Maps of the News: Journalism as a Practice of Cartography 3515128395, 9783515128391

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Geographie Franz Steiner Verlag

Media Geography – 7

Mike Gasher

Maps of the News: Journalism as a Practice of Cartography

Media Geography at Mainz Edited by Anton Escher, Chris Lukinbeal, Stefan Zimmermann and Veronika Cummings Editorial Staff Elisabeth Sommerlad Volume 7

Mike Gasher

MAPS OF THE NEWS: JOURNALISM AS A PRACTICE OF CARTOGRAPHY

Franz Steiner Verlag

Umschlagabbildung: Internet Access by Country © Mallory Stermon (2020) The size of each country is proportionally enlarged or reduced according to its data value. This map is displayed using a Winkel-Tripel projection. Data sources: International Telecommunication Union, World Telecommunication / ICT Development Report and database, and World Bank estimates via World Bank 2016. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2021 Druck: Hubert & Co, Göttingen Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-12839-1 (Print) ISBN 9978-3-515-12840-7 (E-Book)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No one writes a book alone. Beginning with the nugget of an idea, to the research and thought behind it, to the final transformation of a text file into an actual book, a number of people have made valuable contributions at every stage. These include people who worked initially with me as research assistants, but became true collaborators: Andreea Mandache of l’Université de Montréal and Sandra Gabriele of Concordia University. I also want to thank my close colleague and Concordia sociologist Greg Nielsen for the countless, and stimulating, conversations that informed my thinking and writing. I must include here Robert E. Gutsche Jr. of Lancaster University for his attentive review of an earlier draft of the manuscript, and the constructive criticism and helpful suggestions that resulted. He pointed me to works I’d overlooked and his comments no doubt make the book better. It has been a distinct pleasure to work with the people at Steiner Verlag, and those responsible for the Media Geography at Mainz book series. First and foremost, I want to thank Chris Lukinbeal of the University of Arizona for encouraging me to submit my manuscript to the series editors. Chris has been a long-time supporter of my work, and has given me, with my formation in communication studies and journalism, the confidence to delve into the fields of geography and cartography. Secondly, I want to acknowledge managing editor Elisabeth Sommerlad of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz for guiding the manuscript through the editing and publishing process. She has been patient, understanding, and thoughtful through this whole process, working to make the book more readable and presentable. As someone who appreciates careful copy editing, I am grateful to Dagmar Moll for her sharp eyes and good suggestions. And as someone who is less comfortable working with graphics and images, I want to thank Jessica Andel and Polichronios Vezirgenidis for their handling of the graphics and formatting of the manuscript, and Thomas Bartsch for his patience with me in choosing and formatting the book’s maps. I want as well to acknowledge Susanne Henkel of Steiner Verlag for overseeing the MGM book series, and the series editors: Anton Escher and Veronika Cummings of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Stefan Zimmermann of GeorgAugust-Universität Göttingen, and, of course, Chris Lukinbeal. Finally, this book is a product of the Geography of News Project, a research program that has received important financial support from Concordia University, Quebec’s Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the MITACS Globalink program.

TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 Journalism as Cartography.......................................................................................9 CHAPTER 2 Geography: Writing the Earth ................................................................................29 CHAPTER 3 Journalism: Communicating a Sense of Place .......................................................45 CHAPTER 4 Who, What, Where: Mapping Local Community ..................................................63 CHAPTER 5 Dateline Haiti .........................................................................................................89 CHAPTER 6 Mapping the News World .................................................................................... 111 CHAPTER 7 Conclusion: The Power of the Press ....................................................................133 References ............................................................................................................149 About the Author..................................................................................................167

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Mental Maps ........................................................................................10 Figure 1.2 News Geography as a Product of Triangulation ...................................22 Figure 2.1 Constructing Time Spaces ...................................................................34 Figure 3.1 A New Sense of Simultaneity ..............................................................46 Figure 3.2 Mapping a News Story ........................................................................58 Figure 4.1 One Newspaper’s “News Zone” ...........................................................67 Figure 5.1 2010 Haiti Earthquake Zone ................................................................91 Figure 5.2 Closer Than They Appear? ..................................................................93

LIST OF BOXES Box 2.1 Common Features of News Stories and Maps ........................................32 Box 4.1 Quebec’s Language Laws ........................................................................72

LIST OF TABLES Table 6.1 International Filing Origins – Canadian Newspapers ..........................123 Table 6.2 Selected Countries Cited – Canadian Newspapers .............................123 Table 6.3 International Filing Origins – U.S. Newspapers ..................................126 Table 6.4 Selected Countries Cited – U.S. Newspapers ......................................126 Table 6.5 International Filing Origins – International Newspapers .....................128 Table 6.6 Selected Countries Cited – International Newspapers ........................ 128

CHAPTER 1: JOURNALISM AS CARTOGRAPHY The worlds we inhabit are largely cultural rather than natural and as such are subject to a wide variety of cartographies. (King 1996, 41)

There are many ways to think about journalists and the role their work plays in contemporary society. They have been said to form the fourth estate of government, serving democracy by representing citizens as watchdogs over our political powerbrokers. They have been called historians on the run, documenting and assessing the people, events, thoughts, and institutions of our time. They have been described as gate-keepers, sifting through the constellation of possible newsworthy stories occurring each day and providing us with a digest of what is considered most relevant, interesting, and important. They have been described as meaning-makers, defining rather than simply describing the news events and newsmakers they cover. More critically, they have been described as the manufacturers of consent, indoctrinating their audience members into the belief system of society’s most powerful people and institutions. Each of these perspectives has merit, but this book takes another tack. It considers journalism as a spatial practice and posits journalists as cartographers, as map-makers, as symbolic workers who forge geographies of news. Through every aspect of their work, that is, journalists describe and define their community – whatever form that community may take – and situate that community within the larger world. Through words, images and sounds, journalists sketch out the boundaries of community, define its core values, record the debates over shifting values, identify the key components of its political, economic and cultural infrastructure, describe its constituents, position community with respect to neighbouring communities, highlight other constituencies with which this community has important political, economic, historical, and cultural ties, and relegate to the margins great swaths of the rest of the world. This map-making produces centres and margins, places and peoples within our purview and, of course, other places and peoples beyond our imagination, or beyond our caring. These inclusions and exclusions occur on a number of scales, both within and beyond the immediate community – not everything, not everyone, makes it on the news map. The maps I am talking about are mental maps, cartographies of the imagination, cobbled together from the myriad stories and images news audiences are exposed to over time, from whatever news sources they rely upon. These stories and images are depictions – that is, representations – of people, places, events, and institutions, presented on local, regional, national, and/or global scale. They situate the news events and newsmakers they describe and position listeners, readers, and viewers with respect to those events. Such maps can also be thought of as word maps, textual cartographies (see Krotz 2018; Tally 2014) or “langscapes” (see McGregor

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1985), imaginings of peoples and places produced through the combination of journalism’s stories and images. Mental maps, geographers Peter Gould and Rodney White (1986) explain, are formed from “[t]he perception that people have of places, and the mental images that are formed from filtered information flows” (30). These maps, they maintain, can influence personal decisions (e.g., about where to live or where to travel), they can shape public policy decisions (e.g., about foreign aid allotments or regional economic development), they can guide military strategy (e.g., evaluating threats or where and how to intervene in a conflict), and they can affect economic decisions (e.g., investment decisions or locating industrial activity) (137–147).

Figure 1.1 Mental Maps (Jessica Andel 2020) News coverage provides information about who we are and where we are, as well as situating us with respect to other peoples and places.

Communication theorist John Hartley has described journalism as “the most important textual system in the world” (2008, 312) given its daily assertion of objective truths, its production of audiences as publics, and its symbiotic relationship with society’s central political, economic, and social institutions. Journalism does more than merely describe or report on current events; it is a constructive practice, a constitutive practice, contributing to the formation of communities, publics, and audiences. These aggregations do not simply precede the media through which they

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are represented, but media, in fact, play an important role in their constitution and in their validation. Psychologist and communication scholar Jaap van Ginneken refers to this as “the creation of the world in the news” (1998, 19). Sociologist Herbert Gans argues that journalists “help impose unity on what is otherwise a congeries of individuals and groups acting inside a set of geographical and political boundaries” (2004, 298). The news media play a significant role in constituting notions of community, establishing boundaries, membership criteria and values, situating their audiences within society at large. Communication scholar James Carey perceives journalism as “worldmaking” and his theory of communication is rooted in the idea that “a medium implies and constitutes a world” (cited in Rosen 1997, 196). He writes: “We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced” (Carey 1989, 30). The news, thus, has a “positioning effect” on readers. Moving beyond the “transmission view of communication,” Carey proposes a “ritual view of communication” in which communication is “directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs” (15–18). Journalism, as a particular form of communication, is ritualistic in its repeated assertions of a common culture, a shared history, and prevailing social values to an imagined target audience. Following Carey, journalism scholars Robert Gutsche and Kristy Hess (2018) argue: News media have always performed an important role in legitimating social, cultural, and religious rituals and milestones, such as the appearance of birth, death, and marriage columns … or determining who in a given social context will be remembered for their contribution to civic and social life in the “news” pages under obituaries – paid or otherwise (490).

In a similar vein, but with an emphasis on the language of news texts, linguistics scholar Roger Fowler (2007, 4) writes: “News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic code, it imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is represented; and so inevitably news, like every discourse, constructively patterns that of which it speaks.” Discourse, explains geographer Derek Gregory (1994, 11), refers to “all the ways in which we communicate with one another, to that vast network of signs, symbols, and practices through which we make our world(s) meaningful to ourselves and to others.” This is all to say that the world, and the communities that constitute that world, are constructed for us, in part through mediated forms of communication. The focus for political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson (1989) is the mediation of nation. He describes 18th-century newspapers and novels as agents of nation-building and nationalism at a time when these concepts were relatively new, defining the nation as “an imagined political community” (15). He depicts the novel and the newspaper as new forms of imagining, which produced in people a sense of “nation-ness.” If novels created a “sociological landscape” through the depiction of simultaneous events tying together a population of imagined characters (35–36), newspapers presented stories whose sharing of the news cycle – their “calendrical coincidence” – and whose juxtaposition on the newspaper page created connections among them (37–38).

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Hartley (1992, 1996), too, maintains that publics are created by institutions and discourses, arguing that “the media are simultaneously creative and participatory. They create a picture of the public, but it goes live, as it were, only when people participate in its creation, not least by turning themselves into the audience” (1992, 4). Audiences, thereby, are “discursive productions” (1996, 67). The news, Hartley argues, is organized around strategies of inclusion and exclusion from our community, creating domains of Wedom and Theydom, based not only on citizenship, but on gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. (1992, 207). This book, then, adopts the position that journalists are much more than detached bystanders, but are instead actively engaged in depicting and interpreting the subjects of their stories. The emphasis here is on the resultant cartographies produced by news coverage. In the words of Gutsche and Hess (2019), journalists are “much more than conduits of information. They are the place-makers of the digital age” (109). Changes in communication technology can, of course, play a role in how we imagine the world and our place in it. If in earlier times such changes allowed people to imagine life beyond their own physical circulation, (see Anderson 1989; Marvin 1988; Kern 2000), Carey recognized very early that the Internet “should be understood as the first instance of a global communication system,” displacing a national system that came into existence in the late 19th century with the development of, initially, telegraphy and railroad transportation, and later national magazines, newspapers, radio, and television (Carey 1998, 28). In recent decades, we have witnessed the emergence of what he terms a “new media ecology,” which “transforms the structural relations among older media such [as] print and broadcast and integrates them to a new center around the defining technologies of computer and satellite” (34). Carey insists that this new media ecology requires a cultural dimension to complement its global infrastructure, by which he means an imagining and an articulation of community and its various interactions on a global scale, enabled, but not automatically produced, by communications or transportation technologies alone. In other words, produced discursively. This production of the world, this place-making, is governed in part, of course, by the business plans and marketing strategies of news organizations working within available distribution networks. News organizations, that is, target specific markets, markets with geographic and/or demographic parameters, and they develop a news package that they expect will appeal to the people constituting that market. That news package will present a particular rendering of the world, produced specifically for its imagined audience. A local community newspaper, for example, whose market is a village of a few thousand people living in close proximity, will produce and situate its readers in a very different world than a national TV newscast, whose market consists of millions of people scattered across a large territory. The community newspaper’s world comprises very local institutions and events, and its stories are populated by people with whom readers may have regular direct contact. The national TV newscast operates on an entirely different scale; its reports concern regional, national, and international affairs, and its newsmakers are far more remote from the viewers.

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The digitalization of the news media, of course, has disrupted conventional business models in a number of ways, including the destabilization of advertising and audience markets. Significant advertising dollars have migrated away from legacy news organizations to social media sites like Google and Facebook, and to specialized online classified advertising services like Craigslist and Kijiji (see Jackson 2018; Wechsler 2019). At the same time, audience access to news has increased exponentially (see News Media Canada 2019); even though the legacy news organizations were quick to move online, they entered a mediaspace where they found themselves competing for audience attention with every other news provider world-wide, many of whom were granting free access to their sites, thus threatening legacy organizations’ subscription bases (see Heinrich 2011). Compounding these issues is the circulation of news and commentary about public affairs by individuals, groups, social media sites, non-governmental organizations, political parties, even mischievous governments, further fragmenting advertising and audience markets (see Gutsche and Hess 2019, 90–93; Hess and Gutsche 2018, 492; Fard and Meshkani 2015, 5–7; Dahlgren 2013; Anderson 2013). The struggle to forge viable advertising and audience markets, and thereby monetize news production, is ongoing. But the “worldmaking” Carey describes is also governed discursively, and that is the principal concern here. Despite the disruptions noted above, digitalization has not rendered geography completely irrelevant. If there are centrifugal forces at play, such as easy access to international news media and social media sites drawing our attention farther afield, there remain centripetal forces focusing our attention more locally. News stories are typically localized in the sense that news media seek to address specific and relatively proximate audiences. If the most common instance of this is the adoption of a local angle to a story, news coverage can also be seen as exclusive to familiar audiences in its use of acronyms, in its use of colloquial language, by assuming background or contextual information is unnecessary to its audience, etc. Further, given that commercial news organizations need to monetize their content, they can extend their geographical reach only as far as they can extend their geographical audience and advertising markets (see Gasher 2003). As Gutsche and Hess (2019) note: While information published via an online platform may now be accessible from “anywhere” and “anytime,” most news zones generated by traditional mainstream news providers do tend to overlay or align with political boundaries (boroughs and municipalities) and with natural ones (rivers and oceans) (54–55).

Many news organizations, for example, continue to carry a place name (95), and there is some evidence that geographic markets remain resilient (see Gutsche and Hess 2018; Althaus et al. 2009; Mersey 2009; Gasher and Klein 2008). News is defined, after all, by the pertinence of stories to an implied or imagined audience, and news judgment is the very subjective exercise of selecting, from a galaxy of potential news topics, which of them warrant coverage, how much coverage and, most importantly for our purposes, what kind of coverage: how these news items are defined and presented as important and relevant to that idealized audience. What we think of as the news is a compilation of information-rich stories

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that its producers assert is what should matter most to ‘us’ at any given time. In addressing a particular ‘us,’ then, the news plays a constitutive role in defining, depicting, and demarcating that ‘us,’ that community, and in plotting the community’s place in the world. I use the word community here because it has no single or precise meaning, because it is an elastic term that can signify not only a physical locale of varied and imprecise dimensions, but can refer as well to peoples whose association is not necessarily territorially based, such as the black community, the LGBTQ community or the arts community, as well as communities brought together by shared interest, such as business, sports, international affairs or technology (see Williams 1989, 75–76). These are the various kinds of communities that media serve, and help construct, assuming some kind of bond that brings its audience members together and, at the same time, reinforcing that bond through their coverage. This book seeks to convince the reader of two things. First, that journalists can be seen as practising a unique form of cartography, that they provide for us each day a particular rendering of the world, that they situate us within that world, that news texts, individually and cumulatively, are closely analogous to maps and can be read as such. News stories, that is, and the actors and institutions populating those stories, are placed, they are situated and connected, and the actions the stories describe occupy a particular setting. Those actions may be confined to a specific, finite locale, or they could occur over a larger scale, linking several discrete populations and places. Like maps, news stories provide a depiction of people, places, and the events that connect them. Second, the book argues that the ways in which journalists draw their maps matter very much, given the importance of our interconnections in an increasingly globalized or cosmopolitan world, and given that our experience of that world is highly mediated and largely experienced second-hand. The sociologist John B. Thompson describes this as our “mediated worldliness” (1995, 34). News organizations, of course, are not the only communications media engaged in mapping and defining communities; they are part of a larger mediascape and a larger discursive field engaged in this same process. We learn about people and places as well through books (fiction and non-fiction), movies (features and documentaries), TV and radio programs of every kind, advertisements, music, as well as through Web sites, blogs, podcasts, and social media (see Mains et al. 2015; Adams 2009; Couldry and McCarthy 2004b; Gasher 2002a). But the factuality of news stories, and the urgency and consequence inherent to their definition as news, grant these media forms a particularly significant role in describing the world. My hope is that this book will encourage the general reader to think carefully about the particular depictions of the world – and our own immediate communities – with which journalists provide us, how those depictions shape our imagining of the world and our place in it, and therefore affect the ways in which we think and act. I hope that this book will encourage journalists to reflect upon the cartographic aspects of their important work and consider the implications for the people and places they depict, to ponder the differences they draw between the material world and the news world their stories construct. Finally, I hope researchers in the fields

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of journalism studies, media studies, communication, cultural geography, and sociology take up the ideas presented here and push this inquiry further, and in new directions. My interest in the geography of news coincides with my interest in journalism. My first newspaper job was as a part-time “district correspondent” for the Cobourg Star in south-central Ontario in the early 1970s. I was a high school student living in Hastings, then a village of 900 people which was very much a rural satellite of the city of Peterborough, 40 kilometres to the north-west. A number of Hastings residents commuted to Peterborough to work for General Electric or Outboard Marine, many would do their major shopping there, the Peterborough Examiner and CHEX-TV were our main daily news sources, and Peterborough was where teenagers like me went to buy records and see movies on weekends. For us, it was the big city, the planet around which our tiny satellite orbited. Hastings did not then have its own newspaper, and received no regular news coverage by any paper, radio or television station, including those in Peterborough. Local news was exchanged orally – at the post office, the grocery store, the legion, the arena, the hotel beer parlour, and at the coffee counters of a couple of local restaurants. The managing editor of the twice-weekly Cobourg newspaper saw an opportunity to expand the Star’s reach to include Hastings as part of its coverage of the whole of Northumberland County. This made sense in terms of political geography; Cobourg, a town of 10,000 people located 45 kilometres to the south-west of Hastings, was the county seat, squeezed between Highway 401 and Lake Ontario at the county’s southern extreme. Hastings was tucked into the north-east corner of the county, and was part of the same federal and provincial ridings as Cobourg. My job was to provide the Star with regular news reports on all subjects from Hastings, which, in theory, would attract Hastings readers to the newspaper and would, over time, encourage in Hastings a closer identification with Northumberland County and draw its people into Cobourg’s orbit. My job, quite clearly, was to help re-map, expand, and reconfigure the news geography of the Cobourg Star and, by extension, reorient somewhat the geographical imaginations of the people of Hastings. The Star dutifully carried a page of Hastings news twice a week, began delivering the paper to a couple of local convenience stores, and gradually drew more and more attention from community leaders in Hastings – newsmakers who belonged to municipal council, the chamber of commerce, service organizations – and, of course, readers who had never before seen themselves or their community in the news.1 A few years later, while working as the sports editor of a community weekly called the Delta Optimist in Delta, British Columbia, my job was to confine the 1

This re-mapping continues to the present day. In 2009, the corporate ownership group Sun Media merged the Cobourg Daily Star, Port Hope Evening Guide, and Colborne Chronicle into a single daily called Northumberland Today. Postmedia acquired the Sun Media newspapers in 2015, and in November, 2017, as part of an exchange of 37 community newspapers between the Postmedia and Torstar newspaper companies, Northumberland Today was closed (see Krashinsky Robertson 2017). The principal local news source in the region today is the weekly Northumberland News, published by the Metroland Durham Region Media Group (www.northumberlandnews.com).

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news geography of the paper. Delta is a municipality due south of Vancouver which consists of three distinct communities: Ladner, Tsawwassen, and North Delta. The three communities form an isosceles triangle with Ladner and Tsawwassen at its western base, and North Delta much further to the east and separated by Burns Bog. Even though the Optimist’s masthead claimed the paper served all three communities, its subscription and advertising base was in Ladner and Tsawwassen, and most of its news coverage was concentrated on those two communities. North Delta wasn’t completely ignored, because it was a constituent part of Delta as a political unit, but it was only marginally newsworthy to the Optimist, given its business strategy. For me, this meant focusing on the teams and athletes from Ladner and Tsawwassen – the local angle – and restricting North Delta to occasional and passing reference. Maintaining this boundary was complicated for both me and the paper’s readers, mostly because the publisher refused to admit there was a boundary; while he wouldn’t court North Delta readers and advertisers, he didn’t want to antagonize them either. Adding to the confusion was his inconsistency; an exceptional performance by a team or an athlete from North Delta would prompt him, and therefore the paper, to embrace those athletes as ‘ours,’ even if only temporarily. The ‘community’ served by this community newspaper was given a very particular rendering each week in the pages of the newspaper. A few years later again, I worked as a sports reporter for The Columbian, a small daily covering what the newspaper called “Columbian Country,” meaning the eastern suburbs of Vancouver in the Lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia: Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, New Westminster, Surrey, White Rock, and Delta. That was the circulation area, that was the advertising market, and that, therefore, was the focus of coverage for The Columbian’s reporters and editors; the newspaper’s reportage rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of “Columbian Country.” In this case, the newspaper forged a region out of several distinct municipalities which shared a comparable geographical relationship to the Vancouver metropole. When I left journalism and moved to Montreal in the 1990s, I adopted a very different perspective; I was now part of the news audience to which the district of Villeray, the city of Montreal, and the province of Quebec were described and defined in the news each day. New to the city, the news coverage offered me instruction about who Montrealers were, how they spent their time, what they believed in, what they cared about, and where they fit within Quebec, within Canada, and within the larger world, depictions with which I could compare my own experiences of living and working in the city. Given the prominence of the identity question, and the distinct depictions of Montreal, Quebec, and Canada offered by the city’s four daily newspapers, their role in the formation of my ideas about how the news media participate in the construction of place became apparent. The daily news coverage could be read as an assertion about who ‘we’ are and where is ‘here,’ an assertion that was highly contested, often contradictory and certainly complex; the Montreal depicted by the English-language Gazette was not the same as that depicted by the French-language

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Journal de Montréal, and La Presse’s Montreal was different than that of Le Devoir (as will be addressed in Chapter 4). If, during the region’s deadly ice storm of 1998, the news coverage brought the city and the province together in the face of an indiscriminate natural disaster, the reportage of the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum portrayed clear social divides (see Sklar 1999). What I mean, then, by the geography of news is the representational space that news organizations construct and in which they situate their community and its people, the vantage point from which they produce their reportage – what Gutsche and Hess (2019) call their “news zones,” the specific geographic areas in which news organizations focus their coverage. The generation of zones is often an initial stage of the journalistic place-making process, and as the zones are almost always socio-spatial, journalists in these zones are dependent on factors such as scale/range, resources, proximity, and distance (54).

This place-making occurs as the resultant news coverage depicts, describes, defines, and positions the news zone, becoming its vantage point, the starting point for its “worldmaking.” All news organizations mold their own geographies, identifying the area they intend to serve; most commonly this means a small town, a metropolitan city, a region or a country, even if the boundaries of the news zone are permeable and imprecise and don’t align strictly with political boundaries. Other media forms, such as magazines, television programs, and Web sites, often serve markets based on specific interests (e.g., business, sports, travel, the arts) and/or seek an international audience. Whether or not the boundaries of this coverage area were simple to draw and maintain in some bygone age when communities were more clearly delineated, separated from one another, and largely self-contained, such mapping is a far more complicated prospect in the mobile and inter-connected world of today. Political boundaries do not neatly coincide with economic or cultural boundaries, or even the boundaries of physical geography, and the constituent members of any one political community have ties to any number of other communities constituted by social, economic, cultural, religious, racial, and/or ethnic dimensions. The digitalization of the news media, in turn, means people have access to reportage from news sources the world over. What matters, what is relevant to people – what is, in other words, newsworthy – is not confined to their immediate territorial community. This means that news maps are constructed through business plans, marketing campaigns, the editorial judgments of editors and reporters, and, ultimately, the expressed interests of news consumers. In all cases, news stories speak from a perspective of place – of some form – and audiences are situated both within a community and in relation to other communities.2 2

Even special-interest magazines, produced for bird-watchers or runners or gardeners or musicians, reveal place biases through their coverage – the geographical areas they focus on, assumptions about who and where their readers are located, colloquialisms, etc. – and the advertisements they carry. For example, I subscribe to Bicycling magazine. The vast majority of its articles pertain to people and places in the United States and most of its advertisers are based in the U.S.

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Like all news organizations, the newspapers I worked for had very deliberate, and distinct, strategies for drawing their news maps. This book looks at precisely how those maps are drawn by journalists in the coverage choices made and the language choices deployed, and what this means for how we see our community, our world, and our place in it. News is presented as a series of stories, and as with all stories, news stories have a setting in a specific time and place, a clearly-identified cast of characters, and a narrative trajectory which pulls these ingredients together. As news stories, though, their factuality lends them a certain authority and they have a necessary requirement to make audiences care – i.e., this is important, this is interesting or funny, you should know about this. By extension, the people, places and events that don’t make it into the news are, by definition, rendered unimportant, uninteresting, irrelevant, not worth the notice of our community. All communities, of course, have both external and internal boundary markers of some kind. Journalists do not provide blanket coverage of their community, because not everything that happens within that community could be considered news. Instead they cover certain aspects of that community, what they deem to be the most newsworthy people (political and business leaders, first responders, athletes, artists), places (city hall, courts, schools, businesses, clubs, commercial districts), and events (meetings, press conferences, shows, demonstrations) within that community. Even though journalists like to think that they simply mirror or reflect back their community to news audiences, they in fact, and necessarily, exercise news judgment to highlight those aspects determined to be of most interest and most import to audiences; in other words, their coverage provides a framing of their community, depicting what they consider to be news, ignoring what they deem to be not news. Such frames, media geographer Paul C. Adams (2018) insists, are “intepretations that lead to evaluations” (528). Over time, consistent patterns in journalists’ depictions of their community and its relationship to the surrounding world come to give definition to community, to give this place and its people a particular identity, a particular outlook, a particular setting, a particular sense of place. The question to be considered here is how that highlighting works, how journalists pick and choose what is newsworthy, what patterns of inclusion and exclusion their editorial decisions produce, and, most importantly, how this matters. The boundaries of any news organization’s coverage area are shaped by a number of factors, but in ways particular to the community being served and particular to the goals – editorial and economic – of the news organization. It is here that I want to make a distinction between news geographies and markets. While both audience and advertising markets are key factors in shaping coverage areas, the economics of news production and distribution do not explain everything. For one thing, while all news organizations must participate in the economy – i.e., they have expenses and must generate revenues – not all news organizations are commercial, profit-maximizing enterprises. Canada’s largest news organization is CBC/RadioCanada, a crown corporation with a national, public-service mandate. Canada also has news organizations structured as cooperatives (e.g., The Dominion, Vancouver Co-op Radio), and others funded by non-profit foundations (e.g., The Walrus,

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rabble.ca). In 2018, Power Corp. converted La Presse, one of Canada’s largest French-language newspapers, into an independent, non-profit publication. CHEKTV in Victoria is an independent, employee-owned station. Even the category of commercial news organization is heterogeneous, containing news media that negotiate the tension between commercial enterprise and public service in very different ways (see Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 9). Secondly, news coverage extends beyond the immediate territory of the advertising and readership market, including reports about the peoples and places in the world deemed of interest to the audience. Audiences are not interested solely in what occurs within their own communities, but in current events elsewhere as well. How journalists determine the news value of such peoples and places cannot be reduced to a simple commercial formula, but speaks as well to journalists’ image of themselves as information-providers representing – and thus interpreting – the needs and interests of the publics they seek to serve. Understanding how news geographies are constituted is important to understanding the news media as economic structures, but more to the point, it is crucial to understanding how news organizations serve society. Even the most profit-oriented news organization fulfills a sociopolitical function through its production and distribution of the information package we call news, particularly in democratic societies. That is, all news organizations inform us, tell us things about the world we live in and the people we live with, responding not simply to factual questions of who, what, when, and where, but also to interpretive questions of why and how. News organizations don’t simply deal in the facts, but deal as well in opinion, analysis, explanation and criticism, sometimes explicit, sometimes more subtle, helping us not only to see our world, but to define it, give it meaning, explain it, understand it. They help us imagine and constitute community, comprehend notions of us and them, right and wrong, good and bad, here and there. This study of the geography of news is prompted by three contemporary factors which further complicate any news organization’s occupation of a defined social space. The first of these is globalization, understood here not simply as an economic phenomenon, but in the fuller sense of the intensified global circulation of people, goods and services, ideas, investment capital, symbols, weather patterns, environmental degradation, and disease that characterizes our epoch. We may dwell in specific places, but the lives we live are more globally inter-connected than in any previous historical period. Globalization has thus dramatically broadened our horizons, expanded the boundaries of our lives and diversified the communities within which we live. Sociologist Ulrich Beck (2008), in fact, argues that the reality of globalization means we need to move beyond our “national outlook” and adopt a “cosmopolitan vision,” replacing “the either/or logic with the both/and logic of inclusive differentiation” (4–5). With that, it can be argued that our news interests, too, have become more extroverted; what matters to us, what is relevant to us, is not confined to our immediate locale. The boundaries of our working and social worlds have expanded, governing where and how we work and who we work for, where we come from, where we travel, who our neighbours are, where our friends and family are, where we shop, what

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we shop for, and how we spend our leisure time. Foreign people, foreign places, foreign languages, foreign wars, foreign news – these aren’t so foreign any more.3 The second, inter-related factor is the digitalization of news and its circulation via globally-connected networks of computers. Whether we get our news from Web sites, social media, e-readers, satellite television, satellite radio, and/or from the newspaper delivered to our doorstep, digitalization goes hand in hand with globalization, enabling the rapid exchange of every kind of communication between people, businesses, governments, and other types of organization, no matter their location. Digitalization has changed how journalists produce and disseminate news and how we consume news, not only with respect to which news platforms we frequent and where we access them, but in terms of which news organizations provide us with our news. Digitalization has also altered our notions of space and place (cf. Fard and Meshkani 2015). It means we are no longer beholden to our local newspaper, radio or television station. If we still get at least some of our local news from these traditional sources, it has become commonplace for news audiences to venture farther afield for their news diet. On the one hand, brand-name international news organizations like the BBC and the New York Times attract audiences from around the world, lured by the availability, the quality, and the scope of their coverage. They are attractive precisely because they are not local, because they perceive the world from a different vantage point, because they forge a very different map of the world and, given their resources, may have greater authority than local news producers. They seek to cover the world, even if, still, from the perspective of their particular place and who they imagine their primary audience to be. On the other hand, news audiences seek out portals, blogs, digital-only news providers, and social media sites that either have no explicit geographical boundaries or determine their boundaries based on topic specialization – the sports world, the arts world, the business world – or audience members’ expressed interests. The producers of this content may be professional journalists, they may be commentators with a specialized expertise, or ordinary citizens participating in a more accessible mediascape. In every case, though, the reader/listener/viewer remains oriented to the world in a particular way, situated vis-à-vis the people, places, and events of the news stories. The third factor is commercialization, what some term hyper-commercialization (e.g., Cooper 2005), the increasing tendency by the owners of news organizations to perceive journalism as simply another branch of commercial enterprise, to privilege the profit motive by strictly defining news as a commodity and audiences as markets. If journalism, from the time of the earliest newspapers, has been organized predominantly as some form of commodity production, it has been characterized as well by a strong public-service ethos. In this sense, its business role has been seen as compatible with its sociopolitical role; that is, a viable business could be built by providing the public with an array of news, information, and analysis 3

I do not mean to imply that everyone shares equally in this global interconnection. As a number of scholars have pointed out, globalization is a very uneven process; ironically, for instance, globalization has also led to the isolation of some people and their communities (Massey and Jess 1995; Massey 1992).

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that would include the kind of information citizens of a healthy democracy require. Newspapers, magazines and, later, radio and television news and current-affairs programming included in their packages hard and soft news, news from the political, business, sports and arts worlds, news of serious import, and news to amuse and entertain, thus serving a range of publics. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, and increasingly up to the present day, news production has shifted gradually from small business to big business, first with the development of regional and national newspaper chains and radio and television networks, then with the creation of cross-media enterprises, and finally with the absorption of these companies within larger, omnibus corporations (see Gasher, 2010; Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 9). As subsidiaries of what are typically publicly-traded corporations, each of these media properties is increasingly required to generate profits, completing the transition of news to commodity and of audience to market. As political economist Dallas Smythe (1977) was the first to note, the principal product of commercial media is not their content, but audiences to be sold to advertisers. Smythe (1994, 270–271) argues that what advertisers buy is not simply air time or newspaper space, but “the services of audiences with predictable specifications who will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular times to particular means of communications.” Through the increasingly sophisticated audience measurement techniques of digitalization, media managers collect data on their audiences – not only the size of the audience is determined, but demographic factors such as income, education, age, sex, and consumption habits – and sell advertisers access to the kinds of audiences that would most likely be interested in buying their product or service. Mass media content, Smythe argues, is merely “an inducement (gift, bribe or ‘free lunch’) to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention.” He explains that “the free lunch consists of materials which whet the audience members’ appetite and thus (1) attract and keep them attending to the programme, newspaper or magazine, and (2) cultivate a mood conducive to favourable reaction to the explicit and implicit advertisers’ messages.” The economics of news production affects what kind of news we get, how stories are told, and who journalists seek to address (and who, thereby, is excluded from the audience). The meaning of the term ‘news value’ has thus taken on a dual meaning; if to the journalist, news value is a qualitative measure of any story’s newsworthiness – its significance, its importance, its appeal –, to media managers and owners it is a quantitative measure of what kinds of news story sell and to whom. Together, globalization, digitalization, and commercialization shape news judgment and have an impact on the production of news maps. Any one news organization’s geography, then, is the product of a kind of triangulation, in which the space the news organization occupies is drawn by the symbiotic relationship among the news content, the target audience, and the advertisers seeking access to that audience (see Figure 1.2). The news content is determined by the news organization’s particular focus, conventional news values, and the resources it assigns to its newsroom. The target audience is governed, again, by the news organization’s journalistic focus, its marketing strategy, and its technological capacity for delivering the

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news to that audience in a timely fashion and on the audience’s preferred media platform. The advertising content is determined by advertisers’ desire to seek access to that audience, whoever and wherever they are.

Figure 1.2 News Geography as a Product of Triangulation The space any one news organization occupies is shaped by the relationship among its news content, where its target audience is located, and which advertisers it seeks to attract.

The resulting map is a construct and the constituent elements of its triangulation can be altered, slightly or greatly, to reflect the territorial, demographic, and economic ambitions of the news organization. The scale of this common ground is suggested in the very categorization of community, metropolitan, regional, national and international news providers. News geographies are in constant flux. The news media have altered their news geographies throughout the history of journalism, in periods when social, cultural, political, economic, and technological changes encouraged and enabled such expansion. Newspapers, for example, gradually expanded their physical circulation capacity with the introduction of train service in the 19th century, automobility in the early 20th century, satellite printing in the mid to late 20th century, and, more recently, digitalized computer networks. Local radio and television stations became part of regional and national networks before broadcast networks ultimately went global via satellite and Internet distribution. Similarly, the news media have expanded their audience reach historically by appealing to an increasingly literate and educated population and by appealing to working-class, female, and youth audiences, even if they struggle still to embrace fully the diversity of the communities they purport to serve. If our news consumption habits were for most of the 20th century governed by the physical circulation of hard-copy newspapers and magazines and by over-the-air radio and television signals, circulation areas that corresponded roughly to municipal, provincial, and national boundaries, today our news consumption is governed by whatever interests us, because digitalization has rendered the circulation of news ubiquitous and immediate.4 Journalists are thus saddled 4

This is not to ignore the digital divide, which recognizes that computer access and computer literacy depend on a number of socio-economic factors such as income and education levels (see van Dijk 2005, 2012).

