Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 10 - Evidence - May 27, 2003
OTTAWA, Tuesday, May 27, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:34 a.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I would like to give a warm welcome to our witness.
[Translation]
The committee is examining the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent, and diverse, in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years — notably, globalisation, technological change, convergence, and increased concentration of ownership.
[English]
Today, we welcome professor Donna Logan, director of the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. Professor Logan has had an extensive and illustrious career in print and broadcasting and has held several senior executive positions with the CBC. She has taught at a number of academic institutions in Canada and abroad and sits on the board of numerous organizations related to journalism.
Professor Logan, we look forward to your introductory remarks and when you have concluded, we will go to questions and comments.
Ms. Donna Logan, Director, School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, as an individual: Thank you, honourable senators, for inviting me to appear before you today. The mandate of this committee is a broad one. You have already heard from a vast array of practitioners and experts about myriad subjects pertaining to the state of the media in Canada. The perspective that I bring to this discussion is that of a woman who has lived from coast to coast in Canada and worked in print and broadcasting, in both the private and public sector, and lately, in journalism education.
I have read the transcripts of this committee's hearings to date. It appears that much of the discussion has centred on ownership and content. What we have learned, from previous inquiries into the state of the media in this country, is that government can do very little about either of these issues. Davey, Kent and others made recommendations in these areas, with few consequences. For the media to perform its role in a functioning democracy, it must be free and independent. Hence, government attempts to control ownership and content will always meet with resistance.
However, if you believe that the media is a public trust and that the well-being of democracy depends on people being sufficiently well-informed to make intelligent decisions about their lives and about their country, then government bodies such as this one ought to examine, from time to time, the degree to which media is fulfilling that role. The mere exercise of having the discussion has a value in and of itself. Beyond that, the most useful role the Senate committee can play is to attempt to make recommendations that would create a framework in which a free and independent media offers a diversity of views to all Canadians. Rather than specific regulations about ownership or content, you should explore new ways of giving voice to groups that feel disenfranchised by the existing mainstream media. There are many ways to do that.
Before we go get into that discussion, permit me to say a few words about the position of Canada's media in an international context. During my time at CBC, I had the opportunity to work with or train journalists in the U.S., Mexico, Europe — both old and new — and Africa. My conclusion from that experience was similar to what others have said before me: The media model developed in this country is probably the best in the world. The combination of public and private ownership in broadcasting is the envy of many countries. I have not changed my view of our system since leaving CBC six years ago, but the system itself has undergone cathartic change in that period — some of it good, some of it not so good.
On the positive side of the ledger are the explosion of cable TV and the growth of the Internet. Both these developments go a long way toward addressing the concerns about diversity raised when one owner owns too many properties. The downside is that these developments have led to fragmentation of audiences, making it more difficult for the media to exercise its traditional role of consensus building in a democratic society.
The other major development in roughly the same time period has been the emergence of converged ownership. Technology has driven both fragmentation and converged ownership. Almost limitless channel capacity spawned fragmentation, which, in turn, meant that owners had to reaggregate the fragments of audience to maintain economies of scale. This means that because newspaper circulation has been trending downward for several years, owners have to find new outlets in hoping of amassing audiences in sufficient numbers to cover rising costs. Anyone recommending that cross ownership be rolled back needs to keep this in mind.
The other development to be taken into consideration in assessing the present — and especially in determining future needs — is the emergence of the Internet as a media player. Working with young graduate students, mostly in their early 20s, has put me in the fortunate position of being able to appreciate how far-reaching the impact of this phenomenon is. One of the students at the UBC School of Journalism this past year did a study on news habits of people in their early 20s. He found they spend as much time gathering news as previous generations, but they do it almost exclusively on the Internet. They read newspapers, watch television and even listen to radio on the Net. They look at traditional sites, but they also look at a lot of alternate sites, and they rely on CNN, NSNBC and Google News for quick hits of international news. The reason they go to the Net for news is that they have grown up wanting the news when they want it and they do not want to pay for it.
The other interesting finding was that young people feel mainstream media is not addressing their interests and needs and that they have a much better chance of finding the information and news they want on the Net. As a result of globalization and the easy access to information, their focus is much different from that of most people in this room at a similar age. They may not be able to rhyme off the names of all Canadian premiers, but they probably know a lot more about Asia and Africa than we did at their ages. Many of my students had already travelled extensively in the Third World before entering the school.
The final factor that has changed the media world in Canada in recent years is the diminution of the public broadcaster because of funding cuts. Private owners have argued that, as their sector becomes stronger and technology makes it possible for them to easily reach all Canadians, the need for a public broadcaster is obviated. I would argue exactly the opposite. The more concentrated the public sector becomes, the more crucial it is to have a strong public broadcaster, without the constraints of commercialism, as a means of guaranteeing that a diversity of views will be heard and Canadian stories will be told. You have already heard from other witnesses how much better funded the BBC is on a per capita basis to provide fewer services, in fewer languages, in a country with one time zone. The CBC is stretched too thin to perform the role expected of it, especially as a counterbalance to the burgeoning private sector.
The tragedy about all these developments — the explosion of cable TV, the convergence of ownership, the emergence of the Internet and the diminution of public broadcasting — is that we have very little empirical data about their impact. Unlike the U.S., Canada does not have a Pew Center, a Poynter Institute or a Freedom Forum to study these issues. Do we really know what impact ownership has on content? Many rant and rail, there are opinions and anecdotes; but the hard evidence is just not there.
In a modest way, the UBC School of Journalism, together with the York-Ryerson Graduate Program in Culture and Communications and the Centre d'études sur les médias at Laval, has recently begun to study some of the issues surrounding the media in Canada. Funded by a public benefit from Bell Globemedia, we have just launched our first major research study to will examine credibility in Canadian journalism. We hope to go into the field in the fall of this year with a comprehensive survey, and to produce results and analysis early in 2004.
This is a beginning but much more needs to be done. The media industry in Canada has never paid enough attention to research and development. They do countless market studies but they do not do much research about what is happening in their own industry. There are precious few mid-career scholarships for journalists; financial support for courses and further study is truly spotty. Training is excellent at the CBC, but in the private sector, few can make that claim. Why is this? All these things would seem to be an investment in the future prosperity of the product. Can some means be found to encourage this kind of activity among owners — increased tax incentives, perhaps?
This leads me to the design of a framework that would encourage independent and responsible media in this country. Coming up with ways to encourage media owners to invest more in research and development is one way, but there are many other things that can and should be done. It has often been said that the media — with the exception of the CBC — is a public trust in the hands of private owners. To me, this implies responsibilities not only for the owners, but also for the journalists, journalism educators and for the public.
