This election, politicians and media have you thinking about what matters... to them

When it comes to ideas, a frame is the starting set of assumptions about how we should think about an issue. Framing is central to political campaigning. It's also an integral part of the news process -- and perhaps never more critical than during an election.

Framing highlights what news producers deem to be the most important parts of a story, and do so again and again across different media platforms and different constructions, but ultimately rest on the same set of assumptions and ways of interpreting an event.

Mike Barber spoke with Dr. Bob Hackett, a long-time professor of communications at Simon Fraser University and the director of NewsWatch Canada, a media monitoring project at SFU since 1994, to discuss how frames have come to define the 2015 federal election.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Let's rewind to two months ago before the election campaign kicked off. Which frames did you think were going to figure prominently in the campaign?

I actually had no idea, except that I knew that the Conservatives have a campaign fund that more than equals the opposition parties' combined, and therefore they have the resources to do, in particular, internal party polls, which are extremely important, as well as focus groups, to find out what does work and what doesn't.

How have we seen that manifest so far in the campaign?

I think people were surprised, initially, to take one example, that Harper didn't react more strongly to the photo of the dead Syrian boy [Alan Kurdi] on the beach. I think that's because they knew that their base and their potential supporters would in the long run not find this a vote-changing issue.

Compassion for refugees is not a strong theme among their actual and potential base, and therefore they could afford to downplay it. In particular, their exploitation of the niqab issue, just flogging it for two weeks, they've realized that they've found a hot-button issue. It's quite evident, and one could predict from the very start, that they would play two themes. One isthe economy, which has been touch and go for them for a while because their recent record on that has not been great. And the other would be security, and the underlying fear of the Other.

What they've done is tap into underlying fears and anxieties that are in part generated by the very processes that right-wing governments have launched -- free trade deals that undermine job security of people in the Global North that in previous generations had become accustomed to what we now call "middle class jobs."

But there's been so little talk of the economic insecurity in the past two weeks as these issues -- the niqab and refugees -- have dominated the bulk of the campaign discourse. Why has the economy, despite all signs before the election, become such a non-issue in the past couple weeks?

I suspect that it may be that the Conservatives have spun the economy, or have tried to, with a couple announcements of what they consider to be good news. So often from their point of view, it's become a question of deficits vs surpluses in the federal government's budget, which they've achieved with a sleight of hand by plundering the [EI] contingency fund. The very tiny amounts of growth in the last couple of months play to their favour, so it's more difficult for the opposition parties to make a simple case on economic grounds than it was just a month or two ago.

But it's still there. The opposition parties are trying to make it an issue, especially in light of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

We've seen Harper try to change the channel to the TPP in the last couple days (after the niqab issue blew up).

I think it's important to note that Harper has a lot of cheerleaders in the corporate media. We have one of the most concentrated media systems in the Global North, along with Australia. Postmedia by and large has been a cheerleader for neoliberal policies for a number of years. Their reaction to the TPP is that it's a great achievement of the Harper government and for trade and so on. But I've seen nothing in the corporate press on the implications of the TPP on environmental protection, or for Canadian sovereignty.

Although no one has had a chance to read it yet, this agreement will almost certainly contain a clause that will allow foreign investors to sue the Canadian government for damages if new environmental or other laws and practices cut in to their profits. We haven't heard a word about that. Only thanks to the work of Open Media have we heard that TPP could have severe implications for our access to information because of strengthened copyright provisions. And we only know this through leaked drafts of the agreement. So in terms of framing, what's left out is as important as what's included.

Speaking of what's being left out, I'd like to discuss why Indigenous peoples have been so absent from this campaign -- at least as it's been presented by the corporate media. Occasionally the NDP or the Liberals will make mention of commitments to education or MMIW, but that's more or less where it ends. How does framing help our understanding of how Indigenous concerns play out in the national media?

It's really hard to see how in a commercial media system you'd get sympathetic coverage of economically underprivileged and numerically small minorities that do not constitute in any sense potentially profitable demographic for commercial media. It's been about 20 years that newspapers, as still arguably the leading news organizations in terms of original news gathering, really started thinking not in terms of "public service" or "social responsibility," but in terms of meeting commercial needs -- to attract and appeal to the profitable audiences, those audiences that advertisers want to pay to reach. By and large, First Nations don't fit into that category that newspapers need to cater to, unfortunately.

They sometimes do get sympathetic, or perhaps patronizing coverage, certainly on issues that don't fundamentally affect the interests of corporations or capital. For example, the apology for residential schools, there was lots of sympathetic treatment around that. But it's quite different when you get to resource development. It's more of a difficult issue to cover. The media tended to demonize the protestors in New Brunswick (in Elsipogtog), for example.

Changing back to the actual campaign... how do certain frames come to dominate over others based on the structures of the modern election campaign, where we have journalists that are following the campaign on buses or on planes and having very little exposure outside of the campaign, but at the same time have very limited access to the candidates themselves?

