RETROSPECTIVE

In November, four prominent journalists concluded that media blind spots, production processes, and biases resulted in some of the most important stories of 2002 being overlooked or misrepresented.

Kirk LaPointe, John Miller, Rick Salutin, and Antonia Zerbisias offered up some straight talk on the failings of the mainstream media at the second, annual Whine and Cheese media panel. The journalists discussed the topic entitled “Stories
Media Blew in 2002.” The on-line publication, Straight Goods (http://www.straightgoods.ca), organized the panel.

Kirk LaPointe, former senior vice-president of CTV News,who also oversaw the early days of the National Post as executive editor, characterized the Canadian media as having “done a so-so job of distinguishing themselves” from the jingoism of the American media in the year since 9/11.”

LaPointe suggested that the main problem with mainstream media is not censorship or suppression, but a lack of time for investigative work.“We spend
too much time covering and not enough time uncovering.”If they aren’t careful,“newsrooms find themselves playing an accommodations role,”relying too heavily on press conferences and other “staged” events.

He decried the lack of initiative by reporters to seek out stories independently, noting that about 50% material found in newspapers is staged, another 48% “important stories you have to cover,” and only 2-3% is completely original ideas by reporters or the newsroom. The result is that reporters are largely being “passive recipients” instead of active storytellers.

Nominations for missed stories
LaPointe’s nomination for the missed story of 2002 is how the stock market crash and accounting scandals changed “the expectations of my parents’
generation and my own generation.”

“The older generation’s assumption that if you save, you’ll have money at the end of it when you retire” has been severely tested by the crash, he said.“There’s this fascination with Martha Stewart, or perpetrators being led off in handcuffs” in the
business pages.But he says the real story is how the younger generation will be forced to take care of their parents when they have nothing to fall back on.

First on John Miller’s list, was the failure of business journalists to predict or uncover the accounting scandals and retirement bonuses that dominate the headlines. Miller, the director of newspaper journalism at Ryerson University and
author of Yesterday’s News: Why Canada’s Daily Newspapers are Failing Us, suggested that the business pages were not challenging and confronting the business world on problems that must have been apparent beforehand.

“When the accounting scandal broke in the U.S., it wasn’t a result of heroic coverage by the business press,”Miller said.Even The Globe and Mail, with 50
business reporters (“80% of newsrooms in Canada don’t have that many reporters”),failed to foresee the collapse of Nortel.

“They’re not digging for the kinds of stories that might predict” these kinds of events, Miller said. “ So they win my Clitheroe award,”a reference to the deposed Ontario Hydro chief Eleanor Clitheroe.The government dumped her following a
public outcry over the provisions in her contract, which was deemed to contain absurd perks. Miller pointed out that those provisions were uncovered in
court documents – not by intrepid reporters.

Another issue the media failed to adequately cover was the erosion of Canadian civil liberties following 9/11, Miller continued. “The media have this huge blind spot when it comes to race,” he explained. “Bill C-36 (since passed, now the Anti-
Terrorism Act) is the most restrictive law Canada has ever had in terms of civil liberties,” and yet no one is asking the right questions regarding it.“Who is in jail because of this Act? The government doesn’t have to say, but no one is trying to dig for this information.”

As an example, he pointed to the Syrian-born Ottawa man who was flying home to Canada, arrested in New York and deported to Syria. (When Media magazine went to press,he was still in Syria.) “And not one Canadian reporter has tried to find him or talk to him or really piece together who he is and what possible grounds they would have to deport him to Syria. If he had been white and
deported to England, you bet there would have been coverage. That’s why I say race is this huge blind spot.”

Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin had a sobering nomination for top unreported story. “I would nominate the fact that the U.S. has decided
to accept future September 11 attacks on its own soil as the cost of pursuing its real priorities, the restructuring of regimes in the Middle East,” he said. “That’s not something that was announced at a press conference.” He suggested the problem with the mainstream media isn’t necessarily one of omission,but rather of context and understanding. “So it’s not so much a matter of what the
mainstream missed, but a matter of what they didn’t get.”

Another way media miss the point is by rebroadcasting things as if they had never been reported, Salutin said.“There’s a dissonance when reporters report something as new that has been long-held,”he explained.“It’s as if it had been ejected from our consciousness.(For example,) Arafat went on Larry King and King asked,‘So what made you decide to accept the existence of the state of Israel?’ (Arafat had) been on record (on that issue) for 15 years.”

Toronto Star media columnist Antonia Zerbisias took aim at the corporate mindset driving the media industry.“Convergence for now is dead.And I emphasize for now.”She said the battle for media supremacy is simply lying low until the market recovers, and noted that the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S.is moving towards eliminating rules preventing media concentration.

She said that media have almost completely overlooked that Ontario is now operating private prisons — the only province in Canada to do so. And she noted that news reports failed to mention that the recent riot at Ontario’s first ‘super-jail’was the result of corporate cost-cutting. And she said there has been virtually no reporting on the more than 20,000 migrant agricultural workers in Ontario each year.They have “no rights and possibly unsafe working conditions,” and die or are injured on the job each year with no compensation, support or health care.

This is an edited version of an article that appears — in its entirety — on http://www.straightgoods.ca, the home page of Straightgoods.