I don't think the Globe and Mail and its editors and letter-writers are being very fair to Chandler Powell.

Shortly after the federal election was called, G&M started running a series called "Will Chandler Vote?", where they profiled Mr. Powell, a 23-year-old who wasn't sure if he was going to vote, and followed him from the election call to election day, writing a weekly column about his decision-making process.

All throughout this process, people were sending letters to the editor accusing Mr. Powell, and sometimes his whole demographic (full disclosure: I am part of this demographic) of being selfish, self-absorbed, lazy, navel-gazing, and overly introspective. Many of these letter-writers seemed extremely angry that Mr. Powell had not decided whether to vote and was going through such a complex decision-making process, some implied that this introspection and over-analysis was some shameful crime for which he should be punished by being senteced to poverty or war or oppression or hard labour. The Globe and Mail itself even wrote a scathing, scornful editorial, just after the first Chandler column appeared, slamming the fact that he had not yet decided whether to vote.

The problem is that all these people are condemning Chandler Powell for being exactly the kind of person the Globe and Mail needed to do this feature.

Each Chandler column was between 1/3 and 1/2 of a newspaper page. I word-counted a couple, and they came in just under 900 words. The election was about five weeks long. That comes to a total of almost a full two-page spread, or between 4000 and 5000 words, about Mr. Powell deciding whether to vote. Imagine if you were making a simple personal decision and a reporter was following you around, asking questions, making you expound and explain and justify and rationalize and reflect upon your decision making process until they had enough material for a two-page spread. Could you do this and not come across as self-centred, self-absorbed, navel-gazing and overly introspective?

It was particularly inappropriate for the Globe and Mail's editorial of May 27th to attack Mr. Powell for possibly choosing not to vote. On May 27th, the campaign was less than a week old, and there was still a month left. The Globe and Mail still had four or five columns to do about his decision-making process. They NEEDED him to be undecided. What would they have written 900 words a week about if he had already decided that yes, he was going to vote? If the newspaper wanted to write an editorial about how important it is that young people vote that would have been fine, but it was awfully rude of them to condemn Mr. Powell personally for essentially being a cooperative subject for their feature.

As for the readers and letter-writers who, for reasons I don't quite understand, seemed so very outraged that Mr. Powell might not vote and was thinking so much about it, taking so much into consideration, I would have expected better than for them to take it out on Mr. Powell personally. The self-centredness, self-absorption, introspection, navel-gazing and possibly-not-voting for which they condemn Mr. Powell are all necessary characteristics of this sort of feature. If the readers find that disagreeable, they should be taking issue with the newspaper itself for choosing to run such a feature, rather than with its subject for being an ideal subject.