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Roy Brander's avatar

The permanent campaign surely goes back to the founding of Fox News.

Dan Cooper was a founding producer at Fox News, now never mentioned because he offended Roger Aisles. Dan's book "Naked Launch" makes it very specific in the description of the different structure of Fox News: It was never a "news network", it doesn't work that way. It's a 7x24 political campaign. Fox handles news the way political campaigns handle news: not as something to report, but something to *react* to. Every bit of news is processed as good for the campaign (and put on constant rotation) or bad (and the headline claps back at it, as in "Bush fires back at criticisms", which are never the headline). It is then dropped.

Canada's Fox is in print, and it's PostMedia - that's basically the way the National Post in particular processes all incoming data.

Then there is the "Dark Money" problem - in the USA, read the book of that title by Jane Mayer, the avalanche of money poured into political messaging there is quite staggering, and most of it is outside the sight of election-money monitoring. But of course, Canada is a land of oligopolies and dynasties, and you can bet we have our own.

Between the media they own, and the money they donate to P.R. Firms they like to call 'think tanks', the very wealthy that have risen since Reagan and Thatcher (and Mulroney) are very much driving this change. The lefty politicians sure as hell didn't choose it, nor are any poor people organizing for it.

So the upbeat ending David wanted is a call to push back against Big Money, itself -get it out of politics get it taxed away from the perpetrators- surely that's a rally cry that will resonate. A new direction for the NDP.

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Rob Richardson's avatar

I used to joke with US colleagues that a Canadian 1st minister with a majority could spend 2 years doing hard stuff and then the 2nd half of a 4+ year mandate doing stuff to make the electorate forget so they could be re-elected. The every 2 year house elections in the US meant there was never enough time for folks to forget. Alas those days are gone.

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