We need better data so the debate about the media will be better informed and less polemic. This committee should have funds to commission research but, more important, there should be permanent centres and institutes to study the central issues of the day. This would allow work to be done on developing ways to quantify and measure media performance and to publish yearly results.
In the U.S., there exists the Committee of Concerned Journalists that has a research arm called ``Project for Excellence in Journalism.'' It is led by some of the best-known journalists and is associated with the Columbia School of Journalism in New York. Its activities are underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation. It conducts research, does content studies and sponsors books on journalism. Through these efforts, the organization is engaged in pressing for journalism reform. They have an excellent Web site at www.journalism.org.
The Canadian Journalism Foundation is making a somewhat similar, but more modest, attempt in Canada; and the Canadian Association of Journalists has made some admirable efforts to provide training for its members. The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is also active in this realm. The problem — as always in a country of this size — is that they all lack the funding needed to make a significant impact. Perhaps the committee could look at ways to provide stable ongoing funding for these organizations, so they could become an effective part of the framework we are discussing.
I have just come from attending the 25th annual conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists in Toronto. For two-and-a-half days, journalists could choose from among seminars on 63 different topics dealing with the craft and the industry. It was all organized by volunteers and the discussions were excellent. This group is supported mainly by the large owners in the industry, with the exception of CanWest Global, which refuses to fund the organization. The CAJ is naturally reluctant to seek government funding, but some way must be found to allow them to continue and expand the work they are doing. Perhaps this committee could explore how this might be done.
What is the responsibility of the public in all of this? Ideally, the business community and concerned citizens should be willing to fund organizations like the CJF, the CAJ and the Friends, but I am not counting on that happening any time soon. The public is clearly interested in better mechanisms of accountability. This committee might want to explore what those might be. The press councils grew out of the Davey report. They obviously do some good work, but they are of limited value. Most people do not know about them; some provinces do not have them; and their powers to hold owners and journalists accountable are inadequate.
Could the committee make recommendations that would strengthen their role or suggest an alternative? One previous witness suggested a national ombudsman; while it is a daunting thought, it might work if the mandate remained complaint-based and did not attempt to do more.
Other accountability mechanisms that might be looked at or recommended are regular articles in newspapers and programs in broadcasting that provide interactivity between the people who create the news and those who consume it. Some of this has been tried in the U.S. and the U.K. and, to a limited extent, here in Canada. Web sites can also be used for this purpose. It amazes me that they are not. Most media sites invite people to e-mail or participate in opinion surveys but there is little in the way of on-line interactive fora.
I would like to make two more points that need to be considered in designing a framework that allows a variety of voices to be heard. Not much has been said thus far in these hearings about the ethnic press and the alternate media in this country. What is their role in this debate? One-third of the greater Vancouver population is Asian. Two daily newspapers and two — soon to be three — television stations, plus a number of radio stations compete to serve them. Arguably, the Asian community has more choice than the English-speaking community when it comes to daily print media. Yet, when the Vancouver situation is discussed, the role of the ethnic media is rarely included. Alternate papers such as the Georgia Straight or community papers — which are thriving — are also excluded from the discussion, yet they are not all owned by CanWest. Hollinger and David Black — not to be confused with Conrad — own several papers in B.C., some of which are daily.
Vancouver is not the only city with a vital ethnic media. In fact, it has become so important in Canada that The Toronto Star now owns 49 per cent of Sing Tao newspapers in Canada.
Any framework for the future needs to include a revitalized public sector particularly the CBC. It needs more resources to provide good investigative journalism, top quality Canadian drama and comedy, and comprehensive local coverage. New money should be targeted to these ends and should not be spent on acquiring additional broadcast rights for professional sports. That way, the public broadcaster becomes a stronger counterweight to the private sector — particularly in those places where one owner controls both newspaper and television outlets. The problem of diversity is most acute at the local level. There are many choices on national and international stories, so the CBC must continue to provide strong local coverage. It must also be given money to expand its Web site so that it could truly become the public newspaper that some have suggested here.
Of course, this raises the question of cross-ownership and why it is acceptable in the public sector but not in the private sector. The CBC has owned both radio and television for years and now it has a highly successful Web site. It has recently amalgamated all of its news operations. The obvious difference between public and private is the commercial imperative, but does the lack of the need to make money guarantee a diversity of views? Not necessarily. Trying to combine radio and television news runs the risk of weakening the more successful service — that is, radio. That is because the cultures are very different and the demands of TV are bound to take precedence. The CBC is mandated as a full-service broadcaster and, therefore, should be discussing such changes with the public through the CRTC or other means. Instead, it is my understanding that it was all done behind closed doors without consultation of the people responsible for producing the news. In fact, the CBC has gone one step further than the private sector. It has merged the management structure of two different media — which is something that the CRTC expressly forbade Bell Globemedia and CanWest from doing.
The irony in all of this is that even if this committee were to recommend that cross-ownership be disallowed, it would not change the print situation in Vancouver where both English dailies have the same owner.
I have tried to show that the answer does not lie in regulating ownership or in interfering with content. If we truly want a free and independent media that is responsive and responsible, we need a concerted commitment and effort from all parties concerned to create greater knowledge and awareness of the issues, better training and support for journalists and more accountability. As Lee C. Bollinger, President of Colombia University, said recently in a statement discussing journalism education:
There is nothing inherently inconsistent about good journalism operating in a market. Capitalism is a well- proven method of serving public needs and preferences, both for goods and services and for information. But like any system, its advantages turn into harms unless moderated by an internalized value system.
It is time to examine and reinforce the value system. I have tried to suggest some ways that could be done.
The Chairman: Ms. Logan, I understand that you have already told the staff that you will try to obtain a copy of the student's study on young people's news. We would be grateful for the ongoing — and certainly final — results of the credibility study that you mentioned would be finished early next year. That sounds like interesting work.
Ms. Logan: I will send the proposal. I have another study on young people working in newsrooms and the lack of opportunity for young people to penetrate newsrooms, which I think might be helpful, as well.
Senator Graham: Ms. Logan, you raised many interesting points about issues that should be considered by the committee. You said that the media model developed in Canada is the best in the world. Could you elaborate on what you mean by ``model''?
Ms. Logan: The model simply means the way in which our system has been designed.
Senator Graham: Is that by accident or by design?
Ms. Logan: It was an evolution, I suppose. What distinguishes it, in my mind, from other systems around the world is the balance that exists between public and private. In the U.K. for many years, the public broadcaster was simply dominant and is still very strong. In Canada, we have effected a balance that many people think is quite healthy, or was quite healthy.
