One step forward, two steps back

One of the big stories of the last couple days' worth of election news - hopefully one of the last big stories, since Tuesday is voting day - involves the man on the left, Stephane Dion, and his allegedly imploding in a CTV interview.

You can watch the interview for yourself here. Now, while there's obvious unethical behaviour on CTV's part in telling Dion they wouldn't air the false starts, and then going back on their word, that's not the problem.

The problem is that these false starts are supposed to prove that...I'm not sure what, exactly. Not a lack of English (he's not pausing to try and figure out what a certain word is, and when he's talking in a part that he doesn't expect to be broadcast, his English is fine and coming quick). Not an unwillingness to answer the question (and thus a hostility towards the media). Not a lack of an economic plan.

As a journalist - and more importantly, as a person with at least an ounce of common sense - I can see where the problem was here. Dion was asked what he would have done differently than Harper, were he Prime Minister today. Ignoring the obvious contradictions in verb tense, more information is still needed - namely, when did Dion become PM in this hypothetical scenario? If he won the 2006 election rather than Harper, he'd have been able to do stuff that he couldn't have done if this scenario had him becoming PM last week. The interviewer didn't seem to understand this.

Even that part's not too bad - you can't expect someone from a local CTV station (especially someone who clearly has plenty of years in the business and is STILL at a local CTV station) to have the same intellect as a Peter Mansbridge.

But then Mike Duffy - host of a daily political show on CTV Newsnet, and a man who's been covering Parliament longer than I've been alive - got into the act, hyping this interview up as something extremely damaging to the Liberal campaign because...again, not sure why.

From my own observations over this campaign, I get that CTV likes to go easy on the Conservatives and hard on the Liberals whenever possible. Until this happened, I didn't think it might have been a conscious decision.

--Ryan