The polls themselves offer evidence in support of this “dissatisfied voter” explanation. Two days after the B.C. election, Ekos Research replicated its pre-election poll and found both the Liberals and the NDP within sampling error of election day results.  Since both polls were methodologically identical, the only difference was the absence of motivation for voters to mislead the pollster on how they plan to vote.

In Alberta, polls had the Wildrose Party ahead by seven per cent to 10 per cent— until the voters readjusted this figure to plus-10 per cent in favour of PCs on election day. While the dynamics in the two provincial elections had some significant differences and the difference could be explained by methodological shortcomings, it is equally plausible that the results were caused by dissatisfied PC voters who temporarily pumped up Wildrose numbers during the election campaign by simply withholding their support, only to revert to the incumbent PC party on election day.

In the 2011 federal election, all the polls predicted a minority government whereas election day delivered a majority Conservative government. It was an enormous embarrassment for the polling industry. Central to this failure was overstating Liberal strength in Ontario. Many traditionally-Liberal voters chose to express their dissatisfaction with the party’s campaign by withholding their support, and by the end of the campaign switching their vote instead to Conservative candidates. These dynamics were in large part invisible to polls for the reasons noted above. They were, however, the difference between a minority versus a majority polling prediction.

The accuracy of U.S. prediction polls

While this biasing mechanism can explain the flagrant missed calls in recent Canadian elections, it doesn’t seem to have played any significant role in American elections. Poll predictions came within sampling error in both the 2012 and the 2008 Presidential elections. Also they were fairly accurate in predicting results in the critical swing states that essentially determine the election outcome. This accuracy was instrumental for poll aggregators like Nate Silver in helping him achieve his remarkable predictions for the 2012 presidential electoral college vote as well the popular vote.

Predicting the winner in 2012 was not easy. The final polls of those likely to vote put Obama ahead of Romney by just 1.6%.  Perhaps more salient, the USA Today/Suffolk University poll of those “not likely” to vote, showed that many first-term Obama supporters (44% of the sample versus 20% who supported McCain) preferred to sit on the sidelines and not support Obama for the second term. Obama’s election victory in 2012 had 3 ½ million fewer supporters than in 2008.

For all the times during the campaign that Romney shot himself in the foot, he still managed to get 47 per cent of the popular vote compared to Obama’s 51 per cent. The strength of the GOP support in its defeat underlines the strength of partisan divisions among American voters. If only the GOP could have mustered a somewhat more palatable, less gaffe prone candidate, thepresidency was theirs for the taking.  Even now, this realization must make GOP leadership sick to their stomach.

The importance of party loyalty in voting

The discrepancy between U.S. and Canadian prediction polls raises the question of whether Canadian pollsters are doing something wrong, or whether the Canadian electorate is in some way fundamentally different from American voters.  The results from the Rogers and Aida study strongly suggest it’s the latter.

In a key finding, the study found the accuracy of voter predictions were significantly correlated with consistency of previous voting behaviour—“people are more accurate when predicting they will behave consistently with their past behavior then when predicting they will behave inconsistently.” In other words, those who had not voted in the past and predicted they would not vote in the upcoming election were more likely not to do so than those who had voted. Similarly, those who had voted in the past and predicted they would vote in the upcoming election were more likely to do so than those who had not. Self-predictions became unreliable when they were inconsistent with past behaviour.

Consistency of voter behaviour is greatly influenced by voter loyalty to political parties. Although the roots of party loyalty are complex, factors that strengthen loyalty include partisan political propaganda disseminated through mass media. In the U.S., this propaganda machinery is extremely effective, particularly as a large part of the electorate is poorly informed on important national issues and the issues themselves can be extraordinarily complex. Recent examples that come to mind include the ACA (“Obamacare”) and the Dodd-Frank Act (banking reform). In such circumstances many voters defer to party positions that are communicated by the propaganda machine. This strengthens their reliance on the political parties and increases the likelihood of blindly casting their vote for those parties on election day.

In Canada, while it would be wonderful to suggest that Canadian voters are more savvy politically, the truth is that the strength of mass media political propaganda is significantly less potent due primarily to more modest election funding resources than in the U.S. Hence, party loyalty in Canada is not nearly as strong. The happy result (not so much for pollsters) is an electorate more amenable to change than in the U.S.

A good demonstration of such a change was the 1993 federal election where the ruling Progressive Conservative party was left with only two of the 156 seats they held previously. One cannot even imagine a similar situation where the Republicans or Democrats are left with only two seats in the Senate or House of Representatives as a result of an election. The near disappearance of the Bloc Québécois in the 2011 federal election (dropping from a provincial majority of 47 to only four seats) was also quite striking.

Clearly, the Canadian electorate has a significant capacity of vote switching between elections. The findings of Rogers and Aida suggest this makes self-prediction questions in polls far less accurate in predicting voting behavior on election day when compared to the U.S. experience.

Hence, when polls are predicting a big switch from the party in power to another party, as was the case in B.C., self-prediction in polls is in its least accurate guise. In these situations, pollsters need to be extremely careful in their prediction calls.

Impact of wrong polls on political journalism

For pollsters, the inconsistency of unhappy voters withholding their voting decisions until election day represents a nightmare scenario. That’s because for consumers of polling data—the public, politicians, pundits, and the media—predicting who will win the horserace is the central enticement of prediction polls. If it turns out that the polls cannot reliably predict who will win, they will have lost their raison d’être.

Among the news media that commission these polls and are financially rewarded for their investments with an increased subscriber usage, this outcome is awkward to say the least. How do they justify these expenditures when election day results contradict the polls? Should they apologize to their subscribers that the stories they were exposed to were based on inaccurate statistics?

What about the erosion of public confidence that all of this creates. Public confidence in newspapers has been deteriorating steadily over the past few decades. It now stands at 23% compared to 51% in 1979. Publishing political analysis based on faulty polls doesn’t help.

More directly, how do pundits and political journalists employed by these media feel about writing stories explaining why Party X is ahead of Party Y, as reported by the polls, when election day results reveal the opposite may have been true?  What confidence can they have in the polling enterprise? And why would any respectable journalist continue using a story source when the source proves time and again to be unreliable? In frustration, journalists likeTim Harper of the Toronto Star and Andrew Coyne of the National Post, have simply decided to throw in the towel and in future not rely on poll predictions.

Unfortunately, that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even polls that fail to predict, offer useful information.

For all their deficiencies, publicly-available election polls are central to our democratic process. We need to know what fellow citizens are thinking on public issues. Polls help reveal this public consensus while at the same time helping to create it. Not being able to predict election outcomes may damage this process, but it doesn’t destroy it.

The reality is that even in the absence of publicly-available opinion polls, there would still be polls. However, they would be secretive, private polls funded by organizations and individuals who would be in a position to use the results to manipulate public opinion for their own interests. This most assuredly would not be in the interests of the public and democracy.

In Canada, everyone who is part of this process has to come to terms with the uncomfortable reality that sometimes polls will lie.

Pollsters need to better understand how and when this happens. Researching this problem and coming up with a solution, is perhaps one of the biggest challenges Canadian pollsters have ever faced.

At the same time, political journalists and the media they work for have to factor in the possibility that when polls are predicting an election outcome, they may be completely off the mark. Since the media influence in constructing an election campaign narrative is substantial, not to mention this possibility in their stories would be irresponsible and damaging to a fair and balanced election process.

Until such time that pollsters solve the problem of misleading responses, getting it right when analyzing election poll data will be a most challenging and messy undertaking for Canadian journalism.

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