Senator Graham: Do you think that there is balanced coverage on all public issues?
Ms. Logan: I find it difficult to answer an omnibus question such as that. Obviously, there are many problems with coverage of most issues. It depends on how many papers you read, how many television programs you see or how much information you find on the net, whether you have a balanced picture of all public issues.
People make the mistake of expecting each media source to be balanced in and of itself. I think that we are becoming more media literate and we are beginning to realize that you do not receive total balance from any single outlet; you must use a variety of sources and make up your own mind.
Senator Graham: Do you think the media has a responsibility in terms of education? I am not talking about educating employees or journalists to be good reporters or interviewers or broadcasters, but simply about the broader terms of educating the public.
Ms. Logan: Yes. Many issues could be better explained and there could be more educational value added to much of the coverage to make people aware of why it is important and why a situation that is not happening in their own country or in their own backyard is important to them. The media makes many assumptions that the readers, listeners and viewers know where countries are when they suddenly pop into the news and what the backgrounds of those countries are. Much of that background is sometimes not there. From that point view the media could do a better job on the educative side.
Senator Graham: You undoubtedly read the terms of reference under which we are operating. We are looking at ``the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating there to.'' Is there anything in there that you would change or add?
Ms. Logan: I would have to think about that. It is a very all-encompassing mandate. I find it difficult on the spur of the moment to suggest anything to add.
Senator Graham: Perhaps it is an unfair question.
Senator LaPierre: It seems to me that one of the one of the problems we have had in this country in determining the quality of the print media has to do with the notion of freedom of the press. We have been told that freedom of the press is vested in the owner. This was declared solemnly at the McGill Institute for Canadian Studies, for instance, in their last conference.
However, I would like you to think seriously about the fact of section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the Canadian people, which lists categorically that every citizen is entitled to, among other rights, freedom of opinion, which includes freedom of the press and other such media. Consequently, I have concluded that freedom of the press is vested in me, and not in the owners. It is not vested in the professionalism of the journalists. It is vested in me. Therefore, I have a fundamental responsibility in living the concept of freedom of the press.
Most people do not know how to do that. The Canadian public is excluded from its capacity to exercise its fundamental right in freedom of the press, which is inevitable in terms of freedom of opinion. It is basic to the freedom of opinion that you have a variety of opinions available to you from which to exercise a fundamental freedom of the press that is inherent. Does that make any sense?
Ms. Logan: Absolutely. It has always puzzled me that Canadians spend a lot of time complaining about the press and its performance. I am sure any of the journalists in the room could tell us stories similar to those I have encountered. People constantly complain about some experience that they may have had with the press. When you ask them: What did you do about it? Did you phone the editor? Did you write a letter? Did you go to the press council?'' They usually say ``no.''
I have never been able to figure out why that is and why Canadians do not feel more engaged in this exercise of freedom of the press. If it is a fundamental right of every human being in our society — which I believe it is, as do you — you have to engage. I was trying to suggest in my remarks that there need to be better mechanisms for that to happen. Perhaps the Internet will help. Perhaps there should be an ombudsman for the written press. It could be confined to the written press, if you feel that is the principal problem area.
Senator LaPierre: An individual has several instruments for exercising freedom of the press. One instrument is to cancel his or her subscription to the newspaper or magazine. The second is to write letters to the editor. However, at the end of the day, the editor chooses the letters. I have not seen, for example, in the Ottawa Citizen many letters to the editor that have taken a compassionate position on the Palestinian question. I have seen an enormous number of letters taking a compassionate approach to the Jewish position. Consequently, the freedom of the press that I have in terms of complaining is under the responsibility of the editor. The third instrument is to write to the council that is supposed to look after that. However, that takes an enormous amount of time.
The idea that you have given to us about the ombudsman, which has been given to us by someone else as well, is of great importance. Would you elaborate on the Freedom Forum that you mentioned?
Ms. Logan: The Freedom Forum is an organization funded by foundations in the United States. It had offices in Britain. I do not know whether it still does. It had a huge budget crunch a year ago and greatly reduced its operations.
They had fora and studies all over the country. I have been to many meetings. I am sure other people in the room have as well. They dealt with issues of this in a public way. They have a very good Web site at www.freedomforum.org, where there is constant discussion. Papers written on issues affecting the daily media are posted there as well.
Senator LaPierre: Could we get some documentation on that Freedom Forum?
Ms. Logan: They were looking for a partner in Canada about five years ago. It was when I was starting at UBC. I was anxious to be that partner, but I was not in the position at the time because the school was just starting, and we had no track record. They had some discussions with the University of Toronto. I do not know what came of that. However, I must say that they do excellent work and that kind of development should be encouraged.
I should have included this in my remarks. I always thought that media literacy courses in school would be a good idea because people do not know enough about how the media functions, its history, and how to read and evaluate the media. There are some scattered courses in school programs across the country. However, a more concentrated effort in media literacy would go a long way.
Senator LaPierre: I wanted to talk about the Internet and the marketplace of ideas, but I will wait, Madam Chairman.
Senator Merchant: I am interested in the engagement that Senator LaPierre mentioned. It is more difficult for visible minorities and ethnic groups to engage. As newcomers to this country — I was a newcomer myself 40 years ago — it is difficult to want to jump into something like that. We are timid because we are not quite sure whether we are able to engage and whether we might attract more attention to ourselves if we do so. Visible minorities have a feeling that the media frequently portrays them in a poor light. They want to make changes but they do not know how to go about it.
Have you run into that? Do you think they are at a disadvantage because they are newcomers? As they try to fit in, they are trying not to draw so much attention to themselves.
Ms. Logan: Yes, I have seen all of that. What you say is largely true. Organizations, private broadcasters and newspapers do make some effort to meet with various groups in the community. In Vancouver, for example, the Vancouver Sun has made some forays into the Asian community. They did run a regular feature summarizing the editorials in the two Asian papers the Sing Tao Daily and the Mingpao. Unfortunately, this was not continued under the new editors. That bridged the gap — if you like — to some extent, but for whatever reason it was not continued.
There has to be an outreach. The public sector is much more inclined to do this sort of thing than is the private sector. If you talk to some of the marketers, they will say, ``It is not our audience. They do not read us. We are catering to the people who do.'' The onus for this sort of thing is on the public sector, and while they do make some effort to reach out, it is probably not enough.
Senator Merchant: With regard to the public broadcaster, you talked about accountability. With private journalism, you can stop your paper or somehow have some control over how you spend your dollars. With a public broadcaster, how do you get some sense that you can hold them accountable? What can you do?
