The most popular man in the world

As part of following politics for this blog and my class, it's been recommended that I use Google News to figure out what people are talking about in the realm of Canadian politics. I haven't been doing this - I consume enough news elsewhere to know what the big stories are, and I'm trying my best to avoid the big ones anyhow - but that's not to say Google News doesn't have its uses.

This morning, I ran a search through Google News for the names of all major party leaders, and certain other well-known Canadian politicians. My goal was to see who gets talked about, and who doesn't. Going by essentially every news article from the past week, here are the standings:

6552 - Stephen Harper
2070 - Michael Ignatieff
866 - Lawrence Cannon
854 - Peter Mackay
588 - Jim Flaherty
534 - Jack Layton
523 - John Baird
444 - Jean Chrétien
319 - Bob Rae
253 - Stephane Dion
190 - Gilles Duceppe
171 - Brian Mulroney
171 - Gary Goodyear
149 - John McCallum
143 - Thomas Mulcair
71 - Elizabeth May

It's no surprise to see so many Conservatives near the top - and as partisan as I am, you're sure not going to see me complain about a conservative bias in the media or anything like that. The Conservatives are the ones in power, they're the ones making the announcements and handing out the (ethically-ambiguous) giant cheques. Of course it's the government who will get the lion's share of the press coverage, that's how the system works. No complaints here.

What's a little more jarring is the gap between the party leaders and everybody else. Stephen Harper gets nearly eight times the coverage of his top minister, and Ignatieff gets his name in the paper more than six times as often as any other active Liberal. (Chrétien is an aberration, because he was in the news this week for being named to the Order of Merit.)

(Incidentally, look at the URL to that last link - anybody else find it funny that 'eacute' seems to be Toronto Star shorthand for 'é'?)

It makes some sense with Harper, because he - or at least the media narrative of him, although it seems to have a good deal of basis in fact - likes to centralize power with himself, and doesn't like anybody else (even in his caucus) shining too brightly.

But Ignatieff? The Liberals have tried, both in the 2008 campaign and since, to emphasize that they are a team, yet here's their leader getting far more media coverage than anybody else on the team. It's not because he's a star - plenty of journalists like to criticize him for not having enough of a personality.

Instead, the problem is with this perception among the media that the leader is all that matters - a problem that many have claimed will in fact cause the leader to become all that matters. Right now, Canadian MPs are expected to vote however they are told to vote, and say whatever they are told to say. Nothing else, and certainly nothing that might look bad on their party. Andrew Coyne and others have claimed that this is, on the whole, bad for Canadian democracy - MPs who represent their leader to their constituents, rather than the other way around.

I think the media is part of the problem. If the media were to focus less on the party leaders - since, ultimately, don't they just have one vote out of many? - it might lead to less of a star factor among the leaders, a greater role for backbenchers, and ultimately a healthier democracy for Canada.

But maybe I'm just a pie-in-the-sky idealist.

--Ryan