from http://www.policyalternatives.ca

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 24, 2000

    Pressure from media owners leads to underreporting of social
                           issues, study says.

Ottawa; January 24, 2000--The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives today
released a report, The Missing News, which documents and analyzes recurring
blind spots in news coverage by Canada's print media. "These blind spots
are related to institutional filters and corporate pressures on
journalists' working conditions," said Dr. Robert Hackett one of the
study's authors and a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University.

The Missing News reports the findings of an independent six-year research
project, Newswatch Canada, funded primarily by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council. Employing content analysis, the researchers
have identified categories of political stories that have been
systematically underreported. Hackett gave the following examples:

     stories of government tax breaks for the wealthy--how they shift the
tax burden to middle and lower income earners and reduce the capacity to
pay for social programs;

     stories which expose the vested interests and biases of media owners
themselves, one case study showing that changes in ownership clearly
influence newspapers' coverage of their new parent company;

     stories of corporate activities which have adverse social impacts; for
example,the growing corporate intrusion into public health care or
corporate complicity in cigarette smuggling concurrent with their campaign
for lower taxes.

Journalists interviewed for the project also identified newsroom cutbacks and
increasingly bottom-line-driven priorities of management as important
factors filtering the news.

The study also found a large imbalance in the use of sources with business and
conservative policy institutes favoured 3:1 over their progressive
counterparts.

The study makes several policy recommendations to improve the quality,
diversity and independence of print journalism, including: ceilings on
media ownership holdings, a right of reply, and independent press councils
with teeth.

Professor Hackett urged groups of concerned citizens to form alliances to
advocate for media reform.

"Furthermore," said Hackett, "journalists' unions should--as the Calgary
Herald strike demonstrates--place a high priority on establishing
protections against ownership interference with editorial content."

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