If there was a Liberal party Old Testament Book of Lamentations, authored by agriculture critic Wayne Easter, an early chapter would deal with media coverage of rural issues.
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It has been a lamentation of Easter’s for years – urban media do not cover rural or agricultural issues except during crises and then coverage makes rural people look only like takers rather than contributors.
“They (reporters) don’t care how this nation is fed, what is happening to the people who grow the food,” the Prince Edward Island MP complained during a recent weekly radio broadcast in Ottawa.
“It is frustrating. It is a disgrace.”
University of Manitoba political scientist Paul Thomas says it is also a major factor in Canada’s rural-urban split because urban-based media project an image of the country that rural people do not recognize. They feel neglected and disenfranchised.
And national decision makers read that coverage.
“There surely is a rural-urban divide in media coverage,” he said.
“Rural people see and hear less of themselves in coverage and they see that as the way the nation sees them. I think that is a real problem.”
If urban-based media are meant to be a mirror of the nation they report on, then it is an urban nation where rural areas are either irrelevant, yesterday’s story or decaying.
A sampling of commentary in national newspapers that politicians and federal bureaucrats read tells the story.
A National Post columnist opined earlier this year: ” The modern global economy is driven by cities, which serve as hubs for high-value knowledge industries, skilled workers and transportation networks. Rural communities have been dying since the Second World War.”
The Toronto Star has described “a rural hinterland doomed to decline.”
And then there was Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, who analyzed Tim Hudak’s victory last year’s as Ontario Progressive Conservative leader with strong rural support.
She called his supporters “old white guys lost in the woods” and warned him that support from rural Ontario is not a ticket to the future.
“They are the province’s past,” Wente wrote. “Ontario’s future will not be forged in the aging, fading small white towns that he grew up in. It will be forged in the vibrant knowledge belt of southern Ontario and in multiethnic, culturally liberal Toronto.”
From his perch as dean of the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose, rural policy analyst Roger Epp sees this look-down-your-nose urban attitude as part of the divide.
“When they talk about western alienation, I always thought it was rural alienation,” he said.
“There is a fundamental misunderstanding of rural values in the city and how they are relevant.”
