Cameras in inquests: A no-brainer

A judge in the Western Canadian province of Manitoba will announce on March 19, 2010 whether he will allow televised coverage of an important inquest.

This should be a no-brainer. Cameras belong in inquests and courts, just as Canada allows them in public inquiries.

Local media outlets are seeking permission to broadcast and live stream coverage of the inquest in the case of Brian Sinclair, whose death after 34 hours in the emergency ward of a large hospital has raised all sorts of issues.

Cameras aren't allowed in inquests and other court proceedings basically because the rules were created before television was invented. But hey, TVs have been in almost everyone's home for more than half a century, long enough to be made almost obsolete by online live streaming and recorded coverage.

Journalists are already covering judicial proceedings on Twitter.

The nurses' union says it fears that disclosing identifying information would endanger some nurses.

Simple solution: if the union can persuade a judge that this is true in any case, the judge can simply ban the disclosure of that information -- just as the courts routinely protect the identities of undercover police and victims of sexual assault.

Judges should leap at this chance to get on camera, and not only because it would allow wide public access to judicial proceedings.

Televising judges at work would shatter myths, perpetuated by tabloid columnists, open-mouth radio hosts and their yappy acolytes, that judges are arrogant high-paid fatcats isolated from reality.

Canadian judges are serious to the point of being boring in court. They are very concerned about fairness and proper procedure.

Oh, and they really don't like people wearing hats in court.

Television coverage of this inquest and trials in general would demolish a couple of other misconceptions created by television dramas, many of them American:

Canadian judges never bang their gavels. They don't have gavels.

And perhaps more important, many Canadian judges are women.

Sit in a a Canadian trial court and you will witness the increasingly female face of justice. Not just the judge, but many of the lawyers and the court clerks and other officials are women.

We have lots to learn and nothing to fear from allowing cameras into this inquest, and into courts in general.

We can even wear hats while watching.

Also sprach Xerox Workcentre 5655

They may not have the "rattle and moan" of "Hank Williams talking to Nina Simone," in the words of Tom Russell, but the messages of the copying machine in my office have a crude poetry of their own.

Please wait, exiting sleep mode.

The screen will reset shortly.

Please wait, machine self-test in progress.

Accounting/ Authentication logout.

Xerographic Module Cleaning.

Ready to scan your job.

Select the Active Messages button.

Print system configuration report.

Faults/ All faults

Display usage counters.

Clear all Confirmation.

Reset user programming in all pathways.

Touch a button if you require more time.

Selections are about to be reset.

You have been logged out of your session.

Who am I to doubt these mysteries?

Flash! People read newspapers!

Sometimes complaints are good. They assure you that you are still alive.

Example: On Feb. 25, 2010 the Winnipeg Free Press annoyed a host of readers by printing a large front-page picture of the Canadian men's Olympic hockey team winning a quarter-final victory over the Russians.

What about the Canuck women who won four medals the same day, including local fave Clara Hughes?

Small pictures on the front. Turn inside the paper to see and read more.

"Readers were furious, and rightly so," Margo Goodhand, the paper's editor, acknowledged in a column the next morning.

"I am not a male chauvinist, and neither is the rest of the Free Press news team."

The paper's editors assumed that readers would be more interested in men's hockey than in actual medals. Wrong, Goodhand admits.

(Even more wrong now that our hockey women have kicked Yankee butt and won the gold medal.)

Bottom line for newspapers: the dead-trees edition may be losing audience, but big stories still attract readers. The Free Press needs to keep killing trees even as some of its reporters make forays into news coverage on social media such as Twitter.

As Melanie Lee Lockhart, my instructor colleague at Red River College, has commented, mainstream media ain't dead yet.

Take that, Twitter.

Just say no

I took this picture at a Mesa Public Schools building in Arizona on Feb. 18, 2010.

Sorta covers everything, doesn't it?

Another recent prohibition that gave me pause: "Do not reproduce or circulate without permission."

No, it wasn't posted on a conjugal-visit trailer in a jail.

It was at the bottom of an email I received from a journalist.

This is what a newspaper reporter looks like

There are no more print reporters, John White, deputy editor online of the Winnipeg Free Press, told Creative Communications students at Red River College on Feb. 11, 2010.

The Free Press wants to hire a triple-threat journalist who can file breaking news stories by Twitter and write blog entries; deliver live and recorded video hits, and write for the print version of the paper.

This sounds great. It's the kind of stuff our students are learning to do, and it certainly shows where news media need to go.

Too bad it's just for a three-month term. Let's hope the term will be extended -- indefinitely.

A Chinese joke? Should I laugh?

On Jan. 27 Manitoba's Lieutenant-Governor Philip Lee attended a Red River College convocation for the first time.

His Honour addressed the graduates briefly while an aide-de-camp, resplendent in a uniform, stood behind him.

The L-G mentioned that in August 2009 he became the first Chinese-Canadian person to be named the province's vice-regal representative.

Then he recounted a tale of a Grade 3 student who informed his parents that the Lieutenant-Governor has visited his classroom.

Parents: What was the Lieutenant-Governor like?

Child: He was tall and wore a military uniform. But a Chinese guy did all the talking.

Some of the grads and their families laughed. I did, too. But I felt uncomfortable about finding a joke about ethnicity funny, especially at a serious public event. And, as the announcer for the presentation of parchments, I was on stage.

The point of the story, I guess, is that the child (and perhaps, by extension, other Canadians) did not expect a Chinese-Canadian to represent the Queen.

If that is true, such Canadians have not been paying much attention to public affairs. Norman Kwong has been Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta since 2005.

Perhaps Manitoba's L-G could have eased any discomfort in his audience by making the point more explicitly that an accomplished Canadian of any ethnic background can become a Lieutenant-Governor.

Or am I being too sensitive?

In the Chamber, out of the target audience

The Creative Communications Class of 2011 has been blogging about the Manitoba Theatre Projects performance of In the Chamber that they attended Jan. 14, 15 or 16.

The two one-hour performances, essentially monologues, nominally dealt with human factor analysis, a concept that does not guarantee a sparkling evening of theatre.

But IMHO actors Gordon Tanner and Steven Ratzlaff delivered gripping performances of men losing their minds while alienating their implied onstage audiences.

Many of the 70-plus students found the plays challenging; I did, too.

What surprises me about the students' reactions, though, is their frequently expressed resignation: I did not understand this because I am too young. I'm not in the target audience.

Yvonne Raymond, for example, writes:

"But then again, what do I know about these plays? I’m just one of those 20 something-year-olds who doesn’t get ‘grown-up talk’.

And I’m certain I didn’t get the ‘grown-up talk’ because the rest of the non-CreComm-35+ audience was laughing hysterically."

This is not a criticism of Yvonne. She expresses a widespread reaction clearly, even plaintively.

But people who are smart enough to get into CreComm are smart enough to understand just about anything. All they need to do is ask.

So, students; ask those 35+ers what was so funny. Ask about the unfamiliar music and the German-accented voice-over (Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Friedrich Nietzsche).

Don't let the notion of target audiences intimidate you. Come out of hiding and make yourself a target.