Talk:Newspaper endorsements in the 2011 Canadian federal election

Qualifications
A problem with this type of article is that it is subjective as to what qualifies. It's interesting to see where editorial board endorsements fall, but not all publications deliver those. The NOW Magazine and Maclean's endorsements are therefore questionable, because they are opinions in by-lined columns by people who happen to be editors. That's a bit of a grey area since magazines, unlike newspapers, don't traditionally have editorial board positions. If we are going to keep magazines in an article entitled 'newspaper endorsements', it might at least be sensible to split them into a separate section and clarify what is meant by an endorsement in their cases. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.33.43.49  (talk • contribs)  12:50, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I think if the editorial board or editor make an endorsement it should be included here as long as the newspaper as an entity hasn't made a separate recommendation. If no one disagrees, I will add Andrew Coyne's /Mcleans recommendation. Who deleted it without comment? Eb.eric (talk) 23:06, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * There could also be a page like this, solving the problem: Endorsements_in_the_Canadian_federal_election,_2006 Eb.eric (talk) 23:09, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I did not delete Coyne's column but please see the Ottawa Citizen section below. Also, note that the Maclean's editorial board has endorsed the Tories (as indicated), so linking to Coyne might not be appropriate here. --70.26.95.196 (talk) 02:48, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Toronto Star
The Toronto Star ran a companion piece to their endorsement entitled "But vote strategically" where they urged some of their readers to vote Liberal. I think there should be a note of that on their entry. http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/983380 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.247.194.142 (talk) 00:44, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Ottawa Citizen
The issue is that the Ottawa Citizen has written *2* editorials, one endorsing a Tory majority (http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/decision-canada/case+Tory+majority/4702051/story.html), and one endorsing individual politicians riding-by-riding (http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Editorial+board+election+endorsements/4673927/story.html), not all Tories. I have added the first twice, and it has been deleted twice, by 117Avenue, on the grounds that "we" are only looking for the riding-by-riding endorsements.

I have no desire to get into an edit war, but I would note that the Ottawa Citizen is unusual in that it typically endorses a party, and then individual candidates in ridings in the Ottawa area. In 2008, Wikipedia provided the overall endorsement (of the Tories). Simply for the purposes of consistency I think it should be included this time. Also, it's not inconsistent to endorse a Tory majority with the caveat that you also support a few NDP or Liberal MPs locally. Why not provide both?

Certainly most of the editorials listed endorse a Tory majority or minority, and don't go into riding-by-riding endorsements. So if "we" are looking for riding-by-riding editorials, then we would have to delete most of the list, since most papers don't do that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.26.95.196 (talk) 01:22, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Clarification: I did not mean we are looking for the riding-by-riding endorsements, we are looking for the editorial board's endorsement, as mentioned above by Eb.eric, both "editorial board" and "endorsement" are key words. The story entitled "The case for a Tory majority" provides a list of the benefits of a Tory majority, and ends with the statement "we can certainly endorse a return to political stability". The story entitled "Editorial board election endorsements" explicitly states it is written by a number of editors, and that they endorse those candidates, which is what we are looking for. 117Avenue (talk) 01:39, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your clarification, but I remain unconvinced. Firstly, as I wrote above, in the 2008 endorsements article on Wikipedia, there is a link to a similar Ottawa Citizen editorial, endorsing the Tories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_Canadian_federal_election,_2008), rather than the 2008 riding-by-riding editorial. Secondly, I am unclear on the policy re including only editorials written by boards (multiple people). If that's the case, the Maclean's Liberal endorsement should be deleted, because that's only Andrew Coyne's column, and it's not much of an endorsement. Also, we can't conclude that the Ottawa Citizen editorial I added wasn't written by multiple people (the same Editorial Board that the riding-by-riding editorial refers to). Most of the editorials listed here do not refer to "editorial boards" explicitly, though we have assumed that's what they are. And lastly, I do not think you can infer from the last sentence of the editorial that it is somehow not an endorsement of the Tories; as the title says it's the "Case for a Tory Majority." Anyhow, I hope this clarifies my concerns. Thank you for reading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.26.95.196 (talk) 02:34, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * A newspaper endorsement overrides the opinions of a single editor, as of yet none have surfaced for Maclean's. 117Avenue (talk) 02:50, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I've removed the Maclean's. 117Avenue (talk) 02:56, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. As a compromise, would you accept adding a link (to my editorial) to the Ottawa Citizen's line under the "Endorsing Multiple Parties" section? It could note that the Citizen endorses a Tory majority overall and the various candidates in the Ottawa region as listed. Just a suggestion. --70.26.95.196 (talk) 03:13, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I was hoping for more discussion on this, but there doesn't seem to be much interest from registered users. 117Avenue (talk) 03:59, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, would you have a problem with it? I could suggest a draft... I know some journalists are using this list to keep track of endorsements. Also, Andrew Coyne's column is back, and someone has deleted the Maclean's editorial board's endorsement of the Tories. --70.26.95.196 (talk) 07:33, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I have corrected the Maclean's situation (for now) as I thought you would agree on that. I also suggested the minor change to the Ottawa Citizen line. I think it's reasonable and better reflects what the OC endorsed but please feel free to undo if you disagree. --70.26.95.196 (talk) 08:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * This is the ambiguous nature of this article biting again, but I strongly disagree with the decision to remove the Citizen from the Conservative endorsement column. They endorsed the Conservatives, plus a number of individual candidates. They didn't endorse multiple parties -- when doing the individual candidate analyses their respective parties were not taken into consideration. The editorial entitled "The case for a Tory majority" is clearly an editorial board endorsement of a Conservative government, and is among the stronger endorsements in the list. The candidate endorsements are different things than what is in the rest of the list, so having that supersede the party endorsement is inconsistent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.234.60.204 (talk) 12:29, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I have to say I agree with this last comment. I think, like most of these, the Tory majority editorial was clearly written by their editorial board too (though like the rest it doesn't explicitly say so). It's clearly an endorsement of the Tories, and it's not inconsistent for them to also endorse a few local Liberals and NDP candidates. That's the difference; as I said, they write two editorials: one endorsing a party, and one endorsing a few candidates in the Ottawa area. I think it mis-characterizes them to say that they endorsed multiple parties. --70.26.95.196 (talk) 15:19, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Can whoever put the Citizen back in the Multiple Party column please post to explain why you are doing that? This discussion seems to be reaching as close to a consensus as is possible with minimal participation, that the Citizen editorial endorsement of a majority Conservative government should put it in the first category. 208.65.73.107 (talk) 16:58, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Format
I don't think the current format of the article is appropriate to the information that it is trying to convey. A table would work a lot better than a set of separate lists. I propose something like the following (though potentially with some colour). I think this conveys more information, makes it more uniform and readable, while also resolving disputes about different types of endorsements having being categorized. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.33.43.49 (talk) 20:06, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I disagree; with 30 Tory endorsements and only a handful of others there's no need for a table. Several of the columns would be a waste of space and it's easier to just list the non-Tory endorsements below. I have no problem with adding majority/minority information but that's not the current format. Also, the vast majority endorse a majority, so again it's easier to add caveats to the ones that don't. Curious to see what others here think. --70.26.99.158 (talk) 21:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

