World pretends it's been paying attention to Canada

Canada is a quiet country. We like to keep a low profile. If nothing else, it makes it less likely that someone else will try to blow up a part of the place.

This makes the federal election problematic for the world media. They want to cover it at least a little, but in order to cover it they have to act like they understand it, and you can only understand the election if you've been paying attention to Canada, which is something that nobody has any reason to do.

Some case studies:

America

CNN and FOX"News" ran practically the same AP story on the election, declaring (respectively) "Harper's beliefs run in step with Bush, GOP" and "Relations with the Bush administration will likely improve under Harper as his ideology runs along the same lines of many U.S. Republicans." Are these networks on the payroll of the Liberal Party? Because Martin would have loved for Canadians to lump Harper together with Bush and the Repbulicans. Harper, of course, knows that the viability of his party depends on ensuring Canadians that he is nothing like Bush at all. Curiously, I have yet to see anyone in the mainstream American media hit upon this blatantly obvious fact--apparently they are still holding on to the faint hope that they might somewhere discover a significant population of non-Americans who don't hate the American president.

The Conservative victory, it is also claimed, moves Canada "right on socio-economic issues such as health care, taxation, abortion and gay marriage." (FOX version) I suppose that claim makes some sense if all you've done is figure out that the name of the party is "Conservative", but not if you've actually glanced at the party platforms, listened to Harper's statements, and/or considered the breakdown of votes in Parliament. (Well, gay marriage is arguably iffy.)

Britain

One might expect better from the BBC, seeing as how we are still part of the Commonwealth, we share the same head of state, we broadcast low-budget British shows on the CBC, etc. But, no.

"Canada has swung to the right" declared this article, only to be contradicted in this one, which pointed out that "it seems very unlikely that Stephen Harper will be able to effect much change at all."

The latter article also saw fit to recognize the blatantly obvious fact mentioned above: "the Conservative leader is going to have to tread carefully and not appear to be too cosy with George W Bush, a US president disliked by most Canadians." Unfortunately, it also made two clearly false statements about the NDP: first, that it's the "third largest party in Canadian politics" (not by seat count, anyway); second, that it is "unlikely to be in any mood to want to make deals with a Conservative government" (Layton would of course love to make deals with Harper, because that would mean Harper making deals with Layton).

[UPDATE: I dropped the BBC a note, and they deleted the bit that said that NDP was 3rd largest. Not so much as a thank you in return, though. Hmph!]

Australia

I found this article--and, amazingly, it actually manages to avoid being wrong on clear points of fact. It is also so short that the writer didn't bother grouping the sentences into paragraphs.