On balance, the Toronto Star is a reasonably responsible newspaper. Its editors do go a little overboard though when attempting to make a point. Take the current election campaign. The Star’s editors expect that a campaign almost three times the length of normal will be dull as dishwater unless a little spice can be thrown in. To this end they are promoting the election as a three-way race.
Canadians are not used to a three way contest in a federal election. They are confused by what it might mean. And that is the opportunity the Toronto Star editors are looking for: they will then explain it for the hoi polloi.
First of all they need a pollster who can tell the story for them. They need a guy like Aesop. This guy was a story teller noted for his moralistic stories for children—more than 2500 years ago. What would be better than have the story told in polls that kept that three-way fiction in play?
Enter Forum Research. This might be just one more research firm that can connect telephone lines to computers and annoy citizens with recorded telephone calls. It is considered likely that a third of those calls are ignored because of call display, another third are answered by children who press buttons at random and another third who press buttons quickly to get rid of the call. The research firm then applies its patented smoothing to the raw data and gives the sponsor the information the sponsor wants.
And the operative words there are ‘the information the sponsor wants.’ As you know there are many ways to avoid telling the truth. Nobody is accusing the Star editors of not telling the truth. It is just that there is selective truth and if you select carefully, the truth can tell just about any story you wish.
A good example of this is the past week was a Forum Research report that said the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair was the favourite for Prime Minister in a recent poll. The editing had carefully left out the information about how people might vote. We expect that this information was left out of the story because many people knew that after the Leader’s Debate on television there was an interesting readjustment in voting intentions. That change was not part of the Toronto Star’s Fables for Canadians.
The point here is not the foolishness of the Toronto Star. Our concern is that Aesop was a moralist. You could always look for a moral in any of his fables. It is just a bit harder to find the moral in some of Torstar’s fables.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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