Image by the brilliant DonkeyHotey
The American hype machine has been running at a fever pitch this election season. Between the dog and pony show that was the race for the Republican nomination, to the game of hot potato that came before the announcement of a running mate and the actual Presidential campaign, it seems as if America has been campaigning for about a decade now.
As regular readers already know, I live in Canada. You would think that Canada is now America Junior with the way we have been inundated with every little fart that each American candidate has tooted since the beginning of this election season. You can’t get away from news about the U.S. election… it’s everywhere. It’s reported on by our Canadian news shows, in our Canadian newspapers and on our Canadian websites, thankfully the American election is never the top story on any of those venues. Unfortunately, on sites like Huffington Post Canada or Yahoo Canada (Canadian versions of American websites), unless there is a heinous killer on the loose (Luca Rocco Magnotta) or a natural disaster (earthquake of the coast of B.C. or hurricane Sandy) it’s almost always the top story. Yesterday’s top story on The Huffington Post Canada was cleverly disguised as a story about Canada. It was even titled O Canada. The story was all about how a recent poll showed that Canadians would vote for Obama over Romney by a margin of 7 to 1. How is this Canadian news?
Canadians are a fairly savvy bunch. You can’t just put the word Canada and an image of a Maple Leaf on your logo but still report mainly American news stories and expect that Canadians won’t notice. In the case of the Huffington Post, I imagine that the reason for them to have, typically, less than 50 percent Canadian content is due to the fact that most Canadian bloggers know that cachet is not French for cash and don’t want to write for free. In the case of Yahoo Canada and others like it, I assume that as they are American owned and operated, they are not bound by the same Canadian content laws that govern our media.
Canada is part of the Commonwealth, otherwise known as the British Commonwealth, and as such, we have a close relationship to Britain and the Queen, yet when there is an election held in England, we hardly hear about it. The province where I live, Quebec, is still very French in both language and culture, but when an election is held in France, it barely makes our radar. Recently Quebec held an election and the U.S. election still got more news coverage in Quebec than that of our own.
Believe it or not people who live in Canada actually want to know about what is happening in their own country. I have spoken to many Canadians who go out of their way to avoid news about the U.S. election, but still know more about it than the undecided American voters do.
America is the only country on the planet that has such a long election campaign. In Canada our campaigns range from 36 days (the minimum) to 74 days (the length of our longest campaign… just two days longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage). One could be led to believe that Americans really like campaign season, but it seems that Canadians aren’t the only ones who are sick and tired of having news of this election shoved down our collective throats.
I must say, this little girl sums it up perfectly.
Hi, I always thought that Canadians were unarmed Americans. Prolly’ not.
We have wall to wall coverage of the US Elections here in the UK too, and personally, I love it. Next Tuesday I am up all night following the whole thing with the BBC (TV & Radio), Twatter, Facebum, wordpress and whatever else is coming down the line. The USA is the largest Englsih speaking Country on Earth and so it’s natural that we should get this kind of coverage. Also, as they say, “when America sneezes – Europe catches a cold” – and so the issues are very important to us.
Some people are complaining here about it, but they usually are not that interested in the news anyway.
I think the reason that maybe the Canadian News services going over board on their coverage is probably a bit of lazyness – there’s so much news feed available, they don’t have to go out and find the stories. At least the UK news stations have sent their own teams out to cover the event.
Good luck, I hope you get through it OK.
And here I was planning to move to Canada when I couldn’t take it anymore. Now you tell me I’d have to listen to it there, too, it seems there’s no point. Hmm…maybe that was the plan all along. Well played, Canada. Well played.
If I had a moustache, I’d twirl it, but I don’t so instead I will just say…
MUAHAHAHA
Your comment made me actually laugh out loud.
Ha! My work here is done.