Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation 9780773587106

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Public Service Broadcasting and Translation
1 The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation
2 The Rise and Fall of Translated News on Newsworld and the Réseau de l’information
3 Paradoxes of Translation in Television News
4 Quebec and the Historical Meaning of “Distinct Society”
5 “Distinct Society,” “Société distincte,” and the Meech Lake Accord
6 The Charlottetown Accord and the Translation of Ambivalence
Conclusion: Public Service Media and the Potential of Translation
Appendix: Key Dates in Canadian Constitutional History
Notes
References
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W

Citation preview

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    i

EVERYONE SAYS NO

This page intentionally left blank

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    iii

Everyone Says No Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation KYLE CONWAY

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    iv

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011 isbn 978-0-7735-3933-4 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3934-1 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2011 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the International Council of Canadian Studies through its Publishing Fund. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Conway, Kyle, 1977–   Everyone says no : public service broadcasting and the failure of translation / Kyle Conway. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-3933-4 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-3934-1 (pbk.)   1. Public broadcasting – Translating – Canada. 2. Multilingual communication – Canada – History – 20th century.  3. Constitutional amendments – Canada – Press coverage.  4. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  1. Société Radio-Canada. I. Title. he8689.9.c3c657 2011  384.540971  c2011-904406-4 Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10/13 Sabon

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    v

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Public Service Broadcasting and Translation  3 1  The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation  17 2 The Rise and Fall of Translated News on Newsworld and the Réseau de l’information  37 3 Paradoxes of Translation in Television News  60 4 Quebec and the Historical Meaning of “Distinct Society”  82 5 “Distinct Society,” “Société distincte,” and the Meech Lake Accord 104 6 The Charlottetown Accord and the Translation of Ambivalence 129 Conclusion: Public Service Media and the Potential of Translation 158 Appendix: Key Dates in Canadian Constitutional History  175 Notes 181 References 189 Index 211

This page intentionally left blank

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    vii

Acknowledgments

I want to thank everyone who made this book possible. First of all, I want to thank the staff of the CBC and RadioCanada, who could not have made my archival research an easier task. In Toronto, Arthur Schwartzel from the visual resources department helped me find the episodes of The National that I wanted to watch, while Leone Earls and Michele Melady, both from the CBC’s Research Centre, helped me arrange my visits and find print resources I would not otherwise have been able to read. I am especially grateful for Michele’s willingness to take on the challenge of finding even the obscurest reports. Je tiens aussi à remercier tout le monde à la Maison de RadioCanada à Montréal. Tout d’abord, Denise Sicard du service docu­­mentation et archives m’a aidé à planifier mes visites à Montréal. Le médiathécaire Stéphane Gourde m’a envoyé des listes d’épisodes avant même que je ne parte au Québec, alors que Jean-François Gagnon m’a apporté toutes les cassettes (et il y en avait plus d’une cinquantaine) dont j’avais besoin une fois que j’étais arrivé. De même, Nathalie Lemay a trouvé pour moi des études utiles sur l’auditoire, et Christiane Taddeo m’a expliqué comment Radio-Canada a effectué son monitoring pendant la campagne référendaire de Charlottetown. Enfin, je tiens beaucoup à remercier Robert Houle à la réception, qui m’a si chaleureusement accueilli tous les matins pendant deux semaines. Qu’il sache combien j’en suis reconnaissant. Thanks also to the CBC’s Neil MacDonald and Radio­Canada’s Daniel L’Heureux for graciously explaining to me their

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    viii

viii Acknowledgments

approaches to incorporating translated speech into the programs for which they have been reporters. This project would not have been possible without the generous grants I received from the International Council for Cana­ dian Studies, the Chicago delegation of Quebec’s Ministère des Relations internationales, the Association internationale des études québécoises, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison com­munication arts department. I hope all of these associations, agencies, and academic departments feel that I have made good on their investment. My list of people to thank at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, where I wrote the doctoral dissertation out of which this book evolved, is also long. First of all, thank you to Michael Curtin, my adviser, who gave me the freedom to work as independently as I wanted, all the while providing insightful feedback and welcome encouragement. Thanks also to the other members of my dissertation committee: Michele Hilmes and Mary Beltrán from communication arts, Hemant Shah from journalism and mass communication, and Janet Caulkins from French. I would also like to thank Julie D’Acci, now the chair of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s women’s studies department, and Shanti Kumar, now at the University of Texas–Austin, who both provided feedback on the seminar papers out of which much of my dissertation – and now this book – grew. My fellow students in communication arts were invaluable resources. I was constantly impressed by their willingness to engage with the ideas and debates that animate the discipline, and their insight enriched my work in ways they may never realize. Elizabeth Galewski, Colin Burnett, Shawn Vancour, Josh ­Shepperd, Rachel Bicicchi, Matt Sienkiewicz – this is only the beginning of a much longer list. My sincerest gratitude to all of them. Likewise, my colleagues at the University of North Dakota – in the communication program, in the English department, and at the Institute for Borderland Studies – have provided great support and encouragement in the revision process. Jim Mochoruk, Brett Ommen, and Tim Pasch in particular have provided insight

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00A-Prelims.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    ix



Acknowledgments ix

in their own ways, although they are not the only ones. Thank you to all of them. A number of people outside of the universities with which I have been affiliated have helped, especially in visiting distant archives and retrieving information to which I could not otherwise have had access. Dr Paul Moore and his research assistant Emily McGinnis of Ryerson University fall into this category. With­out them, I would not have been able to compile the statistics related to audience measurement in Table 1. Dr Ira Wagman from Concordia University was another who helped me in this way, retrieving documents at Archives Canada that I would not have been able to retrieve myself. Thanks also to the editors at McGill-Queen’s, especially Kyla Madden, who have made the writing process a genuine pleasure. The book is stronger because of Kyla’s insights and attention to detail. Freya Godard, who copy-edited the manuscript, deserves a word of thanks, too. Where my writing is clear, I have her to thank. Where it is not, I can’t say she didn’t warn me. Finally, and most important, thank you to my beautiful wife, Kristi, and my beautiful daughter, Eleanor. Without them, I would be lost. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Paradoxes of Trans­­ lation in Television News,” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 32, 2010. Reprinted here by permission of SAGE. Portions of chapter 5 originally appeared in “A Cultural Studies Approach to Semantic Instability: The Case of News Translation,” in Looking for Meaning: Methodological Issues in Translation Studies, edited by Sonia Vandepitte (special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series, vol. 7), 2008. Reprinted by permission of Linguistica Antverpiensia. Portions of chapter 6 originally appeared in “Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Political Representation,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 64, copyright © 2009 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press.

This page intentionally left blank

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    1

EVERYONE SAYS NO

This page intentionally left blank

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    3

INTRODUCTION

Public Service Broadcasting and Translation Lundi prochain là, qu’est-ce qui arrive? Les autochtones disent non aux Canadiens anglais pis aux Canadiens français, les Canadiens français disent non aux Canadiens anglais, les Canadiens anglais disent non aux Canadiens français, on se trouve tous – on se dit tous non. [So next Monday, what happens then? The Indians say no to the English Canadians and the French Canadians, the French Canadians say no to the English Canadians, the English Canadians say no to the French Canadians, and we find ourselves – everyone says no to everyone else.] Jacques Parizeau, Le Téléjournal, 19 October 1992

This book is about translation and public service broadcasting, especially in Canada. The institution of public service broadcasting is at a crossroads. Or, perhaps more accurately, institutions of public service broadcasting are at a crossroads. The audiences they serve are increasingly heterogeneous: in multicultural countries like Canada, the viewers that public broadcasters seek speak more languages and identify with a wider range of ethnic, cultural, and even national identities than they have at any time in the past. Public broadcasters face a considerable challenge in addressing this diversity. How do they reconcile their historical nation-building mandates with the new ways they must speak to audiences with widely divergent world views? Is it possible to bridge the gaps between viewers with different backgrounds or even to help them understand how their counterparts in different regions, speaking different languages, understand the important events of the day? In all of that, what role does translation have to play?

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    4

4

Everyone Says No

The challenge faced by public broadcasting is a consequence of a media environment where viewers have an ever increasing number of choices, and it is twofold. First, the task historically assigned to public broadcasting – the creation and maintenance of a shared cultural identity – has never been more complicated, given the multicultural, multilingual societies those broadcasters serve. Second, competition with private broadcasters in an era of “media abundance,” to borrow a description from Marc Raboy (2006, 298), has never been more intense. Viewers have seemingly limitless options through cable, satellite, and the Internet. As a result, the audience of public broadcasting is fractured along multiple lines, a situation that contributes to the sustained crisis of legitimacy public broadcasting has been undergoing since at least the 1980s. Consider the situation in Canada. Although the country is officially bilingual, nearly 12 per cent of all Canadians speak a language other than English or French at home, according to the 2006 census (Statistics Canada 2009). Audience fragmentation also results from the proliferation of choices available to viewers. Conventional over-the-air networks are struggling to compete with the growing number of cable and satellite networks, so much so, in fact, that in 2008 the commercial broadcasters CTV and Global petitioned the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to allow them to begin charging cable companies for their signal (Taylor 2008). The public broadcaster – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – is struggling even more as it tries both to compete with private networks and to maintain its distinctive, public-oriented programming while facing cuts that resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs in 2009 alone (Cobb 2009). It is charged with the twin tasks of “contribut[ing] to shared national consciousness and identity” and “reflect[ing] the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada” (Broadcasting Act, 1991, secs. 3(1)(m)(iv) and (viii)). These tasks are challenging in an environment of audience fragmentation. How can public broadcasting contribute to “shared national consciousness and identity” if its viewers speak different languages?

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    5

Introduction 5

This is where translation has a role to play. The ­Canadian Broad­casting Corporation has worked to overcome these lin­­­ guistic divides with programs in languages other than E ­ nglish and French, such as Punjabi-, Mandarin-, and Inuktitutlanguage broadcasts of Hockey Night in Canada. It has also tried to bridge the English-French divide, for example through the program C’est la vie, carried on the corporation’s Englishlanguage radio network, which “gives listeners a window into the life of French speaking Canadians,” according to the network’s website. However, the use of translation in ­public service broadcasting has received little sustained critical attention. For that reason, this book provides an in-depth case study of translation between English and French on Canadian public television. In particular, it examines news coverage of two key events in recent Canadian history – the negotiation and failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords – by The National on the ­English-language CBC and by Le Téléjournal on the ­ French-language Radio-Canada.1 These debates marked moments of intense exchange between Canada’s linguistic and cultural groups. For that reason, their coverage by the CBC and Radio-Canada provides a rich set of examples that make it possible to identify and describe patterns in journalists’ translation techniques. This book’s analysis proceeds from the assumption that there is value in specificity and concreteness. Television news is a genre with distinctive modes of translation, shaped institutionally by journalists’ goal of balance and perspective-free reporting. Lin­ guistic translation can take several forms, including subtitling, voice-over translations, and paraphrases. This book also addresses larger questions of cultural translation, where journalists try to explain to one cultural group how another interprets an object or event. Concrete analysis results in concrete conclusions, which in turn provide insight into broader issues faced by public broadcasters, not only in Canada but elsewhere, too. In this respect, this book participates in a longstanding ­dialogue between Canadian and European media policymakers (e.g., Juneau 1984; Gerlach 1988; Collins 1991, 1995; CBC/

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    6

6

Everyone Says No

Radio-Canada 2007; Sarikakis 2007). Its value lies not only in its ­examination of key moments in recent Canadian history but also in its contribution to that dialogue.

MEECH LAKE AND CHARLOTTETOWN The Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, which were negotiated in 1987 and 1992 respectively, were attempts by federal and provincial governments to create the conditions necessary for Quebec to accept the patriation of the constitution. The process that resulted in the transfer of the constitution from London to Ottawa began in earnest in 1980 and was completed – although not without controversy – in 1982. In practical terms, patriation meant that amendments to the constitution would no longer need approval by the British parliament. The controversy surrounding patriation grew out of Prime Minister Pierre ­Trudeau’s inability to find an amending formula that all provinces, in particular Quebec, could accept. When the dust settled, the predominantly English-speaking provinces accepted the terms of patriation, but Quebec did not. The constitution may finally have been in exclusively Canadian hands, but amending it would still be difficult. At their core, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords were attempts to formalize the amendment process in a manner that Quebec (and the many other stakeholders) could finally accept. The task proved immensely complicated, however, because of the way it codified the controversial relationships between ­Canada’s constitutive communities – francophones, anglophones, First Nations, immigrants, and others – as well as between the federal, provincial, and in the case of Charlottetown, Aboriginal levels of government. Both accords failed – Meech Lake in 1990, when the provincial legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland refused to pass it, and Charlottetown in 1992, when voters rejected it in a country-wide referendum. In this context, the question of Canadian public broadcasting and “shared national consciousness and identity” was relevant at two distinct but related levels. On the one hand, the debates about the relationships between Canada’s different ­com­mu­nities (and, by extension, about the nature of Canadian national

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    7

Introduction 7

­­­ identity) took place independently of the coverage provided by the CBC/Radio-Canada – the first ministers’ meetings would have taken place whether the news media were there or not. On the other, journalists, politicians, and policy-makers actively debated whether (and how) the public broadcaster should help in facilitating those debates. Arguably, in the end, the networks’ coverage did in fact influence public opinion, although the nature of that influence is open to interpretation, as the following chapters make clear. The debate about whether the CBC and Radio-Canada should be observers or participants was part of a larger discussion about how the public broadcaster should address an audience fragmented along linguistic and cultural lines. In that respect, it offers useful parallels to contemporary discussions about ­public service broadcasting and multiculturalism. There are differences, of course, for instance, in the specific groups negotiating their place in Canadian society. The value of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debates, however, is that they brought the question of the media in relation to “shared national consciousness and identity” to the forefront of public discussion. The issues raised in those debates are closely related to the issues faced by policy-makers in the early twenty-first century. An analysis of coverage of Meech Lake and Charlottetown by the CBC and Radio-Canada can provide insight into more recent concerns in a second respect, too. The economic forces affecting public broadcasting now, in particular the competition from proliferating commercial media providers, were already operating in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, the CRTC had just begun to license optional-to-basic cable stations, thus providing new commercial networks with a business model that would be considerably more competitive than what had been available to them in the past. Two decades later, the CRTC has increased the number of licences it issues, in turn increasing the number of networks with which public broadcasting must compete. At the same time, audiences are turning to the Internet as well for their programming, taking still more viewers away from the CBC/RadioCanada. As a result, the corporation has seen its ­parliamentary appropriations cut because the federal government did not see

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    8

8

Everyone Says No

why it should provide funding for a broadcaster that viewers would not watch because they preferred slicker programs from somewhere else. The same was true under Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government, which cut funding for the corporation by more than $100 million in 1990, leading to the loss of more than a thousand jobs. The crisis of legitimacy for public broadcasting was very much the same then as it is now, and the value of this case study is that the issues being addressed by policy-makers, journalists, and politicians were explicitly related to the place of public broadcasting in a saturated media environment.

