Further Updates to Open Government Project: Yes, Harper Parliament is More Secretive than Predecessors
A couple weeks after CP spread a nasty and false rumour that Chretien and Martin ran Parliament far more secretively than Stephen Harper does, electronic versions of its hit piece have become rare as hen’s teeth. Some are still out there, but CP’s retraction, prompted by fact-checking by exactly two journalists across the dozens of papers which gleefully printed the story (Kady of CBC, and myself), means most have vanished down the memory hole. Sun Media’s gleeful pro-Conservative editorial has vanished without a trace, too. True to form, Sun didn’t bother with a retraction. Now you’re just greeted with a warning that “there’s something wrong” with the page, which was true all along.
So far in my own Open Government study, I have shown that the time Parliamentary committees met in secret, away from the public, rose from 22.5% under Martin to over 25% under Harper. CP’s misleading numbers on those two Parliaments involved concocting a seemingly made-up “joint committee” on national security, plus including hours Senate committees spent in secret under Martin but not under Harper. I also pointed out that the Public Accounts Committee met on average 21.8% of the time under the Liberals, but 32.1% under Harper.
I’ve now finished calculating two more Parliaments’ worth of data: the brief fall 2008 session which ended in surprise prorogation, and then the one in 2010-2011 which ended with the downfall of the government over allegations that it was lying about the cost of the F-35 jet fighter. Which, as recent events have shown, it was. Here’s how it all stacks up so far:
During the last minority session, Parliamentary committees spent a total of 88 minutes per day in secret, amounting to 23.2% of their total meeting time. That amounts to somewhat more than under Martin, and somewhat less than under Harper’s majority. Taken together, the numbers suggest a gradual upward trend, which is explained by the fact that some committees (like Public Accounts) meet far more in secret now than they used to, while most committees continue to trundle along pretty much in the public eye.
The 2008 data are on there for the sake of honesty, but in all fairness they don’t really count for much. Only a handful of committee meetings had actually been held before Parliament was prorogued, and some of those were in camera planning meetings. Whether that represented a trend or just an aberration, we can’t say on the basis of just a tiny handful of meetings.
Here’s how all the numbers stack up:
kootcoot
“Sloppy work, CP!”
Really, or purposeful dishonesty to serve the interests of their corporate masters on whose behalf the HarperCons govern? I’ll go with the latter!
Sixth Estate
I pondered that too. The thing is, it’s such an easily detected falsehood — if the media had actual fact-checkers outside of Kady and myself, which plainly they don’t — that it seems like a strange thing to try and just make up. And CP is a wire service. They’re not exactly anti-Conservative, but they make their living supplying copy that any paper can copy and print without worrying too much about the reliability of the contents. I doubt CP would make up a story to serve the government.
Of course, there’s any number of people, like the Sun editors, who, while not being exactly dishonest, grabbed something that suited their ideological perspective and didn’t look too carefully to make sure that it actually added up correctly.
CP has not yet told us where they got their original figures from. If they did, we would know what happened. My feeling is that the 2004 numbers cannot have come from the Parliamentary minutes website, because they have a made-up committee in those numbers and because they added at least that set up using a totally different methodology from what they used for the Harper years.
Either there’s a Library of Parliament study lurking around that they didn’t specifically cite and which made those mistakes, or somebody else fed them the numbers on the Liberal Parliaments and CP decided to add up the rest as part of their story. If that’s the case, then I think we can safely assume the Conservatives were the source for the Martin/Chretien numbers. But that’s all speculation on my part.
kootcoot
“And CP is a wire service. They’re not exactly anti-Conservative, but they make their living supplying copy that any paper can copy and print without worrying too much about the reliability of the contents. I doubt CP would make up a story to serve the government.”
Consider the fact that in spite of the oft repeated false meme about the “librul media” that every significant paper in Canada with the possible exception of the Star endorsed Harper in the last stolen election and most papers that CP supplies content to are owned and operated by and for corporate interests and leaning toward the Harper ideology can’t hurt business now, can it? Well it can in the sense that readers and subscribers are leaving the dailies in droves and not just because of technological change……….people just tire of paying the inflated prices for fiction, and that’s what novels are for!
Lenny
Who owns Canadian Press? I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a subsidiary of Canadian Tire.
