Managing the message

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Last updated at 8:56 AM on 10/01/09

Managing the message

PAM FRAMPTON
The Telegram

There’s an old children’s parlour game called Gossip that demonstrates how information can be distorted when it is passed from person to person by word of mouth.
In the game, a sentence is whispered to the first child in a group and it gets passed on from child to child. The end version rarely matches the original sentence, as a result of words being dropped or the sentence being embellished along the way.
In politics, there’s a reverse kind of game being played, where the information provided can be distorted to begin with, especially if it has been carefully crafted so as to give the illusion of being the whole truth without actually being so.
But unlike the harmless kids’ version, this game is insidious and it can shape public perception.
Let’s call it “Message management.”
It works like this: a government decides its handling of a matter will cast it in an unflattering light, and so it only releases some of the pertinent information.
If the public or the media doesn’t know that the information made available has been filtered or truncated or censored in any way, then it’s pretty hard to call the government’s bluff.
The popularity of this game is disturbing.


Many kinds of muzzles
In a summer 2006 article (headlined “Muzzling the Media”) in the World Policy Journal, Joel Simon writes: “A new breed of sophisticated autocrats is threatening press freedoms around the world.”
Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, writes that there are countries like Cuba and Burma where journalists are routinely jailed for reportage that is seen as being contrary to the message the government wishes to convey.
And then there are regimes that employ slightly subtler methods.
Simon uses the example of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the government has “succeeded in bringing Russia’s once feisty broadcast media under Kremlin control without putting journalists in jail or using violence.”
He describes how there was plenty of television coverage when Russian security forces stormed a school in Beslan in 2004, where Chechen separatists were holed up with hundreds of student hostages, but no coverage of the aftermath, which left more than 300 people dead.
“There were no survivors’ accounts, no stories of desperate people who lost loved ones, no independent experts’ analysis, and no public discussion whatsoever,” Simon quotes Russia analyst Masha Lipman as saying.
In that situation, an autocratic government decided what the story was and when it was time to end it, despite the public’s many lingering questions and concerns.

Reporters shut out
Closer to home, Stephen Harper’s government raised the ire of many people — and not just those working in the media — when, in 2006, he barred journalists from covering repatriation ceremonies for Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
While the PM told CBC News at the time that “it’s about what’s in the best interests of the families,” many members of the opposition, the public and the media suspected Harper’s decision had more to do with damage control and optics, as if somehow by banning coverage of the ceremonies, Canadians would be blissfully unaware that soldiers were losing their lives in Afghanistan.
In a 2007 article on Harper’s media policy published by the Centre for Constitutional Studies, University of Alberta law student Graham Darling writes: “Freedom of the press is granted constitutional protection, ensuring that journalists can report government activities to the Canadian public without interference. Mr. Harper has not placed any legal restrictions on what can be published, but he has limited what information is given to the press and has restricted the opportunities the press has to gather information. Without access to government officials and staff, the media is unable to ask important questions. And without access to military ceremonies or government events, the public is excluded from happenings that may be of great public interest.”
Of course, there are many ways to suppress the press or to control the official message track.
Simon writes: “(The new autocrats) intimidate the media with punitive tax prosecutions and defamation suits, or influence coverage through personal relationships with media owners or allocation of government advertising funds.”

Sorry, we can’t release that
Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, members of the provincial government are old hands at message management.
For example, the executive level of the Danny Williams administration has a penchant for micro-managing the data released to the media through other government departments in response to access to information requests.
And, just before Christmas, it amended its Management of Information Act to tighten up any pesky little loopholes through which useful information might slip through.
As The Telegram’s Rob Antle reported on Dec. 10, Bill 63 — which passed in the House late last year — broadens “the definition of cabinet records, and (gives) Executive Council the authority to manage those records as it wishes.”
That bill has the opposition worried, and for good reason. As provincial NDP Leader Lorraine Michael told The Telegram, such legislation could prevent important documents, including cabinet briefing notes — such as those tabled during the Cameron inquiry into the breast testing scandal — from ever seeing the light of day.
Any move by a government to withhold, censor or over-zealously filter information that reveals to the public how the province is being run should concern us all.
And any government that forgets it was elected to serve the people’s interests — and not solely its own partisan aims — at the very least runs the risk of developing a bad reputation.

Pam Frampton is The Telegram’s story editor. She can be reached by e-mail at pframpton@thetelegram.com. Read her columns online at www.thetelegram.com.

10/01/09


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