SCOPE AND METHOD This book’s primary contribution is to the field of communication and the subfield of media studies. It is a case study of journalists and their craft, albeit in very specific circumstances. To present a responsible case study, however, it has been necessary to borrow heavily from the field of political science, to which this book’s contribution is considerably more modest. The point here is not to offer an overarching explanation for the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords – a task that others have accomplished in ways that this book simply cannot (e.g., Russell 2004) – but instead to supplement an already rich literature by examining the media’s role in an intensely political series of debates. One place where the difference in approaches (and in what those approaches yield) will be clear is in the discussion of the meaning of the terms “distinct society” and “société distincte,” which Quebec sought to incorporate into both accords to describe its place in Canada. Much of the disagreement about the meanings of these terms (like much of the disagreement about the accords themselves) was political and related to fundamentally different conceptions of the relationship between provinces, between the federal and the provincial governments, between anglo­­­phones and francophones, between Native and non-Native groups, and so on. Meech Lake and Charlottetown failed because of these political disagreements, and they might well have failed regardless of the specific form of the CBC/Radio-Canada’s coverage. And yet,

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    9

Introduction 9

a number of well-placed policy-makers and executives, including CRTC chair Keith Spicer (1990), CBC/Radio-Canada president Gérard Veilleux (Canada 1991b), and CBC vice-president Trina McQueen (1991), thought that the corporation could help Canadians understand each other better and – more important – help Canada find a way out of its constitutional impasse. Nor were they the only ones, as comments from a wide range of politicians make clear (see Canada 1991b; 1992a). There appears to be a contradiction between this faith in the CBC/Radio-Canada and the fundamentally political nature of Canadians’ disagreements about the constitution. If Canadians had only understood each other better, would the accords have succeeded? Probably not. A far more interesting question, however, is how the CBC/Radio-Canada participated in the failure of the accords. That is the point of this book, which examines micro-instances of politics, broadly conceived as the contestation of meaning and identity. It looks at one site where such contestation played out, describing the particulars of how it played out, taking account of journalists’ conceptions of their work, their pre-existing notions about “distinct society”/“société distincte,” their notions of newsworthiness, and their relationships with politicians and with viewers. It is not the only site we could consider, but it is useful precisely because it is symptomatic of the larger debates that were taking place about Meech Lake and Charlottetown. It is important to note that the key term here is “symptomatic” as opposed to “representative.” This distinction matters because the relationship between the CBC/Radio-Canada’s news programs and the debates taking place was dialectical: journalists were influenced by the broader debates taking place, and their coverage in turn influenced those debates. However, journalists covered only a subset of the broader debates – how could they do otherwise? The question this book asks, then, is how their choice of what to cover was influenced by the debates themselves, in conjunction with the other factors listed above. All evidence suggests that they were working in good faith and trying to present as many facets of the debate as clearly as possible. Evidence (in particular, journalists’ discussion of their roles in policy

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    10

10

Everyone Says No Table 1 Average number of week-night viewers aged 18 and older for selected nightly news programs, summer 1990 and fall 1992 (in thousands) Summer 1990

Fall 1992

Halifax and Maritimes* The National CTV News ATV Late News

 56  11   5

102  36  19

Montreal Le Téléjournal TVA Nouvelles The National CTV News

324 189 110 105

307 195 104 148

Toronto and Hamilton The National Le Téléjournal CTV News CityPulse Tonight

277   4 345  74

303   6 325 124

Calgary The National CTV News 2 & 7 News First

 38  31  61

 35  39  64

Source: BBM Bureau of Measurement (1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1990d, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1992d). * Figures are for the Halifax market for 1990 and the Maritimes market for 1992.

­ ocuments and trade journals) also suggests that they took cerd tain questions of language, including the equivalence of “distinct society” and “société distincte,” for granted. The linguistic aspect of their job went largely unexamined, while other professional questions such as balance predominated. The fact that the constitutional debates as covered by The National and Le Téléjournal did not stand in for all other debates points to an important limitation of this study. It would be ideal to examine all of the news media’s coverage of Meech Lake and Charlottetown. After all, as Table 1 makes clear, there was a lot of variation in the popularity of The National and Le ­Téléjournal.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    11



Introduction 11

In the Maritimes and in Montreal, viewers preferred the national news programs of the CBC or Radio-Canada over those of their commercial rivals. Such was not the case in the Greater Toronto Area, where the national news of the private network CTV was more popular, nor in Calgary, where the local news was more popular than the national news produced by either the CBC or CTV. An exhaustive study would be a herculean task, however, at whose limits we would encounter a paradox identified by Lewis Carroll, who wrote about a land whose inhabitants strove to produce increasingly accurate maps. At first, they produced one whose scale was six inches to the mile, then six yards to the mile, then a hundred yards to the mile, and finally a mile to the mile. It was perfect, but it could be rolled out because “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map” (Carroll 1893, 169). In other words, it would be possible to broaden the scope of the study, but how broad is broad enough? The most exhaustive study would be an archive of all the television programs themselves, not to mention the radio reports, the newspapers, the magazines, and so on. Just as journalists must choose what to include and exclude, so must academics. This choice can be motivated, however, as is the case of the study presented here. What makes CBC/Radio-Canada programs valuable is the mandate that accompanied them to “contribute to shared national consciousness and identity,” which the private networks did not share. What was the effect of this policy on news coverage? How did their coverage grow out of the different facets of the underlying struggle to define the relationships of different levels of government to each other? To tease out the dynamic relationship between journalists, viewers, and the various political actors, this book adopts an approach informed by the circuit models of culture proposed by cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall (1980) and Julie D’Acci (2004). These models examine a media artifact (such as the news coverage of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords), its production, its reception, and the sociohistorical context within which it circulates. They emphasize the points of articulation – that is, the points of mutual ­influence –

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    12

12

Everyone Says No

between artifact, production, reception, and context, as i­ llustrated in F ­ igure 1. In concrete terms, they draw our a­ ttention to the ways journalists fashioned their coverage in response to those aspects of the socio-historical context they considered salient, in response to political pressures, and in response to viewers. How did the politics of national identity shape journalists’ institutional roles? How did journalists’ institutional roles in turn shape their stories? Similarly, how did viewers’ identities shape their political views, and vice versa? How did viewers’ resulting attitudes toward Meech Lake and Charlottetown (measured by polls and focus groups) affect journalists’ stories? In other words, taking this approach means examining the coverage of Meech Lake and Charlottetown – and the meanings associated with those accords – in all its dialectical complexity (see Conway 2008).

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    13



Introduction 13

Thus the analysis in this book is pulled between two poles, media analysis and political analysis, but one pole – media analysis – takes precedence. The political analysis serves to clarify questions of translation and the news. If the answers to these questions also help to clarify the politics surrounding the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, then this book’s conclusions will be all the more felicitous.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW: “EVERYONE SAYS NO” The story this book tells is ultimately one about a series of failures – or in some cases, refusals – to communicate. Jacques Parizeau’s remark in the epigraph is emblematic in this respect: “On se dit tous non” – “Everyone says no to everyone else.” Journalists, politicians, and Canadian voters said no during both Meech Lake and Charlottetown by actively making choices that led to these failures. Sometimes their choices were clearly related to communication between cultural and linguistic groups, while at other times the link appeared more tangential. In all cases, however, the breakdown in communication resulted from choices they made in response to specific historical circumstances. We are faced with a paradox of news translation: instead of making it possible for different cultural and linguistic groups to understand each other’s point of view, translation as it functioned in reporting by the CBC and Radio-Canada confirmed the viewers’ pre-existing assumptions about members of linguistic and cultural groups other than their own. Chapter 1 describes the socio-historical context (that is, the bottom box in Figure 1). It begins broadly by examining the idea of “nation,” then narrows to a focus on Canada, a country that has long been characterized by a fractured national identity. The country’s fractures predate the advent of broadcast media, and they have been reinforced by radio and television. Translation would seem to offer a bridge between Canada’s different communities, but where the media are concerned, its role has gone largely unexamined. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to production by describing an experi­ment in the early 1990s to use the corporation’s new all-

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    14

14

Everyone Says No

news cable networks to deliver, among other things, subtitled versions of programs such as Le Téléjournal. Among policy-makers and politicians, subtitling news seemed like an obvious solution to Canada’s linguistic divide – finally, anglophones and francophones would have a window into each other’s world. However, the experiment was short-lived. Subtitled French programs on the English-language Newsworld network lasted only a few months, while subtitled English programs never came to be. In fact, they fell victim to institutional politics within the corporation, where French-language journalists actively opposed the efforts to subtitle news because of what they considered inequalities in the funding of new cable stations: Newsworld was launched before plans for a French all-news network were even finalized, and francophone journalists were concerned that efforts to provide subtitled news would only delay the launch of their own network. The fact that the corporation’s networks were not p ­ roviding subtitled news did not mean, however, that translation was not taking place. On the contrary, journalists were incorporating trans­lations into their stories but in piecemeal fashion. Here, too, institutional politics played an important role, as chapter 3 makes clear. This chapter, which looks at connections between the socio-historical context, production, and news programs as artifacts, examines a paradox of journalism in the Anglo­American tradition, which is to say, journalism as it is practised at the CBC and Radio-Canada. Journalists on these networks maintain an ideal of objectivity that is based on a notion of perspective-free reporting, and as a result, they make a discursive claim to a representation of otherness that is unmediated by a journalist’s language or world view. This would imply that they occupy a position outside of the world where the events they write about take place. Of course, they do not occupy such a position, nor is unmediated representation of otherness possible. Journalists are actors in the very same world as the events they describe and are subject to political and institutional pressures that leave an observable trace, among other places, in the ways that they incorporate translated speech into their stories. Viewers of Le Télé­journal and The National had different degrees of access to the original speech of the politicians and other speakers

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    15



Introduction 15

featured in each evening’s program, and speakers played different roles within the context of each story. In this way, the viewers of each program heard a different description of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, even when they had access through translation to the other linguistic group’s perspectives. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 consider all four points in the circuit model – production, reception, artifact, and socio-historical context – by describing how the accords’ key terms “société distincte” and “distinct society,” which ostensibly meant the same thing, in fact meant very different things on Le Téléjournal and The National. Chapter 4 begins by tracing a theory of meaning that provides tools for accounting for the different, strategic ways that politicians, journalists, and others drew on the associations evoked by politically charged words such as “société distincte” and “distinct society.” It then describes the evolution of the meanings associated with Quebec’s desire to be recognized as “distinct,” from the Révolution tranquille through the 1980s, when Canada’s First Nations, in reaction to the proposed recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness, sought similar recognition. In this way, this chapter describes the origins of the gap separating “société distincte” and “distinct society” that existed even before Le Téléjournal and The National began producing stories about the Meech Lake or Charlottetown accords. Against this historical background, chapters 5 and 6 describe the divergent significations of “société distincte” on Le Téléjournal and “distinct society” on The National during the debates in question. “Translation” in these chapters means two things. First, it means “linguistic re-expression.” “Translation” in this sense describes the efforts described in chapter 2 to subtitle news or the incorporation of translated speech into news stories as described in chapter 3. What motivated this re-expression was the assumption that it could make it possible for different linguistic and cultural groups to understand each other, an assumption that leads to a second meaning of “translation,” namely “intercultural transfer.” The notion of transfer, however, is where things become complicated. As chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate, the politics affecting linguistic re-expression were such that the transfer in question was in no way transparent or unproblematic.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch00B-Intro.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    16

16

Everyone Says No

In fact, such politics made the very thing translation seemed to promise – mutual understanding between groups – impossible. In the case of both the Meech Lake Accord (see chapter 5) and the Charlottetown Accord (see chapter 6), translation as linguistic re-expression treated “société distincte” and “distinct society” as interchangeable, but they were not. In other words, they were more than mere mistranslations of each other. Instead, their meanings developed with relative independence as the terms circulated through the parallel debates taking place in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. Finally, the conclusion considers the implications of the translations performed by The National and Le Téléjournal for Canada as a multicultural society. Rather than facilitate intercultural communication, translation in all its forms – subtitling programs on Newsworld, incorporating translated speech on The National and Le Téléjournal, treating “distinct society” and “société distincte” as equivalent – complicated it. So what role can a public service broadcaster, subject to ever increasing market pressures, play in a country that, despite enormous efforts to the contrary, has always been characterized by a fractured national imaginary? In absolute terms, translation is bound to fail, but in relative terms, it does have the potential to improve communication across linguistic and cultural lines. In fact, it has the potential to help overcome a contradiction that has plagued public broadcasting in Canada and elsewhere, namely, the challenge posed by audience fragmentation for broadcasters with unity mandates. Translation can make it possible for public broadcasters to bring together diverse voices and perspectives at a central point, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has the potential to lead the way.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd, Macintosh HD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd, 9/21/2011 9/21/2011 3:26PM    3:26PM 17

1 The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation There is no better case than Canada to discuss questions of identity, belonging, nation-building and, generally, federalism and citizenship, because sorting out its self-understanding seems to be Canada’s intellectual contribution to the world. Alain-G. Gagnon and Raffaele Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec: Debating Multinationalism, 2007

Canada’s national television news anchors opened the programs of 27 October 1992 by taking stock of the dramatic and historic events of the day before. The country had just reached the end of a gruelling, month-long referendum campaign, and Canadians had just voted on the Charlottetown Accord, a sweeping agreement that held the potential to change the constitutionally defined relationships between the federal, provincial, and Aboriginal levels of government. The accord itself was a result of a yearlong consultation process during which representatives of federal and provincial commissions met with Canadians from across the country to find out their constitutional priorities. Would Canadians put an end to what many saw as Canada’s “constitutional crisis”? Would they vote to grant First Nation governments a new level of autonomy? Would they vote to reform the Senate, turning it into an elected – rather than appointed – body? Would they vote to recognize Quebec as a “société distincte” – a “distinct society”? The proposed changes were dramatic, and the stakes were high. Political actors from both the Yes and the No camps predicted that a No vote – and the rejection of Quebec’s

