Sunday, May 08, 2011

The best democracy money can buy

From Paul Wells' The untold story of the 2011 election :
"In the weeks before the budget, a Liberal strategist said, the Conservatives bought airtime to run 1,600 ads. “We had 131, and the NDP had, like, 25 or something,” the Liberal said. “It was a massacre.”
And then there's the best democracy media concentration can buy.

Dwayne Winseck tracked 62 daily newspapers from the ten main newspaper groups in Canada comprising 97.5% of the industry. QMI Sun Media has 18 papers while Post Media is the largest publisher of English-language daily newspapers in Canada at 12, plus another 8 weeklies. Together these two account for just over 50% of the market share.

He found that 21 out of 22 editorial endorsements that advocated for a specific candidate for Prime Minister - including 10 from Post Media and 6 from Sun Media - plumped for Harper. As noted by Winseck, that's 95%.
.

5 comments:

croghan27 said...

This is a 'dog bites man' story - could have been written before the drop of the writ.

An amazing title would be "Papers Found to be Diversified in PM Endorcments".

Anonymous said...

1600 to 25 is more like a 'flea bites man' story.

Vote for us - we already own everything!

sunsin said...

And with this they managed to shift the vote total... 2%. Some of it no doubt by lies that will have caught up with them by the next election.

Food for thought there.

Alison said...

Yup, million$ and million$ spent to inch up just 2% - rather gives one hope.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the cons have enough rope now... oh dog, pleeease.

Blog Archive