CKY-TV tops election-night rivals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2003 (8446 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE outcome of the vote was a foregone conclusion. The much more interesting race last night, at least from the couch-spud perspective, involved the local TV channels and their coverage of the 2003 provincial election.

And the winner, by a narrow margin, was local-news ratings leader CKY, on the strength of its superior presentation of on-screen numbers and a feisty panel of analysts moderated by one of the CTV network’s literal and figurative political heavyweights, Mike Duffy.

CBC-TV also presented a full evening of election coverage, and offered top-notch ongoing commentary from Paul Thomas, but trailed badly in the numbers game with an on-screen tote board that provided only the most general of results.

Global TV’s sporadic coverage, which included a bizarre cycle of in-studio analysis by Allen Mills and sitcom reruns bolstered by an on-screen results crawl, was a disappointment. A-Channel’s puzzling decision to begin its coverage an hour after the polls closed rendered its election package largely irrelevant.

With the outcome of the vote already declared — in the most emphatic terms — by a number of public-opinion polls, the local channels covering the vote had to rely on something other than suspense to drive their election-night coverage.

And basically, that left three options: in-depth analysis, number-crunching, or bells and whistles.

The two local channels that offered full election coverage — CKY and CBC — did a good job of focusing on information rather than gimmickry, but the difference in their approaches could hardly have been more apparent.

CKY took an aggressive approach from the get-go, offering its first very preliminary results at 8:05 p.m. and making a decision-desk call of an NDP majority just 19 minutes later. From the outset, CKY’s coverage focused on numbers, with anchors Gord Leclerc and Janet Stewart offering little insight into the ongoing totals.

But CKY’s panel — Duffy, along with Judy Wasylicia-Leis, James Downey and David Walker — appeared often and delivered a feisty mix of opinion and analysis.

Over at CBC, the emphasis was on commentary, with anchor Jennifer Rattray and co-host Thomas providing useful ongoing perspective but much less in the way of raw numbers. The CBC’s panel of Paul Edwards, Jean Friesen and Harry Lazarenko was strong but underutilized in the evening’s first hour.

Global’s bottom-of-the-screen tote board was possibly the evening’s best, providing constantly updated riding-by-riding results in alphabetical order. But abandoning analysis for more than half of each hour — in favour of sitcom reruns — was a woefully bad choice.

It wasn’t a landslide, but CKY was both leading and elected in the TV race at deadline last night.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca