How The Conversation Canada Amplifies the Unpopular

Journalist, academic, and activist Dr. Yasmin Jiwani concluded the Global Journalism Innovation Lab Spring Speaker Series with a tour-de-force lecture on how Canadian journalism excludes voices from outside the mainstream – and how journalists and academics can challenge that paradigm.

Jiwani is a professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, and is the Concordia University Research Chair in Intersectionality, Violence & Resistance. Her talk, held via Zoom on May 22, 2022, was hosted by Dr. Mary Lynn Young, a professor of journalism at The University of British Columbia and co-founder of The Conversation Canada.

Jiwani presented a rigorous exploration of how journalists’ position in society impacts who they write about and how they do so. While journalists may think they write for “the public,” Jiwani said they really cater to a “populist” audience, the members of the population who constitute the media’s given market share. This populist audience may be the majority, but it’s not everyone – and this has important consequences for the people left out.

When writing for the populist audience, Jiwani says, the mainstream media brings in a particular ideological framework that appeals to their worldview. In Canada, she said, that means people who have been “cultivated, cultured, and nurtured within the framework of a secular colony.” Anything outside of that context will be stereotyped and demonized, she said. 

This includes people of colour. Jiwani recalled growing up in Vancouver BC, which she said was “soaking” in racism. “At that time, it was incredibly difficult for a person of colour to become a journalist,” she said. That legacy continued into the 1990s, when Jiwani completed her doctorate at Simon Fraser University. Her work focused on discrimination towards racialized people in TV news, and when she presented her findings at a conference in Ottawa, a well-known radio broadcaster told her no one would ever hire her given the way she looked and dressed.

Pressured to assimilate in the mainstream media, Jiwani said, journalists of colour created their own, alternative media outlets, presenting the realities that weren’t being reported on. While these two worlds were originally quite separate, she said, they began to blend once the legacy media began to fear for its market share. She gave the example of the Vancouver Sun, which, when faced with dwindling audiences, included a Cantonese-language insert in the paper.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that market forces have pushed the media outside of its populist bubble. Jiwani drew on the Rastafarian idea of word-sound-power, in which words don’t just carry meanings, but inspire certain feelings as well. She noted how countless media outlets described the recent killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh at the hands of the Israeli military as anything but a “murder,” instead simply writing she “died.” “That change of words becomes so imperative in how the story is told,” said Jiwani.

In another example, Jiwani analyzed a 2007 Vancouver Sun story on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side neighbourhood, which is home to many people suffering from mental health issues and substance abuse. Drawing on Robert Entman’s theory of media frames, she noted how the writer focused on how sanitation workers couldn’t keep up with the amount of garbage on the street, and how people were using drugs in the open. This framing, she said, suggests there is no point in intervening, because even the city’s workers are overwhelmed, and the people are beyond help. In turn, this impacts how people consider solutions: by presenting the issue as unsolvable, Jiwani said, one concludes society may as well leave it alone.

This leads her to question what Dr. Barbie Zelizer termed journalism’s “god terms” – facts, truth, and reality. These collectively contribute to the concept of “objectivity,” long the foundation of journalistic ethics, but now a contested concept. For her part, Jiwani says she does not believe in a “fairyland” without material reality. Your landlord, she notes, will not accept beans for rent. But she stressed that material reality contains all the elements of oppression that “sustain a particular kind of hegemonic view of the world.” That hegemony, she says, is “supported by a common-sense stock of knowledge,” and journalists must carefully consider how our ideas of facts, truth, and reality constitute a hegemonic, colonial reality that does not reflect those on the margins of society.

Here Jiwani posed the question: how can anyone interrupt or destabilize that hegemonic reality? This is where The Conversation Canada comes in. Jiwani said that while alternative views have struggled to penetrate the mainstream media, they have successfully infiltrated the academy. By bringing ideas out of the academy and into the media, Jiwani says The Conversation Canada has succeeded in convincing the media to publish ideas that they would not otherwise. This has been helped by the practice of hyperlinking sources, which she said provides credibility to controversial ideas. Thanks to this process, she said, “We’ve had in fact a proliferation of ... subjugated knowledges that is unparalleled.”

Responding to questions, Jiwani noted the limits of this work. She said that while she does not believe power structures can be broken down, they can be briefly disrupted. This is made possible by longform journalism, she said, which can go beyond simple facts to provide systemic analysis.

Jiwani ended her talk by warning against the influence of hate speech in online comments in news media. With an audience steeped in the hegemonic worldview, she said, online comment sections under news articles have become a breeding ground for hateful views. She warned that if the media gages audience responses based on these comments, it will have a perverse influence on what they feel safe to say. The solution, she said, is to close the comment boxes altogether.

Against such hate, she said, marginalized voices need to get better organized – especially as far-right media outlets such as Rebel News are growing more brazen. “The right has been marshaling this for a long time,” she said, but those on the margins have remained on the enclaves. This, she implied, has to change. In her final words, she made the challenge clear:

 “How do we work as tacticians in this sort of game of war?”