Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- The McGill Institute's Election Content Analysis includes plenty of interesting information on how this month's federal election was covered. But the most noteworthy point looks to be the lag time between developments in the public and coverage by the media: the key developments in the polls for the NDP - reaching rough parity with the Libs around April 21, and passing them early in the week of April 25) - were followed by a roughly proportional boost in first mentions and overall mentions only several days later. (And indeed, even the last week of the campaign saw the Libs getting more overall mentions than the NDP.)

Of course, it's also worth noting that the lag time also offers an indication that we shouldn't be unduly concerned with the volume of media coverage: after all, the NDP's surge built up without any particular help on that front.

- And the NDP should anticipate that it'll mostly need to keep building outside the corporate media as well - a point which looks all the more clear in light of Sixth Estate's analysis of opinion-page content.

- Meanwhile, much of the punditocracy's response to the NDP's rise was to declare that it was out of touch with a perceived consensus on issues such as, say, its willingness to revisit Canada's constitution to secure Quebec's support. Too bad nobody thought to ask the public until now:

After almost two decades of constitutional peace, The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey indicates a majority is now willing to risk re-opening the constitutional can of worms to accomplish some specific goals.

For instance, 61 per cent said they're prepared to re-open the Constitution to reform or abolish the appointed Senate.

And 58 per cent said they're willing to offer constitutional amendments in a bid to finally secure Quebec's signature on the Constitution. That includes 66 per cent of Quebecers and 55 per cent of Canadians outside the province.

Fifty-eight per cent also said they're willing to open up the Constitution to change the country's electoral system.

- Finally, Jim Stanford rightly slams the corporatist line that executives should be entitled to take credit for "creating value":

But my bigger point has to do with his claim that he “created value” for investors. This self-important shorthand is regularly invoked by business leaders to justify whatever it is they are doing. But do CEOs really “create value,” even if the share price of whatever organization they are in charge of happened to increase in a certain time period? A more accurate and neutral statement would be that Mr. Underwood was in charge of this REIT during a year when the market value of its unit price increased. Does this mean he “created value”? Of course not.

The market value of those units could increase for all kinds of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Underwood’s talents: like a renewal of low-interest credit creation being used for speculative purchases of real estate-related financial assets (gee, I’ve seen that movie before, and it doesn’t end nicely), overall investor sentiment, the impact of low interest rates on capitalized real estate prices, the impact of tax loopholes on the value of income trusts (indeed, Mr. Underwood’s firm would not even exist where it not for the enormous and blatant tax loophole for income trusts which the federal government is finally now partially closing), and other macro factors.

The only people in Mr. Underwood’s industry who actually “created value” are the workers who actually build and maintain the structures which his firm owns, operates, and markets. Needless to say, the compensation for these genuine value-creators did not increase by 475% last year.