Category: Feature articles

Award-winning Toronto Star investigative journalist Rob Cribb called on the Canadian public to demand greater government transparency at a lecture at UBC’s Robson Square campus last week.

“The public must demand greater openness and transparency from public officials,” he said. “Without this, we remain in the dark.”

Cribb, who is also the Canwest visiting professor at the UBC School of Journalism, is responsible for groundbreaking investigative reports that pry open the bureaucratic vault of secrecy on key public safety issues – exposing problems with daycare, airline maintenance and restaurant regulations.

While journalists act on behalf of the public as a watchdog on government, Cribb argued that a culture of secrecy and silence at all levels of government has frustrated journalists’ attempts to find out the truth.

Information laws at both the federal and provincial levels establish the rights to public access to government-held documents, a 30-day deadline for response and an appeal procedure if access is denied and also detail limits to these rights.

But public records that should be easily attainable through freedom of information legislation are kept hidden through destroying records, delays and flat denials.

Even when a request is granted, Cribb said, bureaucrats assign exorbitant fees for accessing information. In one case Cribb relayed, the government told him it would cost $1200 to transfer data onto a disc.

Academic research, including one published by the Campaign for Open Government, shows that Canadian institutions are taking longer to process requests and are less likely to release information.

A black hole of information results when public bodies are not adequately covered by access to information legislation.

Some governmental bodies that are not held accountable to the public, because they are exempt from access legislation, include Airport Authorities, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, The Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, Foundation Genome Canada, Canadian Blood Services, NAV Canada, and others.

Cribb also reported that “more than half” of requests for court record documents are routinely denied. The greatest indictments against the public interest are committed through these information black holes.

When information is uncovered, it can have enormous public interest. Through his digging, Cribb found that the College of Physicians was dealing with 99 per cent of patient complaints and reports of malpractice in secret, and doctors with complaints filed against them were often given light reprimands, in private, with no transparency.

He said there are also “attempts to silence whistleblowers”, and “economic pressures to avoid delays overruling safety issues” that much of the public may be unaware of.

Cribb said that former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein had denied journalists access to public records, a “strategic way of undermining the public interest”, and that Stephen Harper’s staff attempt to manage news conferences by “picking which journalists get to ask questions.”

“We are dealing with the most hostile government in recent history,” he said of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s relationship with the Ottawa press corps.”

The chill on communication is achieved through gag orders on Ministers. Requests to speak to the media must be approved by the Prime Minister’s Office and information on “sensitive issues” must be approved by the PMO, which adds to the backlog of access to information requests.

In addition, requests from journalists are often flagged and automatically deemed sensitive, restricting debates surrounding important information from entering the public sphere.

Cribb is frustrated that this culture of secrecy is a “sleeper issue in Canadian society”.

He said journalists, acting on behalf of the public, are “dealing with…antiquated legislation and [a] cultural problem. The only way things change is through public pressure…but [it’s] rarely on the public agenda”, he said.

Cribb called for amendments to Freedom of Information legislation, judicial appreciation for journalists’ relationships with confidential sources, and adequate whistleblower protection.

An RCMP Emergency Response Teams swarmed the University of B.C. campus on Wednesday, January 31. With bulletproof vests and dogs, they spent the better part of the afternoon in the biological sciences building.

Neither the public nor people inside the building were told what the police were doing. The RCMP taped off the building and surrounding area and dispatched a helicopter to monitor from above. Students in the building reacted, as suggested by police, by locking themselves in classrooms and offices. They were reportedly not allowed to go to the bathroom or do anything else. They were told these measures were for their safety, and that was all they were told. All over campus, shocked students and faculty watched, waited and wondered what could be happening.

Before long, clues and rumours abounded. Students became citizen journalists as they blogged reports from inside the biosciences building. The citizen journalism website Nowpublic.com published reports that a suicidal assailant was loose in the building, threatening people’s lives. One blogger said that, “According to an email released to faculty and graduate students working in the building, a suicidal student has been displaying threatening behavior.” As part of that same update, the blogger said a witness outside called him saying that the “assailant might have a gun.” That quickly turned the onlookers’ thoughts away from a bomb threat and toward a suicidal gunman. However, at that point the police had still confirmed nothing about the nature of the threat. The only verifiable story was the police presence. Attempts by JournalismEthics.ca to contact the blogger about the accuracy of the statements have yielded no response.

It was not until March 3 that the public got any substantial information about the crisis when police announced the arrest of 19-year-old UBC student Hwi Lee on charges of uttering threats and mischief. Police said the decision to stay mum was key to their investigation. But they’re still not saying anything about the nature of the threat because the case is now before the courts.

On January 31, local media outlets published stories on their websites that a police incident was occurring and a building had been locked down. All over campus – not just in the locked-down building – staff and students were told to stay where they were. Games of telephone tag yielded rumours that included a bomb threat, the aforementioned suicide gunman and even a drill. 

Since I work for the student newspaper, students inside the building and outside were calling me with questions saying that media were reporting these rumours. My girlfriend received a call from her parents telling her that there was a bomb threat. Scared I was in danger, she called me while I was on the scene.

Parents from around the country frantically called their children, haunted by images from Virginia Tech and terrified of imminent violence. At about 4 p.m., mass emails circulated, stating the situation was ‘resolved’ for the rest of campus. Police began slowly releasing trapped students and faculty and by 8 p.m. the building was cleared. The actual danger wasn’t known at the end of the day, and is still not known. The police were tight-lipped. The less they said, the more rumors soared. 

We often talk about how changes in technology are changing the way media operates. It is changing everything from the immediacy of spot news to citizen journalism. From Virginia Tech to the London bombings, ordinary people have begun documenting extraordinary events with the help of their cell phone cameras and blogs. However, the chaos at UBC last month is a perfect place to examine how these new tools can be used prematurely and mishandled.

Is citizen journalism really a benefit to citizens? Citizens were not informed by last month’s citizen journalism, they were merely terrified by it. And the rigid police silence fueled the fire. 

There are many instances where citizen journalism adds to the available information and takes the gatekeeper element out of news. Recently, when a fast food restaurant was blown up overnight on a main street in Vancouver, the damage and location were quickly reported by citizen journalists. Viewers could see the damage and know to avoid that area during their rush hour commute. News agencies only have so many reporters and can only be in so many locations, but with sites like Nowpublic.com, reporters can be everywhere.

However, in an event like the UBC lockdown, citizen journalists were feeding the public unsubstantiated rumours. RCMP Cst. Annie Linteau and UBC spokesman Scott Macrae told me, along with a horde of other journalists, that nothing could be confirmed. All they said was that the building was being locked down for the student’s safety. We did not hear how the police received the threat, the nature of the threat or how many people were affected.

First and foremost, it was the lack of information and the complete silence out of the RCMP that were a root cause of the numerous rumours. This case serves to show that in our age of communication, police need to provide more information. They can no longer keep their mouths shut and expect people to think the best. They may claim that their silence was critical to their investigation, but from where I stood, their silence was not in the public interest: it led to public panic. Almost 30 officers, a helicopter, ERT and a K-9 unit can no longer just show up at a school without an explanation.

The police silence led to a situation where the press wanted and needed to report something, but had nothing to report other than that there was a threat made and there was a police presence. Members of the media looked to what students were saying and looked to citizen journalists and the Internet. Some mentioned what bloggers were saying. Technically, as long as media reports cited bloggers, they were accurate, but readers must remember to read such sources with extreme skepticism.

Luckily nothing happened on January 31 and all the students and faculty inside the building were safe. But events like this will force people to reconsider any trust they may have had in bloggers. With the elimination of the gatekeeper function traditionally held by journalists and editors, people must spend more time deciphering the news to find what is accurate. While citizen journalism is oft-hailed – and rightly so – as a boon to freedom of expression and democratization of media, we can’t forget that it’s no replacement for good old fashioned accuracy.

At the time of initial publication, JORDAN CHITTLEY was in his second year of a master of journalism degree at UBC. He completed a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver where he was the editor of his school newspaper. He later worked as sports editor and multimedia coordinator for the Ubyssey newspaper and freelances for various outlets in print, online and television. He helped shoot, produce and edit a piece for Dan Rather Reports and assisted on a piece for Business Nation on CNBC.

The end for the little tabloid-that-no-longer-could came suddenly, sadly and unceremoniously.
  At 10 a.m. on the morning of Monday, February 11, 2008, Halifax Daily News reporters and editors were still filtering into the newsroom with their Tims and their notebooks, ready to begin what they assumed would be just another week at the office. Instead, they were greeted by “strange guys… with their hands folded and looking very stern [1].”

They were herded into the paper’s executive boardroom where Marc-Noel Ouellette, a Montreal-based senior vice president for the paper’s owner, Transcontinental Media [2], was waiting for them. He wasted few words. The Daily News, which Transcon had acquired from Canwest in 2002, was losing money — “millions,” he would tell other reporters later — so the company had had to make an “extremely tough business decision.”

That morning’s edition, with its now ironic headline, “Town Holds Its Breath”, had been the paper’s last.

It was all over before it was even over. Ninety-two fulltime employees — not to mention dozens of part-time columnists, freelancers and contract drivers — no longer had a newspaper to produce or deliver. There would be no goodbyes, no thank yous for nearly 30 years’ service. It was just over.

Before Ouellette had even finished speaking, the newsroom’s computer terminals had been shut down and email accounts cancelled. Technicians replaced the Daily News logo on the paper’s website with a splashy green Metro, a multinational, cookie-cutter, news-lite, freebie newspaper that Transcon — along with its new partners Torstar Corp and Metro International S.A. — would officially launch in Halifax three day’s later.

Valentine’s Day. The Daily News was history. There would be no more editions of the newspaper, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions. Could the Daily News have been saved? Was its failure the result of peculiar and particular local conditions? Or was the demise of one of the last medium-sized, two-newspaper  cities in North America just one more canary in the coal mine for print-on-paper newspaper publishing? What would its closure mean for Halifax? For journalism?

The Daily News was the brainchild of David Bentley, a British-born journalist with “an entrepreneurial thing” [3] who’d worked for Graham Dennis’s family-owned, 100-plus-year-old Halifax Herald during the sixties and early seventies before deciding to branch out on his own.

The Bedford-Sackville Weekly News, which Bentley launched with his wife and another couple as a modest suburban weekly in 1974, quickly morphed into a daily and then, in 1981, surprised Haligonians by opening up an office in downtown Halifax, dropping the Bedford-Sackville from its title and cheekily declaring a David-and-Graham war on the venerable but moribund Herald.

Bentley provided a feisty, sometimes outrageous British tabloid-style journalism. The paper touched off an international media incident with a 1983 front page story headlined “Agonies of a Princess”, which directly quoted, in violation of official media protocols, the visiting Princess Diana as she complained about her loss of privacy.

In spite of — or perhaps because of such coverage — the paper managed to attract a modest but loyal and growing audience.

By the mid-1980s, however, Bentley had reached the limits of his resources. He sold the paper to Harry Steele, a Newfoundland businessman, who reined in its tabloid excesses and made it more respectable, but still feisty.

The paper reached its editorial zenith during the late 1980s under Doug MacKay, a former Winnipeg Free Press editor. MacKay and Managing Editor Bill Turpin assembled a crew of bright young reporters and editors whose investigative scoops helped drive a scandal-plagued Premier John Buchanan out of office.

The paper also gleefully pursued allegations of impropriety involving provincial cabinet minister Roland Thornhill, who just happened to be owner Harry Steele’s brother-in-law. It didn’t matter. 

The paper was also fun, offering its readers an eclectic stable of columnists of all stripes and hues, who frequently and often loudly argued with each other in print. (“Fire The Slithery Toad”, shouted the headline over one column by curmudgeonly Harry Flemming [4]; it was a plea to the editor to get rid of me, another of the paper’s columnists. (Thankfully the editor ignored the call, though he happily ran the column.)

During this period, the paper also launched a Sunday edition, and the daily briefly flirted with paid circulation of 30,000, which many believe might have been the tipping point to make it an economically viable second daily in the marketplace.

It never tipped. Instead, a devastating early nineties’ recession wreaked havoc on advertising sales. The paper’s editorial and marketing budgets were eviscerated and its circulation began a slow, tortuous, inexorable, feed-upon-itself decline until, by the time it finally stopped publishing, paid circulation was less than 20,000.

In 1997, Steele sold out to Conrad Black’s Hollinger. During Black’s reign, the newspaper briefly became modestly profitable — thanks more to cutbacks than revenues — but those funds ended up being siphoned off to help launch Black’s own pet project, the National Post, instead of being funneled back into developing the paper.

Then, in 2000, Black, his own empire under financial siege, sold out to Canwest. Two years later, CanWest lopped off its apparently incidental eastern Canadian newspapers, including the Daily News, and peddled them as a package to Transcontinental, a successful printer with ambitions to become a real player in the newspaper publishing game.

With each change in ownership, the newsroom’s hopes would rise — “Black’s a newspaper guy,” “CanWest has the resources,” “Transcon wants us” — only to be dashed within a few months. 

Inevitably, the paper’s journalists would soon wax nostalgic for their last, better bad owner.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many now cast Transcontinental in the role of Chief Villain. And, although there are plenty of black hats in this cast, there is little question Transcon merits top billing. 

For starters, Transcontinental was a printer with little expertise or feel for the newspaper business when it bought the papers. It compounded its own lack of knowledge by hiring Jamie Thompson, an accountant who had no newspaper experience either, as its local publisher. 

He and his bosses in Montreal shared unrealistic expectations that — by listening to market researchers and focus groups instead of editors — they could goose circulation back up to that magic 30,000 number within a year.

When that didn’t work, company executives panicked, replacing the editor they had chosen with another. And then another. In its five-and-a-half-years as owner, in fact, five different editors would occupy the position. And Thompson himself was eventually purged too. Nothing helped.

There were cutbacks. To save money, the paper lopped off its four most senior journalists — and lost their critical collective community memory. 

One of the editors Transcon appointed — largely because he promised to shake things up in a newsroom Transcon had come to regard as the enemy — was so reviled that, during his tenure, virtually every reporter and editor had his or her resumé in circulation.

By the time the paper closed, close to half of the 40-person newsroom Transcon had inherited in 2002 had departed, almost all reluctantly, many to government public relations positions.

Circulation, which had been sliding slowly for years, went into freefall.

Ironically, the paper’s last editor, Jack Romanelli, formerly of the Montreal Gazette, had begun to turn the paper around, editorially at least, during his brief 14 months at the helm. 

During that time, the Daily News broke — and pursued — the story of a government-backed immigration scam that is still shaking Premier Rodney MacDonald’s Conservative administration. It launched a proactive, provocative series on coming to terms with the province’s ingrained history of racism. And it devoted a lot of editorial real estate to looking at possible directions for the city’s future development.

Recalling the paper’s bolder history, its longtime city columnist, David Rodenhiser — who’d helped the newspaper earn a prestigious Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service in 1997 — even managed to attract international attention to the paper this fall after one of his columns so incensed Celine Dion’s husband that he cancelled a planned Halifax concert by the pop diva as retribution for Rodenhiser’s “negativity.”

It was all too little too late.

Though the specific causes of the Daily News’s decline and fall are more peculiar and particular than generic, they also, of course, played out against the backdrop of more cataclysmic changes taking place in the media business as a whole.

For starters, there is the reality that more and more readers are getting their news for “free” from the Internet. Although the Daily News was one of the first newspapers in the country to embrace the web as a news delivery vehicle, budget cuts prevented it from ever building on its early success. But its availability online — at the end it had more daily individual visits to its website than subscribers — no doubt made it even harder to win back paying customers.

Ironically, Romanelli himself had been musing in recent months about the notion of making the paper the country’s first online-online daily. He won’t get that chance.

The web wasn’t the only outside force working against the paper’s survival. Ever increasing concentration of media ownership has also turned small-to-medium-sized newspapers like the Daily News into corporate road kill. While it would be naïve in a city like Halifax — where local ownership has at best, a checkered history — to suggest chain ownership is the root of all evil, there is no doubt that the Daily News became an interchangeable trading chip or a bottom-line afterthought for all but its early, locally-based owners.

Whether they were diverting local profits to support more important corporate objectives or replacing an existing flesh-and-blood newspaper with a pale imitation commuter giveaway, the reality is that the suits in Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg who made those decisions cared little for the health of local journalism and less for their readers in Halifax.

In the end, unfortunately, Haligonians — whether they subscribed to the Daily News, loved it or hated it — will be the real losers from its demise.

The paper, even in its worst days, helped make journalism better in Halifax by being there and by providing an alternative to the Halifax Herald.

Before the Daily News arrived on the scene, the morning Herald and its identical twin-sister afternoon Mail Star were such awful newspapers that the 1970 Senate Report into the state of the mass media in Canada concluded: “There is probably no large Canadian city that is so badly served by its newspapers… There is probably no news organization in the country that has managed to achieve such an intimate and uncritical relationship with the local power structure, or has grown so indifferent to the needs of its readers [5].”

The Herald became a much better newspaper with the Daily News nipping at its heels. Will that continue, or will the Herald fall back into what the Davey committee called “uncaring, lazy journalism?”

Sarah Dennis, the Herald’s vice president and the daughter of publisher Graham Dennis calls such speculation “distasteful and nonsense really,” but she went on to say that, in light of the Daily News shutdown, “as any business does, we’re continuing to evaluate all our costs. But no decisions have been made about layoffs or cuts, or anything like that… whether it be pages or people [6].”

That’s hardly a ringing declaration of journalistic fervour.

Meanwhile, over at the hastily launched Metro, Ouellette was quick to suggest the absence of the Daily News wouldn’t mean very much to readers. Halifax, said the man who had closed one newspaper and was about to launch another sort-of newspaper, is “over-mediatized… There’s media here up the wazoo.”

But more media does not necessarily translate into more reporters on the streets, or, certainly, more news.

“In this town and in this province after today,” veteran Daily News legislature reporter Brian Flinn told the CBC soon after Transcon’s announcement, “there will be one print source, so that’s one set of eyes, that’s one point of view that ultimately everything is being generated from. And that’s not good for our society and that’s not good for our democracy.”

The Halifax Daily News (1974-2008). Rest in Peace.

David Rodenhiser, a longtime columnist for the Daily News, describing the scene to reporters that day. Quoted by CBC News

Montreal-based Transcontinental Media, with 3,000 employees and annual revenues of $633 million, describes itself as the “fourth largest print media group in Canada.”

Bentley is one of Canada’s unsung journalist-entrepreneurs. He not only launched the Daily News, one of the few successful daily newspaper startups during an era of closures in the 1970s,but also founded the original Frank magazine and is currently the founder and publisher of allnovascotia.com, a successful, subscriber-based daily online business publication.

Flemming, a larger-than-life character who later won a small claims court settlement against the paper for running what he’d submitted as a column as a letter to the editor, died less than a week after the Daily News folded.

“Report of the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media,” Volume I, P 88-9. 1970.

Allnovascotia.com, February 18, 2008

STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College, is the Interim Director of the School of Journalism. He was a longtime columnist for the Halifax Daily News.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday, about 2 million Quebeckers turned on their TVs and tuned in to Radio-Canada for the last chapter of Les Lavigueur, la vraie histoire — The Lavigueurs, the real story. The miniseries chronicles a family who won $7.6 million on April 1st, 1986, which proved to be the ticket for an instant — and unwanted – celebrity. It was the hit of the season on French television.

Since it first advertised the serial drama, Radio-Canada claimed many times its goal was to set the record straight and to repair injustices committed by reporters during the months and years following their win. “They were a united, simple family, who loved each other,” said Mario Clément, director of programming, when he launched the series. “They went through an incredible human drama. As a public broadcaster, we wanted to rehabilitate their name.”

As Clément points out, more than twenty years after the events, the story of the Lavigueurs is still a relevant tale of the interaction between citizens and the media.

The lottery winning on April 1st, 1986, was reported as a fairy tale for the Lavigueurs, representing the promise of better days. The audience discovers the close-knit family when Loto-Québec introduces them at a press conference as the recipients of the largest amount of money ever won in Quebec history.

Jean-Guy Lavigueur, his children Sylvie, Yve and Michel, their uncle Jean-Marie and a man who found the winning ticket after Jean-Guy lost his wallet and brought it back knowing what it was worth, all made the front page of the Journal de Montréal, Montreal’s tabloid, the next day.

The matriarch of the family, Marie Daudelin, died in 1983 from a heart condition. Two other children also died at early ages. When Jean-Guy Lavigueur purchases his winning ticket he is unemployed, after losing his 34-year-long job at the United Bedding Company. He is analphabet, an illiterate who doesn’t know the alphabet, and relies on his oldest daughter, Sylvie, to take care of the family.

Despite their seemingly good fortune, their winning proved to be the beginning of a Greek tragedy for the Lavigueurs. Making colorful statements to the media, the Lavigueurs made the headlines several times, and the spin was rarely positive. 

The youngest daughter, Louise, eventually sued her family to get her share of the prize. She had been excluded because she was not living with the rest of the family at the time of the winning. The process, followed by the media became an easy source for dirty stories – among them rumors that Jean-Guy was abusing his daughter.

Then, the family bought a 22-room mansion worth $850 000. 

For many years, the Lavigueur have been the subject of many jokes, spoofs and mockeries in the public sphere. During the same period, a Dutch comedy showing a family on social assistance was dubbed in Québec and translated under the title “Les Lavigueurs déménagent”.

Twenty-two years later, only two of the eight Lavigueur are still alive. The others are dead, one of them by suicide. Most of their fortune is now gone. After Yve’s struggles to solve his problems with drug addiction, he wrote a book about his experience, in an attempt to restore his family name.

That’s the insider story the miniseries is telling, and, to the credit of the artisans, with  not only commercial success – they received amazing reviews –even from reporters. But ironically, the “truth” the series is trying to show is subject to controversy. In trying to shed new light on this family, Jacques Savoie, the screenwriter, decided to portray the story from the inside. Even though he claims to tell a story, a greater truth, he changed some of the facts and of the chronology in the story for dramatization purposes.

Individuals surrounding the Lavigueur – reporters, lawyers, Louise’s lover, and even the real estate agent who sold them their house – are depicted as reptiles who’d do anything to make money.

Herein lies the main problem. The reporters and lawyers the story shows never existed. They’re composite characters. It ‘s not even confirmed that Louise’s lover had any influence on her suing her family. 

Le Journal de Montréal wrote several pieces to correct the “mistakes” made in telling the true story of the Lavigueurs. The mean reporters were complete fabrications. The lawyer for one of the family members issued statements saying he was unhappy with his depiction, and even the realtor who sold the family its mansion complained that her depiction was unfair.

By trying to repair an injustice, the miniseries itself is creating another flow of injustices.

Despite the controversy, there’s much to learn from a reporter’s perspective about the consequences of our reporting. Throughout the 80’s the Lavigueurs were an easy target for radio talk shows, news reporters and even satirists. Depicted as welfare bums who were dilapidating their fortune, the Lavigueurs weren’t allowed any sympathy. The news stories, however, hid a darker story.

A drama the media failed to represent accurately, even though their reporting was mostly accurate and based on facts. 

What is the public interest in following a family who won the lottery? What are the ethical implications surrounding the coverage of stories with people who make news not because they want to, like politicians, but because of a particular fate?

Small details, mistakes we make have a bigger impact on those we report on. Jean-Guy Lavigueur, whom the media depicted as a “BS”, someone on welfare, a title attached to many prejudices in Québec. He was not a “BS”. No doubt the mistake had an impact of the perception of the man. After he won, his former status as a “BS” made it acceptable to laugh at him without consideration for his suffering. 

There’s also hope that a story like the Lavigueur’s wouldn’t happen today. The Lavigueurs were unprepared to face the media circus inherent with such a situation. Loto-Québec has since improved its support to winners. And reporters are more and more aware of their impact.

When the sixth – and last – episode aired Tuesday, I was there to watch the conclusion of their story. And by doing so, I thought about the responsibility of reporters when chasing stories about public figures who happened to become the news without being prepared. 

Yet, I wonder if artists too, when they claim to tell the “real story” shouldn’t also follow a strict media ethic.

They too, in claiming to tell the real story, have a duty to provide a fair and balanced account of the events they are reporting on. 

As for the Lavigueurs, we may never know the real story. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle — between the depiction the media, who witnessed the story from the outside, gave of them and the recounting of Yve Lavigueur, who lived the story from the inside. 


Links:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Lavigueur_family http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SN2LSxxrhM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgFvL36p0Lg&feature=related

FRANCIS PLOURDE, at the time of this initial publication, was a graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. He worked part-time at Radio-Canada in Vancouver, where he often asked people if they speak French. The accomplishment he is the most proud of so far is snagging a phone interview with a French-speaking cab driver in Whitehorse. His writing has also appeared on The Tyee and in magazines in Montreal.

In the spring of 2007, after a five-week visit to Rwanda, I produced two television news pieces for the CBC. Together, the stories challenged the prevailing view about healing and reconciliation in that Central African country, 13 years after the genocide.

The stories were anecdotal. They featured two Tutsi women and one Tutsi man who survived the slaughter, and one Hutu man who had killed a dozen people with a machete, and was now free. I used their stories as a frame for my thesis:  that Rwanda was far, far away from healing, despite the platitudes of the government. My script said that for the victims I had met (and by extension, for all the survivors of the genocide), the memory of the slaughter was still too fresh to expect them to forgive the people who had carried out the killings.

This thesis flew in the face of official orthodoxy, but the final edited stories did not quote a single high government official. In fact, there was only one pro-government voice: A low-level village-level functionary who echoed the official line on ethnicity in Rwanda, namely, that henceforth, there were “no more Hutus, no more Tutsis, no more Twas (Rwanda’s third ethnic group)” in the country.

I realized, after the stories aired, that my journalism could be viewed as being unbalanced, unsupported, polemical.

Where were the voices of the Rwandans who insist that they have indeed forgiven their tormentors? Where were the stories of the Rwandans who were hunter and hunted in 1994, but who in 2007 had reconciled, and now live as neighbours?

Had I not crossed the ethical line by focusing on the negative? Indeed, some Rwandan officials could even argue that I had left myself open to criminal prosecution, under Rwandan laws against “negationism” and “divisionism.”

On the surface, these criticisms are valid. But they fail to take into account the extraordinary realities on the ground in Rwanda, and the obstacles that are placed in the way of a Western reporter trying to understand the social dynamics.  I don’t say this lightly: If ever there was a story that required the application of “situation ethics” in reporting, that was it.

The essential reality of Rwanda, I believe, is obscured behind a carefully calibrated campaign based on the mantra of reconciliation and forgiveness. Survivors are expected to put the past behind them, to “make peace” with the confessed killers, even when the killers hide behind moral alibis (i.e. they were “provoked” into committing genocide by ghostly voices).

To work effectively in Rwanda, you need special strategies, special filters.

My first concern, when speaking to survivors of the genocide, was: How open will they be with a Western journalist? How honestly will they respond to my questions? In my preliminary research (while preparing for my trip, I reviewed dozens of academic papers, read scores of newspaper articles, and several books dealing with reconciliation and forgiveness) I came across a poignant Rwandan expression about how “tears flow within.”

In Rwandan culture, one survives sorrow if one has a certain inner strength. Grief is often internalized, and not openly expressed, so it is traditionally understood that one can help someone by genuinely listening to his or her suffering.

In Rwanda, I met a European academic who was doing field research on the social effects of the genocide. She told me, on deep background (since she wanted to protect her sources), that Rwandans who lived through the trauma of the genocide spoke about their experiences with two different voices. The external, public voice said, “I forgive.”

But the deeper voice, the soul’s voice, often expressed much more negative emotions. (My source insisted I not use her name, or even the town where she was working, lest somebody identify the people she was studying. There would be reprisals, she said.)

I spoke to students at the National University of Rwanda. They struggled with the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation. One young man, whose family was wiped out in the slaughter, said he understood why the government wanted Rwandans to forgive. But he himself could not. Why? Because he had never learned who killed his family. Until he looked the murderers in the eye, he could not even think about forgiveness.

Nor could be ever marry a Hutu woman, he said through clenched teeth. The killing, for him, had created an impassable ethnic divide.

A Rwandan psychologist told me the government was wrong when it urged genocide survivors to forgive before they were ready to do so: Forgiveness had to come in its own time, on its own terms, without compulsion.

All of this information came into play when I met survivors, and turned on the camera. It cast a special light on their answers, and how I framed these answers in my script. It informed my reaction when one of my interview subjects, Pelagia, told me, with downcast eyes and a halting voice, that she had forgiven a notorious killer, Eric, who was now her neighbour. “We are like brother and sister,” she told me. But her demeanor projected an altogether different message; she seemed perplexed, afraid. I was convinced she was saying the very things that local officials wanted her to say.

It was Rwanda’s “culture of obedience” prompting her public voice.

Was it presumptuous or paternalistic of me to characterize her answer this way in my script? I don’t think so. A reporter in the field, especially in a post-conflict zone, must be more than a stenographer. It’s our job to give context, to paint the grey zones, to listen and observe with our hearts and a quality of discernment. Had I just recounted the words verbatim, I felt it would have been a lie. Context is the deep tissue of journalism.

Another possible criticism of my journalism in Rwanda is that I did not spend enough time getting the official version of things. I didn’t interview the president. I didn’t interview the official survivors’ organization. I made no effort to counterbalance the negative things I was hearing from survivors.

This is true. And intentional. The government’s position is well known, and didn’t need me to amplify it. Kagame’s information machine (some critics would call it a propaganda machine) is very effective. He controls the print and broadcast media. When the New Times newspaper published a photograph of Kagame that he found unflattering, the reporter was summarily fired, and the staff put on notice.

The relationship between the government and the newspaper, they were told, would be like “husband and wife”. An editor who published an article highly critical of “Tutsi justice” was jailed for a year. Reporters critical of the government have been badly beaten. 

Meanwhile, his government’s warm and fuzzy message of reconciliation between Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus has gotten wide international press, in a West still burdened by guilt for its indifference to the 1994 genocide when it was happening. Well hidden behind Rwanda’s new, modern image, are some harsh realities: Overcrowded prisons, a limping economy that cannot help many of the 300,000 genocide survivors, a Hutu majority that is woefully under-represented in government, and lingering distrust between the two dominant groups.

