One Carney story, a shelf of mastheads

A Google search for “Canada Carney” on October 29 put three stories in the news box. One was an AP piece on trade talks. One was Politico on why a deal is still far off. The middle card was the clone. The label on it said The Washington Post. The headline was “Trump cheers Canadian provincial election wins, but analysts say they're no rebuke of Carney.” The photo was Mark Carney at a podium, Canadian flags behind him, hands up.

Scroll the top-stories shelf and the card comes back. Same crop. Same headline, cut off at the same word. The Oskaloosa Herald. The Seattle Times. The Killeen Daily Herald. Three hours old on each of them. A paper in Iowa, a paper in Seattle, and a paper in Texas did not each write that sentence.

The sentence belongs to Rob Gillies of the Associated Press, filed from Toronto on October 28. ABC News runs it as a wire story under his byline. So do the Toronto Star and the Hamilton Spectator. The Washington Post page uses the same headline, the same opening, and the same picture, credited to Justin Tang of the Canadian Press via AP. The picture is not from either election. The caption dates it to October 21, a joint press conference with Doug Ford, who is named and not shown.

What the copy actually says is short. On Tuesday Trump congratulated Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the Quebec separatist who won on October 5, and linked a piece that called it a blow to Mark Carney. He also congratulated British Columbia’s premier-designate, Lorne Doerkson, and wrote that conservatives are moving strong in Canada. Gillies’s point is that neither vote was a referendum on Carney. The federal Liberals and the British Columbia Conservatives are not the same party. Provincial results are provincial. That paragraph is the whole report.

The wire is built to do this. An AP member publishes the file, the photo comes with it, and Google News indexes each masthead as its own story. The reader gets a shelf that looks like a pile of outlets independently landing on the same conclusion. They landed on the same file. One reporter, one photo from the week before, and a row of logos.