Post Debate Blues...

Following stories Sunday in the Star and the Toronto Sun about Harper hinting at a majority, right-wing blogs were abuzz with dark — and unsubstantiated — suggestions of a mainstream media conspiracy to stall the Tories' momentum.
Ironically, hours after refusing to rule out a Tory majority win, Harper criticized EKOS by name while chatting with reporters aboard his campaign plane in Hamilton on Saturday.
"They are, in my view, the least believable," he said. "Our people feel the momentum, but it is a statistical dead heat. ... There is over two weeks to go and a lot of things can happen. ... There is no certainty."
Graves said the "wild card" in the campaign now is how Canadians react to the potential of a Harper government — minority or majority.(link)(via)

Well let me be the first to jump on the "dark" and "unsubstantiated" "suggestions" that the mainstream media is in a conspiracy to stall the Tories' momentum. But it's all for very rational reasons. Before the campaign began the Liberal Ontario campaign chair - who just happens to be a CTV lobbyist - gave Liberal MP's some advice. He told them that the media would be easy on Harper until the final 3 weeks of the campaign, to try to make the race seem like a horse race.

Is it a conspiracy? No. The media want people to watch. In order to do that they are prepared to make it look exciting - regardless of the truth.

Grave's is a Liberal bagman extrodinaire. His firm, Ekos, is a Liberal puppy. And moreover I think it's clear he loves the Liberals. He can't stand the Conservatives. He's inflated the analysis of certain polls in the past to make the great JC seem good, that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics could tell you was biased. Of course those glaryingly biased analyses are less frequent now that King Paul is heading the good ship Liberal. Now he's not alone for pollsters doing stuff like this, but let's be honest about who and what we are dealing with here.

So his Harper boosting polling results lately, that seem slightly higher for Harper than other less biased pollsters, seems all the more weirder. That "dark" "suggestion" makes a lot of sense. What better way for the Toronto Star to sell newspapers to freaked out Lefties in the Toronto market that makes up a bulk of it's subscribers? Two words: Tory Majority.

But it's not just the Star, it's also CTV, that suggested that Harper went down the road to predicting a majority then pulled away at the last minute... Truth is that Harper I don't think ever mentioned the word "majority" once. This is all just conjecture on behalf of the media, and anyone can see it.

What's worse, I watched the debate last night.

I was so surprised. It didn't seem like Duceppe or Layton was paying attention to Harper at all. In fact, I saw maybe more attention being paid on Martin. And Martin, to me at least, didn't seem to be attacking Harper any more than usual.

I kept on wondering, if those poll numbers that have been coming out lately are true then either Layton and Duceppe have a death wish or something's up. I couldn't see any more attacks on Harper than usual.

Then I watched the post debate analysis only to learn that Duceppe and Layton were hammering Harper somehow, and that it was a gang up on Harper fest (almost). I heard about how Duceppe went to the extravagant lenght of actually mentioning Harper in his opening remarks... Stupid me, I thought mentioning his name more than once would be a sign, but apparently one mention is good enough for the media for Duceppe to be foaming at the mouth.

Where is all of this coming from? I can't help but think the same as other bloggers with that "dark" "suggestion" that is "unsubstanstiated" that the media is playing with people's perceptions to suit another agenda. It may not be a Liberal friendly bias necessarily - it may be a selling newspapers type of agenda.