Against this backdrop, how would I apportion the few minutes of air time the CBC was giving me? What would stay? Who would I leave out? In a choice between the official with his polished message, and the broken widow struggling to keep a family alive on $30 a month, it was an easy call. There wasn’t room for both. My guiding principle in difficult parts of the world has always been this: To follow the humanity, to value the Anecdote over the Big Picture.

And it’s not only a journalist’s social sensitivity that leads me to this principle. It’s also practical.

The Big Picture stories, the ones that carry the voice of authority alongside that of the victims, are often complex and difficult to verify. The small stories, the tightly focused human narratives, are far more reliable guides to the truth.

Is this classic “balanced” journalism as we know it? Perhaps not. But I believe that in the final analysis, it is just as valid. Because it relies on the journalist’s most important skills: discernment, integrity . . . and the ability to verify from the gut.

Religion and journalism might seem incompatible. One lurks in the murkiest mysteries of the spirit; the other’s a no-nonsense broker of fact and action. 

But Columbia University professor Ari Goldman makes the case that there’s no better union out there. 

“I think the best beat in journalism is religion,” he declared recently at a lecture at the University of B.C.’s School of Journalism.

Goldman, former religion reporter for The New York Times and author of The Search for God at Harvard , explained that writing on faith gives journalists a chance to delve behind news stories and into the inner motivations of subjects. It’s also a beat that allows incredible versatility, he said, from features to hard news stories on politics, social issues and world events.

“You can’t cover the presidential election in the United States these days without knowing a lot about religion,” Goldman explained.

From Mike Huckabee’s Southern Baptist roots to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism to the conservative media-stoked confusion over Barack Obama’s religious past, it’s crucial reporters know what they’re talking about when they throw around terms like “evangelical” and “madrassa”. 

Only after Goldman’s lecture did questions from the audience highlight some of the real struggles of reporting on religion. Taking on an intimate and controversial realm like faith can put journalism ethics to the test, and Goldman’s strategies range from the traditional to the radical.

Balance

Asked whether news media are perpetuating Islamophobia in America, Goldman answered with an unequivocal yes. 

“The press has not done a good job and needs to do a better job,” he said. Although there are plenty of moderate Muslims attempting to get their messages out, Goldman said journalists tend to ignore these perspectives in favour of reporting on radical theologies. With such sensational coverage, it’s no wonder that 35 per cent of Americans express a negative view of Muslims, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007.

“The media often falls into extremes, and not the mainstream because they’re boring,” he said. “The press isn’t interested in Muslims that say ‘we condemn violence.’”

Ignoring the middle-of-the road in favour of the sensational is an inherent and oft-criticized bias in the media. But when it comes to coverage of beleaguered minorities, it’s particularly crucial for journalists to examine whether their coverage is representative of popular sentiments or just the squeakiest wheel.

Neutrality

The religion beat tests the limits of a reporter’s neutrality perhaps more than any other. Journalists everywhere strive to put their own political and philosophical commitments aside when they’re on the job. Some go further than others to demonstrate their “objectivity” by declining to vote or join a political party. 

Although the ideal of objectivity in journalism has lost much of its luster in North America lately (neither the Canadian Association of Journalists nor the Society of Professional Journalists include the term in their ethical codes), most journalists still try to keep personal biases to a minimum and assure sources and readers of their neutrality.

Religious commitments are one of the most powerful identity markers around. So how does a religious journalist like Goldman, raised an orthodox Jew, impartially report on his or another faith? When posed this question, Goldman seemed confident he could put his Jewish identity aside when necessary. “It’s hard, but I think it’s possible,” he said. “I think you can say, ‘I’m a Jew, but I’m not here as a Jew.’”

Goldman said in most cases he discloses his faith to his sources. It’s a telling decision. Not all religion reporters follow his rule of thumb: I know one journalist who keeps secret his church affiliations for reasons of privacy.

Religion reporter Julia Lieblich, writing for the Religion Newswriters Association, notes the tricky situations reporters can find themselves in when interviewing an proselytizing source. 

“Most religion writers eventually encounter sources who believe their souls need saving or at least improving. And most have their own informal rules on when and how much to reveal about their own religious roots and deeply held beliefs,” she writes.

Lieblich passes along the advice of a colleague, who, when asked, “Are you a Christian?” replies, “I don’t like to talk about my religion when I am working. But if you are wondering whether I will be sensitive to the beliefs of Christians, the answer is yes.”

Lieblich notes that, “This kind of response is particularly valuable for reporters whose atheist or agnostic beliefs would elicit a strong reaction from some believers.”

Advocacy

Perhaps Goldman’s deeply held religious identity is a clue to his willingness to discuss his beliefs with his sources. He said he often tells interviewees that being of faith makes him “better equipped” to understand their religion. 

The debate over who should write about faith – an insider, an outsider, an atheist or an agnostic – is echoed in academic studies of religion. An insider or a person of faith is perhaps better able to explain the phenomenological side of faith, while an outsider or skeptic would be more ready to inspect religious commitments as an often-destructive social phenomenon.

There is no doubt where Goldman stands in this divide. He said he tries to write from the perspective of the believer, and sees his role as facilitating communication and empathy between faiths. “Most Americans know a lot about our own faith…but they don’t extend themselves and learn about the faith of their neighbours,” he said. “I hope that I’m teaching them that other people aren’t scary.”

Goldman said he avoids criticizing any religious belief, except in the most extreme cases of violence or danger. “I see my role as to tell the story and not put a value judgment on it,” he explained.

Goldman went so far as to say that in his religion writing, he feels comfortable transcending one of the taboos of journalism. “I feel as a religion journalist, I can be an advocate,” he told the audience, explaining that he aims not to champion Judaism, but “faith in general.”

At a time when atheist manifestos like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation condemn commitment to faith as a divisive and dangerous phenomenon, Goldman’s advocacy position makes quite the statement. By coming out in favour of faith, he allies himself with the vast majority of his compatriots, but most certainly takes a side in public discourse.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) new regulatory policy to ensure “plurality of editorial voices” and “diversity of programming” in private media is long overdue. Canadians have been waiting for some 38 years. Studies, commissions and reports have all called for regulations to restrict the concentration of ownership in television, radio and newspapers. Until now, those cries were largely ignored.

But advocates of stronger regulation say this new policy is too little too late. The damage is already done, much of it in the past year since Konrad von Finckenstein, former head of the Competition Bureau took over as chair of the CRTC.

Under Finckenstein’s leadership the CRTC approved five big mergers worth almost $6 billion dollars, including CanWest Global’s partnership with U.S. financier Goldman Sachs to buy Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion and CTVglobemedia’s purchase of CHUM Ltd. for $1.4 billion.

This merger madness sparked an outcry and the CRTC responded by calling public hearings into the issue in September 2007. The agency received 162 written complaints, 1,800 comments from the campaign by Canadians for Democratic Media and 52 parties testified. In discussing the effects of media consolidation, many people noted that while there may be more choices out there, viewers, listeners and readers are getting less news and information than ever before especially at the local level. In response the CRTC has adopted a new policy (Broadcasting Notice CRTC 2008-4) to address cross-media ownership, diversity of programming and broadcast distribution.

Cross-media ownership – Television, radio and newspapers

1. This CRTC policy aims to provide a “plurality of editorial voices” in a local market by limiting ownership to two of three mainstream media in a local market – television, radio and local daily newspapers. So the CRTC set the limit at two, but retained its longstanding policy that allows a media company to own one conventional TV station, and no more than two AM and FM stations in a large market (three in smaller markets). Since newspapers fall outside the jurisdiction of the CRTC and are nominally regulated by the Competition Bureau, it’s unclear how this new rule will do anything to ensure diversity and plurality. In Vancouver for example, CanWest Global can continue legally to publish the Vancouver Sun, the Province, National Post, its community weeklies and broadcast Global TV.

