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The Media: Our Eyes and Ears on the World

Notes for Hon. David Kilgour, MP Edmonton Southeast
and Secretary of State (Latin America and Africa),
for an address to the Media Club of Ottawa,
National Press Club, Ottawa
May 15, 2000

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

As a former journalist -- albeit briefly -- and someone who has been in politics since 1979. I know how the media have become an important part of our lives. It’s a pleasure to share some thoughts with you this evening.

Stop for a moment and consider the amount of information you’ve absorbed today. Most of you will have read at least two newspapers, perhaps turned on the radio in your car or caught the news on television this afternoon. I’m sure some of you surfed the Internet during the day for news updates or to find news from outside Canada. What did you learn? And who decided that those were the stories that most deserved to be told?

As George Bain wrote in his book Gotcha!: "Journalists are not in the business of picking up messages here and unquestioningly delivering there, like Canada Post. They select, from the tens of thousands of available every day, those messages they decided their readers or viewers should have. Next they decide how much or how little information the chosen subjects can be fitted into the product, they decide how the information should be interpreted. Then, if the message contains both good guys and bad guys, which is often the case, they decide which are which."

The media have become powerful players in our post-modern societies; we are increasingly dependent on them to be our eyes and ears in the world.

Yet messages do not merely inform. They play a deeper role in shaping our opinions, especially about places we have never seen firsthand, or situations we have never encountered.

Stereotyping

This can be both good and bad; through media we are exposed to places in the world we often would not have the opportunity to visit, providing a small window into a foreign culture. On the negative side, natural disasters, wars and terrorist acts are too often the focus of coverage, which leads to an image of a country or continent based on stereotypes.

The news media, of course, is changing rapidly. Advances in technology have made the unthinkable possible. While these changes have made it more convenient to show Canadians the world, and events happening outside their borders, in some respects we have also suffered at the hands of these modern conveniences.

As G.K Chesterton said, "It’s not the world that’s got so much worse, but the news coverage that’s got so much better."

Journalism is practiced in a real-time 24 hour world today. With all news-channels like CBC Newsworld, CTV Newsnet, the BBC World Service and CNN, we now expect immediacy. It’s no longer sufficient to pick up a newspaper in the morning and feel satisfied that this dose of news will keep you informed until the next day. The reality is that we live in a play-by-play world, where the day’s events are broadcast into homes almost as they happen.

We saw this during the Gulf War, where we watched the bombings nightly on television screens. It looked like a Nintendo war game with little green lights buzzing through the sky, only to be shot down.

Last summer, the world awoke and turned on their televisions to see airplanes flying over a patch of sea near Martha’s Vineyard, searching for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane. As hours stretched into days, the coverage continued relatively non-stop.

Many have questioned the effect real-time journalism has on governments and policy makers. They feel it forces governments to react too quickly to events because of public pressure, not allowing enough time for a careful weighing of options or waiting to see how a situation will play out.

In my opinion, I don’t think this is the case. There is a connection between journalists’ coverage of events, public response and government action, but I don’t think the media are the driving force behind much policy making in Canada. The media can certainly mobilize public support for an issue, which in turn may influence the policy response.

NHL Decision

An fitting example is Industry Minister John Manley’s decision to scrap the NHL assistance plan only days after it was first announced. My constituency office in Edmonton received dozens of calls opposing the plan, as did many other MPs. Newspapers, radio phone-in shows, and television all followed the negative public reaction closely. By week’s end, Minister Manley had announced he was withdrawing the proposal.

There are also occasions when the media tries to exert pressure on policy makers to move in one direction and it doesn’t happen.

Politicians are not elected to make decisions based on what the newspapers say, but they are supposed to listen to the wishes of the electorate, which are often articulated well in the media.

All of this sounds promising: advances in technology allow us to experience things faster; our world is becoming increasingly connected, removing borders; and we know more about the world, which should make us better informed. However, the situation is not as idyllic as it sounds.

At the same time as access to information and news is increasing, the Canadian voices providing that information are unfortunately shrinking. Due to massive cutbacks by Canadian news organizations, the number of foreign correspondents has decreased approximately 40 per cent in the last decade. The Globe and Mail, for example, has only five foreign bureaus today: Moscow, Washington, New York, China and Europe. It has none in Latin America or Africa. CTV now has only three foreign offices. The Los Angeles Times alone has more foreign correspondents than all Canadian media organizations combined.

