The "True" North

In December 2021, I submitted the text of this blog post to the 2022 Dalton Camp Award $10,000 annual essay contest for the best essay on the link between media and democracy. As I didn’t win, I’m free to share it.

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On Saturdays, I attend an African history class offered by another local Black community group. Our current unit is called 500 Years of Resistance. Our teacher says we’re doing it because historians have largely ignored, or presented slanted versions of, the many rebellions Black and Indigenous people have led against their oppressors. 

The Canadian mainstream media does much the same thing with people and movements calling for social change. Many media outlets either ignore resistance movements completely or frame them in ways that minimize the resistance – especially those led by Black and Indigenous people.

I became aware of one such example following a recent trip to Ghana with my family. In attempting to connect with Ghanaian activists, I learned about the grassroots #FixTheCountry campaign that saw Ghanaians take to social media and the streets in August 2021. On August 4, Al Jazeera reported that several thousand protesters marched in Accra in the latest rally against the government. The story said the protest aimed to demand accountability, good governance, and better living conditions from the government. 

I couldn’t find one story by a Canadian outlet on the #FixTheCountry protests, which some might say is normal because it happened in another country full of people who don’t look like the majority of Canadians. However, shortly after returning from Ghana, I awoke to hear a story on the CBC national news broadcasting live from Barbados about that country cutting ties with the Queen and becoming a republic. My local CBC radio station morning show, Ottawa Morning, did an almost 9-minute live interview with CBC national radio host Marcia Young from a Barbadian beach. The interview provided several examples of the journalistic omissions and commissions that leave an incorrect and ahistorical impression of people’s resistance.

Following the host’s intro in which she acknowledged that Barbados gained independence nearly 70 years earlier, Marcia Young said, “This island is really in the mood for independence.” Paraphrasing from her interview with Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, Young added:

“[She says] it’s time for [Barbadians] to gain the confidence to confront the issues facing Barbadians…She wants to foster resilience and courage in Barbadians. And you just get the sense that there is so much waiting to come out from Barbados – beyond Rihanna.” The host and Young both laughed at that. In response to the host asking what Barbadians had told her about how colonialism impacted their lives, Young said, “Some were waiting for some kind of an apology. A lot of people are just waiting for the reparations conversation where they will finally be paid for the labour that was stolen and forced.” And she added, “What’s left over from colonization…it’s a system. A hierarchy of race and class. Barbadians are working to change that. There are policies in place to help that change. I spoke to the Prime Minister about that and she said you cannot legislate a culture to change. It takes time. And Barbadians are saying to me, let’s wait and see.”

This choice of quotes creates a narrative of Barbadians as passively waiting for change to come from becoming a republic and ignores crucial pieces of history like the Bussa Rebellion which, according the BlackPast website, was the largest slave revolt in Barbadian history that took its name from the African-born slave, Bussa, who led the uprising. Young’s choice of quotes also erases the courageous work of people like feminist and human rights activist, Ro-Ann Mohammed who, in 2012, co-founded Barbados – Gays, Lesbians and All-Sexuals against Discrimination (B-GLAD). In 2018, she helped organize Barbados’ first LGBT Pride Parade. And this in a country that was listed as #8 on Forbes’ 2019 list of the 20 Most Dangerous Places for Gay Travelers – which none of the CBC stories I read mentioned. 

The CBC isn’t alone. The mainstream media has always had a short memory when it comes to history and it appears to have gotten shorter along with their customers’ attention spans. This was evident in coverage of two of the biggest stories in recent years: the #metoo and defund the police movements.

Almost all mainstream reporting on the #metoo movement only started after white actresses started coming forward and largely ignored the fact that the #metoo hashtag was created by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, in 2006 – 11 years before allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein made the movement mainstream. Similarly, reporting on the defund the police movement made it seem like it started with George Floyd’s death, when that isn’t true. 

In a June 2020 Politico article, Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna stated, “…“abolish the police” is an idea that had been brewing for decades in academic and activist circles before it exploded into view this summer. An activist from Chicago shocked Fox News viewers four years ago when she told Megyn Kelly, “We need to abolish the police. Period.” The phrase itself dates back to at least 1988, and its deeper roots run further still—and offer some unsettling insights about the origins and history of American policing.”

In Canada, few stories more clearly show the challenges – and failings – of the Canadian mainstream media in covering protest movements than that of the BC’s Wet’suwet’en Nation’s opposition to Coastal GasLink’s natural gas pipeline. In a Feb. 2020 story in the North Bay Nugget, Nipissing First Nation blasts ‘mainstream media’ over Wet’suwet’en coverage Michael Lee, cites the Nipissing First Nation chief and council “slamming the “mainstream media” for misrepresenting Indigenous nations and voices in the ongoing dispute over a natural gas pipeline in British Columbia opposed by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs…it can be difficult to distinguish facts from rhetoric and truth from hidden agendas in light of the “barrage of information” from social media and the misrepresentation from mainstream media.”

