‘Clearly there are stories we’re not telling’: Study seeks to improve diversity in news sources

2022/05/19 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the results, hopefully with some qualitative analysis of the differences in perspectives covered. One can see some of this shift occurring in the CBC:

For all the prodding, encouragement and reminders, progress to improve the diversity of voices in news stories seems frustratingly slow.

Now a project involving national news agency The Canadian Press and Carleton University’s School of Journalism is hoping to get a better understanding of who gets quoted, and provide a catalyst for change.

CP has teamed with the journalism school to “identify, track and analyze” the choice of interview subjects by its journalists. The goal is to track the diversity of individuals — or lack of, as a news release pointedly notes — based on gender, race and ethnicity and other equity-seeking groups.

Joanna Smith, CP’s Ottawa bureau chief, is the impetus behind the work. The goal, she emphasizes, is not simply to diversify sources. The goal is the better journalism that comes when news coverage is truly representative.

“Over and over again, we are returning to the same sources in TV and journalism, the same largely white, largely male, largely institution-based” people, Smith said. “The idea of broadening the diversity of our sources is really about telling bigger and better and different stories.” 

(Disclosure: Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, is a part owner of The Canadian Press).

Nana aba Duncan, who holds the Carty Chair in Journalism, Diversity and Inclusion Studies at the journalism school, said a journalist’s first choice for an interview is often someone they’ve worked with or someone they know. It’s likely that source is not from an under-represented group.

“Our first thought is what is the easiest and what is the quickest?” Duncan said. “Anything that has to do with change has to be intentional.”

That’s why research is vital to track who is being quoted — and who is being left out. “We absolutely have to do it or else it just doesn’t get done,” said Duncan, a former CBC broadcaster who is part of the project research team.

Duncan says it’s also important how those voices are framed and treated in the story. Are we engaging people for their expertise, such as economics or politics, or only for their race or gender? Where are these voices appearing in the story? Are they making the news or reacting to it?

“You may have an experience in which you are undermined or … your value is just not recognized. That has an effect,” she said. 

Professor Allan Thompson, the head of the journalism school, says the lack of diversity in news articles speaks to the “embedded bias” that exist in newsrooms and journalism.

To him, diversity is about fact-checking and accuracy. “Unless the sourcing reflects society, then it’s not accurate, even if all the words are verbatim,” Thompson said.

“We’re knitting some cloth that is the narrative of our society. If we’re only using one cross-section of voices, then clearly there are stories we’re not telling, there are perspectives on stories that we’re not capturing, and we’re just self-perpetuating our own version of a narrative,” he said.

Shari Graydon, director of Informed Opinions, has been working for years to get more women’s voices into news coverage. (The organization provides a searchable database of more than 2,200 women experts, so there’s no excuse for journalists to exclude them.)

Its online “Gender Gap Tracker” shows the percentage of female sources in online news coverage by major news outlets. It measures all stories, such as those filed by news agencies, rather than those written solely by an outlet’s own journalists alone. Over the last 12 months, sources quoted in stories on the Star’s website have been overwhelmingly male (74 per cent) versus female (26 per cent). 

Graydon said that a diversity of sources in news coverage is a hallmark of good journalism. “I really think awareness is not remotely enough,” she said, urging record-keeping as a precaution against the self-delusion one is doing better than they really are. 

Lasting change requires deliberate action. Journalists have control over the sources they choose to interview. As a start, they should review their last 10 stories. Who was quoted? Going forward, the objective is to cultivate more representative sources and track that work. 

Duncan emphasizes that media outlets must support such efforts. “It’s on the institution saying, ‘We care about this. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to spend money on caring about diversity and being intentional about it,’” she said.

This project, due to unfold over the coming months, promises to improve the diversity of sources used in CP articles, which would benefit all news organizations that rely on its coverage. I’m hopeful it will offer lessons all newsrooms can draw on.

Source: ‘Clearly there are stories we’re not telling’: Study seeks to improve diversity in news sources

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ICYMI: Insight Grant 2021 Birth Tourism and #Citizenship – Activist or Academic?

2022/01/22 Leave a comment

Some background of possible interest to this grant.

My initial 2018 analysis (Hospital Stats Show Birth Tourism Rising in Major Cities) provoked rebuttals from Jamie Lieu and Megan Gaucher.

While part of their arguments concerned my interpretation of the data (largely addressed given the sharp drop in visitor visas covered in my Birth Tourism in Canada Dropped Sharply Once the Pandemic Began), the bulk of their arguments were on policy grounds where we disagree.

Ironically, we had submitted a joint-proposal in 2019 for funding research looking at the policy issues, but were unsuccessful. It has now been successfully resurrected with the original researchers but without my “contrarian” presence and thus may well lack balance given the common perspective of the researchers.