Sixth Estate
kootcoot – I don’t need to be told that the press is right-leaning.
I know that. My point is, I find it hard to believe CP would make up an easily disproved story because they thought it would help the Harper government. Last year, during the election, CP printed a pretty harsh story on patronage under Harper. That one vanished down the memory hole in pretty much the same way, but if they really had a pro-Harper agenda, they probably wouldn’t have sent it out in the first place.
Lenny — Like AP, CP is a joint venture by major press companies. I believe the current owners are the parent companies of the Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, and La Presse/Le Droit.
kootcoot
I wasn’t trying to patronize you or imply you felt different about the Librul media. I guess I mainly meant you really can’t go wrong when you adhere to the corporate creed and agenda, except with the dwindling readership………
Probably carelessness and lack of resources lead to faulty articles like the one in question. Haven’t a number of wire services gone under or out of business and aren’t actual reporters and fact checkers endangered species. Regurgitating press releases from the PMO of PM SHithead and the Fraser and Heartland Institutes is almost too much work for the press. A press which is seriously undermanned (personned?) compared to the mighty PABlum brigade, whatever new name it goes by now!
Sixth Estate
Regarding “diversity” of the press corps — yes. For wire services, there’s CP (in Canada), AP, Reuters, and AFP (French but does English-language reporting too). UPI is basically dead.
The wire services were formed because of the cost of international reporting, but in the past couple decades there has then been great centralization of reporting inside the country too. Postmedia is a good example. At this point it still doesn’t look certain that Postmedia will survive. If and when they don’t, they will presumably be acquired by another media company.
Globe & Mail is controlled by Woodbridge, which is also the holding company that controls Thomson Reuters. In 2010, the Globe joined with Toronto Star and Square Victoria to set up a joint enterprise that has since run the CP news wire.
I could go on at great extent, describing centralization in the media, and could if you want or need me to. But more important to your thoughts is the implication of the centralization: it’s inefficient to have lots of reporters effectively covering the same subject. So you have less and less reporters covering, say, federal politics. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to speculate that the fewer reporters there are, the less likely that one of those who remains will stumble upon big story “X” (whatever story X might be).
In contrast to actual investigative reporting, editorial/opinion content is comparatively inexpensive (general rule: talk is cheap). So that survives even as genuine reporting declines. If you’re already getting the lion’s share of your “real news” from a news wire, the only way to stand out is put together a unique collection of columnists.
Not only is that a cheaper solution, but it gets cheaper still when groups like the Fraser Institute, etc., start offering up reams of low-quality but mass-quantity op-eds to fill up space on the editorial page. Unlike an in-house professional journalist, you don’t have to pay the Fraser Institute a salary.
From an evolutionary perspective, general knowledge usually costs more than it is worth. The free market is an attempt to emulate natural selection in a controlled social setting. The consequence is, unsurprisingly, a decline in general knowledge.
Sam Gunsch
…possible shorthand heading/sub-title for blog posts about future fictional news coverage or editorials in Sun chain…
“There’s something wrong with this page & it gets cheaper.”
…inspired by what @SE said:
“Now you’re just greeted with a warning that “there’s something wrong” with the page, which was true all along.”
…and this:
“…it gets cheaper still when groups like the Fraser Institute, etc., start offering up reams of low-quality but mass-quantity op-eds to fill up space on the editorial page.”
Cathie from Canada
I’m sure CP didn’t originate this story — it smells of the PMO shopping a story to the to a gullible reporter or editor in the Ottawa press gallery — someone who wasn’t there under Martin (like Kady was) and who actually believed that the statistics they were given by the PMO were the truth, who was so delighted to be gifted with this “scoop” that they didn’t bother checking them out with a real statistician before rushing to print.
Sixth Estate
I have suspicions that this was the case as well, given that the numbers for the “joint national security committee” have to have come from a source other than the Library of Parliament minutes website. However, other than the obvious matter of who benefits, I have nothing to actually substantiate this.
I feel guilty about the whole thing. I had the statistics to debunk it immediately and held off a few days to rebuild my spreadsheet, thinking there was no way I could be that far off. At least I have confidence in my numbers now.
Whoever leaked it, the one-two punch of the national CP story plus the embarassment surrounding its retraction means that the in camera kerfuffle has died away.