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    18

18

Everyone Says No

status as distinct – would bolster Quebec’s separatist movement and lead even to the breakup of the country. The vote failed. In overwhelming fashion, Canadians rejected the accord. Fifty-five per cent of Canadians outside of ­Quebec voted against it; for Quebecers, the rate was about 57 per cent, and for members of First Nations – that is, for those who did not boycott the vote altogether – it was 62 per cent (IRPP 1999, 344). Of all the provinces, only Ontario, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick approved the accord. The provinces that rejected it did so by a wider margin than expected, and those that passed it did so by a narrower margin. On The National, the CBC’s flagship nightly news program, Peter ­Mansbridge introduced the evening’s stories this way: “Good evening. It was a whisper that began in Nova Scotia and became a roar by the time it reached British Columbia. Loud, clear, direct, and unmistakable. No, Canadians do not want their constitution changed the way their political leaders suggested.” At the very same time, Bernard Derome intoned on Radio-Canada’s flagship news program, Le Téléjournal, “Bonsoir mesdames et messieurs. Le sentiment qu’on a ce soir, c’est qu’à peu près tout le monde finalement, les Non comme les Oui, les gagnants comme les perdants, sont bien soulagés que la question référendaire soit chose du passé” [Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The general feeling tonight is that finally, almost everyone – No supporters and Yes supporters, winners and losers – is relieved that the referendum is a thing of the past]. Both The National and Le Téléjournal highlighted the way in which the No vote had united the country, either in a collective “roar” or in a shared sense of relief, but the similarities stopped there. After framing the story in political terms, Mansbridge turned to Canada’s ongoing recession: “The immediate concern today seemed to be how the No vote would affect the economy. Through the referendum campaign there were those who predicted gloomy consequences if it went No. Well, today at least, everything economic was coming up golden.” He then passed the story to financial reporter Der Hoi-Yin, who proceeded to interview a series of economists, one of whom explained that “the resounding No vote is being taken by the markets as almost as much of a sign of unity as a Yes

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    19



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

19

vote might have done.” The referendum story, it appeared, had reached a happy – if paradoxically unifying – ending. This was not the story that viewers of Le Téléjournal heard. After his observation about Canadians’ shared sense of relief, Bernard Derome was quick to qualify the statement. If everyone was relieved, it was only for a limited time, parce qu’il y a certains acteurs politiques qui sont déjà chargés de rappeler encore une manche à disputer dans ce ­Canada de l’après-Charlottetown. Par exemple, le chef réformiste Preston Manning avertit Jacques Parizeau qu’il n’y a pas de place pour la souveraineté-association et que si son parti devait prendre le pouvoir, il le forcerait à choisir entre l’indépendance et l’appartenance au Canada. M. Parizeau, lui, à partir de maintenant va consacrer ses énergies à réaliser la souveraineté du Québec, la seule voie acceptable pour les Québécois, à son avis. [because certain political actors have already begun to remind us that there’s still one set to play in this postCharlottetown Canada. For example, Reform Party leader Preston Manning is warning Jacques Parizeau that there will be no place for sovereignty-association and that if his party should take power, he would force Parizeau to choose between Canada and independence. Starting now, Mr ­Parizeau, for his part, will devote his energies to achieving sovereignty for Québec, the only acceptable path for Quebecers, in his opinion.] Marthe Blouin, whose report followed this introduction, des­ cribed the growing rancour between Jacques Parizeau, leader of the sovereignist Parti Québécois, and Preston Manning, leader of the conservative Reform Party, which originated in Alberta and drew its political strength from the western provinces’ frustration with the more populous and politically powerful Ontario and Quebec. Viewers saw a visibly agitated Manning, speaking in Alberta but addressing Parizeau, warning that if and when the Reform Party came to power in Ottawa, Manning would force Parizeau to choose, once and for all, between Quebec and

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    20

20

Everyone Says No

­ anada. This was followed by an image of Parizeau, laughing and C looking almost giddy, responding to Manning, “Est-ce qu’il me laisse le choix des armes?” [Will he let me choose the weapons?]. The moral of the story, it would seem, was that, far from unifying the country, the No vote would lead to what federal politicians had feared and Parizeau had promised – a stronger push for Quebec sovereignty and, ultimately, the breakup of Canada. This contradiction brings the challenges faced by ­ public ­service broadcasters in multicultural societies into sharp relief. Both the English-language CBC and the French-language RadioCanada belong to a single corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Like many public service broadcasters, the CBC/ Radio-Canada had developed out of a larger nation-building project dating back to the development of radio in the 1920s and 1930s. Not only that, but from 1968 until 1991, the CBC/RadioCanada had the mandate to promote Canadian unity. With the Broadcasting Act, 1991, that mandate became one to “contribute to shared national consciousness and identity” (sec. 3(1)(m) (iv)), although in September 1991, the journalism departments of both networks received a memo about referendum coverage reminding them that the unity mandate “remains relevant to the current Broadcasting Act” (McQueen 1991, 2). How is it, then, that the CBC/Radio-Canada, with its mandate to promote national unity or a sense of national identity, presented such divergent perspectives on a story of such centrality to issues of Canadian and Québécois cultural identity? This contradiction, in fact, reflects a larger failure to communicate that characterized Canada’s constitutional crisis in the 1990s. Canada’s two major linguistic groups did not overcome the ideological divides that separated them, despite efforts to do so. While language was the most visible marker of difference, it was only one factor among others. Canadians were also divided by historical, cultural, and political differences, not all of which could be neatly mapped onto the English-French dichotomy. Where the CBC/Radio-Canada was concerned, these pressures contributed to and complicated the institutional imperatives that were shaping news coverage of Canada’s constitutional debates.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    21



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

21

What are the consequences of this contradiction? How did viewers of the two news services see events differently? How did these differences contribute to the dynamics of cultural-identity formation in the context of competing nationalisms in Canada and Quebec? And what of journalists’ efforts to explain Canada’s different communities to each other? Journalists made many efforts to translate between languages and cultural world views. For a brief time, they provided subtitled versions of CBC/RadioCanada news programs, and on The National and Le Téléjournal they frequently had to translate statements made in a language their viewers did not speak. Did these efforts help bridge the gap between anglophones and francophones, or did they maintain it? The answers to these questions shed light on the larger forces shaping public service broadcasters in contemporary multicultural societies, especially since these broadcasters help apparently disparate groups understand each other. Cultural identities, whether formed along national, regional, ethnic, or linguistic lines, are inextricably linked to the narratives people tell about themselves, narratives that public service broadcasters shape and repeat through news and other programs. Not surprisingly, in Canada’s linguistically and regionally divided media system, these narratives vary with the source, an observation that raises one of the central questions addressed in this book: what role has translation in news programming played in bridging Canada’s cultural divides? Ultimately, two things become clear. On the one hand, the CBC/Radio-Canada has faced – and continues to face – considerable, historically determined obstacles in overcoming Canada’s cultural divides. On the other, it has the tools, at least potentially, to begin to overcome these obstacles and, in the process, to serve as a model for other broadcasters.

NATION AND NARRATIVE There are two different ways that the notion of cultural identity has been thought about historically, one positing shared historical roots, the other appealing to the narrative that binds people together:

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    22

22

Everyone Says No

[The first position] defines “cultural identity” in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as “one people”, with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. (Hall 1990, 223) In this way, cultural identity becomes something to uncover or discover. It corresponds to a specific understanding of the “nation,” such as Ernest Renan (1990, 19) describes in his influential 1882 address “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” [What is a nation?]: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.” Ernest Gellner (1983, 7) offers a similar definition: “Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.” Similarly, Benedict Anderson (1991, 6), in a frequently cited turn of phrase, describes a nation as “an imagined political community ... the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Although the contention that the nation grows organically out of a shared culture or identity has certainly endowed the idea of nation with considerable discursive clout, as a definition it is insufficient. Also important is the question of will. When Renan (1990, 19), for instance, describes a nation as both a soul and a spiritual principle, he distinguishes between them in this way: “One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.” Such a will to live together depends upon a sense of mutual recognition, as Gellner (1983, 7) points out: “Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation.”

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    23



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

23

Mutual recognition and the will to live together, however, are not as straightforward as they might seem. A nation as “spiritual principle,” Renan (1990, 11) says, has only ever been achieved through violence: “Unity is always effected by means of brutality; the union of northern France and the Midi was the result of massacres and terror lasting for the best part of a century ... [So] the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” ­Anderson (1991, 201) goes so far as to assert that the nation as an imagined community could not exist without this selective form of forgetting, which he calls the “reassurance of fratricide”: A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861–65 as a great “civil” war between “brothers” rather than between – as they briefly were – two sovereign nationstates ... English history textbooks offer the diverting spectacle of a great Founding Father whom every schoolchild is taught to call William the Conqueror. The same child is not informed that William spoke no English, indeed could not have done so, since the English language did not exist in his epoch; nor is he or she told “Conqueror of what?” To choose not to forget would be to draw into question the mutual recognition between members of a nation, and thus to jeopardize the will to continue to live together. In other words, the narrative of nation might posit a shared origin, but it is ultimately the narrative itself that holds the nation together. So it is, too, with cultural identity. The second way to understand this concept, according to Hall (1990, 225), is to recognize that “as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather – since history has intervened – ‘what we have become’.” This implies that “[f]ar from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within,

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    24

24

Everyone Says No

the narratives of the past” (Hall 1990, 225). Not that the search for some sort of primordial cultural identity is irrelevant; on the contrary, the idea that such an identity exists often shores up the discursive legitimacy of the narrative itself. As a result, however, identity as a function of narrative positioning is contingent and contextual, and any stability it appears to offer is only relative. As we will see, in the Canadian context, this relative stability (or instability) has led Canadians of all stripes to work to influence the various narratives of national identity as best they can.

CANADA AND ITS DIVIDED MEDIA SYSTEM Since this stability is merely relative, there has been the need to repeat narratives of identity in order to perpetuate them. History textbooks perform this function, as do museums such as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, to varying degrees of success (see Cohen 2007). One of the most powerful tools for disseminating the narrative of nation (and more broadly, national culture) has been, of course, the media. However, the relationship between media and national culture has never been direct or uncomplicated. As Richard Collins (1990) asks, how does anthropological culture, or culture as a way of life, relate to symbolic culture, which is embodied in the artifacts that purport to be manifes­ tations of anthropological culture? Supporters of public service broadcasting have argued that symbolic culture, deployed on a national scale through radio and television, can build and consolidate a sense of national identity that is conducive to the functioning of a democratic society. Paddy Scannell (1989; 1990), for instance, argues that public broadcasting has opened up something akin to the public sphere in Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) sense by making it possible for more people to attend public events and by broadening the range of topics considered suitable for public discussion. On the other hand, Collins (1990), writing specifically about the CBC/Radio-Canada, sees the link as more tenuous, for reasons related to the culturally specific development of media institutions in French and English Canada. One result of this culturally specific development has been a pronounced difference between news coverage on the CBC and

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    25



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

25

Radio-Canada. For instance, in a study submitted to the Committee of Inquiry into the National Broadcasting Service, Arthur Siegel (1977, 33) found very little overlap between the coverage of Canadian news presented in the two languages: of 1,785 stories examined, only 259 appeared in both French and English; • over half the stories that appeared in both French and ­English (stories-in-common) had an international content; • the Canadian stories-in-common were often treated differently in French and English newscasts; • the Canadian stories-in-common ranked in the following order: •  national stories including Québec-related stories, major policy announcements, economic stories (inflation and unemployment) • Québec stories • Canadian disasters There is little about the rest of the country that appeared in French and English newscasts on the same day. •

At the level of news themes, Siegel (1977, 33–4) observed that differences vastly outnumbered similarities, suggesting that differences in the world views of the producers of the two languages’ news programs were reflected in “distinctly different perceptions about what is important and what constitutes news or newsworthiness.” Not that this divergence has been limited to the CBC/RadioCanada. In fact, the differences between French- and Englishlanguage media have been confirmed many times, in studies ranging from analyses of specific radio and television programs, to television programs and audiences in Quebec, to coverage of the October Crisis in 1970, to coverage of plebiscites in general and the 1980 Quebec referendum in particular, to coverage of the 1987 Meech Lake Accord and the Oka Crisis. To explain these differences, scholars have looked at divergences in attitude and approach between English- and French-language journalists,

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    26

26

Everyone Says No

as well as differences in television-news presentation style and newsroom organization.1 This divergence resulted in large part from the different ways English and French Canada adopted broadcasting technology. For various reasons, the English-speaking provinces adopted radio more quickly than Quebec, so that by 1932, more than twice as many Ontario as Quebec households had a radio (Filion 1994, 72–3). Quebec’s cities, where the broadcasters were concentrated, had fewer stations than their counterparts in anglophone provinces (Filion 1994, 74). Another reason had to do with the specific people supporting the shift from a commercial system to a public system in the late 1920s. When the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting recommended the creation of a public service broadcasting system in 1929, support for what would become the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) was led largely by prominent anglophones, such as Graham Spry of the Canadian Radio League, although the league was careful to include members of Quebec’s political and religious elite (Prang 1965). As a result of those different factors, in addition to the funding limitations imposed by the Depression, when the CRBC was created in 1932, it was a single system that was nominally bilingual but with English being the dominant language. By 1934, French content accounted for only about 5 per cent of all programming (Vipond 2008, 335). Over the next few years, however, it became increasingly clear that a single bilingual system would be impossible to maintain. The CRBC began developing predominantly French-language stations in Quebec, in effect establishing a “de facto French network” that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which was created by the 1936 Canadian Broadcasting Act, later maintained when it replaced the CRBC (Vipond 2008, 341). Whereas Quebec was slow to adopt the medium of radio, it was much quicker to adopt television. As Jean-Pierre Desaulniers (1985) explains, television took off at roughly the same time as the province entered what came to be known as the Révolution tranquille or Quiet Revolution. This period was marked by a rise in Québécois nationalism (reaching a culminating point in the founding of the separatist Parti Québécois or PQ in 1968), in

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    27



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

27

which television played an important role. Quebec intellectuals embraced the medium in ways that their anglophone counterparts did not, with public affairs and news programming on RadioCanada providing a forum in which journalists such as René Lévesque could launch political careers, following a well established pattern in Quebec politics (Gagnon 1981). At the same time, commercial television, which drew heavily on distinctly Québécois stories and featured Québécois accents and speech patterns, “enabled the people of Quebec to recognise themselves as a totality for the first time in their history” (Desaulniers 1985, 166; see also Collins 1990, 193–201). In English Canada, on the other hand, policy-makers were more concerned with the influence of programs from the United States. In the 1950s, “the biggest draws on the CBC [radio] schedule were the American imports, carried to please listeners and wean them away from American stations” (Rutherford 1993, 269). As radio lost ground to television, this pattern continued, with policy-makers and broadcasters, both public and private, reacting in their own ways to the popularity of US programs. The differences between the CBC and Radio-Canada were main­­tained during the 1980s and 1990s for reasons related to funding. In the time leading up to the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, parliamentary appropriations for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation shrank to the point where Gérard Veilleux had to find ways to cut more than $100 million when he replaced Pierre Juneau as the corporation’s president in 1989. In December 1990, the CBC/Radio-Canada cut 1,100 jobs, closed three stations, and cancelled eleven local newscasts and publicaffairs programs. These budget cuts strengthened the perception of funding inequality between the English- and French-language networks: anglophone journalists complained that the French network was receiving a disproportionately high level of funding (Perigoe 1989), while francophone journalists complained that they were not receiving their fair share (Millet 1990). These cuts also intensified regional rivalries. At the national level, they reinforced historical trends toward the centralization of production in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa (Skene 1993). At the provincial level, when cities that were not provincial capitals lost

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    28

28

Everyone Says No

their local stations or newscasts, stations in the provincial capitals were given the task of covering the entire region (Lumb 1991). Veilleux made the CBC/Radio-Canada’s new regional focus the official policy by 1993, meaning that the early 1990s were characterized by a push-pull operating on two axes: English and French, and centralization and regionalization.

