Had I been there, I would have reminded this crowd that the multibillion-dollar company that owns their news organization muzzles stories from entire parts of the world, such as South America and Africa, each and every night of the year by not having any journalists posted there. When will they get around to discussing that form of media “censorship”?
This was written by Tony Burman, former news director of the CBC (now with al-Jazeera), referring to certain news outlets congratulating themselves for showing the controversial Muhammad cartoons that originated in Denmark a couple of years ago.
I shoved aside Burman's quote and forgot about the subject for a while. Then, while perusing the latest edition of the CAJ's Media magazine, I found a column - page 30 of this PDF link - along the same lines.
Even setting aside my complaints about today's 'news' being mostly entertainment and fluff, and the idea that what is actually reported is manipulated by corporate interests, news *still* isn't what's actually important. It's what seems important based on the resources the news organization has at their disposal.
As mentioned in the Media article, CTV currently operates six foreign news bureaus - Washington, Los Angeles, London, Beijing, New Delhi/Kandahar, and Jerusalem. CBC has nine (not sure on their locations), which is an improvement - but it's still not enough.
When the Taj hotel in Mumbai was taken hostage in December, CTV had to send a reporter from Beijing to cover it - CBC sending someone from Vancouver. Nearly any events that take place in Europe are reported on by Tom Kennedy (CTV) or Adrienne Arsenault (CBC)...but neither of them ever leave London to do this, they just take whatever footage they can find in their office, and report on it from thousands of kilometres away. South America and Australia are complete unknowns, Africa mostly the same (CBC has David McGuffin travelling around the continent, one CTV website lists Murray Oliver as a Kampala bureau chief, but that bureau's been closed and Murray in Winnipeg for a good couple of years).
In 2001, CTV announced that they were opening several new bureaus - you can find that announcement somewhere in this press release. Before this announcement, they had five bureaus - after it, ten. Now they're down to six, having closed Kampala, Moscow, Sydney, and Mexico City - four parts of the world which now cannot have their stories told on CTV.
It's not because of the economy - I've been watching CTV News (almost) daily for about three years now, and I never once saw a report from any of those closed bureaus. The economy was fine back then. (Even if that were the problem, I think that at least CBC should put informing the public ahead of making a profit, but that's another argument for another day.)
And it's not that there aren't stories to tell in these places. CBC regularly airs documentaries shot by their foreign correspondents in different parts of the world - either Adrienne Arsenault or Brian Stewart was in Rome recently. The caveat is that all these stories have an underlying tone of "this is going on in a part of the world we know nothing about". In this day and age, with 21st-century technology, there is no excuse for us not knowing about life in the streets of Rome. There is no excuse for us not knowing why students might be rioting in Paris. There is no excuse for us being unable to name anything that's happened in Australia since the Olympics.
Washington. Los Angeles. Mexico City. Rio de Janiero. London. Paris. Rome (or Berlin). Moscow. Jerusalem. Johannesburg. Kampala. Kabul. Mumbai. Beijing. Sydney. Bangkok.
Seventeen foreign bureaus is a lot, absolutely. And obviously some would be negotiable (Kabul could be replaced by somewhere in Pakistan, perhaps). But with that many reporters out there in the world, Canadians would be well-served. I think they'd like to watch a network that's doing something other than reporting on how cold it is in Winnipeg.
All three major networks are trying to do something to stand out from the other two in their news coverage. Why not beef up the foreign content? It worked in the United States - proud Canadian (and CTV alumnus) Peter Jennings led a revolutionary amount of global reporting that catapulted ABC to the top of the American news heap. Be the only Canadian media presence in these cities, and you'll be bringing back stories that none of your competition has. The ratings increase will pay of the extra cost of a few reporters.
--Ryan
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