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Denis Pilon's 'Investigating Media As A Deliberative Space'

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In this essay I will examine Denis Pilon’s work on Investigating Media as a Deliberative Space: Newspaper Opinions about Voting Systems in the 2007 Ontario Provincial Referendum. On May 15, 2007 the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly (OCA) officially announced their support for a mixed member proportional (MMP) form of proportional presentation (PR). The OCA (Ontario Citizen Assembly) was a collection of citizens , 107 women and men, chosen randomly from each riding in the province, who were given the task by the provincial government to talk about Ontario’s workings of the voting system. If a decision wasn’t reached a referendum would occur in the election of October 10, 2007 the first referendum since 1924 (Pilon, 2009, …show more content…

Pilon here shows one of the main arguments for deliberative democracy which is a core theme for this study, deliberative democracy must be one where ideas are talked about and agreed upon as a whole. Pilon argues that our conventional representative electoral can be replaced by the use of small scale political citizens becoming a “mini” public that would argue over matters of public policy for public interest, that a deliberative democracy model is motivated with a deep public engagements of the topic rather than having a one sided fight. Deliberative democracy focuses on the communicative processes of opinion and is what will precede …show more content…

Percentiles were also noted on which of the five newspapers lead the article the most. Later we can see another method of pros and cons within which section in newspapers provided to be beneficial and which came to be less beneficial along with stats of how qualitative these articles have been. Through the use of collecting 115 articles from the reporting of 2007 and compiling it and seeing what were pro, con, or informative. The voting system produced a lopsided result: 59% were con, 34% were pro, and 7% were unclear or neutral and coded as ‘info’. Editorials were the least balanced with 88% con, 0% pro, and 12% info. Columnists offered more diversity but were still unbalanced with 59% con and 34% pro. The most balanced groups were the op/eds, with 52% con and 42% pro; but these totals masked some wide divergences amongst the newspapers in terms of balance. (Pilon, 2009, 08) he also used many graphs and charts to showcase the five print media and how they reported coverage during the months and the positions for each article the five print media were; Hamilton Spectator, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Ottawa Citizen. These graphs and charts showed that the most coverage was during the end and

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