THE FRACTURED CANADIAN NATIONAL IMAGINARY The divergent world views that have characterized Canadian broadcasting have had an important impact on the fractured Canadian national imaginary. The political philosopher Charles Taylor (1993) describes the relationship between Quebec and English Canada as one of “misrecognition.”2 In the past five decades, members of Quebec’s political elite have sought recognition of Quebec in national terms, conceiving Canada as made up of two “two founding peoples, two nations” (Taylor 1993, 169). English Canadians, on the other hand, have largely understood Quebec in provincial rather than national terms, in part because English Canadians, according to Taylor (1993, 158–61), frame their identity differently, drawing on shared values (maintenance of law and order, collective distribution of resources, equalization between regions) and political institutions (multiculturalism, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). In the years leading up to the Révolution tranquille, the popular view was that the la nation canadienne-française was culturally homogeneous, having been insulated from anglophone North America by the French language and the predominance of the Catholic Church. This apparent homogeneity served as a foundation for the imagined Québécois nation, as is clear in René Lévesque’s (1968) political manifesto, Option Québec, which laid out the guiding principles of what would become the Parti Québécois.3 This conception – and the misrecognition it engendered – was clear in the years following Quebec’s 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association, when the Quebec political scientist Daniel Latouche (1983) wondered why English Canada, unlike Quebec, had not tried to develop itself as a nation. In the intervening years, however, this conception of the Québécois

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    29



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

29

nation as culturally homogeneous has been challenged. In fact, the events accompanying the constitutional debates of the early 1990s marked the beginning of a turning point after which Quebec’s political elite could no longer afford to ignore Quebecers of non-French (or non-European) descent. Canada’s First Nations played prominent roles in both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, gaining new political influence in the process, and immigrants in Quebec played an important anti-separatist role in Quebec’s 1995 referendum. Ever since, Quebec politicians have been working to come to terms with this heterogeneity. English Canada’s self-conception differs from Quebec’s. Taylor (1993, 158–61) describes five values or institutions around which English-Canadian identity is gathered: law and order (in contrast to the perceived violence of US society), the collective provision of resources, the “equalization of life conditions and life chances between the regions,” multiculturalism, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Underlying these values and institutions is a strong sense of the primacy of individual rights and the “commitment to deal fairly and equally with one another” (Taylor 1993, 174). This emphasis on individual rights comes into conflict with the emphasis in Quebec on collective rights, and the need to pursue specific projects (such as the institution of language laws) in order to guarantee the nation’s survival works directly against English Canadians’ sense of fair dealing. These English-Canadian values and institutions also come into conflict with each other, however. “The principles of regional equality and mutual help,” Taylor (1993, 160) explains, “run against a perceived reality of central Canadian domination in the outlying regions, a grievous mismatch of promise and performance,” a contradiction that has sharpened English Canadians’ sense of regional identity. On the one hand, regional identities are a result of historical patterns of settlement and migration. On the other, since Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s efforts in the 1970s to implement bilingualism within the federal civil service, increasingly acrimonious politics have pitted region against region, in particular the west against Ontario. The sense of alienation resulting from what many saw as the forced “bilingualization” of the west, in addition to Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    30

30

Everyone Says No

Program, which imposed federal authority over energy resources in Alberta, has continued to grow. It has reached the point where Professor Leon Harold Craig (2005, A15) of the University of Alberta could write in August 2005 that for Alberta to achieve its potential, Albertans would need to do just “one small thing: [d]eclare our independence – withdraw from the Canadian federation, become an independent commonwealth with our own sovereign government, directly answerable to no one but the people of Alberta.” Not surprisingly, these conflicts become manifest in the media. Serra Tinic (2005), echoing Taylor, describes the effects of constantly shifting centre-periphery relations – between the United States and Canada, between Ottawa and the provinces, between provincial capitals and outlying areas – on television production in Vancouver. Of course, constantly looming on the horizon in any debate about Canadian identity is the United States, whose apparent threat of cultural assimilation has shaped Canadian media policy in general and English-language media production in particular. Anglophone intellectuals and policy-makers, afraid that US culture might overwhelm its Canadian counterpart, have historically disdained US television programs, despite the Canadian public’s marked preference for them (Rutherford 1993). This has led them to encourage the production of distinctly Canadian programs, whether through production for the CBC, Canadian content quotas, or the financing of independent producers with funds from the Canadian Film Development Corporation. The overall result of these cultural, linguistic, and media divides between French- and English-speakers, the increasing heterogeneity of Canadian and Québécois societies, and the regional antagonisms within English-speaking Canada is that the Canadian national imaginary, to the degree that it is even possible to speak of it, is fractured along multiple lines. Internal fractures are also apparent within each group, as Quebec seeks to make a place for people of non-French descent and as English provinces struggle to define the political relationship between Ottawa and the provinces and between the provinces themselves. All of this plays out, of course, in the constant shadow of the United States, especially where the media are concerned. These fractures

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    31



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

31

and the misrecognition they have engendered led to the defeat of Meech Lake and Charlottetown. They are also operative in the media, which constantly produce and reproduce them through the stories they tell and images they provide, as the following chapters demonstrate.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CANADA’S CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS These cleavages were central, not surprisingly, to Canada’s constitutional crisis in the 1990s, and they raise important questions about the news coverage of the debates. How did The National and Le Téléjournal position anglophones and francophones in Canada with respect to each other? What place was there for groups that were marginalized by these narratives – for example, western provinces, immigrants, or First Nations? In other words, how did The National and Le Téléjournal represent groups perceived as cultural “others”? This is where translation as a mediating factor enters the equation, although not in the sense that translation has traditionally been studied, that is, as a system of originals and translated copies. Instead, what was more common during the Meech Lake and Charlotte­town debates was what scholars of news translation have observed elsewhere: “translated texts are dismembered, used as raw material and not viewed as target texts, since the journalist’s real goal is the production of a news story (i.e. a totally new text) and not the presentation of a target text in its own right” (Orengo 2005, 170; see also Vuorinen 1995; Bassnett 2005). An example of the latter type of translation can be seen in the quotation that opens this chapter, in which Le Téléjournal showed Preston Manning speaking English, and then provided a voice-over translation for the benefit of francophone viewers. During the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debates, journalists’ incorporation of bits and pieces of translated texts had an unforeseen consequence. The stories they produced followed identi­fiable narrative arcs, which in turn shaped the meanings of key politically charged words and their apparent linguistic equivalents, in particular “société distincte” and “distinct

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    32

32

Everyone Says No

s­ ociety.” As a result, as the political debates evolved, the meanings of these terms evolved. To be clear, “meaning” here refers not only to literal or denotative meaning, but also to the complex set of associations evoked by the use of a word, following V.N. Vološinov’s (1986) conception of meaning as inherently dialogic.4 As people argued their points, they promoted certain associations over others, so that some gained in prominence while others were devalued. Paul Laurendeau (1997) describes this as the “deformability of notions in discourse”: as political and journalistic actors invested key terms with politically charged meanings, the words’ meanings underwent a dialectical process of stabilization, destabilization, and restabilization (cf. Vološinov 1986, 99–106). Key politically charged words and their translations, then, were linked in a complex relationship of both dependence and independence: dependence, first, because one was a translation of the other (or, more accurately in some cases, they were translations of each other); and independence, second, because both the word and its translation had evolved within different conceptual horizons. More important, they continued to evolve as journalists and political actors engaged in a larger ideological struggle to give them meaning (Conway 2005a). Such was the case, for instance, with the pair “société distincte”/“distinct society” during the negotiations leading up to the Meech Lake Accord in 1987. The designation “société distincte” meant something different to French-speaking Quebecers than “distinct society” meant to Ontarians. Quebecers saw such recognition as an acknowledgement of the province’s special historical circumstances: in their eyes, Quebec had been evolving toward independence before la Conquête in 1760. Ontarians, on the other hand, saw Quebec’s desire for recognition as a “distinct society” either as a power grab or as a waste of time, often judging that Quebec already benefited from a de facto special status (Conway 2002–3). Translation as linguistic re-expression, then, played a role in the construction and presentation of television news stories, but this re-expression was complicated by the ways that words in both languages were constantly invested with new meanings. As certain associations became more prominent while others lost

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    33



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

33

value, these words shaped the image or representation of those people whom they were used to describe. To put it another way, the politically charged key words employed by journalists, politicians, and others who spoke on The National or Le Téléjournal operated as lenses through which anglophones’ and francophones’ images of themselves and of other cultural groups were refracted. The process was dialectical rather than linear: producers, responding to factors such as political pressures, viewer expectations, and their own professional journalistic practices, chose stories that shaped the meanings associated with words such as “société distincte” and “distinct society”; at the same time, the ways in which those words came to be understood shaped the producers’ choices about which stories to cover and how. As a result, any appearance of equivalence was deceptive; in fact, not only did “société distincte” and “distinct society” mean different things to francophones and anglophones, but the stories that viewers saw reinforced and reproduced their divergent understandings of what was at stake. More broadly, the historical processes that had produced Canada’s fractured national imaginary and divided media system continued to operate, and in so doing were themselves reinforced.

QUESTIONS OF NEWS TRANSLATION The way in which CBC and Radio-Canada news programs reproduced the divergent world views of the communities they served raises questions about the process that shapes the semantic evolution of politically charged words and their apparent equivalents. To what political and institutional pressures were journalists responding when they put together the stories that shaped the meanings of the words in question? How can we describe these meanings themselves? Does past research on news translation shed any light here? Scholars have only just begun to respond to questions such as these, and they have largely neglected television. Instead, they have looked mostly at print news, comparing stories and their translations, examining the gatekeeping function of news agencies, or describing the journalist’s institutional role in collecting and writing news about people

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    34

34

Everyone Says No

belonging to different cultures, nations, or linguistic groups. When scholars have turned their attention to television news, they have generally limited their analysis to the role played by interpreters in political interviews where an interpreter is used or in international newsrooms.5 An evolution of sorts has taken place in the questions posed by researchers in the thirty-year span covered by that analysis. Scholars writing in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned with how political relations between countries affected which stories travelled where. Scholars writing more recently have been more interested in the ways in which journalists’ institutional roles within a news organization shape how they construct their stories. The analysis performed by both groups, however, has looked more at the political economy of news and at newsroom organization than at the stories themselves. However, as Susan Bassnett (2005) points out, what constitutes news translation is not straightforward. “A story,” she says, “may be generated orally in one language, be phoned in to a central office in that same language or in another, then be rewritten in a different language in an agency and sold around the world” (Bassnett 2005, 125). How does this chain of disassembly and reassembly differ among news organizations responding to different political pressures? What effect does it have on words’ meanings and viewers’ understandings of themselves and their neighbours? Such external political and social forces have an important influence on news translation in Canada. The dominance of English that in the field of literary translation has historically been reflected in what gets translated and why (Simon 1990a, 1990b), has also characterized the dynamics of news translation. For instance, in a report for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Neil Compton (1965, 7) identified the central contradictions that have shaped media translation in Canada: “It is a paradoxical fact that improved communications have helped to put an end not merely to the willingness of French Canadians to accept an inferior role in the national economy, but also to certain convenient mutual misunderstandings which have hitherto enabled the two communities to live peacefully side by

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    35



The News, the Nation, and the Stakes of Translation

35

side.” Other commission reports found that although a quarter of journalists saw their role as that of “interpret[ing] one language group to the other” (Black 1969, 186), francophone journalists bore most of the burden of translating across linguistic and cultural lines because they were far more likely than their anglophone counterparts to be bilingual and to be familiar with the culture that was not their own (Chartrand McKenzie 1967; cf. Gagnon 1992). The 1981 Royal Commission on Newspapers (Canada 1981) gives some sense of the ways in which institutional forces can affect which stories are translated and how. Of particular interest is the discussion of the Canadian Press (CP) in the commission’s research publication Canadian News Services (Cumming et al. 1981). CP is an organization that was (and still is) run cooperatively by newspapers and media companies from across Canada. In 1981, the two largest contributing companies, with proportionate representation on CP’s board, were Thomson Newspapers and Southam Incorporated. The influence of these two companies, both from English Canada, had a direct impact on the ways in which stories passed from one language to the other. On the one hand, CP reported to the commission that one of its “stated functions is to contribute to national unity” (Cumming et al. 1981, 41). On the other, the relationship between the English- and French-language services was anything but one between equals. The French-language service was “a subsidiary wire service similar to those of the Maritimes, Ontario, and the West” (Cumming et al. 1981, 51). As one publisher put it, “La Presse canadienne [as CP is known in French] is above all Canadian Press” (Cumming et al. 1981, 56). In effect, the control exerted by the English-language papers and the centralization of decision making in Toronto meant that “while the E ­ nglish-language dailies in the rest of Canada publish[ed] English versions (written by English-speaking journalists) of events occurring in Québec, Québec French-language dailies publish[ed] news from elsewhere in the country via an English version of things ‘translated’ or ‘adapted’ by French-speaking journalists stuck at their desk on St James Street in Montréal” (Cumming et al. 1981, 52).

