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February 11, 2000
Image versus image? Should the Nunavut government fight the animal rights movement with the same weapons that the animal rights movement have used so successfully over the past 30 years against Newfoundland sealers, aboriginal people and other powerless, marginalized peoples?
That is a difficult question to answer.
But with the release last week of "Waiting at the Edge," a 48-minute video on Inuit seal hunting financed by Nunavut's Department of Sustainable Development, it is a question that Nunavut residents must think about carefully.
The video is a laudable attempt to provide the world with some badly-needed pro-Inuit propaganda. There's no doubt that the people of the world need to know that seal hunting is about more than the killing animals and that it's also about the intangible bonds that unite people, land, and wildlife in Nunavut. There's no doubt that the world needs to know that the animal rights movement is a dagger pointed at the heart of Inuit culture.
But is it good strategy for the government of Nunavut to join a battle whose weapons are image, emotion, irrational distortion of truth and mass hysteria?
The anti-seal hunt campaigns conducted by organizations such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare have nothing do with "debate" as that term is commonly understood. Debate has to do with facts and logical arguments based on facts.
The animal rights movement, led by organizations like the International Fund for Animal Welfare, bases its appeal on the crude exploitation of visual images torn from their natural context and then re-combined into new constructions intended to stimulate powerful emotions and to suppress rational thinking.
Their use of video, film and still images, and their ability to either buy or sneak these images into the mass media have made the animal rights movement a powerful force. They have successfully demonized a few hundred low-income people in Atlantic Canada who spend a few weeks on the ice every year to supplement their income with seal hunting. Eastern Arctic Inuit who can't make a living anymore from selling seal pelts have been the collateral damage in this irrational war.
The animal rights phenomenon is more than just a social and political movement. It's also a powerful machine for extracting cash from the pockets of the gullible. In an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Canadian Geographic magazine, Newfoundland journalist Ray Guy reports that in 1998, 1.8 million people around the world were members of the IFAW, and that in the same year, the IFAW raised $62.3 million U.S. in donations.
So how can the cash-strapped Nunavut government compete with an organization possessing that kind of mass appeal, capable of raising $60 million a year? In deciding to fight groups such as the IFAW on their own ground — image versus image — has the Nunavut government begun a fight that it's too weak to win?
The other danger is that the people of Nunavut may be too honest to succeed in a war of image manipulation. The truth doesn't matter much to groups like the IFAW, but it's a value that is revered by the Inuit of Nunavut.
On the other hand, it would be churlish not too support an initiative such as the "Waiting at the Edge" video. After all, somebody has to tell the other side of the story. JB
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And here.
Paper apologizes for fake seal hunt story - U.S. News - MSNBC.com MSN
Paper apologizes for fake seal hunt story Reporter described slaughter, but hunt was delayed
Updated: 2:12 p.m. ET April 15, 2005
BOSTON - A Boston Globe freelance writer fabricated large chunks of a story published this week, the newspaper said Friday in the latest incident to embarrass the U.S. media.
The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Co., said it stopped using writer Barbara Stewart because of a story that ran on Wednesday about a seasonal hunt for baby seals off Newfoundland -- a hunt, it turns out, that had not taken place.
The story datelined Halifax, Nova Scotia, described in graphic detail how the seal hunt began Tuesday, with water turning red as hunters on some 300 boats shot harp seal cubs "by the hundreds."
The problem, however, was that the hunt did not begin Tuesday; it was delayed by bad weather and was scheduled to start Friday, weather permitting, the Globe said in an editor's note.
Stewart could not immediately be reached for comment.
The newspaper, which received a complaint from the Canadian government, said it should not have published the story and should have insisted on attribution for details because the writer was not reporting from the scene. "Details included the number of hunters, a description of the scene, and the approximate age of the cubs. The author's failure to accurately report the status of the hunt and her fabrication of details at the scene are clear violations of the Globe's journalistic standards," it added.
Canada is extremely sensitive about the hunt, during which hundreds of thousands of seals are beaten to death or shot for their pelts every year. U.S. activists, who says the seals are killed inhumanely, are urging consumers to shun Canadian seafood until the hunt is stopped.
Canadian Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan said his officials had called the paper to point out the error.
"We've been trying to get the facts out about the seal harvest, the fact that the herd is very healthy ... that in 98 percent of cases it (the hunt) is done in a humane way," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Officials with the newspaper were not immediately available for further comment.
U.S. media organizations have been hit with a series of high-profile cases involving plagiarism or fabrication.
In 2003, The New York Times' top two editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, left the paper after it was disclosed that reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized material.
CBS News, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, the New Republic magazine and USA Today are among the other media icons caught up in celebrated flaps over inaccurate reporting.
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Green Peace Kills Animals for the Camera