You have to wonder why is it even worth doing that given that they're such staged events where so little is happening. I think the campaign coverage is the result of a number of factors.

First, the parties' own strategies and messaging, again based on internal polls and focus groups. Second, we have media perceptions of where the parties stand in the polls, they take more seriously the contenders and who's got momentum. Third, there are news values -- what constitutes something new and exciting. Fourth, the unexpected events that crop up, like the Syrian boy on the beach. And fifth, the organizational routines and interests of media organizations themselves, and that includes ownership.

I'm not the first person to suggest that part of the reason why the NDP promised balanced budgets this time for four years was because of the media-reinforced perception that they're more likely to go into deficit, that they're less responsible fiscal managers than the other parties. So why is that the Liberals can get away with promising deficits but not the NDP? I think that arguably there is a double standard, that the Liberals and Conservatives are better connected to corporate Canada. They're given more leeway than the NDP on these issues, even though an article by Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail showed that left-oriented governments have performed better than right-wing ones in managing government budgets. Probably because they're more willing to raise taxes to pay for their social programs so they're less likely to go into debt.

This raises a whole different framing issue itself. We're looking at the economy through deficits and surpluses and managing budgets but not unemployment, job insecurity and trade barriers. It's a narrow focus.

It always is. And the NDP has played into that. Mulcair's campaign seems to have accepted that logic. It's counterproductive. Who's talking about youth unemployment and precarious labour, or alternatives to jobs in the very volatile and climate-destructive energy sector? Who's talking about building a green economy? The Green Party is, but because they're low in the polls, they don't get any attention to their program.

Why do you think that the NDP has had difficulty getting their message to resonate with Canadians?

Maybe their message has been confusing to supporters. Why are deficits and balancing the budget suddenly something to be concerned about, instead of the funding of urban infrastructure, or the other kinds of programs that we need?

People that don't follow politics very closely simply assume that the NDP aren't good fiscal managers, and certainly the Conservatives are exploiting that theme. Whether or not it has a basis in evidence is irrelevant in their view. So when Mulcair says "we're going to put out four consecutive balanced budgets," to a lot of people that sounds like death-bed repentance, and may not sound as terribly credible. And to the party's own supporters, it sounds like a sudden new change in direction or priority.

For undecided voters, it may simply reinforce the idea that the Conservatives were right all along -- that balancing the budget is the most important consideration. So why not go with the party that's been saying they would do that, even if they haven't, really.

I think we have to talk about not just frames, but also the bigger question of the agenda -- what gets covered and what doesn't? When you're talking about frames, you're already talking about what's on the agenda. If we look at the bigger picture, what we haven't seen is any serious analysis of the Conservatives' economic record or spending record. At least not any sustained attention. For example, their bungling of the F35 jets, which they said would cost $16B, ended up costing $45B! That's $1,000 a Canadian! It's as if the media can't handle these huge numbers. It's like the bigger the lie you tell, the more likely you are to get away with it. The media will focus on something like Mike Duffy misspending $90,000.

Just to come back to the idea of agenda-setting -- where has health care been this election? It's been a total non-issue.

I don't understand why the opposition parties have not made more of an issue out of health care. Maybe there's something to what my colleague Donald Gutstein wrote in his book,Harperism, that Harper has shifted the political and ideological goalposts to the right so that the opposition parties can't contest some of the things that this government has undertaken. It might be one thing to get rid of Harper, but quite another to get rid of Harperism.

So how do media set the election agenda, then? More importantly, how can this agenda be influenced by citizens?

The evidence from the U.S. shows that journalists tend to be more progressive on social issues, but more conservative on fiscal and economic ones, like regarding free trade or balanced budgets. But I've always argued that journalists' own political beliefs are secondary to the organizational constraints and culture, and to source strategies, and news values, and professional understandings. By and large, that's what the evidence tells us what shapes media coverage.

I think that's even more the case when journalists have increasing job insecurity and where there are fewer and fewer journalists assigned to cover more and more news. It's more a question of sources and management that shapes the agenda then individual journalists. I think there are still a fair number of people getting into journalism for idealistic reasons, but those who stick around for a number of years and get promoted are those who are more likely to share the corporate values of their bosses.

That's why we need a social movement to democratize the media. Here in Vancouver, we have Media Democracy Day [held this Nov. 7], and digital groups like Open Media. If you want to democratize and diversify our media system so that it really is more representative of the interests and groups in the population, it's not going to happen through market forces alone. It will need governments interested in democratic reform to provide some of the structural and policy basis for more diverse journalism.

There's a lot of discussion in the U.S. given the perceived crisis of newspapers and financing for journalism -- this crisis of under investment in journalism -- that shows that media is doing well, but they're not investing in journalism. We need a citizens' movement, or a coalition of movements dealing with other issues that share an awareness that they're facing an uphill battle if they don't have a fair and representative media system.

Original Article
Source: rabble.ca/
Author: MIKE BARBER |