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with an increased responsibility for understanding, satisfying, stimulating, and shaping audience interests within newly and variously configured communities. Journalism scholars have identified a number of conventional news values, criteria by which journalists determine the newsworthiness of a particular person, place, institution or event. These determinants include: timeliness (events that are immediate or recent); impact (events that affect many people); prominence (events involving well-known people, places or institutions); conflict (events pitting two sides against one another); peculiarity (events that deviate from the everyday); currency (long-simmering events that re-emerge as objects of attention); and proximity (events that are physically, culturally, or emotionally close to the audience) (Mencher 2006, 58–65). The question of news value is not merely a question of what news stories are covered, but also how they are covered and to whom they are addressed. In a study of American television news, for example, communication scholar Daniel C. Hallin (1994) argues that news reportage is shaped by three ideological spheres: the spheres of consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance (see also Hallin 1986). The sphere of consensus pertains to stories and points of view for which journalists believe there is considerable societal agreement. “Within this region journalists do not feel compelled to present opposing views, and often feel it is their responsibility to act as advocates or ceremonial protectors of consensus values…. Within this region the media play an essentially conservative, legitimizing role” (53). The sphere of legitimate controversy comprises those stories that journalists feel warrant “neutrality and balance,” where legitimacy is granted to varying perspectives on the topic in question. “This is the region where objective journalism reigns supreme” (54). Finally, the sphere of deviance includes stories about actors and points of view that journalists believe mainstream society rejects as “unworthy of being heard” (54). Each of these spheres has “internal gradations” and the boundaries between them are “fuzzy” and constantly evolving (54). In the current environment, the news value of proximity has taken on added significance. The intensified mobility of our globalized society brings us physically, culturally and, presumably, emotionally closer to the peoples and places of the world, whether we feel at times excited and at other times threatened by this redrawing of our political, economic, social, and cultural frontiers. Journalists, whether they work for international news agencies or local media, play a key role in sketching and patrolling these boundaries, determining on our behalf what peoples, places, and events we feel close to, and the bases and nature of that proximity. Such news judgment is, by definition, a process of inclusion and exclusion, revealing a range of assumptions on the part of journalists about what matters and doesn’t matter to their community, as well as about who matters and doesn’t matter (see Gasher and Gabriele 2004). Gutsche and Hess (2019) add a further dimension to the news value of proximity, what they term “performative proximity.” They insist that journalists’ own physical proximity to news events, news-makers and society’s most powerful institutions – sites of power – lends them authority and legitimacy as story-tellers (68–74). By being there, at press conferences, court proceedings, parliamentary

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debates, crime scenes, sites of natural disasters, etc., journalists garner “symbolic power.” “[W]e argue that physical proximity – even in a digital era – is seen to be more legitimate in perpetuating powerful relationships and ideas than those at a physical distance” (72). The increased commercialization of news, of course, means ‘news value’ needs to be understood as well in a financial sense; what monetary value can the news generate? The strongest proponent of this view is communication scholar James T. Hamilton, who argues that economics can be shown to drive news decisions. Instead of the conventional five Ws of who, what, where, when, and why, Hamilton substitutes “five economic Ws”: 1. Who cares about a particular piece of information? 2. What are they willing to pay to find it, or what are others willing to pay to reach them? 3. Where can media outlets or advertisers reach these people? 4. When is it profitable to provide the information? 5. Why is this profitable? (2004, 7)

Hamilton contends: “Whether a particular type of news is offered in a marketplace will depend on the number of people who share an interest in the topic and their value, as measured by their willingness to pay for the information good or the willingness of advertisers to spend dollars to reach these consumers” (19). While this may be too reductive an explanation for all news decisions, we can no longer speak of news value without acknowledging its commercial dimension. Clearly, some news topics – travel, real estate, motoring, fashion, food – can be seen as advertising vehicles with little if any journalistic merit, and topics like sports and celebrity gossip occupy more media attention than their strict public-interest value would seem to warrant. The question is to what degree the news writ large has been affected by commercial considerations, from the choice of stories to pursue to the way those stories are told. News organizations produce at least four kinds of maps. The first of these representational spaces is the map drawn by each individual news story. Every news story stakes out its own territory, draws its own connections, creates its own setting, and its own timeframe. The setting of the news story may be confined to one locale with no external links to anywhere or anyone else – e.g., the story of a local house fire – or its narrative may bring into the picture people and places in other cities or regions or countries, from the present or the past – e.g., the story of a proposed international trade agreement. How the story is set says something about its singularity or, conversely, its universality. The second kind of map we can identify is the micro-scale map of ‘here,’ the community, the ‘us’ the news organization has dedicated itself to serve. This map is drawn gradually over time as the community’s key institutions and political, economic, and cultural leaders are identified, its constituents are described, its history is told, its central beliefs, values, and concerns are revealed, and the boundaries which distinguish ‘here’ from ‘there’ and ‘us’ from ‘them’ come to be drawn. This sense of community is reinforced by the advertisements featured and by the regular con-

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sumption by audiences of its news package. Content supply and audience demand constitute a symbiosis. The third kind of map is drawn by extended coverage of one particular event or one particular people, and corresponds to an inset map, a more detailed highlight contained within the larger, overall map. It is usually rendered over a much shorter period of time, and situates ‘us’ in relation to ‘them,’ ‘here’ in relation to ‘there.’ These maps can result from news stories from within our own community – a specific district of the city that becomes the subject of some dispute – or from farther afield – e.g., a natural disaster in a remote part of the world. They provide us with important information about how these stories are newsworthy, how they connect us to the people, places, and events they describe, on what basis the news value of proximity is asserted or explained. Finally, the fourth kind of map produced by news organizations is the macroscale map of the world as seen from ‘here.’ As with the map of ‘here,’ this map, too, is drawn over time, but in this case by the inclusion and exclusion of news stories from various parts of the world, and from cities and regions beyond the borders of our community. This map of the news world only loosely corresponds to the map of the material world because news organizations cover some places much more intensely – close neighbours, political and military allies, trading partners, tourist destinations – than other places, and leave some off the map entirely. It is the map of the peoples and places we hear about regularly, a map of our perceived and actual connections (see Wu 2000, 2003, 2004). This book focuses on the latest period in the transformation of our news geography. It begins in Chapter 2 by drawing explicit parallels between the practices of cartography and journalism, making the case for understanding journalism as a particular form of cartography. This pertains not merely to what people, places, and events are covered, but how, too, the language of particular news stories shapes these perceptions. Chapter 3 looks at how journalism has always played a role in constituting community, in producing publics, and how the parameters of our sense of place shift over time, concluding with a look at the maps drawn by individual news stories. Chapter 4 looks at the maps of two local communities: the first, the map of a rural community straddling the Ontario-Quebec border drawn collectively by four community newspapers; the second, the distinct maps of Montreal as drawn by four of the city’s daily newspapers. Chapter 5 describes an inset map through a case study of the coverage of the 2010 Haitian earthquake in four Montreal daily newspapers, demonstrating how and why Haiti suddenly appeared so prominently on their news maps. Drawing on the news-flow literature, Chapter 6 addresses the macro-scale map of the world, demonstrating the persistence of the news value of proximity in spite of globalization and digitalization, and in spite of what we might think of as our cosmopolitanism. Finally, Chapter 7 addresses the question of why news geography matters, the impact of these news maps, what they include and exclude, and what those inclusions and exclusions imply. These issues are important because journalists perform a validating function through their news judgment. As discussed above, news is, by definition, what is deemed important, what matters, what is significant to a parti-

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cular community. To cover an event, to consider it newsworthy, is to validate that event as important and relevant, not only to those who are close to the event and may be directly affected, but also to people who are not directly involved, people who may have a more tenuous connection to the event. Beyond informing, this is a matter of granting human dignity, about allowing peoples to share in each other’s joy or sorrow, about paying attention to the welfare of other communities. It is also about making connections between peoples, explaining in concrete terms why ‘we’ should care, why these events matter. Related to this is the point that journalists, through their reportage, construct notions of community, of who belongs to a given community, what its boundaries are, not only in terms of geography, but in terms of culture: goals, ideals, values, notions of proper conduct. This is a complicated yet critical task in heterogeneous – multicultural, multi-faith, multilingual, multi-ethnic and multiracial – societies, as any number of news stories about school dress codes or immigration policies can attest. Here, journalism is implicated in providing answers to the questions ‘Who are we?’ and, correspondingly, ‘Who are we not?’ Journalists, too, implicate their audiences in news events in a number of ways. The manner in which an event is defined can lead to a range of responses, or no response at all. If, for example, a hurricane is defined exclusively as a natural disaster, the response may be confined to disaster relief. If, however, the damages caused by that hurricane can be related to political negligence or incompetence or poverty, which affect the way storm damages are apportioned, other responses become available. News coverage can mobilize individuals, governments, resources, and/or particular solutions to problems, depending on how those problems are framed: major or minor, relevant or irrelevant, resolvable or irreconcilable. A lack of news coverage, similarly, renders events unimportant – at least to ‘us’. Through their seemingly straightforward goal of informing audiences of what is newsworthy, journalists, therefore, participate in the construction and location of their communities. News judgment is the very subjective exercise of selecting which relatively few news items warrant coverage, how much and what kind of coverage they deserve, and how they are defined as important and relevant to a given audience. The choices of what not to cover can be as significant to this process of constructing community as the choices of what will be covered. Choices pertaining to how a particular news topic is framed, and therefore what aspects of the topic are emphasized, are equally important; the same topic, for instance, may have economic, cultural, environmental, broader health, and/or social implications, and may affect different populations in different ways. Related to this is the question of audience address, what assumptions the journalist is making about the imagined audience for any particular story; are, for example, audience members being addressed as citizens or as consumers, as managers or as workers, as women or as men? Highlighting the journalistic, political, economic, social, cultural, and technological determinants that shape news geographies, the book ultimately argues that in spite of what would seem to be the cosmopolitan forces of globalization and digitalization – moving us in the direction of Marshall McLuhan’s iconic and happy

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global village – the maps journalists draw can exacerbate as easily as eradicate the distinctions between the news world and the real world. This has consequences for how we perceive our world, how we understand our connections to other peoples and places, as well as for how we understand and identify with our own immediate communities, our understanding of who we are, our sense of, and the bases for, belonging. The increasing commercialization of the news industry affects all aspects of journalism: who produces original reporting and commentary, how exactly it is paid for, what kinds of news and commentary are produced, the means by which, and the extent to which, that news and commentary are circulated, what audiences are presented with as journalism. How journalism is produced, disseminated, and consumed speaks to the question: what is journalism for? Has the news become merely a disposable commodity, or can we still believe in the ideal, as expressed by journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, that it has a larger, democratic purpose, “to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and selfgoverning” (2001, 17)? I have been thinking about news geography for close to two decades now, and I am indebted to those who have worked with me and helped shape these ideas. These people include: Sandra Gabriele and Andreea Mandache, initially research assistants and now scholars in their own right, who were important collaborators at the earliest stages of this work; Chris Lukinbeal, a cartographer and media geography scholar who encouraged this line of inquiry, validated my original ideas and helped me advance my thinking in new directions; and Greg Nielsen, a sociologist and research partner who shares my interest in journalism as an essential democratic practice. I am fortunate to have been associated with the rich research environment of Concordia University’s Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies (http://www.concordia.ca/research/broadcasting-journalism.html) and Concordia’s Department of Journalism (http://www.concordia.ca/artsci/journalism.html), a department that is committed to research and is home to a number of dedicated and supportive journalism scholars. This book is a product of the Geography of News Project, a research program that has received financial support from Concordia University, Quebec’s Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the MITACS Globalink program.

CHAPTER 2: GEOGRAPHY: WRITING THE EARTH The map is not the territory. (Korzybski cited in Harley 2001, 153)

The central argument of this book is that journalism is a practice of cartography. Journalists, that is, through their reporting, draw maps of the world in much the same way as cartographers do; they produce particular renderings of the world in textual form, texts that establish relationships between people, places, institutions, events, and the natural world. I use ‘text’ here in the literary studies sense, as anything that can be read and thus communicate meaning; in the realm of journalism, this implicates both the form and the content of newspaper and magazine articles, photo essays, charts, and graphs, the words and sounds of radio broadcasts, the words and pictures of TV newscasts, or the mixed-media offerings of digital platforms. If maps are primarily illustrative texts, supported by some explanatory wording, journalism tends to be logocentric, written and spoken accounts of current events – word maps, if you will – supported by illustrative and auditory material such as photographs, video, sound clips, diagrams, charts, tables, and, yes, sometimes actual maps. The cartographies journalists forge emerge cumulatively, each story adding, revising, reinforcing, and refining details on the map, creating a virtual palimpsest. The production of any text is an interlocutory gesture. A text is not simply put out there, but is proffered to an audience, intended to address an imagined audience with a particular purpose in mind: to inform, to convince, to instruct, to assist, to provoke, to initiate dialogue, etc. It is an invitation to individuals to adopt the subject position of reader, to form themselves into an audience community with the aim of consuming – i.e., reading, interpreting, considering, discussing – the text, and for a purpose that may or may not conform to the aims of the producer. These textual renderings of the world thus contain numerous rhetorical devices in constituting their specific form of audience address. They in no way guarantee the audience their producers imagine, but they go a long way toward producing a particular readership community, including some and excluding others. As discussed in Chapter 1, journalism and cartography are textual practices. Their production of texts – news stories, maps – based on observations of the actual material world has a number of important implications. We need to understand that texts are constructions, they are produced. This means that they are depictions rather than faithful reproductions of the world, and that the process of depicton is always at the same time a process of meaning production. Mark Graham (2015), for instance, describes places as “ontogenetic” in the sense that they are “in a state of becoming that emerges through practices” (160). This chapter posits journalism and cartography as meaningful practices because by describing our world they are also, necessarily, defining it for us and situating us within it.

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CONSTRUCTING TEXTS, CONSTRUCTING WORLDS We need to begin, then, by understanding journalism and cartography as forms of mediation – using communication technologies to perceive, render, and comprehend our world – and as practices of representation – depicting rather than reproducing the material world. What we know about the world is largely, and necessarily, mediated, based on second-hand knowledge, derived from books we’ve read, news reports we’ve seen, courses we’ve taken in school, movies we’ve watched, pictures we’ve looked at, and stories we’ve heard from friends, family, and colleagues. Media scholar Shani Orgad writes: “For many people, media representations are the main, if not the only, place that they come to know the world” (2012, 134). These stories and images, she adds, “constitute central symbolic resources we rely on to make sense of our lives and the world we live in” (157). Even our direct personal experience of people and places is made meaningful in large part by images and stories from secondary sources and filtered through our own preconceptions. The best examples of this may be travel guides for tourists; such guides define and encapsulate places through highlighting and prioritizing sites to visit and things for visitors to do, making assumptions about what those visitors will be most interested in. By the time visitors arrive, their destination has been defined for them and an itinerary has been laid out, establishing any number of preconceived notions that they may or may not overcome (cf. Eades 2015, 31–36; Thompson 1995, 34–35). In similar fashion, we learn most of what we know about current events and the people and places they implicate through news reports, and to get a sense of a place we typically consult a map. The geographer Mark Monmonier writes: “Although news maps are a small part of the news business, journalism is one of a few industries that provide the public most of its information about places and geography” (1989, 1). In all cases, our view is mediated; it comes to us through some form of cognitive mechanism. As the cultural theorist Tony Bennett puts it: “[T]he power which the media derive from their reality-defining capability is attributable to the service they perform in making us the indirect witnesses to events of which we have no first-hand knowledge or experience” (1996, 296). Mediation reminds us that the texts we read are never presented to us simply or naturally, but are instead constructed by people with specific sets of technical and aesthetic skills, organized within a given production environment, and guided by some combination of ideals, ideologies, regulations, and institutional demands. “Mediation involves a series of choices about which content to create – how, for what purpose, and for whom, regardless of whether those choices are made consciously or unconsciously” (Gasher et al. 2020, 247) It is not possible for either journalism or cartography to re-produce the world, or even specific elements of the world. Instead, journalism and cartography are activities by which the material world is re-presented, or depicted, described, highlighted, made available to us in textual form, employing the symbolic systems of their respective fields.1 There are two main steps to this process: the selection of 1

Even live coverage of an event is a representation rather than a reproduction: the coverage has a discrete beginning and ending, some people and procedings are captured within the camera’s

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elements to represent and the transformation of those elements from their materiality into some form of language (Fowler 2007, 2). In other words, the textual practices of journalism and cartography involve a translation of the material features and activities of the physical world into words, pictures, symbols, diagrams, etc. Translation, as always, entails some degree of transformation. At the most fundamental level, both journalism and cartography project a spherical, three-dimensional, and intensely dynamic real world onto a confined, rectangular and, usually, two-dimensional surface – what the geographer Geoff King describes as cartography’s “recurring dilemma” (1996, 18–19) – which is either static (e.g., newspaper and magazine stories, conventional maps) or offers relatively brief kinetic segments (e.g., audio or video news clips, interactive maps). News stories and maps, then, are merely partial pictures – snapshots, if you will – of some select aspect of the material world, taken from the perspective of their producer, for that producer’s particular purpose, at a particular time. Even the most skilled, conscientious, and principled reporter or cartographer must make a series of judgment calls about how best to render a complex and chaotic material world onto the page or the screen to make it comprehensible for the audience.2 As snapshots, news stories and maps are necessarily partial, selective, and reductive. No story tells the whole story, no picture gives the whole picture (see van Ginneken 1998, Chapters 8 and 9). In fact, the very purpose of news articles and maps is to highlight some aspect of actuality at the expense of other aspects, to focus our attention on a particular subject matter: in short, to simplify. These texts provide a frame through which we perceive the world, rather than a mirror in which the world would be simply reflected. A newspaper story, for example, may be only 800 words in length, occupying part of a larger newspaper page. Those 800 words form the frame, or container, within which the news event must be described and explained. Because not even the most gifted and insightful reporter can describe every conceivable aspect of a news event in 800 words, the reporter must decide which are the most newsworthy aspects of this event and what else must be excluded. This will result in a particular rendering of the news event. That rendering and the meanings it produces will be complemented by how the story is presented: how it is headlined and illustrated, under which topic it is classified, how much time or space it is afforded, etc. Similarly, a map is framed by the size of the page or screen, or section of the page or screen, and must confine its description of the world to that finite space. Again, no map can feature every possible element of its subject, so particular aspects – population centres, major roads, mountains, subway stops, etc. – must be

2

frame and others are excluded, microphones pick up some sounds and not others, etc., all of which are the result of choices made by the production team. I am not talking here about deliberate distortion, bias or propaganda – that’s a different subject. I want simply to establish the point that news stories and maps do not emerge directly from the natural, material world, but must be produced in textual form by journalists and cartographers working within the parameters – structural, ideological – of their respective practices (see Fowler 2007, 222).

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highlighted and other features left out, depending on what kind of map it is. King argues: There is and can be no such thing as a purely objective map, one that simply reproduces a preexisting reality. Choices always have to be made about what to represent and what to leave out. It is here that cartographic meaning is created. To be included on the map is to be granted the status of reality or importance. To be left off is to be denied (1996, 18).

The geographers James Duncan and David Ley describe representations as “partial truths” (1994, 7) and outline three hermeneutic components of any representation: the text itself, the “extra-textual field of reference” that provides the “data” or information with which to produce the text, and the “inter-textual field of reference,” which are “elements culled from other texts” and used in the new text’s production (9).3 Box 2.1 Common Features of News Stories and Maps ⁕ textual practices employing symbolic systems • news stories logocentric, maps illustrative ⁕ representative practices rather than reproductions of actuality • producers select inclusions and exclusions ⁕ project three-dimensional actuality within two-dimensional frame • results in focus, simplification, reduction ⁕ constructive practices targeting specific audiences • organized by theme or topic ⁕ situate audiences with respect to subject of news story or map • orient audiences vis-à-vis the world ⁕ produce meaning • through theme, nomination, emphases ⁕ make claims to facticity, accuracy, objectivity, authority • assert world as knowable and accessible

3

For those living in border areas, this may necessitate the use of two or more maps, one for each jurisdiction. This is a clear indication of maps’ framing; they are framed according to sociallyproduced boundaries such as municipal, provincial, regional, and national borders, imposing those dividing lines on the natural landscape as well as their readers’ imaginations. Historian Jeremy Black describes this as a “statist” tendency in maps, in the sense that they privilege the boundaries of nation states and other political jurisdictions (1997, 17).

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News stories and maps, then, force complex and multi-faceted features and activities of the material world into simplified portrayals, using their own forms of shorthand. To cite a simple example, the word ‘forest’ in a news story, or the symbol of a tree or a green patch identifying a forest on a map, in no way reflects the complexity of such an ecosystem’s plant and animal life, in either its specificity or its variety. Even if the story goes on to describe the forest in some detail, or the map charts the forest exclusively, some elements will be included and others excluded, leaving the reader to fill in many blanks. The forest can only be represented, not reproduced. Again, such simplification is a central purpose of news stories and maps. Because story-telling and map-making involve these kinds of decisions, they are constructive activities (see Schudson 2003); news stories and maps are texts that are produced by people according to the rules and conventions of their respective fields, according to the editorial decisions of their producers, according to the immediate purpose the story or the map is intended to serve, according to their producers’ individual abilities and proclivities, and according to the imagined audience. This may seem obvious or commonsensical, but the point is to draw attention to the distinction between the material world and our representations of it, to deconstruct the textual practices of journalism and cartography, “to break the assumed link between reality and representation” in the words of the historical geographer J.B. Harley (2001, 152). What we think of as reality, John Hartley (1992, 142) argues, is “a socio-discursive construction.” King adds: There never has been any such thing as news-gathering, in the implied sense of a merely passive and neutral recording of events ‘out there’ in the world. All news is constructed to a greater or lesser degree, according to a host of contingent and often arbitrary factors which determine which events are defined as news and which are not, when, how and by whom (1996, 80).

Each news story and each map produces what the philospher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls a “chronotope” or “time space,” a text which creates its own temporal and spatial bounds (1981, 84). In his literary studies, Bakhtin notes that the chronotope digresses both spatially and temporally from “the normal course of life” (90–91). Time sequences in novels, for example, do not adhere to historical or chronological time. Similarly, the places in which the story unfolds are bounded and connected – or separated – to suit the author’s purposes and cannot be considered faithful to their actual physical arrangement in the world. As chronotopes, news stories and maps construct time spaces to suit their own needs. News stories do not usually recount events chronologically, and their relative brevity requires the journalist to condense and summarize events into a series of pertinent highlights, with a discrete beginning and ending.4 Maps, of necessity, condense space and are not always faithful to scale; for simplicity’s sake, subway maps, to cite a classic 4

One recurrent criticism of conventional journalism practice is its focus on specific dramatic events rather than long-term and complex processes. News stories about labour-management disputes, for example, tend to concentrate almost exclusively on strikes and their manifestation in picket lines – the immediate event – rather than the procedural aspects that led to the strike, such as working conditions, the particular economic environment within which both the workers and their employer operate, let alone the larger power dynamics of the exchange economy that is capitalism (cf. Lynch and McGoldrick 2005, Chapter 1).

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Figure 2.1 Constructing Time Spaces (Société de transport de Montréal 2021) News stories and maps construct time and space according to their need to condense and simplify. Subway maps provide a good example in that they connect stations with straight lines and do not reflect the actual distances between stops.

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example, connect stations with straight lines and do not reflect the actual, varied distances between stations (cf. Short 2003, 189). Maps, too, are temporal; they can portray a specific place on a specific date, or, like radar weather maps or maps that depict the effects of climate change, can track variations over time. As noted above, we rely heavily on media such as news stories and maps for our access to, and understanding of, the world.5 Gradually, the representational conventions of journalism and cartography can become our cognitive conventions, such that the distinctions between the material world and representations of it can be forgotten, that we take their renderings of the world as the way the world actually is. Harley writes: “Far from holding up a simple mirror of nature that is true or false, maps redescribe the world – like any other document – in terms of relations of power and of cultural practices, preferences, and priorities” (2001, 35). The audiences for news stories and maps are also constructions. Audiences do not simply precede texts as already-assembled congregations simply waiting to be addressed. Rather, texts forge their audiences, media build their markets, through the production of specific types of content and the marketing of that content to desired audiences (see Hartley 1992, 1996).6 Communication scholar Joseph Turow distinguishes between a public and an audience this way: “A public consists of the real individuals who make decisions to use or not use certain media materials. A mass media audience, by contrast, is a construct created by mass media industries to describe the groups who are being targeted by the creators and distributors” (1992, 171; see also Curran 1996). In the case of commercial media, this means producing content that will appeal to the kinds of audiences that advertisers are most interested in reaching (see Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 5). This recalls the observa5

6

I am fully aware that journalism is undergoing a period of crisis, given the fragility of its conventional economic model, the absorption of news organizations within large omnibus corporations, the downsizing of newsrooms among legacy news organizations, the emergence of various forms of citizen journalism, the establishment of fake news sites, various scandals involving plagiarism and invention, attacks on journalism by political leaders, etc. (cf. Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 10; McChesney and Pickard 2011; McChesney and Nicols 2009). Nevertheless, we remain dependent upon news reports, regardless of their source, for our awareness and understanding of current events. If anything, concerns about the future of journalism point to the importance of journalism – original, independent reporting and informed, rational analysis – as a democratic communications system. The status and use of cartography, on the other hand, may have increased in recent years, given the popularity of applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps and hand-held GPS devices, and given its increased technological sophistication with the emergence of geographic information systems (GIS). Here, too, though, it is important not to ignore the elements of its construction (cf. Crampton 2011; Propen 2011; Kitchin et al. 2011). On this point, Hartley quotes Karl Marx from Grundrisse: “Production thus produces not only an object for a subject but also a subject for the object.” Hartley writes: “It suggests that publics and consumers are not simply people waiting passively out there for something to consume, but on the contrary that they are brought into being as consumers and publics by the process of cultural production itself. By this formula, then, journalism cannot simply be thought of as an industry which produces a throwaway commodity (printed paper), but as a form of cultural production which produces its own consuming subjects – the public, the consumer” (1996, 47).

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tion by Dallas Smythe (1977), noted in Chapter 1, that the audience is the principal product of commercial media, a product to be sold to advertisers.7 MEANINGFUL TEXTS Both journalism and cartography remain highly subjective practices, even if journalists and map-makers subscribe to a certain, even if naïve, notion of objectivity – seeking to represent the world accurately and devoid of personal bias – and they are instructed in specific codes of ethics. Both practices require their producers to make choices. The use of language – any kind of language – is a signifying practice, in that we assign particular words or symbols to signify, or stand for, elements in the material world, ideas, concepts, etc., and we always have a choice of which words to use. The acquisition of language is precisely this process of learning to associate particular signifiers – words, symbols, signs, gestures, sounds – with corresponding signifieds – the things, ideas or actions we wish to express (see de Saussure 1971). We learn as children to read, to put together the letters t-r-e-e into the word ‘tree’, and to associate that word, that signifier, with a certain category of plant life. Gradually, that association between signifier and signified becomes more and more complex; there are many different kinds of trees, there are trees in forests and parks and in our own backyards, and when we speak of trees, we might be speaking of them as a source of beauty, of shade, of wood, of pulp and paper, of climate control, or objects for children to climb on. We learn, in the same way, to read a map, to understand that a thin blue line signifies a river, that a circular dot signifies a town or city, that north is at the top of the map, and we learn to read maps in various ways for different purposes. Once we have learned to read, we learn to read critically, to read between the lines, as it were. Because language is always value-laden, even if the values are implicit and unconsciously expressed, choices in the representation of the world through language produce meaning, unavoidably providing a particular perspective on the world, framing reality in a certain way, forging our “mental maps” through representation (see van Ginneken 1998, 5–7). The geographer Harm de Blij maintains that a mental map “is a map that accrues over a lifetime, the spatial equivalent of our temporal, chronological knowledge…. But our mental maps are not historic, they are current, and they guide and inform our actions and decisions whether a simple excursion for pleasure or a military campaign in a distant land” (2012, 60). Cultural theorist Stuart Hall defines the practice of representation as “the production of meaning through language” (2013, 2). To represent is, literally, to re-present, or make present, to depict or symbolize through some form of language, whether words, images or sounds. A photograph of an automobile is not the automobile itself, but a representation of it. How it is photographed and described 7

A distinction should be drawn between the empirical audience, which is the actual audience for a media product, confirmed by some form of empirical measurement, and the implied audience, those people that content producers imagine as their audience (see Iser 1974; Livingstone 1998; Nielsen 2008; Nielsen et al. 2016; Jackson et al. 2011, Chapter 3).

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in any accompanying caption or title will attribute meaning to that automobile – luxurious, sporty, powerful, fuel-efficient, etc. – either explicitly or inferentially. In other words, the language choices made by the producer of the text are meaningful. All utterances of language – words, images, symbols – have both denotative (literal) and connotative (associative) meanings (see Barthes 1967). With the experience of seeing and hearing these various utterances, we learn what they mean both denotatively and connotatively. And because utterances have no solitary and fixed meaning, each of us may understand them in slightly different ways. To cite a simple example, when he hear in the news of a demonstration taking place, we share the understanding at a denotative level that a group of people has assembled for some kind of protest, to raise awareness of an issue of concern to them. At a connotative level of meaning, however, that demonstration can take on a different hue, prompted by the language of the news report and/or by our own ideological leanings and degree of familiarity with the issue. Some of us may regard a demonstration as, on principle, people exercising their fundamental democratic rights as citizens, whether or not we support the cause of that particular demonstration. Others may see it simply as a gathering of troublemakers disrupting the order of daily life, regardless of the merits of their cause. The word ‘demonstration’ has meaning, then, but not always the same meaning. The linguistics scholar Roger Fowler insists that “the very notion of ‘representation’ carries within it the qualification of representation from a specific ideological point of view” (2007, 66). “The main point,” Hall argues, “is that meaning does not inhere in things, in the world. It is constructed, produced. It is the result of a signifying practice – a practice that produces meaning, that makes things mean” (Hall 2013, 10). Language is, in other words, unavoidably value-laden. Even conventional practices of journalism and cartography are value-laden. Journalism, at least as it is practised in Western democracies, subscribes to, and promotes, Enlightenment values: for example, the pursuit and promotion of truths, rational knowledge production and dissemination, popular education, social mobility, personal responsibility, honesty, democratic governance, and human rights, including equality among peoples and various individual freedoms (cf. van Ginneken 1998, 60–63; Gans 2004, 42–52).8 Cartography, similarly, values knowledge production and dissemination, the pursuit and promotion of truths, accuracy, precision, transparency, efficiency and the idea that the world is knowable (Robinson et al. 1995, 4–6, 21–28; Hartley 1992, 147; Kitchin et al. 2011). Further, to produce a news story or a map is to assert value, that the subject of the story or the map is worthy of an audience’s attention, it is newsworthy or noteworthy; that is its first level of meaning. Harley describes maps as “inherently 8

Jaap van Ginneken lists common values expressed in the news reportage of the Western media as the economic values of free enterprise and a free market, the social values of individualism and social mobility, the political values of pragmatism and moderation, the lifestyle values of materialism and autonomy, and the ideological value of “we have no ideology” (1998, 60–63). Herbert Gans, in a 1970s study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and the newsmagazines Time and Newsweek, listed the common values as ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, and moderatism (2004, 42–52).

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rhetorical,” as texts that seek to persuade. “As images of the world, maps are never neutral or value-free, or ever completely scientific. Each map argues its own particular case” (2001, 37). He includes maps within “the broader family of value-laden images” (53). Harley adds: “All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority … and appeals to a potential readership through the use of colors, decoration, typography, dedications, or written justifications of their method,” at the same time as omitting “those features of the world that lie outside the purpose of their immediate discourse” (163–164). Wood describes maps as “propositions,” affirming that what is indicated on the map exists and belongs together in a shared space (2010, 34–39). “In effect, maps are systems of propositions, where a proposition is nothing more than a state that affirms (or denies) the existence of something. As such, maps are arguments about existence” (34; see also Pickles 2004). For their part, news stories are rhetorical in the sense of signalling, first and foremost, that their subject matter is important; to be covered at all, a subject has to be newsworthy. The degree of the subject’s import can be gleaned from its formal aspects, such as its prominence in the news package: where it sits in the hierarchy of other news stories, how much time or space it occupies, what other elements – illustrations, sound clips or charts – accompany its presentation, etc. The more important editors or producers consider a story, the greater the prominence it is assigned. The story itself will then tell us how and why it is newsworthy. The language choices made, for example, can signal a story as good news or bad news (and for whom), the inclusion of certain facts and sources’ points of view can encourage us to understand the story in a particular way, at the same time excluding other perspectives. As with the demonstration example cited above, the same news event can be framed in different ways, whether the journalist is fully aware of such biases or not. In addition, both journalism and cartography are inherently ethnocentric. They speak to the audience, whether consciously or unconsciously, from a particular perspective or, quite literally, point of view. Lots of events occur in the world each day, but news assigns its subject matter gravity and relevance, a particular meaning to a specified news audience. Why is that event newsworthy to us? Sometimes the answer to this question is obvious and would prompt considerable consensus about its importance and its meaning. Often, though, this question is more contentious; there are constant newsroom debates among reporters and editors about the newsworthiness of events, and how they might qualify as warranting coverage. Fowler argues that the news values of cultural proximity or relevance are “founded on an ideology of ethnocentricism” or what he prefers to call “homocentrism: a preoccupation with countries, societies and individuals perceived to be like oneself” (2007, 16). The practice of representation, he adds, “carries within it the qualification of representation from a specific ideological point of view” (66). Similarly, maps do not include every feature of the world, but include some and exclude others, put some parts of the world at the centre and some at the margins, some at the top and some at the bottom. As the geographer Mark Monmonier reminds us, selection necessitates suppression; the two go hand in hand (1996, 25; see also Adams 2009, 193). Maps privilege those features at the centre and at the

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top of the map where the eye is drawn, marginalizing, literally, those features at the left, right and bottom edges of its frame. The oft-cited example of this is the “Eurocentric” Mercator projection, which features Europe at the center of the world and gives the northern hemisphere primacy over the southern hemisphere, which occupies less than half of the map (see Black 1997, 30; Short 2003, 207; van Ginneken 1998, 2–4). Harley argues that this “rule of ethnocentricity” in the production of world maps “has led many historical societies to place their own territories at the center of their cosmographies or world maps” (2001, 156). Other formal properties of maps that reveal perspective include the scale of the map (governing how much detail is included/excluded), the use of nomenclature (Bombay or Mumbai? Burma or Myanmar? Queen Charlotte Islands or Haida Gwaii?) (Black 1997, 42),9 the depiction of towns and villages proportionate to their political importance, rather than their physical size or their population (Harley 2001, 69), and the depiction – or not – of disputed territories such as Kashmir, Palestine or Tibet (Short 2003, 207). Wood suggests that a map “allows us to view the world as we choose, as much or as little of it as we like, from whatever vantage point we like, and with whatever distortions we like; and, even though we know better, it nevertheless projects an aura of ubiquity and authenticity” (2010, 92–93). CONSTRUCTING REALITY This notion of construction goes one important step further. Not only are our texts constructions in and of themselves, but those texts in turn construct the world for their readers. The practice of representation is central to what the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967) mean by “the social construction of reality.” There is, of course, an actual, material world, but our knowledge of it, our perception of it, our understanding of it, our access to it, is mediated or socially constructed. Even what we come to think of as our direct experience of the world is shaped by our beliefs, values, prejudices, interests, expectations, experiences, history as we have come to understand it, what we perceive as normal and not normal, proper and improper. This is the prism through which we view the world and come to comprehend it. Social scientists David Morley and Kevin Robins maintain: “We are all largely dependent on the media for our images of non-local people, places and events, and the further the ‘event’ from our own direct experience, the more we depend on media images for the totality of our knowledge” (1995, 133). Berger and Luckmann argue that “knowledge must always be knowledge from a certain position” (1967, 10). As noted above, a considerable amount of our experience and knowledge of the world is not based on first-hand observation, and we are therefore dependent upon others’ representations (cf. Donald 1999). The 9

van Ginneken maintains that place-names are never neutral or “innocent” in that “they are coupled with very specific events and aspirations” (1998, 11). He cites the examples of places, particularly in Africa and the Americas, assigned European names when they were colonized by European peoples – e.g., Congo, Gold Coast, and Rhodesia in Africa, Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Argentina in the Americas (10).

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world becomes accessible to us through various forms of language, including the language of news reports and maps. Berger and Luckmann note that “language is capable of ‘making present’ a variety of objects that are spatially, temporally and socially absent from the ‘here and now’” (1967, 39). These representations through language, whether contained in conversations with friends, scholarly texts, tourist brochures, feature films, or popular music, are incomplete, biased, possibly inaccurate, but nonetheless contribute something to our understanding of the world. Berger and Luckmann argue: “Reality is socially defined. But the definitions are always embodied, that is, concrete individuals and groups serve as definers of reality” (116). Speaking to this point, Fowler argues: “A socially constructed model of the world is projected on to the objects of perception and cognition, so that essentially the things we see and think about are constructed according to a scheme of values, not entities directly perceived” (2007, 92). For Harley, a map is “a social construction of the world expressed through the medium of cartography” (2001, 35). This is significant because how we understand the world and our place in it informs how we act in the world. Representations of the world connect us to, or distance us from, other peoples and places, they offer definitions of people, places and events, and they provide us with a menu of viable actions we can take. News stories can prompt a range of responses from individuals, governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, depending on how the news event is explained. For example, citizens and governments might be more inclined to accept Syrian refugees if the news coverage provides us with a graphic picture of their desperation and assures us of their innocence and their potential future contribution to society. We, and our political representatives, might be less hospitable if they are cast as alien others who may not conform to our society’s values, if the legitimacy of their refugee status is called into question, or links to terrorist activity are inferred. As citizens, we might donate funds and encourage our governments to help if we believe an earthquake or flood was truly a random, natural occurrence and produced a sizeable number of innocent victims. We might act differently, or not at all, if the damages the earthquake or tornado or flood caused can be traced to some form of incompetence or corruption, whether in the local construction industry or responsible government agency. These responses, of course, will not be prompted by news reports alone, but in concert with all those information sources that have shaped our world view. Maps, too, can condition our responses to them. Think about how we interpret spaces that appear as blank on a map; the cartographic language suggests that there is nothing or no one there, that they are empty spaces – in the middle of nowhere, as the expression goes. If such voids might simply encourage readers of a roadmap to keep driving, they can lead government bureaucrats or real-estate developers or mining and forestry companies studying survey maps to believe that the blanks represent virgin, unused territory, ripe for some form of commercial exploitation. The writer Peter Turchi maintains that blank spaces on a map can mean many things, including “what is known, but deemed unimportant” and things that are “deliberately withheld” (2004, 32–33; see also Hubbard 2005; Cook and Phillips 2005).

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In many instances, maps have been used to assert sovereignty over contested territory (cf. Short 2003; Eades 2015; Shoalts 2017). Two famous indigenous land rights cases from Canadian history stand out in this regard. The first, in 1869, was an attempt by the Canadian government to re-survey lands recently acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert’s Land and the North West that sparked the 1869–70 Red River Resistance. The survey stoked fears among the Métis in the Red River colony that they would lose their river-lot farms, along with their culture, language, and religion, in the run-up to the new province of Manitoba joining Confederation (see Oppen 1979; Bumsted 2006). More recently, maps were used as key pieces of evidence in a land-rights legal case between the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan First Nations and the Canadian and British Columbia governments, a case that began in 1984 and wasn’t settled until 1997. A central aspect of the case was the clash between indigenous oral traditions and the Canadian legal system’s reliance on written documentation, compelling the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan to translate their oral knowledge into a series of maps. The geographer Matthew Sparke writes: “Through the medium of modern mapping, they articulated their claim to the territories in a way the judge might understand” (1998, 472). The Supreme Court of British Columbia rejected their claim of 58,000 square kilometres in north-western B.C., claiming their treaty rights had been extinguished when the province joined Confederation in 1871. However, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned that decision in 1997, ruling that treaty rights could not be extinguished and at the same time confirming the legitimacy of oral testimony (see Kurjata 2017). News stories and maps, which are intended to be factual, accurate, and produced with some degree of professional autonomy, attribute meaning to their subject matter as a product of their factors of production. As noted above, a news story is a story about something newsworthy, so its subject matter is by definition deemed to be somewhat significant, important, relevant, and/or interesting. Further, it is deemed to be newsworthy to a particular audience, so that it is important to a specific group of people for a specific reason. A state election in New South Wales does not have the same news value in Sydney, Nova Scotia as it does in Sydney, Australia. As Fowler states: “Discourse always has in mind an implied addressee, an imagined subject position which it requires the addressee to occupy” (2007, 232). The need to appeal to specified audiences leads news organizations to privilege stories that sell, the commercial dimension of newsworthiness noted in Chapter 1. The story itself is composed of material either asserted as fact – the who, what, when, and where elements, whether the journalist collected this information firsthand or relied upon authoritative sources – or presented as opinion – typically the how and why elements, based on some combination of interviews, official statements, and any conclusions the journalist may offer. The story will be structured according to journalistic convention, assigning the most importance to those facts and opinions contained in the first part of the story, relegating less significant or more speculative material to the bottom of the story. Some material will be excluded entirely from this hierarchy. The story will be told from a particular angle, which could depend on a number of things: why the reporter perceives the event to be newsworthy; what kinds of stories the reporter’s news organization is most

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interested in; the department of the news organization the reporter works for (news, business, arts, sports), etc. The story will employ a particular language style – e.g., serious, sombre, technical, folksy, adversarial, irreverent, humorous – to provide further definition, and the individual word choices will provide the audience other indications about how to understand the news event. This is what Stuart Hall means when he refers to a news organization’s “public idiom,” its “own version of the language of the public to whom it is principally addressed,” an attempt to forge a communal feeling among audience members (cited in Fowler 2007, 40). Further, the language will provide clues – some obvious, some more subtle – about who the story is addressing. If front-page newspaper stories tend to be written for the general reader, think about the more technical language of certain business, arts, or sports stories, or reviews of wine or classical music, that presume a target audience with specialized knowledge and thereby exclude those lacking the requisite literacy. Maps operate in the same fashion. At a basic level, they, like news stories, provide who, what, when, and where information (Kraak and Ormeling 2010, 3). Some are intended for the general reader, such as standard roadmaps and illustrated maps of tourist destinations, simplified renditions of places to facilitate navigation, serving a commercial imperative. Others require a much greater degree of cartographic literacy and subject-specific knowledge, such as detailed topographic or geologic maps intended for specialists. The rhetorical and perspectival dimensions of news and cartographic texts, then, offer guidance to their readers, drawing attention to particular people, places, and events, suggesting ways to understand the objects of their depiction as well as intimating possible courses of action. CONCLUSION It would be wrong to conclude from this chapter’s critical categorization of journalism and cartography as constructive practices of mediation, representation, and signification that news stories and maps are merely fabrications, that they are simply stories or pictures of the world that can be easily dismissed or disregarded – fake news, if you will. My purpose is not to undermine these practices, but instead to draw attention to the symbolic power of journalistic and cartographic discourse; in spite of their construction and the contingent nature of their truth claims, we are nonetheless highly dependent on journalism and cartography for our understanding of the world and world affairs, given the extent to which they provide us regular and repeated depictions of people, places, institutions, and events to which we don’t always have direct or frequent access.10 Their avowed objectivity and facticity – and, in cartography’s case, scientific method – grant these practices a certain authority, informing our world view, our common sense. John Hartley (1996, 35) insists: 10

A much more serious study of this phenomenon is contained in Edward Said’s classic work Orientalism (1979), in which he details the extent to which the West’s understanding of the Islamic world is the product of a consistent discourse permeating several centuries of texts, from novels to bureaucratic memos and military dispatches.

