politics/opinion by John Scott Cowan
The spectacularly awful leaders’ debates:
IMAGE: VIA CBC NEWS STREAMED LIVE ON SEP 9, 2021
CAUSES AND A REMEDY
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ow that a discrete interval has passed since our recent federal election, it is an opportune time to try a bit of dispassionate analysis to explain to ourselves why it felt like such a shambles. It launched amidst some controversy over whether it was needed at all, but it seems to me that it didn’t entirely become a festival of mutual ox goring until the so-called leaders’ debates. Something very odd has happened to the word “debate”, if those leaders’ debates are anything to go by. Perhaps it’s my inner curmudgeon speaking, but through most of my life, there were two incontrovertible properties of a debate. The first was that all the debaters were expected to speak about the same subject, and the second was that each side had a substantial reserved block of time to elaborate their position (and sometimes more than one block) and a further consolidated block of time for rebuttal. Interruptions by opposing debaters were usually heavily penalized. The first of the two debates in French had a hint of the original definition of “debate” in its structure, despite the woefully short time blocks. It was conducted with considerable decorum (with only odd exceptions), and the referee (called a “moderator” to mollify 26 OTTAWALIFE FALL 2021
the media folk) was respectful, helpful and not especially intrusive. The participants were expected to address the same topics.
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The central focus was on the so-called moderator, who peppered each of the leaders with different questions, allowing seconds, rather than minutes, for an answer. It felt more like the interrogation of captured spies than a debate.
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By the time we reached the sole Englishlanguage debate, the concept had transmogrified itself into an egregious caricature of a sort of demented collective press scrum. The central focus was on the so-called moderator, who peppered each of the leaders with different questions, allowing seconds, rather than minutes, for an answer. It felt more like the interrogation of captured spies than a debate. But enough about the dubious features of the event. Amongst my usual interlocutors, I have found none who
found it edifying. The more interesting questions are, first, what are the causes of that sort of debacle, and, secondly, what can be done to give us something more useful during future elections. I suspect that there are many causes for what we saw. It is popular to blame the communications revolution and social media for some perceived decline in the attention span of some folk. I’m not entirely certain that attention spans have declined. People still develop intense interests that evoke sustained concentration on a single subject. But some other causes are fairly obvious. Some portions of the press and media have, over the last two generations, become hugely narcissistic. They have gone from reporting the news to thinking that they are the news, and reporting incessantly on themselves. Again, perhaps it is the curmudgeon in me that makes me think that journalists were better forty years ago. Given the critical importance of free speech and a free press in guaranteeing democracy, I am relieved that there still are a nontrivial number of exceptional, wellinformed and perceptive journalists. But many are not. A significant slice of the fourth estate is neither literate nor numerate, and do us the huge discourtesy of assuming we aren’t either.
