The illusion you alluded to eluded me...

A friend of mine who is a journalist recently returned to Southern Canada after working in the North. He sent me an email a week after starting his new job. Here is a short quote from his email. "I just finished my first full week and I'm loving it so far. It's a very different style of reporting... It's more... what's the word I"m looking for... accurate." How true that is. I love living in the North, things are so different up here. One of the things that is very different is the media. There can be little doubt that it has it's own inimitable style. I guess it is hard to write hard edged, incisive, investigative journalism when you have to go on living in that town with that same group of only a few hundred people. Recently a local paper had the following news bite, "An NWT man appeared in and NWT court charged with the sexual assault of a woman whose name is being withheld." Wow, talk about information overload.

Last spring a story appeared in a northern paper about the gas station at the Northern store being closed for repairs and that the Coop was being praised because it had not raised its' prices for gas. Great piece only problem is that the Northern store had never had a gas station before. It was not closed it had never been opened.It was just being built. If it had been opened and had temporarily closed it would have been illegal for the Coop to raise its' prices. Mere details. It made a good story, if you weren't so trivial as to be hassled by things like truth.


I remember listening to the radio news a few years ago. A group pf sailors had been rescued after their ship had sunk. According to the newscaster they had been picked up by a passing trailer. Trailer? I had visions of some short sleeved Bermuda shorted senior behind the wheel of an RV pulling over and helping the swabbies aboard. Unfortunately the truth is that it was probably a trawler, although there was no correction, not even on the next news.


On another occasion the news reader informed us that PLO extremists were holding hostages demanding the release of TOURISTS who were imprisoned in Germany. Wow remind me not to vacation there. I think perhaps the word she was looking for was TERRORISTS. Germany is more likely to arrest those people. It is funny how just a few letters can change the meaning of a sentence so drastically. It is so critical that society trains and employs people who specialize in words and communication, we call them, er, uh, journalists.


The front page of our newspaper is far more likely to have a photo of two boys holding up a huge trout than of some plane crash, or exploding bomb. Perhaps it is our relative isolation from such events that fill the front pages of the world's great papers. Or perhaps we are a breed apart, men and women of good will who want nothing but good news. Perhaps we care nothing of accuracy, perhaps we are apathetic. More likely we are tolerant.As long as you are sincere and you are trying, Northerners are willing to overlook some flaws. Living in a climate that is so unforgiving perhaps we are more generous of the flaws of our fellow humans. Maybe when you get home after a long days work in minus fifty weather you want to curl up with an article about a Ft Resolution store keeper or some kids in Tulita snaring rabbits.



Oh well, I don't expect the state of journalism in the North to change anytime soon. Oh, by the way, to my buddy who recently moved south; I saw a picture of the writer who replaced you. In the text of his first article was a photo of him. Underneath the photo in block letters, underlined, it read " Insert Name Here ".