how to spin (twist) a story

One reporter. One story. Two newspapers. But one is edited much different from the other. The result is a lesson in how individuals in the news media can spin a story, insert their own bias into a story, to send a very different message to the reader.

The reporter is Kerry Benjoe. His email address at the end of the first story puts him at the Regina Leader Post, part of the Canwest (Canada.com) chain. The first story is the longest and is in the Leader post. A shorter version is re-printed in the Vancouver Sun. The two headlines of the same story, however, say very different things.

This is the first headline, and the top of the story (the lede):

Aboriginal children in need of most help: new report
Kerry Benjoe, Leader-Post

REGINA — The most disadvantaged group in Canada is aboriginal children, a new report by the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) concludes.

Jessica Ball, a professor at the University of Victoria who authored the study, examined the opportunities for health and development of First Nation, Métis and Inuit children from infancy to age five. She specializes in early childhood development and felt compelled to study this area.

Here are the second set of headlines, and the lede from the story in the VANCOUVER SUN:

Aboriginal kids found to do better in cities
Persistent disparities for decades, study says
Kerry Benjoe, Canwest News Service

REGINA — Aboriginal children on Canadian reserves are starting out their lives at a disadvantage compared to non-aboriginal kids — and even compared to aboriginal kids living in cities, a new study suggests.

Jessica Ball, a professor at the University of Victoria’s School of Child and Youth Care, says in a new report for the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy that aboriginal children are the most disadvantaged group in Canada.

Here’s my beef. Maybe the reporter re-jigged the second story for a national audience, hoping it might be picked up by other newspapers in the Canwest chain. Maybe each newspaper in that chain has an editor who makes their own headlines for every story that comes across the system. Whatever the reason, these are two very different stories now.

The first story, the one in the Regina LEADER POST, emphasizes the suffering of onkhwehnohweh (Indigenous) children due to the failure of federal and provincial governments to adequately support programs in remote, northern and reserve communities, or failing to fund them at all (thus the “funding gaps” mentioned).

The spin takes off in the second story, in the VANCOUVER SUN. This version pins the failure to adequately provide for “Aboriginal” children upon the reserves, letting the governments off the hook. More, it seems to suggest that these kids are lacking opportunities because of the failure of the entire reserve system.

There are several things wrong with this second story. First, Indians live on reserves but not Métis or Inuit. So the use of “Aboriginal” is wrong.

Secondly, the study examined “the opportunities for health and development of First Nation, Metis and Inuit children from infancy to age five.” The author of the study found “that aboriginal children, particularly in rural settings, continue to lack adequate housing, food security, clean water and access to services.”

The author wrote that there are gaps and disparities in services and funding for these services, between urban and remote, on and off-reserve programs for all Aboriginal groups. However, of special concern is the situation with Indians (First Nations). These disparities and gaps in services exists due to the jurisidictional fumbling that goes on between the federal and provincial governments. This game of “not me” plays “a major role in creating that gap between the two groups (urban and remote) of aboriginal children.“

Where is the spin? The original story in the LEADER POST is fairly neutral in tone. The second story in the VANCOUVER SUN, blames the folks who have little or no control over how government spends — or deliberately chooses not to spend on basic services, or decides to spend much less that it would on white Canadians. The explanation that it’s actually the governments that are at fault is buried halfway down into the story.

First impressions count in journalism today. Most people scan and would probably miss the point of that second story once they got beyond the headline and the first three paragraphs.

You see, according to that second version, it isn’t a case of discrimination at all. The government isn’t really deliberately under-funding Indigenous programs at all. It’s not governments fault that they choose to live to far away from everything. Y’see? Doncha? Huh?

what is taking so long?

When the National Indian Brotherhood, or NIB, began using the word “aboriginal” in some of its documents more than 30 years ago, my Mom and Dad railed at those those they called “idiots” and worse. The NIB is the fore-runner of today’s Assembly of First Nation, and the national organization representing band council chiefs in Canada. My parents could not fathom why the NIB seemed insistent upon using generic, one-size-fits-all umbrella terms to refer to themselves.

Why, they wondered, didn’t they go back to referring to themselves as they had for centuries and in their own languages. To my parents, use of those other generic terms showed just how successful decades upon decades of brainwashing had been in erasing their own national identities. So instead of calling themselves “chopped liver,” they should call themselves “onkhwehhonhweh,” “Kanienkeha:ka” or “Anishnabek” instead.