 In a March 2020 NOW Magazine article, Wet’suwet’en: the mainstream media’s big fail, Enzo Dimatteo argues that, “When it comes to mainstream media coverage of Indigenous issues, it’s almost always in a negative light and without the necessary history to offer any real context or clarity.” Dimatteo says, “it happened with Idle No More, when protests spilled into the streets in 2012 over the Harper government’s omnibus bill threatening environmental protections and national waterways. It happened after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report into residential schools. It happened last June when the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found Canada guilty of genocide. And so it was again with Wet’suwet’en, an issue that has been simmering for a decade, only that salient fact – along with the legal basis for the Indigenous opposition to Coastal GasLink’s plans – was largely absent in the early reporting.” The legal basis Dimatteo refers to is the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling, Delgamuukw vs British Columbia, which said the Wet’suwet’en people, as represented by their hereditary leaders, had not given up rights and title to their 22,000-square-kilometre territory and that comprehensive consultations with hereditary chiefs are required for major projects in traditional lands.

The media’s short historical memory results in another chronic problem with mainstream media coverage of protest movements: sanitized versions of their leaders. 

Coverage of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are two of the most blatant examples of this. Media outlets, especially those run by white liberals, often quote MLK’s I Have A Dream speech, but rarely mention things like what he said about white moderates:  

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Most mainstream outlets also ignore how King had broadened his focus to all poor people not long before he was assassinated. In a January 2021 Al Jazeera story, Jenn M Jackson said, “Towards the end of his life, King turned his focus to the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to unify Americans behind issues like equitable pay, unemployment insurance and a fair minimum wage. He never got to see the culminating events of the Campaign as he was killed before the project was completed.”

American political activist and public intellectual, Cornel West, critiqued the “Santa Clausification” of Nelson Mandela, especially following his death. West pointed out how the media portrayed Mandela as an “unthreatening, huggable old man with a smile with bags full of toys” – completely ignoring that Mandela was imprisoned partly for his actions while leading the African National Congress’ armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation”, a group whose activities TIME Magazine once described as a “low-level guerrilla war.”

Danielle K. Kilgo’s June 2019 study Protests, Media Coverage, and a Hierarchy of Social Struggle, in the International Journal of Press/Politics, supports the argument that the media generally covers protest – especially by Black and Indigenous folks, negatively.  “Media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo…media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment.”, concludes Kilgo.

So why is mainstream media so bad at covering social dissent, especially those led by Black and Indigenous people?

The Canadian Association of Journalists’ recent Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey may offer some insights. The survey found that newsrooms are, well, pretty white. Specifically, it found white journalists tend to hold more senior and stable jobs, hold 81.9 percent of supervisor roles and 79.6 percent of top three leadership positions. Approximately 90 percent of outlets that participated have no Latin, Middle Eastern or mixed race journalists on staff and about 80 percent have no Black or Indigenous journalists. 

That so many journalists come from the most privileged group in North American society may partly explain why their collective reporting on protest movements is so bad: they don’t understand it because most of them have never lived it. That fact, combined with the time pressures all journalists face, makes it easier to understand why many journalists go the easy, shallow route – and are allowed to do so by their mostly white editors. That easy route appears to include focussing on social movements only after things get heated, figuratively…and sometimes literally.

Both in Canada and the U.S., media outlets tend to be most interested in covering stories about social change movements when things are being blocked by Indigneous folks…or burned by Black folks. Most Canadians probably hadn’t heard of Oka before they saw the news reports in the summer of 1990 of masked Mohawks facing down police near Montreal in an attempt to stop a golf course from being expanded onto their traditional burial grounds. Most folks had probably not heard of the Wet’suwet’en before the story blew up their TVs, radios and phones.

In the U.S., social change movements have always gotten the most attention when Black people burn down white people’s stuff. This was true with the unrest following the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King in 1991 and we saw it again with the protests following the murder of George Floyd. 

There are always exceptions…a good story, now and then…but the general rule is to swoop in and cover things only when they blow up. And that may only change when the explosions start affecting many more people (i.e. the mainstream media’s customers) in ways beyond just delaying their daily commute.

Note: Sarah El-Shaarawi’s winning essay The Similarities Between Red and Yellow was be posted in the Tyee August 8, 2022.)