Among the CBC listeners I have talked to, there appears to be a perception that the journalists have a certain bend — shall I say — that is more to the left than the right. Some people do not like that, because this is a public broadcaster and they would like to see more balance. They do not seem to feel they get enough balance from the public broadcaster.
How can the public hold a public broadcaster accountable? What can they do to feel they are getting their money's worth?
Ms. Logan: The public broadcaster is held accountable through the CRTC. Anyone can make a complaint to the CRTC. They have better accountability mechanisms than most media in the country. They have one of the few ombudsman in the country, who is doing a very good job and deals with all the complaints with a great deal of care and diligence.
They probably could do more. For instance, I read just in this morning's paper that tomorrow, in Toronto, the foreign correspondents are having a day-long session where people can go and interact with the correspondents. That is great for the people in Toronto, but more of that needs to happen across the country. They do have annual sessions where the public is invited. However, to be honest, that is more of a ``meet and greet'' than it is dealing with serious issues.
I am not as concerned about the lack of accountability at the public sector as I am in the private sector. The public sector, because of the ombudsman and the CRTC, perhaps is more accountable than the private.
Senator Merchant: I am sure you are correct, but the public perception is that they do not have a say in how the CBC is run. It takes a bit of engagement and sophistication. People complain, but they do not do anything about it. May I tell what you they do? They do not listen to it. They just do not listen to the CBC. They say, ``I do not listen to it. When I listen to it, I get angry, so I do not tune in. Why should I put tax dollars into that broadcaster?''
It is a frustration that people feel. I do not know what the answer is.
Ms. Logan: I grant you that there should be a broader spectrum. Diversity is just as important in the public sector as it is in the private sector. That is what I was trying to say in my remarks. This integration of a news department is not something that will provide a greater diversity of voices. It will lead to fewer voices and there is some danger in that. That is a change that needed discussion with the public, and it did not happen.
The Chairman: You mentioned a student's study on how young people consider news. I was struck by your comment that people in their early twenties go to the net for news because they have grown up wanting news when they want it and not wanting to pay for it. Mother-in-law research, child research, suggests that you are right. All the young people I know, indeed most of the not-so-young people I know, would like to get their news for free.
However, the basis of that Canadian model to which you refer has been that people pay for news except for the CBC. All those Internet sites are provided by sources where people pay. If the young are truly no longer willing to pay for news and remain unwilling to pay for news as they age and the rest of us disappear, what does that mean?
Have you thought about the implications of those preferences for the Canadian model?
Ms. Logan: Of course I have. That does not mean that I have an answer. I suspect that it will not always be free on the Net. I believe that the Internet will become the vehicle of distribution for newspapers. I believe that will happen more and more. I think in the future there will still be a print version of the paper for the few people who want to read it that way, but distribution will gravitate to the Internet. As that happens, then I would think free access to all of those sites would end. The advertising will shift. You heard from previous witnesses about classified advertising shifting to the Internet. As that happens, it seems to me that it will no longer be free. This study, at this moment in time, says that students want their information free. I know that is true from just observing them.
The Chairman: One of our previous witnesses referred to some academic work that had been done and suggested that there is uniformity in the way journalism schools teach journalists about what news is and that if there are inadequacies or gaps in the way news is covered and transmitted to the public, it is in part because journalists are getting the same training. I do not think he was talking about ideology here — right wing versus left wing; I thought he was talking more about craft rules. The instinctive judgment about what is a story worth covering and what is not. How do you go about covering it and how you do not? Do you think that is true? If so, what should we do about it?
Ms. Logan: Well, I heard the statement. One of the things that annoys me about discussion of journalism schools is that they are lumped together as if they were all the same; they are not. There are a lot of journalism programs in community colleges. There are a lot of undergraduate programs, and there are a few graduate programs in this country. They are all very different. If you are suggesting that everybody believes that the news is the news — as I was once told by one of my editors — then there is a problem.
I have always believed in questioning the traditional definition of news, and I think it has evolved and changed. It needs to change again. Certainly, in our courses, we question traditional definitions of news and traditional ways of covering news. Adding context is very big on our agenda. It is kind of unfair to make a statement blanketing all journalism schools. There are journalism schools; and there are journalism schools. One of the ways of judging who is doing a good job and who is not, I guess, is to look at the graduates and see how they are doing.
The Chairman: Then you plead not guilty?
Ms. Logan: I teach some traditional news values and traditional news structures, but one of the reasons I am there is that I believe the definition of news needs to be re-examined.
Senator Phalen: In a recent interview, you suggested that this committee could look at the concentration of ownership and how bad it is, and that we can make recommendations for banning cross-ownership. It has been 20 years since the two larger dailies in Vancouver have come under the same ownership. I am wondering if you could give us some concrete examples of what problems that has caused?
Ms. Logan: I do not know what interview you are citing, because I do not remember saying that.
The Chairman: Perhaps you could address yourself to the fundamental issue of living in Vancouver.
Ms. Logan: In Vancouver, as I am sure you are all aware, both dailies — the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province — and the largest television station, CH TV are owned by CanWest Global. The acquisition of the television station is relatively recent, but the situation with the daily newspaper, as you pointed out, has existed for some 20 years. I think it is longer than that; I believe it was actually one of the reasons that the Kent Commission was set up.
There is no problem on the television side. There is plenty of choice on the television side because you have CBC, CTV, and Citytv, which is the CHUM operation; then there are all of the others stations that I mentioned earlier on the ethnic side. The choice in television is there.
The problem is in print — in having one owner of two papers essentially espousing similar views. The papers are different; they have different audiences. There is no question about that. However, in terms of their outlook and political leaning, they speak with one voice. That is a problem. I mentioned that we have the Georgia Straight, which does a very good job, but it is a weekly. The number of choices in print is small.
Print is not the major source of news for most people in Vancouver. The numbers of the circulation, as I mentioned, is trending down and that situation does lead to frustration. For example, the referendum on the Olympics, both the Vancouver Province and the Vancouver Sun were overwhelmingly in favour of this event — they were almost cheerleading. The people who were against it — and there were a considerable number — were frustrated because they felt they could not get the coverage. They did not have an outlet in print that could represent their views to the public. That is the kind of situation that comes up frequently.
The Chairman: We did find the transcript of the CBC Radio interview on May 13. According to the transcripts we have, you were saying that we should travel and do some research. We should, ``Get out here to Vancouver, because it is refuted to be the most concentrated ownership across the country ... If they are interested in that they ought to be here seeing it first hand.'' You said, ``They can look at the situation and try to determine how bad it is. They can also make recommendations for banning cross-ownership, for example.''
