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Fairly Quiet on the YouTube Front
In the better part of a week since my last post, I’ve been revisiting the ads posted on YouTube by the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP. First, a bit of background. Viewcounts for YouTube ads stop increasing after a while, indicating saturation. In effect, the ad is no longer news. But the interesting question is the…
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What are the Viewcounts Saying?
In the 2015 Canadian federal and 2016 US presidential elections, YouTube viewcounts for party ads were closely correlated with the ultimate outcomes. In the Canadian election, the Liberals had a total viewcount of almost 10 million for their ads, while the NDP and Conservatives were both far behind, with total viewcounts of 2.4 million and…
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Narrative and Politics Graduate Seminar
This winter semester, I will be leading my graduate seminar on narrative and politics. There is still space in the seminar for graduate students to enroll, so I am posting about what we will be studying. With the explosive growth of social media and the rise of Internet-enabled government, narrative has become an essential mode…
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New Article about Investigative Journalism Films
Co-author Beth Herst and I have just published a new article about investigative journalism films in the journal Journalism Practice. The article is titled “Beyond ‘Woodstein’: Narratives of Investigative Journalism.” We identify 14 recurring structural and formal elements of a fable about investigative journalism and use the fable to analyze six diverse films produced in…
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The First Federal Election Ads: Guilt by Association
I’ve started looking at the first election ads of the two major parties, and both are using the rhetoric of guilt by association against each other. The Liberals’ “Choose Forward” ad associates Conservative leader Andrew Scheer with his predecessor Stephen Harper and his colleague Doug Ford as a practitioner of the politics of backwardness. Prime…
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Gaffes by Hillary and Amy
I’ve just read Amy Chozick’s 2018 memoir Chasing Hillary. The book is an enjoyable mixture of bildungsroman and political reportage. Chozick writes about her development as a journalist over the ten years she spent covering Hillary Clinton, first for the Wall Street Journal and then for the New York Times, and also includes reminiscences of…
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Harry the Wanderer
A few years ago when anyone in our household returned from school, errands, or shopping, we often noticed a ginger cat with tiger-like markings and a beige underbelly and the name Harry on his collar. Besides seeking our attention by rubbing against our legs and meowing, he was trying to get into the house. Never…
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Consultation without Communication
The Ford Government, as reported in the Toronto Star, is going ahead with its plan to require gasoline stations to post stickers denouncing the federal government’s carbon price by the end of August. As I discussed in my post on June 19, the Ford Government gave citizens until July 9 to comment on that initiative.…
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Taking Some Time Off
I will be on holiday for a few weeks, so I won’t be blogging for a few weeks. Here are some things I will be working on when I return. My website is in need of a bit of a refresh. I will be trying to increase subscriptions with slightly more persistent nudging than is…
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Doug Ford: Gone in a Year?
When I was at Kathleen Wynne’s concession speech a year ago, a media type asked me to prognosticate about the Ford Government, and I predicted Ford would be gone in two years. The reporter looked at me like I had two heads, but exactly a year into Ford’s mandate, the odds of his departure have…
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Protesting Gas Pump Politics
The Ford Government is getting set to roll out its controversial gas pump stickers. The stickers, like the ads it is already running on radio and television, tell us the average payment in 2022 under the federal government’s carbon price without adding that most of the payment would be rebated. To implement the sticker policy,…
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An Ambivalent Remembrance of Marty Feldstein
The recent passing of Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has led to praise from many of his students, who were quoted in the eulogy in The New York Times. Columnist Paul Krugman tweeted that “his lasting legacies will come from research — both his own, and the research environment he created for young economists.” It was…
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Doug Ford’s Battle with Business
There is an obvious contradiction when a government slaps “Open for Business” signs all over the highways while it is passing legislation that unilaterally and without compensation breaks contracts with the private sector. That is what the Ford Government did to firms that bought credits in the Wynne Government’s cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission market and…
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Watch Great Movies. Tell your Story. Learn Management. (MGSC12)
MGSC12 (Narrative and Management) is not your typical management course. It’s based on the now well-recognized idea that telling stories is a fundamental aspect of being human, and that well-told stories can be immensely persuasive, particularly in a management context. MGSC12 begins by introducing some fundamental ideas about story-telling, such as the roles of protagonist…
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Learning Public Management Experientially (MGSC03)
Recently I was walking along Bayview near Eglinton with my teenage son. Two joggers passed by, then a few seconds later they stopped and I heard one of them call out “Professor Borins.” I turned around, he came up to me and said, “You probably don’t remember me, but I took your public management course…