As election day approaches here in Canada, we find ourselves in the middle of a fascinating case of a purely manufactured media dialog. Harper’s got a solid, unassailable momentum, CTV and the Globe and Mail tell us. Canadians have displayed an unprecdented level of support for his policies. We’ll have a Conservative Majority government for sure.
(More after the fold…)
And yet, recent polls show a drastic reversal of Conservative momentum. Martin’s ratings have jumped, as his party’s slowly clawing its way back up. The CTV/Globe and Mail poll still shows Harper with a solid lead, but that’s no surprise. They’ve aggressively resisted linking Harper with anything negative for the entire duration of the campaign. Even when one of Harper’s advisors travelled to BC to help a Conservative candidate accused of smuggling, they resolutely avoided linking the two stories.
There’s an even bigger elephant in the living room, to boot: the environment. Again, CTV and the Globe, and other media outlets, have done their best to avoid bringing this to the public attention, but Harper’s stance on the environment is positively terrifying. The environmental section of the Conservative Platform is loaded with promises and programs… But, unlike the rest of their platform, there’s no money allocated to these planks. Not a cent. I wonder why Harper thinks he can get environmentalism for free?
Maybe because he thinks the environment isn’t really important, and is just lying to Canadians to try and get into power? After all, Harper’s stated in the past that he doesn’t believe in Global Warming. One would think this would be a major news point during the campaign. We’re having an unseasonably warm winter here. Some winter roads in the west that rely on frozen rivers and lakes have been kept closed, as the ice hasn’t formed at all or is too thin to support traffic. We’ve had very little snowfall, and what snow we’ve had hasn’t lasted very long.
And yet, none of this receives anything more than a cursory mention in the media, and never in connection to the election campaign. WTF?
This is especially serious given the recent doomsday predictions by James Lovelock. While his science seems dubious (it relies on certain cooling factors simply disappearing entirely), one would think that the severity and potential consequences would lead to the electorate and media taking this issue a tad more seriously.
So, what do my fellow Tribbers think? Clear evidence of a pre-selected media dialog ignoring inconvenient facts? Simple incompetence? And what of Lovelock’s predictions?
(I’ll be coming back to some of these issues in my next New Environmentalism diary, which should be going up Saturday morning. Same Boo time, same Boo channel!)