My parents were also quite upset when band council chiefs at the AFN decided to call each of their reserves “first nations.” They felt that was just as divisive as a generic term since it gave each reserve, an artifice of the Indian Act, the pretense of existing as a separate and distinct “nation” but (still) under the Indian Act and without any central, sovereign national identity.

In northern Saskatchewan for instance, you can have a whole bunch of Cree territories separating themselves from each other as “first nations,” refusing to group themslves under their own national identity – as part of the Cree Nation.

To my parents, it was all about “divide and conquer;” it was a simple question of cultural, political and national survival. Our own Indigenous nations would either hang together or, to quote Benjamin Franklin, we would surely hang separately.

It seems someone is now thinking along similar lines. The Union of Ontario Indians (UOI) represents mostly Ojibway and Algonquin bands in eastern and northeastern Ontario. they passed a resolution instructing:

“… government agencies, NGOs, educators and media organizations that they should discontinue using inappropriate terminology when they are referring to the Anishinabek. We respect the cultures and traditions of our Metis and Inuit brothers and sisters, but their issues are different from ours.”

The resolution notes that “there are no aboriginal bands, aboriginal reserves, or aboriginal chiefs” and that the reference to “aboriginal rights” referred to in Section 35 of the Constitution Act of Canada “was never meant to assimilate First Nations, Metis and Inuit into a homogeneous group.”

Now if these Anishnabek can only get away from that clumsy “first nation” bit, and convince the others at the AFN as well, they might get somewhere. They might even get there quicker.

So… listen up. I am not a “first nation person.” I am Kanienkeha:ka (aka Mohawk). Get it?

If Canadian reporters can understand the difference between Shona and Kikuyu in Africa, or Croat from Serb in the Balkans, then why can’t they learn the differences and proper names for the distinct Indigenous nationalities within Canada as well? So can politicians.

Just saying.

if it shoots like an ak-47…

Why aren’t the news media, journalists and reporters, calling the Blackwater company exactly what it is?

At first glance, the Blackwater security firm that has been hitting headlines in Iraq for some time apears to be no different than a company called Executive Outcomes, mainly South African ex-soldiers who contributed much to the destabilization of countries like Sierra Leone, fighting and killing Sierra Leonians on behalf of international diamond, gold and other precious resource conglomerates. Some reporters even dared to call them mercenaries.

So what is the difference between Executive Outcomes – your basic army-of-mercentaries-for-hire – and Blackwater, except that Blackwater is an American-owned company?

Blackwater deal allows company to have AK-47s (6/23/08)
MOYOCK, N.C. (AP) — Private security contractor Blackwater Worldwide has been able to keep 17 AK-47s at its armory under a deal that sidesteps federal laws prohibiting private parties from buying automatic weapons, a newspaper reported Sunday.

So the question is: Why aren’t news organizations — or at least individual writers and journalists — calling a spade a ding-danged shovel?

uh… who’s looking at your books?

I try to keep an eye on announcements by the federal government of Canada. Yes (sigh), even the announcement that the feds have launched BizPal in Muskoka. But there was nothing on my computer about Son of Chuckie’s latest.

Chuck Strahl, the Minister of Indian Affairs, announced new “value-for-money” audits which will, according to Sue Bailey at Canadian Press, “better track how Indian Affairs spends billions of dollars will catch misappropriation, lax reporting and – in rare cases – fraud.”

The emphasis here, of course, is not on Indian Affairs but on those pesky Indians their danged mai-tai sipping lifestyles.

Let us ignore for a moment that one of the biggest frauds in recent years in Indian country was actually organized and perpetrated by a senior civil servant in Ottawa’s Health Department.

Or that the Auditor-General of Canada slammed the Indian Affairs Department in 2002 for lack of or bizarre funding policies, and of ham-stringing band councils and Aboriginal organizations with multiple layers of audits that had some bands filing as many financial reports as days in a year.

Which raises interesting questions amongst we poor folk in the bushlands. We were just wondering how much the Federal Government wastes with its bizarre arrangements for program funding, in outstanding interest payments, or where the “value-for-money” is in such idiocy.

