Editor’s Le er
L , journalist and author Anne Kingstonand I taught a new course at the University of Toronto titled “#Metoo and the Media.” Through a series of weekly twohour lectures, we discussed the roles of both professional journalism and social media in advancing #Metoo, the cultural movement that went viral, in 2017, in the wake of allegations of sexual assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein. (In the rst year after it became popularized, the hashtag was used more than 19 million times on Twitter.) We’re all still taking the measure of #Metoo: Does it represent a cultural movement as consequential as the civil rights movement of the 1960s? What would “redemption” and healing from these crimes actually look like? #Metoo may have thrown more questions at society than it answered, but it demonstrates the speed at which we, especially in the digital era, can change our ways of thinking.
In class, our lectures covered topics such as power dynamics, celebrity, gender, and the legal system — but one of the most telling lessons for me was about the media industry itself. The decimation of traditional news outlets over the past decade is well known — partly the result of consolidation but largely because of competition (for users and revenue) from tech platforms like Facebook and Google. We’ve heard a lot about the rise of fake news, clickbait, and inaccurate reporting. But the journalism that spurred #Metoo has also underscored the e ectiveness of professional investigative journalism: this past January, just over two years after the New York Times and The New Yorker published assault allegations against
Weinstein, the former ilm producer appeared at his rst criminal trial for these allegations.
Here at The Walrus, the #Metoo era has led to an evolution in our reporting. Based on feedback from sources and outside experts, we re ned our guidelines for writing and fact-checking stories about sexual assault, which involve bringing special sensitivity to interviews with survivors. In one sense, publishing #Metoo stories requires the same values that good journalists have always brought to their profession, such as the pursuit of accuracy with an understanding of one’s own limitations and biases. But the degree to which this kind of reporting a ects sources and subjects has raised the stakes.
Last June, the inal report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was published. It includes a seven-page section that critiques media representation of Indigenous people — the report notes that, “on average, missing or murdered white women received three times more coverage than Indigenous women did.” It also includes a set of calls for justice that urges media outlets to avoid stereotypes and, above all, to cover Indigenous communities in a nuanced and culturally sensitive way. We have sought to provide more in-depth coverage of the crisis with this month’s cover story, our rst editorial collaboration with Longreads, an online publication with an international readership for narrative non ction. The story, “Searching for Mackie,” which Annie Hylton spent many months reporting and writing, details the e orts of one family to nd Immaculate “Mackie” Mary Basil, a woman from the interior of BC who left for a party one night almost seven years ago and has never returned. In chronicling the e orts of a family that has not stopped looking for one of its own, Hylton introduces the people affected by the crisis while also exposing its broadly connected roots.
In 2014, when criminal accusations against host Jian Ghomeshi rst came to light, I was working in another industry. I wrote an essay for this magazine, about the conversation that arose out of Ghomeshi’s high-pro le trial, that led to more writing for The Walrus and, eventually, to the job I have now. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into writing about feminism; to me, real equality would mean not having to centre my work around my own gender. With time, I have come to see the opportunity to produce journalism on these issues as a form of privilege, one that many others don’t currently have. One of the biggest motivations to continue to do this work is so that others — like my students, who can have a hard time understanding why justice isn’t automatic for everyone — will not have to. I
— Jessica Johnson
“Witness,” p. 54
“I was in Guyana, which is the country that my maternal family’s from, in 2015. My brother went out one day and came back and told me a story. It was on the eve of an election, so there was a kind of electricity there. There’s a way, especially in a charged time like that, in which human a airs acquire a kind of importance, speed, intensity, and a total trajectory of their own with a disregard for anything else in their path. That’s the genesis of this short story.”
Kaie Kellough is a poet, novelist, and sound performer. Dominoes at the Crossroads, his new book of short ction, was published this February by Esplanade Books/véhicule Press.