As well, the CBC’s future as a provider of regional news across the country is also being threatened. The elimination of local CBC newscasts, a further reduction of the CBC’s role in the regions, would be a disturbing state of affairs for an organization which should be a major unifying vehicle providing a broad cultural highway of national self-expression. More news would come from the centre, Toronto and Montreal, and would be a reflection of those cities, not the pan-Canadian reality. I feel the CBC needs to continue to play a role in telling our local stories.

Paradoxically, while the newspapers are losing their capacity to report the regional news around the globe, the CBC is reducing its capacity to report the regional news within our own borders. We are all the losers for such a development. Hopefully, the local newspapers that have been put up for sale will be purchased locally, and will cover the local news, providing information to citizens about what is happening in their corner of the country.

It all comes down to cost. The main reason cited for slashing foreign bureaus is cost. It’s very expensive to maintain a bureau overseas. Using freelancers who happen to be in the area, or sending a reporter in for a few days or weeks to cover a big story is the growing trend. Even more disturbing is the growing reliance on US or British wire stories because there is no Canadian in the area and it is more cost effective.

Canadian Voices

These measures may save money, but I feel they come at a very big cost. We should be hearing Canadian voices tell us about the world. If, as I stated earlier, the media plays a role in mobilizing public opinion, how can Canadians be influenced if our knowledge of world events is not told from a Canadian perspective? We are constantly lamenting Americanization, yet it’s more difficult to combat it when we are beginning to see the world through their eyes. For example, how many more Canadians would be able to articulate the US relationship with Cuba than our own?

Without Canadian reporters abroad analyzing world events and placing them in a Canadian context, our foreign policy often gets lost in the shuffle. The BBC doesn’t cover Canada’s role on the world stage unless its as part of a collective response to a crisis or through a multilateral institution. If we don’t report adequately on our relations and achievements abroad, no one else will.

Something else that is often lost by using journalists who are sent to a country to cover an event unfolding is context. A reporter living in a foreign country absorbs the culture, political climate and daily happenings which usually have led to the war or tensions they are covering. This allows them to analyze better situations and put them in the proper context. They are already at a deeper level than someone whose knowledge of the country comes from a briefing on an airplane en route to an assignment. What might appear as a revelation to a newcomer is common-knowledge to someone familiar with the situation.

What I think is the most disturbing consequence of shrinking foreign bureaus is the kind of stories that do get covered. More often than not the foreign coverage we see is of tragedies and conflict. No where is this more evident than in Africa. As Secretary of State for Latin America and Africa, I frequently travel to both regions. I have seen poverty and children with their arms tragically hacked off, but these are the only things that spring into the minds of many Canadians when they think of Africa.

In recent weeks we have all been bombarded by images of pain and suffering among Africans: starving children dying from the famine in Ethiopia, atrocities and human rights violations in Sudan, chaos and appallingly gruesome fighting in Sierra Leone.

Yet these images paint a too one-sided picture of Africa. We rarely hear of the success stories such as the return of democracy in South Africa, Tanzania or Ghana; or the dignity of former President Diouf handing over office to the new President recently in Senegal; and so on.

An fitting example is Mozambique. Who can forget the floods that ravaged Mozambique in March. The coverage was thrilling, the situation almost made for television: a woman giving birth to her child in a tree while hanging on for dear life as the flood waters threatened to drown both of them. I was fortunate enough to be on board the Canadian airlift into Mozambique and met with people waiting to take the supplies of water, blankets and such to the Mozambican people.

I would bet that for a lot of Canadians the flood was their first introduction to Mozambique and it was a crisis. How many of them know what a success story Mozambique really is? The country has struggled and succeeded in forming a working democracy after a lengthy civil war, and has enjoyed one of the fastest growing economies, with an annual growth rate of more than 8 percent for three years. How many know that Botswana is a model for the world in economic growth, good governance and democracy?

Canada has just recently hosted Africa Direct to encourage trade with Africa. The task was educating Canadian business about the realities of Africa and showing the opportunities that exist there; that there is much more to Africa than conflict and tragedy.

I wanted to highlight what I find a distressing trend in foreign coverage. In an age where we profess to live in a global village, we should be searching for ways to learn more than failures about our neighbours: also their successes. Is our success always a media disaster? Our Canadian media should be telling our citizens about our accomplishments abroad; how projects funded by Canadian taxpayers are benefiting families all over the world; situations around the world that affect us here at home or that we might learn from. In short, making us all more informed about the world around us.

Thank you.