CSN Press Room re: “CLOSED LOOP” ELECTION POLL DESIGN
NEWS ARTICLE - Explanatory piece illustrating key concerns MISSING from most mainstream election polling
“CLOSED LOOP” ELECTION POLL DESIGN & REPORTING REFLECTS SELECTED NEWS VALUES, OMITS OTHERS
CSNews April 8, 2025 Contact H. Noerenberg CanadianShareableNews@proton.me
Recent Canadian election polling by agencies such as Nanos, Ekos, Abacus, Angus Reid and others asks questions which rely on audience perception of news events. Yet without a history of critical balance in Canadian news reporting, poll respondents are unaware of what they are unaware of. Poll results that resonate with the values of establishment news agencies are then amplified while issues that run counter to those values go unreported.
Among the issues NOT being asked in polling and subsequently not being reported are questions of transparency, accountability and ethics along with a growing awareness of Canada’s departure from constitutional to administrative law and flawed claims made by government and media during the declared COVID-19 pandemic.
Typically, during election polling, select Canadians are asked questions like “Who do you believe is better able to handle issue X” in the absence of information as to what the various candidates have said or done about the issue in the past. The uninformed views of the respondents are then recirculated by the same media outlets that are responsible for not ensuring a fully informed public in the first place. It becomes a closed loop.
Meanwhile, citizen organizations working to encourage voters to elect candidates who will put “People over Party”. Many also seek to ensure policies are implemented that put “People over Profits”. Yet these organizations and their concerns remain outside of the establishment polling and reporting loop. The contributors to the Political ScoreCards Canada initiative (www.PoliticalScorecards.ca) have compiled a list of questions which they identify as pivotal in the upcoming election.
Transparency and Accountability “What will you do to ensure government is transparent and accountable?“
Political Representation “Will you place the rights and needs of your constituents ahead of the interests of your party or government?”
Sovereignty and Foreign Influence “How will you honor the priorities of your constituents when faced with pressure from foreign organizations, NGO’s and lobby groups?”
Censorship and Free Speech “What role do you think government should have in regulating speech?”
Government Control/Overreach “Under what circumstances should government restrict individual freedoms?”
The intent of those behind this initiative is “to determine whether a candidate truly grasps the essence of foundational representation—rooted in safeguarding our natural rights and inherent freedoms. As voters prepare to cast their ballots, it is crucial they look beyond superficial issues and focus on the character and values of those seeking office. Elections are not solely about policies—they are about the integrity, ethics, and trustworthiness of the individuals who will represent the public. To encourage more critical thinking, Political ScoreCards urges voters to reflect on what truly matters to their families and communities. We invite voters to ask themselves: ‘Will this candidate stand shoulder to shoulder with me to protect me and my family’s future?’ And ‘Will this candidate defend our shared natural rights and uphold the principles of a free society?’”
Questions around accountability, transparency and the willingness of candidates to defy the directions given by a party whip to vote according to principles supporting citizen rights appear NOT to be included in the reporting of the major polling firms.
This graphic prepared by Angus Reid highlights the pollster’s interpretation of the 15 “top issues” in the election. The choices included perfectly illustrate the concept of “consonance”. This term is used in media studies to reflect how “events that fit with the media's expectations and preconceptions receive more coverage than those that defy them (and for which they are thus unprepared)… consonance really refers to the media's readiness to report an item. Consonance has also been defined as relating to editors' stereotypes and their mental scripts for how events typically proceed.” (Source: A Wikipedia article on “News Values” which defines "criteria that influence the selection and presentation of events as published news.”)
The topics provided by pollsters to those answering the poll questions reflect the topics being reported on in mainstream media reports. The many other crucial topics that are being censored out of mainstream reporting also end up censored out of the polls as well. When such topics then do not appear in polling exercises, they again are not reported on in the news cycle, and as such the closed loop repeats itself. As a result, these un/underreported issues are not making their way back to Canadian living rooms or party backrooms were people rely solely on mainstream government or corporate backed media for their information. The list of omitted topics includes: how captured governments have been perpetuating medical misinformation; how the judicial system is increasingly implementing administrative instead of constitutional law; how totalitarianism is being legislated in Canada; how medical and climate emergencies are being used to implement ‘post-national’ social and financial global governance; who within Canada’s government has already been influenced by and is working toward such aims, and how very censored reporting on these matters is in this country.
