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June 1, 2004

The media can smell the fear

Every once in a while, a governing political party goes into an election full of confidence only to find itself fighting for it's life after only a few days on the campaign trail. There is no doubt that this is the case for Paul Martin's Liberals who, according to the polls, are now just four points ahead of Stephen Harper's Conservatives nationally.

Loosing during an election campaign goes in five stages: 1) Hubris (“We’re going to win and we’re going to win big!”); 2) Denial (“These poll numbers can’t be right.”); 3) Realization (“We’re in trouble and we have to do something about it.”); 4) Blame (“It’s the media’s fault”); 5) Acceptance (Well, we had a good run.).

To their credit, the Liberals ran through stages 1 and 2 quickly. You loose precious time when you are pretending you haven’t got a worry in the world, time you need to make up lost ground after you’ve made the changes prompted by stage 3. But, by the end of yesterday, I think the Liberals could be forgiven if they slipped into stage 4: Blame.

The media during election campaigns are an interesting animal. They take on the properties of a flesh-eating beast. For the most part, as long as you keep them fed, rested and give them the appropriate amount of attention they won’t lose it and rip the leader’s arm off. But sometimes, they smell fear in the leader and they choose to attack. Yesterday was such a day.

According to reports, Mr. Martin’s major event of the day was badly knocked off its message when reporter after reporter asked the PM hypothetical questions about the possibility of a minority government. In fact, the entire report on the Martin Campaign from the CBC was about Mr. Martin’s answers to hypotheticals!

Political parties have recovered after slipping into stage 4, but next week will be really important, if you linger around “blame” too long, it starts to own you.

Posted by maxthecat on June 1, 2004 at 12:05 PM | Printer-friendly version
Filed in: The Media

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