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“The most important textual feature of journalism is the fact that it counts as true.” Similarly, Wood contends, “the most fundamental claim of the map is to be a system of facts” (2010, 76). News stories and maps perform a validating function; the subjects they represent are deemed worthy of representation, they are granted a particular significance or relevance. Maps certify – and deny – existence, at the same time establishing relationships – and disconnections. To be ‘on the map’ is to count, to matter. Similarly, when journalists cover an event, they define that event as newsworthy, as important and relevant, not only to those who may be directly affected, but also to news audiences as well. This power of inclusion is always at the same time a power of exclusion, even erasure; what is not in the news story, what is not on the map, is, by definition, insignificant, unimportant, irrelevant, even non-existent. In the case of news stories, these exclusions efface not only people, places and events, but, recalling Daniel Hallin (1986), points of view that may be deemed too radical, too extreme, or simply beyond the bounds of conventional understandings of events. This reveals, as well, a power of definition, the power to make things mean. The theme of a map is a categorizing device, and what is depicted on the map is defined by that theme: e.g., tourist sites, sites for mineral extraction, political centres. News stories, too, have themes – politics, business, crime, entertainment – and, through word choices, quotations, privileging of sources, and the mustering of facts, can be quite explicit in the meanings they assign newsmakers and news events. Through these inclusions, exclusions and their accompanying definitions, journalism and cartography wield a power of assertion. Aside from their obvious ontological claims – speaking to the “reality” or nature of things – they can make judgments between true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, normal and not normal, belonging and not belonging. Their underlying philosophy is that the world is knowable and accessible. News stories and maps have situational power; they provide us with detailed pictures of our community, how our community relates to others, both near and far. They identify who does and does not belong, what the community’s boundaries are – physically and culturally (its goals, ideals, values, nations of proper conduct) –, and the reasons why this community is connected to, or cut off, from others. This is a complicated yet critical task in complex and diverse modern societies, where social norms and values evolve constantly. In such complex and fragmented societies, Hartley, echoing Benedict Anderson, argues: The only real contact with others is, paradoxically, symbolic, and rendered in the form of stories, both factual and fictional, in the electronic and print media. The news media function, at the most general level, to create a sense of belonging for the population of a given city, state or country. Their readers and audiences are an ‘imagined community’ (1992, 207).

Finally, journalism and cartography, share a power of implication. Their texts not only present readers with information, but their manner of presentation infers courses of action and lines of thinking. The roadmap, for example, presents a hierarchy of routes between A and B, such that the bolder and straighter the highway lines the more that route is deemed preferable, quicker, more efficient. Journalists implicate

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their audiences in news events in a number of ways. The manner in which an event is defined can lead to a range of responses, or no response at all. News coverage can mobilize individuals, governments, resources, and/or particular solutions to problems, depending on how those problems are framed. A lack of news coverage, similarly, renders events unimportant – at least to us. These representations, then, can have serious consequences for how we perceive the world, for how we understand our connections to other peoples and places, as well as for how we understand and identify with our own immediate community, our understanding of who we are, our sense of, and the bases for, belonging.

CHAPTER 3: JOURNALISM: COMMUNICATING A SENSE OF PLACE Our sense of a place is in many ways more important than objective facts. (Turchi 2004, 28)

Analyses of the role of media in shaping peoples’ sense of place and sense of community permeate the scholarly literature in the fields of communication, media studies, and journalism studies, dating at least as far back as the early 20th century. The initial studies occurred in a very particular historical context, a period of emergent and transformative communication technologies (photography, telegraphy, telephony, wireless telegraphy, sound recording, cinema, radio), transportation technologies (bicycles, railways, automobiles, airplanes), a corresponding increase in the general awareness of other peoples and other places, the precipitous growth of cities in industrializing countries, along with rising literacy rates and greater access to public education. The new communication technologies allowed more people more often to imagine, to see, and to communicate directly with people and places beyond their local community. Similarly, new transportation technologies facilitated greater mobility of people and goods over greater and greater distances. Urbanization expanded exponentially the scale of community and necessitated new ways of thinking about, and managing, increasing numbers of people living together in close proximity. At the same time, the spread of literacy and education served as socializing and democratizing forces. The historian Stephen Kern provides a fascinating study of the period between 1880 and 1918 when “sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space,” resulting in “a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought” (2000, 1–2). One overarching effect of this transformation – the ability to communicate with and travel to distant places – was a new sense of simultaneity, a new way of thinking about time and space, a new awareness by people from all walks of life of events in discrete places happening at the same time. Kern points out, for example, that the increasing use of telegraphic communication and rail travel necessitated a uniform time system to facilitate scheduling, one of the factors prompting the 1884 establishment of the world’s 24 time zones (11–13). Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp blurred “the division of day and night” and altered the meaning of time of day (29). What Kern describes as “modern journalism,” which made use of the telegraph, the telephone, and the emerging international news services, began to create for newspaper readers “a simultaneity of experience,” the experience of being presented with news stories, juxtaposed on the same page, from various parts of the world, all of which occurred roughly within the same time period (69–70). The telephone, the first electronic medium to penetrate the home, “made it possible, in a sense, to be in two places at the same time” (69; see also Marvin 1988, 6).

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Figure 3.1 A New Sense of Simultaneity The Cubist painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso is perhaps the best-known exponent of the multiperspectival vision, evoking a new sense of simultaneity that became increasingly popular in the late 19th century among artists across a number of disciplines, from literature to music. Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), shown here, serves as an example of Picasso’s technique.

The recognition of, and the significance of, this new sense of simultaneity was fodder for the creative arts of the period. Cinema was international from the outset and its editing techniques – e.g., contrast editing, jump cuts – allowed spectators to view scenes taking place simultaneously in distinct settings (Kern 2000, 70–72). In literature, Kern cites the “simultaneous poetry” of Henri-Martin Barzun (Voix, rythmes et chants simultanés), Blaise Cendrars (La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France), and Guillaume Apollinaire (Le Roi-Lune) (p. 72) and the prose of Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Frank Norris (The Octopus), Andrey Biely (St. Petersburg), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Kern writes: “In Ulysses, [Joyce] improvised [cinema’s] montage techniques to show the simultaneous acti-

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vity of Dublin as a whole, not a history of the city but a slice of it out of time, spatially extended and embodying its entire past in a vast expanded present” (76–77). In music, Kern notes the simultaneous use of different keys by Claude Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande) and Bela Bartók (Fourteen Bagatelles), bitonal passages by Sergei Prokofiev (Sarcasmes) and tritone harmonies by Igor Stravinsky (Le Sacre du printemps) (75). In fine art, Kern points to examples of simultaneity by the Futurist painters Giacomo Balla (Rhythms of the Bow) and Luigi Russolo (Memories of a Night) (84–85), and, similarly, the multiperspectival visions of Cubist painters and sculptors Georges Braque (Houses at l’Estaque) and Pablo Picasso (Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon) (195–196, 311–312; see also Frank 1982). Very simply, simultaneity shatters feelings of insularity, compeling a far more extroverted world view; it calls for us to imagine other people in other places, whether those people are across town or on the other side of the world, people engaged in similar activities to ourselves. A simple telephone call, for example, requires the caller to think about the best time to call, to anticipate where the recipient of the call might be – at least in the days of land lines – and what he or she might be doing when the phone rings. During the ensuing conversation, the parties may form a mental picture of each other and the settings in which they are speaking. Early cinema and radio allowed people, many for the first time, to see and hear people and places beyond their normal range of contact; we can think of newsreels showing actual soldiers in the European trenches of World War I or the earliest radio broadcasts when many people heard the voices of their political leaders for the first time.1 As per our discussion in Chapter 2, these electronic media provided people with some of their first visual and aural depictions of actuality and became, as the digitalized media remain for us today, principal points of contact with the world – and not only the world beyond their usual range of activity, but their quotidian world as well (see Gasher et al. 2020, 281–283). While face-to-face interaction remains integral to interpersonal relations even in the globalized world of today, proximity no longer limits our opportunities for social contact. Communication technologies like the cellular telephone and computer networks bind social spaces and enable people to maintain contact across distances, rendering the media “a primary channel of social interaction” (Jackson et al. 2011, 56). This is particularly so as these technologies became throughout the 20th century more accessible in terms of cost, ease of use, and availability, and as the media entered the private sphere of the home. These media are also the media of governance; they enable governments, businesses, and service organizations to function on a broad geographical scale and are often our primary means of contact with these institutions that structure so much of our lives. Finally, and this is the central concern of this book, the media situate us within the world, offering us regular pictures of who we are, where we are, and how we relate to other people and places. They provide us, in other words, with a sense of place, a sense of identity. They represent to us who we are, where we live, how we are 1

Some of these early newsreels can be viewed on the National Film Board of Canada’s Web site: www.nfb.ca. Similarly, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Web site has archived a number of early radio broadcasts, including an excerpt of the Diamond Jubilee national broadcast from Parliament Hill in Ottawa on July 1, 1927: http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1539503449.

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connected to one another, and how we differ from others. The media scholar Roger Silverstone describes the work the media do as “boundary work”; they draw “macro” boundaries of national and linguistic cultures, but they also draw “micro” boundaries, “work which involves the continuous inscriptions of difference in any and every media text and discourse.” This is “their primary cultural role: the endless, endless, endless playing with difference and sameness” (2007, 19; see also Hess and Gutsche 2018, 489). MEDIA AS ENVIRONMENT The notion that the media forms born out of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created a new environment, or media ecology, or mediascape, has been a recurrent theme in the scholarship. Perhaps most famously, the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1967) perceived these technologies as extensions of our senses, our central nervous systems, allowing us, for example, to see (photography, cinema, television) and to hear (radio, television) at much greater distances than we could with the naked eye or ear. His famous dictum, “the medium is the message,” draws attention to media form rather than media content, emphasizing the new environment these electronic media create. “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (23). He adds: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (24). These media, in other words, allow us to project our voices and extend our senses of hearing and sight such that the scale of our communications becomes global: hence, McLuhan’s metaphorical and hopeful “global village” (93). In an analysis of McLuhan as a spatial theorist, Richard Cavell writes: “McLuhan sought to examine not only how society produces space but also how technologies of space produce society” (2002, 30). James Carey observes that the earliest American scholars to turn their attention to communication – John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, and Charles Cooley – saw communication in the late 19th and early 20th century as “the cohesive force in society” (1989, 143). In an oft-cited quotation, Dewey posits communication as a necessary component of modern society: Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge – a common understanding – like-mindedness as the sociologists say (1916, 4).

The sociologist Robert Park saw communication as “bringing about those understandings between individuals and peoples which are the substance – the warp and woof – of culture. The social function of communication seems to be to bring about

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and maintain understanding and cultural solidarity among individuals and societies” (1938, 187). The function of news reporting, as a particular form of communication, Park writes, “is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as it succeeds it tends to preserve the sanity of the individual and the permanence of society” (1940, 685). The news prompts discussion, which leads to the formation of public opinion (684). This is the line of thinking Benedict Anderson pursues, as noted in Chapter 1, when he argues that the original mass-circulation media, the newspapers and novels of the 18th century, allowed people to imagine community on the scale of the nation-state. He writes: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (1989, 15). Anderson adds that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (15). The novel, for its part, creates a “sociological landscape” for the reader, permitting the reader a kind of bird’s-eye view of the novel’s setting and the actions of its characters (35–36). The juxtaposition of stories in a newspaper draws a connection between them, largely based on the fact that the news events occurred in the same time period, what Anderson calls their “calendrical coincidence” (37). Further, because news has a short shelf life – it’s not really news if it isn’t new – the reading of the newspaper creates “an extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day not that” (39). Anderson describes this mass ceremony as paradoxical. “It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (39). New communities became imaginable, Anderson argues, through the confluence of an economic system favouring mass production (capitalism), new communications technology (printing), and the effect large-scale printing had on diverse vernacular languages, creating what he calls more uniform “print-languages” (46–49). Further advances in communications technology – radio, television – gave print allies in the creation of imagined communities (122–123). The sociologist John B. Thompson takes issue with Anderson’s larger argument about the causal relationship between the development of printing and the rise of nationalism,2 but nonetheless adopts the position that “the use of communication media transforms the spatial and temporal organization of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction, and new modes of exercising power, which are no 2

Thompson’s issue with Anderson’s main argument is that “the precise nature of the alleged link between the development of printing and the rise of nationalism is never spelled out in detail…. If the early reading public was the embryo of the nationally imagined community, why did it take nearly three centuries for this embryo to mature?” (1995, 62). Thompson believes that while the development of printing may have been a factor, “the main explanation for the rise of nationalism is likely to be provided by other factors” (63).

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longer linked to the sharing of a common locale” (1995, 4). The emergence of these mass media forms “is, in a fundamental sense, a reworking of the symbolic character of social life, a reorganization of the ways in which information and symbolic content are produced and exchanged in the social world and a restructuring of the ways in which individuals relate to one another and themselves” (11). This affects, Thompson argues, peoples’ sense of place and their sense of belonging, “that is, on their sense of the groups and communities to which they belong.” Through media, he adds, people can feel themselves belonging to groups and communities “which are constituted in part through the media,” what he terms “mediated sociality” (35). Herbert Gans notes in his study of four major American news organizations that nation and society were recurring news topics, “their persistence, cohesion, and the conflicts and divisions threatening their cohesion” (2004, 19). News, he argues, serves as a barometer of social order, “apprising the audience of the emergence of disorder but at the same time reassuring it through restoration stories.” He posits this as part of news coverage’s larger role of constructing the nation and society by gathering “information on what individuals and groups do to and for each other in a wide range of institutions, agencies, and communities,” framing it as news in a national context (295–298). Roger Silverstone perceives the media as “environmental,” in the sense that “in the array of possible technologies, delivery systems, platforms, discourses, texts, modes of address, as well as in the patterns of our use of them, they define a space that is increasingly mutually referential and reinforcive, and increasingly integrated into the fabric of everyday life” (2007, 5). And he insists on “the significance of the media for our orientation in the world” (6). Silverstone’s aim is to interrogate the media’s role and responsibility in creating this “global civic space” or what he calls the “mediapolis” (22). The mediapolis, the “space of appearance” the media create, “is the public space, perhaps the only viable public space now available to us in a world of global politics and global interconnection.” He adds: “Appearance, mediated appearance … constitutes our worldliness, our capacity to be in the world” (26).3 As we become increasingly dependent on the mediated word and image for our understanding of what takes place beyond our front door, as everyday life, in its taken-for-granted ordinariness, becomes inseparable from the mediations that guide us through it, and connect or disconnect us from the everyday lives of others, how the media position us, or enable us to position ourselves, becomes crucial (170).

The sociologists John Jackson, Greg Nielsen, and Yon Hsu (2011) add that “the expression ‘mediated society’ places emphasis on understanding ‘society’ as an intervening force in our lives and as being constructed from complex interests that extend far beyond our immediate experience” (2011, 5). 3

The mediapolis is distinct from Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere, Silverstone insists, because Habermas’s ideal public sphere depended on rational and reasoned debate about public affairs among participants engaging with one another as equals. Silverstone’s mediapolis is far messier, in that its participants represent a diverse plurality and their discourse is similarly wideranging, not at all restricted to reasoned or rational debate about topics of public import (2007, 33–35).

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The idea that the media provided a new and important public space was not, of course, greeted with universal praise. Benedict Anderson was fully aware of the dark side of nationalism; he probed the history of nationalism in order to understand the “profound emotional legitimacy” it commands, including sending countries to war (1989, 13–14). For his part, John Thompson recognized that while the effect of “symbolic distancing” allows media users to experience different cultures and reflect on their own ways of life, it can also be a source of tension and conflict, both personally and interculturally (1995, 174–177). The new “publicness” of the mediasphere largely governed by large-scale commercial media organizations, Thompson warns, removes values such as sovereignty, accountability, and individual liberties – e.g., freedom of expression – beyond the regulatory purview of democratically-elected governments (237–243). Roger Silverstone’s purpose in drawing attention to the environmental aspect of the world’s media is that they provide “an increasingly significant site for the construction of a moral order” (2007, 7). “Media are technologies which both connect and disconnect, but above all they act as bridges or doors, both open and closed to the world” (18; see also Morley and Robins 1995). They provide the principal sites upon which we encounter people different than ourselves, places different from our own. As such, they can encourage either “cosmopolitanism” or “cultural neo-imperialism” (170–173). The literature features a rich body of critical scholarship on the relation between media and society. Work in political economy, for example, examines the social relations of the production of mediated communications: who owns the media infrastructure, for what purpose, how media organizations are financed, what determinants come into play in the production of mediated messages, who these messages are intended for, how media work is performed and structured, etc. (cf. Mosco 2009, 2017; McChesney 2007, 2013; Skinner et al. 2005). Works in political theory consider the role the media play in democracies, particularly given the context in which the mediascape becomes the central venue for modern political engagement and discourse (cf. Herman and Chomsky 1988; Habermas 1991; Nesbitt-Larking 2001; Hardt 2004; Taras 2015). Sociologists have been interested in the media as agents of socialization, in terms of both cohesion and, especially, exclusion, on local as well as global scales (cf. Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1998; Keane 2005; Couldry 2010; Couldry and McCarthy 2004a; Jackson et al. 2011; Clarke 2014). This is but a modest sampling of a prodigious body of work (see also Gutsche and Hess 2018, 474–475), but it points, nonetheless, to a general agreement across the social sciences that the media play a significant role in orienting us socially and spatially, that they contribute to our sense of place in a number of ways. Some, including geographers interested in the role space plays in a variety of cultural forms, take the notion of mapping quite literally.

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MEDIA GEOGRAPHY James Craine (2014) defines media geography as an exploration of “broad questions of material production, cultural meaning, and bodily affects and percepts in relation to the practices and processes by which geographical information is gathered, geographical facts are ordered, and imaginative geographies are created.” He adds: “Media geographers argue that media hold powerful transformative potentials because people use cultural representations to create social relationships and to define space.”4 Craine claims that the field has no definitive starting point, but has been informed theoretically by works such as Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1968), Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1991). Among the first works to address the connection between geography and various media forms, Craine notes, was the collection Geography, the Media, and Popular Culture, edited by Jacqueline Burgess and John Gold (1985a). For David Harvey, the media constitute one of the sites upon which geographical knowledge is produced (2001, 212). Stefan Zimmerman notes that media forms “mediate our experiences of place and geography” (2007, 59). In the introductory volume of Aether: the Journal of Media Geography, co-editors Chris Lukinbeal, James Craine, and Jason Dittmer write: “Media, the organized means of disseminating information, permeates space and power/knowledge” (2007, 1). Paul Adams describes four spatial perspectives on communication. The first is media in space, based on Manuel Castells’s “space of flows,” the space defined by communication traffic, bringing together: communications infrastructure, the footprints left by such infrastructure, and “the space of flows created by signals moving through infrastructure.” The second perspective addresses spaces in media, “a functional topological space” of nodes in a communications network. If these first two perspectives foreground studies of space, the third and fourth concentrate on place. Adams’s third perspective, places in media, concerns the “place-image” conveyed by communications. And finally, the fourth perspective is media in place, which situates communicative activities in particular locations (2009, 1–3). Adams notes that “all four of these geographical aspects of communication are present at any given time and shape every communication situation: a single communication event moves through geographical space and also contributes to a topological space, while it represents place and is part of place” (3). He reminds us that any communications medium is not simply a piece of technology, “but a network of human actors, social institutions, technologies, places, and constructions of space and time” (30).

4

There is a prodigious amount of theoretical scholarship on the notions of space and place. See, for example, Relph (1986), Lefebvre (1991), Keith and Pile (1993), Soja (1994), Agnew and Corbridge (1995), Riegel and Wyile (1998), Cresswell (2004), Panelli (2004), Couldry and McCarthy (2004a), Pickles (2004), Hubbard and Kitchin (2011), Darroch and Marchessault (2014).

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My own introduction to this work – before I was aware there was a field known as media geography – came as a result of my doctoral research on the feature-film industry in British Columbia. This was an industry largely based on shooting Hollywood films in the province, such that the locations were almost always disguised as American settings: American flags replaced Canadian flags, Canada Post mailboxes were replaced with those of the U.S. Postal Service, police cars, ambulances, and fire engines were repainted, etc. British Columbia became known as Hollywood North – the name I took for the title of a book based on my PhD dissertation (Gasher 2002a) – and the New York Times dubbed Vancouver “The city that can sub for all of America” (Elias 1996). Indeed, in the films of the period I studied, British Columbia substituted for Washington state (First Blood 1982; Housekeeping 1987; Roxanne 1987), California (Jennifer 8 1992), New Hampshire (Jumanji 1995), Alaska (Alaska 1996), Massachusetts (Little Women 1994), and Montana (Legends of the Fall 1994). Vancouver stood in for Detroit (Bird on a Wire 1990), Seattle (Stakeout 1987), New York (Look Who’s Talking 1989), and Los Angeles (Who’s Harry Crumb? 1989) (Gasher 2002a, 116–117). The book posits the B.C. film industry as an example of a contemporary trend in which jurisdictions the world over are developing cinema as a medium of regional economic development, as opposed to an expression of regional or national culture as cinema had conventionally been perceived. It considers the impact of location film production for British Columbia’s sense of place and for the prospects of developing its own unique cultural vision expressed through a growing body of local independent films (see also Elmer and Gasher 2005). Scholars adopting a geographical approach have engaged with the full gamut of media forms (see Mains et al. 2015; Adams et al. 2014), but cinema has been one of their most popular objects of study. In an overview of geographic approaches to cinema, Deborah Dixon distinguishes media geography from traditional film studies approaches; geographers address the political-economic settings of film production, the scales of activity of the entertainment industry, the representation of locations on screen, and the role of such locations in the films themselves, that is, cinema’s “spatiotemporal imaginaries and materialities” (2014, 39). “Whilst cinematic geographies remains a minor subfield [of human geography], there is no doubt that film as an object of inquiry strikes a chord with geographers interested in all manner of economic, political, and cultural topics, insofar as film becomes a vehicle for the representation of these to a wide-ranging audience” (45). She writes that “geographers concerned with cinema, and the grounding of spatial thinking, continue to turn inside out not only the notion of on-screen and offscreen, viewer and viewed, spectacle and spectator, subject and object but also the narrative devices of previous cohorts of film geographers” (48). For their part, Laura Sharp and Chris Lukinbeal divide film geography approaches into two categories: the author-text-reader model, which can be subdivided into author-centred, text-centred, and reader-centred studies, and the economics of production model, which can be subdivided into political economy and economic geography analyses (2015, 21–22). Adopting a text-centred approach, Giuliana Bruno sees film as “a principal narrator of space” (2011, 66). Travel, and travelogues, were among the most po-

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pular subjects of early cinema, she notes, and films continue to play a significant role in narrating city spaces, what she refers to as “urban scenography” (28). City films of the 1920s – e.g., Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1926), Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1927) – established “a correspondence between the city space and the film space, between the motion of the city and the moving image” (21). She argues that the urban landscape is a product of the city’s own mapping practices, certainly, but it is also a creation of its “filmic incarnations” as well as other representations. A sense of place is actively produced by a constellation of imaginings, which includes films, both those shot on location as well as those that fabricate their mise-en-scène. In fact, the important work of art direction and production design itself creates a sense of geography. In many ways, a city becomes activated as a place on the screen as much as it does on the street (27–28).

Bruno goes so far as to describe film as “modern cartography,” a “mobile map.” She writes: “Film’s site-seeing – a voyage of identities in transito and a complex tour of identifications – is an actual means of exploration: at once a housing for and a tour of our narrative and our geography” (71). Chris Lukinbeal adopts a more holistic approach, employing spatial analysis and cartography to study “cinematic landscapes,” which are comprised of “sites where filmmaking occurs, the tasks involved in filmmaking, and the business practices of the film production industry that lead to the formation of cultural products” (2012, 172). He deploys the term “taskscape,” in part to capture film production’s “inscriptive” and “incorporative” logics, and in part to highlight the montage aspect of the cinematic landscape, “to emphasize the ongoing, or ontogenic, form of a cinematic landscape that is not fixed or finished but is always becoming” (172). By “inscriptive logic,” Lukinbeal refers to cinematic landscapes as representations or texts “inscribed as cultural products,” the landscapes as they appear on the screen (175). By “incorporative logic,” he means the off-screen industrial processes by which the on-screen landscape is produced (175). He argues that “a region’s cinematic landscape is formed and made meaningful through a montage that resonates between cultural industry and cultural representation, form and process, inscription, and incorporation” (189). Research in media geography has also explored literature (cf. Reynolds 2004; Talley 2014), photography (Hoelscher 2014), radio (Pinkerton 2014), television (Spigel 2015), the Internet (Purcell 2014), geographic information systems (Sui and Zhao 2015; Wilson and Stephens 2015), comic books (Dittmer 2014), video games (Ash 2014), and, of course, the news media (Gasher 2015). GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NEWS Jacqueline Burgess and John Gold (1985b) identified news coverage as “a key area for geographical interest” in their pioneering volume on media geography, a collection largely concerned with the news media’s representations of people and places and their consequent ideological role (8; see also Burgess 1985).

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An early demonstration of a geographical perspective on journalism is a book by the historian David Paul Nord (2001) entitled Communities of Journalism. Through his studies of daily newspapers in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he sets out to establish the crucial role played by communication in building a sense of community in fast-growing and heterogeneous urban environments. Communities are built, maintained, and wrecked in communication. In static communities the most potent forms of communication are traditions, religion, myth, ritual, and habit.... But when community building is an active, conscious act, as if often has been in American history, communication becomes more conscious, more formal, more organized (2).

He adds that “at the vortex of many collective efforts to build community or to undermine it has been formal, public, printed communication, including journalism” (2). Nord saw urban daily newspapers in the United States as playing an important part in the transformation of community life in 19th-century American cities (128), positing newspaper readership in the period as a form of community participation, a form of citizenship because “the increasing complexity of the modern city required formal structures to build community and to hold it together” (200–201). Following Alexis de Toqueville’s idea of the “associational character of journalism” (100), Nord cites the example of the Chicago Daily News of the 1870s and 1880s as the first “thoroughly urban” daily in the U.S., “that is, the first to articulate a vision of public community.” This public community is “a kind of association founded upon communitarian notions of interdependence and identity, of sentiment and sympathy, yet powered by formal organizations and activist government and guided by the new agencies of mass communication” (108–109). The aim of the Daily News, a penny paper with a predominantly working-class readership, was “to promote community across class lines and to appeal to common interests of all classes” (124). The Daily News stood in contrast to the rival Chicago Times, which “had no vision of public life in Chicago. The city was merely a complex of marketplaces where individuals conducted their private affairs.” The Times, Nord writes, presented news as “miscellany” with no necessary connection (112–116). Robert Gutsche and Kristy Hess (2019) foreground journalism’s geographic role; their book is dedicated to journalism’s relationship to place-making. “We are interested in the way news media shape perceptions of location but also how the news shapes people’s connection to the physical and digital spaces where journalism is practiced and how this relates to legitimacy and power” (2). They refer to “the role of journalism in patrolling boundaries and generating divides between insiders and outsiders” (2). News reporting plays a part in turning geographic spaces into specific places by granting them meaning and significance (22, 61). They situate journalism within the “social sphere”, as opposed to more confined public sphere, by which they mean “the realm of our everyday within which our social lives help us make sense of who we are as individuals and ultimately as collectives” (2). They argue: “News media play a distinct role in establishing social norms which function as forms of social control and order, maintaining approved standards of daily life, institutional structures and practice, and dominant expla-

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nations of the world around us” (2; see also Gutsche and Hess, 2018; Hess and Gutsche 2018, 484, 491). News coverage contributes to a sense of place, they argue, “a process that generates feelings of inclusion and acceptance but which reminds us that there are always environments where we feel ‘out of place’ – even ‘put in our place’” (Gutsche and Hess 2019, 3). The news media become “custodians” of place (25), promoting collective identity and social cohesion, which they argue “has been a key journalistic function across societies” (35). A prerequisite to this custodianship, however, is the question of a given news organization’s legitimacy. “Journalists have to ensure that the news product itself meets with geographic interpretations shared by audience members; users and producers have to appear to ‘be’ in the same ‘space,’ as it were” (64). They argue: “In the end, it is the continued practice by audiences (or perceived audiences) to purchase media or at the very least to perform among and conform to the practices of journalism in demarcating and naming in so much as the naming and demarcation supports approved expectations and explanations of place” (66). In this way, Gutsche and Hess assert a symbiotic relationship between the audience’s and journalism’s sense of place (78–79). This applies doubly in the digital era, when journalists are not the sole sources of information and commentary about current events (see Hess and Gutsche 2018, 488). I take the notion of mapping spaces and places quite literally, suggesting that the news media, regardless of the form their reports take or the platforms upon which those reports are distributed, draw maps that are forged by a rough triangulation (as depicted in Figure 1.2): what stories they report, how they report them, where those stories originate, and what people, institutions, and other places populate those stories; what, if any, advertisements they feature, particularly as those advertisements are designed to address prospective customers within a geographic market; and where the final news product circulates, whether locally, regionally, nationally, or globally. My focus is on the news stories themselves, through textual analysis, the word maps – or “langscapes” – the stories, and accompanying images, form. And my examples are drawn from newspaper coverage. Why newspapers, one might ask? Why these forms gradually being displaced by digital news platforms, often by the newspapers’ own parent companies? The answer is three-fold. The first, stock response is that newspapers are easily collectible and readily available in libraries and databases – the simplest form for media researchers to work with. Of course, this is the least satisfying reason. A second reason, and one that is consistent with this study’s purpose, is that hard-copy newspapers have to be delivered physically and quickly, limiting their range of circulation, which is an important determining factor in shaping the map their news coverage draws and the perspective from which they report (see Chyi and Sylvie 2001, 232–236). I hasten to add that this remains the case when these same newspapers publish digitally, whether through their Web sites, tablet editions, or mobile apps.5 Finally, though, I would argue that all forms of 5

The original thinking behind the Geography of News Project, in the early 2000s, was to employ news-flow studies to compare the hard-copy and digital versions of the same newspapers, to

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news media draw their own maps, even if in unique ways, and therefore newspaper coverage serves simply as an illustrative example of a case that holds across media forms. Regardless of the media form in which news reports appear, textual analysis would reveal their cartographic dimension. MAPS OF THE NEWS The first map news organizations draw is the map sketched by each individual story, the territorial (and temporal) parameters the story sets for its narrative account. These maps are comparable to the “sociological landscapes” Benedict Anderson evoked in his discussion of 19th-century novels; the site or connected sites where the story, quite literally, takes place. These maps can vary greatly in scale. The news story may be confined exclusively to one site, suggesting it is a unique occurrence, or that its subject matter pertains only to that place. Or, as is often the case, that it is a relatively mundane event and does not warrant links to be drawn to other times and places. These are choices made by reporters and/or editors that can contribute to the definition of the event as, for example, significant/insignificant, hyperlocal/ local/regional/national/global, parochial/universal, etc. The Globe and Mail, for example, sketched this type of confined, local map in a report on a fatal hiking accident (Givetash 2017). Five hikers were killed near Lions Bay, British Columbia, about 30 kilometres north of Vancouver, when a cornice of snow they had climbed upon collapsed, causing them to fall 500 metres. All five victims were from the Vancouver area. The only places mentioned in the story are the town of Lions Bay, the search headquarters in Lions Bay, the local library where the families of the hikers gathered, nearby Mount Harvey where the accident occurred, unspecified “mountains north of Vancouver,” and B.C.’s Lower Mainland. The story does not extend beyond these bounds. There is no indication that anyone beyond the greater Vancouver area was involved or affected, and no mention is made of other spring hiking accidents either in the immediate area or elsewhere in the mountainous province. The borders of the map are drawn at Lions Bay to the north and the B.C. Lower Mainland to the south, east, and west. This is a map typical of “spot news,” stories that describe unexpected events, such as accidents and local crimes, confining the events to a specific place.

determine whether these newspapers were differentiating their Web site versions from their hard-copy editions in order to take advantage of the digital platform’s global circulation (see Gasher, 2003; Gasher and Gabriele 2004). Subsequent studies of the Web site editions of nine daily newspapers from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel provided little evidence that the newspapers were taking advantage of the World Wide Web to expand the scale of their news reportage, to, in other words, alter their news geographies in any significant way, as will be discussed in Chapter 6 (see Gasher 2007, 2009; Gasher and Klein 2008).

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Figure 3.2 Mapping a News Story Each news story draws it own map, the setting or settings within which its narrative takes place. Globe and Mail coverage of a fatal hiking accident confined its account to Lions Bay, Mount Harvey (where the accident occurred), “mountains north of Vancouver,” and British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.

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Local events, though, can reverberate beyond a principal locale, if the story situates the local event on a map of broader scale. A Globe and Mail story about a casting controversy at the Calgary Opera, for example, tied it to the larger issue of diversity in the “theatre world” and the “opera world” (Lederman 2017). The story concerned the opera company’s difficulty in finding a Polynesian or Asian actor to play the role of the Tonkinese or Polynesian character Bloody Mary in a production of the musical South Pacific. The director, a designer, and a performer had resigned over concerns a white actor was being cast for the role. A new director, who previously worked in theatre in Banff, Vancouver, and Victoria, had already been hired, and the white artist was “on hold for the role” while the company searched for a “raceappropriate” actor to fill the part. The Calgary controversy was set in the context of diversity in theatre at large; the story noted that a recent production of Othello in Edmonton was cancelled because of criticism over a similar casting decision, and mentioned the decision by the Factory Theatre of Toronto to stage six plays, all written by people of colour, for its 2016–17 season. In this framing, then, the local Calgary incident is presented as merely one example of an issue with considerable geographical sweep, even if the instances cited all took place in Canada. These two examples demonstrate that journalists have some discretion in how they bound their stories spatially, and that the drawing of boundaries contributes to the meaning the stories produce. The hiking story is presented as a unique, strictly local occurrence; the reader is given no indication that such an accident has happened elsewhere, or that the risks of spring hiking may be shared by people in all mountainous regions. The opera controversy, on the other hand, is presented as merely a particular instance of a larger issue that has reached as far as Edmonton and Toronto, and possibly the larger “theatre world” and “opera world.” The story ties the Calgary Opera into a network of theatres and opera houses and its casting conflict into a larger national, possibly global, concern. A news story about a local event can be granted news value, and thus meaning, by framing it as part of a larger international issue. For instance, a Globe and Mail story about a hijacked beer truck killing four people and injuring 15 others in downtown Stockholm, Sweden ties this local incident into the larger topics of crossborder migration and international terrorism, at the same time establishing a link between migration and terrorism (Huuhtanen 2017). The story’s headline and lead paragraphs noted that the driver, who slammed the truck into a department store on a major downtown shopping street, was a rejected asylum seeker from Uzbekistan “sympathetic to extremist organizations,” according to Swedish national police. A second person, suspected of terrorist offences, was arrested in connection with the incident, and four other persons were being held by police. The story noted that “lion-shaped boulders” had been erected on the street as roadblocks, similar to the roadblocks erected “in several European capitals” following a truck attack in Berlin the previous Christmas. And the story noted that public opinion in Sweden is divided on the question of open vs. closed borders. By bringing these elements together – the truck incident, the driver’s refugee status, his alleged ties to extremism and terrorism, public opinion on immigration – the article ties a local tragedy into a matter of greater significance and broader

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scale. Reinforcing the cross-border migration theme, the story noted that of the four killed, two were Swedes, one was British (an executive working for the Swedish streaming music service Spotify), and the other was Belgian. Among the injured was an 83-year-old Romanian woman, who was begging on the street at the time. At a memorial rally for the victims, organizer Rickard Sjoberg said many of those attending were from “out of town,” adding: “But today, we’re all Stockholmers.” If the Calgary and Stockholm stories begin with a local setting and then pan out to situate events in a broader landscape, other stories adopt a macroscopic view from the outset. A Vancouver Sun story examines a purported national “housing crisis,” citing data from 25 residential housing markets collected by the Canadian Real Estate Association (Marr 2017). The article tells the reader that the housing crisis, “as some have called it,” is in fact a crisis centred in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area of southern Ontario, even if it acknowledges ripple effects in other areas of the country. The story addresses specifically housing markets in three provinces – Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta – as well as policy responses by the federal government and the provincial governments of Ontario and B.C. The article puts the issue of housing prices on a national map, casting it as an issue of national interest and concern, even if the story addresses specifically the housing markets in only three provinces – Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia – and policy responses by the federal government and the provincial governments of Ontario and B.C. A Globe and Mail story about a meeting in Washington between U.S. president Donald Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron ties their meeting, and their countries’ foreign policy initiatives, to three interrelated international issues: the war in Syria, the Iran nuclear agreement (with the U.S., U.K., Russia, China, France, and Germany) and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program (Superville and Miller 2018). The meeting in Washington between two nations’ leaders, in other words, is described as a meeting of significant international scope, bringing into play actors from North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Washington, in this story, occupies a central position on a map of considerable international scale, and the discussions between the U.S. and French presidents are granted global importance. The point here is not to take issue with the framing of these stories, or their accuracy, but simply to point out that the stories situate cartographically the events and the actors they describe, and that how the news events are situated provides them with context, and consequently, with meaning. The hiking story is confined to a micro-scale map and thus, taken at face value, presents the accident as a unique occurrence with very limited local impact. The Calgary Opera story situates a local casting controversy on a map of national scale, rendering it part of a larger struggle of identity politics. It is not a unique event, but part of a pattern that spans the country, and possibly extends beyond Canada’s borders. Similarly, the Stockholm story connects a local incident to broader European concerns over both cross-border migration and terrorism, casting it as a particular example of a much larger issue. In both the Calgary and Stockholm cases, that is, the stories expand from a local event to adopt a much broader view, granting the stories corresponding significance and meaning. The Canadian real-estate story and the story describing the meeting bet-

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ween Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, begin with macroscale maps and thus define their stories from the outset as questions of, respectively, national and international import. The journalists who produce these stories have some latitude in how they draw their maps, and subsequent stories about the same events, or stories produced by rival news organizations, may draw them differently. For instance, a story about the same Lions Bay hiking accident in the Vancouver Sun expanded the context somewhat by including, in its final two paragraphs, comments about the dangers to hikers of cornices from the forecasting program manager of Avalanche Canada, suggesting that the accident was not an entirely unique occurrence (Quan 2017). And, to be fair, the establishment of any story’s boundaries is a collaborative affair, not only between a reporter and his/her editors, who may confer on the angle and parameters of any given story, but between the reporter and that reporter’s sources. Reporters are very often reliant on officials for factual who, what, where, and when information, and similarly dependent upon experts with specialized knowledge for how and why interpretations. In the Stockholm story, for example, information about the truck driver was provided by police investigating the incident, and it is the police who suggest a link with extremism and terrorism. The bounds of the Trump-Macron story were largely established by the principals themselves; the reporters had no access to the private discussions between Trump and Macron, and therefore were required to base their reports on official statements that what was discussed were the American and French positions on Syria, Iran, and North Korea. That said, to be published at all these stories need to be considered newsworthy: significant, important, or otherwise interesting to the readers the journalists imagine to be their audience. They will, therefore, contain clues about why they are considered newsworthy, how the stories situate readers vis-à-vis the events described. CONCLUSION In reviewing the scholarly literature, I have sought in the first part of this chapter to demonstrate a widely-shared view that the media play a significant role in developing our sense of place, whether our sense of place in the world or within our immediate community. The media can be seen as constituting an environment, an environment which has become a significant part of our public space. It is in large part through the media that we connect to fellow members of our community, the media provide the sphere within which we engage with our community’s leaders and principal institutions, and the media help us to situate our community with respect to the larger world. I have discussed how media geographers have built upon this scholarship by studying the spatial aspects of media production and their implications for how we experience and imagine space and place. Finally, I have sharpened the focus to the cartographic dimensions of the news media in particular, beginning with a few illustrative examples of the maps of varying scale drawn by individual news stories.