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch01.indd,9/21/20113:26PM    36

36

Everyone Says No

CONCLUSION: NEWS TRANSLATION AND THE CBC/RADIO-CANADA While the report on Canadian Press gives some sense of how translation took place in one news organization, the question of translation figures only tangentially. There are more questions to ask, especially if the object of study is Canada’s national broadcaster, with its various historical mandates related to unity and identity. The forces shaping the fractured Canadian national imaginary and Canada’s divided media system are mutually rein­ forcing. When Canadians were presented with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, their perspectives already diverged along linguistic and cultural lines; the coverage of those debates by the CBC and Radio-Canada reinforced that divergence. What influence did translation have? The following chapters describe this dialectic and the role of translation in it. They ask, for instance, what influence professional and institutional pressures had on how journalists went about performing acts of translation, as well as how those acts shaped how Canadians thought about and understood each other. But first, there is an even simpler question, which the following chapter will address: why does the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation not offer subtitled news?

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

2 The Rise and Fall of Translated News on Newsworld and the Réseau de l’information La traduction en français de l’information produite par Newsworld est un non-sens journalistique ... Si l’information de CNN n’est pas bien adaptée au public du Canada anglais, comment peut-on penser que l’information de Newsworld serait bien adaptée au public francophone? [Translating Newsworld’s news into French is journalistic nonsense ... If CNN’s news is not a good fit for the English Canadian public, what’s to say that Newsworld’s news would be a good fit for the Frenchspeaking public?] Alain Saulnier of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, 27 February 1991

In the spring of 1990, Canada was at the beginning of what would prove to be a tumultuous decade during which the question of national unity would be constantly at the forefront of political debate. At the time, the concern was with the quickly unravelling Meech Lake Accord. Negotiated in 1987 in the hope of creating the political conditions necessary for Quebec to join the constitution, the agreement faced opposition in the legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland. Without ratification by all ten provincial legislatures, the accord would fail, and its failure would lead – or so feared many among the country’s political elite – to an increased sense of alienation in Quebec, pouring fuel on the flames of separatism. With stakes that high, federal politicians and policy-makers were eager to find ways to encourage dialogue between francophones in Quebec and anglophones in the rest of Canada. Their

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

38

Everyone Says No

hope was that if Canadians came to know each other better, they might overcome the linguistic and cultural differences that divided them. Politicians and policy-makers both recognized, however, that francophones and anglophones did not share a common stock of cultural symbols and that they continued to exist, to evoke Hugh MacLennan’s well-worn image, as “two solitudes.” Where news coverage was concerned, for instance, anglophones and francophones were getting different interpretations of events, if they were seeing the same stories at all: media scholars had long since established that the overlap even between the English- and French-language television networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was as low as 15 per cent (Siegel 1977, 33). Out of this desire to encourage dialogue grew an idea that captured the imagination of many prominent members of Canada’s governmental elite. If anglophones and francophones weren’t seeing the same news, they reasoned, why not make news in one language available to speakers of the other by playing subtitled versions of CBC/Radio-Canada programs such as The National and Le Téléjournal? No less a person than Keith Spicer (1990, A4), chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), opined in an address to the Empire Club in Toronto in May 1990: CBC, both radio and TV, does a lot for understanding among Canadians. But let me give you a small example of the remaining potential. During the Sault-Ste-Marie language nonsense [when the city council passed a controversial resolution declaring English the official language of the municipal government], we saw and heard mainly from the extremists – and French Canada, on its news, heard almost exclusively the English-Canadian extremists. A dialogue of the deaf, and of the blind. I wonder what might have been achieved by subtitling the national TV news of English and French Canada – the French news with English subtitles outside Quebec, and the English news with French subtitles within Quebec. Naive? Impractical? The other day in Paris, I watched the TV news in my room from Germany, Italy and Spain – all

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

39

with French subtitles. And the Europeans aren’t building a country, just a closer-knit continent. (emphasis in original) The idea Spicer was describing dated back at least three years. Its timing had been propitious. Even as Canada was facing a prolonged debate about national unity, the CRTC was revising its policy for licensing specialty cable channels. In 1987, following those revisions, the CRTC approved the CBC/Radio-Canada’s application for an English-language all-news cable network, Newsworld, which would need a steady supply of programs to fill its broadcasting day. Subtitled versions of Le Téléjournal and the public-affairs program Le Point could help fill out the schedule, alongside rebroadcasts of The National and The Journal from the CBC’s over-the-air network. Indeed, as part of its licence decision, the CRTC (1987b) declared, “In the hour from 11:00p.m. to midnight, the new service will exhibit, with English subtitles, the French-language programs Téléjournal and Le Point from the Corporation’s French-language television network.” Enthusiasm for the idea continued at least until 1992, especially as the CBC/Radio-Canada prepared to apply for a licence for a French-language counterpart to Newsworld. One person expressing strong support was Sheila Finestone, a Liberal member of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Communications and Culture. Not only would one group’s exposure to the other group’s news help ameliorate the “lack of understanding of the difference in the culture,” she said while questioning CBC/ Radio-Canada representatives during a 1992 hearing, but subtitling would also help Canadians learn the official language they did not speak: “people who were learning a new language could reinforce the learning by association” (in Canada 1992a, 29). Such enthusiasm, however, was not enough to make subtitled news a reality for more than a very short time in 1989, when Newsworld first began to air. In fact, by 1994, when News­ world’s French-language counterpart – the Réseau de l’infor­ mation – received its licence from the CRTC, mention of subtitled news was nowhere to be found (CRTC 1994). How was it that an idea of such apparent promise in 1987 – and with such longstanding political support – lost favour to the degree that it

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

40

Everyone Says No

was ­abandoned completely seven years later? The answer can be found by examining the links between the CRTC’s policy for licensing cable stations, the resources available to the CBC and to Radio-Canada, and anglophone and francophone journalists’ relationships with the national broadcaster. The complexity of the answer reveals both the promise and certain limits of public service broadcasting for encouraging national unity in a country such as Canada. Because the programs in question – subtitled versions of CBC/ Radio-Canada news programs – existed only for a brief moment in 1989, the focus of this chapter is on the pressures affecting the production (or not) of such programs. The historical precedents for the linguistic and regional divides that characterized the CBC/ Radio-Canada were set in the early days of radio. Over the years they were reinforced by economic, political, and cultural pressures, whose effect in the late 1980s and early 1990s was felt in the way the CRTC and the CBC/Radio-Canada negotiated two distinct but mutually dependent questions. The first was whether all-news networks would receive licence approval from the CRTC. The second was, if they did, what their content would be. The answers to these questions were in turn informed by the various tensions shaping the conceptions of Canadian nationalism: Canada’s place in relation to the United States and its media, the place of francophones and anglophones in relation to each other, and finally, the place of Canada’s regions in relation to one another. Ultimately, despite its apparent promise to bring linguistic communities together, news translation (or the lack of it) instead confirmed anglophone and francophone viewers in their mutual solitudes.

REGIONALISM AND THE CBC/RADIO-CANADA The right structure for broadcasting in Canada has been disputed since the late 1920s. Should Canadian broadcasting be commercial or publicly funded? Should regions (or provinces) play a dominant programming role, or should that responsibility fall to the federal government? In December 1928, after a brief experiment with commercial broadcasting during which the popularity

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

41

of US radio spilling across the border alarmed Canadian nationalists in Ottawa, Parliament established the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, with John Aird as chair, and gave it the mandate “to examine into the broadcasting situation in the Dominion of Canada and to make recommendations to the Government as to the future administration, management, control and financing thereof” (Canada 1929, 5). A little less than a year later, the Aird Commission returned with its recommendations: “That broadcasting should be placed on a basis of public service and that the stations providing a service of this kind should be owned and operated by one national company; that provincial authorities should have full control over the programs of the station or stations in their respective areas” (Canada 1929, 12). As media historian Marc Raboy (1990, 28) observes, “It may not be an exaggeration to say that all subsequent debate on broadcasting in Canada has centred on one or another part of this brief phrase.” Initially, the debates about whether to adopt the Aird Commission’s recommendations focused on the question of private versus public funding. Private broadcasters with an established presence opposed a publicly funded system because it would put them out of business. On the other side, the Canadian Radio League, a coalition led by Graham Spry, national secretary of the Association of Canadian Clubs, headed up support for Aird’s recommendations. Spry wanted Canada to have access to broadcasting that stood apart from what the United States could offer, and he realized that to be effective, the League would have to reach out to French Canadians and to the western provinces (Prang 1965). The Canadian Radio League interpreted Aird’s recommendations as favouring a strong federal (and weak provincial) role in programming. “Broadcasting,” wrote the League’s Brooke ­Claxton, “by reason of its very nature, is inevitably interprovincial, and not intraprovincial. The instant a sound is broadcast, the waves that issue are perceptible in every province” (quoted in Raboy 1990, 34). As early as 1931, however, cracks in the coalition were beginning to appear along linguistic lines: English­language newspapers worried that anglophones would be forced to listen to French while French-language newspapers feared

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

42

Everyone Says No

“English domination of the airwaves in Quebec” (Raboy 1990, 32). Nevertheless, when the Radio Broadcasting Act was passed in 1932, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) it created had only one network, which would try to broadcast to the entire country in both English and French. The forces working against a bilingual network were considerable. Although the proportion of French-language or bilingual programs was as high as 50 per cent in early 1933, by historian Mary Vipond’s (2008, 335) estimate, it quickly fell to about 5 per cent by late 1934. Vipond attributes the decrease to a number of factors, ranging from opposition from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Orange Order in the Prairie provinces to fears among French-Canadian nationalists in Quebec about what might happen if French-language programming were controlled by a national agency, rather than a provincial one. At the same time, however, the CRBC “had made the improvement of service in Quebec a priority from the beginning of its mandate,” setting up stations in Quebec City, Chicoutimi, and Montreal, even before the Prairie or Atlantic provinces had a single station of their own (Vipond 2008, 340). By 1933, in fact, the CRBC had set up what Vipond (2008, 341) calls a “de facto French network,” along with other networks serving regional needs elsewhere in the country. When Parliament passed the Canadian Broadcasting Act in 1936, the newly formed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation maintained its French network. According to Raboy (1990, 62), “even in the absence of any clear policy, [the] Frenchlanguage service was effectively autonomous ... Because of the language barrier, [the French service] had to rely more strongly on local resources and could more easily create a distinctive relationship with its audience. Thus, instead of contributing to ‘national unity’ in the coast-to-coast sense, the CBC, in spite of itself, began to foster the feeling of difference that would eventually take the form of radical nationalism in Quebec.” While disputes over language caused one set of problems for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, competition with commercial broadcasters caused another. The CBC (and, once it came into existence, Radio-Canada) was called upon to do two contradictory things: provide programming reflective of the

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

43

country while competing for audience share with private broadcasters. Distinctively Canadian programs did not necessarily attract large audiences, especially when what made them distinctive was the way they appealed to regional sensibilities. Thus the tension between private and public broadcasting dovetailed with the tension between national and regional (or provincial) control of programming, as continued to be the case during the time when the CBC/Radio-Canada was applying for licences for Newsworld and its eventual French-language equivalent (see Skene 1993). In this way, the CBC/Radio-Canada was shaped by competing interests divided along linguistic, geographic, and cultural lines. These divisions have rarely been crossed. The Committee of Inquiry into the National Broadcasting Service, for instance, which was established in 1977 to gauge how well the CBC/ Radio-Canada was fulfilling its mandate to encourage exchange between Canada’s regions and to “contribute to the development of national unity,” found that on the CBC, the regions of English Canada were poorly represented, except in programs they produced to fill the summer schedule (CRTC 1977, x, 57). The committee’s judgment of the exchange between the CBC and Radio-Canada, especially in the realm of news and public affairs, was even harsher. Describing the situation as “cultural apartheid,” it wrote, “Each network’s lack of interest in the other part of Canada is reinforced by differences in outlook, spirit, and working methods between French- and English-speaking journalists. It is reinforced, even more, by a structural organization in the CBC that a well-known and respected CBC personality has trenchantly described as a ‘working model of how the country will fail’” (CRTC 1977, 55, 58). The structural aspects the committee referred to had to do largely with the fact that most anglophone journalists working for the CBC could not speak French; as a result, they found it a struggle to work on co-productions with their francophone counterparts. There was also “a general belief that audiences [were] indifferent to offerings from the other language group,” and therefore “producers [were] not enthusiastic about spending time on productions of what they regard[ed] as of minimal interest” (CRTC 1977, 59–60).

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

44

Everyone Says No

Consequently, most attempts at co-productions between the CBC and Radio-Canada failed. “A 1965 proposal to create a national news service to be situated in Ottawa, though at first greeted with enthusiasm, posed so many problems that it was abandoned,” the committee reported (CRTC 1977, 60). Beyond this, the committee identified a “failure to pool talent, equipment, and effort,” except in the case of programs about events such as “elections, conventions, [and] political debates” (CRTC 1977, 60). Even this type of sharing, however, involved “mainly the sharing of of image facilities, not the commentary or makeup of the program” (CRTC 1977, 60). In response to this criticism, the CBC/Radio-Canada increased the number of francophone journalists working outside of Quebec in the late 1970s, and in the short term, this resulted in an “increase in common ground between the French and English newscasts,” going from 15 per cent of stories in common in 1977 to more than 25 per cent in 1978 (de Bonville and ­Vermette 1994, 702; Siegel 1979a, 5).1 This improvement, however, was shortlived: Jean de Bonville and Jacques Vermette (1994) observed that by 1987 the coverage of Quebec by the CBC and of ­English Canada by Radio-Canada followed patterns similar to those the Committee of Inquiry into the National Broadcasting Service had observed ten years earlier. Thus the proposal to make subtitled news available to E ­ nglishand French-speaking viewers was historically significant. It would have represented a tangible outcome to the long-standing desire that the CBC/Radio-Canada find a way to bridge the gap separating francophones and anglophones, a desire that was all the more urgent given Canada’s ongoing constitutional crisis. However, the same obstacles that had blocked such efforts in the past would plague these efforts, too.

