MONTREAL—No election defeat would be complete without the ritual shooting of the media messenger by one or more of the defeated parties.

On the heels of Monday’s Quebec vote it fell to François Gendron, the Parti Québécois’ dean in the national assembly, to pull the trigger.

According to Gendron, there is an overabundance of media commentators and they collectively spent the past month “confusing” voters — with the result that his party was kicked out of office this week.

Coming from an MNA who was first elected alongside René Lévesque in 1976, it was a revealing comment but not necessarily for the reasons that Gendron had in mind.

In Quebec, as elsewhere across Canada, there has been a multiplication of political commentators. But that is due to the appearance of a legion of partisan spin-doctors — including a strong contingent of past sovereigntist politicians — who now get to practice their art as pundits.

As a result there have never been more opportunities for parties to deliver their messages right into the living rooms of voters.

Until recently it was always the federalist side in the Quebec debate that routinely complained about media bias.

With Pierre Karl Péladeau, who owns the province’s biggest tabloids and its most-watched television network, landing a central spot in the PQ casting, one might have expected that particular chip to remain squarely on federalist shoulders.

Yet many péquistes — including Gendron — now feel that the Quebec media environment has become hostile to their party and to sovereignty. But the media are ultimately a mirror of the larger reality. The thing that PQ critics of the media may be on to is really a change for the worse in the general outlook of Quebecers on sovereignty.

As for sowing confusion in the minds of voters, in hindsight it seems that in the Quebec election, as in other recent provincial and federal campaigns, the media mostly managed to confuse itself.

When all is said and done Quebec voters actually kept their eye on a ball of their own choosing in the lead-up to the April 7 vote.

The watershed moments of the campaign were the most unfiltered.

That starts with the appearance on the scene of PKP. His strongly worded pledge to make Quebec a country ran on a loop on the all-news stations and promptly became viral on the Internet.

PKP’s arrival on the scene was initially cast by most of the media as a game-changing coup for the Parti Québécois.

The only thing that was right about that journalistic consensus was that the event was a game-changer.

The PKP episode was followed by two televised leaders’ debates.

In the first Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard made few waves — a performance that cost him some punditry points but won his party votes — in no small part because he did not get in the way of Pauline Marois’s referendum waltz.

A week later the second debate took place against polls that showed the Liberal leader in first place. As a result all media eyes were riveted on the hits that Couillard was taking at the hands of his three opponents.

But voters were more impressed by the attacks of CAQ leader François Legault on Marois. While the Liberals stood their ground in voting intentions the PQ continued to slip.

Thanks to the social media it has never been easier for political journalists to follow simultaneous campaign developments in real time . . . and, by all indications, to lose the thread of the election conversation.

There is a consensus that this was the most dispiriting Quebec campaign ever.

A mudslide destroyed the high road early on.

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But much of the impetus for that mudslide came from the social media.

It was a prime conduit for a lot of the dirt that the parties threw at each other and the micro-climate of the twittersphere influenced party strategies and the daily mainstream coverage.

If, as I suspect, the line that connects the dots of a dirty Quebec campaign and the constant decline in civility in Parliament runs through the social media, things will continue to get worse before they ever get better.

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