Developing world needs coverage
Conflicts, coups and catastrophes: These are the stories Canadians are most often told about the world beyond our borders.
Media coverage of international affairs has long been driven by dramatic breaking news events while deep reporting on the ongoing issues affecting the developing world has been as scarce as the GDP of some of the planet’s poorest nations.
That is the unsurprising news in a recently released research project exploring Canadian media coverage of global development issues. The extensive and excellent report was commissioned by the Aga Khan Foundation Canada and conducted by a research team from Carleton University and Université Laval.
Western media coverage of the developing world tends to be, “rare, episodic, fragmentary and focused on conflict and catastrophe,” the report concludes.
The study asked several critical questions about Canadian media and the developing world: What are the stories that Canadians are told about the developing world? Which part of the developing world do these stories feature? Who are the voices and sources telling these stories? What perspectives and interests are informing them?
It also included a content analysis of the media coverage of the developing world by significant Canadian news organizations, reviewing more than 3,000 news stories across multiple news platforms from January to April, 2015.
Here, the results were pleasantly surprising: Among English language newspapers included in the study, the Toronto Star had the highest volume of coverage about developing countries included in the study — 21 per cent, compared to 12 per cent for both the Globe and Mail and the National Post.
As well, the content analysis indicated that of all the Canadian English-language newspapers studied, the Toronto Star published more development-themed coverage than any other.
In other words, the Star drove deeper than the usual drama/conflict narrative to provide more reporting, analysis and opinion journalism focused on development themes, such as education, health, human rights, gender and infrastructure.
“In the English media, the Toronto Star had the highest volume of all international news coverage of the developing world, both in terms of development and non-development stories,” the report states.
I do not have a ready explanation for why the Star stood above other media organizations in covering global development at that time. I expect it has something to do with the Star newsroom’s understanding that people from all over the developing world have made the Greater Toronto Area their home and the Star’s ongoing efforts to serve this diverse audience with news that matters to them.
I do keep in mind, however, that all of these results reflect facts gathered more than three years ago. I don’t know what a current study might indicate given that the Star, like most other Canadian news organizations, is affected by a deepening revenue crisis that has affected newsroom budgets. The Star now relies more than ever on its extensive network of wire services to provide coverage of the world at large as it focuses its newsroom on important local and investigative coverage.
In a time when many smaller newsrooms across Canada struggle to find resources to cover city hall and the local school board, we can expect that Canadian media coverage of international affairs and global development issues may indeed suffer. This report acknowledges both the “thinning of editorial resources” and the closing of foreign bureaus by many news organizations.
But, it also provides a strong reminder of why media coverage of the world at large still matters.
“Public understanding of international issues is shaped in important ways by the news networks that make up the modern mediascape,” the report states. “Media coverage remains the major, if not only, source of news and information about the developing world for ordinary Canadians and influences policy discourse and development as well.”
Certainly in this distressing time of an international migrant crisis that shows us the interconnectedness of the world and its peoples and the developing world issues that drive people from their homes, media coverage of these matters would seem to matter much.
Indeed, just as the world needs more Canada, Canadians need more media coverage of the world.