NEWSWORLD AND THE CRTC One of the themes running through early debates about Canadian broadcasting, namely the need to produce Canadian media to counterbalance the influence of media from the United States, also had a large part in the CRTC’s decisions about the licensing

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

45

of Newsworld, which would compete with the American cable network CNN. From the outset, CNN had an advantage over its eventual Canadian competitor because it operated within a more favourable regulatory framework. In Canada, the CRTC issued licences for specialty stations, which carried “narrowcast television programming designed to reflect the particular interests and needs of different age, language, cultural, geographic or other groups in Canada” (CRTC 1986), and the first licences it issued in the early 1980s restricted the ways in which the stations could attract subscribers. In contrast, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was more interested in regulating distribution technologies than in administering a licensing system for cable networks. For instance, in the 1960s when cable began moving away from the community-antenna television (CATV) model, so-called because of the large antennas that communities would erect in order to capture and redistribute over-the-air broadcasts from larger nearby markets, newly formed cable networks such as HBO used microwave relays to distribute their signal. Microwave operators needed a licence from the FCC in order to secure their frequency. In the mid-1970s, cable networks began to distribute their signal via satellite, which did not fall under the purview of the FCC, meaning that they no longer needed FCC approval and that they had only the market to contend with as they worked to make their networks viable. As a result, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the creation of a number of niche or narrowcast cable stations in the United States. Nickelodeon and ESPN were both launched in 1979, MTV in 1981, and Lifetime for Women in 1984. More important here, Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network – CNN – in 1980 (see Hickey 2001). Networks such as these had two sources of funding. In addition to selling advertising, they received fees from cable operators when they were carried as part of basic cable packages. Although cable networks did not have the reach of their over-the-air rivals NBC, CBS, and ABC, they could set their advertising rates much lower. As the US cable industry grew, then, cable networks succeeded by focusing their programs on target niche audiences, thus making themselves doubly attractive to advertisers: not only were they less expensive, but they could

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

46

Everyone Says No

also reach the specific audiences the advertisers desired (Conway 2005b, 49–50). Canadian cable stations, on the other hand, operated in a very different regulatory environment. In 1984, when the CRTC issued its first licences, it explained that it was “conscious of the uncertainty faced by the pay television licensees in their first few years of operation” and therefore “took a conservative approach in licensing the first few specialty services, which were to be distributed on a discretionary basis” (CRTC 1987a). This meant that individual consumers, rather than cable operators, could choose whether or not to subscribe to a station. In other words, niche stations could not be bundled as part of basic cable packages, as was the case in the United States. As a consequence, these specialty services encountered significant difficulties in obtaining carriage commitments from cable operators, and that hindered their financial viability (CRTC 1985). The first licences the CRTC issued in 1984 were for two English-language networks, MuchMusic and The Sports Network (TSN), as well as Telelatino (operating in Spanish and Italian) and Chinavision (operating in various dialeacts of Chinese) (CRTC 1987a). At the same time, the CRTC gave cable providers permission to import signals from seventeen stations originating in the United States – including CNN – in order to put together the first pay-television packages (Raboy 1990, 319). The CRTC did not begin to issue licences for Canadian “optional-to-basic” stations – those that would be carried at the discretion of cable operators rather than individual subscribers – until 1987, when it awarded licences to eight new networks, four in English, three in French, and one in both languages. In order to obtain a licence, companies had to demonstrate “the financial viability of and market demand for their proposed services” (CRTC 1987a). In Newsworld’s case, the CBC/RadioCanada had to show the need for a distinctly Canadian news service to compete with US news sources, which included not only CNN (which by that point had a seven-year head start in building infrastructure, with three of those years spent building a Canadian audience), but also US broadcast networks. To do this, it described the goals of the proposed station in terms of

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

47

“information sovereignty” and drew connections between those goals and Canadian viewing habits: “At the most fundamental level, Canadian networks, with limited resources for foreign bureaus and international coverage, must rely heavily on US networks for much of their foreign coverage ... As the [federal] Task Force [on Broadcasting Policy] noted, some 56% of the news an English-speaking Canadian has access to is foreign. Only 44% comes from Canadian stations. Yet despite this imbalance, when it comes to viewing, 90% of the news and information programs Canadian audiences choose to view is Canadian” (quoted in CRTC 1987b). The CBC/Radio-Canada went on to say that, according to its audience research, more than three-quarters of cable subscribers would watch a Canadian all-news channel, and a third would do so often. The CRTC approved the corporation’s application on 1 December 1987 (CRTC 1987b). At the same time, it denied a competing application by the private company Allarcom to launch a station called Canadian Cable News (CRTC 1987c). Judging from the CRTC’s written decisions, it appears that it found the national broadcaster’s application more complete and its business plan more compelling. In particular, the CRTC discussed the CBC/ Radio-Canada’s existing news infrastructure, which in English included thirty television and forty radio newsrooms across the country. Newsworld would make extensive use of this infrastructure, producing six hours of programs each day from both Atlantic Canada and the west. As already mentioned, Newsworld would also encourage interregional and intercultural communication by playing subtitled versions of Radio-Canada’s programs Le Téléjournal and Le Point (CRTC 1987b). The CRTC expressed two concerns about the application, however. The first, as described below, had to do with the corporation’s decision to postpone its licence application for a French all-news network. The second had to do with how Newsworld would be funded. Although Newsworld might draw on the newsgathering resources of the CBC’s over-the-air network, the CRTC wanted to be sure that the cable network would be financially self-sufficient, that is, that Newsworld’s funding would come entirely from cable fees and advertising, and not from the

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

48

Everyone Says No

­ arliamentary appropriations intended for the CBC’s traditional p broadcast network. To that end, the CBC/Radio-Canada predicted in its application that Newsworld would depend on cable fees for a little more than three-quarters of its revenue during the first year but that by the third year, as advertising revenue increased, its dependence on fees would fall below 70 per cent. It also predicted that, depending on the number of subscribers, the monthly fee would be between twenty-five and forty cents per subscriber (CRTC 1987b). This fee structure ultimately proved to be an obstacle in Newsworld’s launch. Initially scheduled for 1 September 1988, the launch was delayed until 31 July 1989, in large part because of protests from consumers when cable companies raised their rates in 1988 after adding the specialty stations YTV, Vision TV, and WeatherNow to their basic packages (Quill 1988). When it finally began airing, the fact that it played subtitled versions of Le Téléjournal and Le Point went more or less unnoticed. The Toronto Star, for instance, highlighted the regional nature of the programs (many of which were produced in places like Halifax, Calgary, and Winnipeg) but neglected altogether to mention the inclusion of programs from Radio-Canada (Quill 1989). As a matter of fact, Le Téléjournal and Le Point were pushed back from their originally planned 11:00 p.m.–midnight slot to 1:00– 2:00 a.m.; by 1990, they were replaced entirely by reruns of various international reports.2 Their effectiveness was further limited by the fact that Newsworld was not yet available on all cable systems across the country. Its “optional-to-basic” status meant that cable operators could decide not to carry it, prompting the Toronto Star to write in an editorial, “Why, asks Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, is Newsworld ‘an optional add-on,’ when the major US [broadcast] networks are on basic cable? We’d like to know, too” (“Newsworld Eclipsed” 1992, A16). Thus, because of the viewers’ apathy and a poor time slot, subtitled news on Newsworld never had much chance.

“FRENCH NEWSWORLD” The CRTC’s other major concern, of course, was that the CBC/ Radio-Canada was applying for an English-language network

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

49

only and neglecting the needs of francophones. The corporation, on the other hand, argued that because of the presence of US networks, the need for distinctly Canadian news was more urgent in English than in French: In response to concerns that a service of the type proposed in this application might be equally urgent for French Canadians and that the Corporation’s mandate under section 3 of the Broadcasting Act requires the provision of services in both languages, the Corporation answered that the provision of services in both languages did not necessarily need to be accomplished simultaneously and explained that most of the available foreign information programming is in English, constituting a greater imbalance of domestic to foreign English-language news and public affairs programming. It stated that a high quality English-language service is immediately achievable at a reasonable cost to cable subscribers. (CRTC 1987b) The CRTC, which found the explanation provisionally acceptable, approved Newsworld’s licence on the condition that the broadcaster submit a feasibility study for a French all-news network within a year. The problem, as the CBC/Radio-Canada saw it, was that resources in French were considerably less than the pre-existing resources available in English. This became especially clear in 1989, when the corporation submitted an application for a French counterpart to Newsworld. According to Michael McEwen, CBC/Radio-Canada’s executive vice-president (who was not involved in putting together the 1989 application), “We did apply for a Newsworld licence for the French system, and it was initially turned down. It was not the same type of Newsworld service the English had, but it was a beginning, and tailored to what we thought the economics would stand at that time” (in Canada 1992a, 25). From the perspective of the CRTC, the broadcaster promised more with its 1989 application than it could deliver: “the Commission does not share the CBC’s contention ... that the service as proposed could be ... ‘the Frenchlanguage counterpart of the English-language service’ authorized by the Commission in 1987” (CRTC 1989).

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

50

Everyone Says No

One thing that disappointed the CRTC was that the proposed French service would carry very little original programming, especially in comparison to Newsworld. The proposed service would have been on the air only 114 hours each week, with no programming between midnight and 6:00 a.m. on weekdays or between midnight and noon on weekends. Original programs would have accounted for a little more than 20 per cent of the network’s lineup, the rest consisting of Radio-Canada programs and of “unedited rebroadcasts of local supper-time news and information programs originating from 17 different cities across the country” (CRTC 1989). Newsworld, on the other hand, was on the air 168 hours each week, with about half that time spent on original programs; when it replayed segments that originated outside its studios, it could afford to re-edit them, something the French network would not have had the means to do. A further obstacle was the opposition from outside groups such as the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec (FPJQ) and the Canadian Television Producers and Directors Association (CTPDA). The CTPDA thought that replaying regional newscasts “could seem repetitive and become monotonous,” while the FPJQ seemed to agree with the CRTC’s assessment that the CBC/Radio-Canada, by proposing an “equivalent” to Newsworld, was promising more than it could deliver: “[T]he CBC cannot be allowed to mislead its audience in this way, even for short periods of time” (quoted in CRTC 1989). Finally, the CRTC did not think that the business model for the proposed network was viable. The broadcaster’s audience research was vague. The CRTC thought that the question posed to viewers “did not include details pertinent to the application before the Commission. Moreover, it gave the impression that the French-language service would be similar to the English-language news service. Under these conditions, those interviewed could not have had an accurate idea of the type of programming the CBC is proposing” (CRTC 1989). The CBC/Radio-Canada also faced opposition from private Quebec broadcasters, the Consumers’ Association of Canada, the Quebec Ministry of Communications, and the Association québécoise des câblodistributeurs, which testified that “the CBC has not demonstrated either the relevance or the

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

51

viability of such a channel on the basic [cable] service” (quoted in CRTC 1989).

SUBTITLED NEWS AND JOURNALISTS’ RESISTANCE The CBC/Radio-Canada did not have the chance to submit another application until 1994 because of a moratorium on new services enacted by the CRTC, but it was under pressure nonetheless to find a way to meet the needs of francophone viewers. This was clear each time corporation representatives testified before the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture between 1990 and 1992. The discrepancies between English and French resources were not quickly overcome, however. Trina McQueen, vice-president of news, current affairs, and Newsworld, explained: On the English side, we do programming, and quite good regional programming, in 11 different locations. We have approximately 400 journalists across the country in those operations, all of whom can feed into an English Newsworld. I would suspect that the number of people available to feed material into a French news channel would be possibly 50% of that number. As well, the extra costs come also from the things such as rights to foreign news services ... Satellite and microwave line costs would all have to be separately financed for a French news channel. Even though there is some infrastructure and some journalists in place, we are talking about filling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (in Canada 1992a, 26) In 1991, as a partial measure, the CBC/Radio-Canada included a proposal as part of its Newsworld licence-renewal application to make four hours of subtitled English news available each day to cable providers in francophone markets. It would appear that the proposal came at least in part in response to suggestions made by Keith Spicer, whose support for subtitled news was clear in his comments cited above (see also Canada 1992a, 21–2). The proposal provoked a strong negative reaction from

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

52

Everyone Says No

the FPJQ, which opposed the idea on the grounds that subtitled news was a poor substitute for a French all-news network and that providing it would be little more than an act of contempt for francophone viewers. In effect, according to the FPJQ’s Alain Saulnier (1991b), the proposal “ferait passer l’information destinée aux francophones sous la coupe d’une société anglophone, dirigée par des anglophones et concevant leur information en fonction du public anglophone. Aux francophones on accorderait le privilège de goûter à cette manne ... en version traduite” [would put news intended for francophones under the control of an an anglophone company, run by anglophones who understand news in relation to an anglophone public. Francophones would be accorded the privilege of tasting this manna ... in translation]. Besides, he continued, the idea of translated news was nonsensical. The CBC/Radio-Canada had justified the creation of Newsworld by arguing that US journalists, on CNN and elsewhere, did not share the same world view as (English) Canadian viewers and that a Canadian service could deliver news better suited to a Canadian public. Couldn’t the same be said for francophone viewers, who did not share the same world view as their anglophone counterparts? More important, however, according to Saulnier, was the threat perceived by the FPJQ that Newsworld’s provision of subtitled news might “short-circuit” future applications for a French allnews network. In comparison to the corporation’s English networks, its French networks were already underfunded, as the FPJQ saw it (see Millet 1990).3 In this respect, the FPJQ’s reaction was consistent with a larger pattern of francophone mistrust of the CBC/Radio-Canada and the federal government. This mistrust had deep historical roots, which Raboy (1993) traces back as far as the conscription crisis in 1942. In 1991, francophone journalists’ mistrust of the CBC/Radio-Canada had grown because of the ongoing debates in Parliament – at first in the context of revisions being made to the Broadcasting Act, later in the context of the upcoming Charlottetown referendum – about the broadcaster’s responsibility to promote a sense of Canadian unity. On the one hand, corporation president Gérard Veilleux was very clear about the limits of what the CBC/Radio-Canada could do

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

53

to promote national unity directly: “National unity is a political objective and should be promoted, defended and articulated by political institutions. CBC is not a political institution, nor should it be. It should reflect the country and, if it does so and does it well, it will contribute indirectly to national unity by making every part of the country better known to each other part” (in Canada 1990, 37). On the other hand, when Veilleux expressed similar ideas in an opinion piece in Montreal’s La Presse, suggesting that the country’s “rediscovery” of itself could help heal the Canadian federation (Veilleux 1991), he was excoriated by the FPJQ. In separate position statements, the federation sought to “remind Mr Veilleux” that no political point of view, including the defence of federalism, should guide the national broadcaster and that a reporter’s first obligation was to report, even when “the truth hurt” (Noël 1991; FPJQ 1991). This mistrust goes a long way in explaining anglophone and francophone journalists’ divergent reactions to proposals for subtitled news. As mentioned above, the fact that Newsworld in its early days played subtitled versions of Le Téléjournal and Le Point went unnoticed in the English press; it also went unmentioned even as a precedent during the CBC/Radio-Canada’s appearances before the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture. Unlike their francophone counterparts, anglophone journalists did not see proposals to play subtitled news as a threat. This attitude resulted from the circumstances of Newsworld’s creation, to be sure, but also arguably from a longstanding linguistic imbalance between anglophones and francophones. Historically, because of the high rates of bilingualism among francophone journalists, most anglophone journalists have not had to learn French (Chartrand McKenzie 1967; CRTC 1977; Cumming et al. 1981). By and large, then, anglophones could work linguistically undisturbed because the burden of translation usually fell on their French-speaking colleagues. The resulting power difference was such that by the early 1990s, anglophones did not consider translation of news from French into English to be a threat either to the English language or to English-Canadian culture. The same could not be said, however, of translation from English into French, especially if such

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

54

Everyone Says No

t­ ranslation, as the FPJQ feared, was to give regulators and policymakers a reason not to create a network where francophone journalists could produce news suited to the world view of their francophone audience.

