Heavy price paid to bring you the story

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Canadian Classroom

Zahra Kazemi had made a career of taking photos that told stories, and that career brought her life to a brutal end.

The 54-year-old photo-journalist had traveled to Iran from Montreal in June 2003 to record for the world the plight of protestors, thrown in jail for taking part in student demonstrations. Kazemi was quickly arrested for doing her job. Iranian officials accused her of being a spy.

On July 11, Kazemi died from head injuries received during beatings she suffered while in custody. Iranian vice-president Mohammed Ali Abtahi confirmed that Iranian authorities were responsible for her death.

The Kazemi case is only one example of the dangers journalists face when working in countries that stifle freedom of the press. Every year there are reporters who write stories deemed critical of political leaders or their policies, who end up in jail, and in some cases are killed.

May 3 is World Press Freedom Day, which recognizes the sacrifices made by these journalists in the cause of free and open reporting. It was established in 1991 and marks the anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek, a statement of principles drawn up by a group of African journalists calling for free, independent and pluralistic media around the world.

The day allows an opportunity for the public to put pressure on nation-states that continue to deny their citizens the right to be informed, and to honor the memory of journalists who have been killed in that struggle.

According to Reporters Without Borders, an organization that speaks out against press censorship, 40 journalists were killed in 2003. Since January of this year, 11 reporters have lost their lives. A third of the world's population lives in countries where there is little to no press freedom-China, Nepal, Brazil, Turkey, Cuba, Iraq, Cambodia, Philippines, Pakistan and India among them.

"Canada is quite fortunate in the world. We have one of the greatest freedoms of expression, and a press comparable to Nordic countries like Norway, Iceland and Sweden. Those countries have a strong, liberal background," said Tanya Churchmuch, a reporter for Global TV Montreal and president of the Canadian chapter of Reporters Without Borders.

The ability to freely challenge government leaders and policy-makers in order to inform the public about their decisions is one of the key ingredients of a democratic society, said John Medicine Horse Kelly, a journalism professor and director for the Centre for Indigenous Research Language Culture and Education at Carleton University.

"There is no democratic society without the press. It does not exist," said Kelly. "Any government that wants to control its people has to control the press. They kill reporters for reporting in some countries, where [they] have the courage to put their lives on the line for that kind of thing. If we lose ground, even one step in Canada allowing that to happen, I fear for what Canada will become. Government is only accountable to the people when the government can be watched freely and openly, and that's what the press does or should do."

An incident this year called into question Canada's commitment to a free press.

On the morning of Jan. 21, the RCMP raided the home of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, because the police believed she had in her possession leaked government documents linked to the Mahar Arar case.

Arar, a software engineer and Canadian citizen, was deported by the United States to Syria in September 2002. He had landed at a New York airport on a stopover en route to Ottawa. American authorities believed him to be connected to al-Qaeda, the organization that caused the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands in 2001.

Arar was held in Syria for more than a year, and claims he was tortured while in custody. He was never charged with terrorist activities, and Canada's involvement in allowing the deportation of a Canadian citizen to a forign country has been grist for the mill for Canadian news reporters.

O'Neill had been at the forefront in reporting on Arar's situation and used many confidential sources in her work. She faces possible charges under the Security of Information Act, anti-terrorism legislation passed in the wake of 9/11, which enables police to charge anyone in possession of confidential government information.

Paul Schneidereit, a writer for the Halifax Herald and the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said what happened to O'Neill is an illustration of police "trampling all over the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press." He said the raid undermines the ability of reporters to do their jobs, because the public may be less inclined to talk out of fear the information may end up in the hands of the police.

"After the police raids, there was coast to coast condemnation about what happened...Actually I think it was a blessing in disguise. Let's get that out on the table and talk about it because, if this is the face of the new Canada, where police officers rampage through a reporter's home at eight o'clock in the morning going through personal belongings, this is not the face of a democracy that I recognize. So I think that really shocked people and I think that obviously led pretty quickly to an announcement that we have to review this. So I don't expect that the police are going to be continuing to be doing this sort of thing. If they do, we're going to have to continue to condemn it and fight it."

Kelly believes there will be more incidents similar to the O'Neill incident, because of the heightened interest in national security.

"We're going to have to redefine freedom of the press. Nine-eleven is very real. Buildings blown up, the possibilities of using airlines for poisonings, these are real. We have to redefine it. My hope is that, in the end, we remain a free society. Right now, that's a hope because I can see the trends," Kelly said.

If a free press is one key to democracy, than a fair press is another.

Coverage of controversial issues, particularly in the area of Aboriginal affairs, has raised concerns about the representation of Aboriginal people in the stories seen in the mainstream press. The tendency of reporters to use non-Aboriginal sources to build their work has resulted in unbalanced coverage of Aboriginal issues, some say.

"It's funny. When you look at one article on Native issues or one story on Native people, you can look at it and say 'I don't see any indication of racism or bias.' But then if you read 10 articles in the same paper. . . then you might say there's bias there and you can see it as a trend," said Carla Robinson, a news anchor for CBC Newsworld.

"Then you notice that 80 per cent of the people spoken to in that story were not Native...there's not enough of an awareness of the Native community who would be the best person to speak to."

The sources used to build a story determine the perspective from which a story is told. Robinson said that many reporters, particularly the ones working for private broadcasters, regularly go to the same sources to get their information.

"There definitely could be a fear, like, 'Will these people talk to me?' Or they'll go to media friendly Native people, or who they think of as media-friendly. People tend to go to familiar territory and, often times, they just don't branch out enough. I find with some [private broadcasters], they have a certain idea of how they want to present their stories or they just have their own world outlook. It might be ethnocentric or more along with the mainstream [of] what they think the mainstream audience will be interested in. So when they're looking for sources, some reporters tend to find sources to back up their theories. I haven't seen that too much in the CBC. We do try to go into the communities and get different stories," Robinson said.

Kelly believes the problem is not particuar to the Aboriginal community. He said coverage of issues in minority cultures has always been underrepresented in the press in Canada.

"It's any kind of issue that is not the same as mainstream Canada...the coverage of Aboriginal people is a glaring example, but the same holds true for other cultures. The press has always reflected the national consciousness. Canada's national consciousness has to go a lot further than making statements about the mosaic. We need to do it," said Kelly.

Robinson said a reporter's day is "packed to the gills." Deadlines loom. There is a lack of investigative reporting, a need to hold the attention of the audience and a lack of understanding of Aboriginal culture. All are factors that go into why stories and the people involved tend to be oversimplified.

These factors may also explain why stories about the positive achievements in First Nations communities do not get much attention.

"There's no news in Canada that's reported that is good news," said Ken Williams, a journalist with the Aboriginal People's Television Network. "We're not getting the really good positive stories coming out, and very often you don't from any news agency. It's rare that, unless you are doing a lot of local stuff...the audience, Aboriginal or otherwise, have a limited attention span so you're stuck with a lot of constrictions when it comes to TV."

Sensational stories that involve confrontation, corruption and scandal are more likely to entice the audience, Williams added.

A case in point is the events at Burnt Church that made headlines across Canada in 1999, when Mi'kmaq fishermen took to the waters after the Marshall decision, a Supreme Court ruling that upheld a treaty from the 1760s that allowed commercial fishing rights to the First Nations people of the area.

The Mi'kmaq set lobster traps out of the season prescribed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), claiming they were exempt from the regulations. Angry non-Aborig