The CRTC also classified The Globe and Mail and Toronto-based National Post as national newspapers, not local dailies. The ideal that the National Post is a national newspaper defies many Canadians. In Atlantic Canada it’s been years since we’ve had home delivery or could buy a copy at the corner store. The national designation, however, is good news for the CTVglobemedia, owner of The Globe and Mail, with its extensive television and radio holdings.

The CRTC did not wade into the complexities of online or wireless journalism. It also excluded weekly newspapers from its calculations. In failing to recognize this vast and fast growing sector, the CRTC has overlooked the fact that there is little plurality of editorial voices in many parts of rural Canada. Small communities are dependent on mostly corporate-owned weekly papers and broadcast media that pipe-in news from urban centres.

But in the current media landscape, no companies violate this new CRTC cross-media ownership rule. Challenges will arise should a media company with newspaper and television holdings, for example, want to expand and buy another media outlet with radio holdings.

Ownership Policies and Diversity of Programming

2. This CRTC policy is all about trying to create a balance in market power and preventing any one company from controlling content in the television sector. The rule limits a television broadcaster to 45 per cent of a national audience for its conventional, pay and specialty channels. Currently that’s not an issue, but this regulation has serious implications for future mergers. The 45 per cent cap means the two big private English-language broadcasters CTVglobemedia (37.4%) and CanWest Global (26.3%) and the two French-language broadcasters Quebecor (32%) and Astral Media (23.2 %) have limited wiggle room. Future acquisitions will not be simple and may require splitting up companies to stay under the 45 per cent.

That said, the CRTC allowed that television broadcasters can expand their national audience above the 45 per cent cap the old fashioned way – through normal competition or by introducing new services – but not through acquiring other media companies.

An editorial in The Globe and Mail on January 16, 2008 complained about ‘the arbitrariness” of the 45 per cent cap. . But the CRTC notes in its 25-page document that it’s just following the figure used by the Competition Bureau to determine market dominance in other industries and private media by all accounts are businesses with shareholders and profit margins. Canadian television broadcasters operate in a protected market and have yet to make a convincing case for relaxed regulations or special treatment. Indeed, a case could be made for a much lower national audience cap for television given that the airwaves are public property and according to the Broadcasting Act these media companies are supposed to be providing diverse programming that is in the public interest. But most media companies don’t want to have this discussion.

Diversity of broadcast distribution services (BDU)

3. This new CRTC regulation aims to uphold the current competitive environment of broadcast distribution and ensure diversity of voices. It will not allow one company in any community to control all means of broadcasting distribution such as direct-to-home, cable, and satellite television. For example, this policy would prevent a merger between satellite television distributors Star Choice and Bell Express Vu. The CRTC did not consider phone television a competitor at this point.

Reaction predictable

Even though the new rules do not affect current media ownership in Canada and are not retroactive, big media as evidenced in The Globe and Mail editorial are attacking the CRTC and the new rules. This is the same sort of rhetoric we have heard over the last 38 years at any suggestion that public policy rein in media expansion. The CRTC and government have caved in time and time again to the huge pressure from publishers, private broadcasters and their powerful lobby, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. It’s about time that the CRTC took a stand and reminded broadcasters that they are caretakers of the public airwaves and have a responsibility not just to their shareholders but the Canadian public.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and ACTRA applaud the CRTC for doing its job, but are these changes enough to achieve plurality of editorial voices and diversity of programming in Canadian media?

The Communication, Energy and Paper Workers Union and Canadian Media Guild say no – this regulatory policy does little to limit more media concentration. The recent round of mergers and earlier ones in 2000-01 have caused irreparable loss of diversity. That’s true, but one must give a nod to CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein who has taken tentative steps to contain media’s business interests and inject public interest back into the mandate of the CRTC and broadcasting. It is important to keep a close watch on future media developments to see if the CRTC upholds this new regulatory policy when faced with new mergers and when broadcasters renew their licences. If the CRTC does not enforce its regulatory policy then maybe it’s time to join the president of the Media Guild (The Toronto Star, Jan. 16, 2007)   and call for a review the CRTC and its operational guidelines.

References

Broadcaster Magazine. “CRTC Preserves Media Concentration in Canada – Media Guild.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

—.“ BREAKING NEWS — CRTC Introduces New Policies to Media Ownership.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

—. “ CRTC Ownership Policy Permits Big Players to Get Bigger–CEP Union.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

—.“ CRTC Did Not Go Far Enough In Supporting Programming–Directors Guild.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

—. “ CRTC’s Diversity of Voices Policy.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

CBC News. “CRTC imposes cross-media ownership restrictions.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

CRTC, “Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2008-4,” Ottawa, January 15, 2008

Accessed Jan. 16, 2008)

The Globe and Mail. Editorial. “The CRTC plucks a 45 from the air.” January 16, 2008, A16.

Mediacaster. “CRTC Introduces New Policies to Media Ownership.” January 15, 2008.

Accessed Jan 16, 2008.

Robertson, Grant. “New rules to crimp broadcast mergers.” The Globe and Mail. January 16, 2008. B1.

Shecter, Barbara. “CRTC restricts media ownership in local markets.” CanWest News Service. Halifax Daily News. January 16, 2008. 20.

Trichur, Rita. “CRTC limits newspaper, radio ownership.” The Toronto Star. Accessed Jan. 16, 2008.

Trichur, Rita. “The Critics slam CRTC cross-media ownership policy.” The Toronto Star. Jan 16, 2008/ Accessed Jan 16 2008.

KIM KIERANS is the Director of the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, where she also acts as professor of broadcast writing, reporting and documentary. Her research areas include community newspapers and media concentration.

Kieran spent 22 years reporting, editing, and producing for CBC Radio (Maritimes) and continues to work as a freelance writer and editor for CBC One and a columnist on community news.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Classics from King’s/Dalhousie and a MA in Atlantic Canada Studies from Saint Mary’s University.

In a Burmese border town cafe, in the midst of a military crackdown against pro-democracy protesters, a recently-fled child-soldier sat with me, talking about cell phones and girls. 

Thet Ye Htwe spent five years as a radio operator, punching bag, human “mine sweeper” and arsonist while soldiering in the Burmese military. He fled his brigade just days before September’s democracy protests began but already is considering returning. “We need to take up arms. Nothing else will stop them,” he told me, referring to the military junta that rules Burma (and renamed it Myanmar).

Thet Ye Htwe now hopes to join one of the 30 rebel forces, peppered throughout the nation’s jungles, that oppose the military regime.  

The week we chatted, Burma was a hot news item in North America for the first time in nearly 20 years. What’s more, child soldiers were being implicated in the beatings of monks in the largest anti-democratic crackdown the country had seen since a 1988 massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. I had a potential co-perpetrator of atrocities sitting right next to me.

For over a decade, the UN has documented the widespread use of child soldiers in Burma’s military and in the anti-government militias throughout the country. How many kids have been conscripted is unclear, partly because they are all registered as 18-year-olds, and partly because the size of the actual military itself is unknown. The government inflates numbers to intimidate would-be rebels, but the 400,000 man army roster is filled with the names of defectors and dead men, Human Rights Watch has found. The high desertion rates have left generals desperate for new recruits, and children have proven easy targets.

But I wasn’t allowed to ask about Thet Ye Htwe’s experiences in the military. In order to get the interview, I had to agree to an “I promise not to…” list that included any questions that would conjure up ugly, festering memories. While I urgently wanted to know how he was treated as a military member, what fighting was like, what his first experience was, and what made him leave, I wasn’t allowed to ask, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the one to bring those memories to the surface.We were in a town ill-equipped to deal with the emotional trauma Thet Ye Htwe had suffered.

