Covering Aboriginal issues on CBC
CBC News chief Tony Burman has an interesting article on his blog today about how the CBC covers First Nations issues.
Yesterday, the Ceeb brought 20 CBC Aboriginal journalists from across Canada (about half of the CBC’s total number) together with a number of reporters, producers and other CBC journalists who deal with Aboriginal issues as part of their job. A video shown at the meeting captured some recent highlights on CBC Television and CBC Radio.
This was a very difficult meeting to organize. There are no official records allowed about ‘who’ among CBC staff are Aboriginal — or from other ethnic backgrounds for that matter — so the invitation list was difficult to compile….
The CBC group was shown a new website being formally launched on June 21 to coincide with National Aboriginal Day. It’s called ‘CBC Aboriginal’ and can now be reached online as part of its ‘soft launch.’ Its goal is to pull together CBC’s extensive coverage of Aboriginal issues on Television, Newsworld, Radio and CBCNews.ca, and to provide accompanying history and background to the topical issues.
Burman’s blog post didn’t specifically ask for comments on the topic (though it is open to comments) so let me ask the question:
Do you think the CBC is doing a good enough job covering issues of Canada’s First Nations? How would you rank us compared to private broadcasters? Are we missing the boat on anything?
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The CBC does a pretty decent job covering everything. I for one, am hopeful that I will live to see the day when we get past peoples’ skin colour and mother tongue, and we start viewing eachother as humans and completely ignore culture. We have much more shared humanity than difference.
Until thern, where is http://www.cbc.ca/albino?
Dave
I came from multicultural Toronto to NWT, the population of which is 85% Aboriginal. I think that we (CBC North: Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Inuvik, Iqaluit) do a good job covering Native issues (Aboriginal, Inuit, Metis), which of course ya gotta do – it’s all around you.
And it’s not necessarily called “Aboriginal issues”, since when stuff happens, the people involved may be Aboriginal…or not. It’s just the daily news.
Current pipeline negotiations – mostly NWT. We have a crew of reporters in Inuvik for daily reports.
And…I’d like to see/hear many more Aboriginal/Inuit facse & voices up here, & across the country, to add to the many First Nations/Inuit languages CBC North already broadcasts in.
One People… 52 separate Languages- pretty well says it all for our First Nations People in the Family of Canadians. How many of these languages will disappear entirely is impossible to predict. I hope some- if not all- Aboriginal/Inuit Journalists get to use English as a second working language. We have miles to go and many promises to keep before we can all rest.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing as many First Nations languages as possible represented in CBC’s online coverage, as it is elsewhere in the service. I’m not a First National, but I believe the preservation of these languages matters.
My wife used to work for the CBC and she describes story pitch forms with check-boxes at the top – one for woman, one for native, one for disabled. If you could check all three boxes then the story would almost certainly be accepted. If you could not check any boxes then you had to pray. She was quite appalled at this semi-quota system and sees systems like this coloring the choices of news and other programming on the CBC.
“CBC Aboriginal” is an intriguing idea . . . but I’m wondering where it will live in the long run . . . will we have a tab for it on CBC.ca/news, just like we do for ‘World’ or ‘Health’ right now? And while we’re at it, why not a Women’s tab, and a tab for each significant minority? It could get out of hand pretty quickly.
Maybe this points to a need for a rethink around how we categorize news and other content — SHOULD we be building pigeonhole sites / channels? Or should we be focusing on bringing important aboriginal stories, women’s stories, ethnic interests stories to the ENTIRE Canadian populace? Seems to me this would be a hell of a lot better use of airtime than a weather forecast, for instance.
I think CBC does an excellent job covering Aboriginal issues, but I believe we can do even better. We can find out what our junior reporters, both Native and non-Native need to tell great stories like our more experienced reporters, as well as find the holes in our coverage that happen with any issue or group of people. I was happy that we had this meeting to brainstorm ways we can support our journalists to do the best job they can in telling stories about Native people, communities and their issues. And yes, in a perfect world I wish we didn’t have to encourage people to go outside their comfort zone and cover stories that aren’t about people who look, sound and think like they do, but, we are human and still have to be reminded to do this on occasion. Actually, I first heard about an unofficial quota system in a region at the meeting and wasn’t too pleased about it because I thought it might lead to less stories from the Aboriginal communities because the quota might have already been met that week. So your point makes me realize why we need meetings like this. Yes, stories should stand on their own merit.
I think CBC reporters and shows are light years ahead of the private networks when it comes to covering Native stories and people. But there are still a lot of stereotypes, assumptions and limitations in this country and unfortunately sometimes in our newsrooms that make many Native Canadians feel marginalized, wrongly judged, overlooked and underestimated. This one day conference was just one small effort to find ways for the CBC to continue its tradition of going where others dare not go, and make its aboriginal journalists not feel so isolated here at the Corp, which you’ve got to admit still has a way to go to reflect Canada’s diversity.
Nya-weh, in peace, Carla Robinson