Canadian media coverage doesn't do refugees justice

Canadian media coverage doesn’t do refugees justice

By commoner • Jan 23rd, 2009 • Category: 2009, Features, Focus, Jan 23 - 29, 2009

Nick Logan

It takes responsible media coverage to understand the life of a refugee says Joan Baxter.

Discussing the image Canadians have of Africans, the Nova Scotian journalist recounts the comment of an audience member after a lecture she gave at Saint Mary’s University two years ago.

“I never saw pictures of African people who look happy and healthy.”

Baxter blames Western media for biases and misconceptions about life there. She has a hard time coming up with a positive story about the continent she’s seen in Canadian news.

She hails the Qatar-based Al-jazeera news network as a model for coverage of both positive and negative stories.

Unfortunately – as she wrote to The Chronicle Herald on Jan. 14 – that network is not available to Canadian cable subscribers.

The controversial Fox News Network, however, is easily accessible.

Baxter spoke to a small crowd at the Spring Garden Memorial Library on Tuesday night.

She told the audience that journalists who don’t live in Africa aren’t capable of telling stories that accurately depict life there.

She refers to them as “parachute journalists” who drop in to cover the latest catastrophe.

“It usually portrays Africans as helpless, hapless, or hopeless,” she says, making it easy to think Africans are “unable to do anything for themselves.”

The people of Africa often flee their countries, Baxter says, because of problems they didn’t cause, not because the continent is a terrible place to live.

But we rarely see that side of the refugee story.

“Every now and then you might hear a news brief,” she says, “of 62 migrants who perished and drowned off the coast of Gambia.”