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The point is to show not only that these stories produce distinct maps, but the ways in which the events they recount are mapped contribute to the meanings the stories produce, the ways in which their subjects are defined, and the ways in which audiences may be implicated with respect to the people, the places, and the events the stories describe. The chapters that follow will address newspapers’ maps of their local community (Chapter 4), special inset maps that highlight a particular place in the world brought to prominence by a newsworthy event (Chapter 5), and, finally, the maps of the “news world” at large (Chapter 6).

CHAPTER 4: WHO, WHAT, WHERE: MAPPING LOCAL COMMUNITY Home, far from being the cloistered place it used to be, is now a communication hub. (Adams 2009, 189)

I have been using the term ‘community’ to designate the situated audience that news organizations serve and, at the same time, they seek to bring together as some form of recognizable collective. The term is usefully elastic. As I discussed in Chapter 1, we sometimes use ‘community’ to refer to groups of people who do not share a precise locale. People who want to inform themselves about cinema or finance or books or bicycling may be dispersed widely, even internationally, but media products tapping into their shared interests assemble them as audiences, as virtual communities. In this chapter, as an illustration of the ways news organizations draw their maps, I am interested in how news media forge a sense of community by demarcating, and situating within the larger world, a particular locale and its people, institutions and activities. It is the kind of place Doreen Massey (1991) envisions in her essay, “A Global Sense of Place.” Here, the metaphor for place is an intersection rather than a container or enclosure, acknowledging that any place is characterized as much by routes as by roots. Places, that is, exhibit signs both of continuity – distinct local histories, long-serving institutions, stable population bases – and of change – movement, growth, flows of people, goods, and services. Some of the communities news organizations map out bring together several disparate municipalities or jurisdictions. This is what a national newspaper or a national broadcaster does, forging a sense of community on a grand scale as in Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” (1989). But it is also what some community newspapers do, creating readership and advertising markets by amalgamating several suburbs of a metropole – e.g., Vancouver’s North Shore, Montreal’s West Island – or a handful of interconnected rural jurisdictions, such as the newspapers I will discuss in the first part of this chapter. Other news organizations map out their community from within a larger population centre, such as a major city. People in cities like Toronto, who are fortunate enough to have more than one newspaper, may have the choice between a populist tabloid (the Sun), a left-leaning broadsheet (the Star), a conservative broadsheet (the Globe and Mail), and a more right-wing broadsheet (the National Post), the Globe and Post also seeking to serve a national audience with partially modified editions. In addition to political leanings, topic specialties or presentation styles, newspapers can serve different language communities, such as those in Montreal. Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse, and Le Devoir serve, primarily, francophone readers, albeit in their distinct ways, while the Montreal Gazette serves Montreal’s English-language community, as I will examine in the second part of this chapter.

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CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY THROUGH AMALGAMATION The industrial category known as community newspapers comprises publications serving distinct rural villages and towns, rural regions, neighbourhoods within larger cities, and, sometimes, larger suburban areas. Besides these geographic communities, community newspapers can also serve proximate communities based on language, shared ethnicity, common country of origin, sexual orientation, or specific interests in arts and culture, sports, etc. (see Lindgren 2013, 2014). Community, as I have noted, is a vague enough term that it can encompass an array of social groupings, but it remains meaningful enough to evoke a sense of belonging, shared interest, some sense of togetherness. And most of us would think of ourselves as belonging to more than one community at the same time, even if we identify principally with one over another. As with any news medium, community newspapers help to constitute community, to provide readers with a community map, identifying the places, institutions, traditions, events, and people that together forge some sense of cohesion. The stories and images tell readers not only what is happening in their community, what they should be interested in and concerned about, but they orient readers geographically, historically, and culturally as well, giving them a sense of here – and not here – and a sense of us – and not us. My concern here is how the published articles and photographs accomplish this, but, it must be added, the advertisements participate in this process as well.1 The newspapers I will look at in this section of the chapter aim to serve a region that straddles the Ontario-Quebec border roughly halfway between the cities of Ottawa and Montreal, on both sides of the Ottawa River. It is an area with no name, official or otherwise, occupying two provinces and populated by a mix of francophones and anglophones. It provides an interesting case study of the role the local newspapers play in providing an otherwise disparate region with a sense of place. It is a primarily rural region with Hawkesbury, Ontario and Lachute, Quebec as its commercial poles, surrounded by numerous smaller communities: places like Grenville, Pointe-au-Chêne, and Brownsburg on the Quebec side of the river, Chuteà-Blondeau, St-Eugène, Vankleek Hill, and Alfred on the Ontario side. French is the majority language on both sides of the river – 69 per cent report French as their first language –, but English is commonly spoken; according to the 2016 Statistics Canada census, 83 per cent of people in the region report that they have knowledge of both languages (Statistics Canada 2016).2 The area provides an interesting mix 1

2

Advertisements contain geographical information, telling us what goods and services are available to a particular audience, and who is providing them. While advertisements on-line, in major daily newspapers, magazines, on television, and radio may advertise goods and services available nation-wide or world-wide – and, increasingly, addressing on-line shoppers – those that appear in community newspapers and the print editions of dailies tend to address potential customers within the physical circulation area of the newspaper. Thus, reading these ads can also help to fill in the map of the community, providing a profile of the local business community. While the newspapers discussed in this section of the chapter occasionally report stories from farther afield, their principal coverage area comprises the United Counties of Prescott-Russell

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of people, including those who commute to Montreal or Ottawa for work, retirees, people who have lived in the area all their lives, and people who have arrived from elsewhere. Predominantly white, visible minorities comprise only between one and three per cent of the population (Statistics Canada 2016). My home in L’Orignal, Ontario is served by four community newspapers, three of which are delivered free of charge to all the homes in the area – Le Régional, the Tribune-Express and Le Carillon from Hawkesbury – and one we subscribe to – The Review from Vankleek Hill. All four newspapers publish weekly, the Tribune-Express and The Review on Wednesdays, Le Régional and Le Carillon on Thursdays. All four also have Web sites. The Review (established in 1893, owned and operated by Louise Sproule since 1992) and Le Régional (owned and operated by its founder Sylvain Roy) are independents, while the Tribune-Express and Le Carillon are part of a small group of community newspapers owned by La Compagnie d’édition André Paquette Inc. in Hawkesbury. The predominantly Frenchlanguage Régional and the English-language Review are the newsiest of the four, providing a relatively comprehensive news package each week. At the other end of the spectrum, the French-language Le Carillon is the thinnest, its news pages often filled more by photos than by text. These papers are typical of their genre in that they focus almost exclusively on local news: municipal and county council meetings, chamber of commerce business, regional crime and court updates, new business openings, social and cultural events, and the activities of local service clubs, youth groups, and amateur sports teams. When provincial, national, or international affairs are covered, it is through a local angle. The articles are produced by the newspapers’ own reporters – they do not subscribe to news services – with some submissions provided by community members. The papers are filled with the names of local residents, people that readers in Ontario, and the Regional Municipal County of Argenteuil in Quebec. The statistics cited in the body of the text combine these two census regions. Prescott-Russell, which includes the town of Hawkesbury and Champlain Township, has a population of 89,333, an unemployment rate of 5.3 per cent (compared to the Canadian national average of 7.7 per cent), an average household income of $90,427 (slightly below the national average of $92,764), with the majority of its labour force working in three census categories: sales and service (9,730), trades, transportation, equipment operations, and related areas (8,600) and business, finance, and administration (8,460). Slightly more than half (56.6 per cent) of those with work were employed full-time. Among residents aged 25–64, 58 per cent have a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree. The visible minority population is three per cent. The Regional Municipal County of Argenteuil, which includes the town of Lachute, has a population of 32,389, an unemployment rate of 7.8 per cent, an average household income of $63,297 (considerably below the national average), with the majority of its labour force in the same three categories as Prescott-Russell: sales and service (3,495), trades, transportation, equipment operations, and related areas (3,085), and business, finance, and administration (1,975). However, only about one-quarter (26.7 per cent) reported working full-time. Of its residents aged 25–64, 53 per cent have a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree. The visible minority population is 1.3 per cent.

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could reasonably expect to encounter on the street, while shopping or at social events. There are numerous photographs of cheque and award presentations, again with local names and faces, and appearances by local politicians representing municipal, county, provincial, and federal levels of government. The papers are also filled with advertisements from area merchants and tradespeople, and the three Hawkesbury papers come stuffed with flyers from the area’s chain stores. What these articles, photographs, and advertisements do is sketch out the map of the region and populate it with representative individuals, institutions, and events, giving the region a discernible identity. In simple terms, a newcomer to the area reading these newspapers would get a good sense of what is going on and who lives here. While it requires regular reading to establish the contours of the regional map – each edition filling in and reinforcing its outline – Le Régional publishes an actual map of the area in which it seeks to serve readers and advertisers, situating the region between Ottawa to the west, Montreal to the east, Mont-Tremblant, Que., to the north and Cornwall, Ont., to the south (see Figure 4.1). The scale of the region itself, highlighted with green shading, appears accurate, but Ottawa, Montreal, Mont-Tremblant, and Cornwall are used merely to orient the region and, as with stops on a subway map, are not as close as they appear. The region’s commercial centres of Lachute and Hawkesbury, where Le Régional has its business offices, are emphasized in larger, italicized red type, and the constituent communities of the region are indicated in bold black. There is no line to indicate the provincial boundary between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec; the boundaries that count, the map suggests, are those that demarcate the region itself, and correspondingly, the newspaper’s coverage area. Interestingly, these boundaries are not marked with stark lines, but are represented on the map instead by a gradual change in shading from green to white, and the very faint place names of the communities on the periphery of this constructed region – e.g., Dalhousie Mills, Ont., and Montebello, Que. – suggest they retain a certain connection. This reminds us again of Doreen Massey’s notion of place as intersection, rather than as a self-contained and sealed enclosure. The map tells us the region has no clear boundaries, that the cities of Ottawa and Montreal remain relevant as places where people in the region may work or shop or catch a vacation flight, and that the peripheral rural communities retain some degree of economic, cultural, and social pertinence. The paper’s news coverage reinforces readers’ sense of this area as a discrete region.3 In order to illustrate more precisely how the papers construct a sense of place, let’s consider examples from six principal topics of coverage: politics, social services, business, sports, culture, and local history. The examples, taken from editions of the papers between October, 2017 and January, 2018, range from the strictly local to stories that demonstrate the ways in which the region is tied into broader provincial, national, and international currents. As with all borders, they can be rigid at times, porous at other times, even occasionally ambiguous. 3

In an analysis of news photographs and cultural narratives in the Iowa City Press Citizen, Gutsche (2011, 141) notes the paper similarly constructs the “Southeast Side” as a region within the city that has no official designation.

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Figure 4.1 One Newspaper’s “News Zone” The weekly newspaper Le Régional publishes an actual map of the territory (shaded dark gray) in which it seeks to serve readers and advertisers, straddling the border between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, halfway between the cities of Ottawa and Montreal. (Image provided courtesy of Le Régional)

The most rigid boundaries within the region are those created to provide effective governance, to demarcate municipal (Hawkesbury, Lachute), township (Champlain), regional (the United Counties of Prescott-Russell, the Regional Municipal County of Argenteuil), and provincial (Ontario, Quebec) jurisdiction and responsibility. Photographs and stories about municipal and county politicians demarcate and legitimize the region as a distinct polity, even as reports about local council meetings and municipal elections subdivide the region into those component parts that touch most directly on readers’ lives. Examples include Le Régional’s coverage of the election of a new municipal council for Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Que. (Bourgeois 2017e) and Le Carillon’s profile of Grenville, Que. mayor Luc Grondin, elected by acclamation and entering his twelfth year of municipal politics (Hountondji 2017b). Both Le Régional (Taylor 2017a) and The Review (Sproule 2017e) provided extensive coverage of the regular monthly meeting of Champlain Township Council, during which its annual budget was passed and taxes were raised. A burst pipe at the Hawkesbury water treatment plant that prompted a boil-water advisory for Hawkesbury, L’Orignal, and Vankleek Hill received prominent coverage in

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three of the four newspapers, coverage that was as much news as public-service announcement for constituents of the affected areas (Myre 2017c; Bourgeois 2017h; Hountondji 2017a). The Tribune Express brought local and provincial politics into play with a story about the decision by the United Counties of Prescott-Russell to approve a symbolic resolution rejecting Ontario’s proposed new minimum-wage law (Chamberlain 2017b). Le Carillon provided a local angle to the international refugee crisis with a pair of articles, the first profiling Josée Sahoua Nekpato, a refugee from Ivory Coast living in Hawkesbury and working at the local Walmart (Hountondji 2017c), the second about Pierrette Leclair, the director of a women’s shelter in L’Orignal that has accepted and housed nine refugees in recent years (Hountondji 2017d). These stories address readers as citizens, situating them within their relevant jurisdictions of governance and providing them with pertinent political information, whether an increase in taxes or a potential threat to public health. In the vast majority of cases, these are stories unlikely to be found in the major dailies of Montreal or Ottawa, nor on radio or television newscasts, thus emphasizing the role of these weekly newspapers in readers’ ability to imagine a community of smaller, more intimate scale and independent of these two metropoles. Closely related to, and often overlapping with, the region’s formal political affairs are the activities of various social and health service agencies and the social issues they deal with. This topic area includes crime reports from Hawkesbury’s Ontario Provincial Police detachment (OPP Festive 2017), news from the region’s fire departments (Bourgeois 2017a) and ambulance services (Bourgeois 2017g), and the Prescott-Russell employment centre (Inscrivez-vous 2017). All four newspapers, for instance, covered the annual radio-telethon to raise funds for the Hawkesbury General Hospital, which serves people from all over the region, including those living on both sides of the provincial boundary (Bourgeois 2017b; HGH Foundation’s 2017; Chamberlain 2017c; La radiotéléthon 2017). In the lead-up to the Christmas holiday season, the papers included stories about the area’s various food banks (e.g., Myre 2018), as well as a more general story comparing the food-bank systems in Ontario and Quebec (Myre 2017b). Aside from this strictly local coverage, Le Régional covered a vigil in Hawkesbury drawing attention to the larger issue of violence against women and children (Bourgeois 2017i), and the Tribune Express carried a story about “a new problem drug” circulating within the illegal street drug scene in Eastern Ontario (Chamberlain 2017e). Ranging from the hyper-local to those of broader interest, these stories situate readers within a regional network of social services, extensions of the area’s political infrastructure. These are services that most community members would have direct contact with, either occasionally or regularly, and thus they lend a material reality to the imagined community, an additional layer to the polity described in the political stories. Business stories in the newspapers serve to carve out a distinct regional market, tied, of course, into farther-reaching business and labour networks. They describe the particularities of a local, regional economy. Some of this coverage can be ca-

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tegorized as boosterism, such as The Review’s regular profiles of local businesses and businesspeople. Examples include a Review story about a new pet-grooming business in Vankleek Hill, the dream of animal-lover Sabrina Paige-Kack (Sproule 2017a), and the opening of a knitting and crocheting specialty store in Vankleek Hill (Sproule 2017b). Other articles celebrate the progress of local businesses. A Review article described the $2.3-millon installation of robotic milking machines on a dairy farm in Fournier, Ont. (MacNab 2017). The papers enthuse regularly about developments in the local craft-beer industry. Le Régional, for example, highlighted the Embrun, Ont. brewery Tuque de Broue in its coverage of the 2017 Gala de l’excellence for regional businesses. Tuque de Broue won both the prize of excellence and the prize for new businesses. The same story noted Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company of Vankleek Hill won the prize for community service for its work in establishing a brewery in Rwanda, where all of the profits remain in the community (Bourgeois 2017c). For its part, The Review reported that Beau’s was the official brewery of Ottawa 2017 celebrations (marking Canada’s 150th anniversary), with a share of its profits donated to charity (Beau’s Ottawa 2018) and it covered the announcement of $15,800 in federal funding for job creation and promotional activity for the Cassel Brewery in Casselman, Ont. (Local brewery 2017). At the same time, the topic includes hard-news stories. A number of reports in the Fall of 2017 pitted proposed business developments against local residents’ environmental concerns, including the establishment of a cement plant in L’Orignal, a mining operation in Grenville-sur-la-Rouge (Rétrospective 2017; Prévost 2017) and a wind-farm development in Champlain Township (Chamberlain 2017f). The Review covered the laying off of 11 employees from a convenience store in the village of Limoges, Ont. three weeks before Christmas, and a subsequent community protest via social media (Tessier-Burns 2017). An editorial in The Review addressed the provincial regulation of workers in the construction industry who fulfill contracts on both sides of the Ontario-Quebec border (Sproule 2017c). Such stories address local readers as those with some kind of investment in this local market, whether economic – as customers of these businesses, as workers in these industries – or emotional – simply as local residents who know these businesses and the people who own them and work for them. A reminder that the region’s economy has significant external links was the extensive coverage of efforts to expand high-speed Internet connectivity, something urban areas take for granted, but remains incomplete in more remote, rural areas of Canada. The Tribune Express reported $11.1 million in municipal, provincial, and federal government funding over the next three years to expand high-speed Internet access to an estimated additional 4,000 households in the Argenteuil municipal region of Quebec (Bergeron 2017). The same announcement in Le Régional put the funding figure at $13.25 million, noting that a second project to extend high-speed Internet service to municipalities in the southern part of Argenteuil included private investment from a local telecommunications company (Legault 2017a). In carving out the region as a distinct market, the business coverage adds a further degree of authenticity to the region as a discrete community. Even if resi-

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dents may work and shop elsewhere, it is not simply a bedroom community; it has its own industrial and agricultural base, providing employment in a considerable array of skilled and unskilled labour, and the commercial centres of Lachute and Hawkesbury make it unnecessary to shop farther afield. Typical of community weeklies, the newspapers provide a considerable amount of amateur sports coverage. These stories are populated by a variety of local athletes, from young and old recreational participants to those competing at more elite levels. The circuits they follow through their schedules – their leagues, their regular tournaments – provide a mapping of regional sports activity because the athletes wear the names of their towns and villages, their school, or their club on their uniforms. Something as simple as the weekly publishing of the standings for the National Capital Junior Hockey League, for example, acts as a listing of regional communities, sketching out the rough contours of the region’s boundaries (see Standings 2018). Sports articles, and their accompanying photos, add considerable texture to the portrait of the region’s people, because they touch all demographic categories; unlike the athletes who populate the sports sections of big-city dailies, these athletes are not celebrities. They include pre-teens, teens, young adults, mature adults, and seniors; for the most part they are regular participants in the region’s daily life. A typical sports page in The Review featured articles about a minor hockey tournament, a high school basketball tournament, calls for entries to a summer baseball tournament, as well as the standings for two regional junior hockey leagues (AA Stars; Hawkesbury Selects; Casselman Community 2018). As with the other story topics, the sports reports in these newspapers are primarily concerned with local events, but occasionally they tie the region into larger provincial, national, and international networks, situating this region on a map of broader scale. The Review, for example, reported on the induction of a Vankleek Hill man into the Canadian Drag Racing Hall of Fame (Myre 2017a). Le Régional noted that a Casselman high school was hosting a basketball tournament for teams hoping to qualify for the Special Olympics (Bourgeois 2017f). The same newspaper carried a story about a L’Orignal skater who was part of a Montreal synchronized skating team competing in the world championships in Croatia (Bourgeois 2018). A Review story featured a Vankleek Hill archer who finished in the top 10 at the world championships in Mexico (Shootin’ true 2017). Similarly, the cultural activities reported in the newspapers’ pages celebrate local arts groups and publicize regional cultural events, with the occasional visit from performers who occupy a larger national, even international, stage. Typical of the local stories are those about the Lachute Theatre Group (Legault 2017b), the Popsilos public art project in Eastern Ontario (Rétrospective 2017), events at Vankleek Hill’s Arbor Gallery (Canada 150 2017), and the release of a new novel by Bourget, Ont. writer Liliane Gratton (Charbonneau 2017). Visits from national and international artists warrant particularly prominent coverage. Such was the case with a concert by the Newfoundland duo Tanglecove (Tanglecove 2017) and a benefit concert in Vankleek Hill by nationally-known singer-songwriter Wayne Rostad (Sproule 2017d). Both Le Régional and the Tribune

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Express carried excited stories about a visit by South African jazz singer Lorraine Klaasen at Hawkesbury’s Le Chenail Cultural Centre (Bourgeois 2017d; Chamberlain 2017d). Aside from demonstrating that the region has its own cultural life, these stories are a reminder of the region’s particular heritage – originally populated by indigenous peoples, subsequently settled by French, English, and Scottish peoples – and its predominantly rural character. Major annual events include the Highland Games in Maxville, Ont., the Vankleek Hill Fall Fair, and the Electronic Music Festival in St-André d’Argenteuil, Que. Such coverage grants the community a cultural history, further legitimizing its sense of distinct place. Finally, stories about local history reinforce this temporal dimension, speaking to the region’s roots and thus enhancing its sense of place as particular and authentic. Such stories frequently entail personal histories, but they can also relate institutional histories. Coverage of Remembrance Day ceremonies throughout the region honour the local population’s contribution to Canada’s war efforts and speak to its sense of national belonging (cf. Landriault 2017). Both the Tribune Express and Le Carillon featured reminiscences on the 20th anniversary of the ice storm that hit Ontario and Quebec, a singular event for creating a bond among community members in a time of both personal and economic hardship; the ice storm of January 1998 cut off hydro power and water to parts of the region, some for a few days, others for several weeks, in the middle of winter. Neighbours helped each other out by sharing generators and firewood, while Canadian soldiers, local firefighters, and hydro workers from across the country and parts of the U.S. were brought in to restore power and clean up the mess of fallen trees and broken power poles (Chamberlain 2018; Hountondji 2018a, b; Prévost 2018; Marsillo 2018). Other coverage of local history included the Tribune Express’s two-page spread on the demolition of the Sisters of Ste-Marie Convent in Vankleek Hill (Chamberlain 2017a), The Review’s story about the restoration and expansion of Vankleek Hill’s historic murals (Vankleek Hill mural 2017), and Le Régional’s coverage of a presentation by two local authors of their work on the Franco-Ontarian fur trader Etienne Brulé (Taylor 2017b). In highlighting the newspapers’ role in constructing this region, this place, through the amalgamation of numerous distinct towns and villages, I am not suggesting the newspapers fabricate an artificial place. As the stories referenced above indicate, there is a lived reality to the region; the area is meaningful to readers of the papers, as citizens, workers, shoppers, users of its services, participants in its sports and cultural activities. The newspapers, instead, serve to demonstrate this lived reality and help to reinforce a sense of distinct place. This does not mean that every resident is familiar with every corner of the region – just as it is not necessary for every Montrealer to be familiar with every part of the city to identify as a Montrealer – but that there are enough ties among its constituent parts to generate a tangible sense of place. The business leaders and chambers of commerce featured in the newspapers’ pages – alongside the advertisements for local businesses – demarcate the region as its own market. The service clubs, food banks and other social service organizations

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give readers a sense of the region’s socio-economic structures. The athletes and sports teams represent quite literally the communities within the region by wearing place-names across their chests and by participating in leagues whose circuits echo the rough parameters of the region’s geography. This place, as depicted in the newspapers’ pages, is given its own identity in that it is occupied by people engaged in localized economic, political, cultural, and social activities, it has its own array of institutions – schools, libraries, banks, other local businesses, police detachments, government offices, social service clubs, recreational facilities – and a considerable number of regular cultural events highlighting historical, cultural, and economic features of the region, showing us the products of local agricultural activity as well as local arts and crafts production. CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY THROUGH SUBDIVISION In other cases, newspapers can segment recognizable communities or, it might be more accurate to say, cobble together a reorganized community from a larger entity. Such is the case with daily newspapers serving big cities. Their product differentiation, whether it be their style of reporting, their political slant, and/or the emphasis they place on specific topics – and corresponding de-emphasis – may divide the market into different readerships. Montreal is Canada’s second-largest city, after Toronto. Based on 2016 census data, the greater Montreal area has a population of 4.1 million. A distinguishing characteristic, of course, is its majority French-language population; almost threequarters (73.54%) declare French as their first language, while another six per cent report both English and French as first languages. More than half of the population of greater Montreal (55.5%) claims knowledge of both French and English; only seven per cent report knowledge of English only. Almost one-quarter (23.35%) of Montrealers immigrated to Canada and the visible minority population is 22.56 per cent. Another distinguishing feature of Montreal is the education level of its population; with four large universities attracting students from around the world, slightly more than 60 per cent of those aged 25–64 report having attained a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree (Statistics Canada 2016). Box 4.1 Quebec’s Language Laws Because the province of Quebec is the only majority French-speaking jurisdiction in North America, governments have passed a number of laws to protect and promote use of the language (Chevrier 1997). ⁕ Bill 22 (The Official Language Act, 1974): This legislation made French the official language of Quebec, with the goal of making

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French the everyday language of services, commercial signage, labour relations and business, elementary and secondary school instruction, legislation, and justice. ⁕ Bill 101 (The Charter of the French Language, 1977): This bill supplanted, and expanded upon, Bill 22, making French the official language of the provincial government, as well as the courts, civil administration, semi-public agencies, labour relations, commerce and business, and elementary and secondary school instruction. With respect to instruction, exemptions are permitted to a child whose father or mother is a Canadian citizen and received the majority of their elementary or secondary school education in English in Canada. ⁕ Bill 86 (an amendment to Bill 101, 1993): Known as the Quebec sign law, it permits the use of languages other than French on commercial signs, provided French is “markedly predominant.” ⁕ Office québécois de la langue française: Originally established in 1961, among its principal functions is the monitoring of language use in the province, the fielding of citizen complaints regarding breaches of Bill 101, and the publication of reports on the status of the French language in Quebec. Montreal is a relatively media-rich city. It is a hub of French-language film and television production and it publishes six daily newspapers, if we include the two French-language commuter dailies: Metro and 24 Heures. I will focus here on its four major dailies, the French-language Journal de Montréal, La Presse, and Le Devoir, and the English-language Montreal Gazette. Le Journal de Montréal is the paid circulation leader.4 A division of Quebecor Media, it is a tabloid published seven days a week, with a companion Web site (journaldemontreal.com), tablet (Édition É), and mobile application (J5). Typical of the tabloid newspaper format, it features prominently photographs and infographics, and its stories are short and written in an informal, even conversational, style. Le Journal covers a great range of news topics, but with a particular emphasis on crime stories, popular entertainment, and sports. La Presse is Le Journal’s closest rival.5 Previously owned by Gesca, a division of Power Corporation, and recently converted to an independent non-profit, La 4

5

According to News Media Canada figures for 2015 (the year from which our sample week was taken), Le Journal sold an average of 175,220 hard-copy newspapers on weekdays, 192,404 on Saturdays, and 179,070 on Sundays. Its digital versions attracted an average of 231,069 on weekdays, 241,485 on Saturdays, and 229,497 on Sundays (News Media Canada 2018). News Media Canada (2018) figures for 2015 report La Presse’s average paid circulation as

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Presse published a broadsheet edition seven days a week until 2009, when it closed its Sunday edition. It began publishing Saturdays only beginning on January 1, 2016 and published its last print edition on December 30, 2017, going digital only, with tablet (La Presse+), Web site (lapresse.ca), and mobile (La Presse Mobile) versions (La Presse, 2017). It has been something of a pioneer in the digital realm, launching its tablet edition in April, 2013. As a print publication, La Presse could be said to be typical of major daily broadsheets, adopting a something-for-everyone editorial approach, covering a range of news, business, sports, entertainment, and lifestyles issues. Le Devoir is an independent, small-circulation broadsheet, generally considered a newspaper for Quebec’s intellectual elite, with a strong focus on politics, culture, international affairs, and economics.6 Published six days per week, it is a relatively text-heavy newspaper, featuring long stories written in a much more formal, literary style than those found in Le Journal de Montréal, certainly, or La Presse. It also has a Web site (ledevoir.com), a mobile app (Le Devoir Mobile), and a tablet edition. The English-language Gazette is part of the Postmedia newspaper chain. The paper features articles from sister newspapers in the chain; its business section consists primarily of stories shared from Postmedia’s National Post and that paper’s business section, the Financial Post.7 The Gazette claims to be Quebec’s oldest daily newspaper (originating as the French-language Gazette du commerce et littéraire, pour la ville et district de Montréal in 1778). It is also available online via its Web site (montrealgazette.com), mobile app, and as an electronic paper. Among the Montreal dailies, it is most similar to La Presse in providing coverage of a broad range of stories within the categories of news, business, sports, entertainment, and lifestyles. Recurring cutbacks to its newsroom staff through layoffs and buy-outs, however, have hampered considerably its ability to generate original stories in recent years (cf. Collard 2012; Hays 2015). In terms of news geography, the distinctions among the four newspapers can be subtle at times, quite dramatic at other times, depending upon the topic of the particular news story, the larger political, economic, and/or social context informing the coverage, and what aspects of the story the journalists imagine their readers to be most interested in or concerned about. Clearly, and most significantly, the

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98,657 on weekdays and 143,266 on Saturdays, with an additional digital audience of 279,731 on weekdays and 340,943 on Saturdays. Le Devoir has an interesting history. It was established in 1910 by the former municipal, provincial, and federal politician Henri Bourassa as a voice for Catholicism and French-Canadian nationalism. Independently owned and managed by an administrative council, it has evolved from a politically-engaged newspaper into a more typical North American newspaper, but one devoted to the political, economic, cultural, and social advancement of Quebec society (see www.ledevoir.com). The newspaper sold an average of 28,799 papers on weekdays in 2015, and its weekend edition averaged 45,366. Its digital edition (ledevoir.com) attracted an average of 18,295 visitors of weekdays in 2015 and 22,997 on weekends (News Media Canada 2018). The Gazette sold an average of 53,344 newspapers on weekdays in 2015 and 68,468 on Saturdays. Its digital editions attracted another 78,797 on weekdays and 91,384 on Sundays (News Media Canada 2018).

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readership is divided into French and English-language communities, although the relatively high rate of Montrealers’ bilingualism means that all four papers remain accessible to francophone, anglophone, and allophone readers.8 To provide specific illustrations of how the newspapers can situate readers differently, I collected the editions of all four newspapers for the randomly-selected week of Monday, April 27, 2015 through Saturday, May 2, 2015. My purpose here is not to make any conclusive assertions about the news geography of these newspapers, but merely to demonstrate the ways in which the Montreal newspapers can at times unite readers as a community, and at other times situate them very differently, within their city, within their region, within Canada, even within the world.9 Some obvious examples of stories that united Montreal newspaper readers came from the international news pages and the sports pages. For example, during the sample week, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, killing an estimated 9,000 people and injuring many thousands of others. All four newspapers provided continual, empathetic coverage that week, not only of the earthquake itself, but of Canadian relief efforts and the individual Canadians and Quebeckers in Nepal at the time (cf. L. Pelletier 2015; Gurnbacharya and Daigle 2015; Blais 2015; Reuters 2015). Similarly, all four newspapers looked south of the border, providing several days of coverage of riots in Baltimore resulting from the death of Freddie Gray, a black youth who suffered a fatal spinal-cord injury while in police custody. This came a year after similar protests in Ferguson, Missouri, when police shot and killed a black teenager named Michael Brown (cf. Agence France-Presse 2015; Hétu 2015; Associated Press 2015; Rettino-Parazelli 2015). Closer to home, the newspapers’ news and sports pages celebrated the feats of the local professional hockey and soccer teams. If the Montreal Canadiens regularly receive extensive coverage, it was ramped up considerably by their victory over the 8

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For example, based on Vividata statistics for the third quarter of 2017, Le Devoir’s combined print and digital audience included 7 per cent anglophones and 8.6 per cent allophones (Alain Tréhout, Le Devoir, email message to author, February 26, 2018). Also based on Vividata statistics for the third quarter of 2017, the readership for Le Journal de Montréal’s print edition is 5 per cent Anglophone and 13 per cent allophone (Annie Bergeron, Quebecor Media, email message to author, February 27, 2018). There is a temptation to examine the coverage of highly-charged news events to draw conclusions about the differences among these newspapers, as there is a popular assumption that there are stark differences between the ways the French-language and English-language media respond to such events. In my reading of the Montreal daily newspapers over more than 20 years, I have always felt that the role of language or culture in these style differences was overstated. For this chapter, then, I chose to study a typical and random week of coverage for two reasons. First, one could argue that highly-charged events, such as the sovereignty referenda of 1980 and 1995, and more recent debates about immigration and reasonable accommodation, are exceptional rather than typical, and thus exaggerate the newspapers’ distinctions. As such, these distinctions would not be part of the regular, daily and cumulative differences in news geography that I am interested in studying. Second, research indicates that even in these exceptional instances, the distinctions are not so neatly drawn; they are either not apparent (cf. Nielsen and Mandache 2011, 2013) or are far more nuanced and subtle than one might assume (cf. Robinson 1998).

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rival Ottawa Senators in the first round of the National Hockey League playoffs (cf. Hickey 2015; La presse canadienne 2015; Labbé 2015; Bernier 2015). Pascale Breton, in an editorial in La Presse, entitled “Thérapie de groupe” (“Group therapy”), wrote: “Divided over health issues, the environment or the economy, torn by divergent ideologies, Quebeckers have difficulty finding a project to bring them together. Yet it is in unison that they stir when spring returns, as if the Montreal Canadiens mended the social fabric by reviving a common fervor”10 (Breton 2015). Le Journal de Montréal carried two stories about the playoff games’ impact on Montreal merchants and social services. Attendance was down an estimated 75 per cent at the Guzzo cinemas, prompting its manager to offer a discount for “veuves du hockey” (“hockey widows”) on game nights, with video stores, exercise gyms, and on-line pornography sites also suffering (Scali 2015a). Hospitals and other health emergency services reported a drop in demand during the hockey games (Scali 2015b). Similarly, all four newspapers celebrated the Montreal Impact soccer team’s advance to the CONCACAF Champions League final against Club America, which attracted 61,000 fans to the city’s Olympic Stadium (cf. Zurkowsky 2015; Milano 2015; Lévesque 2015; Delgado 2015). This included front-page photos in all four papers, including the normally sport-averse Le Devoir. Le Journal de Montréal noted that the game attracted a record television audience of more than 400,000 viewers for the French-language network TVA Sports, a reported 13.3-per-cent market share. This was a record audience for a soccer game, even if it paled by comparison to the 1.7 million who tuned into the hockey game three nights earlier (Lemieux 2015). These instances, I maintain, have a unifying effect on Montreal newspaper readers, even if each in their own way. Coverage of natural disasters emphasizes peoples’ common humanity; what happened there could happen here, and we can feel for the ways in which they have been impacted. We are the world. Reporting on racial violence in a U.S. city, on the other hand, suggests a qualitative difference in race relations between a Canadian or Quebec ‘us’ and an American ‘them.’ We are Canadians (or Quebeckers). And stories about major sports events evoke widespread civic pride as the teams are seen to represent our city – even if they are privatelyowned corporations staffed largely by players who are not from here – and become our teams. We are Montrealers. These stories bring readers together as a common ‘us,’ emphasizing shared sentiments and setting aside the differences that divide this us in other areas of news coverage. News coverage can, of course, divide people as well. In the Montreal and Quebec context, the most obvious examples pertain to coverage of language and identity issues; Quebec’s status as a distinct society within Canada can be traced, historically, to its origins as a French colony in the 16th century and, after being absorbed into British North America in the late 18th century, to its majority French language, 10

“Divisé sur des enjeux de santé, d’environnement ou d’économie, déchirés par des idéologies divergentes, les Québécois peinent à trouver un projet qui les rassemble. C’est pourtant à l’unisson qu’ils vibrent quand le printemps revient, comme si le Canadien de Montréal soudait le tissu social en ravivant une ferveur commune” [All translations are provided by the author.]

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Roman Catholic religion, and civil law system (see O’Neal 1995). Today its distinct society status is pegged primarily to its resilient majority French-speaking population and the political struggle to have un peuple québécois recognized as an independent nation.11 Two referenda – in 1980 and 1995 – have been held on the question of Quebec independence, and political parties at the provincial and the federal levels of government – le Parti Québécois and le Bloc Québécois, respectively – serve to promote and protect Quebec’s independence.12 If the context of a referendum provides the occasion for particularly impassioned coverage, and reveals clear differences between the ways in which the English and French-language newspapers frame the issues and address their readers, the distinctions are not always so pronounced. Stories about language featured quite prominently in our sample week, but there were other signs that the newspapers mapped out their own particular news geographies. All four newspapers proved themselves guardians of minority-language rights, with the difference that the French-language papers portrayed francophones as a beleaguered minority within Canada, while the Gazette framed anglophones as a vigilant minority within Quebec. The two issues that most vexed the French-language newspapers during our sample week were the predominance of English on construction sites at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal and the Davie shipyard in Lévis, Quebec, and a decision by the Quebec Court of Appeal to allow seven major retailers to keep their English-only store signs. Le Journal initiated the construction sites story with an April 27 report noting that, five months after a worker had complained to Quebec’s language office – l’Office québécois de la langue française – with no response, English continued to be the predominant language of the Davie site (Caron 2015a). The story included a harsh dismissal of the worker’s complaint by local union president Gaétan Sergerie, whose comments contained a 11

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Use of the term Québécois in news reportage and common parlance can vary in important ways. Sometimes it is used inclusively, to refer to all Quebec residents, regardless of language, in the civic nationalism sense. At other times it is used exclusively, to mean only francophone Quebeckers, often referred to as pure laine Québécois, in the ethnic nationalism sense. The referenda, in particular, divided Quebeckers between those who wanted some measure of formal independence from Canada and those who believed the province’s best interests were served by remaining within the confederation. A clear majority of francophones favoured independence – an estimated 60 per cent voted OUI in 1995 – while a strong majority of anglophones and allophones preferred to remain within Canada. The referendum result was very close, decided by slightly more than one percentage point – 50.6 NON, 49.4 OUI. And while the coverage in the English and French-language press differed, all were agreed that the referendum exposed a serious divide within Quebec (cf. Venne 1995; Wells 1995). The ethnic nationalism that many NON supporters believed tainted the sovereignty option was revealed in a concession speech by Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau, leader of the OUI campaign, when the referendum results had become clear. In contrast to Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard’s conciliatory speech, a bitter Parizeau blamed “money and the ethnic vote” for the defeat. “We’ll stop talking about the francophones of Quebec. We’ll talk about us: at 60 per cent, we voted for it.” He later added: “We are beaten, it’s true. But by what? Money and the ethnic vote” (Authier and Scott 1995; see also, Wells 1995; Venne 1995; Cantin 1995 Lessard, 1995). A Gazette editorial argued that Parizeau’s “vile and racist comments shocked and embarrassed many Quebeckers, including sovereignists” (Jacques Parizeau’s 1995).

