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Barbara
Goslawski: How is
Memoirs of a Media Maverick different from
other autobiographies?
Boyce
Richardson: It's
not a traditional autobiography, but more an
account of my working life as a
journalist/writer/filmmaker. It's probably rather
different from your usual media autobiography
because I've worked in the media all my life yet
never really subscribed to the ethos of the media.
Although I took it seriously and tried to do the
best job I could, I never really belonged in it. I
always felt as if I was a member of the
opposition.
BG:
Journalism has changed since your early days as a
newspaper reporter in the 1940's.
BR:
I think journalism has completely changed since my
early days in the 40's and it's because of
technology. For instance, I was always reluctant to
keep in touch with the office when I was working.
Some journalists would feel nervous unless they
were receiving about four telegrams a day from
their head office. In the eight years I worked for
the Montreal Star in London I received maybe
two telegrams. That's a considerable difference.
These sorts of telegrams were basically expressions
of the ego of the people sitting in the office.
They just wanted to interfere with the person who
was doing the job, who knew perfectly well what was
required. But they wanted to keep on telling the
correspondents what to do.
When I went to London for the Montreal Star
in 1960 I found that the newspaper had bought the
services of just about every agency and other
newspaper that they could. They had the entire
service of the New York Times, with thirteen
journalists in London. They bought the entire
service of the Daily Telegraph, the
Guardian, the Observer and so on.
Anything I could do, if it was to be anything
sensible, would be to ignore all that stuff and
just write what interested me. So I did that.
BG:
How did your experiences working as a newspaper
reporter influence your later work in documentary
film?
BR:
I was lucky when I quit the newspapers that the
National Film Board of Canada hired me to do
research for which my journalistic background was
very useful. But I was even more lucky in that they
suggested that I should direct a film, which was
quite a leap of faith on their part. I found that
filmmakers, like people in other professions, tend
to make a mystery of their craft and that it's not
really as hard as they pretend it is. Journalism is
the same.
I found that my journalist's training was helpful
because I was used to organizing facts in a
sequential way and I found that many filmmakers,
even documentary filmmakers, are uneasy with
information. A lot of them don't really know how to
handle it.
BG:
How does Memoirs of a Media Maverick
critique mainstream media?
BR:
Mainstream media has immense power. I'm not sure if
that comes from their own power or just from the
fact that they ally themselves so closely with
power in society. We're part of it too - we have
very few criticisms to make of journalists. I think
they are an immensely powerful barrier to the
actual improvement in the quality of life for most
people. Basically they're not interested in that
kind of thing. They're only interested in making
money, fundamentally, and in supporting power. So,
anything that lies outside of that perspective just
doesn't get much attention.
When I first started off in 1945, it was at a small
town newspaper in New Zealand. I quickly realized
that the media, in addition to supporting power,
just uses disadvantaged people as fodder for their
own ends. I still believe that. Any disadvantaged
group, whether it's the poor in the cities or the
Indians, can expect to be used probably once every
six months as the subject for a media investigation
into their problems. The purpose of this is simply
to build up the circulation of the newspaper. It
has nothing whatsoever to do with improving the
condition of the people that they're writing
about.
BG:
Your writing in this area is very
different.
BR:
At the Montreal Star in 1968, I started
writing about the problems of the Indians. The
editor had been with the Hudson's Bay Company and
was supposedly sympathetic toward Aboriginal
people. He assigned me to write some articles about
some people living in Northern Ontario in very
appalling conditions. He said that newspapers tend
to pick these stories up from time to time but
never to follow up so why don't we follow this one
up. So I did that and I traveled all across the
country and wrote about Aboriginal people. But he
didn't really mean follow it up for thirty
years.
BG:
What myths about journalism do you dispel in the
book?
BR:
The first one, and one that I have always found
offensive, is that journalism pretends to be
objective. This is so ludicrous and self-deluding
and it's amazing that anyone takes it seriously. It
doesn't stand up to any kind of examination. For
example, our economic life is divided basically
between capital and labour. If they were objective,
fifty percent of the stories would be about labour
and fifty percent would be about capital. But
anyone knows that's not so, that there's almost
nothing about labour compared to whole sections,
everyday, about capital. That's also infected the
so-called objective CBC, which just a few years ago
changed their whole routine so that they'd have
twenty broadcasts a day on the news about the
markets and so on. As if that's a matter of the
utmost significance to every person in the country,
which is baloney. If they do have anything about
labour it's usually because someone's on strike and
they're denouncing it. That's not objective.
I've personally never taken myself that seriously
while journalists do tend to take themselves very
seriously. I remember an occasion a few years ago
when the editors of the Ottawa Citizen (this
was in the days before Conrad Black.) Every year
they had a self-congratulatory page explaining how
objective their editorial process was and in it
they said how no editorial writer was ever told
what he had to write. But somewhere in the middle
of the page they slipped in the fact that the
owner, if he wanted, could impose his views. So I
wrote an article in reply to this, kind of a
humourous article, but of course they never used
it.
BG:
How has the commercial ethos of mainstream media
affected your work?
BR:
From 1945 until 1971, I was a staff journalist and
therefore I suppose I was doing what I was told.
But I always had in the back of my mind the
knowledge that I could quit at any time if I was
asked to do something disreputable. I think I
always did actually - I quit every newspaper I ever
worked for. Also, I never allowed myself to be
involved in the internal politics of any paper I
worked on. I had a row with the editor of the
Montreal Star eventually and the first
accusation that he lodged against me was that I'd
always refused to take a position of responsibility
in the paper because I had refused to take any of
the editing jobs they offered from time to time. I
said, 'What do you mean? I'm a reporter. Isn't that
a position of responsibility?' I think they were
glad to be rid of me when I quit - since I refused
to be promoted, they had no means of controlling
me.
BG:
When you quit journalism, after having worked so
hard to maintain this sense of freedom, what was it
like working at the bureaucratic National Film
Board?
BR:
I never have felt that the barriers to freedom of
expression in the National Film Board were any
greater than those in the commercial press. In
their publicly funded system, they had nothing to
apologize for to the commercial media. When I made
films there, if you had an idea, you could interest
a producer and you'd go together to the programming
committee, which was made up mostly of filmmakers.
If they liked the idea they'd give you money and
you'd make your film. It was based on the
assumption that they would find people who had
something to say, allow them to do that, and if the
resulting film was any good it would find an
audience. Almost all of the Film Board's best films
were made according to that formula. It had nothing
to do with market research, it was all about giving
someone who had something to say a chance to say
it.
Many of the films that I have made, which were
publicly funded, would never have started had I
depended on private sources of funding. The films
we made about the Aboriginal People in the 70's -
no one was interested in making films like that. I
made a film for the NFB called
Supercompanies, focused on Alcan, the mining
company. It examined the way that multi-nationals
went out into the world and collected their raw
materials and the kinds of deals that they made
with the people who owned those materials.
Supercompanies questions the worldview of
the corporation and even under public funding that
kind of film is rare.
Let me return to the point about objectivity in the
media. I've never really considered myself
objective and I never ever considered that I should
bend over backwards to give a hearing to the people
whose views I opposed. Alcan, for example, is a
huge corporation with a vast public relations staff
and they have every capacity to make their views
known. I was making one little film that lasts for
an hour. Why would I devote half an hour to allow
Alcan to have their say? They have their say
already.
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