Poilievre Truthers And Burning Credibility
On Media Failure
This is mostly not about Pierre Poilievre’s chances of winning the Conservative Leadership (100%), or about whether or not he can win it on the first ballot (he will), but unfortunately we have to start there, because for some reason people are being dumb.
With the release of the Conservative fundraising data today, we know that Pierre Poilievre is going to win easily. He received the most donations in 325 of the 338 ridings, he got nearly 60% of the donations in Quebec, and Jean Charest got less donations in Ontario than Roman Baber. Yes, the guy who is probably coming in 4th. (All of this data is courtesy of Bryan Breguet’s Twitter feed, because he did the work I was too lazy to do.)
His projections have Skippy getting either 64% or 67% of the points on the first ballot, depending on which of the possible metrics you want to quote. My votes model has Poilievre at 63%, but again, given the regional spread (leading in 325 ridings!) of the fundraising, there’s likely not much of a points/votes difference this time. Given this, why am I bothering to write about this race again? Because of media failure, obviously.
Why is Eric Grenier saying that Charest is likely to win Quebec, and be competitive in Ontario? Why is Fournier’s most recent Politico column claiming that the race is still competitive? Why on earth is the National Post uncritically reporting Charest’s campaign making shit up about how they still a path? I know why – it drives traffic and keeps people interested. Hell, I predicted this when I said the media would go crazy if they didn’t get a competitive Conservative leadership race this summer after Ontario was a snoozer, and yet this is even worse than I expected.
Let’s have a very honest and blunt conversation about the intersection of credibility and traffic, because that’s what this is. When you hype up things that do not happen, you’re making a trade – you are trading an eventual hit to your credibility for the rush of traffic now. Whether or not you actually believe what you are writing or are just an idiot who believed dumb shit, that’s the tradeoff. I know this tradeoff well, because in Ontario, I got a lot of traffic for my columns which declared Del Duca and the Liberals were going to do well, and I am now paying for that error in lost credibility now.
I am having to intentionally be careful not to feed into the narrative that I’m just a Liberal shill who will always predict the Liberals or the left to do well to make sure I can keep my credibility, which is why I haven’t posted an Alberta projections update recently – my model right now has the NDP in majority, and I don’t believe it, so I’m avoiding posting it to avoid the implication or sentiment that I’m just a hack. It’s the most first world problem of all time, and I’m not writing this to say woe is me, but I’m saying that there is a price to getting shit wrong and making shit up.
Had I stuck with Del Duca as the favourite and continued to argue he would win even as the polls swung, this problem would be way worse, but fortunately I got my head out of my ass and saw the writing on the wall fast enough to avoid too much reputational damage. In the same way, Fournier clearly did the same federally, which is why he got hired by Politico so soon after Macleans let him go when they destroyed their news organization.
It's the same with Grenier, who hasn’t done particularly well at any of the last three Federal elections despite the fact that he’s playing on easy, without individual seat projections in public and so it can’t be easily checked whether he was right because he actually got things correct, or because he was in aggregate right as his errors cancelled out. Both Fournier and Grenier are institutions in the business at this point, but they’re also willing to say things that are, pure and simply, bullshit.
But it’s not just those two, it’s the legacy media, where CTV is putting noted expert at internal Conservative politics Tom Mulcair on to say that Jean Charest would easily beat Pierre Poilievre, it’s the National Post letting a Charest co-chair excerpt her book in the pages of the paper because she used to be a columnist there (and will presumably get her column back immediately, despite her lying to the press repeatedly during the campaign), it’s about the media collectively hyping up Brown and Charest despite the fact that Brown’s a known liar and Charest is just fancy French Jeb! Bush. It’s a cultural problem amongst the Laurentian Elites who run the media that assumed that the candidate for the Laurentian Elites would win a leadership full of people who hate them.
The thing is, my argument is self-defeating here, because for my selfish self-interest, I want people to be pretending this is a close race, because then it makes me look more prescient when Poilievre wins easily. This race has been called in the pages of this site perfectly from the day the campaign started, with Poilievre a clear and obvious winner, with Charest and Brown jokes, and with Lewis a theoretical danger but probably not one, because Poilievre was always going to eat her lunch.
I would love to be able to claim all of this is some impressive accomplishment, and compared to the legacy media I’ve kicked ass, but it’s a claim I can’t actually make, because it’s bullshit. This was extraordinarily easy, and all the efforts to pretend it wasn’t this obvious the whole time are also bullshit. And it’s coming at a cost.
I started this column talking about credibility for a reason – there’s a cost every time you lie or report bullshit. It’s a cost to your credibility every single time, and at a time when we need a media to be trusted, we have one that is willing to shill themselves out to obvious lies for the drip of extra traffic. In a vacuum, it’s just a summer of bad reporting. Coming after years of bad reporting and bullshit passing as truth, it’s much, much worse.
Poilievre is going to win easily.
And everyone who is trying to claim otherwise is lying.