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threat to the reporter and revealed the tension language issues can raise: “If you put out this ‘damned’ nonsense, you will get yours,” Sergerie told the reporter.13 Le Devoir took up the story with a pair of columns by Michel David. In the first, David (2015a) took exception to the threatening comment from the Davie site union leader, elevating the matter to a significant legal issue: “In its preamble, the French Language Charter affirms that French is ‘the normal and usual language of the workplace.’”14 In addition to the shipyard site, David quoted a Quebec Workers Federation leader as saying the new Université de Montréal hospital “se construit en anglais” (“is being built in English”). Two days later, in the context of English predominance on the two construction sites and the appeals court signs decision, David (2015b) broadened his canvas considerably, casting the governing Quebec Liberal Party as the province’s anglophone political representatives. He recounted numerous instances in which successive Liberal governments in Quebec had failed to be vigilant in protecting the French language, pointing to anglophone support for the Quebec Liberal Party as an explanation. “In the face of opposition from the Anglophone community, these efforts were abandoned.”15 With respect to the appeals court’s signs decision, David added: “It is hard to imagine anglophone supporters of the PLQ [Quebec Liberal Party] manning the barricades. Given that only seven companies are resistant, the impact on the French face [of Montreal] will be relatively limited, but to see the Liberals make a gesture in favour of the French language for the first time since the adoption of Bill 22 (1974) would be an event in itself.”16 The retail signs decision by the Quebec Court of Appeal was covered by all four newspapers. While the front-page Gazette story quoted Premier Couillard as saying, “There is no language crisis in Quebec” (Authier 2015b), the French-language papers saw the ruling as an indication that Quebec’s language law needed to be strengthened (cf. Caron 2015b; Croteau 2015; Dutrisac 2015). A Le Devoir editorial by Antoine Robitaille (2015) urged the government to revise Bill 101, but expressed doubt that Couillard’s Liberal government would act, echoing colleague Michel David’s skepticism. “Given the premier’s lack of sensitivity to the protection of the French language, we would have expected him to reject this possibility from the outset.”17 Le Devoir proved to be the most forceful voice on the topic of French-language protection, and not just within Quebec. An editorial by Le Devoir’s director, Bernard Descôteaux, drew attention to a Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding the constitutional minority-language education rights of francophones 13 14 15 16

17

“Si vous sortez des ‘hosties’ de niaiseries, vous allez vous faire planter.” “Dans son préambule, la Charte de la langue française affirme que le français est ‘la langue normale et habituelle du travail.’” “Face à l’opposition de la communauté anglophone, ces dispositions ont été abandonées.” “On voit mal la clientèle anglophone du PLQ monter aux barricades. Comme seulement sept entreprises sont récalcitrantes, l’impact sur le visage français serait relativement limité, mais voir les libéraux faire une geste en faveur du français pour la première fois depuis l’adoption de la loi 22 (1974) serait un événement en soi.” “Étant donné le peu de sensibilité du premier ministre pour la protection du français, on se serait attendu a ce qu’il écarte d’emblée cette possibilité.”

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in Vancouver, calling it “[u]ne victoire importante pour la francophonie canadienne” (“[a]n important victory for francophone Canada”) (Descôteaux 2015). The decision pertained to a French-language elementary school with 350 students in a facility meant to accommodate 199. “At the heart of this debate is Article 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees to linguistic minorities education in their own language” where numbers justify.18 Descôteaux was critical of the British Columbia government, associating it with “those who look to hold back or refuse francophone minorities from exercising their constitutional rights.”19 In the same edition, Jean-Benoît Nadeau (2015) posited Quebec as a model for minority-language protection in a column about studies that claimed 6,000 of the world’s languages were threatened with extinction. While La Presse and Le Journal included these more serious language issues in their coverage – La Presse editorialist André Pratte (2015) also praised the Supreme Court’s minority-language education decision, although he framed it as proof that Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is effective in protecting minority-language rights – the two papers also ran the kinds of stories that can make the language issue appear trivial. For instance, accompanying a photo of outspoken CBC hockey commentator Don Cherry (widely considered by Quebeckers as a symbol of English-Canadian bigotry), La Presse lamented that the number of Quebec francophones turning to English-language hockey telecasts had more than doubled with the passing of the French-language television rights from RDS to TVA Sports, owing to the latter’s limited availability (Brousseau-Pouliot 2015a). In its two-page coverage of an arts gala celebrating Quebec francophone culture, a brief Le Journal article noted social media complaints about Kevin Bazinet being asked to sing in English (S. Godin 2015). A Le Journal column by Gilles Proulx (2015) recounted, anecdotally, two aggravating experiences with Air Canada, one on a flight when he claimed the safety instructions were given only in English, the second when “deux hostesses, vieille mode, ne maîtrisant que la langue des conquérants” (“two hostesses, old school, mastering only the language of the conquerors”), would not answer his questions. The Gazette, as noted above, ran a front-page story on the appeals court retail signs decision and made passing reference to the construction sites language issue in a story that was primarily about the Liberal government defending budget cuts to its language “watchdog” (l’Office québécois de la langue française) (Vendeville 2015b). But as the only daily newspaper addressing a predominantly anglophone audience, the Gazette foregrounded two stories of particular concern to the English-language community. The first, not covered by any of the French-language newspapers, reported that the Quebec English School Boards Association had hired a constitutional lawyer to contest the Quebec government’s plan to end school board elections (Vendeville 2015a). Association president David Daoust told the Gazette: “We’re trying to send the message that we, the English-speaking com18 19

“Au coeur de ce débat se trouve l’article 23 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, qui garantit aux minorités linguistiques un enseignement dans leur langue.” “des gens qui cherchent à retarder ou à refuser aux minorités francophones l’exercice de leurs droits constitutionnels.”

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munity, are not to be taken for granted.” The lawyer, Michael Bergman, said the issue was about “constitutionally protected rights for parents and children,” and that abolishing school boards would hasten the decline in English-language school enrolment. A second, front-page Gazette story related the possibility of Quebec’s two dozen private, English-language secondary schools refusing an annual government subsidy that would allow them to skirt Quebec’s language law (Bill 101) in order to attract more immigrant students and francophones (Valiante 2015a). A translated version of the same Canadian Press story ran on page 5 of Le Devoir the same day (Valiante 2015b). Schools accepting the subsidy – about $4,500 per student per year – must abide by Bill 101, which means immigrant students and francophones whose parents went to a French-language school are not allowed to attend an English-language primary or secondary school. The Gazette story framed Quebec’s language law as detrimental to the English-language school system and as a restraint on educational choices for immigrants and francophones, reminding readers: “Language politics in Quebec – especially when it comes to children’s education – is a highly sensitive issue” (Valiante 2015a). Keeping in mind that the news, by definition, consists of stories that highlight the unusual, the exceptional, the extraordinary, rather than the simply routine or quotidian, it could be argued that the language stories discussed above exaggerate the divide between Quebec’s, and Montreal’s, linguistic communities, creating the impression that the boundaries between these communities are far more rigid than daily experience would suggest. But, of course, language is the one element of identity that binds the readers of the respective newspapers; the readership communities are, for the most part, language communities. And in the Quebec context, the language one speaks is a principal element of one’s identity, given the minority status of francophones within Canada and North America, and the minority status of anglophones within Quebec. Instances in which there appears to be some form of discrimination based on language, therefore, become newsworthy. This coverage, in turn, reinforces the notion of separate language communities, not only within Montreal, but within Quebec and Canada as well. The newspapers become representatives of what they understand to be their readers’ interests, in this instance drawing attention to issues that seem to threaten a core element of their identity: language. There are, of course, other less obvious distinctions in the ways the Montreal dailies sketch out their news maps and situate their readers. If much less explicitly than Le Régional and the map of its readership and advertising market discussed in the first part of the chapter, the Montreal dailies nonetheless exhibit tendencies in establishing the cartographies of their coverage area. The Gazette, for example, aims toward the central and western parts of the island of Montreal where most of its readers, and the institutions they tend to frequent, are located, and it publishes a West Island section each Wednesday, carrying stories from the western suburbs of the island of Montreal. The Gazette covers Montreal municipal affairs and Quebec provincial politics, but is less inclined to send its reporters searching for stories in

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the areas populated primarily by francophones: the east end of the island of Montreal or in the smaller towns of Quebec. One clear example of this during our sample week was the Gazette’s extensive and largely celebratory coverage of the opening of the new McGill University Health Centre. The MUHC is one of Montreal’s two new superhospitals and, because of its location and the history of its affiliates, it is considered by many to be Montreal’s English superhospital. Conversely, le Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, located in the centre of the city at the corner of Rue St-Denis and Boulevard Réné-Lévesque, is considered to be the city’s French superhospital. Both hospitals, of course, are accessible by all.20 Affiliated with the English-language McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, the MUHC is located on the Glen site in the western part of the city, on the border of Westmount and the borough of Notre-Dame-de-Graçe. This part of the city is largely, although not exclusively, English-speaking and the health centres it amalgamates have been historically the main health centres serving Montreal’s anglophone community (the Royal Victoria Hospital since 1893). The MUHC opened in late April, 2015, when 154 patients were moved from the Royal Victoria Hospital, beside the McGill University campus, to the Glen site in a little more than five hours on a Sunday morning. All four dailies covered the move, but none as thoroughly or enthusiastically as the Gazette, which devoted the first four pages of its Monday front section to what was described, repeatedly, as “a historic move.” In photos and text, the Gazette provided coverage of the move itself (Derfel et al. 2015; Derfel 2015a; Seidman 2015a), a timeline based on its reporters’ live online broadcast of the move, a description of “a hospital reputed to be a marvel of design and engineering” (Fidelman 2015a), a report on the preservation of artifacts from the Royal Victoria (Seidman 2015b), and doctors’ reminiscences of the old hospital (Fidelman 2015b). What was most striking about the Gazette coverage was the volume, produced by three staff reporters and, on the first day, four staff photographers. The celebratory tone faded after the first day’s reporting, but the Gazette carried eight more stories that week, including front-page coverage on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Tuesday stories included a report on “glitches” during the hospital’s first full day of operations – problems with access for disabled people, workers’ passes to restricted areas not functioning properly, people having difficulty navigating the huge facility – (Derfel 2015b), a story recounting patients’ complaints about hospital parking fees (Seidman 2015c), and another about the birth of the hospital’s first baby (Fidelman 2015c). The parking issue was raised again in a front-page story on Wednesday, with a borough councilor urging the MUHC to review the fees (Seidman 2015d), and in a Friday editorial that viewed the fees as “unavoidable” (Hospital parking fees, 2015). The most critical story appeared in the Wednesday 20

The McGill University Health Centre consolidates four other health centres: the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the Montreal Chest Institute, and the Cedars Cancer Centre (see www.muhc.ca). Le Centre universitaire de l’Université de Montréal amalgamates three hospitals: l’Hôtel-Dieu, l’Hôpital Notre-Dame, and l’Hôpital Saint-Luc (see www. chumontreal.gc.ca).

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edition after two Gazette journalists were “expelled” from the MUHC’s lobby for not seeking permission from the hospital’s public-relations department to speak to patients, a move denounced in the story by a media lawyer and the Fédération professionelle des journalistes du Québec (Derfel 2015c). There was no followup to this incident the rest of the week, but an interview with a patient that was approved by the hospital’s public affairs department was published the following day, noting the patient’s “million-dollar view of Mount Royal and the downtown skyline” (Seidman 2015e). Clearly, the volume and intensity of the Gazette coverage speak to the significance of this institution to the newspaper’s target readership. It is reasonable to assume many of its Montreal readers would have had contact with the health institutes the new hospital amalgamates, and could very well visit the new superhospital at some point in the future. The superhospital move was covered by the French-language papers, too, but both the volume and the tone of their coverage were quite different. La Presse ran only two articles: a single-sentence brief accompanying three photographs on page 11 on Monday, describing the quick and efficient move (Sioni 2015), and a story the following day about a feasibility study into the future of the Royal Victoria site and McGill University’s interest in integrating some of the Royal Victoria’s abandoned buildings into its downtown campus (Tison 2015). Le Journal de Montréal and Le Devoir – in a wire story – also provided complimentary stories about the smooth transition (Noël 2015; Lowrie 2015), but the remainder of their coverage was much more critical. An otherwise trivial story in Le Journal about the first baby born in the hospital was preoccupied with the fact that the baby shared, coincidentally, the first name of Arthur Porter, the former hospital director accused of corruption and fraud (Pailliez 2015). The only other Journal news story had to do with the $1.5 million in legal fees that had so far accumulated in the MUHC’s court dispute over extra charges claimed by contractor SNC-Lavalin (Archambault 2015). However, an acerbic Monday column by Lise Ravary (2015), which cast the Royal Victoria as a hospital built for Montreal’s 19th-century anglophone elite, hoped the site on the slopes of Mount Royal wouldn’t simply be turned into condominiums. The MUHC’s only other mention in Le Devoir came in a Wednesday column by Francine Pelletier (2015), in which she posited the construction of Montreal’s two new superhospitals as part of a larger, and worrying, privatization and commercialization of Quebec’s health-care system. Under the headline “Le marché des malades” (“The market of the sick”), Pelletier argued: “There is no better symbol of the current health reforms than these gleaming castles offering a maximum concentration of workers.”21 This is an instance in which the paucity, or absence, of stories can be as meaningful as the presence of news coverage. Clearly, the Glen site superhospital move had less news value for the French-language press, suggesting that it had less pertinence for the francophone readership than for the anglophone readers of the 21

“Il n’y a pas de meilleur symbole de l’actuelle réforme de la santé que ces chateux forts rutilants, offrant une concentration maximale d’effectifs.”

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Gazette. There is nothing in the French-language coverage to explain this, but it lends credence to the idea that the MUHC is the anglophone community’s hospital, located as it is in the western part of the city and bringing together health centres that have served historically a predominantly anglophone clientele. In a similar vein, the Gazette provided only a single story about an issue – and two high-profile Quebeckers – that received considerable impassioned coverage in the French-language press. The issue was sparked by the discovery that, in the Liberal government’s budget one month earlier, changes to a tax-credit program disqualified the television production company of Julie Snyder. Snyder is a prominent French-language media producer and television star and was, in 2015, the spouse of Pierre Karl Péladeau, the principal shareholder and former chief executive officer of media conglomerate Quebecor and the front-runner in the imminent leadership race for the Parti Québécois. The tax-credit program was designed for independent producers. The government ruled initially that because most of Snyder’s production agreements were with TVA, a network owned by Quebecor, and given her personal relationship with Quebecor’s boss, Snyder’s Productions J was not an independent producer and therefore ineligible for the tax credit. That interpretation had stood until 2014, when, five days before PQ premier Pauline Marois called an election in which Péladeau would be a star PQ candidate, and against the advice of finance ministry bureaucrats, the ruling was changed to render Productions J eligible for the tax credit. Both TVA and Péladeau himself had lobbied the PQ government for the change. The Liberal Party of Quebec won the 2014 election, and its March, 2015 budget reversed that decision. The tax credit was not inconsequential to Productions J, amounting to several millions of dollars, although a specific amount was never cited in the coverage (see Authier 2015a; Lessard 2015; Orfali 2015). It is understandable that this story would play much more prominently in the French-language papers than in the Gazette, for several reasons. First, while Péladeau is well-known by Montreal anglophones – even if Quebecor’s properties are primarily French-language media – Snyder is far less-known by anglophones because her celebrity comes from hosting French-language television programs like Le point J and Le Banquier, along with frequent appearances in celebrity gossip stories in the French-language press, programs and publications that most anglophones would not know.22 Secondly, and as some of the stories indicate, Péladeau’s chosen political party, le Parti Québécois, is considered a party for Quebec francophones, particularly those who favour Quebec independence, whereas Quebec anglophones tend to vote Liberal. Finally, Le Journal de Montréal is a Quebecor Media property and it would seem reasonable that coverage of Péladeau and Snyder would be coloured somewhat, not only in his own company’s newspaper, but also in those of his competitors. 22

Quebec has a star system that the rest of Canada cannot match. Musicians, writers, actors, film and television directors, even chefs and politicians, are regularly featured in magazine profiles, newspaper articles, and on popular talk-shows like Radio-Canada’s weekly Tout le monde en parle.

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Le Journal ran only one story about Snyder’s tax-credit troubles during our sample week (M-A. Gagnon 2015), two days after the story first appeared in La Presse (Lessard 2015). Somewhat detached in tone and accompanied by a head-andshoulders photo of Snyder, the story recounted premier Philippe Couillard’s denial that Snyder had been “ciblé” (“targeted”) by the decision. It included a wellcirculated quote from the PQ’s former finance minister, Nicolas Marceau: “I don’t believe that a businesswoman should have to choose between her business and her relationship.”23 Oddly, while the story stated the reason for the ruling was because Snyder was “initimement liée à TVA et Pierre Karl Péladeau” (“intimately connected to TVA and Pierre Karl Péladeau”), it did not state the nature of her relationship with Péladeau, nor the fact that he was a PQ leadership candidate. It is tempting to see this as careless editing, but it may simply speak to editors’ assumptions of Le Journal readers’ familiarity with these two personalities. The remaining four articles in Le Journal that week were columns about Péladeau’s leadership bid and did not mention Snyder at all. None of the columns could be said to be complimentary of Péladeau (see Facal 2015; Dufour 2015; Beaudoin 2015; Samson 2015). For the purposes of understanding media geography, the most noteworthy of these was an analysis of Péladeau’s leadership bid and the prospects for Quebec sovereignty under a PQ government led by Péladeau. In a column, Joseph Facal (2015), a former cabinet minister in the PQ governments of Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry, maintained that because the Quebec Liberal party had “un quasi-monopole sur le vote des Anglophones et des néo-Québécois” (“a quasi-monopoly over the vote of anglophones and new Quebeckers”), Péladeau would need “une majorité massive du vote francophone” (“a massive majority of the francophone vote”) to win an election. Specifically, Facal argued, Péladeau would need to appeal to francophones in the regions known as 450 and 418 (450, referring to the area code of the largely French-speaking suburban and rural region surrounding Montreal, 418 to Quebec City and surrounding area, also predominantly French-speaking), inferring that the 514 (Montreal) would vote heavily Liberal. Facal was dividing the province into anglophone (Liberal) and francophone (PQ) constituencies, coinciding with their respective area codes, and ghettoizing them geographically. Le Devoir’s focus that week was the tax credit, publishing two news stories. The first was a front-page story recounting Snyder’s angry reaction to losing the tax credit, in which she called the Liberal government’s decision “discriminatoire” (“discriminatory”) and “sexiste” (“sexist”), adding that it threatened her production company’s survival (Orfali 2015). “What the government is doing is insinuating that I am merely someone’s spouse,” Snyder was quoted as saying.24 The story downplayed her relationship with Péladeau somewhat; he wasn’t mentioned until the fifth paragraph, and the story was the only one in the coverage that week to mention that Snyder and Péladeau were separated at the time of the PQ rule change, and that the PQ government’s decision was supported by a letter from l’Association québécoise de la production médiatique. Le Devoir did, however, run on its op-ed 23 24

“Je ne crois pas qu’une femme d’affaires doive choisir entre son entreprise ou son couple.” “Ce que fait le gouvernement, c’est d’insinuer que je ne suis que la conjointe de quelqu’un.”

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page a letter signed by 101 Quebec artists recognizing in some detail Péladeau’s various contributions to Quebec culture over the years (Pierre Karl 2015). The letter did not mention Péladeau’s PQ leadership campaign and, while it listed several of the letter’s signatories, Snyder was not included among them, nor was she one of the four Quebec artists pictured alongside the text. The letter was to be treated with considerable scorn by La Presse. La Presse broke the tax credit story and provided the most coverage of Snyder and Péladeau in our sample week: four news stories and three columns. The original tax credit story emphasized, both in its headline and in the body of the story, that the PQ government’s change to the eligibility ruling “directement favorisé” (“directly favoured”) and “visait” (“targeted”) Snyder’s company; no other production company was reported to be affected by the decision (Lessard 2015). The Liberal government’s recent budget, the story noted, “rétablit les règles qui prévalaient avant les dernières elections” (“re-established the rules in place prior to the last election”). Unlike Le Journal’s story about the change two days later, La Presse noted that Péladeau, TVA’s owner and Snyder’s spouse, was a “candidat-vedette” (“star candidate”) in the election. A follow-up story in La Presse, leading with premier Couillard’s denial that Snyder’s company had been targeted, twice mentioned that Snyder and Péladeau were a couple, and repeated the fact that the PQ decision was made five days before calling the 2014 election, insinuating that it was a strictly political decision (Croteau and Chouinard 2015). Snyder and Péladeau continued to be linked, even when La Presse turned its attention later that week to Péladeau and his PQ leadership bid. A photo of Péladeau and Snyder appeared with a column by Marc Cassivi (2015), who reacted with considerable cynicism to the 101 artists letter in Le Devoir. Noting that the letter was published 13 days before Péladeau’s “couronnement” (“coronation”) as PQ leader, Cassivi was surprised that a number of the signatories, normally seen as left-leaning politically, would close their eyes to Péladeau’s anti-union past, noting in particular lockouts and layoffs at Quebecor’s daily newspapers in Montreal and Quebec City, and his opposition to modernizing anti-scab provisions in Quebec’s labour code. Similarly, La Presse columnist Lysiane Gagnon said that in 40 years of political journalism she had never seen a group of artists express their support for a party leadership candidate and, like Cassivi, was surprised that “cette lettre d’amour” (“this love letter”) would voice appreciation for Péladeau, whom she described as anti-unionist and a “selective” proponent of Quebec cultural activity, given his loud criticisms of the public broadcaster Radio-Canada and the barring of certain artists from Quebecor’s TVA network (L. Gagnon 2015). Gagnon repeated a claim by Radio-Canada that the letter was written by Snyder. The final irony, she noted, was that the letter demonstrated the reach of “l’empire culturel de Québecor” (“the Quebecor cultural empire”) and thus “adds to the fears supporting the perspective that perceives a governing party in the hands of a man whose financial empire exercises a virtual monopoly over Quebec’s cultural activity.”25 A more measured column 25

“renforcer les craintes que suscite la perspective de voir un parti de gouvernement aux mains d’un homme dont l’empire financier exerce un quasi-monopole sur l’activité culturelle du Québec.”

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about the tax credit issue by Francis Vailles (2015) in the business section of the paper nonetheless questioned whether a PQ government with Péladeau as its leader would reverse the Liberal government’s ruling. “Once again, the question demonstrates the importance of having a clear separation between politics and business.”26 Finally, La Presse was the only Montreal paper to run a story, with photos of Péladeau and his sister Anne-Marie on the front page of the business section, about a Quebec Court of Appeals case in which Anne-Marie Péladeau is seeking $46.8 million from Quebecor for shares she sold in 2000 following the death of their father, Quebecor founder Pierre Péladeau (Brousseau-Pouliot 2015b). Clearly, stories about Snyder and Péladeau were considered far more newsworthy by the French-language press than by the English-language Gazette, and further, it could be argued that these stories had added value given the commercial and professional rivalries among the French-language newspapers. Snyder is one of the Quebec cultural community’s most recognizable figures. Péladeau, already one of its best-known business leaders, was on the verge of becoming one of its most prominent political figures as well, leading a party a majority of Quebec francophones would see as defending their rights as a minority within Canada, and most anglophones would see as a threat to their rights as a minority within Quebec. CONCLUSION It is important to point out that both the presence and the absence of news stories can be meaningful. By covering a story, a newspaper is asserting that the issue described is important or relevant or of interest to its imagined audience; the story is, in a word, newsworthy. That is the first meaning the story conveys; this matter has some consequence for our audience members. Further meaning is granted the topic by how it is covered – where it is placed in the newspaper, how much space it is afforded, what aspects of the story are highlighted, who is given voice in the article, what words are used to portray the issue and the actors involved, what image accompanies the story, etc. But the absence of a story – especially if it is given space in a rival newspaper – is also meaningful. Stories that are not covered are deemed to be not newsworthy, at least not to that newspaper’s imagined audience; they are deemed not important, not relevant, not consequential, at least to our audiences. News judgment is, therefore, a subjective exercise and, through patterns that can be discerned over time, reveals the news geography any one news organization maps out: who it believes its audience to be, where they live and work and play, and how it situates its audience members vis-à-vis the activities, the institutions, the people, and the places that constitute its coverage area. How, in other words, it constitutes community. As this chapter sought to demonstrate, the rural region covered by the four community newspapers and the city covered by the four dailies are constituted discursively; their sense of place is to some extent produced through news coverage. 26

“Une fois de plus, la question démontre l’importance d’avoir une separation claire entre la politique et les affaires.”

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The rural region is a place with no name – official or unofficial – and straddles the boundary between two significant provincial jurisdictions. It has no concrete frontiers, but is instead sketched out and filled in, week after week, year after year, by the stories and photographs the newspapers’ editors choose to include as within their purview, the stories and pictures they imagine touch on their readers’ lives and interests. Some places – Hawkesbury, Lachute – are central to this map, while others are more peripheral. Similarly, this map is populated by the people, the institutions, and the activities the newspapers’ editors perceive to be the most important, most interesting, and/or most representative of their community. The news coverage and the activities its reportage describes are mutually constitutive of this community. The boundaries of the city of Montreal and the island of Montreal, on the other hand, are clearly established. But the Montreal the four dailies map out varies, both spatially and how it is populated with people, activities, and institutions. The Montreal Gazette, the city’s lone English-language daily, covers who and what it believes its readers are most interested in and concerned about. Sometimes that news judgment coincides with the French-language press, as in the international stories and the sports events described. Often, though, different issues impact differently on its readership; the Gazette is clearly more sensitive to matters that seem to impinge on anglophones’ language rights and access to services, and more interested in the activities and institutions in the areas where Montreal’s anglophone population tends to live and work. If language matters are important to the French-language newspapers as well, given their readers’ membership in a linguistic minority within the nation and the continent, they nevertheless draw their own maps of Montreal. Le Journal de Montréal portrays what I would describe as a street-level map of the city, adopting a populist perspective, with lots of stories about crime, corporate and government corruption, health inspections of restaurants, and celebrity entertainers, politicians, and athletes. Le Journal situates Montreal on a map of Quebec that is dotted with the smaller places that fill in the spaces surrounding its two major cities. Le Devoir, at the other end of the spectrum, adopts a loftier perspective, placing Montreal on a map of a different scale, where the city and its citizens are more closely tied into provincial, national, and international affairs. It is less interested in individuals, per se, than the institutions or collectivities or issues they are part of.

CHAPTER 5: DATELINE HAITI1 Je pense à ma mere qui, elle, n’a jamais quitté son quartier. Je pense à ces six millions d’Haïtiens qui vivent sans espoir de partir un jour, ne serait-ce que pour aller respirer un bol d’air frais en hiver. Je pense aussi à ceux qui pourraient le faire et qui ne l’ont pas fait. Et je me sens mal à regarder ma ville du balcon d’un hotel. I think of my mother, who never left her neighbourhood. I think of these six million Haitians who live without hope of leaving one day, if it were only to go breathe a bit of fresh air in winter. I think as well of those who can leave and who didn’t do it. And I feel badly looking out at my city From the balcony of a hotel. (Laferrière, L’Énigme du retour 2009, 174)

Newspaper coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake offers a vivid example of an inset map, a series of stories and images focusing on a single news event, providing detailed accounts of a specific occurrence and the people, places, and institutions affected, along with some information to put the news in context. The inset map of Haiti in January 2010, in this case produced by Montreal’s four major daily newspapers, demonstrates the ways in which the coverage situates readers with respect to the news topic, the location(s) in which the news story evolves, the people most directly implicated, and how they are implicated.2 The Haiti earthquake reportage is striking because Haiti is a country that very rarely occupies any space on the news map. In news-flow studies my research group conducted, analyzing the on-line coverage of nine daily newspapers from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., France, and Israel in 2003 and 2004, Haiti was almost invisible. Not a single story was filed from Haiti in our sample of Canada’s national dailies in 2003; nor was Haiti even mentioned in the 1,838 stories we coded from The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Le Devoir (Gasher 2007). Only two stories were filed 1 2

I would like to acknowledge the work of research assistants Andreea Mandache and Stephany Tlalka in the analysis of the news coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake summarized in this chapter. Gutsche and Hess (2019) maintain that “there is perhaps no news event that more powerfully illustrates the interplay of the geographies of journalism than natural disasters” (17).

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from Haiti in our 2004 study of three international dailies (from a total of 3,647 stories in The Times of London, Ha’aretz of Israel, and Libération of France) (Gasher and Klein 2008), and just three stories were filed from Haiti in our 2004 study of three U.S. dailies (from a total of 4,427 stories in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times) (Gasher 2009). Our findings proved consistent with numerous other news-flow studies (see Chapter 6). In a follow-up study of The Globe and Mail in 2015, not one of the 594 stories we coded was filed from Haiti, nor did Haiti rate even a mention.3 Typical of the news media treatment of such places that are generally ignored in international news coverage, Haiti only attracts journalists when it is hit with a natural disaster or political upheaval, such as the coups d’états in 1988, 1991, and 2004. While the 2010 Haiti earthquake garnered news coverage around the world, Montreal’s dailies distinguished themselves with front-page coverage for the better part of three consecutive weeks. Haiti stories permeated the January editions of these newspapers, including their business, arts, and sports sections, and local Montreal reporters parachuted into Haiti to file stories from the field. The coverage was so extensive that it prompted the question of why a country hardly ever mentioned in Canadian news coverage would receive such sustained and passionate coverage in these newspapers, why, suddenly, Haiti was on the news map, and in a very prominent way. Such was the tone and breadth of the coverage that, at first glance, newspaper readers could be forgiven for thinking that Haiti was somehow part of Quebec. Haiti was struck with a magnitude 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010, with its epicenter near the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The quake killed an estimated 300,000 people in a country with a population of 10 million, considered the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Five years later, 80,000 Haitians were still living in tent camps (from a post-earthquake peak of 1.5 million), owing to the destruction (5th anniversary 2015). The coverage of the Haiti earthquake is a good example of the kind of reportage I have compared to an inset map, the kind of evocative mapping journalists produce when they wish to highlight and provide considerable detail about an extraordinary news event. And, as suggested above, the extent and prominence of the coverage in Montreal’s daily newspapers drew a particularly close connection between Haiti and Quebec. Given the quantity and profundity of the coverage, it is worth exploring how the reportage situated Montreal newspaper readers with respect to Haiti and the Haitian people most impacted by the earthquake. A partial explanation of the coverage can be chalked up to the fact that Montreal is a predominantly French-speaking city in which between 85,000 and 90,000 Haitians live. And, certainly, a central theme of the coverage was the historical 3

We downloaded a constructed week of Globe and Mail stories between the random dates of Monday, January 12 and Saturday, June 13, 2015, coding the 594 stories for their source, newspaper section, international filing origin, national filing origin (for stories filed from Canada), and length in words. Ninety per cent of the stories (533) were filed from Canadian locations. My thanks to research assistant Marisol Montúfar Hernández, who coded the stories, and the MITACS Globalink program, which sponsored her research internship.

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Figure 5.1 2010 Haiti Earthquake Zone The epicenter of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 was close to the capital city of Port-au-Prince, resulting in an estimated 300,000 deaths and considerable destruction of homes and other buildings.

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and cultural link between Haiti and Quebec. But, as frequently as these links were drawn, a closer reading of the news reports revealed clear distinctions between an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ keeping Haiti, as it were, in its place. As I will seek to demonstrate below, the coverage – with some noteworthy exceptions – was largely about the effect of the earthquake on Quebec and Quebeckers, rather than on Haiti and Haitian nationals. DRAWING HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL LINKS Both Quebec and Haiti are former French colonies, which share the French language and the Roman Catholic religion, even if most Haitians speak Creole and Vodou remains an important spiritual belief system (see Mills 2016; McAlister 2013). During the depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, FrenchCanadian and Haitian intellectuals visited each other’s countries, and Haiti became an important site of French-Canadian missionary activity (Mills 2016, 4–5). Historian Sean Mills argues that from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, French-Canadians saw their relationship to Haiti “through the lens of the family, with Quebec and Haiti conceptualized as the two central poles of francophone culture in the Americas,” a connection, he cautions, “based on similarity but not equality” (9). Haiti was seen as a brother or sister society, even if “its people were simultaneously constructed as deviant and childlike, in need of the assistance that French Canadians could provide.” Mills describes a persistent “dual discourse” which casts “Haiti as a parallel society upholding French civilization and Haiti as an infantilized other” (5). An initial migration of well-educated and French-speaking exiles arrived in Quebec in the 1960s, coinciding roughly with the beginnings of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. This was followed by the migration of poorer Haitians in the 1970s, many of whom spoke only Haitian Creole and worked in manufacturing, domestic service, and, later, the taxi industry (Mills 2016, 6–7). As a visible minority and the largest immigrant group, the timing of the Haitians’ arrival in Quebec – during the political modernization of the Quiet Revolution and the rise of Quebec nationalism – was awkward, but they gradually “asserted themselves as creative and political actors in Quebec’s shifting public sphere” (10), reinforcing a sense of their belonging to the Quebec family. In 2010, there were an estimated 130,000 people of Haitian origin living in Quebec, among them numerous high-profile writers, singers, politicians, educators, and athletes (see Pierre 2007). These connections were clearly depicted in the news coverage, ranging from institutional links in the spheres of politics, business, and, especially, ongoing humanitarian aid, to the much more personal and familial. And the coverage very much perceived Haiti, as per Mills above, through the lens of the family. The most explicit expression of this sentiment comes in the headline and lead paragraph of a La Presse column by Marie-Claude Lortie (2010b). Under the headline “La neige a tremblé aussi” (“The snow also shook”), Lortie begins:

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Figure 5.2 Closer Than They Appear? It is a 4 ½-hour flight between Montreal and Port-au-Prince, but the extensive and empathetic news coverage of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake in Montreal’s newspapers made it seem as if Haiti was part of Quebec.

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“An earthquake in Haiti, it’s also an earthquake in Quebec. In Montreal.”4 Lortie describes the extent to which the Haitian community permeates Quebec society, comprising colleagues, friends, neighbours, doctors, professors, taxi drivers, and daycare workers, not only in Montreal, but beyond the metropole as well. She notes the shared Catholic religion and French language of the two peoples, and traces the history of their interactions back to the 1930s and 1940s, when French-Canadian missionaries began working in Haiti. Noting not merely the presence of 130,000 Québécois of Haitian origin, 90,000 of whom live in Montreal, but the degree to which they have integrated into Quebec society, she writes: “The tragedy reminds us that, if Quebec is Chinese, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Latin American or Srilankan, it is also truly very very Haitian.”5 In a province that has struggled for decades to establish its distinctiveness within Canada – and North America – as a nation of Québécois, the sentence above represents an especially warm and inclusive embrace. Lortie’s list of prominent Quebeckers of Haitian origin includes politicians, athletes, writers, and musicians. Recognizing, too, that the Haitian community has experienced gang violence, racism, poverty, and unemployment, Lortie concludes: “As with Tuesday’s tragedy, in bringing death and solidarity to our doors, it shows us to what extent Haiti, here, is so much more than that.”6 This was a theme Lortie had established in La Presse the day after the earthquake. In a very personal column, she registers her shock that Haiti, after previous hurricanes and “le chaos politique” (“political chaos”), has suffered another serious blow. “To the misery already omnipresent in this impoverished country in the Americas, are now added the thousand and one scars of a natural catastrophe of infinite cruelty” (Lortie 2010a).7 She makes reference to “[l]es racines de nos amis, de nos frères, de nos collegues, de nos proches” (“[t]he roots of our friends, of our brothers, of our colleagues, of our close ones”). Noting that she lives among Haitian Montrealers, the news of the hurricane keeps her at her computer screen. “Rather than go to a Haitian café or to the end of my street, to the taxi stand, I remained fixed, hypnotized by my computer.”8 Like Lortie, fellow La Presse columnist Lysiane Gagnon goes to great lengths to forge connections between Quebec and Haiti. “The shockwaves of the horrible quake shook Quebec, because Quebec and Haiti are linked by history and language” (L. Gagnon 2010).9 She, too, recalls the missionary visits to Haiti and the phases of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. This historical connection is 4 5 6 7 8 9

“Un tremblement de terre en Haïti, c’est aussi un tremblement de terre au Québec. À Montréal.” [All translations performed by the author]. “La tragédie nous rapelle que, si le Québec est chinois, italien, grec, portugais, latino-américain ou sri-lankais, il est aussi vraiment très, très haïtien.” “Tout comme la tragédie de mardi, en apportant la mort et la solidarité à nos portes, nous montre à quel point Haïti, ici, c’est beaucoup plus que ça.” “À la misère déjá omniprésente dans ce pauvrissime pays d’Amérique, vont maintenant s’ajouter les mille et une cicatrices d’une catastrophe naturelle d’une cruauté infinite” “Plutôt que d’aller dans un café haïtien ou au bas de ma rue, au stand de taxi, je suis restée scotchée, hypnotisée par mon ordinateur.” “Les ondes de l’horrible séisme ont ébranlé le Québec, car Haïti et le Québec sont liés par l’histoire et la langue”

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referenced as well in an editorial in the Montreal Gazette the same day (Our hearts 2010). In Le Journal de Montréal, columnist Michel Beaudry put a positive cultural spin on this history, singling out Haitian immigrants for their ability to blend into Quebec society. “The Haitians who have settled here over almost a half century have marvelously well integrated in respecting our social norms, in elevating our culture,” adding: “It is the best moment to show them that we are brothers … blood brothers, now and for always” (Beaudry 2010).10 As a form of story-telling, news reporting typically puts the names and faces of people front and centre, and this is precisely how the Haiti earthquake coverage gave substance to the historical, cultural, political, and economic links between Haiti and Quebec (and Canada) referenced above. Numerous well-known Quebeckers of Haitian origin were singled out in the coverage, foremost among them Michaëlle Jean, Canada’s governor-general at the time, writer Dany Lafferrière, Montreal Canadiens hockey player Georges Laraque, boxing champion Jean Pascal, and singer-songwriter Luck Mervil. But readers were also introduced to dozens of Haitian-Quebeckers from less prominent walks of life. All four Montreal dailies remarked on Michaëlle Jean’s direct address to the people of Haiti the day after the earthquake. La Presse noted that the governorgeneral could not help but sob while speaking in the first-person plural, and in Creole. Jean is quoted as saying: “Haitians, we must not lose hope. We are known for our strength and our resilience. We must stand bravely in the face of this challenge that confronts us once more” (de Grandpré 2010a).11 Born in Port-au-Prince, with friends and family still living in Haiti, Jean situates herself within the Haitian community: “But you know, this is not about me, today. I am only one person among many others in the Haitian community.”12 The Gazette story frames the earthquake as happening to her, and to her people. A “teary-eyed Jean” is quoted as saying: “Already it’s hard for all Canadians to watch, but when one is born there … it is part of your heritage and spirit” (de Souza 2010). Dany Lafferiére was in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit, helping to organize an international writers’ festival. In a very personal La Presse column, Vin10

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“Les Haïtiens qui sont débarqués chez nous depuis près d’un demi-siècle se sont merveilleusement bien intégrés en respectant nos moeurs, en rehaussant notre culture.” “C’est le meilleur moment de leur montrer que nous sommes des frères … des frères de sang, maintenant et pour toujours” Such positive sentiments have to be read in the particular context of debates in Quebec about the “reasonable accommodation” of immigrants to the province and the general context of Quebeckers’ ongoing quest to be recognized as a distinct people, un peuple québécois. News coverage, often sensationalized, in the years just prior to the Haiti earthquake, had drawn attention to a number of instances held up as proof that immigrants were not adapting to the norms of Quebec society. The Quebec government took the issue seriously enough to appoint a Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences in 2007 (the Bouchard-Taylor Commission). (See Joncas 2009; Adelman and Anctil 2011). “Haïtiens, Haïtiennes, nous ne devons pas perdre espoir. Nous sommes connus pour notre force et notre resilience. Nous devons tenir debout courageusement face à ce défi qui nous affecte encore” “Mais vous savez, ce n’est pas á propos de moi, aujourd’hui. Je ne suis qu’une personne parmi plusieurs autres dans la communauté haïtienne.”