Y’see, this is how federal funding usually (often?) works in Indian country, and keep in mind that this applies for both new and continuing (year-to-year) programs:

• bands and organizations understand and rush to submit applications for funding on deadlines often set toward the end of the calendar year (around Xmas) for funding that should be approved and kick in by the beginning of the new fiscal year, April 1.
• Federal departments, though, sometimes (even often) change the program criteria and funding requirements even after the bands and organizations have had to submit their applications. The bands do so on assurances from Federal program officers that changes in policy likely, probably, hopefully will not affect their submission. No guarantees, of course.
• the Federal departments then consider the program and grant applications sometimes (perhaps often) without knowing what changes will be made to policies, program criteria or funding requirements. This process may take months, and months, and more months, while they wait for the highest levels of government to decide what to do.
• in the meantime, homes need to be built, schools need to operate, salaries for any number of people need to be paid, and this comes from lines of credit and loans that need to be arranged so ambulances continue to run and clinics keep operating. Who pays the interest on these loans and lines of credit? Sometimes this item is buried in the “miscellaneous” column, but often it must be taken out of regular program funding which may mean one less home or ambulance ride. But it certainly means more money to the banks.
• it is not unusual for programs to receive their “new” funding six, eight, ten months into the fiscal year. One group I’m familiar with received its funding one month before it was required to submit its final report at the end of that fiscal year.

So here are some questions:

1. this example deals only with Indian programs, and only in general terms. Does this or similar shenanigans take place in other federal departments as well?
2. how widespread do you think this problem is?
3. how much does the federal government’s idiocy (constantly changing funding requirements and late approval for funding) cost the Canadian taxpayer — not to mention the Aboriginal organization and programs?

do what I say, not what I do

A well-worn axiom in journalism holds that the truth is not to be found in the high sounding words of politicians, but in their actions.

Lately, we’ve been treated to the concerns expressed by the Conservative Government of PM Stephen Harper on the 26-year old exemption of the Indian Act from Canada’s Human Rights legislation. Is it just me, or does anyone else get just a wee bit anxious at the combination of those words into one single sentence?

The Conservatives recently passed a bill in Parliament to remove that exemption. It’s called Bill C-27, An Act to Amend the Human Rights Act. Why does it bother me? Why should it bother anyone else? Consider the following.

The exemption was originally allowed because there are so many discriminatory facets to the Indian Act and programs that have been designed for Aboriginal peoples, that it would take major revisions to other existing Canadian policies, laws, regulations and institutions to remove them. For example, Human Rights legislation is designed to protect individual rights. However, most Aboriginal rights are based on collective rights such as language, culture, territory, treaties and Indigenous nationality. Many programs and services deliberately discriminate FOR Aboriginal peoples as a means of overcoming centuries of discrimination AGAINST them. It’s called ameliorative programming.

Canada hasn’t been willing to change what it could, and removing the exemption with Bill C-27 will not solve anything. In fact, it will create division, undermine existing programs and services, and spark legal challenges but only to those who can afford it. Remember: the Conservatives killed the constitutional Court Challenges Program.

Those other guardians of Aboriginal rights, the Liberal Party of Canada, did not oppose Bill C-27 because nearly every bill the Harper Conservatives proposed in Parliament was billed as a “confidence” bill. Defeat of a “confidence” bill (similar to a confidence ploy, or a con) would result in an election — and the Liberals would rather dispose of their principles than risk an election.

Why so negative? Why can’t I trust the elected officials of Canada to do the right thing? Read on, McDuff.

I have something in common with the United Nations’ International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. We were both born in 1952. We have also been sort-of recognized by Canada — but not completely. I may explain about me sometime. Right now, let me explain how Canada has been selective in accepting only those parts of the Convention on Genocide that it likes, but not to other parts that it apparently does not like. It goes to why I am and must remain pessimistic of Canada and its politicians to ever do the right thing when it comes to Indigenous peoples.

A couple of years ago, I read an article by Pierre Loiselle at dominionpaper.ca. I don’t have a link anymore although I still keep a copy on my computer. The title was “Genocide, International Law & Canada’s ‘Indian Problem.’” Much of it was circumstantial, and hyperbolic. Still, it raised some interesting points.

The gist of the article was this:

The following parts of Article Two [of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide], which define the crime of genocide, were omitted from Canada’s Criminal Code after the Convention was ratified and became law in 1952:

• “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and,
• “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The writer and Dr. Roland Chrisjohn (then director of Native Studies at Trent University) concluded that the omissions of these two parts of the UN’s Convention from Canada’s own laws “are not a coincidence,” and “correspond directly to Canada’s official policy of abducting Native children and keeping them in residential school, where many were subject to gruesome and well-documented abuse and torture.”

They assert that the definition of genocide has changed over the years but always meant more than systematic, official, mass murder, such as the Holocaust of Jews in the Second World War. Genocide always meant, according to another writer, “a co-ordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.”