I do not think you meant that necessarily as a recommendation. I think you were discussing the range of possibilities open to the committee, but nobody made up those words.
Ms. Logan: No, it was implied that I was advocating a ban on cross-ownership, which I was not.
Senator LaPierre: Madam, you had two things here. I should like to return to section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In order for me to have freedom of opinion, I must have access to a diversity of opinion. The Internet, of course, will provide me access to many forms of information. However, a great number of our people — perhaps a majority —do not have ready access to a computer. Second, many people do not know how to use a computer.
Furthermore, the broadband policy of the federal government, which was to cover all but 5 per cent of the country with a low satellite that everyone could access, appears to have diminished. Consequently, I think that the Internet — even though I do believe in it — is part of the future. We will have to deal with the fact that we are lacking that tool as a kind of universal national instrument at this particular moment. However, that is not what I need to talk to you about.
Most people have derided Patrick Watson for his public newspaper idea. They have argued that the CBC is there and all they have to do is to go to it. Furthermore, they have contended that print media is a sort of a sacred cow that no one can touch because it is there in the middle of the square and all you have to do is bow your head in respect towards it. I refuse to accept this idea.
You are disturbed by the fact that CBC radio and television are limiting a variety of news and expression of opinion because it is done largely for the news audience. Furthermore, we know that in many instances now in the writing press that the journalists sit down and write an article, then they go to the make-up room and put on make-up and they become a television star. They condense their article in a minute-and-a-half clip. That should be forbidden.
It seems to me that the print media is controlled through various laws that we already have. What is wrong with having a public newspaper, supported by Canadian taxpayers, available as another source of opinion that may differ dramatically from that expressed by the CBC? In other words, the purpose of our exercise in exercising our freedom of press is to increase the instruments that can propagate, not limit, ideas.
I think that Patrick Watson is a genius; he has made one of the most important recommendations to this committee so far.
Ms. Logan: I assume there is a finite amount of government funding that can go into the public sector of the media in this country. Given the fact that we have a broadcaster that is hobbled at this moment, I would be reluctant to support the idea of a public newspaper, even if I agreed in principle that it was a good idea.
I do not think we can afford it; that is my first point. Second, CBC has the potential to be that newspaper, but I believe that the CRTC was on to something when they forced the private sector to keep its management structures separate. I think the same applies to the CBC: If they are going to be in multimedia — in broadcasting, Internet, radio and television — if want to share their reporters — and forgive me if a print reporter wants to be a television personality — I do not see a lot wrong with that as long as it is managed separately. It is separate and distinct.
There is some advantage in having reporters use more than one medium for routine stories. It frees up other reporters to cover other stories that are ignored. It would be great if it worked that way; unfortunately, it does not. When they combing resources in the private sector, they shoot the other person out the door. That may be a function of the economic climate in which we find ourselves. Perhaps if it improved that would not happen.
On routine stories, I do not have a problem with using one reporter to do ``bimedial'' stories. If it meant that would broaden the news agenda — which is something I would dearly love to see happen — then it would be a good thing.
The Chairman: I thought it would be useful for our television audience to read the text of section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to which Senator LaPierre referred, for those who do not happen to have it. Section 2 says:
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Senator Graham: I am wondering if we could address a more practical question. That is, what is your assessment of the coverage of the war in Iraq by the Canadian media?
Ms. Logan: Are you referring specifically to the embedded reporters?
Senator Graham: Both. We had many embedded reporters from Canada. It seems to me they were freelancing in their method of operation.
Ms. Logan: Are you referring to all media — print, radio and television?
Senator Graham: Earlier, you talked about how the CBC is too stretched to counterbalance budgeting the private sector. It seems to me they did very well in stretching during the coverage of the war.
Ms. Logan: Oh, yes. I would agree with that.
However, because I worked there and managed the budgets, I found myself wondering what would not get covered as a result of the money that had to be spent doing a good job on the Iraq war. One of the things that always amazed me is we had no war chest — or at least CBC did not in those days, and I am assuming they still do not. When something like this comes along and it requires extraordinary expenditure, then everything else suffers. While I agree that a good job was done, I think it would probably be at the expense of a lot of other stories.
Senator Graham: Is this your assessment on the coverage generally by other Canadian media outlets and print in addition to the CBC? Did you follow it that much?
Ms. Logan: Of course, I did. I think by and large, that the Canadian media did a good job.
I did say earlier that I think you have to look at a lot of television and read a lot of newspapers before you get a total picture.
CanWest Global provided an example of where convergence worked. They used a lot of the print reporters on the television reports. Their coverage, on television in particular, was much enhanced by having the accessibility to the print people. Similarly, The Globe and Mail did a very good job. I certainly could quibble with some of it, but generally, I thought that the Canadian media acquitted itself very well.
You have not asked me about foreign ownership, but I found myself wondering, as I observed the coverage of the war, what it might have been like had the papers and the television networks in Canada been American owned.
Senator Graham: I would have asked if that were the case.
The Chairman: Professor Logan, this has been extremely interesting. Thank you very much. As you can see, we are frustrated that we have to cut this section off now. That is just the way committee life works. I expect we will be in touch with you again when we get to Vancouver.
Ms. Logan: You are most welcome.
[Translation]
The Chair: I welcome our next witnesses, Mr. Neil Seeman and Mr. Patrick Luciani, from the Fraser Institute of Vancouver.
[English]
Mr. Luciani is a Senior Fellow at the Institute. Mr. Seeman is the Director of the Canadian Statistical Assessment Service, which is operated by the Institute. It is my understanding that Mr. Seeman will make the introductory statement and that Mr. Luciani is here to participate in the question period that will follow that. Thank you both very much for joining us today.
Mr. Neil Seeman, Senior Policy Analyst and Director, Canadian Statistical Assessment Service, The Fraser Institute: It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to meet with you today. I am greatly honoured by the invitation. I would like to introduce my colleague, Patrick Luciani, who is a senior fellow at the institute. He is also an economist and is affiliated with Massey College at the University of Toronto.
I come to you in my position as Director of the Canadian Statistical Assessment Service, which is a project of The Fraser Institute and operates out of the institute's new offices in Toronto. A large part of our mandate is to encourage better coverage of public policy issues in the media, specifically, by studying how the media report on empirical research and communicate quantitative information. We also offer seminars to journalists and journalism students across the country. We work with an independent advisory board of economists, statisticians, scientists, epidemiologists, and other researchers in a wide variety of fields. I encourage those of you who are interested to visit our Web site, through which we disseminate some of our research, at www.canstats.org.