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cent Marissal (2010) refers to “mon ami Dany Lafferière” (“my friend Dany Lafferière”) and reports that he had spent time with Lafferière at a Montreal café a month earlier. Marissal positions Haiti within “the large family of the Americas, in which we play, by our privileged situation, le role of a big brother.”13 He insists: “Nous devons porter secours” (“We must help”), a sentiment reflected in the column’s headline, “Le devoir d’assistance” (“The duty of assistance”). La Presse reporter Chantal Guy and photographer Ivanoh Demers were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake working on a story about Lafferière “qui nous a fait découvrir la veille ‘son’ Port-au-Prince” (“who helped us discover the previous day ‘his’ Port-au-Prince”) (Guy 2010a). More than any of the other celebrities, Lafferière came to personify the connection between Montreal and Haiti in the coverage (see Petrowski, 2010). A column in Le Devoir by journalist and novelist Gil Courtemanche (2010) is entitled “Lettre à Dany Laferrière” (“Letter to Dany Laferrière”) and is written as such, in a very personal style, beginning “Salut Dany …” and addressing Lafferière in the familiar first-person singular tu. The day after the earthquake, a Journal de Montréal story was entitled, “On s’inquiète pour Dany” (“We are worried for Dany”), noting that the author, who was staying at l’Hotel Caraïbe in Port-au-Prince, had not yet been heard from (Bouchard 2010a). The following day, Le Journal de Montréal reported Lafferière “sain et sauf” (“safe and sound”) (Bouchard 2010b). Another favoured son in the coverage was Georges Laraque of the Montreal Canadiens, who was born in Montreal to parents who had emigrated from Haiti. Laraque speaks fluent Creole and still has family members in Haiti. The week of the earthquake, he was about to inaugurate a new outdoor skating rink in Montreal North, a neighbourhood with a large Haitian community. “I pray that everyone is alright,” Laraque told reporters (M-A. Godin 2010; see also Poissant 2010).14 In the aftermath of the quake, he received numerous phone calls and almost 1,000 email messages of support, and the Canadiens organized a fund-raising drive at their January 14 home game. Laraque scored his first goal since joining the Canadiens during that game and dedicated it to the earthquake victims (Tougas 2010). Boxing champion Jean Pascal of the Montreal suburb Laval was similarly distraught, particularly as, initially, he had no news of his father who was in Haiti during the earthquake. A native of Port-au-Prince, Pascal called on Quebeckers for solidarity with the victims and to donate relief funds to the Red Cross (Agence QMI 2010a). Pascal later learned that his father was safe (Ladouceur 2010). Singer-songwriter Luck Mervil, also born in Port-au-Prince and with family members in Haiti, set to work organizing a January 22 benefit concert, which Quebec’s rival French-language television networks and several radio stations agreed to simulcast (Coudé-Lord 2010a). The concert was set for the same night as an American benefit was being televised on the U.S. television networks, as well as on the English-language networks CTV and Global in Canada (Coudé-Lord 2010b). 13 14

“la grande famille des Amériques, dans laquelle nous jouons, par notre situation privilegiée, le role de grand frère.” “Je prie pour que tout le monde soit correct.”

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Aside from these celebrities, readers were also introduced to lesser-known Quebeckers with strong Haitian ties, adding further to the associations between the two places. A front-page Gazette story the day after the earthquake was set in a Montreal neighbourhood restaurant where Haitians had gathered to watch the TV news. Through this highly personalized story we meet: Gérard Kenny, whose mother and brother live in Haiti; Karina Joubert, a 19-year-old university student who recently moved to Montreal and whose parents, sister, and two grandmothers remain in Portau-Prince; Lesly Tilus, president of Montreal’s Association culturelle Haïtienne la perle retrouvée; and Pierre-Michel Bolivard, a journalist with Haitian community radio station CPAM. The radio station had staged a special broadcast the previous evening, inviting listeners to exchange information about their friends and relatives in Haiti (Magder and Ravensbergen 2010; see also Pigeon 2010). Similarly, Le Journal de Montréal recounted the story of Abner Valère, who worked for sporting goods manufacturer Reebok in greater Montreal, flying to Haiti to search for his five children, three of whom were reported to be in hospital in Pétionville. When his initial commercial flight was cancelled, he was offered a seat on Quebecor Media’s private jet, which was ferrying a team of TVA journalists to Haiti (Doucet 2010). A later Gazette story recounted the desperation of Haitian Montrealers in the face of the inadequate rescue and relief efforts on the ground in Haiti a week after the earthquake. Raymonde Casimir was seeking counseling advice on sponsoring her destitute parents’ immigration to Canada, but found the overwhelmed private counseling service closed by mid-afternoon. Jean-Yvon Dupuy, a taxi driver from Montreal North, was luckier; he had completed the application to sponsor his daughter, Winchelle, who had survived the earthquake. “But she has no water. No food. No place to stay. She hasn’t eaten for days” (Ravensbergen 2010b). Not all individual ties to Haiti were familial, and some extended beyond Quebec to the rest of Canada. The first known Canadian victim of the earthquake was Yvonne Martin, a retired nurse from Kitchener, Ontario, who was part of an evangelical church mission that had arrived in Port-au-Prince a mere 90 minutes before the earthquake. She was there to assist with H1N1 vaccinations, and it was believed to be her fourth trip to Haiti. The same La Presse article noted that several Quebec religious orders – Les soeurs de Ste-Anne, Les frères du Sacré-Coeur, Les clercs de Saint-Viateur – were awaiting word from their colleagues in Haiti (Leduc 2010a). Two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were also killed in the earthquake: Douglas Coates of Ottawa, chief of the United Nations’ stabilization mission in Haiti, and sergeant Mark Gallagher of Halifax (Cameron 2010; Edwards and Barrera 2010). These stories, and many others in a similar vein, created the impression that Quebec society had a distinct Haitian inflection, ranging from the celebrity realm to individuals readers might encounter on a casual daily basis. Further, the empathetic tone of the coverage posited the Haitian community in Montreal and Quebec as a welcome addition, people who had integrated well into a society sensitive to its identity and its affirmation as a distinct peuple québécois. The news map drawn by this coverage featured Haiti very prominently, establishing a close cultural and emotional proximity to Quebec, and, albeit to a lesser degree, Canada.

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THE IDEA OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY Echoing to some extent the bilateral linkages described above, the news coverage also asserted the existence of an international community, with Haiti as a particularly needy member, but a member nonetheless. An array of national governments provided assistance, the United Nations, numerous non-governmental agencies, and several religious orders stepped up their aid efforts, and various artists and athletes banded together to raise awareness and much-needed relief funds. Le Journal de Montréal captured this sentiment in an article entitled, “Le monde entier se mobilise après le séisme meurtrier” (“The whole world mobilizes after the killer quake”), highlighting in particular aid efforts by Canada, Quebec, the U.S., France, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Red Cross (Agence France-Presse 2010a). If such stories included Haiti within an international community, the reportage at the same time provided some measure of detail about its relative position within that community. Haiti occupied a very particular place on the global map the news coverage drew. Articles in La Presse and Le Journal de Montréal recounted aid efforts by the governments of France, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Sweden, China, the U.S., and Canada (Chaos 2010; Ménard 2010) and La Presse reported that Cuba had opened its airspace to the U.S. for aid flights, reducing their flying time by a crucial 90 minutes (Duchesne 2010a). A front-page story in Le Devoir singled out aid efforts by Canada, the U.S., and France in anticipation of a meeting the following week in Montreal that would bring together the foreign ministers of countries implicated in ongoing development efforts in Haiti (Bélair-Cirino 2010). A photo essay in Le Journal de Montréal documented Canada’s aid efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake (L’Aide 2010) and a Montreal Gazette editorial touted Canada’s historical role in assisting Haiti, noting that the Canadian government had committed $555 million in development funding for the period 2006–2011 (Our hearts 2010). Recognizing that the earthquake was only the most recent instance of Haiti needing help from the international community, both Le Devoir and La Presse reported on calls for a Marshall Plan for Haiti, referring to the American-led recovery plan for Western Europe following World War II. Le Devoir, citing a communiqué from the French government, noted that the U.S., France, Canada, Brazil, “and other countries directly implicated, have decided to work together, without delay, in the organization of an international conference for the reconstruction and development of Haiti.”15 The article noted the sorry state of Haiti’s infrastructure, the lack of adequate existing development funds, as well as Haiti’s own debt and “la corruption omniprésente dans le pays” (“the omnipresent corruption in the country”) as evidence of the need for a comprehensive redevelopment effort (Shields 2010). Université de Montréal professor of planning Gonzalo Lizzaralde told La Presse that 15

“et d’autres pays directement concernés, ont decidé de travailler ensemble, sans délai, à la preparation d’une conférence internationale pour la reconstruction et le développement d’Haïti.”

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he favoured leadership by the international community in the short term, but: “In the long term, to relieve the decision-making capacity of local organizations, local municipalities or local families, this is not a good strategy” (Duchesne 2010b).16 The international aid effort included as well assistance from military and police forces. The United Nations had in place a peacekeeping force of 7,000 soldiers and 2,000 police officers, 50 of them from Montreal, joined by 3,500 U.S. soldiers and 2,200 Marines (Alberts 2010; see also Truffaut 2010). The American effort, described in a full-page Journal de Montréal infographic, included a hospital ship staffed by 900 medical personnel and capable of treating 1,000 patients at a time (Navire-hôpital 2010). One week after the earthquake, Canada had 2,000 soldiers committed to the relief effort, which Journal de Montréal columnist J. Jacques Samson described as “une belle démonstration de solidarité humaine” (“a fine demonstration of human solidarity”) (Samson 2010; see also Agence QMI 2010b). Among the international aid organizations populating the news stories were Médecins sans frontières, the International Red Cross, the World Food Programme, and One Drop, a foundation established by Cirque de Soleil founder Guy Laliberté (Agence France-Presse 2010a; Bouchard 2010c). MSF featured particularly prominently. La Presse underscored the organization’s long experience in Haiti, running two hospitals with 800 employees, the majority of them Haitian, although the state of those hospitals was unknown at the time of publication. MSF had set up two operating bases in Cité-Soleil and Pétionville and had treated 2,000 patients three days into the crisis (Duchesne 2010c). By the end of the first week, however, MSF was lamenting a lack of organization in the relief effort. One specific grievance was the priority given to U.S. military flights into the Port-au-Prince airport, which had resulted in aid agency flights being diverted to the neighbouring Dominican Republic (Gervais 2010). Even some international corporations were lending a hand. For example, Google pledged $1 million to aid agencies as well as technical assistance in the areas of cartography and satellite imagery (Agence France-Presse 2010b). If most of the coverage cast the international community’s aid efforts in a positive light, there was also some criticism, pertaining both to the ineptitude and inadequacy of the specific measures, as well as to their underlying hypocrisy. Frequent reference was made to the lack of Haitian infrastructure impeding international relief efforts and, as the crisis dragged on, to safety concerns as Haitian nationals desperate for food, shelter, and medical care resorted to scavenging, looting, and occasional violence (see Barrera et al. 2010). The Haitian government was virtually absent from the coverage. Suspicion was cast on U.S. military involvement; a Gazette story noted that the U.S. military force in Haiti was its largest military deployment in the country since September 1994, when 25,000 American troops were sent to Haiti to restore the ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Haitian presidency. The article, published just three days into the crisis, portrayed a Haiti on the verge on political unrest and widespread violent crime (Alberts 2010). 16

“À long terme, enlever la capacité de décision des organisations locales, des municipalités ou des familles, ce n’est pas une bonne stratégie.”

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If, overall, the multi-faceted international relief effort was framed in the coverage by the typically positive community metaphor – community members coming together to assist a beleaguered neighbour – columns in Le Journal de Montréal by Joseph Facal and Richard Martineau poured some cold water on the purported bonds between Haiti and Quebec, Canada, and the West at large. In a clear-eyed and blunt political-economic assessment, Facal, a former Quebec government cabinet minister, subverted the idea of Haiti as a member of the international community, lamenting its hopelessness and irrelevance to the globe’s political and economic spheres. “From the point of view of the great powers, this country has, in effect, no geopolitical importance and possesses no natural resources for which it would have the least interest” (Facal 2010).17 Much more cynically, Martineau echoed this general sentiment in his own fashion two days after the earthquake, noting that the West, and its news media, care about Haiti only during a natural disaster. “Nothing better than a good old earthquake to interest the media in the fate of a country forgotten by God.”18 He added: “The only times the West is interested in Haiti is when the country suffers a coup d’État or it is hit with a natural catastrophe. The daily misery and the incidental death, we don’t worry about” (Martineau 2010a).19 In a second column, Martineau undermined the purported notion of solidarity with the Haitian people. “These people live in the most abject misery and we watch them suffer on our giant HD stereo TV, our iPhone 3G and our Macbook Pro.” He added:“It’s as if we live on two different planets.”20 He dismissed the relief effort as largely fruitless, ignoring the root causes of Haiti’s problems. “It’s all good the radiothons, the telethons and the benefit shows. But these are first and foremost charity events. It’s to put a bandage on a sore, but it heals nothing, it proposes no fundamental change” (Martineau 2010b).21 Two days later, in response to readers’ indignation at media 17 18 19 20

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“Du point de vue des grandes puissances, ce pays n’a en effet aucune importance géopolitique et ne possède aucune resource naturelle pour laquelle il y a le moindre intérêt.” “Rien de mieux qu’un bon vieux tremblement de terre pour intéresser les médias au sort d’un pays oublié de Dieu.” “Les seules fois où l’Occident s’intéresse à Haïti, c’est quand le pays est l’objet d’un coup d’État ou qu’il est frappé par un catastrophe naturelle. La misère au quotidien et la mort à petit feu, on s’en balance.” “Ces gens vivent dans la misère la plus abjecte et nous les regardons souffrir sur notre télé géante HD stereo, notre iPhone 3G et notre Macbook Pro.” “C’est comme nous vivons sur deux planètes différentes.” Media scholar Shani Orgad describes the Haiti earthquake as “a milestone in the unprecedented immediacy and liveness with which news about suffering is disseminated” (2012, 77). She writes: “In the twenty-four-hour, consumer-oriented media environment of the twenty-first century, the broader moral agenda seems to be giving away to a ‘petite’ ethics. It privileges shortterm and low-intensity relation to the suffering other, over engagement through a large intellectual agenda informing a humanitarian sensibility…. It privileges privatized action rather than grand ethical and political changes that seek to undermine and dismantle global structures of injustice. It is an ethics of click, donate, and (possibly) forget it.” Following John Thompson’s notion of “mediated sociality” (discussed in Chapter 3), she cites it as an instance of “mediated intimacy at a distance” (77–78). “C’est bien beau les radiothons, les téléthons et les spectacles bénéfices. Mais ce sont d’abord

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images of looting and violence in Haiti, Martineau rejected what he saw as the othering of Haitians. “When one spends their life watching the world displaying its jewels behind a large protected glass while not being able to earn enough to feed their family, it’s not surprising that they wish to help themselves when the alarm system isn’t working.”22 He reminded readers of the 4,000 people arrested for looting during the New York City blackout in 1977 and those who stole generators and firewood during Quebec’s ice storm in 1998. “We are like any other human being: the only thing protecting us from barbarity and savagery is the state. Take away the state, get rid of the police and the military, and our nice ‘civilization’ will descend into chaos within 48 hours” (Martineau 2010c).23 US AND THEM If the columns by Facal and Martineau were explicit in casting doubt on the credibility and emotional sincerity expressed in much of the coverage, including coverage in their own newspaper, a nuanced reading of the reportage and commentary in all four newspapers reveals that it was concerned primarily with how the earthquake affected ‘us’ – Quebeckers, Canadians – rather than ‘them’ – Haitian nationals. As noted above, the relief effort is led by outsiders: governments, their police forces and armies, the United Nations and its affiliate organizations, relief agencies, some corporations, celebrities – many of them Haitian ex-pats –, and individual donors. The Haitian government plays no apparent role and Haitian nationals are depicted primarily as helpless victims of the earthquake, desperate for the food, water, shelter, and medical care that only foreign agencies seem capable of providing. Or, they are perceived as impediments to these efforts: looters and other kinds of threat to aid workers’ security and efficiency (cf, Reuters et al. 2010; Lavallée 2010). Those who are granted agency in the coverage – people who speak in the stories, who are identified in the photographs, granted biographical information, and described as somehow contributing to the relief effort – are almost exclusively nonnationals or Haitian ex-pats. With a few noteworthy exceptions, the Haitian nationals depicted in the stories and the photographs are anonymous, sharing simply their amorphous group identity; individuals are not named and are not granted any agency, unless, of course, they’re labeled as looters. It results in a complex process of othering, even when the articles otherwise come off as heartfelt and empathetic. This recalls John Hartley’s discussion of journalism’s creation of Wedoms and Theydoms, as I touched on in Chapter 1; people belonging to Wedom are named,

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et avant tout des événements caritatifs. Ça met un diachylon sur le bobo, mais ça ne guérit rien, ça ne propose aucun changement fondamental.” “Quand on passé sa vie à regarder le monde étaler ses joyaux derrière une grande vitre blindée alors qu’on ne gagne même pas de quoi nourrir sa famille, pas étonnant qu’on ait envie de se servir quand le système d’alarme se brise.” “Nous sommes comme n’importe quel autre être humain: la seule chose qui nous protégé de la barbarie et la sauvagerie, c’est l’État. Enlevez l’État, éradiquez le système de police et l’armée, et notre belle “civilization” va sombrer dans le chaos en 48 heures.”

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those from Theydom are not. Hartley writes: “Individuals in Theydom are treated as being all the same; their identity consists in being ‘unlike us’, so they are ‘like each other’” (1992, 209). This tendency is most clearly expressed in the numerous photographs that accompanied the stories and adorned the newspapers’ front pages. Often dramatic, even intimate, together they provide a graphic documentation of the damage the earthquake inflicted on the Haitian people and the urban environment of greater Port-au-Prince. And yet, in contrast to the clearly identified aid workers, politicians, and Haitian ex-pats, the Haitian nationals are rarely named, their individuality denied. Some of this can be explained by the chaotic context of a natural disaster, certainly, but as the examples cited below demonstrate, the pattern holds even in the cases of intimate, up-close photographs of individuals with which the photographer, and often the accompanying reporter, have direct contact. Unlike the detailed background provided the non-nationals and ex-pats, the Haitian nationals become anonymous others. They are described as “ces Haïtiens,” “des citoyens,” “des survivants,” “des habitants,” etc. This tendency becomes especially apparent given the great number of photographs depicting Haitian nationals, documenting in dramatic fashion their suffering and their desperation against a background of chaos and devastation. But with very few exceptions, the Haitian nationals photographed are not identified; they are labeled simply as Haitians. In contrast with the Haitian ex-pats who have Quebec or Canadian connections, who are named and assigned biographical information, the Haitian nationals are denied any individuality. As I conceded above, some of these instances may be excused given the crisis atmosphere in which the news photographers were working, but the tendency was too great to grant blanket forgiveness. For example, a full-page colour close-up photograph of a child receiving medical care, his head wrapped in a bandage, is captioned simply as “un enfant blessé” (“an injured child”) in Le Journal de Montréal (Reuters 2010). Similarly, in La Presse, a close-up photo of what appears to be a young boy, wearing a torn t-shirt, his head and face covered in plaster dust, is identified simply as “un enfant” (“a child”) (Demers 2010). A black-and-white photo of a woman rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building is identified as “cette femme” (“this woman”). The photograph was seemingly shot up close, with the woman looking straight into the camera, her face covered in dust and debris, her arms reaching as if to the photographer (Morel 2010). A colour version of the same Agence France-Presse photo was used on the front page of the Gazette, again with no identification. Le Devoir published on the front page of its January 15 edition, above the fold, a close-up of a young boy with a bloodied bandage wrapped around his head, his face cut and bloodied, his right eye closed and his left eye looking into the camera. Not even a caption accompanied the photograph. Perhaps the most stunning instance of this failure to distinguish the Haitian victims of the earthquake by naming them was a photograph by André Forget of Agence QMI, taking up three-quarters of page 2 of Le Journal de Montréal. The photo depicts a woman lying on the floor of the Port-au-Prince hospital Adventiste Diquini shortly after she’d given birth. Her stomach is exposed, her skirt is pulled up and her legs are apart as she is examined

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by two medical staff. A third staff member holds the newborn baby. The mother is identified merely as “une femme accouchait sur le sol” (“a woman who gave birth on the ground”) (Forget 2010). La Presse published a photograph, shot in medium close-up, of “une famille de Port-au-Prince” (“a family from Port-au-Prince”) on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The photo shows a young woman lying in the back of a pickup truck, her right leg in a cast from toe to hip, who has just received treatment in a Jumani, Dominican Republic, hospital. She is surrounded by what appear to be four members of her family. The photo caption provides no identification (Sanfaçon 2010). The accompanying story, written in the first person, reads in part: “I hardly had the time to note her name or her age: Ivrid Meid or Meid Ivrid, I’m not sure, 28 years old, studying management. Large clear eyes, a delicate face, an anguished look” (Ouimet 2010a).24 In this instance, there was an attempt by the reporter to record the young woman’s name, but her confusion as to which is the first name and which is the family name is simply brushed off as an insignificant detail. It is hard to imagine the name of a Quebecker being treated this way. Perhaps the clearest example that the coverage privileged the impact the earthquake had on ‘us’ was an article by La Presse reporter Chantal Guy (2010b), who was in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake occurred and was fortunate to emerge unharmed. The article’s subheadline posits Guy, “au meme titre que des millions d’Haïtiens” (“in the same position as millions of Haitians”), a “victime du séisme” (“victim of the quake”). Recounted in the first person, in the tone of a letter home, Guy writes: “To live such an event on-site, at the same time as the local people, brings us closer together. It’s silly to say, but we suddenly had something very powerful in common.”25 A few sentences further, she adds: “I met some people I knew, writers, and I found myself truly with the people, sharing the same anguish.”26 The article is accompanied by a photograph, shot by La Presse photographer Ivanoh Demers, which shows Guy interviewing a black man. Guy is identified in the caption, the man is not. There is no doubt the event was traumatic for a reporter who admits her most “exotique” previous travel destination had been an all-inclusive resort in Cuba. But equating in any way her experience of the earthquake with those of Haitian survivors who lost close family members, who were left homeless and who will have to live with the earthquake damage for years is nonsensical, insensitive, even offensive. Guy did not lose any family members, while in Haiti she had the financial and institutional support of a major daily newspaper owned by an established Canadian corporation, and she had the further luxury of flying back to Montreal and leaving Haiti and its problems behind at the earliest opportunity. 24 25 26

“J’ai à peine eu le temps de noter son nom et son age: Ivrid Meid ou Meid Ivrid, je l’ignore, 28 ans, étudiante en gestion. Grands yeux clairs, visage fin, regard angoissé.” “C’est que de vivre un tel événement sur les lieux, en même temps que ses habitants, nous rapproche d’eux. C’est bête à dire, mais on a tout à coup quelque chose en commun de très fort.” “Je recontrais des gens familiers, des écrivains, et je me suis retrouvée véritablement avec le peuple, dans la même angoisse.”

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A Gazette story the following day demonstrated clearly the divergent impact of the earthquake on the fate of Haitian nationals and those with Canadian connections (Montgomery 2010b). The article tells of two babies – Naïs Acacia and Christie Péton – born in Haiti two days after the earthquake, “their first cries drowned out by the screams of a country full of dead and dying.” But Naïs, whose father holds a Canadian passport, will likely grow up to learn the circumstances of her birth, while Christie, whose parents are wallowing in a makeshift camp in a soccer field, with no water, food or medicine, will most probably not survive another week unless help comes now.

Naïs’s parents, Nadège Bien-Aimé Acacia and Aly Acacia, sit in the shade of the grounds of the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince, hoping for a military flight to Canada where they would like to settle near family members in St-Léonard in eastend Montreal. Aly and his three-year-old son Naël hold Canadian passports, but Nadège is Haitian, so their future is not entirely certain. But Naïs, at least, is safe and being fed. Christie, on the other hand, is described as screaming from hunger. She lies on a dirty mattress where she was born, with her mother, Sylfine Callas, who is unable to nurse because of dehydration. “Callas, suffering from pre-eclampsia following her delivery, had epileptic-like seizures, increasing her risk of cerebral hemorrhage and liver and kidney failure.” She needs a magnesium sulphate intravenous, “a pipe dream in her situation.” With no medical supplies available to them, the story leaves readers with the distinct impression that the lives of Christie and her mother are both at risk. INVOKING THE SUPERNATURAL Even though the earthquake is cast as a natural disaster, and therefore, by definition, no social forces can be blamed for it, the question of agency does arise in the news coverage in a curious way: the extent to which the supernatural is invoked in seeking explanation for the frequency with which Haiti is hit with natural disasters. We cannot, of course, attribute motive to the large number of journalists reporting on and commenting on the Haiti earthquake, but it is noteworthy how frequently articles published in newspapers from a Quebec society that has largely rejected organized religion – specifically, the once-powerful Catholic church – in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution, invoke God in answer to the question of why Haiti is so frequently devastated by natural disasters. It plays into the idea of backwardness, and may even caricaturize Haiti as the land of Vodou. Such articles far outnumbered the stories offering a scientific explanation for Haiti’s misfortune (cf, Ouimet-Lamothe 2010; Ravensbergen 2010a). These stories work inferentially to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ In a story about the loss of symbolic buildings in Haiti, the Gazette describes as “[l]ikely more traumatic than the loss of Haiti’s presidential palace, the loss of local churches and the partial ruin of Port-au-Prince’s iconic National Cathedral,” described by University of Western Ontario anthropologist Douglass St. Christian

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as “symbols of hope in a very hopeless place” (Harris 2010). The story notes that about 90 per cent of Haitians practice Catholicism “often mixed with the local flavouring of voodoo [sic].” Five days after the earthquake, the Gazette ran a story about Haitian ex-pats gathering in Montreal churches to sing, describing 150 “lively evangelical churches within the city’s 86,000-member Haitian community” (Johnston 2010). “All this singing was a local echo of something that reporters in Port-au-Prince have found extraordinary about the Haitian capital in recent days: In the middle of the night, you can hear people singing.” The article quotes Carylyne Garçon of Montreal North as saying, “song, for us, is like a second kind of prayer.” On the same page, a story portrayed the scene at Port-au-Prince’s St. Jean Bosco Catholic Church, where Haitians gathered to sing and worship “as if it were any other Sunday” (Edwards 2010). Against the background of destruction and rubble, the story remarks on how well-dressed the parishioners are that morning. Choir member Viege Lamothe, for example, “[d]ressed in a spotlessly clean pink skirt with matching blouse,” had awoken that morning “amid dust and filth.” Another parishioner, Jean Charles, explained: “Even though we are in the midst of a disaster, for many who come to church, the attitude is that when it is Sunday, you do everything you can to look beautiful for God.” La Presse provided a similar juxtaposition of stories the same day, reporting from the same Saint-Michel district in Montreal and the same St. Jean Bosco church in Port-au-Prince (de Grandpré 2010b; Leduc 2010b). In both of these stories, God is seen as Haiti’s savior rather than the cause of its misery. In La Presse, Mario Roy introduces his editorial about the inconceivable misfortune of Haiti with a fable-like scenario featuring “un dieu insensible et vengeur” (“a god insensitive and vengeful”), who asks: “‘Let’s see. Hurricanes, floods, landslides, oppression, coups d’État, deforestation, exodus, illness, misery … what haven’t I already sent from heaven to burden Haitians?’ God found it: a gigantic earthquake, that’s all that was left” (Roy 2010).27 In a La Presse column principally about writer Dany Laferrière, columnist Natalie Petrowski poses two questions to explain the disaster, both invoking God: “If God exists, what is His problem with Haiti? And if God tests those that He loves, why does He love Haiti so much?” (Petrowski 2010).28 Even articles that seek concrete explanations for Haiti’s woeful history acknowledge a resilient belief in a “malédiction divine” (“divine curse”) (Pratte 2010; Ly-Tall 2010). There were, as mentioned, exceptions to this tendency of treating Haitian nationals as anonymous others. For instance, Le Journal de Montréal published a photo of six-year-old Giovanni Momperousse, who was rescued after surviving 72 hours under the rubble of his family’s apartment building (Keystone 2010). Reporters Sue Montgomery in the Gazette, Michèle Ouimet in La Presse, and Caroline 27

28

“‘Voyons voir. Les ouragans, les inondations, les glissements de terrain, l’oppression, les coups d’État, la déforestation, l’exode, la maladie, la misère … qu’est-ce que je n’ai pas encore fait descendre du ciel pour accabler les Haïtiens?’ Le dieu a trouvé: un gigantesque tremblement de terre, il ne restait que ça.” “Si Dieu existe, quel est son problème avec Haïti? Et si Dieu éprouve ceux qu’il aime, pourquoi aime-t-il tant Haïti?”

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D’Astous in Le Devoir distinguished themselves by expending considerable effort to produce stories on the ground with, and about, the Haitian nationals suffering through the aftermath of the tragedy. Along with the story about the two newborns cited above, Montgomery wrote of a single mother, Charlene Noël, who had spent the previous night anxiously hoping for the survival and rescue of her six-year-old son, Olivier Lagroue, who was trapped beneath the wall and roof of a collapsed apartment building (Montgomery 2010a). Noël was attending a university class when the earthquake struck. She rushed to the apartment building of her sister, who was looking after Olivier, only to discover that he was buried beneath the rubble. She could hear her son call out, but she had to wait all night for him to be rescued, hoping he would survive. When he was finally rescued later the following day, she and her son were turned away from two hospitals that had no supplies before finding a makeshift clinic, where Montgomery recorded their story. Gazette photographer Phil Carpenter captured a picture of Noël sitting on the ground beside her son, whose head and arms are bandaged. Two days later, Montgomery produced companion stories from the devastated neighbourhood of Canapé Vert, the first documenting the hunger, thirst and pain of residents, along with their fear from the threat of “thousands of prisoners out on the streets after the prisons collapsed” (Montgomery 2010c), the second recounting the personal stories of residents of the neighbourhood “perhaps worst affected by Tuesday’s earthquake” (Montgomery 2010d). This story focuses on 63-year-old Pierre Charles, who walks with the help of two wooden sticks and lives in a 24-square-foot shack “cobbled together with cast-off wood and metal, sitting precariously on the steep slope of a mountain covered in the rubble of what was once a neighbourhood.” He hasn’t eaten in five days. Perhaps the most vivid of Michèle Ouimet’s stories in La Presse describes the scene outside a Port-au-Prince hospital where earthquake survivors search for the missing amid piles of dead bodies (Ouimet 2010b). “People walk slowly among the corpses and carefully examine the faces. They are looking for a close one, a spouse, a child.”29 In another story, Ouimet reports from Carrefour, a city of 375,000 just 10 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, where a group of twenty youths has set up a blockade, prohibiting traffic along the main road between the capital and the western part of the island (Ouimet 2010c). In a Le Devoir story by Caroline D’Astous we meet Brunet Lebrun, an elementary school principal who owns a two-room house in the Haitian city of Saint-Marc, which he normally shares with his wife and three children (D’Astous 2010). Since the earthquake, his home has been turned into a shelter outside of which 20 people sleep each night under blankets donated by neighbourhood churches. Brunet lost eight family members in the earthquake. These stories serve as a welcome exception to the greater tendency of the news coverage to focus on foreign nationals and Haitian ex-pats and to treat Haitian nationals as anonymous others. The Haitians in these stories have names, faces, fami29

“Des gens se promènent lentement entre les cadavres et examinent attentivement les visages. Ils cherchent un proche, un mari, un enfant.”

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lies, and personal histories, they live in distinct neighbourhoods, all of which serve to emphasize their humanity. They are rendered people like us, as opposed to the alienating treatment they are given in stories and photographs in which they are assigned a simple, and othering, group label, restricting considerably our ability to identify with them in any meaningful way. THE NEWS VALUE OF NATURAL DISASTERS As discussed in Chapter 1, scholars have identified a number of values which determine whether a particular event warrants news coverage, and how much. The determinant of newsworthiness most pertinent to a discussion of news geography is proximity, which can be understood as physical, cultural, and/or emotional closeness (Mencher 2006, 58–65). Natural disasters tend to have considerable news value, wherever they occur, for a number of reasons. For one, they are especially dramatic events, revealing the destructive power of nature, often resulting in significant numbers of deaths, injuries, and extensive material damage. This drama can be captured in stirring images and impassioned eyewitness accounts. Secondly, because natural disasters can happen anywhere and to anyone, they spark universal interest, producing a human bond between news audiences and those impacted directly. Audiences can relate to the suffering of the innocent victims, fellow human beings with homes, families, children. This emotional closeness explains why natural disasters in places that aren’t often in the news – like Haiti – attract such extensive coverage. The news value of a particular natural disaster is enhanced considerably, of course, if it happens near us – physical proximity – or to people like us – cultural proximity – however cultural proximity may be interpreted. It is this cultural proximity that the Haiti coverage took such great pains to assert and explain. So, not only did Haiti suddenly occupy a place on the news map – as most places suffering a natural disaster do – but it was granted by the Montreal daily newspapers its own inset map, a special highlighting of this particular disaster because of its secondlevel proximity – cultural proximity – to the Montreal newspaper audience. Emotional and cultural proximity function differently in the case of a natural disaster. Emotional proximity assumes a universal ‘us,’ an all-inclusive category; this natural disaster could have happened to anyone, and thus we are all affected by the tragedy. We have homes and families and communities, too, and we would be devastated at their loss. Cultural proximity, on the other hand, requires a bonding based on some shared trait or set of traits, and/or some shared history. In this case, the news coverage reminded readers of Haitians’ and Quebeckers’ shared religion and language, and the history of French-Canadian missionary activity and periods of Haitian migration to Montreal and other parts of Quebec, and the subsequent integration of Haitian ex-pats within Quebec society. Cultural proximity, however, is exclusive and conditional; membership in the ‘us’ it constructs is restricted, there is an ethnocentricity behind it. How and where those lines are drawn requires careful reading of the news texts that assert this cultural proximity. The proverbial elephant in the room here is the question of

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race; if the population to which these news stories were addressed is predominantly white – just 12.9 per cent of Quebeckers self-identify as visible minority, compared to 22.27 per cent of Canadians overall (Statistics Canada 2016) –, the coverage concerned a population that is 95-per-cent black (Haiti 2018). The news reports analyzed here did not address race in any explicit way, making it difficult to determine how, or whether, race was any kind of factor in the coverage, how it may have played into the us-them dichotomy.30 We know, however, that questions of race and ethnicity play a particular role in Quebec’s complicated identity politics, a politics in which aspirations for a sovereign or independent Quebec can produce tension between inclusive civic and exclusive ethnic versions of nationalism (cf. Potvin 2011). If such tension has a long history, it resurfaced dramatically and divisively during the reasonable accommodation debates of 2006-2008, followed by the proposal of a bill proposing a Charter of Values and a ban on the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols by the Parti Québécois government in 2013 and the successful adoption of a bill banning religious dress by the Coalition Avenir Québec government – supported by the PQ – in 2019 (see Bouchard and Taylor 2008; Potvin 2011; More Wedge Politics 2014; Perreaux 2019). Quebec has long been uncomfortable with the meaning of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988) for Quebec’s francophone population (Karim 2009, 704). The aim, that is, of Québécois to be recognized as constituting a distinct nation or peuple conflicts with Canada’s official status as a multicultural state. Instead of multiculturalism, Quebec advocates a philosophy of interculturalism, which recognizes the centrality of the province’s francophone majority and, while respecting its diverse cultural communities, insists upon members of those communities integrating within Quebec’s common culture (cf. Chiasson 2012).31 30

31

I have described the coverage here as generally empathetic, particularly as it highlights the contributions Haitians have made to Quebec society and their apparent success in integrating into Quebec culture. In an article reviewing largely U.S. media coverage of the Haiti earthquake, Murali Balaji (2011) makes an important point about the distinction between empathy and pity, writing: “Empathy implies a sentiment based on equality. Pity, on the other hand, assumes the one pitying holds the power over the pitied” (51). Balaji argues that the reportage “highlighted the construction of black people as somehow hopelessly dependent upon the charity of whites” (51) and that the news discourse “homogenized” the victims of the quake as “a tragic and dysfunctional Other” (52). I would argue that elements of pitying can be read into the Montreal newspapers’ reports, particularly in the ways in which the coverage distinguishes between Haitian-Quebeckers and Haitian nationals. A number of specific incidents of discrimination in 2006 and 2007 prompted the Quebec government to establish the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (known as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission) to “ensure that accommodation practices conform to Quebec’s values as a pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society” (Bouchard and Taylor 2008, 17). Hearings were conducted throughout the province in the fall of 2007, resulting in a report with 37 recommendations in May 2008. The Commission recommended, for example, that Quebec officials associated with the legal system – i.e., judges, Crown prosecutors, prison guards, police officers – refrain from wearing religious symbols, and advised the government to remove the crucifix hanging above the Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly. Teachers, health-care workers and civil servants were excluded from the recommended ban on religious dress. In 2019, the Quebec government passed a controversial bill banning public servants – teachers,

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The coverage of the Haiti earthquake described in this chapter comes across as genuinely heartfelt and well-meaning. The reporters and photographers sent to Haiti went to considerable effort to document the damage the earthquake caused to the country and its people as well as to describe the multinational rescue and relief efforts. As noted, their stories and their images put Haiti on the front pages of Montreal’s daily newspapers for the better part of three weeks and sought to exude empathy – and donations to the relief effort – from their readers. The coverage granted Haiti a place on the news map that it is normally denied, and in so doing closed somewhat the physical and imaginative distance between Montreal and Port-au-Prince with its detailed recounting of the institutional and personal histories linking these two places. The effort, I argue, is undermined somewhat by the particular place Haiti is granted on the news map and by the ways in which the people who occupy the news map are treated and identified. As a place, Haiti is a country from which people who have the means emigrate to places like Quebec, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, a country racked repeatedly by political and natural disasters. The Haitians we are introduced to through the news coverage are predominantly those who have succeeded in leaving Haiti. Foreign nationals and Haitian ex-pats occupy the forefront and the principal roles in the drama the news coverage describes. Haitian nationals, with too few exceptions, are like movie extras, filling in the background as anonymous and passive victims of this tragedy, with no apparent role to play in their country’s recovery.

police, government lawyers and others in positions of authority -- from wearing religious symbols, such as Sikh turbans and Muslim head and face coverings, making Quebec “the only jurisdiction in North America with a religion-based dress code” (Perreaux 2019). The government passed a bill the same day requiring French-language and “values” tests for new immigrants to the province.

CHAPTER 6: MAPPING THE NEWS WORLD News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic code, it imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is represented; and so inevitably news, like every discourse, constructively patterns that of which it speaks.” (Fowler 2007, 4)

The initial cartographic approach to the scholarly analysis of news coverage was the production of news-flow studies, intended to document, or map, the circulation of news globally. These quantitative content analyses, which continue to be employed, track the precise number of news stories emanating from the different places of the world; they sketch broad patterns in the circulation of news items, document the extent to which some places and some topics predominate, and identify margins and exclusions in news coverage. Conducted over a specified period of time and via particular news organizations, news-flow studies draw a clear distinction between the material world and the “news world” (Wu 2000). Typically, news-flow studies tally not only the number of stories emanating from each place in the world1 but also track the principal news topics (e.g., news, business, sports, etc.), the agencies producing the stories (e.g., wire services, staff reporters), as well as the length and placement of stories. The end result is a macro-scale map of the world as it is depicted through news coverage. From the growing bank of such studies, researchers have sought to identify consistent patterns in the international circulation of news and to establish the determinants of international news coverage: which factors lead to the coverage of some places and not other places, why some places are deemed of interest to news audiences, and why some are less interesting (cf. Chang et al. 1987; Kim and Barnett 1996; Chang 1998; Wu 2000, 2003, 2004). News-flow studies were applied initially to newspapers, when newspapers were considered the most important source of international news reporting, but since that time they have been applied as well to television newscasts and to the Web sites of various news organizations as those news platforms have assumed greater currency with audiences (cf. Hackett 1989; Chyi and Sylvie 2001; Gasher and Gabriele 2004; Shoemaker and Cohen 2006; Gasher and Klein 2008; Gasher 2007, 2009; Golan 2008; Goodrum and Godo 2011; Akoh and Ahiabenu 2012; Segev 2015). News-flow research was a response to the increasing recognition throughout the 20th century that international flows of news – and, later, other communications 1

The term “places” rather than “countries” is used advisedly here, because news is often filed from, and treats as subject matter, places such as the Vatican in Rome and the United Nations headquarters in New York, places that are located within nation-states, but do not belong to those nation-states. In a similar vein, news-flow studies may seek to account separately for disputed territories such as Israel’s Occupied Territories. Some news-flow studies may also track stories filed from, or about, particular provinces or states within countries (see Gasher 2007, 2009).