Earlier drafts of the Convention Against Genocide also included provisions for the creation of an international court and sanctions against “forcible citizenship,” opposed by both Canada and the United States, and eventually removed from the UN’s Convention at their insistence.

Article Two, which defines genocide as: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

I could argue all five, but the fifth one is a slam dunk,” says Chrisjohn. “There is absolutely no way Canada can deny that they legislated the transference of children from their parents to the church authorities.”

He could also argue, and does, that Canadians are complicit in a crime of genocide if they know about violations to the UN’s Convention but do nothing to end or prevent it.

Today, consider that Canada is once again part of an exclusive group of nation states that voted against another of the UN’s conventions — this time voting against the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples along with the U.S.A., Australia and New Zealand.

Thus my skepticism given Canada’s record in deciding things affecting the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and of the motivations of politicians wanting to do things over the objections of those affected.

yippee! it’s the year of the spud!

Thank goodness. It’s about time. Read all about it in this story at Indian Country Today:

NEW YORK – An ancient Bolivian legend tells the story of Choque, son of a Sapalla chief, who chose to resist the assault of the Kari invaders. To reward him for his courage, the gods sent Pachacamaj, who changed into a condor that delivered some tubers and a direction: allow the invaders to eat the visible plant and save the part that is below ground for the people. The potato, then, was the substance that fed them and helped them to regain their freedom.

This is one of the creation stories of the potato, which was first cultivated 7,000 years ago around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia by the Tihuanacu (the ancestors of the Aymaras, President Evo Morales’ people). The humble tuber helped sustain 500,000 Tihuanacus, and then the Huari people of what is now Peru, hundreds of years before the Incas took over.

What else to say: Whoo-hoo!!

yapping herds of chihuahua

That’s my impression of the reaction to Ryerson J-school prof John Miller’s writings about the complaint lodged with the B.C. Human Rights commission against “polemicist” Mark Steyn.

Steyn, if you don’t know or haven’t read Maclean’s magazine lately, published an excerpt from a book that made certain disparaging statements and claims about Muslims, such as an apparent secret plot to take over the world. Natch, the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like those thinly veiled accusations (pardon me for that) and thus their complaint against Steyn.

It’s all over the moronosphere as rightwingnutbars have taken up the cause with less and less fact forming the basis for their arguments, more and more paranoid delusions of state persecution and threats to their “free speech” (at least their wish for unchallenged vitriol and misinformation) generating something akin to hysteria, leading to ever-increasing nastiness against any and all who dare to disagree.

Thus my comparison of their online behaviours to a herd of yapping chihuahua; endless noise and nipping at heels by those masty little creatures (not to mention the trail of piss and shit they leave behind in their mindless stampede).

Don’t believe me? Just check out the reactions for yourself in comments to Miller’s assessment of Steyn’s writing at the Canadian Journalism Project which posted a submission that the B.C. HR Commission refused to accept. It makes me wonder how many of the folks leaving those comments are Canadian journos or j-students using pseudonyms – and if so exactly what they teach in j-schools these days? Because if their writing is any example, it can’t be spelling. Or clear, logical, concise writing.

An alternative theory might be that the rightwingnut universe has ID’d Miller – and his damned facts – as a threat to their propaganda and is going to gang-bang him at every instance. If that one pans out, then ya gotta love those idiots for their dedication to the protection of free speech.

Read on, McDuff!

your thoughts?

On Wednesday, June 11, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons to deliver an apology to Aboriginal peoples - in particular survivors of native residential schools – with these words:

“I stand before you, in this chamber so central to our life as a country, to apologize to aboriginal peoples for Canada’s role in the Indian residential schools system.

Mr. Speaker, I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history.

For over a century, the residential schools separated over 150,000 native children from their families and communities.”

Were you in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill, watching TV from home, listening to it on radio, reading about it the next day? What did you think? After a while to let things sink in a bit, what DO you think now?
Any thoughts?

Anybody?

I’ve grown up with these things and have seen them all over the province of Quebec. I’ve asked from time to time what they might be? What purpose do they serve? Who puts them at highway intersections? Why never in the cities? At least, I cannot remember ever seeing one in any large town or city.

Here’s a closer look at one just north of a town called Ste. Placide, north of the Ottawa River.

Any ideas?

apology industry? think again.