REGIONALIZATION VERSUS TRANSLATION In its 1992 decision to renew Newsworld’s licence, the CRTC responded to the FPJQ’s protests against plans to make subtitled news available to French-language cable operators by declaring the question moot: “Although Newsworld announced at the hearing that it had decided not to proceed with these plans, the Commission notes that, in any event, such a proposal would have to be the subject of an application for a separate licence” (CRTC 1992). When the CBC/Radio-Canada finally received approval for the Réseau de l’information (RDI) in 1994, it had no plans to translate news from English. Instead, the network would present news from across Canada told from a francophone perspective: news gathering, editing, and broadcasting would be concentrated in Montreal “so as to make maximum use of existing satellite systems, land links, and other facilities,” while other aspects of production would be decentralized, “making use of regional facilities for as many programs as possible” in order to take advantage of francophone population centres outside of Quebec (CRTC 1994). In this way, RDI, which began airing in January 1995, would maintain the historical divide between languages, even while increasing coverage of events taking place throughout Canada’s regions. Among other things, this regional focus grew out of an economic strategy that had taken root at the CBC/Radio-Canada in the late 1980s. This strategy was evident in 1988, for instance, when Ron Crocker, director of regional news and current affairs, told English-language executive producers that their programs should be “obsessively local ... [T]o compete against the often better-rated private stations of the CTV network they must reach deep into their local communities and come up with journalistic riches that would turn the ratings tide” (Lumb 1991, 8). When $108 million was cut from the CBC/Radio-Canada’s budget in

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

55

December 1990, the process of regionalization sped up, especially as the broadcaster consolidated its production facilities across the country. The idea that the CBC/Radio-Canada should make it possible for Canada’s various regions to get to know each other – Gérard Veilleux’s regionalist philosophy – then became a driving force behind the corporation’s “repositioning” efforts from 1991 to 1993, when it worked to carve out a place for itself in a media environment characterized by increasing audience fragmentation, economic uncertainty, and technological change (CBC 1993c). In an open letter to the staff and the viewing public, CBC/ Radio-Canada officials explained that the regional focus “enhances the distinctive character of the CBC and its program offerings, ... allows the CBC to make better use of its creative potential, ... fosters greater sensitivity [to] the social and economic realities of the country, ... and encourages Canadians to lend support to their national broadcaster” (CBC 1993b, 2). As for RDI, the need to represent points of view from Canada’s various regions had always informed the debates about what form the network should take. Even when proposals for translated news were on the table, Michael McEwen insisted, “It’s not just a matter of translating material. It is more than that. It is getting first-person journalism in the language that you’re broadcasting” (in Canada 1992a, 26). Ultimately, this orientation prevailed. While people like Veilleux maintained an interest in “collaboration between the French and English services of the Corporation, as well as ... the exchange of program material between the services” (CBC 1993b, 4), the type of programs that lent themselves best to collaboration were dramatic or cultural programs. In an (unintentional) echo of the Committee of Inquiry into the National Broadcasting Service, the broadcaster explained, “In the area of information programming ... collaboration tends to take place behind the scenes, in the form of resource sharing” (CBC 1993b, 4).

CONCLUSION: TRANSLATION’S MISSED POTENTIAL It is worth asking at this point whether an opportunity was missed in the decision not to provide translated versions of the

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

56

Everyone Says No

CBC/Radio-Canada’s news programs for both anglophone and francophone viewers. As it stands, the development of Newsworld and RDI followed a pattern identified by former broadcaster Neil Morrison (1991, 244) when he observed that the CBC and Radio-Canada “have done a great deal to foster the growth of Canadian consciousness and identity, but as a duality not a unity. Radio-Canada has contributed to the development of a ‘French-Canadian’ identity, which later became more of a Quebec national consciousness and identity (Québécois instead of Canadiens-français), and the CBC has fostered more of an English-Canadian consciousness and identity – outside Quebec” (emphasis in original). Hence the “two solitudes” evoked in the introduction. In this respect, the claims made by the CBC/Radio-Canada and by the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec bear further scrutiny. To justify the creation of Newsworld, the corporation argued that CNN presented news from an American perspective and that Newsworld could present news better suited to a Canadian world view. Likewise, when arguing against proposals to make subtitled news available to French cable providers, the FPJQ asserted that Newsworld’s perspective was EnglishCanadian and therefore ill-suited to a French-Canadian (or Québécois) world view. What did these claims mean? Reporting from a culturally specific perspective, whether anglophone or francophone, meant reporting from within a taken-for-granted conceptual horizon that journalists shared with their viewers. Anglophone and francophone journalists and viewers made sense of events differently because they interpreted them against different sets of background assumptions, drawing on different points of reference and prioritizing even shared points of reference differently.4 The effect was only amplified when journalists drew on culturally specific news frames as they structured their stories and contextualized the events they were covering. The people who opposed imported or translated news on Canadian cable, then, were concerned that news told from a foreign perspective would not address the issues they found important in a way they found meaningful.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

57

Thus the CBC/Radio-Canada was caught in something of a bind, one that has played a central role in current scholarship on news translation. As Yves Gambier (2006, 12) asks, “To what extent does news submitted to translation undergo a r­ eframing process, entailing a reconstruction of a constructed reality, already subjected to professional, institutional and contextual influences? To what extent does a translator-editor reproduce, change, adapt the frames? Watching CNN in an Arabic ­country does not mean that the original frames match the viewers’ frames; the same being true when watching Al-Jazeera in the United States.” By and large, the answer to Gambier’s question has been that reporters, who do usually not think of themselves as translators, take translated versions of foreign-language news items or official texts like speeches and incorporate them into their stories in piecemeal fashion (Bassnett 2005; Orengo 2005). By incorpo­rating translated material into their stories, rather than translating stories in their entirety, they maintain their ability to report from a shared, culturally specific perspective in the sense described above. This is the point where translated versions of the CBC/RadioCanada’s news programs would have had the potential to accomplish something new. Subtitled programs would have left stories – and the foreign cultural assumptions that shaped them – largely intact. The FPJQ’s objections notwithstanding, there would be a value to this approach. While the assumptions made in an English-language program might not be readily apparent to francophone viewers (or vice versa) in a single episode, the patterns that would emerge over repeated viewings, perhaps in the form of discrepancies between viewers’ expectations and what they saw as part of the program, could begin to provide a window into the other linguistic group’s world view. Such a viewing experience, in other words, would be effective precisely because of its ability to disturb or destabilize the culturally informed assumptions that viewers brought to bear in their interpretation of the news. The process would be iterative, with viewers re-evaluating programs seen earlier in the light of the program they were watching at the moment, and it would be imperfect in that even

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM

58

Everyone Says No

the observed discrepancies would be filtered through the lens of ­viewers’ own taken-for-granted assumptions. But in an ideal situation – one where the provision of translated news did not constitute a threat – and in the long run, it would also have the potential to make it possible to begin overcoming the gap between Canada’s “two solitudes.” Instead, what happened was that Newsworld and RDI, working as networks largely independent of each other, maintained and even perpetuated the world views of the different linguistic and cultural groups they served by leaving them relatively undisturbed, a situation that was not necessarily overcome by the networks’ efforts to represent regional (but linguistically specific) perspectives. A more pragmatic question remains, of course. Would viewers have watched subtitled news? It seems unlikely, at least during the period discussed here – Newsworld was not an immediate hit. As one TV critic wrote, “CBC Snoozeworld. What else to call it? It’s narcolepsy with silly haircuts” (Bacchus 1992, 60). Translated news might have found an audience among Canada’s “policy elite,” the senior-level public servants who watch programs such as The National and Le Téléjournal more frequently than average members of the public (Lee and Winn 1991), but outside of that select group, viewers still expressed a certain ambivalence for news produced by CBC/Radio-Canada. CBC Research, for example, found that even among frequent viewers of The National, many people expressed a preference for CNN for news about international crises, although they would turn to the CBC/Radio-Canada for news about domestic crises (CBC Research 1991; 1992). Whether they would have watched translated news about Canada’s constitutional crisis, however, is doubtful: “Meech Lake, bilingualism and Brian Mulroney were [story topics that were] sure to make many switch channels” (CBC Research 1991, 15). What does this reveal about the promise and the limits of public service broadcasting in Canada? Establishing a common vocabulary, both literally and figuratively, is difficult in a multicultural, multilingual country. That in itself is not news. What this chapter highlights are the factors that limit what public service broadcasting can do. While the most visible limiting f­actor

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch02.indd,9/21/20113:26PM



The Rise and Fall of Translated News

59

might be funding, it is necessary to see funding in the context of the politics – and ultimately the power dynamics – that influences how much goes where. In a situation such as Canada’s in the early 1990s, where translation seemed to promise a bridge between networks serving two different linguistic communities, the national broadcaster was forced to recognize that translation was not apolitical – it could not overcome the long history of mistrust caused by francophone journalists’ perceptions that they were receiving unequal treatment. Establishing a common vocabulary could not mean assimilating a minority perspective into that of a historically more powerful majority. Not that this was necessarily the intention of the policy-makers or CBC/ Radio-Canada executives involved in the creation of Newsworld and RDI, but to elicit protests from francophone journalists, it was enough to suggest a plan, however well intentioned, that appeared to reinforce historical inequalities. That being said, CBC/Radio-Canada news programs did employ forms of translation other than subtitling entire programs. The need for Canada’s different linguistic and cultural groups to understand each other grew only more urgent during the first half of the 1990s. The next chapter describes how journalists on The National and Le Téléjournal incorporated translated speech – in piecemeal form – into stories about the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. The difference in world views between anglophones and francophones became manifest in the ways that journalists and politicians employed the key terms “société distincte” and “distinct society,” raising the question, as will become clear, whether it is necessary to rethink the modalities of translation and what it means for one word to be a translation of another.

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   60

3 Paradoxes of Translation in Television News Do you reflect Canadian reality? Are you that reality? Are you a model with which Canada can identify? ... I am asking three simple questions. Do you reflect Canadian reality? Are you the faithful image of Canadian reality, in Canada or elsewhere? ... Or are you a model Canadians can identify with? You may answer A, B, C or All of the above, or None of the above, but do give me an answer because I will be assessing you on the basis of your reply. Jean-Pierre Hogue to representatives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 October 1991

Journalists covering the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords for the CBC’s The National and Radio-Canada’s Le Téléjournal faced two important challenges when it came to explaining Canada’s linguistic and cultural groups to each other. The first arose from ongoing political debates about whether the national broadcaster should actively promote national unity. The second was that journalists had to translate between English and French so that their viewers could understand the many political actors involved, regardless of the language they spoke. The first challenge, however, complicated the second because the politics that shaped the debates about the proper role of the CBC/Radio­Canada had an influence on how journalists went about doing their job. The debate about the CBC/Radio-Canada and national unity was not new, having ebbed and flowed since the broadcaster’s earliest days. During the time of the Meech Lake Accord, it was triggered again when Conservative Members of Parliament proposed changes to the Broadcasting Act, which had not

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   61



Paradoxes of Translation in Television News

61

been updated since 1968. One particular exchange between CBC/ Radio-Canada executives and Jean-Pierre Hogue, the Member of Parliament for Outrement in Quebec, made the two principal competing visions clear. While the corporation’s president, Gérard Veilleux, and its board chair, Patrick Watson, thought that the corporation’s French and English networks should work to build “cross-cultural bridges or cross-walks” between Canada’s linguistic and cultural groups, Hogue argued – with a vehemence that is well conveyed by the epigraph that opens this chapter – that mere “bridges” were insufficient. “I am not talking about bridging,” he insisted, “I am talking about railroad ties” binding communities to each other (in Canada 1991b, 28–30; see also Canada 1991a and 1992a). The exchange got at the heart of the central tension shaping CBC/Radio-Canada policy and programming in the early 1990s. Should the CBC/Radio-Canada actively promote a certain vision of Canada in order to be the “cross-ties” holding the country’s linguistically, culturally, and regionally divided communities together? Or would that exceed the broadcaster’s mandate and compromise its independence? These questions were all the more urgent given the long-running constitutional crisis, which the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords were intended to resolve. They were fiercely debated within the broadcaster’s news departments, where many journalists saw the political desire for the CBC/Radio-Canada to promote national unity as a threat to their professional independence. This fear was especially widespread among journalists working for the broadcaster’s Frenchlanguage networks, where it was necessary to present separatist points of view in order to uphold standards of balance and objectivity. Could they give voice to Quebec separatism and still “reflect Canada as a nation and evoke the social, economic, cultural and political benefits of nationhood to individual Canadians over the years” (CBC 1988, 106), as directed by the corporation’s journalistic policy guidelines? This concern for objectivity was at the heart of a paradox – the second challenge mentioned above – that shaped coverage of the accords, a paradox of which journalists were not necessarily aware. While politicians argued in the abstract about how

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   62

62

Everyone Says No

the CBC/Radio-Canada should bring Canada’s diverse groups together, journalists faced the more practical problem of reporting the ongoing constitutional debates. Often this meant that journalists reporting news in one language had to translate statements made in the other. The act of translation, however, did not square entirely with the ideal of objectivity. The paradox was that the North American journalistic ideal of objectivity is based on a notion of perspective-free reporting (see, for instance, ­Tuchman 1972; Denis and Merrill 1991; Gauthier 1993; Ryan 2001); thus, it makes a discursive claim to a representation of otherness unmediated by a journalist’s language or world view. However, unmediated representation of otherness is impossible because the concepts evoked by a word in one language do not map neatly onto the concepts evoked by the supposedly equivalent word in another. When journalists act as translators, they must make choices about how to represent ideas expressed in one language to viewers who speak another. In this inescapable act of mediation, journalists’ perspective enters into the equation. Despite the apparent promise of translation to facilitate communication between different linguistic and cultural groups, the window it provided was far from transparent. On the contrary, rather than expose viewers to perspectives that might challenge their own, the way journalists incorporated translated speech into their stories worked to neutralize difference and confirm viewers’ pre-existing assumptions.