Lacking any psychology background, I had no reason to believe I could discuss his brutal treatment without doing harm. But to let an NGO worker set the terms of my interview clearly pushed the limits of my independence. Reporters link integrity and independence closely. To accept such a conditional interview was to allow a stranger (and non-journalist) to shape my story according to her own agenda.

Maybe out of weakness, maybe out of curiosity, I decided to do the interview anyway, figuring it was worth knowing how an ex-child soldier, who can’t read or write and has never known anything but military orders, tries to become a civilian. But I couldn’t justify my decision with any sound journalistic ethical reasoning. I accepted the terms, and then I accepted a second term-laden interview with a child-soldier supported by a different NGO. In the course of these ethically compromised interviews, however, I learned of a child-soldier who had recently fled the border town hoping to be reunited with his family.

The NGO that had cared for him gave me all of his background information, details about his treatment and his responsibilities, and his family’s home address in Yangon. 

Outside of Shwe Dagon temple, the largest in Burma, tour guides had gathered around a tree, lamenting the utter void of tourists and seeking work from any and every passerby. When they spotted an American face, three eagerly offered their translating and guiding services. 

“I want to go to this address,” I said. 

“Why that one?” 

“It is where an escaped child soldier lives.” 

“I don’t understand, if he escaped, isn’t he in jail now?”

“I’m not sure. Of course that’s possible.”

“So you realize this is the house of a criminal? You want us to translate for a criminal. Who has probably served hard labor?” They looked at each other and muttered and exclaimed in Burmese.

“Not if it puts you at risk.”

“We can’t go here,” they said, not without regret. “It is fine for you, you are foreign. If we go here, government will see us and photograph.”

The military had been photographing protesters by day and visiting their houses by night, quietly arresting anyone they deemed insurgent. These guides knew that their mere presence near a criminal’s house could implicate them. They were strapped for cash and desperate for work, but they couldn’t take this job. “I’m sorry,” they kept saying. 

I took a taxi to the location, unaccompanied by a translator, knocked on the door, and no one answered. Maybe no one was home, maybe the sight of a young westerner was the last kind of trouble that family needed.

Days later, I left Burma without a story. All the hours that former child-soldiers and NGO workers spent talking to me were for naught. The stories they thought they could promulgate were left untold. Although I passionately wanted to tell the stories of child soldiering in Burma, to bring to light how the military is destroying its own members as readily as it destroys the lives of its citizens, I felt I couldn’t risk writing what I had seen. Was it the right move?

What had been at stake? The identities of these escaped soldiers, for one thing. But also the security of the NGOs that were working to help them. Thai authorities have an agreement with the Burmese military to return all escaped soldiers. Deserters’ ages are never checked before they are turned back across the border into government hands, so proscriptions against child soldiering are moot.

NGOs in Thai border towns shield deserters from would-be captors and reshape their identities to keep Thai authorities’ suspicions at bay. To expose the NGOs, in name or location, would be to ruin lives. Writing for publications that demand specifics, I couldn’t guarantee the security of anyone involved.

Alongside a recent Economist editorial “Is America Turning Left?” ran a political cartoon depicting an absurd rendition of a large elephant, exhausted and beaten, carried about on a stretcher by two medical aids straining with the effort.

The elephant was a satirical swipe at the Republican party’s mascot, and the stretcher/medic allusion was a metaphor for the demise of the “Western World’s most impressive Political Machine” that the article argued has been “driven off a cliff” by the Bush administration.

The Economist reported that only 19 per cent of Americans feel confident about the direction America is headed under the administration, and that “an astonishing 45 per cent of Americans support impeaching Mr. Bush (according to the American Research Group).”

This provokes an emphatic question for North American media. Why are American citizens reading reports on the failures of their government in an elitist financial journal and not having them  broadcasted in front-page, prime-time syndication?

You could ask Dan Rather why not.

In America, an 81 per cent loss of public confidence evidently doesn’t justify a call to action. The people must instead wince and count the months, or years, till the next regularly scheduled election. 

Americans, while they’re waiting, got the highly stylized YouTube debates, hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper last November. 

The premise is compelling: An open-forum in citizen journalism that exercises the peoples’ right to speak and ask their potential leaders tough questions. 

All you needed was American citizenship and a functional webcam, and all of a sudden any person, regardless of social or economic standing could partake in the Republican debates. 

It was a brilliant concept — but it didn’t work. 

You would anticipate the ensuing conversation to be a remarkable forum in which outraged citizens held politicians accountable for their policies, actions and inactions.

You’d think you’d see the people rise up.

Instead, the YouTube debates were a stage show featuring unsettling questions from an unprepared audience that were successfully spun by the slickest rhetoric.

The questions were unchallenged by journalistic scrutiny and the result looked like complete media complacency. 

Network darling Cooper facilitated the debates, but his role looked more like Alex Trebek’s scorekeeping on Jeopardy than that of a seasoned journalist whose job it is to ensure answers are provided to the toughest questions.

Cooper prefaced the debate by reminding the candidates that the focus must be to answer the question that is posed — and not to spin it.

The YouTube debates then handed the questioning power over to the audience. And so the web-cam wielding public became both policy critic and media analyst on prime-time national television.

This media shift reflects the public’s ruptured faith in mainstream media’s coverage of national politics.

The network’s aim was to satisfy the demands of the audience — and the audience wanted citizen journalism.

And they should have it. But citizen journalism such as YouTube postings is still in nascent stages, and media professionals must still do their jobs. Cooper should have been able to step in when the debates needed his journalistic prowess. Failure to do this reflected American media’s passive role in politics.

Questions in the YouTube debates pitted former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney against former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani took Romney out in the first round by exposing his  “illegal immigration” hypocrisy.

Apparently, if your political mandate includes opposition to migrant worker’s being employed illegally, you shouldn’t be employing illegal immigrants sans papers in your own home.

There was no dialogue about US’s dependence on migrant workers’ labour for economic subsistence. Migrant workers from Mexico seep into the US’s porous borders to perform the manual labour that American citizens do not. A critically engaged journalist should be aware of this angle, and pose the questions that weren’t asked by the public.

Giuliani talked tough on crime, taking credit for ‘cleaning up’ New York’s streets. His policies didn’t solve poverty, crime and homelessness, but rather drove them underground. Ever wonder what happened to New York’s street dwellers? Many are reportedly living in squalor in the tunnels under the city.

The YouTube questioners proved to be both politically savvy and quasi-deluded. One podcaster sat in his living room, pointing to the Confederate Flag hanging behind him on his living room wall and asked the candidates what they believed the flag represents. 

The confederate flag is, for many, a symbol entrenched in racism and has been long associated with segregation in the south.

No candidate was willing to risk alienating an entire demographic of Confederation flag-waving potential votes, and so no candidate spoke out against the flag’s implicit connotations. “People are free to hang what ever they wish in their homes and I’m not going so say any more about it” was the general consensus among candidates.

Another podcaster asked candidates a chilling hypothetical question: “If Roe vs. Wade were overturned and a woman obtained an abortion illegally, what would her punishment be?”

Most of the candidates are standing on a firm anti-abortion platform with the exception of Giuliani. Candidates hemmed and hawed and generally agreed that the decision would be up to the state. 

A pro-life agitator from the extreme right posed a scenario in which a woman be stripped of her constitutional rights and then persecuted and not one murmur of disagreement was heard from one of any one of the next potential leaders of the free world.

And Cooper, designated scorekeeper rather than journalistic mediator, maintained a  silence that represented the media’s acquiescence to audience autonomy.

The result was an absence of accountability — an escape from media’s interrogation.  

Not even from Ron Paul, the renegade Texas congressman, made a peep. Paul did speak out against the war in Iraq and has made ‘bringing home the troops’ his campaign mantra, much to the chagrin of John McCain, who sneered openly at Paul’s brashness. Iraq was not a popular topic, although the nominees, with the exception of Paul, appeared in favour of continued interventionist foreign policies.