As a journalist, I grew up reading certain opinion writers (columnists) in Canadian and U.S. newspapers. I soon had my favourites. I also discovered how badly so many wrote; how prejudiced they could be, how little insight and perspective they put into their columns. Most of the columns seemed to be top of the head stuff that almost any knuckle-dragger could have written. They were that bad. Many still are.

One of my teachers wrote a book about the best – and the best known – of these opinion writers called “The Pundits.” He considered the best of them opinion leaders; writers who earned the trust of readers regardless of political leanings, social classes or jobs. Farmers, bus drivers and university profs read their columns because they cared what their country was doing in their names. Policy makers read them to see if their work made sense to average voters, or was just another brain fart.

Jeffery Simpson was rated highly in that book and on my personal list of faves, but not in top spot of either. He was – is – an intelligent person and a good writer. He writes with intelligence, and sometimes flair, but IMHO is fundamentally lazy. He wants to belong. He wants to be liked, even loved, and respected. This is where so many columnists lose me.

I believe a good columnist should care more about the long-term effects of what he or she writes. How do their words capture the mood of the country, explain the actions of the powerful. Do they show whether the emperor is naked or wearing women’s panties beneath that three-piece suit? Is the columnist just filling space, writing what they hope will be read and liked because real opinions lead to cancelled dinner invitations. Should a good columnist care about any of that shit?

I bring this up because, while catching up on things Canadian, one of Simpson’s columns caught my eye. It has bothered me since. At the end of May, Simpson wrote a column on “the apology industry.” It was sparked no doubt by the so-called Aboriginal truth and reconciliation exercise that is about to take off here in Canada, and a formal apology that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will make to Aboriginal peoples on behalf of this country for the damage caused to them by the federal native residential school systems.

Simpson take is in the first three paragraphs:

We were told 20 years ago, in 1988, that the apology would be the last because the injustice was the worst.

So declared then-prime minister Brian Mulroney in offering an apology, payments and a community fund for Japanese-Canadians interned during the Second World War. This was a terrible abuse, the prime minister said. It was a unique case. There would be no more.

Prime minister Pierre Trudeau, when previously pressed to do likewise, had resisted, arguing that we can only be just in our time and that once an apology (and more) was given for this or that historical event, there would be no end of demands for others.

Sure enough, writes Simpson, next came the Chinese-Canadians, the Ukrainian-Canadians, and the Italian-Canadians, all seeking compensation for the damages wreaked upon them by – and this is Simpson’s argument – past Canadian governments.

Simpsons writes how the Liberals went one step further than mere compensation when Chinese-Canadians pressured former PM Paul Martin, in the heat of an election, to issue an apology as well. The Conservative Party under Harper are now negotiating a package – and an apology – for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident when Canada denied entry to 376 Sikhs on board a stinking freighter in Vancouver harbour for weeks using immigration laws of the day to justify this little bit of racial bigotry.

That last bit is mine. Nowhere in Simpson’s column does the issue of racial discrimination take place, official or otherwise. It’s all rather sanitary. Just bad luck to be born at the wrong place, wrong time. Righty-o? Time to get on with your lives so we can get back to our rightful places in the scheme of things. Apparently, all of these events had nothing to do with systemic racism entrenched in policies of the past that continue to adversely affect people to this day.

This is what grates. The overwhelming sense of denial. Simpson criticizes an “apology/victimization industry” without bothering to ask a crucial question: Who victimized them? Where did this almost divine sense of entitlement by one race over others come from? Didn’t the governments of the day have any responsibility whatsoever to live up to the fine words they wrote in their hallowed documents and etched upon the facades of their cherished institutions? Or was it all a big boo-boo?

Simpson is wrong. It isn’t an industry of apology and victimization that’s the problem. The problem is this overwhelming attitude today in government – and the media, including its newspaper columnists – to shy away from uncomfortable questions that might require some serious soul-searching on Canada’s part. The real problem is with the Hypocrisy/Denial industries that exert themselves today, still based on past – and false – assumptions.

It is so easy to slam the apology that Harper is about to make to residential school survivors – and they are survivors in every sense of the word. They deserve an apology for the deliberate, thoroughly considered decision by this country to obliterate the langauges, cultures and independence of Indigenous peoples living within its boundaries.

The compensation paid to the survivors is as much for Canada’s bureaucrats, who continue to push their agendas upon Aboriginal peoples. It serves as a warning, similar to damages awarded by civil courts, to remind them that they must not ever again devise such odious policies that seek to destroy entire nations of peoples.