The 13th annual Media Democracy Days (MDD) — organised by SFU’s School of Communication, OpenMedia.ca, and the Vancouver Public Library — took place on Nov. 8 and 9 in downtown Vancouver at the Vancouver Public Library and The Cinematheque.
MDD is a “gateway event,” according to MDD steering committee chair Kathleen Cross, who is also an assistant professor in the school of communication at SFU. “[It’s about] reaching out to people who have never thought about . . . the importance of media in a functioning democracy,” Cross stated.
Cross went on to quote communications professor and media reform activist Robert McChesney: “Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second.” The event brought together students, citizens and scholars, to discuss and learn about the state of media in Canada.
This year’s main themes reflected the news that has occupied people’s attention over the past 12 months. Information control was chosen in the context of this summer’s NSA and PRISM leaks, while the #IdleNoMore movement, the Northern Gateway Pipeline protests, and the recent RCMP raid on the Mi’kmaq-led anti-fracking blockade in New Brunswick influenced the choice of Aboriginal voices as another main topic.
“Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second.”
– Kathleen Cross, MDD steering committee chair, quoting media reform activist Robert McChesney
MDD’s program included a series of practical workshops — from audio production, to information control in the news, to filing a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. The program also included conferences, a media fair exhibition with about thirty social justice and media reform groups, and a packed film screening of Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013, Cullen Hoback), accompanied by a keynote address by BC’s Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
“The media today is filled with power, ideology, bias . . . and spectacle that distract us, and yet make possible for each of us to reach out to communicate,” said Stuart Poyntz, programming advisor for MDD and assistant professor in the school of communication at SFU.
He went on to say that a central objective of MDD is to act as “a platform . . . to connect many of us together, around the recognition that social change and democratic reinvention can only happen today in and through our media system.”
Speaking on the issue of information control, privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham defended privacy and access rights as “critically important for our democracy, for freedom of opinion and also for open societies.”
Evoking BC-specific issues such as the HST debacle and the “fudge-it budget,” Denham stated: “It’s often not the substance of the issue, but the perception of government secrecy that really is dominating the news; so access rights are really important underpinnings of our democratic system.”
Denham also expressed concerns about privacy and the emergence of “dataveillance,” echoing the theme of the film that followed her keynote, Terms and Conditions May Apply — which deals with the implications of clicking on the ‘agree’ button on various services’ license agreements.
Other speakers at MDD expressed distress about access rights in Canada. Mike Larsen, professor in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, stated: “Right now the [FOI] system is out-dated, inefficient and over-burdened.”
Gwen Barlee, policy director and spokesperson with the Wilderness Committee, who has filed approximately 45 FOI requests, told The Peak that “privatisation [of public services] is dangerous because as more government services get off-loaded to the private sector, we as a public have less ability to see the inner workings of how the services are delivered.”
Jennifer David, former director of communications at Aboriginal People’s Television Network and author of Original People Original Television introduced the other main topic on the second day, highlighting the need for Aboriginal voices to express themselves “on their own terms and in their own words.”
David explained how the #IdleNoMore movement was illuminating a discrepancy between mainstream media’s coverage of aboriginal news and reality. On #IdleNoMore’s first National Day of Action (Dec. 10, 2012), the IKEA monkey largely overshadowed the protests against Bill C-45 in national mainstream TV coverage.
The MDD event has found national success; this year, not only Vancouver, but Ottawa played host to MDD as well, with Montreal and Waterloo planning to join soon.
