The NB Media Co-op held a talk last week in Kinsella auditorium on the shale gas resistance. I’m sympathetic to the cause, so I decided to attend. What happened at the talk left me feeling confused, guilty and frustrated. As an aspiring journalist and activist I felt that talk had some solid content but an awful execution.
The event focused around a panel of four activists who all played roles in the Rexton protests. They put their lives on the line for the cause, and I respect that. Three of them had been arrested, and the son of one of the panelists was even facing charges of up to 15 years in prison. No one is questioning their resolve, and I want to be clear I mean no disrespect to those who have put so much on the line. As a talk on environmental activism, it was a great event.
The trouble started when the talk switched its focus to journalism. It’s the NB Media Co-op, so I would be surprised if they didn’t talk journalism. Basically, if you think the Irvings have too much power of the press in NB—I know I do—then you agree with the gist of what they said. But as they went along with their examples of the corruption of journalism, they started targeting Phillip Lee, head of the STU journalism department and a member of the audience that night.
I thought the representatives of the Media Co-op were greatly disrespectful criticizing Lee without inviting STU’s journalists to participate in the event. They accused Lee of being a cog in the corporate machine trying to crush democracy and human rights. This accusation came with a lot of emotional weight when the first hour of the event was focused on the emotional impact the protesters suffered.
The accusations were based on a comment Lee made on CBC about how journalists shouldn’t become directly involved in what they’re writing about.
The NB media co-op was invited by the criminology department, so you would think they might want to talk about the legal matters facing activists and journalists. Not the case.
Of the two hundred or so people in attendance, only one other student and I were studying journalism. Now I may have missed something, but I didn’t miss enough to make the speaker’s point resonate. If he was going to get a point across to the students, then he shouldn’t have exemplified their professor as a part of an evil agenda. If they felt like they had to call Lee on what he had said, then they should have given him some formal notice before making him the enemy in his own faculty building. I thought their actions were distasteful and immature.
I hoped for more from the voice of independent journalists in New Brunswick.