Gun control legislation also made the debate agenda. Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson supported Americans’ ‘right to bear arms’. He nostalgically recalled the sound of gun cartridges ejecting from his father’s rifle as they hunted quail together during childhood. “It’s about family tradition”, he argued. 

Romney chimed in with a smile and a nod to his son Ron’s gun collection. 

A poignant moment was captured when McCain said simply, “I fought in Vietnam. I don’t own a gun.”

No candidate discussed what gun-control legislation could do for the nation’s violent crime rate. America boasts the highest death-by-firearm rate in the world, but neither Cooper nor the podcasters confronted candidates with this reality. A prepared interviewer would ideally invigorate the discussion with this line of questioning. At the YouTube debates it just didn’t happen.

Cooper patiently kept time, gently reminding the candidates when their air time was up and of the need to move on. He stood without agenda, stripped of his designated role and journalistic prowess.

Isn’t it the journalist’s job to ask tough questions and stand up and demand accountability when the public trust is as stake? CNN did not engage itself in the dialogue surrounding the debates. This void can only aggravate the loss of public faith in media coverage of national politics. 

Post-debate coverage merely provided a recap of the events for the audience that may have missed it. Sensationalized clips of the Romney-Giuliani sparring session over migrant workers were highlighted, but journalistic interrogation of the discussion’s implications was absent.

One paramount question that escaped scrutiny at the Republican debates was the question of health care coverage, which a large number of American citizens are perpetually without.  

Many tough questions escaped scrutiny both throughout the debates and in post-debate network coverage. 

A critical viewer would note the complicit nature of the media’s coverage and wonder what has become of the journalist’s mission to remain on guard and critical at all times of its governmental policies, both domestic and international.

The YouTube phenomenon is a force to be reckoned with, and any network that will remain relevant in the new technological age of user-oriented media must engage the citizen journalist. It is impossible to argue against this reality. But the media must create a hybrid between civic and citizen journalism. Journalists cannot step back and take a passive stance when so much is at stake.

AMANDA STUTT holds an MA from the UBC School of Journalism. She completed a B.A. in English Literature and Sociology. Her writing has appeared in the Ubyssey, The Seed, the Tyee, the Thunderbird and The Vancouver Sun. She specializes in advocacy reporting.

When I was sent by the Vancouver Sun to cover the November 17, 2007 memorial service for Robert Dziekanski, the Polish immigrant who died last month after being Tasered by RCMP, I steeled myself for the worst. 

It would be my first funeral as a reporter, and I had heard there is nothing like covering a funeral to make you question your role as a journalist, to wonder where to draw the lines between public interest and a family’s privacy, and to chose between advancing a story and capitalizing on sorrow.

These thoughts were at the back of my mind when I arrived at the Kamloops Funeral Home Saturday. More than an hour before the event, there were already a few dozen people gathered, most of them media. Television crews from all the major networks had staked out their spaces in the parking lot and set up cameras in the chapel.

Dziekanski’s death has dominated headlines as both a tragic narrative and an unexplained case of systems gone wrong. A poor and troubled Polish man determined to start a new life in Canada, Dziekanski took his first airplane ride to join his beloved mother in the country of his dreams.

When he arrived at Vancouver International Airport on October 13, 2007, he spent nearly 10 hours in the terminal and in a secured area without ever finding his mother, Zofia Cisowski. Cisowski waited in the nearby public area for almost six hours until airport officials said her son couldn’t be found.

Dziekanski, who spoke not a word of English, grew increasingly frantic and frustrated and finally began throwing small furniture and electronics. Airport security failed to calm him down. In the early hours of October 14, four RCMP officers entered the airport. Within seconds of encountering Dziekanski, and without first trying to physically restrain him, they Tasered him twice and tackled him to the ground.

He was dead within minutes.

The perplexing story had just begun to fade from the public eye when Victoria resident Paul Pritchard’s graphic video footage was released last week. Within minutes, the video was posted on Youtube. Although it doesn’t explain everything, the recording brought the incident to viewers across the world.

When his mother arrived at the Kamloops memorial, puffy-eyed and flanked by friends and family, the international outrage over Dziekanski’s death found a focal point.

Cisowski’s private pain had become unbelievably public. In fact, with speakers including Poland’s consul general in Vancouver and Ricki Bagnell, an anti-Taser activist since her own son died after being Tasered, it seemed likely the ceremony would be taken over by the politics surrounding Dziekanski’s death, and lose sight of the life it was supposed to memorialize. 

But as the event got underway, complete with Catholic liturgy and a slideshow of Dziekanski’s life, it became clear that the attention of the media and the world was not reviled, but welcomed.

In his speech, Maciej Krych, the consul general, specifically singled out the media to express his appreciation “for their persistent collaboration and efforts for reconstructing the facts which led to this tragic [incident].”  As I sat scribbling in the overflow seating area, his words reminded me of why I was there. 

After the ceremony, Cisowski’s lawyer, Walter Kosteckyj, drove the message home. When a reporter asked him whether any answers were emerging around the mysterious hours leading up to Dziekanski’s death, Kosteckyj replied: “I think we all know that the media’s been leading the story in terms of turning up a lot of the information.”

Kosteckyj is right.

Dziekanski’s death is a clear example of the power of media. And I use media in the broadest sense of the term, because the strongest impetus for action and answers was Pritchard’s raw video footage, which appeared to contradict the RCMP’s version of the incident and brought international attention to the case. It also reopened the old ethical debate about broadcasting graphic footage of deaths.

Since the release of Pritchard’s video, the Dziekanski case has not strayed far from the front page. Reporters have dogged the Canada Border Services Agency for answers around what happened to Dziekanski inside the CBSA-controlled secure area. When answers didn’t come, that itself became a top story on Global TV’s November 16 newscast.

It’s worth pondering whether the recently-announced provincial public inquiry into the incident and the policies around Taser use would have happened if not for the media pressure applied to the case. However, it’s unlikely this pressure would have reached such a tipping point if not for Pritchard’s video footage – a testament to the growing impact of citizen journalism.

On a personal level, despite the rationale of public interest behind our media coverage of the Dziekanski memorial, I was still worried that we were hurting the one most vulnerable: his mother. In a brief meeting in her tiny Kamloops apartment before the memorial, Cisowski had told me reporters had been calling her at all hours. She had become hesitant to talk because she was afraid of what she might say and how her words would be used. She said she couldn’t turn on the television because she couldn’t bear to relive those last horrible moments of her son’s life.

There’s no doubt the media coverage of this case has taken a toll on her, and reporters, myself included, need to reflect on the impact they have. But even in the depths of her anguish, it seemed Cisowski acknowledged the role we were playing. 

After the memorial, she summoned the strength the face the scrum. “I just like to thank you all that came today to Robert’s ceremony,” she said. Quickly, her voice faltered, and her words trailed off.

There was none of the usual barrage of follow-up questions. The reporters gathered had only one response. 

“Thank you, Zofia.”

CATHERINE ROLFSEN was born and raised in Vancouver.  She completed a B.A. at UBC before heading east to earn a Master’s degree in Religion and Modernity from Queen’s University. Her love of writing (and the west coast) lured her back to the UBC School of Journalism. In her graduate work, Rolfsen combined her journalistic and academic interests by researching and reporting on issues of culture, ethnicity and religion in Canada. She completed a reporting internship at the Vancouver Sun, and has also freelanced stories for the Tyee, the Thunderbird and The Ubyssey. This year, she was invited to be a guest host on CBC Radio’s “Spark”, and she’s co-producing a documentary for the television newsmagazine, Dan Rather Reports.