Their concern that “proposed measures risk being driven by polarizing narratives about borders and citizenship rather than by evidence” is somewhat ironic as they contest the best evidence that we have regarding the likely numbers of birth tourists.

As a whole, the proposal reinforces critiques of universities and academics not having a diversity of views and perspectives in their work:

Birth tourist is a term used for non-resident mothers (NRMs) who come to Canada with the sole purpose of giving birth so that their child has a claim to Canadian birthright citizenship.

“They are accused of undermining Canada’s jus soli citizenship laws and subsequently labelled ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘system cheaters,’” says Megan Gaucher. “While both completely legal and statistically low, birth tourism continues to be identified by political parties as an issue in need of remedy.”

Gaucher, an associate professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, has been awarded a five-year $223,328 SSHRC Insight grant for the project, “Mapping the Discursive and Institutional Landscape of ‘Birth Tourism’ and its Perceived Attack on Canadian Birthright Citizenship.”

“Proposed measures have focused almost exclusively on refusing automatic citizenship to children born on Canadian soil unless one of the parents is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident,” says Gaucher. “Calls for legislative action however, remain reliant on an incomplete picture of the prevalence of and motivations for engaging in birth tourism, the socio-legal structures that facilitate it and the implications current political and public discourse present for NRMs.”

The project will provide the first comprehensive mapping of the state of birth tourism in Canada. Gaucher — along with team members Jamie Chai Yun Liew (University of Ottawa), Y.Y. Chen (University of Ottawa) and Amanda Cheong (University of British Columbia) — will conduct interviews with NRMs and their family members, birth tourism industry insiders, health care practitioners, government officials and local residents.

These interviews will be complemented by an analysis of pre-existing government data, Parliamentary Hansard, birth tourism promotional materials and media coverage from mainstream and ethnic media. “Current conversations about birth tourism tend to rely on data from health facilities,” says Gaucher. “Our project will bring together experts in political science, law, health and sociology to critically interrogate how multiple socio-legal spaces are used to both criminalize and restrict access to NRMs and their future children.”

This study will explore how constructions of foreignness undermine the longstanding assumption that formal legal citizenship is an uncontested condition for membership to the Canadian state and explore how political and public discourse around birth tourism ultimately reproduces settler-colonial imaginaries of “good” familial citizens.

“As debate around birth tourism in Canada and the appropriate policy responses continue to unfold against a backdrop of knowledge gaps, proposed measures risk being driven by polarizing narratives about borders and citizenship rather than by evidence,” she says.

Source: Friday, June 18, 2021 in Department of Law and Legal Studies, News, Research
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Reevely: Carleton loses fight to keep survey of Jewish students secret

2018/06/19 Leave a comment

Amazing. No matter what the findings, the bigger story becomes Carleton’s efforts to hide them:

Carleton University has to stop hiding a survey of Jewish students meant to find out how they feel about life on campus, a panel of senior judges says. Well, how they felt about life on campus at the beginning of this decade. Carleton’s been fighting for five years to keep the survey from public view.

When the case finally made it to court this week, three judges of Ontario Divisional Court took one day to laugh the university’s arguments off. They heard the case last Tuesday and told Carleton to stop screwing around on Wednesday, in a ruling that observes that Carleton’s lawyer could point to no precedents for its secrecy and had no evidence supporting its more outlandish claims about what might happen if it lost. (Full disclosure: I have a degree from Carleton. Fuller disclosure: About once a year, Carleton as an institution does something so at odds with the values it teaches that I cringe.) This survey was done for an internal commission set up by then-president Roseann Runte in 2010 to look at how various minority groups were treated at Carleton. The point of striking a commission — this one included several dozen people, from students to senior administrators to outside volunteers — is usually to get to the bottom of a serious problem in the most open way possible. Air all the dirty laundry. Get everything out there so we can start fixing problems.

The commission’s work was a bit of a mishmash, since the “inter-cultural, inter-religious and inter-racial relations on campus” it was supposed to look at are incredibly diverse and complicated. But its report in 2012 highlighted some standout problems on campus: legitimate debates about Israel too often spilled over into anti-Semitism, or into discussions where they didn’t belong both in classrooms and faculty meetings; and Indigenous students felt stereotyped and sometimes didn’t have help they needed adapting to university life.

The commission’s most important data-gathering came in surveys — one campus-wide one and narrower followups to dig into the first big survey’s findings. The final report includes a detailed summary of the big survey, including what questions it asked, what the response rates were (barely 10 per cent among students, and 30 per cent among Carleton staff), how members of particular groups found their Carleton experiences more satisfactory or less.

