A passionate plea from an MIT Professor

I have just gotten my hands on a passionate letter written by Professor Nick Dyer-Witheford to MIT's Dean regarding this agreement. Thank you so much to Professor Dyer-Witheford for allowing me to post this letter. I hope it will hit as closely to home for all of you as it did for me.

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“The hand that gives, rules.”
Bantu proverb

Dear Catherine,
I am writing to you about the current negotiations between our Faculty and the media corporation CanWest Global. You recently informed some of us that discussions are underway to institute a FIMS CanWest Fellowship. As I understand it, this endowment would be for approximately $1 million, funding the annual appointment for one semester of a visiting Fellow who would lecture and research on media, journalism or cultural studies; there would be ‘no strings attached’ to the Fellow’s research agenda; and the endowment would provide additional moneys for scholarships.

While I appreciate the care with which this arrangement has been crafted, I believe it should be rejected because it compromises the integrity of our Faculty. The issue is the branding of academic activity by a corporation with an exceptional record of abusing media power.

Can West stands out amongst Canadian media for its unremitting assertion of proprietorial rights to control media content, control that it consistently exercises against contending claims of journalistic responsibility and the public interest. Since 2000, many CanWest employees, including some of the most deeply respected Canadian journalists, have been fired, forced into resignation, disciplined or marginalized in the workplace for contesting directives to follow a managerial ‘line’ reporting on a number of issues. In 2002, the Brussels based International Federation of Journalists, one of the largest journalists organizations in the world, condemned Can West for “corporate censorship and the victimization of journalists who are trying to defend professional standards.” The events leading up to this are numerous, well known, and well documented; a useful archive can be found at http://www.montrealnewspaperguild.com/canwestlinks2.htm.

I will, however, detail one recent event indicative of the standards informing Can West Global news management. In September 2004 one of the world's leading news agencies, Reuters, complained that CanWest newspaper editors had been altering words and phrases in its stories dealing with the Middle East, inserting the word ‘terrorist’ as a descriptor for various-- mainly Arab--political organization. This was done without the knowledge or consent of Reuters, and without informing readers. There are at least three dimensions to this incident that warrant attention: a) insertion in wire reports of a term that is, in the age of ‘war on terror’, propagandistically loaded; b) deceit of the public, who were not made aware of the stealth editing; c) endangering Reuters workers, whose safety in conflict zones depends on perceived impartiality. The net effect is Orwellian.

Can West has for some years had a well-earned public relations crisis, attracting widespread criticism from both working journalists, public intellectuals and media scholars. Now the company is on a charm offensive to rehabilitate its image as a ‘good corporate citizen’ –without (as the date of the episode described above shows)-- any real change to its corporate practices. The CanWest Fellowship makes our Faculty a partner in this legitimization effort.

It is, of course, tempting to imagine we might ‘have our cake and eat it too,’ hiring Can West Fellows who, with exquisite academic irony, incisively expose CanWest practice. There is, however, no guarantee at all that this will happen. Even if it did, such critique is undercut by its dependence on corporate largesse. Indeed, the administrative approval given our corporate sponsor implicitly repudiates the work of all faculty members critical of CanWest and other media behemoths.

It might be argued that, since we already have Chairs endowed by Rogers and Bell, why not CanWest? This argument—if we take one, we’ve got to take ‘em all—seems to me precisely an argument against any relations with corporate sponsorships. If, however, such relations are to have integrity, we must be able to make continuing ethical discriminations. After all, if not CanWest, why not Fox News, or the Pentagon Channel?

Finally, the compelling appeal of the Fellowship is that —what else—we need the money. But the endowment, substantial as it is, will not alone solve any economic problems FIMS faces. The entire picture of university funding is, at this post-Rae Report moment, uncertain. This is not the moment to sell out on FIMS founding principles of critical media practice in the public interest, thereby following the logic of ‘to save the village, we had to destroy it.’

No critical media intellectual in the contemporary university practices with clean hands; all of us compromise on a daily basis. Nonetheless, the Can West Fellowship presents a significant choice to those who speak of protecting public space from corporate enclosure, and fostering a communication commons. Walking the talk means rejecting the offer-with all the inconvenience, difficulty, and, yes, even ‘struggle,’ that this entails. Accepting it, however, just gives our students, our corporate masters, and us, another cynical lesson about the gap between our theory and our practice. This is a deal whose price is too high; I urge you to reconsider it.

Yours sincerely,

Nick Dyer-Witheford