hapen to you

WHEN I was a cub
reporter, a generation azo, [
was taught to get both sides
of the story. During elec-
tions, this was particularly
important.

The first election I ever covered,
in which a provincial cabinet
minister accused of misconduct
quit and ran in a byelection to win
an expression of support from his
constituents, was a particularly
delicate battle because he was the
first Jewish cabinet minister in the
province’s history, and every ef-
fort had to be made, my editor
stressed, not to allow stercotypes
to find their way into the
coverage, or to give any comfort
to neo-Nazi types hanging around
the fringes.

There was a contradiction here
with ‘‘getting both sides,’’ but I
didn’t notice it.

The paper’s approach struck
me, instead, as the fair and libera!
and, indeed, Canadian way to
handle things. I was proud to be
part of such a noble tradition.

It never crossed my little cub
reporter mind that I was party to
# process of censorship, that was,
in its own way, rather insidious.

I don’t want to blacken the
otherwise excellent reputations of
any of my former colleagues, but
the fact is that the newspaper I
worked for at the time had a very
definite bias which it was serving
under the guise of fairness, liber-
alness and Canadianness.

I didn’t realize the extent of it
until a couple of years later, after

I'd interviewed a fellow from the
YMCA, who had just returned
from an extended visit to deliver
humanitarian aid to the people
suffering in Palestinian refugee
camys.

Being the sheltered, callow
youth that | was, I really hadn’t
known much about the situation
in Israel, except, of course, that I
had read Leon Uris’s Exodus, and
had volunteered to go there during
one of the wazs with the Arabs
and “‘fight, fight, fight for
Israel,’’ as the battl: song of the
day went.

Several of my friends, including
my very best friend in those days,
were Jewish.

Naturally, | had never met a
Palestinian. So when it came to
Jewish issues, it wasn’t just the
paper’s biases that were at work,
it was my own, and those of my
friends.

What the man from the YMCA
had to tell me about the situation
in Gaza was appalling. | was gen-
uinely shocked.

In fact, | wasn’t sure I believed
him, despite the photographs he
snowed me. So I started resear-
ching, which is what a reporter
does when fic’s upset about
something.

And then | wrote a story. Actu-
ally, a three-part series.

The first part ran. But when |
opened the paper the next day, the
sequel wasn’t there. The series had
been killed, I was told. Without
explanation. Don’t make a Fuss,
was the advice.

Years later, over too many
diinks, my editor confided that
the series had been killed because
the publisher had gotten a call
from a Jewish fellow who owned
one of the city’s biggest depart-
ment stores, threatening to pull his
advertising.

From that point on, { knew
there were all sorts of forces at
work behind the scenes, deter-
mining what kind of coverage the
paper pave to stories.

The influence of one store-
owner was but a minor factor in

the midst of all these different
pressures being brought to bear,
nothing compared, for instance,
with the influence of political at-
titudes in the upper echelons of
ownership, or the basic philo-
sophical leanings of management.

Tam as great an admirer of the
achievements of Jewish people as I
ever was, and I have, if anything,
more Jewish friends.

1 am even something of a stu-
dent of Jewish history, which is
one of the greatest human Sagas
ever, compared with which the
Canadian story is barely in its first
chapters.

Whiat the siore-owner was do-
ing was what everybody attempts
to do in our society, which is to
control the media to one degree or
another. This guy just happened
to have more strings to pull, and a
compliant publisher to work with.

Anybody representing any
pressure group is free to try
whatever manoeuvre he thinks will
work, all being fair in media and
war,

That the fellow involved was
Jewish is just a detail of the story,

“and as far as I’m concerned all

neo-Nazis can still drop dead.
The point is, after that experi-

_ ence, I no longer saw our “‘liber-

alism’’ as being such a pure thing.
And, imperceptibly, a crack
opened in my automatic assump-
tions about the absolute moral
authority of the Canadian political
system.

Today, the pressures on media
to look this way and not that, to
withhold a tape recorder here and
point the camera there, is greater
than ever.

Thankfully, there are enough
dedicated professionals within the
media to ensure that the built-in
biases of the system are somewhat
balanced by journalistic ethics.
Press councils. principled
publishers, unfettered columnists.

The fact that 1, for one, am sull
being published more than 30
years after that unfortunate expe-
rience with the Palestinian refugee
story, and am free to cite such an
example, speaks reams in itself
about the essential health of the
system.

But we do live ina
muldcultural, multiracial, multil-
inguistic society, and the conflicts
within such a society, however

politely they may be expressed, are

bound to reflect the turmoil of the
whole world, making ours, poten-
tially, one of the most fractious
societies ever invented.

There aren’t just a handful of
ethnic axes to grind, there are
more than most of us can count,
or know about.

Bear with me. This is all going
somewhere. Just how biased are
the media? Despite the genuflec-
ting toward “objectivity,” | would
say: almost completely.

A 41-YEAR-OLD: North Van-
couver man was recently fined
$3,000 in connection with three
charges related to failing to
complete income tax forms.

Don J. Gornall pleaded guilty
to the charges concerning his

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1989, 1990 and 1991 tax returns.

The charges stated that Gor-
nall failed to complete and sign
inclividual income tax returns
after he was personally notified
to do so in an Aug. 7, 1992, let-
ter.

Besides the fines, $1,000 for

cach count, Judge Bill Rodgers
ordered Gornall to complete and
file the three tax returns within
@& days of sentencing.

Rodgers fined Gornall in
North Vancouver provincial
court on Sept. 24.

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