They could be combined into a single column if space is considered an issue. The information in the article is currently disorganized, though. For instance: how do you capture the Independent & Free Press (Georgetown and Acton, Ontario) endorsement of Conservative candidate Michael Chong for Wellington-Halton Hills riding? The editorial quite deliberately avoids any party endorsement for government, so putting it under the Conservative category is misleading. The information representation I am proposing seems more intuitive since the topic is supposed to be newspapers endorsements -- newspapers map to rows and endorsements map to columns. Organizing by party creates grey areas because party is not a standardized attribute of endorsements. 173.33.43.49 (talk) 22:57, 1 May 2011 (UTC)


 * You realise, about half of the Ontario papers listed are from one media owner, Metroland. It would be nice to get a bit more diverse a listing. --  Zanimum (talk) 20:25, 2 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Diversity. Haha. Metroland is a subsidiary of Torstar. If you took away all of the papers in this article owned directly or indirectly by Torstar, Bell Media, Postmedia Network and Quebecor, I don't think you'd have any left. The newspaper industry in Canada is quite consolidated. For the purpose of this article, I think unique editorial content should be the only distinguishing factor between publications. We can speculate to ourselves on how independent the editorial content may or may not be. 208.65.73.107 (talk) 20:53, 2 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree that the consolidation of ownership of the various news papers causes the endorsement list to appear heavily swayed towards the conservatives. Many of the articles linked to are the exact same articles syndicated throughout sister companies.  There seems to be an agreement that there is a problem with this skewing the article towards a non-bipartisan article. 64.56.156.66 (talk) 20:27, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I recommend just consolidating all the Sun Media endorsements into one endorsement. The article opens, explicitly stating that "Sun Media" endorses the party. It's the exact same article for each of the syndicate news papers, too. 64.56.156.66 (talk) 20:30, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Delete Liberal & Green sections?
I have no strong feelings either way on this, but since there are no endorsements for either party, should we delete the headings for them? --70.26.99.158 (talk) 21:32, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
 * After the election empty sections will be deleted, but we should wait to see if more pop up. 117Avenue (talk) 22:39, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

The Economist
Wait, I thought that "No person who does not reside in Canada shall, during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting or vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate..." So why are we listing a foreign publication's endorsement? Do they have a Canadian edition suddenly? -- Zanimum (talk) 20:28, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Broken Links
Many of the links to the endorsement articles are broken. We need to find them and fix the links. It might be a good idea to properly cite them with access times in the citation, too. 64.56.156.66 (talk) 20:25, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

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