Niki Ashton would like you to know that she has been treated unfairly. The Manitoba MP and erstwhile NDP leadership contender, who placed third in that particular dustup a couple of weeks ago, recently blamed her loss on a lack of media coverage and a soupçon of sexism permeating the mainstream press.

“It was under-reported and underestimated,” Ashton told the Winnipeg Free Press of her campaign. What little press coverage she did receive, she said, concentrated on her pregnancy — a pernicious state of affairs, surely, since by definition no man would have to suffer the same indignity.

Niki is in fantastic company. Blaming the media for one’s woes is old hat in politics, spanning the ideological gamut from noted losers like Bernie Sanders to sore winners like Donald Trump. Faceless and omnipresent, the “media” is remarkably easy to demonize and provides a ready-made scapegoat for one’s failings.

For the circa-2015 Conservative faced with the late-breaking onslaught of the Liberals, the media is in the tank with Justin Trudeau. For a curmudgeonly socialist senator from Vermont trying to break the institutional arrogance of the Democratic Party, the media is pro-Hillary. In the same vein, the media was apparently uninterested in a certain Manitoba MP trying to restore the NDP to its leftist glory. And it’s probably sexist to boot.

In short, blaming the media is a reflex among politicians. In Ashton’s case, it’s also patently wrong.

Last week, I took her concerns to Jean-Francois Dumas, president of Influence Communication. Among other things, Influence measures newspaper, web, radio and television media coverage and penetration of newsworthy events, the NDP campaign among them.

I asked Dumas to crunch the numbers for the four NDP leadership candidates, to see if there was anything to Ashton’s contention that her campaign was ignored. The results: Jagmeet Singh was first in media mentions, with 30 per cent. Second was Charlie Angus with 23 per cent. Quebec’s Guy Caron and Ashton were virtually tied, at 22 and 21 per cent, respectively.

The personal is political, particularly during a leadership campaign, and narratives are forged not through policy but by the human face selling it. The personal is political, particularly during a leadership campaign, and narratives are forged not through policy but by the human face selling it.

Translation: Ashton received roughly the same media coverage as her fellow also-rans Angus and Caron. Neither Angus nor Caron complained about a dearth of coverage, in quality or in quantity. Somehow, this only happened to Niki Ashton.

As for the claim that her the media focused on her pregnancy, there Ashton has a point. She was indeed pregnant during the campaign, a fact noted in much of the coverage of her campaign. Yet she failed to mention how often she mentioned it in interviews.

Ashton herself patted her party on the back in an interview with The Huffington Post, noting how “it’s not by accident” that several NDP MPs had become pregnant during their tenure. She used her pregnancy to underscore the need for a comprehensive policy “on parental leave or on childcare to ensure that mothers and parents have the support necessary.”

Intentionally or not, Ashton’s pregnancy became a prop as a result. This isn’t a knock on the candidate; it’s an observation of a political reality. For her to suggest mentioning her pregnancy was detrimental to her campaign is folly. The personal is political, particularly during a leadership campaign, and narratives are forged not through policy but by the human face selling it.

I can’t for the life of me remember what Charlie Angus and Guy Caron were pushing. Ditto Peter Julian, who dropped out of the race in part because he struggled to differentiate himself from the two other pleasant white guys running against him.

Ashton? She’s for cracking down on big pharma and expanding medicare to include dental care. She wanted to a national daycare system, and was committed to ridding the country of its first-past-the-post electoral system. I know this because a young, earnest politician — and expecting mother — was selling it. It was a touchtone narrative.

Unfortunately for Ashton, Jagmeet Singh had an even better narrative — that of a dashing, debonair fellow in a turban who was both well-dressed and bilingual. Though admittedly cringeworthy, the term “exotic” aptly describes Singh’s mix of novelty and approachability — enough to bring night sweats to the seemingly imperturbable Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente. He has the royal jelly; it’s as plain as the beard on his face and the turban on his head.

Turning the personal into the political is a crass, cynical process. But it also works — for Singh, for Justin Trudeau, for Jack Layton. And it nearly worked for Niki Ashton, despite her protests to the contrary. Now if only she could lose in peace.

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