Juno News - September 26, 2022


CTV skews poll results coverage against Pierre Poilievre

Topics
bias of placement in the article
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Pierre Pauly Andrew Pierre Poilievre Conservative
Parents speak out about prosthetic breast wearing transgender teacher Pierre Poilievre and Chrystia Freeland clash over rising cost of living

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

217.94

Word count

983

Sentence count

54


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we continue our series on fake news, and this time, we're talking about a story about a poll that suggests that more Canadians would vote for the Tories than the Liberals in a hypothetical election, but the headline doesn't tell the full story.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, so why don't we just move on to the next story here,
00:00:02.620 because this is such a perfect example, in my opinion,
00:00:05.560 of the tricks that legacy media try and pull on Canadians.
00:00:09.360 They do these little things where they place certain statements in their articles,
00:00:13.860 they play with the headlines to trick the reader
00:00:15.820 into believing something that isn't exactly as it reads, as a headline.
00:00:19.580 So CTV came up with this article,
00:00:21.580 and the headline is Justin Trudeau slightly favoured over Pierre Pauly
00:00:24.880 for Prime Minister, new poll.
00:00:27.020 So when you read that, you probably think to yourself,
00:00:28.680 well, the Liberals are, you know, they're edging up past Pierre Pauly's Conservatives.
00:00:33.240 You probably think that more Canadians are willing to vote Liberal.
00:00:37.220 But the problem is, actually, that's not the case.
00:00:40.120 Because if you read past the first couple headlines,
00:00:42.520 it says very plainly that 28% of respondents to the poll
00:00:46.580 said they would cast a ballot for the Liberals,
00:00:48.720 and 34% of respondents said they would part their vote with the Tories.
00:00:52.600 Now, I'm no mathematician.
00:00:53.940 I know we talked about math earlier on in the show, Andrew.
00:00:56.220 I'm no mathematician, but when I read that,
00:00:57.760 it appears to me that more people in that poll would vote for the Conservatives
00:01:02.340 than the Liberals.
00:01:04.300 So why exactly they think they can go along with the headline of
00:01:07.080 Justin Trudeau slightly favoured over Pierre Pauly for Prime Minister
00:01:09.740 when, you know, the numbers itself say that the Liberals would have fewer votes
00:01:14.760 than the Conservatives obviously speaks volumes.
00:01:17.060 It's only 11 paragraphs into the story, Andrew,
00:01:20.420 where they finally say that in a preferred Prime Minister poll,
00:01:24.400 which doesn't actually matter that much, in my opinion, on the national scale,
00:01:29.380 preferred Prime Minister,
00:01:30.980 Justin Trudeau edges Pierre Pauly by two percentage points.
00:01:33.660 So they're playing tricks with us there.
00:01:35.440 It's classic fake news, in my opinion.
00:01:37.060 It's just exactly what they've been doing for many years now.
00:01:40.700 This story is actually, I think, a test case in how media bias can work,
00:01:47.340 because what they said is not inherently untrue.
00:01:50.580 The poll does say that, but it also says what you know,
00:01:53.420 and what I actually think is a more reasonable and more useful metric,
00:01:57.020 that more people would vote Conservative than the Liberals.
00:01:59.960 I mean, there was that old meme that circulates every now and then
00:02:02.780 of like two people staring at a number on the ground,
00:02:05.420 and one of them is convinced it's a six,
00:02:07.120 and the other is convinced it's a nine.
00:02:08.580 And the premise of that is that, well, you know, both people can be right.
00:02:12.200 It depends on your perspective.
00:02:13.400 And then the retort to that is, well, no, one of them is wrong,
00:02:16.340 even if they don't know they're wrong.
00:02:17.840 Like someone put that down there knowing it was going to be a six or a nine.
00:02:22.100 And here you've got multiple people that can look at the same poll
00:02:25.000 and draw wildly different conclusions from it.
00:02:27.440 And I think that, you know, the headline could be, you know,
00:02:31.100 voters favor Justin Trudeau but would vote Conservative.
00:02:33.860 Like what is that?
00:02:34.540 Like that's actually, I think, a very useful and very concise headline.
00:02:38.420 Or you could even talk about how, you know,
00:02:40.460 Pierre Polyev is still introducing himself.
00:02:42.420 There are a number of ways to frame it.
00:02:44.020 But just picking one or the other, which is what media does here,
00:02:47.740 gives a very skewed version of this.
00:02:49.880 And I actually think this story in a way could be taught
00:02:53.020 and should be taught in journalism programs
00:02:54.640 because you do have a poll that has an inherent contradiction in it.
00:02:58.660 And it's amazing how media like to just pick the one
00:03:00.960 that benefits them the most and use that.
00:03:03.020 Well, the journalist, you're exactly right about it being a case study,
00:03:06.040 and it should be studied in journalism schools.
00:03:07.960 The journalists knew exactly, as you said, Andrew,
00:03:10.220 they had two, they had really two avenues to go with the story.
00:03:13.240 Well, three, really.
00:03:14.260 They could go down the middle and try and blend the two together,
00:03:16.580 as you said in the headline.
00:03:17.700 Or they could take the one that counts or the one that doesn't count.
00:03:20.880 They knew that the opinion polls of the preferred prime minister,
00:03:25.260 which really mean nothing when it comes to the ballot,
00:03:27.860 they knew that that...
00:03:28.380 Yeah, if you're prepared to vote Conservative,
00:03:30.220 but you're like, ah, you know, I guess I'm not sure about Pierre,
00:03:32.200 but I vote Conservative anyway, that is almost more useful.
00:03:35.000 There's no room on the ballot to write your thoughts about the leader.
00:03:37.960 It's just, you just circle the name and that's it.
00:03:40.220 That's all you get.
00:03:41.100 So they knew, however, that the preferred prime minister poll itself
00:03:44.620 was not as important as the voting choice.
00:03:48.080 That's why they put it 11 paragraphs down into the story.
00:03:51.200 But they chose to lead with it in the headline.
00:03:53.240 That, I think, speaks volumes to where the legacy media is coming from,
00:03:57.360 what they're prepared to do,
00:03:58.500 and just how willing they are to try and play tricks on the audience.
00:04:02.560 And I think that's just, it's just, it's not right.
00:04:05.440 And I think that it happens all the time.
00:04:09.040 That's why we talk about on the show, there's a bias of omission.
00:04:11.660 There's also, you know, there's also,
00:04:13.420 I consider it to be bias of placement in the article.
00:04:16.140 Most people will never get 11 paragraphs into the story
00:04:18.320 because they're busy.
00:04:19.120 They're doing other things.
00:04:20.300 They want to skim the headlines and get the story there.
00:04:22.960 I just think it's a classic trick that the legacy media play
00:04:25.720 and more Canadians should be aware of it
00:04:27.740 and they should get called out for it.
00:04:28.940 So I'm glad we're doing it on this show.