There is nothing quite like us in Canada. We are modelled after a similar organization, the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C., which is affiliated with the Center for Media and Public Affairs there. That group has been very successful in promoting the accurate use of statistics in the U.S. media.
The Institute decided to launch my particular project last year because we felt that the pace of policy development — as you no doubt appreciate — is extremely slow and yet the speed of the media today is extremely fast, and increasingly faster in this age of the Internet. Accordingly, a lot of public policy research gets badly misrepresented in the press.
Sometimes important research gets overlooked. I have tried to track this — and the three background articles I have provided get at this — by studying empirically the gap between what experts in different fields consider important and what journalists feel is important. Much of the time, there is insufficient nuance given to news stories, such that critical qualifications are not included when broadcasting the research. This is not always just a problem in instances of health reporting or science reporting. Economics reporting and commentary are especially rife with statistical errors. The portrayal of complex research often dwindles into a kind of public-policy entertainment, where extremists on both sides are given voice to spout an opinion. So-called ``poll-driven news'' is becoming more and more common, with news media commissioning a small sample or web-based poll, running news of the poll and then editorializing on the poll's findings.
Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is my strong suspicion that in many cases, researchers will now refuse to deal with the media at all for fear that their research will be misrepresented. As has been well documented by researchers such as the University of Southern California's Dr. Barry Glassner, the media tend to overestimate findings that generate fear. Urban myths are sometimes generated out of whole cloth — for instance, the idea that dozens of children every year die of poisoned candy on Halloween, or the infamous New York Times report of many years ago suggesting that men have a greater tendency to beat their girlfriends on SuperBowl Sunday.
Research studies have shown that studies that find positive risk correlations — for example, preliminary studies in the early 1990s that silicone implants are positively correlated with breast cancer — are far more heavily covered than research that finds negative risk correlations such as the 1999 National Academy of Sciences' report finding that silicone implants do not cause cancer. When a risk association is found, as in the case of last year's published study on hormone replacement therapy for women, the risks tend to be wildly exaggerated in appearance, because the media tend to concentrate on increased relative risk. In this case, there was a 50 per cent elevation in risk when the therapy was used in conjunction with a certain combination of drugs. The media frequently fail to report that the absolute risk increase may be so tiny as to be irrelevant. These sorts of findings are more interesting to me intellectually than the traditional media scholarship, which looks at instances of bias in the media.
I come at this project as a former journalist myself. I was a founding member of the editorial board of the National Post, where I was responsible for a number of matters, including handling complaints, meeting with members of the public and readers on a regular basis. Before that, I was a lawyer, and then I went on to take graduate training in epidemiology and biostatistics.
I have found that, although we often hear people talking about media bias, the bigger complaint most people have of the media today is that journalists often get things wrong. This is not just a matter of the light being red and journalists are reporting that it is off red or pink. It can be a matter of the light being red and the journalists are saying it is green. I often find this to be the case in legal reporting: Some journalists may confuse, for instance, an acquittal with a conditional discharge.
What do all these observations mean for public policy? Essentially, issues like media concentration and cross- ownership issues are red herrings. Although they are popular discussion topics in certain elite media circles around the country, they are not what people, in my view, gripe about when they complain about the Canadian media. Canadians care about basic facts; they care about accuracy.
Does convergence or cross-ownership have any bearing on this? Professor Logan alluded to this slightly, and that is that the scholarship concerning the impact of media convergence and cross-ownership on the quality of news has been sketchy, contradictory and mostly superficial. In canvassing much of the testimony before this committee and reviewing opinion pieces in Canadian newspapers on this topic, I found no reference to empirical research to support the opinion that media convergence has any bearing whatsoever on the sorts of quality concerns such as the accurate representation of statistics and complex policy issues.
The few studies that do exist are all in the U.S. context. One such study is from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think-tank affiliated with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, to which Professor Logan alluded. Their study, entitled ``Does Ownership Matter in Local Television News: A Five-Year Study of Ownership and Quality,'' was updated in April of this year. After surveying and providing content analysis on 172 distinct news programs and 23,000 programs, the authors concluded:
Taken together, the findings suggest the question of media ownership is more complex than some advocates on both sides of the deregulatory debate imagined. Some of the arguments favouring large companies are unsupported by the data — even contradicted. On the other hand, some of the arguments for the merits of local control appear similarly difficult to prove.
It found, for instance, that stations with cross-ownership in which the parent company also owns a newspaper in the same market, tended to produce higher-quality newscasts. This may be counterintuitive to some.
To the limited extent that any of this research even exists, it also offers a more fundamental problem in terms of its definition of quality. In the case of the study to which I just referred, researchers traditionally measure quality in terms of whether a newscast reflects its entire community; whether it covers a broad range of topics; is locally relevant or whether it balances stories with multiple points of view. There is no or little qualitative focus paid to whether authoritative sources are used or whether statistics or research is presented accurately.
I say all this to underscore the idea that the presupposition that media concentration begets bad news — quite a part from being a red herring — is often founded on a thin tissue of research. If there is an empirical foundation to the opinion, it often stems from survey data, suggesting that a certain number of Canadians are supposedly concerned about the erosion of quality through convergence. However, there is little analysis as to why. I have not seen any survey on this topic conducted by a neutral pollster — that is, not for a newspaper guild — that shows that a majority of Canadians truly are concerned about media convergence, even if they do not know what that concern means. Frequently, in my opinion, a concern regarding convergence stems from a simply ideological opposition to a media- owner's stated position, say, on a heated political issue such as the mid-East.
In summary, I would submit that the greatest challenge in terms of news quality is not media concentration or cross- ownership. It is more fundamental: How to transmit complex public policy in an accurate and coherent manner? No one media outlet stands guiltier than another on this front and we cannot rely on a public broadcaster to provide better information than private media outlets. There is no evidence that a new publicly endowed newspaper will do a better job. Neither ownership structure nor media convergence dictates the degree to which journalists working for any particular company get statistics right.
The only solution, I would submit, is better education of journalists. This might come from journalism schools — but only maybe, because increasingly news outlets do not hire directly from journalism schools. When they do hire, they may insist on better grounding in economics and quantitative studies. Some improvement may come from a variety of independent critics like ourselves. It is my impression that Canadian news media tend not to select or recruit journalists with solid numeracy or quantitative skills.
The answer to getting better media, in my opinion, comes not from new rules governing cross-ownership or ownership guidelines, but by encouraging the training of better-informed journalists. Regulating ``diversity'' or cross- ownership will not necessarily ensure quality.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I read with some interest the reprints of the articles from the Fraser Forum that you sent to the committee citing databases. I noticed in one article called ``Canada's Missing News Part I: A Dissent on Nancy Olivieri,'' that when you were counting media hits, the sources cited did not include The Globe and Mail. Was that just because it got left out of the footnote?
