From whistle stops to message events, the evolution of political spin

Last Updated Sept. 7, 2008

by Ira Basen, CBC News

It was all so different 50 years ago. In the federal election of 1957, a grand total of four reporters covered the national campaign of Conservative leader and soon-to-be prime minister John Diefenbaker.

They would be joined, on occasion, by other reporters who would spend a few hours or days aboard the campaign train as it passed through their region, but the entire national press corps consisted of representatives from the Toronto Star, Telegram, Globe and Mail and Canadian Press.

The leader's entourage was not much bigger. Apart from Diefenbaker and his wife, Olive, there were only his executive assistant, two secretaries and a photographer. The Diefenbakers shared one railroad car; everyone else, including the reporters, shared a second.

In the long stretches between stops, the Diefenbakers would sometimes venture back to join in a game of bridge.

In that world, reporters had access to the candidate whenever they wanted him. There were always many events to report on. It was not uncommon for the train to make about a dozen stops during the course of a day for Diefenbaker to deliver his stump speech.

Today, of course, things are much different. There are now dozens of media people covering the campaign full time, and just about as many speechwriters, spinners, handlers, image consultants, videographers and advisers surrounding the leader.

Quantity can be misleading

With all those extra people, you'd think there would be a lot more campaign to cover. But, in fact, the opposite is true. A leader's campaign now consists of just two or three carefully selected, well-choreographed events a day.

Reporters, who in the last campaign each paid about $9,000 a week for the privilege of travelling with the leader's campaign, can report on what the candidate says and does during those appearances, but not much else. The media has little access to the candidate outside these campaign appearances.

The leader will occasionally stroll back to visit "the boys" in the back of the plane, but these encounters are now more often than not highly strategic and well-planned.

Increasingly, even the candidate's closest advisers rarely make themselves available for informal chats.

The reasons for this turn of events are not hard to find. The stakes are so high, the consequences of making a potentially campaign-killing "gaffe" so great (remember the Liberals' "beer and popcorn" slur from the 2006 campaign?), that it is not surprising that candidates and their advisers choose to follow a strategy that minimizes the risk of anything bad happening.

And so the "whistle stop" of Diefenbaker's day has morphed into the "message event" of today.

Rule No. 1 of the message event is you talk about one thing, and one thing only. And that one thing will be chosen by the candidate and their advisers, not by the media.

No matter how hard the media tries to get the leader "off message," the successful candidates of today will not allow themselves to be distracted by extraneous noise.

The morphing of the election campaign

It is hard to say when exactly the wheel turned. Certainly the arrival of television on the campaign trail in the late 1960s, with its obsession with image and shrinking soundbites, played a major role. In Canada, the first campaign to fully embrace the gospel of the message event may have been Pierre Trudeau's triumphant comeback tour of 1980.

Nursing a healthy lead in the polls following the collapse of Joe Clark's ill-fated government, the Liberals had no intention of reminding Canadians why they were so eager to see Trudeau go just a year earlier.

"In '80, we kept his off-the-cuff or unrehearsed access to the press to a minimum, and you know it was the speech or nothing for the television cameras," recalls the Liberal leader's press secretary, Patrick Gossage. "The press would be all pissed off because they'd want a shot at him themselves and they'd want to control the agenda by using their own questions, but what do we care if we annoyed them?

"It's as simple as who's going to decide what the public sees of the campaign and what they see of the leader and his views and his thoughts and his policies and it's either the press's version or your version and you can control that we learned."

But running a modern message event campaign requires enormous discipline from the candidate and all of those around him.

Politicians are naturally talkative people who like to spew opinions on a wide range of topics. The obsession with staying "on message" demands that they keep those instincts in check. And there are right ways and wrong ways of doing it.

It helps if you can be subtle about what you are doing. Being too obvious about ignoring questions from reporters can make you seem evasive. Sometimes it can take a while for politicians to learn how to get it right.

The downside of staying 'on message'

Even Stephen Harper, the most disciplined Canadian politician in recent memory, had to endure a bit of a learning curve. One day during his first national campaign in 2004, he arrived in Saskatoon to talk about Liberal corruption.

But local reporters wanted to know about his policy on farm subsidies. Not today, Harper replied, "We're doing a message event here."

Later, he explained that he feared being "grandslammed" if he opened up the floor to whatever reporters or members of the audience wanted to talk about. "If somebody gets up and says I think you're a warmonger and all that, then that's what gets covered, and why would we do that?"

Why indeed? It was a rare moment of candour from a politician who has since learned to keep those kinds of insights to himself.

Harper now finds himself getting "grandslammed" daily by the opposition parties in the House, but rarely by the media.

That's because the prime minister has essentially brought the strict discipline of the campaign "message event" into his ongoing relationship with the Ottawa press gallery.

His famous feud with the gallery in the spring of 2006 revolved around his desire to control who got to ask the questions at prime ministerial news conferences. The dispute came to a head during a news conference Harper was holding to announce Canadian aid to the Darfur region of Sudan. He did not want to talk about other issues at that message event; the reporters did. About two dozen reporters walked out.

Reporters may get frustrated by message event campaigns, the public might well want to see their party leaders come out of their shell a bit more, but in the campaign backrooms, there is little nostalgia for a return to the days of Diefenbaker.

The stakes are too high, the possibility for disaster too great, to allow reporters into the inner circle the way party leaders did 50 years ago.

For the most part, in this campaign you will see the pictures the parties want you see. You will hear the audio clips they want you to hear. If you want to witness a grand slam, your best bet is probably to watch a baseball game.