The Point

Sunday, January 28, 2007

What gets said

While doing some soul-searching about this business of journalism tonight, I came across two interesting things - interesting not so much in themselves, though they're both worth considering, but in their confluence. First, some background.

The BBC has been heavily covering the World Economic Forum in Davos and all of the gilted handshakes going around there since it started earlier this month. Today there was a triumphant headline about Tony Blair's optimism that Germany's upcoming G8 presidency will mean good prospects for a much broader international agreement on post-Kyoto Accord action on anthropogenic climate change. In the article, he says, 'I believe we are potentially on the verge of a breakthrough.'

Potentially. On the verge. He believes.

What struck me is that this conference continues to monopolise the mainstream media, even as a massive counter-gathering went on in Nairobi with some 60 000 attendees. Every year, while presidents and finance ministers shake hands in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, an alternative conference is held in the South: the World Social Forum. It's meant to be a venue for critical discussion of key issues of global inequality, it's closely associated with the anti-globalisation movement, and there are a massive number of attendees going to this thing presenting genuinely well-thought out critiques of the global hegemonies being agreed on up in Davos.

Surprisingly, unsurprisingly, the BBC has given almost no coverage whatsoever to the World Social Forum except a brief, almost sneering story about local kids taking food from the venues. A lot of food in a city where thousands can't afford to feed their families, and some of it was stolen? Shocking!

The interesting thing, though: I did find an article on Christian Today about something Archbishop Desmond Tutu said at the conference about terrorism:
The war on terror will "never" be won "as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate," like dehumanising poverty, disease and ignorance, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu told ecumenical participants at the start of the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. [...]
Tutu emphasised that the "fundamental law of our being" is that "we are bound to one another". Because of that, "the only way we can make it is together, all of us". Only together can we be free, safe and secure.
And then, five minutes later, I was looking through videos of Robert Fisk on YouTube. He is, you may recall, the author of the 1136-page The Great War for Civilization, and one of the foremost Western journalists in the Middle East. And to my amazement, he said almost the exact same thing. Not a defense of terrorism, nor of violence. Simply the posing of the question: why do people commit these horrific, barbaric attacks?

What responsibility do we have to address those grievances at the heart of the violence?

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posted by Christopher at 2:13 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Sunrise at eight


I don't know whether you've heard of this magazine called Ode? My friend Dianne directed me toward it a while ago when we went to go see Carol Off speaking at the U of A. We were trying to figure out what we knew about the cocao trade in the Ivory Coast (Ms Off's topic of the evening) and child slavery and the conversation started getting darker and darker. With marine life in the oceans now on the brink of collapse and journalists in China being regularly harassed and imprisoned, I reasoned, what hope is there for the future?

Dianne smartly upbraided me for that little bit of self-indulgence. We have a responsibility, she said, to be optimistic, to be hopeful and dream big dreams for the future. Our grandchildren's world (and the generations after them) after all, will be shaped - are being shaped - by our choices today. Milan Kundera's musings about kitsch, I think, are what have brought my thoughts so dramatically to swirling pools of cynicism and negativity. She told me to read Ode, because it was a magazine with an outlook of recognition of our world's weighty injustices and cruelties, but courage enough to look brightly at people making a positive difference and encourage them. Purely coincidentally, someone had recommended I pick up this month's issue of The Walrus for the same reason. Sure enough, they were pondering too On Optimism*.

So last week I picked up a copy of both at Front Page down on Jasper. I remembered, actually, that I'd heard of Ode before because of an article they'd published by Vandana Shiva articulating clearly what the real roots of poverty are, and what it means. Bizarrely, I flipped through the Muhammad Yunus article and the excited murmurs of algae-based power on my way to a Christmas party only to meet a woman named Tilly talking about exactly the same way of looking at life (over mulled wine, of course) not an hour later. The research doesn't seem exhaustive, and they certainly seem to have some undue optimism here and there, but I think it's kind of wonderfully subversive to turn to imagination and creativity and hope instead of sheer depression about The State of Things.

Certainly a welcome warmth in the belly of Edmonchuck winter.

*Article available to Walrus print subscibers only (and I'm not one either)

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posted by Christopher at 7:55 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Oh, of course

Todd Babiak has written a much more eloquent piece about the impact of the Bell Globemedia-CHUM merger on local specificity of news coverage. Perhaps it was hasty to assume so much of our national media converging will reduce the spectrum of opinion open to people, given that so many get their news from new sources like podcasts and blogs, something like this, but Todd has a point about people knowing less and less about events going on in their community.

Depending on how long the munificence of CanWest Global's servers lasts, the article is available here.

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posted by Christopher at 1:44 p.m. | link | 1 comments

Mergers and missiles


I wanted to write about what's going on in Israel and Lebanon and the Gaza Strip right now, but I have been quieted by the sheer pace of the violence. It seems I am more naïve than I realised, because I have really been stunned by how quickly the situation has escalated. Possibly more on that later.

I am, however, perhaps predictably concerned about Bell Globemedia's overtures toward CHUM. Edmonton has three main daily news broadcasts, CFRN News (owned by BGM), Global (owned by CanWest Global), and CityTV (owned by CHUM). Global used to be called ITV, and was an independent station established and owned in Edmonton; CityTV was called A-Channel, and was relatively independent until it was bought out by CHUM a few years ago and they added that Much More Music driftwood guy to the morning show, Bill Welychka.

So the already small number of media outlets with a news broadcast in Edmonton, if the merger goes through, will be basically divided between a company owned by the Aspers and a company owned by the Thompsons. The unique spin on this story in The Globe and Mail (BGM's -ahem- national newspaper) is worth mentioning; rather than portray the merger as one giant company trying to get an even bigger share of the market to run down their competitors by folding in another relatively large and willing partner, they published a front page article about purported tensions between the adult children of CHUM founder Allan Waters, who passed away last December. I was intrigued by how cleverly The Globe told the story as one of desperate sibling drama reaching a seemingly inevitable breaking point and forcing them to sell. I'm not biting, but then, I'm not in charge of the CRTC.

It's now up to the independent broadcasting watchdog, which regulates Canadian media from radio to satellite TV, to decide whether to allow BGM, which already controls CTV, the Discovery Channel, the Comedy Network, and has 15% shares in the Toronto Raptors, among other things, to take control of CHUM's newsrooms from Vancouver to Winnipeg, its muzak division, its sprawling radio network, and, of course, MuchMusic. Any sane and rational person might point out that the media in Canada is already incredibly concentrated, and perhaps even take the bold move of arguing that allowing Bell Globemedia to have such a huge slice of the pie might be bad for say, people wanting to get a balanced set of perspectives from their nightly news, let alone the hundreds of people fired by CHUM hours before the merger was announced.

The BGM management's triumphant announcement that this will create a 'national champion in broadcasting' seems disingenuous at best. I've heard people saying the CBC's rather negative coverage of the merger from its Arts division is overly harsh, that it's a bit rich for them to be arguing there won't be enough variety of opinion in the Canadian media if it goes through. But who can honestly say they would rather have fewer newsrooms operating in our country, fewer journalists, fewer talented hosts on sports radio? Perhaps it's wishful thinking to assume I'm not alone here. Anybody?

Photo credit: Dan Barham

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posted by Christopher at 2:14 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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