Robert J. Ballantyne | VO: Journalists who choose to report for Indigenous audiences, like those who watch APTN National News, can explore stories in greater depth. |
| SOT: When I’ve worked at Indigenous news outlets, we’d often take a lot of shortcuts. One of the examples I used is I can talk to another Indigenous person and say, Hey, do you remember way back when C-31 used to take status away from women and the MIB wasn’t on board on it, then a bunch of women formed NWAC and we got C-31. So, I’m a C-31 (02) and my son is actually a Macgyver (sic?) baby. So, he’s become a C-31 (02) through that. That conversation is a whole conversation that makes sense to another Indigenous person, but a non-Indigenous person has no idea what I was just talking about. |
Robert J. Ballantyne | VO: Melissa Ridgen says this is true even for the non-Indigenous audiences that tune in to APTN. |
Melissa Ridgen | SOT: You know what you’re getting at APTN. You know that this is from an Indigenous perspective, it’s to an Indigenous audience and you’re not going to expect that I’m hand-holding your settler hand through the issues, right? If you’ve tuned in, I’ve kind of assumed that you’re at a different state than when I was on the local radio station trying to tell the same story. I would tell the story differently if it was like, Melissa, you’re a reporter speaking to a broad population of just Winnipeggers, or a small town or whatever. I would tell the story differently as a journalist than I would tell the story to APTN’s audience. If you are turning in, I think that you appreciate that I’m talking to this audience like that and you’re getting to listen. |
Robert J. Ballantyne | VO: At non-Indigenous media outlets, more explanation is required to introduce many Indigenous issues to mostly settler audiences.
And another barrier to understanding, according to Rick Harp, is that settler media outlets and their audiences aren’t really that interested in Indigenous stories either. |
Rick Harp | SOT: You know, journalism’s all about hooks! And unfortunately that hook is, operationally speaking, what would interest a settler about this story affecting Indigenous interests? In some ways, it’s like trying to tell a story about, I don’t know, Latvia. Why would a Canadian (laughs) care about Latvia? I mean, unless they were born there. You would have to go, hmm, how much detail should I go into this. Of course, there will people who will submit that it’s not that foreign Rick Harp, calm down. But some days, I might as well be talking about what’s going on the red planet. |
Robert J. Ballantyne | VO: Karyn Pugliese, who has worked at APTN as well as at mainstream outlets, tells us more about how these conversations happen within a mainstream newsroom environment. |
Karyn Pugliese | SOT: I would have a hard time sometimes pitching stories that were Indigenous and getting people to understand them because the implicit bias that is in mainstream newsrooms still tends to be sort of a boomer male. It certainly was back then. So, you’ve got a boomer male editor who’s asking why would this story be of interest to our audience? And however he’s imagining that audience, he’s imagining them like people like himself, so he’s very interested in things that are happening in their own lives, to their children, to their neighbours. Not to something that’s happening to somebody else who they don’t think they’re ever going to meet or know about.. |