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such as satellite signals – were decidedly uneven, and that a handful of Western news agencies dominated the production and dissemination of international news reports. This imbalance in news flows was significant for political, economic, and cultural reasons. For instance, news stories contain information that could inform political decisions or shape scientific, industrial, and agricultural practices; they are, in other words, part of a system of knowledge transfer. Further, news stories adopt a particular focus, or news angle, which privileges some news events over other prospective topics, and the perspectives of some sources over other sources, skewing the news agenda in particular directions. And, with respect to our discussion of representation in Chapter 2, news stories attribute meaning to the people, places, and events they report on, defining those people, places, and events for their news audiences. When only a few news organizations assume the responsibility of producing and circulating most of the original reporting of international news events, catering these news reports to their client audiences, they acquire considerable power over the framing of the people, places, and events that populate their news stories, as well as the power to determine which places and events are worth paying attention to, and which they can ignore. A NEW WORLD INFORMATION AND COMMUNIATION ORDER The problem of uneven information flows has been a source of friction between the developed and the developing world since the end of the Second World War (see ICSCP 1980; Sreberny-Mohammadi 1984; McPhail 1987; Gerbner et al. 1993; Mowlana 1997). Close to eighty former colonies representing a combined population of some two billion people achieved political independence in the post-war period. These new nation-states, however, realized very quickly that they remained dependent in the communications sphere, which implied serious political, economic, and sociocultural repercussions. Describing the Western-based news agencies as the first “transnational media systems,” communications scholar Oliver BoydBarrett explains: Newly-independent ex-colonies discovered that continuing economic dependence effectively limited their political economy. Barriers were not just material but also ideological, relating to how developing countries were perceived by Western governments and investors. Identification of significant countries, events and opinions were thought to be influenced by the global [news] agencies who could boost or undermine a nation’s construction of national image, with economic as well as political consequences (1997, 132).

These emerging nations took advantage of their new-found voices in the General Assembly of the United Nations, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to push for a debate on the lack of balance in flows of all forms of communication. Up to this point in time, a doctrine of “free flow” of news and information had prevailed in discussions of international communication (see Hamelink 1994, 152–155). The United States was the most vocal proponent of this doctrine – to the chagrin of the Soviet Union, its Cold War rival – but the free-flow position was endorsed as well

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by the UN and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which Article 19 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers” (cited in Hamelink 1994, 155). As evidence mounted through the 1960s and 1970s that the free-flow doctrine was largely a recipe for Western hegemony, the issue of communication flows was revisited at the behest of these newly formed countries. The Western-based international news services – the “big four” of Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Reuters, and United Press International – had until then been the principal components of the global communication system, but that system was expanding with the introduction of communication satellites, which allowed national broadcasters, again based in the West, to export their programming.2 UNESCO took up their cause and established the MacBride Commission to investigate patterns and problems in international communication flows. The international debate at that time focused on three points: first, historically, communication services allowed dominant states to exploit their political and economic power; second, economies of scale in information production and distribution threatened to reinforce this dominance; and third, a handful of transnational corporations were 2

Daya Kishan Thussu notes the significant role the newspaper industry played in the development of international telegraph networks, which he described as “the arteries of an international network of information, of intelligence services and of propaganda” (2000, 19). Among the first and most active players on this network, the French news agency Havas (founded in 1835), the German agency Wolff (1849), and the British agency Reuters (1851), signed a treaty in 1870 to divide into exclusive territories the world market for international news, with each agency making separate contracts with the national news agencies within its respective territory. The treaty was extended for a further 10 years in 1890 (20-21). Associated Press, an American news agency founded in 1848, remained primarily a domestic news service until it started supplying news to Latin America after World War I. The original Havas-Wolff-Reuters cartel was broken by the 1930s when AP and United Press (subsequently United Press International) expanded internationally (21). Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1997) explains: “In operation and in content [the news agencies] developed a modern global consciousness, contributing transnational information, gathered at speed, to political and economic elites directly or through media. They helped formulate the concept of news as about events, elite people, elite nations, their international conflicts and interests” (132; see also Mattelart 1994). As recently as the mid-1990s, more than 80 per cent of global news was distributed by AP, AFP, and Reuters (Thussu 2004). The same general pattern continued with the establishment of the video news services in the 1990s, when the major players were APTV (AP’s video branch), Reuters TV, and Worldwide Television News (WTN, which began as UPI’s video service) (Boyd-Barrett 1997, 134). Reuters TV was the largest video news wholesaler in the mid-1990s, with 70 international bureaus and 260 client broadcasters in 85 countries (Paterson 1997, 146–147). There were some attempts to develop new regional and sub-regional news agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to reduce dependency on the Big Four: for example, the Caribbean News Agency (CANA), which linked thirteen English-speaking Caribbean countries, the Pan African News Agency (PANA), and a pool of national news agencies from Yugoslavia (Tanjug), Tunisia (TAP), Morocco (MAP), Iraq (INA), Cuba (Prensa Latina), and India (Press Trust). Similarly, regional broadcast program exchanges were established: for example, Eurovision (Western Europe) and Intervision (Central and Eastern Europe) (ICSCP 1980, 84-86).

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employing technology to exploit markets rather than to serve the cultural, social, and political needs of nations (see Gasher et al. 2020, 289–290). In its report, the MacBride Commission advocated “free, open and balanced communications” and concluded that “the utmost importance should be given to eliminating imbalances and disparities in communication and its structures, and particularly in information flows. Developing countries need to reduce their dependence and claim a new, more just and more equitable order in the field of communication” (ICSCP 1980, 253). Even though UNESCO adopted the MacBride Commission’s key principles – eliminating global information imbalances and having communication serve national development goals – the report was poorly received in the West “because it gave governments, and not markets, ultimate authority over the nature of a society’s media” (Herman and McChesney 1997, 24–26). The report was viewed by its opponents as a curb on media freedom, argues communications scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng, “while in reality the concept [of free, open and balanced communications] was designed to widen and deepen the freedom of information by increasing its balance and diversity on a global scale” (2012, 37). The U.S. under Ronald Reagan and the U.K. under Margaret Thatcher pulled out of UNESCO in 1985 over concerns the MacBride Commission’s New World Information and Communication Order would threaten their media industries. They chose, instead, the path of further liberalizing global trade, including trade in the cultural industries (35). New concerns for the Global South arose in the 1990s with the emergence of digital information networks, the creation and expansion of cyberspace, issues pertaining to Internet governance, and the financing of digital activities (Masmoudi 2012, 25). As these concerns grew with evidence of further communication asymmetries, the ITU launched the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS 2010), which took the form of international conferences bringing together scholars, civil society groups, governments, and policy experts in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005. The Geneva conference laid out a 67-point declaration of principles and an action plan, and the Tunis conference addressed the financial implementation of the action plan, including the creation of the Digital Solidarity Fund. The Geneva declaration privileges the understanding of information as a resource for the promotion of freedom, equality, peace, and democracy, rather than simply as a consumer product, and its main target is the digital divide between those peoples, organizations, and nations in the world with the ready access and the skills to take full advantage of communications technologies and those who lack that access and those skills (WSIS 2010). The digital divide between the information-rich and the information-poor remains a concern. Based on 2016 ITU figures, more than half of the world’s population does not use the Internet; overall, 47.1 per cent of individuals in the world are on-line, 81 per cent in the developed world, but only 40.1 per cent in the developing world and just 15.2 per cent in the world’s least developed countries. Similarly, fewer than half of the world’s people (49.4 per cent) have a mobile broadband subscription, but the distribution here is skewed as well; 90.3 per cent of people in the developed world have mobile broadband subscriptions, compared to 40.9 per

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cent in developing countries and 19.4 per cent in the least developed countries (ITU 2016, 4). The international news agencies that were implicated in originating global information disparities continue to play a role in the digital divide. The world’s three major wire services, Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, have used the Internet to reinforce their dominance and have developed audio-visual services to supply international all-news television services like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera (Laville and Palmer 2012, 179–184). This dominance is enhanced by a general withdrawal from independent foreign news coverage by newspaper and national television networks (see Jean et al. 2014; Schmidt 2016). HOW NEWS FLOWS News-flow studies have consistently demonstrated that news organizations are much more interested in certain parts of the world than they are in other parts of the world. Such a tendency creates what international communications researcher H. Denis Wu describes as a “discrepancy between the ‘real world’ and the ‘news world’” (2000, 110). Scholars in the field of news-flow research seek to understand the rationale governing such flows and have identified several prominent determinants. Kyungmo Kim and George A. Barnett, for example, conducted a network analysis of the exchanges of newspapers and periodicals among 132 countries in 1990 and concluded that international news flows were influenced by a country’s economic development (as measured by gross domestic product), the language(s) its people speak, its physical location, its degree of political freedom, and its population size. “Among them, economic development is the most important factor” (1996, 347). Wu, in an attempt to consolidate earlier studies, measured the influence of nine systemic factors – population size, territorial size, level of economic development, language, degree of press freedom, presence of international news agencies, geographic distance, trade volume, and colonial ties – on the volume of news originating from 214 countries as those news reports were presented in the media of 38 individual countries. He concluded that, overall, trade between countries was the most influential determinant of news coverage, followed by the presence of international news agencies (2000, 111–124). The most-covered country overall in Wu’s study was the United States, ranking as the largest source of news in 23 of 37 countries (besides the U.S. itself), reflecting its superpower status in world affairs. “This result suggests a mixture of forces that shape international news coverage worldwide – economic interest, information availability, and production cost of international news are apparently at work in determining the volume of information from abroad” (126). The news-flow studies that have been conducted over the past half century have looked at different media, adopted different geographical scales, employed different methodologies, and reveal country-specific particularities. Nonetheless, some consistent patterns have emerged. The overall conclusion is that news flows remain

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unbalanced. As participants in a 17-country study of television news between 2008 and 2011, Jürgen Wilke, Christine Heimprecht, and Youichi Ito conclude: “Relatively few countries tend to make up the bulk of foreign news” (2013, 68). Further, if domestic news occupies the greatest share of the overall news agenda (see Cohen 2013), the United States and Western Europe – especially the United Kingdom and France – are consistently over-represented in foreign news reports. The continents of Africa and South America, on the other hand, are consistently marginal to international news coverage (see Gerbner and Marvanyi 1977; Wu 2000, 2004; Gasher and Klein 2008; Golan 2008; Gasher 2009; de Beer 2010; Cohen 2013). Regionalism, however, is also a factor; countries within close physical proximity tend to be more newsworthy than more remote places (Wu 2000; de Beer 2010). News-flow studies of Canadian news media echo these findings (Hackett 1989; Kariel and Rosenvall 1995; Gasher and Gabriele 2004; Gasher 2007; Goodrum and Godo 2011). The analysis by Gerbner and Marvanyi was accompanied by hand-drawn maps to show the world as depicted in the foreign news coverage of the 60 daily newspapers from nine countries they studied and the world as depicted by foreign news coverage in the U.S., Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and “some” Third World newspapers (1977, 58–59). On the map of the world of U.S. newspapers, Western Europe occupies more space than North America and Latin America combined, and the Soviet Union is half the size of the Middle East (58). The foreign news coverage in Soviet newspapers shows a world in which Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North America occupy the most space (59). In all cases, Africa is minimized, ranging from 2.1 per cent of the space (on the map of Eastern European newspapers) to 7.6 per cent (on the map of Western European Newspapers). THE GEOGRAPHY OF NEWS PROJECT At the turn of the 21st century there was tremendous research interest in on-line journalism. As of the mid-1990s, with the development of the World Wide Web, news organizations of all kinds were setting up Web sites and others – e.g., Matt Drudge – were aggregating news reports on portals. At the same time, more and more journalists were experimenting with what was then called computer-assisted reporting, which entailed everything from employing search engines and accessing databases to conducting interviews via email (see Gasher 2002b). Increasing numbers of people were connecting to the Web via personal computers at home, at their workplaces, at public spaces such as libraries, schools, and community centres, and at private businesses such as coffee shops, malls, and hotels. This was also a time when the concept of globalization was becoming the new credo, not only in the international trade arena – the 123-nation World Trade Organization succeeded the more limited General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1995 – but with respect to a general awareness of the intensified global circulation as well of capital, information, images, diseases, climate patterns, and people:

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workers, investors, travellers, immigrants, and refugees (see Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 11). As a result of the migrations of people, the populations of developed countries like Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France were becoming more and more multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multi-faith, and multilingual, suggesting their news audiences might have an increased appetite for international reportage. For example, based on 2001 census figures, the proportion of foreign-born Canadians had reached 18.4 per cent, its highest level in 70 years. Canada’s population at that time comprised more than 200 ethnic groups (Anderssen 2003).3 In this context, the development and exponential growth of the Internet appeared to present an opportunity for increased international news coverage by all news organizations. This was the thinking behind the establishment of the Geography of News Project in 1999.4 The initial question guiding our research was whether the new digital tools afforded journalists and their news organizations would alter in any way the disparities between the material world and the news world, resulting in more comprehensive global news maps. Would it change the news geography of daily newspapers? These were, of course, still early days for the World Wide Web, but news organizations were already exploring the possibilities of this technological change. The Globe and Mail, which had taken advantage of satellite printing to become a national newspaper in 1980, was the first newspaper in the world to produce a complete electronic version in November, 1977 (Gibson 1998). The Montreal Gazette established its initial Web site in 1995 and Le Journal de Montréal, besides establishing a Web site in the mid-1990s, offered its subscribers a full-text, on-line version of the newspaper (Canadian Press 2000). We sought to investigate whether the ability to gather information and conduct interviews via networked digital technologies would mitigate the impediments of on-site reporting from foreign places, particularly given the prohibitive costs of travel, accommodation, and labour (for journalists, translators and/or fixers). Would we see more international news reporting by newly-wired news organizations? Even more tenable, given the increasing ease and diminished cost of accessing and 3

4

By 2011, immigrants accounted for 20.6 per cent of Canada’s population, the highest proportion of foreign-born citizens among G8 countries. Forty-six per cent of Toronto’s population was foreign-born, which is significant when we consider that Toronto is Canada’s Englishlanguage media capital, home of its largest daily newspaper – the Toronto Star –,two national dailies – the Globe and Mail, the National Post –, and headquarters of its national broadcaster, the CBC (Statistics Canada 2011a, b). The author is the principal investigator in the Geography of News Project, based in the Department of Journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. The project has received funding from Concordia University (2000–2003), le Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (2002–2005), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2004– 2007, 2008–2011, 2011–2014) and the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program (2015). A number of student research assistants have contributed to the conceptualization and execution of this research over the years (see https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/journalism/faculty. html?fpid=mike-gasher). Dr. Andreea Mandache began working with me in 2001 and was instrumental in developing the methodology for our news-flow studies. She also played an important role in formulating our qualitative analyses of news texts.

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circulating news reports globally via the Web, would we see evidence that news organizations were expanding their gaze to include stories from a broader assortment of places? In sum, we sought to determine whether those newspapers that had established an on-line presence would seek to alter their conventional news geographies to take advantage of the new communications geography that the international network of computer networks known as the Internet enabled. Our focus was on daily newspapers for two reasons resonant with our interest in news geography. First, on-line publishing allowed daily newspapers to break out of the physical confines of hard-copy publishing, confines predicated on the need to transport to their readers bulky bundles of paper within hours of their printing so that the news they contained was still fresh. On-line publishing allows for immediate access to the Web site wherever in the world people had Internet access, enabling the delivery of news without the delivery of newspapers. If, beginning in the 1970s, every stage of the newspaper production process was computerized with the exception of printing and delivery, newspapers completed the cycle in the 1990s by producing a digital end-product. Ostensibly, this freed newspapers to expand their geography, to broaden their coverage and circulation areas (see Chyi and Sylvie 2001, 232–236). Secondly, we perceived an economic incentive in newspapers expanding their coverage. That is, by publishing digitally, newspapers changed the nature of their business from the production of private goods – hard-copy newspapers – to the production of public goods – news sites on the World Wide Web. This shift creates an extra financial incentive to maximize audiences. Media economists define a private good as a material good that is produced in finite supply, a stock that is diminished each time a good is purchased. Newspapers, books, and magazines are private goods. You buy them, you take them home, they are yours. If they sell out at any one location, they are no longer available to subsequent buyers. Each day, newspaper publishers must determine the number of copies they will print, based on anticipated sales: more newspapers on weekends, typically, and busy news days, fewer copies on slow news days. If those estimates are off, they will either print too many copies with the accompanying costs they can’t recoup, or they will print too few, sacrificing potential sales. Either way, a faulty estimate in the press run proves costly. Manufacturing, distribution, and newsprint costs account for roughly 50 per cent of the total operations of a newspaper, so that every time a newspaper increases its press run, it is increasing its costs (Leurdijk et al. 2011). Unless those costs can be recovered, it makes no economic sense to increase the press run. And the costs of labour, newsprint, ink, and the fuel for delivery trucks are unlikely to decrease over time. Public goods, on the other hand, are those that, once produced, can be consumed by any number of people without in any way reducing their availability to others and without increasing – or increasing very marginally – the cost of the original production. Radio and television programs are examples of public goods (Picard 1989, 17–19). There is no limit to how many people can watch the Super

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Bowl on TV at the same time. There is a limit to how many people can buy the New York Times print edition the next day to read about it. The distinction between private and public goods is critical to understanding how these media operate economically – as well as spatially and temporally. For one thing, private and public goods are paid for in different ways. When a customer buys a newspaper, he or she pays for a material copy of the newspaper itself, even if the cost of the newspaper is highly subsidized by advertising. The actual price paid is the result of a complex formula, which takes into account both the costs of producing the news and the costs of producing the newspaper (i.e., printing and distribution). Newspaper readers, of course, also pay with their time, the time they spend reading the newspaper. They literally pay attention, and it is this attention that advertisers seek to attract. Public media goods are another matter entirely. Companies that produce public goods are in the business of generating one media product – a master copy, if you will – and disseminating it to as many markets as possible as quickly as possible. Such companies have an economic interest in maximizing distribution, because their principal cost is in the production of the original, and their distribution costs are relatively low. Media economist Robert Picard maintains that public goods production needs to be understood within “distribution economics” where “the cost of production is not affected by the number of users.” He writes: “Once a program or production is complete, the costs of getting it to a larger audience by making it available nationally or internationally are small and incremental.” Under distribution economics, income increases as audience size increases (1989, 65-66). Once a newspaper, for instance, pays the labour and technical costs of mounting a Web site, there is an incentive to generate as many visits to that site as possible. And the electronic version of the newspaper is as available to the Web surfer in Auckland as it is in Dallas, at no extra cost to the publisher.5 Audiences don’t buy pubic goods. What they pay for, if they make any direct payment at all, is access to content subsidized by advertisers paying for audiences’ attention. The larger and more economically appealing the audience, the more valuable that audience is to advertisers. The speed of digital distribution is significant as well. News is a highly perishable product and if this was an issue for newspapers confined to a daily print cycle, it has become an existential challenge as news producers of all kinds have entered the digital mediascape. This would seem to make it even more imperative that the on-line newspaper reach as many markets as possible as quickly as possible. If the initial response of newspapers was to publish “breaking news” stories on their Web sites, in more recent times they have taken advantage of mobile digital technologies such as smartphones and tablets to reach audiences in a more timely fashion, while at the same time extending the lifespan of much of their reportage by providing more depth and analysis than their competitors can typically muster.6 5 6

To be precise, though, there is some cost in maintaining scalable server capacity. But these costs are minimal compared to the physical production and delivery of newspapers. A casual observation that warrants study is the frequency of news stories adopting the future tense. In other words, rather than simply report what happened in the recent past – e.g., the prime minister announced yesterday – news stories are reporting what is going to happen in the

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THE WORLD WIDE NEWS WEB When we started the Geography of News Project in 1999, the most comprehensive news flow studies of Canadian newspapers dated from the early 1970s. In an examination of 21 dailies between August, 1972 and July, 1973, H.G. Kariel and L.A. Rosenvall concluded that local news always dominated coverage (averaging 37 per cent of all news items), and that while international news accounted for a significant average of 31 per cent of stories, news emanating from the U.S. constituted half (49.8 per cent) of all foreign news in Canadian newspapers. They concluded that “cultural affinity” was the most important determinant of foreign news origin (1995, 20–21, 82). How the Internet would impact international news flows – and thus, the map of the world presented by news organizations – was not yet known. In a Spring 2000 survey of Canadian daily newspaper editors, Walter Soderlund, Martha Lee, and Paul Gecelovsky found that some editors believed the availability of international news on the Internet may compel newspapers to increase their concentration on local news “where information is not available on the Internet” and where local newspapers have a clear competitive advantage (2002, 83). The determinant of news circulation we were most interested in was the technological capacity of the World Wide Web, keeping in mind that at this point tablet editions and mobile applications had not yet been developed. We conducted three intensive news-flow studies on the Web sites of nine daily newspapers from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel, seeking any evidence to indicate that these newspapers were occupying a more global – and less local or national – news space in accord with the potentials digitalization offered. As Canadian researchers, we began with a study of three self-styled national newspapers: the Globe and Mail (theglobeandmail.com), the National Post (canada.com/nationalpost) and the French-language Le Devoir (ledevoir.com).7 The Globe and Mail, based in Toronto, is a former metropolitan newspaper which began publishing national editions in 1980 thanks to satellite printing technology. The National Post, also based in Toronto, was founded as a national newspaper in direct competition with the Globe and Mail in October, 1998. Le Devoir is a small-circulation, independent, French-language daily based in Montreal, whose distribution is concentrated in the urban centres of Quebec. It is a national newspaper in the sense that it regards French-Canadians, and particularly those living in Quebec, as a nation or a people. The case was worth considering for two reasons. First, these newspapers’ task of covering the second-largest country in the world (in terms of land mass), with

7

future. For example, “A planned EU-Canada summit to sign a free trade deal was still possible on Thursday, European Council President Donald Tusk said on Wednesday, as Belgian politicians entered a second day of talks on the future of the pact” (Blenkinsop and Bartunek 2016). While this has occurred in the past as well, it seems to be a more frequent practice and may relate to the acceleration of the digital news cycle. Research assistants Philippe Gohier, Reisa Klein, and Andreea Mandache conducted the initial coding for this study and made important contributions to the analysis of the results.

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a diverse and dispersed population is formidable. The Internet would allow these newspapers greater and cheaper access to Canadian readership and advertising markets, and in turn, would provide greater access to these publications for Canadian readers. Thus, the Internet would seem to facilitate somewhat the national ambitions of these newspapers. Second, Canada is an extroverted country in terms of its strong and varied international connections; Canada is one of the most diverse countries in the world culturally, racially, and linguistically (with citizens who can trace their origins to every part of the world) and it has one of the largest economies in the world, based principally on international trade. The key question we asked was: Do these newspapers use their on-line editions to provide coverage that is more in line with the global dimensions of the world their readers increasingly inhabit? The case is particular, but the challenges and opportunities presented by on-line news are widely shared by news organizations around the world.8 In the end it became clear that these on-line newspapers, at least at this stage, were not seeking to cover the world, nor were they even providing coverage of many parts of Canada.9 The only significant international interest demonstrated in 8

9

While some news-flow studies confine their sampling to “news” items or stories contained only in the front section or front pages of newspapers, we chose to be as inclusive as possible, to avoid discriminating between different kinds of news stories, and to allow us to detect news sites’ emphasis on particular topics, such as business or sports. Excluded were statistical summaries, event listings, editorial cartoons, and all advertising material. We downloaded the sites every six days between June and August, 2003, assembling a constructed week of each, collecting a total of 1,838 items. Our coding protocol was the product of our experience with a 2001 pilot study of the Montreal Gazette (see Gasher and Gabriele 2004) and two months of pre-testing and trial inter-coder reliability tests during the Spring of 2003. For each story, we coded for: publication name; date; headline; source agency (e.g., Reuters); international filing origin (the country the story was filed from); countries cited in the story; national filing origin (the Canadian province or territory the story was filed from); provinces and/or territories cited; word count; number of accompanying illustrations; and topic. Once coded, data were entered into an SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) database for subsequent analysis. For each site, the analysis was concerned with: where in the world its stories originated; which places predominated and which were largely excluded; where, and in what proportions, domestic stories originated (by province or territory); which news agencies tended to provide stories (e.g., wire services vs. staff reporters); what topics foreign stories tended to address (e.g., business vs. news vs. sports); and the relative prominence of domestic and foreign stories (as measured by word count and illustrations). We took each of the sites’ own sections and divided them into the following conventional newspaper topics: news, business, sports, arts and entertainment, lifestyle, and other. The prominence variable is a combination of the number of illustrations accompanying an article and the number of words in the article. We gave each illustration (photograph, map, chart) a value of 100 words. The articles were then assigned one of five categories: brief (up to 199 words), short (200 to 399 words), medium (400 to 599 words), long (600 to 799 words), very long (800 words or more). Most of Canada’s largest news organizations have continued to close overseas news bureaus; the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, had bureaus in India, Hong Kong, Israel, the U.K., Mexico, and the U.S. as recently as 2005, but now has only one, in Washington, D.C. (Jean et al. 2014; Schmidt 2016). The CBC-Radio-Canada and the Globe and Mail have also

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their coverage, whether based on filing origin or countries cited, was the United States (see Gasher 2007). The United States is, by far, Canada’s biggest trading partner. At the time, two of the Globe and Mail’s six remaining foreign bureaus were in the United States, as were the National Post’s only two (Vasil 2003). The most prominent foreign countries cited in these newspapers’ coverage tended to be northern, wealthy, and fellow travellers with Canada in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), what was then the Group of 8 (now the G7) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), countries, in other words, with which Canada has formal political, economic, and military ties. Three of the top four countries cited by each of the Web sites – the United States, United Kingdom, and France – belonged with Canada to the OECD, the G8 and NATO. The exception was Iraq, newsworthy because of an ongoing and controversial military campaign involving American and British forces. Canada’s three national dailies portrayed a news world in which articles filed from two countries – Canada and the United States – predominated. Canada was the filing origin for more than 75 per cent of items, with the United States a distinct second at just under 10 per cent. After that, the filing origins dropped off precipitously: the United Kingdom (2.5 per cent), France (1.5 per cent), Israel and the Occupied Territories (0.9 per cent), and Iraq (0.8 per cent), in that order. The entire African continent provided just 26 stories (1.4 per cent of the total), nine of which came from Liberia, engulfed in civil war. South America provided just six stories, and half of those originated in Brazil. Mexico, with which Canada is a partner in a free-trade agreement, was the origin of just five stories. Not a single story was filed from two countries that became front-page news in Canadian newspapers in 2004: Haiti and Sudan.10

10

cut back on their numbers of foreign bureaus. International news coverage comes from parttime correspondents (stringers), wire services, and staff reporters sent temporarily to breaking foreign news sites, with no necessary background knowledge or sources to draw upon (called parachute journalism) (see Macdonald, 2008). In a series of interviews with 49 editors and journalists responsible for international news coverage at television stations in 12 countries, Mujica and Hanitzsch (2013) found that, with the exception of China and Brazil, the status and relevance of foreign news had declined. In Haiti, a February 2004 coup forced the flight of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and in September, 2004, the country was devastated by Tropical Storm Jeanne. During the Summer of 2004, Sudan’s bloody civil war attracted prominent news coverage in Canada.

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Table 6.1 International Filing Origins – Canadian Newspapers The vast majority of articles in Canada’s national newspapers were filed from two countries: Canada (ca. 75%) and the United States (ca. 10%). The United Kingdom (2.5%) and France (1.5%) were next, leaving very little news filed from the rest of the world. Country

Globe & Mail

National Post

Le Devoir

Canada

479

239

262

United States

364

155

153

United Kingdom

85

45

39

France

44

28

74

Iraq

51

18

28

China

31

12

9

Russia

23

9

12

Mexico

17

6

14

Brazil

12

6

5

Argentina

5

0

2

South Africa

6

4

8

Liberia

11

0

7

Sudan

1

0

0

Haiti

0

0

0

Table 6.2 Selected Countries Cited – Canadian Newspapers A more accurate picture of international news coverage is provided by how often different countries are mentioned in news reportage. Canada was the country cited most often by its national newspapers (980 citations), followed by the United States (672), the United Kingdom (169), and France (146).

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Canada, too, was the country cited most often by all three sites (a total of 980 times), but far less often than the number of stories filed from Canada (1,388) might suggest.11 The United States was cited 672 times (compared to its 183 placelines), followed by the United Kingdom (169 citations, 46 placelines), and France (146 citations, 27 placelines). The three Canadian sites had 14 stories filed from Iraq, but in fact 97 of their stories cited Iraq in some fashion. Similarly, the South American countries accounted for 52 citations (compared to six placelines) and African countries were cited 153 times (compared to 26 placelines). However, Haiti was not mentioned in any of the three newspapers’ coverage, and Sudan was mentioned just once (by the Globe and Mail). Each of the three Canadian dailies drew at least 70 per cent of its stories from domestic origins. The Globe and Mail was the least parochial, drawing from the broadest range of places (56) outside Canada. Still, slightly more than 70 per cent of its stories had Canadian origins, and another 13 per cent were filed from the United States.12 Le Devoir drew on 34 places outside Canada, but 73.7 per cent of its stories were filed from Canada, and another seven per cent originated in the United States. France was Le Devoir’s third-largest source of stories, at just over four per cent. The National Post drew from just six places outside Canada. Almost 94 per cent of its stories were filed from Canadian origins with 3.6 per cent from the United States. News, not surprisingly, was the principal topic in the three newspapers, but sports was the second most-frequent topic of stories filed from outside Canada, accounting for more than a quarter of the total international filings. Sports stories even outnumbered news stories filed from the United States. Both the Globe and Mail (248 of 309 articles, or 80 per cent) and Le Devoir (89 per cent) relied on wire services for foreign coverage, further suggesting a lack of commitment to foreign affairs and an unwillingness to fully domesticate news items from abroad. The National Post relied on its own staffers for both foreign and domestic coverage (but, it must be repeated, carried only 21 articles filed from abroad). These three Canadian newspapers, then, provided no evidence of greater geographical ambition in their Web editions. Overwhelmingly, their principal foreign interest was the United States. Not only did they show little interest in the rest of 11

12

We decided to count both placelines and citations, because stories filed from the newspaper’s home country may be primarily about, or partly about, another country or countries. Placelines tell us where the reporter is stationed, but it is not a reliable indicator of the subject of that reporter’s story. Here, the ‘countries cited’ variable is much more meaningful to our sense of how these newspapers cover the world. If, as mentioned above, the ‘filing origin’ variable overstated the number of articles that concerned the home country and understated international news coverage, the ‘countries cited’ variable nonetheless revealed a picture of parochialism and significant disparity between regions of the world in international coverage. This, in spite of the Globe and Mail’s international pretentions. In an April 7, 2001 advertisement, the newspaper boasted that it was “[l]ocated in some of the world’s leading centres of finance, culture and politics,” and had “more editorial bureaus than any other Canadian newspaper.” Printed across an image of the globe identifying the newspaper’s six foreign bureaus was written: “Is it any wonder that they call us The Globe?”

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the world, they could not even be said to be providing comprehensive coverage of Canada itself. Aside from their dutiful reporting on national politic affairs, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Le Devoir ignored significant portions of the country, particularly the northern territories and the Atlantic provinces. Following the same coding protocol, we conducted two further studies in 2004, the first examining three highly-respected newspapers with well-developed Web sites from distinct regions of the United States – the New York Times (nytimes.com), the Chicago Tribune (chicagotribune.com), and the Los Angeles Times (latimes. com) (see Gasher 2009) – and three marquee international newspapers – The Times of London (thetimes.co.uk), Libération of Paris (liberation.fr), and Ha’aretz of Tel Aviv (haaretz.com) (see Gasher and Klein 2008) – from countries that both generate a considerable amount of news and attract attention from around the world: the U.K, France, and Israel.13 As with the Canadian newspapers, the U.S. dailies mapped out a highly circumscribed news world, consisting largely of their respective home states, the U.S. federal government, a handful of Washington’s closest political, economic, and military allies, and the battlefields of Iraq. Their news maps were further circumscribed in that news and sports coverage predominated, accounting for more than 75 per cent of stories overall and more than 85 per cent of international coverage. Consequently, their business, arts and entertainment, and lifestyles sections contained few foreign stories. Overall, domestic news coverage predominated on all three newspapers’ Web sites, accounting for 70.6 per cent of stories in the New York Times, 87 per cent in the Chicago Tribune, and 83.8 per cent in the Los Angeles Times. Further, slightly more than 60 per cent of domestic filings in all three newspapers were from their respective home states. More than 86 per cent of the stories filed to these three sites on all topics came from four countries: the U.S. (79 per cent), the U.K. (2.8 per cent), Iraq (2.4 per cent), and France (1.8 per cent). The entire continents of Africa (0.8 per cent) and South America (0.6 per cent) each provided less than one per cent of the total filings. Of the top seven foreign sources for stories, four – the U.K., France, Canada, and Germany – were fellow travellers with the U.S. in NATO, the OECD, and the G8. The U.S., Iraq, the U.K., and France were also the countries most often cited in their coverage. At least one African country was cited in 5.8 per cent of stories and a South American country was cited in 2.8 per cent of stories. Still, the U.S. predominated, cited in 68 per cent of articles overall.

13

Research assistants Karen Biskin, Philippe Gohier, Reisa Klein, Andreea Mandache, and Tina Silverstein made significant contributions to these studies, with their careful coding work as well as valuable input with respect to methodological questions and the interpretation of results.

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Table 6.3 International Filing Origins – U.S. Newspapers Four countries accounted for more than 86 per cent of the filing origins of stories in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times: the United States (79%), the United Kingdom (2.8%), Iraq (2.4%), and France (1.8%). Country

NY Times

Chicago Tribune

LA Times

United States

1154

735

1127

Iraq

220

69

163

United Kingdom

214

67

115

France

168

63

91

Russia

68

16

38

China

65

26

30

Canada

71

28

46

Mexico

20

18

37

Brazil

20

8

11

Argentina

6

5

10

South Africa

12

2

7

Liberia

1

0

0

Sudan

13

4

8

Haiti

7

1

2

Table 6.4 Selected Countries Cited – US Newspapers Not surprisingly, the United States was the country cited most often by the three newspapers (3,016 citations), followed by Iraq (452), the United Kingdom (396), and France (322). If the United States was cited in 68 per cent of the newspapers’ articles, the countries of Africa (5.8%) and South America (2.8%) received scant coverage.

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If news, not surprisingly, was the single largest topic of articles in all three newspapers, sports was second across the board, accounting for 15.7 per cent of articles in the New York Times, 32.6 per cent in the Chicago Tribune, and 23.5 per cent in the Los Angeles Times. In international coverage, too, sports was clearly the No. 2 topic, accounting for 19.8 per cent of international stories in the New York Times, 36.4 per cent in the Chicago Tribune, and 27.6 per cent in the Los Angeles Times. News and sports together made up 85.7 per cent of international coverage in the New York Times, 94.3 per cent in the Chicago Tribune, and 79.7 per cent in the Los Angeles Times. Sports, in fact, frequently overshadowed news coverage from specific countries. For example, 31 of 75 New York Times stories filed from the U.K. were sports, as were 21 of 46 from France, 11 of 22 from Canada, and three of five from Mexico. In the Chicago Tribune, 13 of 20 stories filed from the U.K. were sports, as were six of eight from France, six of seven from Canada, and all three from Germany. In the Los Angeles Times, 18 of 32 stories filed from the U.K. were sports items, as were 18 of 24 from France, six of seven from Canada, and eight of 10 from Switzerland. Sports was the topic of all five stories in which Monaco and Belarus were cited by the three newspapers, all three in which Kazakhstan was cited, and three of five stories in which Latvia and Slovenia were cited. These results suggest that instead of building international bridges, these online newspapers in effect portion off the world, clearly demarcating relatively few places, peoples, and topics of interest, rendering the better part of the globe largely irrelevant. They map out a very conventional and conservative notion of community in their coverage, clearly privileging stories about the United States as a whole and their respective home states. This reveals a number of assumptions on the part of these newspapers: that they perceive their audiences as predominantly local or regional, drawn from the same pool of readers who buy the hard-copy versions of these newspapers; that they believe their audiences are primarily interested in local news, news from the national capital, and sports; that they imagine their audiences’ interest in foreign affairs to be negligible, particularly when it comes to news from beyond Western Europe, and especially from the continents of Africa and South America; and that they believe their audiences have a great appetite for sports coverage. Their news maps are further circumscribed in terms of the kinds of news provided; news and sports coverage predominated, accounting for more than 75 per cent of stories overall and more than 85 per cent of international coverage. Consequently, their business, arts and entertainment, and lifestyles sections contained few foreign stories. This is surprising when we consider the global interconnectedness of the American economy in general, and the U.S. arts and entertainment industries in particular. In our study of The Times of London, Libération, and Ha’aretz, similarly, the majority of stories were filed from the home country, ranging from a low of 68.4 per cent of filings in Libération to a high of 92.7 per cent in The Times. The United States was the second most-popular origin of stories, accounting for 5.7 per cent of the total. Overall, the three newspapers carried articles from 67 places in the world,

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but fewer than one per cent came from the continents of Africa (0.6 per cent of the total) and South America (0.2 per cent). Even large, politically powerful countries like Russia (13 articles) and China (8) generated relatively few placelines.

Table 6.5 International Filing Origins – International Newspapers Consistent with the Canadian and U.S. studies, domestic filings predominated in The Times (92.7%), Libération (68.4%), and Ha’aretz (89.4%). The United States was the second-most frequent origin of stories (5.7%).

The three sites, however, mentioned 180 places at least once, meaning their coverage was more extensive than the placeline totals would suggest. For example, one in 10 stories (10.6 per cent) cited an African country, at least in passing, and South American countries were cited in 3.6 per cent of articles. After the home country (1,547 citations), the top five foreign places cited were the United States (852 citations), France (790), Israel (664), and Germany (281). News was the principal topic in all three newspapers, accounting for 43.2 per cent of the total, but sports stories predominated in certain instances. Of the 59 stories that cited South Africa in The Times, 31 concerned sports, and because France was competing in the Euro 2004 soccer tournament in Portugal, 21 of the 22 Libération articles citing Portugal were sports stories. Country

Times

Libération

Ha’aretz

United Kingdom

1399

82

66

France

261

449

75

Israel

39

27

598

United States

468

198

186

Iraq

131

61

51

Table 6.6 Selected Countries Cited – International Newspapers The home country was cited most often by all three newspapers, while the United States was the foreign country accounting for the most mentions: 852 times, or 23.4 per cent of the total 3,647 stories.

