Common Cents: Media Portrayal of the Gulf War and Other Events

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

Objectivity is the theme of these five case studies, which deal with how
the media covered the Gulf War, the Oka standoff, the Meech Lake Accord,
Free Trade, and the Ontario NDP’s socialist budget.

According to Winter, an associate professor of communications at the
University of Windsor, the mass media are in the business of delivering
audiences to advertisers; the coverage of the news is driven and shaped
by the opinions of the power elite (the owners); and journalists are
subject to economic and organizational constraints imposed on them by
the owners. He says that “today’s news media simultaneously create a
particular picture of the world in our heads, all the while largely
preventing the formation of alternative pictures.”

In his persuasive style, Winter chooses to document the problems rather
than prescribe solutions. But the answer is simple: let journalists have
their way and forget about advertisers, shareholders, government
regulations, and the like. But that would be too easy, and the media
would quickly go out of business.

Some of these case studies were previously published in Canadian
Dimension, Canadian Forum, and other venues.