On the road (again)
By Jeff Davies | April 25, 2005

April 25, 2005

You might call it the BlackBerry campaign.

Those wireless, handheld computers that let users read e-mail on the fly have become ubiquitous on the campaign bus. Politicians have them. So do their staff and campaign organizers.

Now even CBC reporters are being issued with blackberries. The whirr and buzz of the vibrating BlackBerry in my pocket announcing the arrival of another e-mail is becoming as familiar as the ring of the cell phone.

Within minutes of a campaign rally, policy statement or media scrum, the response from the opposing party may be e-mailed to reporters.

Late Friday morning, for example, Premier Campbell told reporters in a scrum in Vancouver that Liberal candidates would refuse to take part in what he termed, "phony debates." That is, debates organized by groups the Liberals believe are simply fronts for the NDP.

Reporters received an e-mail response to Campbell's comments from NDP leader Carole James before many of them had even had time to write the initial story.

It's one more example of the way in which modern telecommunications has changed the nature of political campaigning.

Increasingly, political parties and candidates are using technology to get out the quick response, blunt opponents' attacks, even kill stories before they hit the airwaves.

The campaign buses are equipped with high speed internet. As soon as reporters climb on board they log in, check their e-mail, read rivals' stories, gather background and try to flesh out major stories of the day. It's a huge step up from the days reporters had to scan press clippings at the start of the morning.

But dependence on technology also makes us more vulnerable. On a campaign bus, Murphy's law is writ large: anything that can go wrong, will, usually at deadline time with a major story breaking, and an anxious editor or producer on the line.

On a crowded campaign bus lurching through a mountain pass, a high speed internet link may be lost at any minute.

For a radio reporter, not being able to maintain a connection is more than an inconvenience: it's a disaster. We can feed neither script nor audio from the field – without using that decidedly low-tech technique of simply holding a telephone against the speaker of my portable recorder. And last week, as I hit one technological roadblock after another, that's what I was sometimes forced to do.

I recalled the stories of Mike Duffy, the veteran Ottawa reporter, who in the old days is reputed to have carried a phone company "out of order" card in his pocket while on the road – hanging it on a functional payphone would deter others and ensure there was always a phone available for him to use.

For the reporter on an election campaign, there will always be times when ingenuity trumps technology.