Don’t look to media for answers to political woes

I listened to Terry Lake the other morning talking about how the media are influencing expectations with respect to the next provincial election.

(I must digress here for a moment — you will note that I use the word “media” in its plural form. “Media” is the plural of “medium,” though it’s commonly, and erroneously, assumed to be singular, as in, “the media is to blame for all kinds of things.” I will remain faithful to the proper use of “media” until the men in white coats come and take me away.)

The MLA for Kamloops-North Thompson seemed to be saying that the media are bored with writing about the Liberals being government so have started writing about how there might be a change in government as of next spring’s election. I understood him to mean the media aren’t necessarily reflecting the real picture.

Aside from oil pipelines, a teachers’ strike, B.C. Rail, cuts to community outreach services, the liquor distribution issue, cuts in post-secondary education, the HST and a few dozen other controversies the Liberals have had to deal with, there might be something to that argument.

Poll after poll after poll puts the New Democrats far ahead of the Liberals, but the Liberals no longer believe in polls. They will, as Kevin Krueger has done, point out that polls were showing the Conservatives would take a drubbing in the recent Alberta election, and yet, triumphed.

The many election polls that have proven accurate over the past several decades will not be mentioned.

And, of course, there’s the view that anything can happen between now and next spring, and the Liberals could make a comeback.

This is true.

It’s conceivable, I suppose, that the media simply like to amuse themselves with talk of a change in government, and, at the same time, that the public opinion polls are all wrong, and that the Liberals are actually quite popular but that nobody wants to admit it.

Trying to make sense of that scenario gives me a headache, so let’s deal with the simpler question of whether the media influence what people think of politicians.

While newspaper editors and radio-TV news directors would like to regard themselves as having such clout, they’d be delusional if they really believed it.

The American newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst was convinced it was so, and he’s given credit for starting at least one war. Maybe, in the early days of mass media, they did have that kind of juice, but things have changed.

While people still depend on the mass media for information, they maintain a healthy scepticism, distrust even, of them. Some put as much stock in the baseless rumour mongering of untrained citizen “journalists” in the blogosphere as they do, or did, in the words of Lloyd Robertson or Woodward and Bernstein.

They would take political advice from a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman as readily as they would from the newspaper that lands on their front step or the TV newscast that comes into their living room.

None of that depreciates the value of the mass media or those of us who are gainfully employed in them; it’s simply an acknowledgement that we would be mistaken to put ourselves on a pedestal.

As for politicians, they should probably look elsewhere for answers to how the voters perceive them, and why.

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