By R John Hayes
Windspeaker Staff WriterThe picture is an ugly one: a horde of reporters descends on the unsuspecting people on an isolated reserve. Their reports are at best only somewhat accurate, not respecting the people or the traditions of the place as they deserve. The people are celebrities for 24 hours, non-entities thereafter. "Old news," they are called. The rest of the country remembers the tiny community as "the place where there was that blockade," or "the place where that Native guy was killed."
How true is this picture? Is the media insensitive to Native issues? Or, as some have suggested, are they so afraid of offending that they don't cover Native issues much, and when they do they don't do it in any depth?
"There is often the perception that journalists behave in a callous manner, and this extends beyond the Native community," said Tom Arnold, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists and a reporter with the Edmonton Journal. "I think it's a perception that journalists float into town, trample on people's feelings, then leave onto the next big story."
Arnold explained that, as far as he is concerned, it isn't that way: most of the journalists he knows are caring and sensitive, but that is mitigated by the requirement that they get a story and by the time constraints placed upon them by deadlines.
"They need information, and they need it now," he said. "I'm not sure that it's a question of insensitivity or of ignorance, but I do know that journalists who approach situations in Native communities, where they have little or no experience, don't know how to do so without offending people, so they are extremely careful in their search for information and access."
Arnold agreed that a timid reporter - one too afraid of stepping on toes - is just as much a danger as an over-aggressive reporter.
"In that case, their [timidity] certainly impairs the quality of information elicited and provided in the articles," he said. "A reporter doing one or two stories in Native communities a year can't provide an accurate context for the reader about a blockade or a protest or whatever. The article will create a sort of false sense of what is really going on for the broadest readership about the Aboriginal community."
"The attitude really depends on the reporter who's covering the story," said Judi Halfe-Phillips, host of Edmonton-based ITV shows Health Matters and First Nations Now. "Bonnie Fox, for example, goes in with a really good attitude, but some of the others go in with preconceived ideas and you can see them fighting, unsuccessfully, to do the story fairly."
Halfe-Phillips said that she'd encountered both racism and ignorance, in reporters and even in her role at the television station.
"They kind of feed off each other," she said, "but as people get to know me, and they come to show a little more interest and compassion, they're being educated whether they like it or not about Native people."
She said that she loves her job in television, but is very aware of one reason that her show on Native affairs is produced at all.
"The show is a completely token show. It's part of their CRTC licensing position," she said. "I was hired basically because I hold a token position. I was told that I wouldn't be on the Native beat because we don't cover it because the viewers aren't interested. Native people in the mainstream media can't really help, either, because the other people just aren't interested."
Halfe-Phillips said that she's limited in the most effective way now - she has almost no budget to put together her half-hour show. She ends up doing most of the work herself, and she has a set that "we just wheel out and then, when we're done, we just wheel it away again. It doesn't look very good."
Halfe-Phillips said that, when TV reporters do deal with Aboriginal stories, they are mostly quite insensitive to the effect the incident covered and their coverage of it will have on the community.
Alan Moore of the award-winning Lac du Flambeau News, a monthly Native American newspaper published in Wisconsin, agreed.
"There's definitely an insensitivity in the mainstream media," he said. "They're often insensitive, occasionally over-sensitive, too often downright ignorant.
"The larger papers will at least try to get comment from Native Americans, although they may misuse it," he continued. "Often, local papers don't look deeply at research, for example, and they seldom look behind a negative story for the agenda of the company or organization pushing it."
Moore said that the root cause of much of the problem is, as he sees it, a basic misunderstanding of Native American history. Manifest destiny, he said, has not been questioned in the mainstream media, although the Native media has been more responsible in its reportage, but altogether it doesn't have the reach of even one big-city daily.
"I think racism is a learned behavior and a lot of people have learned it around here lately. It is like any other dysfunctional behavior in that it's handed on generation-to-generation," he said. "Basically, though, in the media you have to go on a case-by-case basis."
Doug Cut Hand, an independent film producer and columnist with the Regina Leader-Post, agrees.
"The example that stands out to everybody these days is the murder trial where the headlines blared 'Two Young Men Charged for Killing Prostitute,'" he said. "It was so easy to dismiss the victim - a Native single mother - with the word 'prostitute,' but she wasn't a regular prostitute. There was evidence that she'd only done it once or twice. The coverage was callous and hurtful - and typical."
Cut Hand said the coverage of that particular story varied widely, and that shows how each story has to be judged on its own merits.
"The Globe & Mail covered it quite well, describing her as a 'mother of two,'" he said. "The stories by the [Saskatoon] Star-Phoenix and the Leader-Post - that side of the coverage really stank, but after the verdict the Star-Phoenix wrote a very good editorial on the issue. Trevor Sutter of the Leader-Post did a very balanced story two years ago that revealed the person, too.
"Over all, I'd say that there's been a change in the last few years," he continued, "and reporters have become more sensitive, more aware of Native issues."
John C. Whittaker, a professor of anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa, believes that there are cases in which editors have become too sensitive. He candidly confronts both insensitivity and hyper-sensitivity with what he sees as fact.
"It's harder for a mainstream media person to criticize the minorities that it is to criticize, say, the religious right," he said. "I think that they are a bit intimidated to be critical. I see this in my students, who seem to feel that criticizing an idea leads to questioning the moral integrity of the person who put the idea forward. I try to make them able to separate the ideas from the people."
Whittaker panned Vine Deloria Jr.'s Red Earth, White Lies in a recent issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, an American bi-monthly magazine. The article included comments such as: "[Deloria's] basic theme is that science is flawed, and Native traditions offer a better way to understand the world." Whittaker called the book "a wretched piece of Native American creationist claptrap that has all the flaws of the Biblical creationists he disdains." He said that the mainstream media would be reluctant to print such a review because of the prevailing uncritical orthodoxy.
"I tried to treat this the way I would treat any other crackpot," he said. "I attempt to treat the Native American sacred beliefs with the same respect due to any religion, but when those beliefs are misused to undermine geology, you have to draw the line."
The review is meticulous in its criticism, giving careful and clear reaction to the ideas, not the author, although Whittaker does take a few shots at Deloria: "Deloria's style is drearily familiar to anyone who has read the Biblical creationist literature," he wrote. "At the core is a wishful attempt to discredit all science because some facts clash with belief systems. A few points will suffice to show how similar Deloria is to outspoken creationist author Duane Gish or any of his ilk."
"I think Deloria as a scholar must be aware that he is not arguing honestly" in the book, Whittaker said. Does it say something about the media that Whittaker said he wouldn't have been able to publish his review elsewhere?