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Chapter 3 | Florian Sauvageau (continued) In Québec and in English Canada, language and culture can have opposite influences. According to what is often held, the first allegiance of Francophone journalists is to society. They are Quebeckers first, then journalists. The journalist in English speaking Canada is, on the contrary, a disinterested observer and the “objective reporter” that the North American tradition has set up as an ideal. A great many people think that a distinct journalism is practiced in Québec, much closer to the journalism of opinion found in Europe. It can be characterized, as Lysiane Gagnon put it in La Presse twenty years ago, by “the predominance of analysis as opposed to factual reports of events [and] the propensity to approach things from the angle of ideas rather than facts and individuals.” The Royal Commission on Daily Newspapers (the Kent Commission) went so far as to assert in 1981 that the “French Canadian journalist, like the priest or the politician, has always been, willy nilly, invested with a certain nationalistic mission.” Even in 1996, in the re-issue of his book Politics and the Media in Canada, Arthur Siegel said of the French press that it was maintaining an “intense political commitment.” This was true in the past, and is still true for a small number of journalists. However, in 1996, at the time David Pritchard and I did a survey of journalists in Canada, on what their motivations and perceptions of their role were, similarities between Anglophones and Francophones were more numerous than differences (Pritchard and Sauvageau, 1999). Our results contradicted certain generally accepted ideas; they show that journalists of the two linguistic groups share the same convictions and that their ways of approaching journalism are similar. Among other things, the accurate transmission of content (the dominating trait of journalism in North America) is seen as the most important quality of journalism. Influencing opinion or the political agenda are, for Francophone and for Anglophone journalists, at the bottom of the list of priorities of how journalism should be seen. The content of Francophone and Anglophone media is obviously different. But they bear witness to two distinct societies, one in isolation from the other. But the way journalists speak of them is the same. On the other hand, this survey, the first pan-Canadian survey of a representative sample (550) of journalists in the two linguistic communities, covering all types of media and all regions of Canada, showed that there are two streams or two main ways of practicing journalism within the belief system that transcends the linguistic communities. In the private sector, especially in radio and television, a significant number of journalists were oriented toward commercial practice, seeking as many viewers and listeners as possible. Their main concern was entertaining the public. There is another type of journalism in Canada, which is more of the public service type and concerned with democratic life. The support for this view exemplified by words like “investigation,” “analysis” and “a critical point of view,” is found more frequently at Radio-Canada and the CBC, where journalists are in a way the incarnation of the “journalism of citizenship” (see table). |
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