Mr. Seeman: No, not at all.
The Chairman: The footnote cites CTV, the CBC, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, the National Post, The Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, and several other newspapers.
Mr. Seeman: The nature of that particular research database was such that it did not include The Globe and Mail. You are right. In order to be completely comprehensive, I would have to be more ambitious in my scope, but I had to be pure just to that particular research database.
Senator Graham: In your assessments, how much attention do you pay to balanced coverage? Do you pay attention to headlines? If a clever headline writer wants to skew a story in a particular direction or leave an impression, those people who skip-read newspapers can find that a headline is totally unrelated to the actual fact or to the body of the story.
Mr. Seeman: Believe it or not, very little headline content analysis has been done in Canada. Interestingly enough, most content analysis skips the observation that you made. Recently a content analysis was done of Canadian news media's coverage of prescription drug trials and the extent to which Canadian journalists cover off the pros and cons of new drugs to the extent that they may be unwitting pawns to pharmaceutical companies' press releases. However, no attention was given to the study of the news headlines. I agree with you entirely. A content analysis on the headlines might yield completely different findings. However, I have not done any coding of that.
Mr. Luciani: Occasionally, we will take a look at a headline and talk about the fact there is no relationship between the headline and the story itself. I was trying to think of some examples of that. One that came to mind is in our publication here of a study that was done by the Canadian Medical Association Journal on home births. The three or four major newspapers gave the impression from the headline that home births were as safe as hospital births. However, when you got into the story — into the newspaper coverage and the research itself — that is not what the conclusions carried.
Senator Graham: They may have been quoting one individual.
Mr. Luciani: We are talking about the headline itself. If that is all you were to have read, for instance, you would have been left with a completely wrong impression of what that study was all about. That happens quite a bit.
As Mr. Seeman said, public policy is a slow-plodding process, but the media is a very fast one. When these two things collide, there is a collateral damage. Policy is not something that you can cover the same way you can cover sports. It takes a more active participation on the part of the readers. Often, they are left with exactly the wrong impression from what the public policy study actually tries to convey.
Mr. Seeman: I have a colourful example of a contemporary issue on marijuana. The effects of marijuana are an important public policy issue today. There was a study that came out in May of last year looking at the alleged impact of marijuana use on IQ levels. This is how three different headlines read in interpreting the same study. This is from The Toronto Star: ``Heavy Marijuana Use Lowers IQ, Study Finds.'' This is from the National Post: ``Effect of Pot on IQ Temporary, Study Says.'' This is from The Globe and Mail: ``Smoking Pot, No Risk to IQ Study Says.'' It is comical, but it is tragic in some sense. The headlines appeared around April Fools' Day. At the same time, it was a prominent study and it was front-page news.
Senator Graham: That sounds like a lot of potluck. I am wondering if you find that there is a tendency to emphasize the negative? A lot of things happen in our country and around the world. There are a lot of good-news stories. My impression is that in terms of the print media, we have more emphasis on the headline-grabbing side of the story and that there is more emphasis on the negative than there is on the positive.
Mr. Seeman: Oh, absolutely. There are all sorts of empirical research studies that have found that. A typical example might be the recent war coverage.
In terms of quantitative news, we noticed there was a lot of quantitative news on friendly-fire casualties for example. However, there was not any coverage on the improvements in combat medicine that have resulted in far fewer, combat- related casualties. It is just an extraordinary improvement in combat medicine just over the couple few years.
Senator Merchant: I found your presentation very interesting. I am confounded sometimes. The journalists have a lot of power to influence people. When people are asked about how they would rate journalists, I believe that they rate them quite low. At the same time, though, when people read something or see something on television, they seem to believe it, whether statistically it is true or not. This is kind of a contradiction in my mind anyway.
Sometimes I will see the news, let us say the ten o'clock news on CBC. Then there is the news at eleven o'clock. The lead story, let us say, on CBC may never appear on CTV at all. Alternatively, a story might have two different faces all together.
How can viewers determine what is really going on?
Mr. Seeman: Viewers have to rely on their own intuition, their intelligence and the credibility of the news source. Studies have suggested that people invest less credibility in Internet-related news sources. We are still waiting for research in Canada, though, that can really study the extent to which Canadians have credibility in different news sources. It will be interesting if Professor Logan carries through with that research.
I am not a psychologist. I do not know how people weigh those different sources. Ultimately, perhaps, the issue is not so much which news source may win out if there are conflicting news stories, but in some cases, the bigger problem is when people discount everything they hear in the news and are skeptical of every number. That is happening increasingly.
Senator Merchant: Sometimes when a story appears on the news or in print turns out to be untrue, let us say, the retraction is often on the last page in a little footnote, while the actual story was a big headline on the front page. I see this as a problem, too.
I do not know how you deal with it. It just makes people more cynical.
Mr. Luciani: You mentioned that journalists are at the bottom of the rung when comes to professions that are respected.
Senator Merchant: I did not say the bottom. However, you would know because you know the statistics.
Mr. Luciani: I would say all professions have taken serious hits over the last generation. I do not think anybody left standing looks good anymore. I think it is a general skepticism regarding all professions.
The Canadian Statistical Assessment Service, CANSTATS is trying to address some of the issues you have raised. At the end of the day, what are we trying to do? We are trying to tell readers and users of the media that they should understand how the media works. The media are going to try to be sensational. They are going to try to give you stories that sell the medium per se. They are going to try to engage you in a sense, not just intellectually, but emotionally. Therefore, readers and viewers have to rank stories according to what they think is important. Our job, basically, is to tell people to be sceptical. We are also saying that if people are interested in a topic, they must look behind the headlines. One cannot simply accept what the newspapers or the radio and television are saying.
We are also doing something else. We are trying to look over the shoulders of journalists to let them know someone is paying close attention and that we will look behind the numbers where we can. We will go back to the study and see if we come to that same conclusion. If we do not, we will write about it.
I think that in a sense that is basically our job. What was surprising, when we started this project, was that something like this did not exist in the country. I hope that we grow and become more successful at what we do.
The Chairman: I was interested in your observation that Canadian news media tend not to select or recruit journalists with solid numeracy or quantitative skills. I suppose the key word there is ``solid,'' in that most journalists now hold at least a bachelor degree, which means they had to get through high school math. You would not consider those solid numeracy or quantitative skills?