Earlier this year, Canadians witnessed the closed loop between reporting, polling and policy making in the medical context. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) commissioned the polling firm Abacus Data to conduct the 2025 Health and Media Annual Tracking Survey. Because of a clear lack of critical and balanced reporting in government and corporate-backed media in Western nations including Canada, those designing the polling questions erroneously coded a number of proven concepts as “misinformation”. They also did not include questions or examples highlighting known false claims (aka misinformation) made by Canadian health officials (for example around known harms of mRNA injections in pregnancy). The Canadian Medical Association then reported on the (flawed) poll results. The resulting news story around a rise in so-called medical misinformation in Canada was then further uncritically amplified by a wide array of establishment media organizations, like the CBC, and within the medical publishing industry. (See Medscape and the Canadian Health Network.) Chillingly, the manufactured “fact” of “rising medical misinformation” then makes its way back into the policy making realm. This can likely lead to support for even further increases to censorship in Canada. (For a critical look at existing censorship initiatives in this country, Canadians need to look across the border to the US based publication Reclaim the Net. And for an updated look at evolving evidence to counter government disinformation on the alleged safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, see the references associated with the full letter of this national Open Letter initiative: https://www.call2halt19.ca/.)
To address the problem of a lack of critical balance in news reporting, the independent PDF/Substack publication Canadian Shareable News launched the CRITICAL BALANCE REPORTING INDICATORS for use by journalists and the news-following public alike. Since March 2024, Canadian Shareable News has been pointing toward issues of key importance to Canadians which have been left unaddressed by corporate and government backed media outlets in this country. Generally, stories included in past issues of CSNews do not even register in the search engines of The Canadian Press or the CBC. Occasionally, these or other outlets select only single aspects of the stories without setting the stories into the larger context. At other times, key figures in the stories are simply slandered in various ways with no efforts made to provide balanced reporting on their attempts at breaking through corporate or government censorship. As a result, Canadians creating and responding to polling are oblivious to the issues presented, for example, by the long list of ethical whistleblowers and others listed in the 2024 year-end issue of CanadianShareableNews: https://canadianshareablenews.substack.com/p/csnews-week-40-december-31-2024.
Legal precedence is being set in court cases involving many of the individuals on the list. This points to increasing disregard in the courts of the Constitutional rights of Canadians as constitutional law is being replaced by administrative law. Meanwhile, lawyers, judges and others within the court system also appear impacted by the closed loop of news reporting, polling and policy making. They appear unaware of realities outside of that loop. Increasingly, they are ruling in favour of the stances taken by government administrators (for example those appointed into positions of public health, environmental policy, etc.) instead of considering the evolving evidence-based science, geopolitical analysis, etc. presented on behalf of individual citizens facing illegitimate charges. For a deeper analysis on how legal precedence is progressively moving Canada closer to the definition of an administrative state (with increasingly totalitarian tendencies) readers are encouraged to listen to: Legislating Totalitarianism in BC.
In this earlier interview, The Tyranny of the Administrative State, Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy explains: “We have a nation where Parliament delegates to the Executive, the Executive determines what, in their discretion, is best for the good of the country, and the courts defer to the "expertise" of the Executive.” The concept of the administrative state has been reported on in the US for at least the past 7 years (see Administrative State is THE Leading Threat to Civil Liberties of Our Era and and Battling the Administrative State). Meanwhile, the Canadian Press news agency, which bills itself as “Canada’s trusted news leader” does not show any meaningful search results for the topic "administrative state" in Canada. Neither do many other prominent government and corporate backed media outlets.
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Your quote, "stances taken by government administrators (for example those appointed into positions of public health," resonates with me. As a researcher in tobacco harm reduction, the misinformation is so rampant that it has become a part of our culture to simply dismiss evidence because its funding sources. For instance, most of the bigger tobacco companies are heavily investing in research and innovation for vapes, heat-not-burn, nicotine pouches, and snus products. To dismiss any research on its face like this is called the ad hominem logical fallacy, or rejecting evidence based on factors other than the arguments they provide. This happens all the time, in other fields as well. And it's unbelievably frustrating because there is no other reliable sources of funding for researchers who want to help people who smoke, to improve their quality of life and prevent early, very uncomfortable deaths.
Well done Hannah. You've captured how we are being lied to over and over again by our media. I've learned to assume that the opposite of what they say is true.