RADIO-CANADA’S EMPHASIS ON LANGUAGE One of the difficulties in describing translation on CBC/RadioCanada news is that, by and large, the act of translation is institutionally invisible. In the case of the CBC, advice about dealing with translated speech is entirely absent from the network’s training manuals (see, for example, Everton 1999b; St James 2002; Knight 2003). It also receives no mention in the network’s journalistic policy manual (CBC 1988) nor in the CBC Television Style Guide (Everton 1999a). As for Radio-Canada, the French network does not seem to have any training manuals along the lines of those produced by the CBC, probably because ­journalists

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   63



Paradoxes of Translation in Television News

63

in Quebec have tended to emphasize experience over formal training and thus have not seen the same need for formal manuals (Sloan et al. 1981; Robillard 1994, 100–3). Rather than focus on questions of translation, then, journalists at both networks focus on how to tell a compelling story and how to achieve balance. Translation is a secondary consideration; it is simply a tool that journalists can employ as they pursue more primary goals. Despite pursuing similar goals, however, anglophone and francophone journalists produce news programs that have markedly different visual styles. In particular, they place different emphases on the roles of reporters, anchors, talking heads, and people on the street. In the case of Radio-Canada and the CBC, these differences are historically conditioned and can be traced back to interactions between journalists and the members of Parliament who allocate funding for the national broadcaster and periodically revise the Broadcasting Act. From the days of radio, the news services of both networks have come under fire when politicians have not liked their coverage, but the attacks have been motivated by different sets of concerns and have elicited different reactions. When politicians have challenged journalists working for Radio-Canada, they have often called the journalists’ loyalty to Canada into question. When they have challenged CBC journalists, they have been concerned with the journalists’ loyalty to the broadcaster or to the government in power. Consequently, French-language journalists have demonstrated a much stronger mistrust of the federal government as an institution than their English-language counterparts, whose mistrust has typically been directed toward management or specific politicians. Their different reactions have shaped their approach to demonstrating their impartiality (Robillard 1994, 87). Although the mistrust between Radio-Canada journalists and the federal government can be traced back to the days of early radio (see Raboy 1990), the conflict that has had the greatest effect on Radio-Canada visual style had its origins in the 1950s with the beginning of Quebec’s modern nationalist movement. According to Radio-Canada’s former news director Marc Thibault (1991), during this time, which came to be known as the Révolution tranquille or Quiet Revolution, the network was

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   64

64

Everyone Says No

s­ubject to suspicion from the federal government because its journalists were interviewing Quebec’s emerging class of political actors, many of them in favour of the burgeoning Québécois national project, even when opposing politicians refused to speak to the press. The impression of imbalance was amplified, however, over the course of the 1960s as the separatist movement solidified. In 1964, for instance, Prime Minister Pierre ­Trudeau called Radio-Canada “un nid de séparatistes” [a nest of separatists] (quoted in Robillard 1994, 49). In part because of such perceptions, the 1968 Broadcasting Act formally gave the CBC/Radio-Canada the mandate to “contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity” (quoted in Raboy 1990, 176), a mandate that some journalists feared would turn the broadcaster into an organ of propaganda (Skene 1993, 92).1 Radio-Canada journalists reacted to this concern and to accusations of separatist bias by making strategic decisions about how to present the news, their goal being to deflect such criticism while upholding professional journalistic standards. For example, they tried to turn Radio-Canada into a “mirror” where news was constituted by an event itself and where a journalist’s overt intervention – which might prompt the political attacks the network hoped to avoid – was kept to a minimum. When they presented someone else speaking as part of an interview, a press conference, or a media scrum, they allowed the speakers to express themselves longer without interruption than was often the case at the CBC (Robillard 1994, 91–2). At the same time, they emphasized language, rather than images, so as to appeal to the viewers’ reason rather than their emotions. This emphasis grew out of a concern about the affective power of the image. Raymond David, director of French news in the late 1960s, had borrowed from the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan when he warned, “La télévision ne s’adresse pas d’abord à la raison, mais à l’affectivité: elle engage directement celui à qui elle s’adresse, lui fait sentir ... l’événement, lui donne une sensation de participation, d’intégration avant que ses mécanismes intellectuels aient pu entrer en jeu” [television does not appeal first to reason but to emotion: it directly engages

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   65



Paradoxes of Translation in Television News

65

the person it addresses, makes him feel ... the event, gives him the feeling of participation, of integration before his intellectual mechanisms can begin to operate] (quoted in Barbeau 1969, 3). In many respects, this approach was consistent with a philosophy that had long shaped French-language journalism in Canada, where journalists had historically taken a “Cartesian” approach characterized by the “tendency to treat matters conceptually rather than in terms of people and events” (Gagnon 1981, 28). It was also coupled with an emphasis on the quality of a journalist’s elocution, which the network encouraged as a way to promote and preserve the French language (Robillard 1994, 100–2). The practical implications of Radio-Canada’s languageoriented approach were twofold. First, it was more common for journalists to give an account of events by addressing the camera directly than to provide voice-over narration for actuality footage where the reporter could not be seen. Second, anchors, who almost always addressed the camera directly, were more prominent than reporters (Robinson 1998, 70–5). As the next section demonstrates, this approach stood in considerable contrast to the one adopted by the CBC.

THE CBC’S EMPHASIS ON THE IMAGE The situation at the CBC has been very different, perhaps because no separatist movement in English Canada has attracted as many supporters as the one in Quebec, and consequently federal politicians have had less reason to question CBC journalists’ loyalty to Canada. Instead, when politicians have attacked the network, they have called into question journalists’ loyalty to the CBC. To give one example: in 1966, the CBC cancelled the public-affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days after the cavalier attitude of its hosts, Laurier LaPierre and Patrick Watson (who became the CBC/Radio-Canada’s board chairman in 1989), struck a raw nerve among members of the government in Ottawa. What offence had the program committed? According to journalist Wayne Skene (1993, 90–1), it had “tried to poke fun at the Queen, interviewed politicians, convicts, homosexuals and the leader of the American Nazi Party, satirized the Pope’s visit, defended the ‘little guy’

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   66

66

Everyone Says No

against Big Business and Big Government, showed its biases and shoved its cameras wherever the producers felt goodness and justice could be served.” Worse yet, as Watson was told by a CBC vice-president, the hosts were “antimanagement” and “had a bad attitude towards Canada,” as historian Marc Raboy (1990, 165) recounts. According to Raboy, the accusation of “a bad attitude towards Canada” was of secondary importance in relation to the hosts’ attitude toward management. By Raboy’s (1990, 167) account, H.G. Walker, head of English-network broadcasting, “said ‘Seven Days’ was like a ‘corporation within the corporation.’ [Marcel] Ouimet [head of French network broadcasting] referred to the ‘continuing challenge to management authority ... unwillingness of ‘Seven Days’ to function within the framework of corporate policy and operating conditions ... open defiance ... precedent for the challenge to corporate authority which we are now witnessing.’” This episode illustrated the differences between the CBC’s concerns and those of Radio-Canada – the CBC did not have to prove its loyalty to Canada. There was another factor, however, that shaped the CBC’s visual style, namely, competition from commercial networks, especially those that originated in the United States. In the 1960s, when Radio-Canada journalists were beginning to emphasize language at the expense of the image, the CBC was facing stiff competition from US broadcast networks and from private Canadian networks such as CTV, which took many of their stylistic cues from their US counterparts. David Taras (1989, 325) asserts, “[T]he formats and values that have triumphed through North America due to economic forces have forced [the] CBC to change the character of its news reporting. As Ottawa bureau chief Elly Alboim has put it, the CBC feels ‘as competitive and market driven’ as the private networks.” How was this visually manifest? According to the historian Paul Rutherford (1991), the CBC was heavily influenced by the philosophy of people like Reuven Frank, who worked for the CBC and went on to become executive producer of the NBC Evening News. In 1963, Frank explained, “The highest power of television journalism is not in the transmission of information but in the transmission of experience ... joy, sorrow, shock, fear, these

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   67



Paradoxes of Translation in Television News

67

are the stuff of news” (quoted in Rutherford 1991, 382). In CBC training manuals originally published in the 1990s, this emphasis on arousing the viewer’s emotions was still clear: “Since TV is an emotional, intimate medium – a relatively small box sitting there in people’s living rooms and bedrooms – it follows that it is most effective when used in an emotional and intimate way” (Knight 2003, 70). The difference from Radio-Canada could not have been more pronounced, in particular with respect to actuality footage accompanying voice-over narration: “Actuality is the least artificial, least contrived, least controlled element in a story. Actuality pulls the viewer into the story, makes the viewer part of it. The viewer becomes a participant, a player, not a spectator. Actuality turns sympathy into empathy” (Knight 2003, 29, emphasis in original). On The National, actuality footage was usually accompanied by a reporter’s voice-over, rather than an anchor’s. In contrast to Le Téléjournal, then, The National was characterized by its emphasis on the image, rather than language, and the prominent role of the reporter, rather than that of the anchor.

TRANSLATED SPEECH ON

THE NATIONAL

AND

LE

TÉLÉJOURNAL

During the time of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords the historical tensions characterizing the relationship of the CBC/ Radio-Canada to the federal government were still very much in force. This is clearest perhaps in the divergent reactions journalists had to Gérard Veilleux as president of the CBC/RadioCanada. Among Radio-Canada journalists, he was viewed with suspicion because of his strong federalist leanings (Lisée 1992). For example, in 1991, when Parliament changed the CBC/RadioCanada’s mandate from that of contributing “to the development of national unity” to that of contributing “to shared national consciousness and identity,” Veilleux wrote an opinion piece for Montreal’s La Presse in which he argued that the CBC/RadioCanada could “heal” Canada and make it whole again by helping Canadians in different regions “rediscover” each other (Veilleux 1991). In response, André Noël (1991) of the FPJQ wrote,

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   68

68

Everyone Says No

La Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec aimerait rappeler à M. Veilleux que le mandat de RadioCanada n’est pas de promouvoir l’unité canadienne, mais de refléter la globalité de la réalité canadienne. Aucun point de vue politique – comme la défense du fédéralisme – ne doit guider un média aussi important que Radio-Canada, d’autant plus que la société d’État est financée par les contribuables, qui ont des opinions politiques très variées. [The Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec would like to remind Mr Veilleux that the CBC/RadioCanada’s mandate is not to promote Canadian unity but to reflect Canadian reality in its totality. No political point of view – such as the defence of federalism – should guide a media company as important as the CBC/Radio-Canada, especially since the publicly financed company is paid for by taxpayers, who have varying political opinions.] CBC journalists, on the other hand, were critical of Veilleux for the perceived heavy-handedness of his management style and the draconian cuts he made to the CBC’s budget in December 1990 (Ross 1991; Lumb 1992). In fact, the unity question was something of a non-issue. In the Ryerson Review of Journalism, Jill Sawyer (1991) insisted that the political controversy generated by the unity clause in the House of Commons was merely an affair pitting Liberals, who supported the unity clause, against Conservatives, who were opposed to the centralization of powers the unity clause seemed to imply. Instead, CBC journalists were preoccupied with Veilleux’s cuts: “[R]eporters and producers in CBC newsrooms,” wrote Sawyer (1991, 15), “aren’t as concerned about whether their jobs require them to work towards national ‘unity’ or ‘identity’ as they are about the survival of the national broadcasting service itself.” Not surprisingly, the CBC’s and Radio-Canada’s historically conditioned stylistic practices were still operative on The National and Le Téléjournal during their coverage of Meech Lake and Charlottetown. The programs’ divergent emphases were apparent, among other places, in their treatment of translated speech. Between 9 June and 25 June 1990, that is, the final

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   69



Paradoxes of Translation in Television News

69

days leading up to and immediately following the deadline for passing Meech Lake, both The National and Le Téléjournal aired sixty-three stories about the accord.2 As for Charlottetown, between 21 September and 27 October 1992, the duration of the federal campaign in support of the accord, The National aired 191 stories about the accord, and Le Téléjournal aired 231, fifteen of which were not available for viewing in Radio-Canada’s visual archives.3 Table 2 describes the frequency with which the two programs used different techniques for incorporating translated speech into their stories.4 Some of the differences represented in Table 2 can be accounted for by the circumstances of the events in question. For instance, there were many more examples of translation in all its forms on Le Téléjournal than on The National during coverage of Meech Lake. Moreover, in 49 per cent of Le Téléjournal’s stories, a reporter provided a voice-over paraphrase of something a speaker on screen was saying in English, while conversely, in only 8 per cent of The National’s stories did a reporter provide a voice-over paraphrase of something said in French. This divergence resulted in large part from the nature of the events that constituted the “news” about Meech Lake in its final days. Meech Lake failed when the provincial legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland refused to pass it. Those provinces were predominantly English-speaking, and one of the people leading the opposition to the accord, Manitoba’s Elijah Harper, spoke only English in his interviews with the press. In fact, the monolingualism of anglophone politicians was an important factor during both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, in that journalists on Le Téléjournal frequently had to translate speech from English. On the other hand, Québécois leaders such as Premier Robert Bourassa and opposition leader Jacques Parizeau spoke excellent English and would often conduct press conferences in both languages; journalists for The National had to translate them from French to English only when the speech they were giving was addressed to a French-speaking audience. Other differences, however, were arguably the result of anglophone and francophone journalists’ historically conditioned practices. For instance, stories on Le Téléjournal were s­ignificantly

MacintoshHD:Users:muruganap:Desktop:13-06-12:9780773539334:9780773539334_Indesign:Conway-Ch03.indd,9/21/20113:26PM   70

Table 2 Types of translation on The National and Le Téléjournal in final weeks of Meech Lake campaign (9–25 June 1990) and lead-up to referendum on Charlottetown Accord (22 September–27 October 1992) The National N %

Le Téléjournal N %

Meech Lake self-translation, all cases self-translation, strong cases voice-over translation, reporter voice-over translation, anchor summary translation, anchor subtitles total

16 5 5 0 0 0 63

25 8 8 0 0 0 100

21 10 31 0 4 7 63

33 16 49 0 6 11 100

Charlottetown self-translation, all cases self-translation, strong cases voice-over translation, reporter voice-over translation, anchor summary translation, anchor subtitles total

38 10 19 2 10 2 191

20 5 10 1 5 1 100

42 19 35 10 21 16 216

19 9 16 5 10 7 100

Meech Lake and Charlottetown Combined self-translation, all cases self-translation, strong cases voice-over translation, reporter voice-over translation, anchor summary translation, anchor subtitles total

54 15 24 2 10 2 254

21 6 9