Sunday September 26, 2004
News empire reveals its prejudices
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”>
The CanWest newspaper chain got international exposure this week. The New York Times, probably the world\’s most prestigious newspaper, wrote about CanWest\’s editorial policies.
CanWest, for those still stranded on Gilligan\’s Island, is Canada\’s largest and therefore most influential communications conglomerate. It owns 13 daily newspapers, 17 television stations, and two television networks. It also has seven cable channels: Prime, Men\’s Channel, Xtreme Sports, Lonestar, Déjà vu, Mystery, and Fox Sportsworld.
The story started when the Ottawa Citizen revised an Associated Press story from Iraq.
AP reporter Hamza Hendawi wrote, “U.S. jets pounded targets in Fallujah” without “weakening the Sunni militants who have steadily expanded their control of the city…”
The Citizen changed that to, “U.S. jets pounded terrorist positions … [without] weakening the Sunni terrorists…”
The change was deliberate. Seven times in a single story, the Citizen replaced words like rebel, insurgent, militant, and guerrilla with the all-inclusive epithet “terrorist.”
Less than a week later, the National Post, CanWest\’s flagship, took similar liberties with a story from the international Reuters News Agency.
Protecting readers, from what?
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> Reuters objected. "Our editorial policy is that we don\’t use emotive words when labeling someone," said David A. Schlesinger, Reuters\’ global managing editor, in the New York Times article. "If a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they removed our byline."
Schlesinger said that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations.
"My goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity," he said.
The goal became more than academic when a Canadian journalist, Scott Taylor (no relation) was kidnapped, severely beaten and several times threatened with execution as an American agent. His captors used Google to search the Internet, to verify that he was indeed a journalist and not a spy.
A fellow editor, Lee Hunter, wondered, “What if they had come across an article under his byline that had been altered in the same way the Hendawi article was changed, painting all insurgents as terrorists?”
Had Scott Taylor been published in the Ottawa Citizen or the National Post, he might well be dead now.
Truth, by any other name…
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> The Citizen published an apology for altering Hendawi\’s article. But then it did it again, with another AP story. AP described six of ten persons killed in the West Bank by Israeli troops as “Palestinian medical officials.” The Citizen changed them to “terrorists.”
Once again, the Citizen issued a correction, attributing the change to “an editing error.”
But the paper\’s editor-in-chief, Scott Anderson, defended CanWest\’s actions. “If you\’re couching language to protect people, are you telling the truth?” he asked.
As Pontius Pilate asked cynically, during the trial of Jesus, “What is truth?”
We who spend our lives drowning in an ocean of information – and misinformation – might well ask the same question.
Eliza Doolittle (in Shaw\’s Pygmalion and Lerner & Lowe\’s My Fair Lady) railed against “words, words, words, words…” And those words – I say this as one who has spent his life working with words – those words are never unbiased. Never!
No one puts pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, or voice to microphone without expressing an opinion. Even when trained journalists deliberately try to choose neutral words, emotionally untainted words, they still have to choose which incidents to report, which statements to quote, which details to highlight.
No one can report everything. What gets reported has already passed through the fine filter of the reporter\’s value system.
Then it goes through another filter – the publisher\’s policies.
Deliberate refocusing
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> Those policies can, and often do, re-focus a story.
A former boss once commissioned Joan Hollobon, then the medical reporter for the Globe and Mail, to write an article about abortion. He expected her research would inevitably lead her to oppose abortion.
She didn\’t.
He gave me the article to edit, along with a pile of his own anti-abortion documentation. I didn\’t rewrite Hollobon\’s words. I merely inserted examples. But by the time I was finished, few readers would have recognized her original position.
I\’m not proud of that incident. I cite it only to show how easily journalists can define their professional role as doing the most skilful job possible within the bounds of their masters\’ prejudices.
In this case, CanWest\’s prejudices have been exposed. They want to be even more loyally pro-American than Americans.
In a published editorial, the National Post announced its policy would not change.
"Mr. Schlesinger\’s implication — that the substantive meaning of his reporters\’ stories are being universally vitiated by our house style — is one we reject," The Post wrote in prose reminiscent of former owner Conrad Black\’s verbosity. "The agency\’s use of euphemisms merely serves to apply a misleading gloss of political correctness. And we believe we owe it to our readers to remove it before they see their newspaper every morning."
Did you catch that? Words like “rebel,” “militant,” or “medical officer” have become a “misleading gloss of political correctness.” CanWest will keep our politics unsullied by labelling all such people “terrorists.”
Inconsistent application
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> Anderson, at the Citizen, defines terrorism as “the deliberate targeting of civilians in pursuit of a political goal.”
Fair enough, except that that definition would also fit Israeli forces – to whom CanWest never applies that tarred brush.
Would they call George Washington a terrorist? After all, he mobilized civilians to overthrow an existing government.
Or Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for leading the opposition to the apartheid government of South Africa?
Or Charles de Gaulle, sentenced to death for treason during the Nazi occupation of France by the Vichy government, at the time the only government recognized by the United States?
No, CanWest is more consistent in its doing than its definitions. Anyone who physically opposes U.S. authority must be a terrorist. Period.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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