Media gets failing grade on Ipperwash

Ryerson University journalism Professor John Miller surprised himself when he began to look at how the mainstream media reported the occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995.

"The language in the report I deliberately toned down because I wanted people to focus on what I found. But I'll tell you that I was quite shocked by what I found," he said. "And I had to keep pinching myself and saying, 'That was 10 years ago.' But I've done a lot of studies about media coverage about black people, Vietnamese people and the connection with crime and I know now from looking at Ipperwash that the stereotyping and unconscious racism towards Native people in this country is worse than towards any other group. It's pretty bad towards any other group, but towards Native people it's dreadful."

Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto (ALST) is an agency that advocates for, and assists, urban Aboriginal people in Canada's largest city. ALST has standing at the Ipperwash inquiry and was able to get funding from the inquiry commission for a study of media coverage. Miller was contacted to do the research. He looked at 19 daily newspapers, Maclean's magazine and four wire services. His 76-page report is available at the inquiry's Web site -ipperwashinquiry.ca

"I wanted to look at some of the coverage from before the park but I also wanted to look at it for about a month afterwards, where there was evidence available that the Stoney Pointers were telling the truth. That they had a right to be there and they weren't armed. But almost nobody picked up on it," he said.

He concludes in the report that "the Ipperwash crisis was not journalism's finest hour."

By doing a statistical analysis of what sources reporters used and what lens was used to look at the information, Miller came to the conclusion that a vast majority of the work was based on stereotypes. And those stereotypes got in the way of what should be every journalist's most sacred goal: the search for the truth.

Most reporters, he concluded, "framed" the story long before they ever arrived at the scene.
Miller was asked to define what he meant by framing.

"It just means the context of the story, how it's portrayed. For instance, one of the frames was 'Natives as troublemakers.' How did I determine that? I determined that by, if the story was cast as a police story rather than a land claim story. It was, you know, the Stoney Pointers were up to something that required the police presence and build up, police action," he replied. "So they were someplace they weren't supposed to be and were causing trouble. If, however, it said they were there out of frustration that their land claims hadn't been settled then it was framed as a land claim story. Or if it was emphasized that they were rebels or a splinter group from the main band then they were again cast in a negative light and not even authorized by the their own band."

And the more senior reporters -those who are allowed to express their personal opinions in columns-seemed to be the worst offenders.

"The opinion articles, especially, were written purely on the basis of stereotypes. Almost as if the columnists-and some of them were very prominent columnists-say, 'We know how people feel about this. This is just another instance of Oka-like terrorism. They leapt to that conclusion without any evidence," Miller said. "The wonder to me is why is this stuff published. Who made the judgement to put this tripe in the paper? Is there no standard of accuracy for columns? The only reason they'd put this in the paper is they say, 'Well, we all know about Native people and this is just more of the same.'"

Non-journalists fared much better than the columnists.

"When the letters to the editor are separated out from the opinion columns and editorials, they're much more supportive and more reasonable towards what happened at Ipperwash," he said. "There were more of the letters that were at least expressing doubt that the police were right. They say, 'We didn't see any evidence of guns. How can you write this stuff when the facts are still in dispute.'"

All of this reinforces Miller's belief that cross-cultural training is a very important part of journalism training. He has been involved in such a course at Ryerson for several years.
"It's the only course of its kind in Canada. It draws somewhat from similar courses in the United States where there's much more consciousness that this needs to be addressed. You know, avoiding the journalistic impulse to make up your mind what the story is as soon as you get the assignment is something that takes practice because we all do," he said. "We all immediately start framing the story and deciding who we're going to talk to. But when you don't know the culture, you have to withhold judgement for a little bit until you do some initial investigating."