If I think back to my days in the journalism business, I think there is some truth in what you say, in that if you are hiring a journalist, that person must be able to tell a story. I do not mean fabricate a story; I mean communicate a story. Many mathematicians and scientists are that kind of person. I think it was Henry Luce who said, when he was founding Fortune magazine, that he had the choice between taking economists and turning them into poets or taking poets and turning them economists. He thought it was easier to take poets and turned them into at least sufficiently skilled economists to write a business magazine.
I suppose this long preamble is: Are you not in a sense butting up against a fact of life here? That it is never going to be possible to have the kind of degree of post-doctoral rigour and statistical analysis that I suspect you would really like every working journalist to have?
Mr. Seeman: I agree with you. The point is well taken. I think every editor shares that opinion. I think all editors would prefer to turn a Wordsworth into a Galileo.
It is hard to generalize. Some news outlets are better than others. Some recent trends have changed. We find that newspapers are strapped for cash and that defines everything else in terms of quality. With the exception of The Globe and Mail and perhaps one or two others, there are very few defined medical reporters or health reporters. Increasingly there is a wider array of general assignment reporters, who one day may shoot off and report on the latest article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and then the next day may report on the goings on at the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. It is not necessarily that they are lesser trained than they were 10 years ago, but their demands are higher.
I do not expect that things are going to become perfect. Part of the solution lies in the journalism schools. We are embarking on preliminary research to look at what is going on in the curricula of journalism schools and the extent to which practicing journalists are happy with how they have been taught. I share your observation.
The Chairman: Will you be looking at the journalism school curriculum?
Mr. Seeman: We are toying with doing that. It is a question of budgets and research scope, but we are certainly interested in that.
The Chairman: Have you been in touch with actual editors or publishers about this kind of work? Have you had any response from actual practitioners?
Mr. Seeman: They are all very welcome. They have been overwhelmingly inviting and embracing. They have extended invitations to speak to editorial boards and interact with journalists. We get calls from journalists from across the spectrum in terms of private and public and political. We get calls from CBC and from private outlets as well.
Senator Graham: I am very interested in what you are doing, and I hope you continue with your work.
Is CANSTATS more concerned with improving the quality of views that are now available in the media, than with having or encouraging a greater diversity of views?
Mr. Seeman: They overlap. We are focusing on quality. It would be too wide-ranging to get into issues of diversity, but they certainly overlap. We are singly focused on the quality of news. We are not trying to encourage a wider diversity of voices.
At the same time, we are interested in measuring the extent to which some news does not get covered. That is interesting to us, too. If the accurate research does not get covered, or if the research that deflates the exaggerated risks does not get covered, we are interested in tracking that. To that extent, we do look at diversity as well.
Senator Merchant: You touched on bias in broadcasting. What are you finding? What kind of biases are you finding in broadcasting?
Mr. Luciani: We are not looking at biases. We are looking at accuracy. By bias, I am assuming they cover some stories more than others and so on.
Senator Merchant: I am wondering if you are noticing a trend? Perhaps you are not measuring that.
Mr. Luciani: No, not directly.
Mr. Seeman: I am generally not very confident in the quality of content analysis to prove the existence or non- existence of so-called bias. The definition of bias, of course, changes depending on your point of view. A lot of the ``media scholarship'' surrounding bias is dippy and superficial. Often it looks at the number of times the word ``liberal'' is used versus the word ``conservative.''
I do not want to castigate all academic research on content analysis. Some of it is actually pretty good and it is getting better. The point is that it only takes you so far intellectually and academically. If you are interested in improving the quality of news, it is better to focus on issues of accuracy — certainly to narrow down issues of statistical accuracy and numeracy — rather than address issues of bias.
Senator Merchant: Are you saying that you cannot measure bias? Is the evidence not accurate enough?
Mr. Seeman: It is methodologically very hard. It is extremely time-consuming and expensive. You need an army of researchers to code stories and to code each sentence in each story. It is extremely exhaustive. At the end of the day, the accuracy and the reliability of your results depend on the accuracy of your codebook and what defines, say, a ``left- wing view'' or a ``right-wing view.''
There has been some good work on this. I would refer you to my colleague Lydia Miljan now at the University of Windsor. She is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. She used to head up the National Media Archive at the Fraser Institute and has looked at some of this stuff. In particular, she looked at the CBC coverage of the Free Trade debate.
Senator Graham: I think that you said that you often hear people talking about media bias, but that the bigger complaint that most people have of the media is that journalists get things wrong. Is that the point that you were making?
Mr. Seeman: Absolutely. The left and the right now sling around the word ``bias.'' The word ``bias'' is just this sort of bugbear that people like to throw as a generic criticism of the media today without being focused.
We are trying to focus on issues of accuracy.
The Chairman: I would think you are going to get more attention from the media themselves if you go after accuracy, which is, after all, the foundation, the gospel. If you do not get it right, then you have not done your job.
Mr. Seeman: That is true. It is a cultural phenomenon that the media do not like to criticize themselves.
The Chairman: When I was a young journalist, I was, in a sense, a classic example of what you were talking about. I had a degree in Modern Languages and I found myself assigned to be the science reporter on a small newspaper for which I worked. It was wonderful. I learned a lot.
I learned, the hard way, that it was important to be wary of reporting scientific stories — particularly the results of scientific studies — because most journalists were not in a position actually to gauge the importance of those stories. I cannot think of an example right now, unfortunately, but you have been making the point that people will hype one story and ignore another story. I put it to you that it is possible that they can ignore the second story because they just cannot understand it.
As the old rule says, ``when in doubt, leave it out.'' If that is true, then how can one achieve some kind of a system where the actual importance of these things can be understood by the lay press and therefore the public? How do you rate them? How do you rate the stories that appear for importance versus non-importance?
Mr. Seeman: Part of the problem does not just lie with journalists. Increasingly science journals are becoming aggressive in marketing and that sort of thing, and research bodies are aggressive. They will colour a news release specifically so that journalists will pick it up. Part of the solution lies with researchers.
You are right. You simply cannot rely on journalists to dissect immediately as soon as a research study comes out whether or not it is significant or not. You can try and create informal scientific advisers. A lot of scientific journalists will have an informal team of people that they will turn to. We hope that we provide a bit of that sort of thing. Yes, it is a challenge.
Part of the solution lies with the academic community. I think they have a responsibility to look back a number of months down the line and assess how the media interpreted their research. They have done that, for example, with the hormone replacement story. A number of academic studies have critiqued the way in which that original study was interpreted by the media. It is a dance and both journalists and researchers bear responsibility.
The Chairman: I thank you both very much indeed for having joined us. It was absolutely fascinating.
Mr. Seeman: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.
The Chairman: We are very grateful for you being here.
The committee adjourned.