🚀 go-pugleaf

(Jean Wootton) wrote in message <388D8939.DF5B36E6@home.com>...
>please can someone who is better at copy/paste than I, post this whole
>message?
>http://www.canoe.ca/LondonNews/lf.lf-01-25-0040.html
>Disproportionate use of "right-wing" sources and newspapers' biased
>reluctance to criticize influential owners and corporations are also
>red-flagged in the 233-page book. Broadcasters weren't studied.
>

begin fair use of copyrighted material/
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Papers missing major stories, report finds

By CP
OTTAWA --  Stories about labour, weapons exports and white-collar crime are
among blind spots in Canadian print journalism cited in a report released
yesterday.

The Missing News, by media monitoring group NewsWatch Canada, blames such
omissions on ownership concentration and newsroom cuts.

Disproportionate use of "right-wing" sources and newspapers' biased
reluctance to criticize influential owners and corporations are also
red-flagged in the 233-page book. Broadcasters weren't studied.

"Canadian print media, by and large, on matters of economics . . . veer
very strongly to the right," said co-author Richard Gruneau, a
communications professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Data gathered by senior communications students at Simon Fraser from 1993
to 1998 also show "Canadian journalism itself is in disarray," he added.

"Journalists feel . . . increasingly under pressure to do more with less or
see themselves being squeezed by a concentrated, corporate press moving
more in the direction of features and the relentless pursuit of advertising
revenue."

Bryan Cantley of the Canadian Newspaper Association, an industry lobby
group, said corporate influence does not hover in the country's newsrooms.

"Newsrooms tend to be fiercely autonomous and they run things as they see
them.

"I have no evidence that there's any kind of mass conspiracy in the news
media."

Investment in investigative journalism seems to be on the rise, Cantley
added, noting the annual National Newspaper Awards received a record 1,250
entries this year. The total includes 75 enterprise reporting entries --
close to the all-time high of 77 in 1990.

The Missing News was funded with $62,300 from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Council of Canadians and
the British Columbia Federation of Labour.

NewsWatch, formerly Project Censored Canada, ranked the top 10
under-reported stories from 1993 to 1995. These included exploitation of
home-based garment workers across Canada and the tobacco industry's
complicity in cigarette smuggling in the early 1990s as it lobbied for
lower tobacco taxes.

The group switched in 1996 to content analysis of major Canadian newspapers
using controlled criteria. It says blind spots include:

- Canada's involvement in global militarism (Canada is ranked as the
world's 10th largest arms exporter by the United Nations).

- Environmental damage.

- Religion and social values.

- White-collar crime (which costs an estimated $30 billion a year.)

- Gender stereotyping of women as victims and men as strong.

- Anything on labour that doesn't involve a strike or other disruption.