FRAMING DEMOCRACY: MEDIA POLITICS AND THE 2004 ALBERTA ELECTION Jared J. Wesley & Michael Colborne Department of Political Science University of Calgary
[email protected] www.ucalgary.ca/~jjwesley Presented at: The Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association University of Western Ontario London, Ontario June 2, 2005 FRAMING DEMOCRACY: MEDIA POLITICS AND THE 2004 ALBERTA ELECTION Considering the importance of their role, media actors are positioned alongside politicians at the core of many liberal democracies, including Canada. During election campaigns newspaper and television coverage shapes far more than perceptions of individual candidates and parties. More fundamentally, as Fletcher notes, the media determine “the quality of the public debate [and] the information environment provided for voters.” Media politics, he argues, holds the potential to “promote constructive engagement of citizens, foster their interest and confidence in and understanding of the electoral process, and provide a stimulus to participation” (1991: 180). In this sense, the media help set the tone of democratic discourse, determine the scope of deliberation and dialogue between voters and their candidates for office, and, through this, affect citizens’ attitudes toward the political system and their role within it. To this extent, the health of a deliberative democracy is strongly linked to the calibre of its mass media. Analyzing this relationship in the context of the 2004 Alberta General Election, the following article offers an alternative perspective on the influence of media coverage of Canadian political campaigns. By first comparing the role of television to print news and, second, media effects in the provincial context, the research design is unique in both approach and subject matter.