The report didn’t do the same for a follow-up survey of Jewish students and staff. “Respondents to the survey (of Jews at Carleton) participated on the condition of anonymity and therefore the results have not been distributed,” the commission report said. That’s it. This is a non-standard definition of “anonymity.” You can release results of a survey without revealing who said what. A university, of all places, should have this capability.

In 2013, someone (the person’s name isn’t in the court decision) filed an access-to-information request for the commission’s materials, including the raw results of the surveys and details of how they were conducted, and minutes from the commission’s two years’ worth of meetings.

“The university submits that the requester seeks the information to challenge the findings of the commission,” this week’s court ruling says. Which is neither here nor there — if documents are public, they’re public. A government institution doesn’t get to keep public information back just because it doesn’t like what a member of the public might do with it.

The survey is research, Carleton argued. The minutes of the commission’s meetings are related to research. We don’t have to give out research. Among other things, it wouldn’t release “the survey (of Jewish students) and its results, and an explanation of the survey methodology, who designed the survey, who approved the survey, how it was conducted, who analyzed the survey results.”

Ontario post-secondary institutions are covered by provincial public-information law but they can hold back material “respecting or associated with research conducted or proposed by an employee of an educational institution or by a person associated with an educational institution.” The idea is that if every lab note from every PhD student were open to public release, competitors would spend half their time nosing around each other’s work and answering requests instead of researching.

The law covers academic research, not stuff a university does that’s like any other corporation, the judges decided: “(T)he survey results and associated information are akin to market research which is not particular to universities and is not subject to the specific concerns of academic freedom articulated by the legislators.”

The university’s lawyer “was unable to provide a single decision where information gathered internally by a university for its own purposes and unrelated to academic research was covered by (the) research exemption,” the judges pointed out.

The university argued that releasing this information will make all university research harder and harm Carleton’s competitiveness. “No evidence was adduced to substantiate this claim,” the judges observed, using legalese for “Lawyer, please.”

Carleton’s conduct here is embarrassing for a public institution that set out to address problems on campus by talking about them openly. The fact it took five years for Carleton to get slapped down is embarrassing for Ontario’s access-to-information system. Both need to work better than they have.

Source: Reevely: Carleton loses fight to keep survey of Jewish students secret

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Survivors project to save Holocaust stories

2016/04/21 Leave a comment

Worthy initiative:

But what happens when they’re no longer able to tell their stories?

That was a question asked by Mina Cohn, director of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship, within Carleton University’s Centre for Jewish Studies. Five or six years ago, she considered the possibility that “second-generation” survivors — the children of survivors — could share their parents’ experiences.

“These experiences are an integral part to teaching the Holocaust,” she says. “They bring details that you can never read in a history book. But so often the details and immediate emotion are absent when a second-generation survivor tells them. So we decided to record the survivors, so students and scholars could hear their voices and see their faces.”

So was born the Ottawa Holocaust Survivors Testimony Project, which aims to record and preserve these stories on video, and make them accessible to teachers, students and researchers.

They’ve so far identified about 30 living survivors in the Ottawa area, and plan on recording 10 of them in their first round. They figure they need about $7,500 to cover the production and editing costs, as well as a public launch. The university has agreed to let them pitch for funds through its Future Funder crowd-sourcing website (futurefunder.carleton.ca/project/ottawa-holocaust-survivors-testimony/). If they raise sufficient funds, they also plan on editing the 30-minute interviews into thematic groups — camp survivors, for example, or child survivors.

“These oral history testimonies fill in the gaps of the traditional historical narrative,” says Carleton masters student and project organizer Elise Bigley. “They give that feeling and emotion that will be lost when survivors stop going to schools. These testimonials are vital for that.”

Each testimonial is also unique, she adds, making it imperative to gather as many as possible. “It challenges this grand historical narrative of just one story. Tova’s story, for example, will challenge the idea that Japan was this Axis power that could have never helped the Jewish people. So it’s so important that each testimony gets documented.”

“It’s of personal importance to me,” adds Young-Drache, “because it forces you to examine your life, and what happened and why. It’s so important for my children and grandchildren, for everybody, to know what happened.

“Many people say you can’t learn from such terrible things as the Holocaust, but on the other hand, it’s obvious that a lot of things happened not just because there were mad men and others who hated a certain group of people just because of who they were, but also because there were lots of people — and there still are in many parts of the world — where ordinary people accept what is going on without questioning and don’t like to intervene or get involved.

“It’s important to know with accuracy the truth, to know what actually happened.”

Source: Survivors project to save Holocaust stories | Ottawa Citizen

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