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If the maps these newspapers drew remained highly circumscribed, there were some distinctions that may indicate they were developing distinct strategies for their on-line presence. Libération, for example, appeared to be far more extroverted in its coverage, providing stories filed from 53 places around the world, even if these stories were provided primarily by wire services and Libération’s map offered still a very partial picture of the world. If we consider the countries cited by all three newspapers, the home country and the United States were clearly predominant, and there was a clear predominance of citations from countries of economic and political power. If Libération and Ha’aretz relied on the international news wires for foreign coverage, The Times counted on staff for two-thirds (67.3 per cent) of its foreign news dispatches. The source variable is a question of journalistic voice, of the extent to which a newspaper wishes to put its own particular stamp on its news coverage, to assert its own voice and style for an audience accustomed to that voice. It may also be a question of audience address. If it can be argued that staff stories are tailored for a particular and identifiable news audience, wire stories are intended for far more universal reception, and may thus be more digestible or comprehensible to more audiences. Normally, sites with a high percentage of staff content are praised for their originality and sites with a predominance of wire copy are criticized for serving simply as repeater stations. Here, however, wire copy, because of the accessible style in which it is written, may signal a news site’s intention to be more extroverted, more inclusive of non-national readers. This may suggest, therefore, that The Times, with its high degree of staff-produced content, is targeting a domestic audience and that Libération, with its high degree of wire content, is less confined to a local readership. Finally, the emphasis Ha’aretz placed on regional coverage – 89.4 per cent of its articles were filed from Israel and Israel was cited in 84.7 per cent of its stories – may suggest the newspaper is exploiting quite strategically its location and expertise to attract audiences with a keen interest in Middle East politics, carving out for itself a coverage niche. CONCLUSION As noted above, these studies were conducted in the very early days of on-line news, within the first decade of the existence of the World Wide Web and prior to the emergence of the mobile applications commonplace today. These newspapers may have been early entrants into on-line publishing, but they were still experimenting with how best to utilize their Web sites, how to achieve economic viability with their digital activities without hurting their print publications, and how to confront increasing competition from all the other news providers establishing a Web presence – a struggle of imagination, ambition, and economics that remains ongoing and existential for many. Nonetheless, these news-flow studies illustrate the ways in which news organizations draw maps of the world through their coverage. Clearly, how any news

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organization draws its news map is much more than a question of available communications technology. If digitalization offers new possibilities, that potential must be weighed against all of the other factors shaping news judgment and the economically viable production and circulation of news packages. As discussed in Chapter 1, James Carey (1998) provided us with a very early reminder that the “new media ecology” of the Internet was strictly infrastructural and that a new imagining and articulation of community on a global scale would require in addition the kind of cultural work – in this case, journalism – this book has been addressing. With respect to news judgment, the news-flow studies summarized here point to the persistence of proximity as a news value, defined, after Melvin Mencher (2006), as physical, cultural, and emotional closeness. Physical closeness explains the kind of regional coverage we saw in our discussion of the community newspapers in Chapter 4; these newspapers privileged, and built their franchises upon, news about the people, institutions, and events within the physical confines of the community they demarcated in eastern Ontario and south-western Quebec. Cultural and emotional closeness were the news values best explaining the Montreal daily newspapers’ extensive coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake examined in Chapter 5; if it can be argued that natural disasters frequently stimulate news coverage on the basis of emotional proximity – tragic events with human costs to which we can all relate –, cultural proximity adds a further dimension in that the victims of the tragedy are deemed to be people like us. This sense of proximity is, of course, highly subjective, a product of the decisions by journalists about what is newsworthy, to what extent it is newsworthy, and why. Who and what do their readers feel closest to? If it is easy to understand cultural and emotional proximity as subjective evaluations – on what basis some people are perceived as ‘like us’ and others are not, and in which circumstances –, physical proximity as a news value is similarly subjective, as is evidenced by the lack of coverage of neighbouring countries like Canada and Mexico in our study of the three U.S. newspapers, or the spotty coverage of smaller provinces like Manitoba and New Brunswick in our study of Canada’s national newspapers. Reporters and editors exercise news judgment on one level, assessing particular stories on a daily basis, news judgment at ground level, if you will. But there is another level of news judgment, that which is exercised by publishers – whether the publisher is an individual or an executive board – who determine the news organization’s overall mandate. What kind of news will we provide, to whom, and what is our economic model? These are the kinds of questions that differentiate news organizations, determine the news topics they emphasize, the resources they assign to their newsrooms – and their geographical purview. As discussed in Chapter 1, the geography, or news zone, of any newspaper is governed by a type of triangulation, in which the map the news organization draws is bounded by the spatial relationship delineated by three interacting points: the news content (determined by the newspaper’s particular editorial goals and conventional values of newsworthiness), the target audience (determined by its specific marketing strategy), and the advertisers interested in paying for access to that audience. This map is a construct and the points in the triangle can be shifted, slightly or grea-

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tly, to reflect the territorial, demographic, and/or economic ambitions of the news organization. The scale of this common ground is suggested in the very categorization of community, metropolitan, regional, and national newspapers. Electronic publishing offers newspapers the potential to expand their geographical purview, and further, allows a newspaper to differentiate its hard-copy and on-line versions. There are, of course, significant limiting factors to this potential expansion as well: the necessary newsroom resources to provide adequate regional, national, and/or international news coverage, the ability to interest advertisers in more remote audiences, and much more competition in both the areas of reporting and advertising because on-line publishing brings newspapers into competition with every other news organization on-line, including radio and television networks, digital start-ups, and the world’s best-known news brands from every platform. There is another understanding of news value: the commercial value of particular news audiences. And the newspapers we have been studying are all commercial properties. This points to the fact that specific topics, like sports, and news from the world’s centres of political and economic power, may be most conducive to international news flows and most appealing to the kinds of audiences most attractive to advertisers. If not all news stories can be said to have equal value, neither do all news consumers (see Hamilton 2004). Every news organization has to determine its own triangulation, whether it is feasible to take on the world or whether it is best to specialize, whether by topic or by region. It seems clear that the news organizations best positioned to adopt a more expansive geographical reach are the well-resourced marquee players like the New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN, or Al Jazeera. It appears equally clear that the smaller players need to specialize, to determine what kind of coverage they can provide that rivals can’t equal and define themselves on that basis. The wild card in all of this, of course, is the ever-evolving mediascape: our changing, even promiscuous, news consumption habits (cf. Sheller 2014); the proliferation of new, digital-only news organizations; social media sites distributing news reports from the full gamut of news and information providers; and the shifting economics that all of these changes portend. If we are less reliant on, and faithful to, traditional news providers, what will this mean for the news maps we will be presented with? What kinds of maps will be drawn by news aggregators and social media sites? Will they be any more inclusive or comprehensive than those provided by the news organizations studied by news-flow researchers? Or – and this is seeming more likely each day – will it be increasingly up to us to formulate our own maps, by using the digital media resources available to us to seek out the stories that will allow us to fill in the blank spaces on the global news map?

CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION: THE POWER OF THE PRESS [T]he power of media representations lies in the creation of a certain environment of images, narratives and sensations that become the resources that shape what we know and get to know about the world. (Orgad 2012, 41)

If we can acknowledge at this point that the news media play a role in providing us with maps of our world, with journalistic cartographies, these daily, textual renderings of who and what constitutes the communities we live in, and how our communities are situated within the larger world, the question that remains is, why this matters. The ‘so what?’ question, if you will. After all, I insisted in Chapters 1 and 2 that journalism does not provide us with a faithful mirror image of our material and social worlds, but rather that it frames actuality, that the practice is an act of selecting in what is deemed newsworthy and selecting out what is not, a necessarily partial rendering of life as it unfolds. Journalism’s purpose is to provide us with the news, not an encyclopedic synopsis of everything, everyone, and everywhere. By definition, what is newsworthy is not society’s routine quotidian occurrences, but the exceptional, the impactful, the surprising, the unusual, the tragic, the novel. The news media, I argued, provide us with representations – constructed and meaningful depictions – rather than faithful reproductions. But even if journalism’s purpose is not to hold up a mirror to our world, but instead to highlight that which journalists judge to be most significant, important, relevant, and consequential to an imagined news audience, we need to recognize the power in their representations, the symbolic power in the maps that journalists produce. Robert Gutsche and Kristy Hess (2019) define symbolic power as “the often-unquestioned ability of certain legitimate agents in society to construct reality about places that either matter to us or which we only come to understand through mediated representations” (38). It is a power that emanates, first of all, from the fact that our connections to our dynamic and complex world are highly mediated; it is largely through media – all media, and not just journalism – that we come to know our world, that we form, in the words of the philosopher Charles Taylor, our “social imaginaries.” Taylor defines social imaginaries as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (2000, 23). The social imaginary is produced through legends, images, and stories, often transmitted through media. Our social imaginary is important, Taylor argues, because it “constitutes a horizon we are virtually incapable of thinking beyond” (185). Such “imaginative power,” Gutsche and Hess (2019) add, “serves as the power to ima-

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gine what we cannot see, to create ideas and perceptions that are entirely unreal, and to imagine the authority assigned to meanings of dominant ideologies” (47). Among media, the news media play a particular role, and assume a certain authority, a certain legitimacy, as reporters and interpreters of actuality, asserting themselves as factual story-tellers, intermediaries between us as citizens and society’s political, economic, and cultural spheres. They exercise power in delineating and patrolling the borders between here and there, us and them, and the values and behaviours we perceive as proper and improper, normal and not normal. Roger Silverstone, in fact, describes media work as “boundary work,” both on the macro level of articulating “the boundaries of national and linguistic cultures,” and on the micro level, “work which involves the continuous inscriptions of difference in any and every media text or discourse” (2007, 19). Hess and Gutsche (2018) write: “Journalistic boundary work helps to explore the role of journalism in shaping centre-periphery relations, and the patrolling, maintenance, and changing performative nature of journalism in constructing socially constructed boundaries” (489; see also Gutsche 2011). News media power, in other words, is two-fold. On the one hand, it is the power of selection, one of inclusion and exclusion, exposure, and suppression. On the other hand, it is the power of categorization, which entails classification, definition, and appraisal. This power is exercised in every choice of what to cover – what is news, what is not news – and in every decision about how to cover – how to frame, how to define, how to evaluate – what journalists deem to be newsworthy. This power becomes particularly acute in the repetitions, in the patterns these selections and categorizations produce over time. It is enhanced further by the editorial and distributive capacities of the respective news organizations themselves – which news organizations have the strongest and most influential voices – and the corresponding influence they may bring to bear on us as individuals, and on society’s leaders and decision-makers. NEWS AS AN INFORMATION SYSTEM News stories contain information; they inform. This information is asserted as factual and emanating from reliable sources, raising awareness of what journalists consider to be the most important and relevant issues, events, people, and ideas in any given community. Much of that information is political, lending credence to the idea that a vigorous and independent journalism is essential to democracy. If people still join political parties and attend meetings and rallies, the vast majority engages with politics through media. That is where we get a sense of what the issues are, where we are introduced to the most viable options for addressing those issues, who the opinion leaders and political leaders are, and where they stand. The news media, in other words, provide the forum where much of our political activity takes place. The power of setting the political news agenda is shared, of course, with politicians and their pollsters and communications staff, but the result is that some issues make it onto the news agenda and others are omitted. To cite a simple example, eco-

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nomic concerns – job creation, taxes, government budgets, investment, trade – occupy a significant place on this agenda, while topics like working conditions and the environmental impacts of the economy are typically granted much less space, rendering them less important. Beyond simply reporting political activities, news stories and analyses also communicate political values; they provide instruction about our society’s larger belief system, about the ideals reflected through our constitutional history and how those ideals square with proposals addressing current issues. Governance, in Western democracies at least, is expected to be, above all else, democratic, to respect the will of the people, to serve the broad public interest. Journalism has assumed the role of holding governments, parties, and individual politicians and public employees to account. Specific policy proposals and government decisions are weighed against common standards of responsibility, transparency, justice, and equity, and whether or not they reflect more particular values of individual freedom, independence, and social mobility. Reports about political scandals are fodder for news coverage precisely because they foreground social values, setting clear boundaries between proper and improper conduct. News media provide essential ground for political debates when conventional values or attitudes or standards evolve. For example, when Canadian society wrestles with legalizing marijuana use, with legalizing assisted dying, with enshrining in legislation the rights of the transgendered, with permitting the sale of beer and wine in grocery stores, news stories about these matters contain basic, factual information as well as wide-ranging assessments of the pros and cons. Such debate can continue for years as the costs, the benefits, and the ethics are weighed, and the practicalities of what can sometimes be quite radical social change are considered. Coverage of these debates often brings social values into conflict, such as individual rights vs. collective rights. The values expressed in political coverage – those that are endorsed as well as those that are spurned – help to distinguish one political community from another, to provide a community with its particular political identity. Political coverage of other jurisdictions is typically informed by this same value assessment, comparing and contrasting their form of governance with ours, their political values with ours, either implicitly or explicitly. The conclusion is often: they are not like us. And further, our values are somehow preferable to theirs. We need only to think about how stories in Canadian news media are framed when they address, for example, the treatment of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe, the Chinese government’s regulation and surveillance of Internet activities, or gun laws in the United States, to see that they contain value judgments. Not only are we presented with factual who, what, when, and where information, but the how and why elements of the story typically contain appraisals of these governments, their policies, and the cultural values they reflect, weighed against our own standards of propriety. News stories contain economic information. They tell us about the state of our economy, what its key components are, what factors influence our economic wellbeing, and they identify its various actors: politicians, corporations, individual ent-

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repreneurs and investors, unions and their leaders, occasionally individual workers. They situate what is considered to be our local or national economy within the larger world economy, again drawing connections and partitions. At the macro-economic level, we are presented with information about interest rates, inflation levels, unemployment rates, trade balances, debt levels, and the gross domestic product. Stories about micro-economics speak to us on a more personal level, providing information about household debt levels, personal finance, what to look for in major purchases, whether it is best to rent an apartment or buy a home, how to find a job and where to look, etc. As with political coverage, economic reporting endorses certain values about the economy at large and our place in it. With respect to the economic system as a whole, news stories in Canadian media generally support the core tenets of a capitalist economy, such as private enterprise, economic growth, and competition. Economic policy stories tend to favour innovation, efficiency, productivity, liberalized trade, balanced budgets, and notions of progress. They treat positively some forms of public investment, but can often cast government regulation as unnecessary interference in the economy. They recycle clichés about the efficiency of the private sector and the inefficient, bureaucratic public sector. Often, news stories are precisely about a conflict in these values; how, for example, international trade agreements may affect certain industries, or wages for workers, or costs to consumers, or environmental and safety standards. Stories that address us as workers tend to endorse the values of education, skills training, workplace safety, adaptation to changing employment patterns and work environments, and, most of all, hard, honest labour. Those that speak to us as citizens acting within the economy support consumption, home ownership, wealth accumulation, and, at the same time, personal financial responsibility: saving and investing for retirement, maintaining manageable debt loads, etc. Again, the news media provide a forum for occasions when these values may conflict, or change, when, for example, workplaces shift to flexible and precarious employment patterns, when home ownership in major cities becomes unaffordable. News stories about economics help to demarcate a given community’s distinct economy and its economic values. They identify the central actors, central activities, and the values those actors and activities are encouraged to express. If Canada’s economy, for example, has been largely based in natural resource extraction, news coverage tells us how areas of our country are differentiated by their reliance on different resources, how those resources are processed, where they are exported, how many and what kinds of jobs they produce, how their development squares with environmental concerns, how government economic policies affect regional economies, etc. We learn that other jurisdictions are dedicated to manufacturing or financial services or cultural production or the development of advanced technologies. The stories, in other words, carve out an economic map of Canada. Stories about the economies of other countries and our trade relations with them can produce both a sense of difference and a sense of interdependence, reinforcing or dissolving boundaries between our economy and the larger global economy. Coverage of international trade agreements provides a good example. Stories

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that present such agreements as favourable emphasize notions of partnership, mutual benefit, and interdependency. Stories critical of international trade agreements can foreground threats of job loss or diminishing regulatory standards of workplace safety or environmental protection. News stories also contain cultural information, and here I mean culture in the broadest sense. If the arts and entertainment sections of the news tell us about some of the finer expressions of our artists and performers in books and plays and movies and music, expressions that can particularize ‘us’ and ‘here,’ stories across the news spectrum inform us about our culture as our way of life, our belief systems, our values, norms, and aspirations. Again, these stories construct an ‘us’ and a ‘here,’ distinct from others and other places, either subtly or explicitly. In this case, I would argue, the arts and entertainment sections of the news, at least in Canada’s English-language media, treat U.S. popular culture – especially movies, TV programs, and music – as our popular culture, even as universal, for all intents and purposes erasing borders. When Canadians go to the movies, they go to Hollywood movies, many of which are made with the participation of Canadians; Canadian cinema – again, at least for anglophone Canadians – is a marginal cinema, largely relegated to art-house theatres and the film festival circuit (see Gasher et al. 2020, 208–215). Canadian television and popular music, on the other hand, are protected and partly funded through government regulation, going some way to integrate these art forms within larger international circuits of commercial production and circulation. Arts and entertainment coverage, then, draws a world map in which Canada and many other countries in the world – if they appear at all – are satellites orbiting the powerhouse United States. The sports news provides one site where particular cultural values are plainly asserted. Because sports reporting in the mainstream media is predominantly about elite commercial sport, the reporting typically values determination, persistence, hard work, teamwork, creativity, physical and mental strength and toughness, personal sacrifice, and personal responsibility. Such coverage, however, defines sport as competitive, rather than recreational, and sets the goal of sport as winning, rather than participation or sociality or physical fitness. Sport is presented as extreme sport, primarily a male bastion, a business rather than a pastime, and winning means winning at all costs. It is also a site for expressions of nationalism. If these expressions can be subtle, as in news stories highlighting performances by Canadians participating in professional leagues or international competitions, they become quite explicit when athletes don their countries’ colours and compete against athletes from other countries in an Olympic Games or a World Cup. Here, the reportage often attributes to individual athletes and teams stereotypical characteristics of the country at large. Articles throughout the various news sections similarly promote cultural values. I have argued elsewhere (Gasher 2017) that Canadian news coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis, for example, framed Canada as a distinct and particularly welcoming and hospitable destination for Syrian refugees, tying the Canadian government’s response as essentially Canadian, distinguishing Canada from numerous other countries that were either reluctant to accept refugees or were downright hostile.

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Whether or not we accept this reporting as accurate, it nonetheless depicted Canada as happily multicultural, a hospitality the coverage tied to Canadians’ very nature. The conveyance and endorsement of values in the news, whether political, economic, or cultural values, is one reason why the emphasis on a handful of places in the world, and the virtual absence of so many others, as addressed in Chapter 6, is so important. When we are exposed primarily to the values and norms of those news-dominant peoples and cultures, we can come to naturalize and normalize those values, remaining blind to other ways of being and unexposed to other ways of thinking. This applies as much to absences in domestic coverage – in the case of Canada’s major news organizations, for instance, a paucity of news about rural areas, smaller provinces, the northern territories – as to the voids in international news flows – e.g., the entire continents of Africa and South America. We may acknowledge and accept, in an abstract way, that people have different values, but when we are not often exposed to those values, those different ways of thinking about and responding to political, economic, and social challenges, they can be perceived as alien to us, reinforcing divisions between us and them, particularly if the news coverage treats them that way. This is an example of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed “symbolic violence,” in which groups of people are either excluded entirely from our representations or they are rendered somehow illegitimate (see Gutsche and Hess 2019, 42). In Canada, for example, where we value the separation of church and state in governance and believe in individuals’ religious freedom, we make look askance at countries that either ban religious practices outright or, on the contrary, adopt central tenets of a particular faith as public policy. We may disapprove of arranged marriage, in spite of our own elevated divorce rates. We may be critical of large, extended families sharing the same house, while at the same time lamenting our own treatment of elderly relatives. When we do confront these distinct values and norms, our reflex can be to reject them before we’ve even had a chance to think them through, particularly if the news coverage shrouds them in dismissive or critical language. Some of these values, certainly, may be quite contrary to our own and may be well worth rejecting, such as institutionalized forms of discrimination: denying education to girls, criminalizing homosexuality, racial segregation, etc. In every case, though, news coverage helps to erect, reinforce, or dissolve the boundaries between the peoples and places on its news map based on its treatment of political values. Oftentimes, though, the distinctions are more subtle and may simply be variations on our own values. Both Canada and the United States, for example, share many values, but only up to a point. Both countries have market economies, and both countries’ governments intervene in the economy through regulations and subsidies, but Canadians tend to value public enterprise more readily than Americans do. Both Canada and the United States value free speech and freedom of the news media, but the U.S. interpretation of these values is more absolute than our own. Distinctions can occur on a domestic level as well. News media can construct others within our own communities by subtlely or more blatantly disapproving of the way they dress, the foods they eat or don’t eat, the music they listen to, etc.

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In every instance, the news media’s powers of selection and categorization come into play. Some political, economic, and cultural subjects are highlighted, some are downplayed, others are ignored. Some perspectives are privileged, others downplayed, others still disparaged or excluded completely. MAKING MEANING If news stories contain information, they always at the same time attribute meaning. The first meaning they attribute, as I noted in Chapter 2, is newsworthiness. If a story is reported, the underlying assertion is that it is worthy of our attention, it is important and relevant somehow. And the story will tell us, either explicitly or implicitly, why the story matters. Stories that are not covered, if we are even aware of them at all, are, by definition, not important or relevant or worthy of our attention. In telling us why stories warrant coverage, the news media define newsworthiness itself, they define journalism itself, pointing to the news values journalists seek. Prominent people and prominent places, for instance, are considered more newsworthy than lesser-known people and places. Movie stars and rock stars, for example, often generate news coverage when they comment on political or environmental issues, even when their expertise in these areas may be limited or downright suspect. Journalists grant them a certain authority and a platform for their views based largely on their celebrity, privileging their views over those of lesser-known specialists who may be much better informed. Relatively insignificant occurrences in powerful countries like the United States overshadow serious issues in smaller places. While I was writing this section, for example, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that while the U.S. media were “obsessed” with the cancellation of the TV sitcom Roseanne, a report by Harvard researchers that estimated the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria was more than 70 times higher than the official count, was “met with relative silence” (see Vernon 2018). Other meanings are advanced through the facts the stories muster, the opinions expressed through the interviews the journalist solicits, or the statements made by spokespeople deemed authoritative and credible, how the tone of the story provides inflection to those facts and opinions, any images or graphics accompanying the story’s textual elements, and the overall presentation of the story: its prominence within the news package, the general topic it is assigned, its length, etc. In every instance, inclusions imply exclusions; what other facts and what other opinions could have been expressed, how else could this story be understood? If the only stories from African countries concern disasters or famines or coups or political corruption, then Africa can not only become defined in our social imaginaries as a place of disaster, but it becomes monolithic as well, its 54 countries treated as a single entity. If the only stories we see about Quebec in the news media concern French-English language issues, then Quebec becomes a place of constant linguistic friction. As I examined in Chapter 4, news coverage provides definition to notions of community, whether that community is a place or whether it is founded on a common interest or a shared identity based on ethnic background, race, nationality, gen-

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der, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Such coverage reveals criteria for belonging, implying both characteristics and values, establishing a boundary between the ingroup and the out-group, often based on a particular rendering of the community’s history. The borderlines drawn can be porous or rigid, they can be inferred or boldly demarcated, they can acknowledge and accept heterogeneity, or they can demand homogeneity. In every instance, news stories speak to a sense of who we are – what Hartley refers to as Wedom – and, in the case of communities with a physical base, a sense of location, an articulated notion of ‘here.’ The markers of inclusion/exclusion in audience address can be some combination of: the mode of expression, vocabulary, terminology, jargon, use of shorthand or acronyms, and insider references. The mode of expression employed may be respectful and contemplative, suggesting an open-mindedness toward the subject, or it might be cynical and dismissive, casting a critical eye. The vocabulary can be suggestive as well; are the bituminous sands of northern Alberta described as “tar sands,” subtlety suggesting their need for considerable processing, or “oil sands,” suggesting a more straightforward separation of the oil from the sand? The use of technical language and jargon can distinguish between in-group and out-group members; are stories about international trade agreements or the science behind climate change told in such a way that all citizens can understand, or do they address only those with specialized knowledge? Similarly, shorthand references – e.g., Tories, G7, millenials – and acronyms that are used without first spelling out the full name – NFB, CRA, CSIS, AI – are other forms of exclusive speech, as are insider references – e.g., to historical figures or events (Viola Desmond, Reginald Fessenden, the Quiet Revolution, D-Day), to popular culture (dubstep, grunge, 4K, ketogenic), to economic or political theories and theorists (Keynsianism, Marxism) – that separate those who ‘get it’ from those who don’t.1 FROM PERCEPTION TO ACTION News reports not only create the perceptions that shape our social imaginaries, but perhaps most importantly they can influence our behavior and the actions of governments, corporations, and other social institutions. News, in other words, informs decision-making, especially when patterns in the reportage emerge over time. On a strictly personal level, we can think about how health stories provide us with instruction about, for example, the use of sunscreen to prevent painful sunburn and, ultimately, the development of skin cancer, the use of insect repellent to prevent irritation and the spread of Lyme disease (from ticks) or West Nile Virus (from mosquitos), the advisability of receiving an annual flu vaccine, etc. With practical

1

When I first moved from Vancouver to Montreal and began reading both the English-language and French-language newspapers, I noticed their frequent use of acronyms. It took me some time to learn what they stood for, especially when the English and French acronyms were quite different: for example, the MUHC in English (McGill University Health Centre) is the CUSM in French (Centre universitaire de l’université McGill).

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advice supported by scientific data, such stories provide explicit guidance to personal behavior. Over the longer term, through repeated stories and images, the news can operate on a much more implicit level, communicating messages about, for example, body image: what we should look like, how we should dress. Health stories can also shape our views and behaviors when it comes to issues of broader import, such as Canada’s decision to legalize marijuana or provincial funding of the health-care system. News reportage can have an impact on how we, and our governments, respond to international affairs. Natural disasters provide the simplest example. If damage caused by flooding or a violent storm or an earthquake is attributed to strictly natural causes, we may be more inclined to act by donating money or materials than if the damages are blamed on some form of incompetence or corruption, particularly, as with the Haiti case described in Chapter 5, if the people directly impacted are cast as people like us, or connected to us in some way. Governments, too, can be pressured to respond when the news media draw sustained attention to a particular disastrous event. Similarly, news stories provide us with the information we require to make our minds up about a broad range of issues that not only affect us personally, but shape public opinion on matters that lead to action by governments, social agencies, even corporations. Climate change is one example of an issue that ties the personal to the political and situates us on a map of global scale.2 News reports provide us with information about the science behind climate change and the extent to which it is linked to human behavior, findings related to changes in average global temperatures, ocean and ice-pack levels, and what experts believe is needed to be done about it. These reports help us as individuals to form an opinion about climate change; some of us accept the science, some of us are more skeptical, others deny human involvement entirely. Our views can then shape our personal behaviors, from the extent to which we seek to alter our carbon footprint – recycling, composting, driving less, flying less, eating less meat, etc. – to our broader political activity, such as how we vote in elections. Politicians and other decision-makers see these news reports as well, come to their own views on the topic, and take stock of public opinion. Climate change, in other words, is a global and intensely local issue at the same time. News coverage prompts us to connect the dots between the grand scale – rising sea levels, increases in average temperatures, more frequent violent weather events – and more immediate, local manifestations. Where I live in rural Eastern Ontario, people have posted signs opposing a proposed wind farm and the use of farmland for solar-power projects; however they may feel about climate change and the need to develop alternative energy sources, they are voicing their objection to these particular responses. Other signs in the area oppose a request to rezone a parcel of agricultural land by a company seeking to build a cement plant. Local news 2

The news is not the only place where this occurs, of course. The advertising content that subsidizes the news can also tie personal consumption habits to climate change on a global level. Marketing products as green, for example, encourages the idea that consumers can make an environmental difference by purchasing particular products.

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coverage amplifies these issues and disseminates related information and analysis to a larger public audience. In this way, they become defining issues for the community, establishing the community’s stance on broader environmental and economic development questions. One of the challenges of climate change is that the issue itself occupies a global space, while the responses to it fall largely to actors – individual citizens, governments, corporations – within bordered states and whose purview for action may be subject to jurisdictional limitations. How news coverage of specific local environmental issues maps these issues will go some way to defining them, in some cases as confined local conflicts between regional economic development and some form of pollution, in other cases plotting them on a map of broader scale, establishing them as part of a regional, national, or global concern. Another example of a global issue in the news that ties the personal to the political and the global to the local is migration, the movement of people – whether asylum-seekers, documented immigrants, or workers required by particular industries – across borders. If some places are impacted more dramatically than others – e.g., European countries receiving asylum-seekers from Africa, the southern United States receiving asylum-seekers from Latin America – it is nonetheless a global phenomenon with implications for our own communities. The issue compels us as individuals to think precisely about the normalized distinctions between ‘them’ – the migrants – and ‘us’ as potential host communities. News coverage of migration can prompt discussion of history: who has occupied this place in the past, who were the founders of this community, how has the population of this community evolved over time? It can address economic issues: how will migration affect our economy, the employment picture, wages, rental rates, and housing prices? Often, the coverage delves into cultural matters: what may change for our community’s values, its traditions, its practices? The map of migration can be localized, as when seasonal migrations occur in resort towns like Whistler, British Columbia or Banff, Alberta, or in the orchards and vineyards of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley and Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula. Similarly, migration can be an impactful story in resource towns like Fort McMurray, Alberta, when relatively sudden increases in the numbers of workers create stresses on community resources and services. Typically, the map of migration is drawn on a greater scale, addressing the arrival of international migrants to national communities, and often particular urban areas within those national communities. Here, stories concern politics (how governments are managing the arrivals), economics (employment rates, wage rates, rental rates, and housing prices), and culture (how migrants adapt to or alter our culture, adopt our ways, acknowledge our history, etc.). In every case, news coverage of migration draws attention to borders, providing them with definition, in some cases depicting them as barriers, providing strict separation between inside and outside, between us and them, and at other times representing borders as managed portals. If in these instances the borders are actual, concerning matters of state jurisdiction, the reportage also raises much less tangible borders: for instance, how we imagine our community. This is about who we feel

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belongs here, who we are and want to be, forms of acceptable behavior and belief, our community’s values, all of which raise questions of identity. Evidence that news coverage can be a catalyst for action can be found in the responses of individuals and governments to iconic news photographs and video footage. Among the most recent images to prompt individuals, governments, and relief agencies was the September, 2015 image of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy found drowned on a Turkish beach. The photo, taken by Nilufer Demir of the Dogan News Agency and distributed around the world, shows the little boy face down on the beach with a relief worker standing over him. He drowned, along with his mother and five-year-old brother, attempting to cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos in an inflatable boat, which capsized not far off shore (Time 100 nd). A study by American and Swedish researchers (Slovic et al. 2016; Cole 2017) indicated that donations to the Swedish Red Cross were 55 times greater the week after the photo appeared than the week previously, and that the number of monthly donors increased tenfold. The photograph appeared in the middle of a Canadian federal election and had government officials scrambling, particularly when initial news stories mistakenly reported that Kurdi’s family had been refused admission to Canada (see Wright 2018b). Immigration was a key theme of the election. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government at the time had vowed to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees; the subsequent Justin Trudeau Liberal government accepted more than 51,800. Immigration remains a hot topic as I write this. News images of asylum seekers trekking through frozen fields to cross the Canada-U.S. border during the winter of 2017 still resonate as Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels attempt to deal with the claims of more than 8,000 people who fear deportation from the United States (see Wright 2018a). The images, and their accompanying stories, have prompted considerable public and political debate, reflected in headlines describing them either as “illegal” or “irregular” border crossings. From the U.S. we are presented with heart-breaking images of children caged in detention centres across the southern states, separated from parents who face criminal charges for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The Department of Homeland Security is reported to have seized 1,995 children from their parents during a six-week period in April-May, 2018 (see Davis 2018). Again, the dramatic images have been a focal point of political debate as the Trump administration scrambles to reunite the children with their parents, many of whom have already been deported (see Dickerson et al. 2018). RE-IMAGINING WEDOM Because news maps emerge over long periods of time and their spatial patterns are frequently reinforced, re-drawing them, and modifying our social imaginaries, entails a long and complicated process. I believe, however, that it is a necessary process to bring our thinking, our imaginations, in line with the 21st-century world.

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We live in a globalizing world, a world more closely integrated than in any previous historical period, bringing peoples and places into more frequent contact, whether that contact is economic, political, cultural, or social, involving everything from multilateral trade agreements and multinational corporations to climate change, the spread of disease, and international terrorism. As individuals, globalization means our workplaces are tied into cross-border networks, we shop for goods and services from various parts of the world, and we live in communities where people speak different languages, wear different clothes, come from other places, and have different histories. The sociologist Ulrich Beck sees the current era as one of “reflexive modernity” in which “national borders and differences are dissolving.” He believes the “national outlook” whereby nation-states create and control society as a “container” needs to be replaced by a “cosmopolitan outlook” (2008, 2–3). In this “second modernity” we are living through, “cultural ties, loyalties and identities have expanded beyond national borders and systems of control” (6–7). He writes: … the cosmopolitan outlook means that, in a world of global crises and dangers produced by civilization, the old differentiations between internal and external, national and international, us and them, lose their validity and a new cosmopolitan realism becomes essential to survival (14).

Beck’s cosmopolitan outlook requires that an inclusive form of both/and thinking replaces exclusive either/or logic, an outlook “in which people view themselves simultaneously as part of a threatened world and as part of their local situations and histories” (48). The media play a significant role in this transformation. Beck argues: The more television, mobile phones and the internet become taken-for-granted parts of the trappings of daily life, the more the private sphere becomes an illusion because it is being drawn into processes of inner globalization. Domestic information technology partially overcomes the limits of space, time, place, nearness and distance. It makes those who are absent constantly present (103).

He refers to “a great new migration, the migration and mingling of peoples through communications media” (112). This recalls the prescient observation by James Carey, discussed in Chapter 1, that the international communication system we call the Internet – and which now incorporates all of our digital communication technologies – is displacing the national, analog system that emerged at the end of the 19th century. Beck’s cosmopolitan vision is one attempt to sketch out what Carey insists is a requisite cultural complement to the new media ecology that has emerged in the digital era. Media scholar Peter Berglez proposes “global journalism” as another cultural intervention that speaks to the themes of this book, positing global journalism as “a necessary discursive infrastructure” for the expansion of a “global consciousness” (2013, 13). Berglez maintains that journalism “is not in sync with the globalizing development of society” (xvi). “My idea is that global journalism is mainly based on global outlooks,” outlooks whereby journalists demonstrate “how society is embedded in global processes.” The key question global journalism asks is, “In what

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ways and to what extent does news journalism shed light on the interconnectedness of social reality?” (2). Berglez distinguishes foreign reporting from global journalism. “Foreign journalism concentrates on covering distant events, while global journalism focuses on interrelating distant events across the world as well as on combining domestic and foreign processes” (11). The idea is “to report the world globally” (15). If Ulrich Beck imagines a world in which we live both locally and globally, Peter Berglez advocates a corresponding revision of our news maps. What does this mean in practice? Borders, both material and imaginative, remain real, but they are constructions, how they are drawn has shifted over time, and what they actually mean continues to evolve. Our news maps need to acknowledge this. With respect to news topics like climate change and the spread of infectious disease, material borders are relevant only in that they assign responsibility for addressing their causes and dealing with their effects; otherwise, climate and disease know no material borders. This is one area where I would argue that news reporting has moved toward Berglez’s global journalism approach, situating local environmental and health stories within a broader frame. The tension in these stories is created precisely in the conflict between local and global interests, often expressed as the localized costs of taxation and pricing against the collective costs to the environment or human health. For example, a story about the new Ontario government’s move to cancel the province’s cap-and-trade program pits the dollar costs of the program to Ontario consumers and businesses against the global effort to encourage a shift to cleaner, alternative energy sources (see McCarthy 2018). Here, I maintain, there is clear recognition in the news coverage that Ontario is simply one player in a collective struggle implicating political jurisdictions the world over. The coverage situates Ontario, and Ontarians, on a global map. On the other hand, news stories on the topic of migration continue to draw borders as somewhat rigid containers of national cultures. Largely ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Canadian families migrated from other countries to the places we now call home, headlines continue to draw on the menacing flood metaphor and represent migrants as potential threats to what is often idealized as ‘our’ way of life, whether the threat is economic, political, cultural, religious, even criminal. If mainstream news coverage often mocks U.S President Donald Trump for his brusque characterizations of asylum-seekers and is highly critical of the worst excesses in the treatment of migrants wherever those excesses occur, migration is nonetheless treated as a problem – for us, former migrants, now settlers – rather than a solution – for them, migrants seeking safe haven from often horrific circumstances. THE QUESTION OF AGENCY None of what I have argued up to this point is meant to suggest that we as consumers of news reports do not have agency. It has long been a central tenet of communication theory that communications are not determinant; if they assert and

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privilege particular meanings, those meanings remain subject to the interpretive capacities of audience members, who may filter those communications through other communications they have been exposed to as well as their own life experience. In other words, if messages are encoded by their producers, they are subsequently decoded by their receivers (see Hall 1993).3 This agency has only been compounded by the digitalization of media, which has enabled a mind-boggling proliferation of news providers on a continuum ranging from professional journalists to individual, engaged citizens. Journalism no longer functions as a pipeline through which established news organizations exercise a virtual monopoly over the production and distribution of reporting and commentary on current events. Instead, the practice has become part of a vast network of information producers and disseminators. If what we might call professional journalism – i.e., original reporting produced by paid journalists working for reputable news organizations – continues to evolve by developing new forms of storytelling (i.e., citizen journalism, peace journalism, global journalism, public or civic journalism, advocacy journalism, data journalism, etc.), it is disseminated within a continually expanding, web-like network of information providers which includes ordinary citizens, hobbyists, bloggers with specialized expertise, community groups, advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, governments, and affiliated governmental agencies (cf. Dahlgren 2013; Anderson 2013; Anderson et al. 2012; Sheller 2014; Archetti 2014; Benkler 2011; Clark and Van Slyke 2011). These developments have not only changed the way journalism is practised, it has altered fundamentally the ways in which consumers satisfy their needs for information and analysis. No longer confined to the pre-packaged news digests proferred by a limited number of local newspapers, and radio and television newscasts, they can draw upon whatever sources they prefer from the network described above, on whatever platform(s) they choose, whenever and wherever they choose (see Peters 2012). News consumers, thereby, can construct their own maps, their own cartographies. If the examples and case studies cited in this book have been drawn from legacy news organizations, simply for the purpose of illustrating how news maps are drawn, we are no longer beholden to these prefabricated news packages; we have a virtually limitless number of sources we can draw upon to compose our own news worlds. The onus, of course, is on news consumers to make the effort to overcome the agenda-setting of the most influential mainstream news organizations, to venture beyond the filter bubbles of our social media feeds, and, just as importantly, to have the necessary degree of curiosity, even intellectual courage, to engage with the people, places, institutions, and perspectives beyond our usual comfort zones (cf. Gutsche and Hess 2019, 89–93). As I stated in the introductory chapter, I hope that in positing journalism as a practice of cartography, I will encourage readers to recognize the ways in which news reports sketch their maps, define community for us, and situate us within 3

There is, of course, an immense body of literature on the subject of how communications make meaning. For a summary, see Gasher et al. 2020, Chapter 4.

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those communities and the world. I hope readers will think about the constructed nature of these news maps and consider the ways in which alternative renditions might situate them differently. Further, I hope that journalists will come to the same recognition and reflect upon the spatial dimensions of their important practice. Through their words and their images, they are drawing the lines that construct our daily news maps and they possess considerable agency in determining the firmness of those lines and the scale of the maps they compose.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR A former newspaper reporter and editor, Mike Gasher is a professor emeritus in the Department of Journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the principal investigator of the Geography of News Research Project and co-author of the widely-used textbook Media and Communication in Canada (9th edition published in 2020 by Oxford University Press). He has previously published on cinema, public policy, political economy, and issues of media representation.

Chris Lukinbeal / Laura Sharp / Elisabeth Sommerlad / Anton Escher (ed.)

Media’s Mapping Impulse media geography at mainz – Volume 6 324 pages with 63 b/w illustrations and 9 tables 978-3-515-12424-9 softcoVer 978-3-515-12425-6 e-book

Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and through space and time. Media has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation of spaces in order to produce places of communication. Both media and cartography are never static, but instead, are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and remake how we understand and interact with our world. Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. Owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires geographical situatedness in which

and for which media can take place. Media’s Mapping Impulse is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the relationship between cartography, geospatial technologies, and locative media on the one hand, and new and traditional media forms such as social media, mobile apps, and film on the other. the editors Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Anton Escher and Elisabeth Sommerlad are part of the Media Geography at Mainz research group of the Institute of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg University and the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. For the last two decades this group has been at the forefront of the scholarly conversation that advance the linkages between media, space, self and society in our digitally interconnected world.

Please order here: [email protected]

This book adopts a unique perspective on journalism by considering it as a practice of cartography. Through every aspect of their work, journalists describe and define their community and situate that community within the larger world. With words, images, and sounds, journalists: sketch out the boundaries of community; define its values; identify key components of its political, economic, and cultural infrastructure; describe its constituents; position community with respect to neighbouring communities; highlight other constituencies with which this community has important ties; and relegate to the margins great portions of the rest

of the world. These news reports create mental maps for news audiences, cartographies of the imagination, from whatever news sources they draw upon. Because access to the world is highly mediated, it is largely through news reporting and commentary that we come to know that world. Thus, these maps of the news wield considerable symbolic power, feeding the social imaginary. News media power is two-fold. First, it is the power of selection, one of inclusion and exclusion, exposure and suppression. Second, it is the power of categorization, entailing classification, definition, and suppression.

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag

ISBN 978-3-515-12839-1

9 783515 128391