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Article Excerpt
Energy production is, without doubt, a subject of enormous economic importance and public interest in North America. Consequently, energy topics are widely reported in American and Canadian news media. This article provides a comparison and analysis of Canadian and American newspaper reporting about one North American energy megaproject: the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project. The central feature of this project, if it goes ahead, will be a 1,220 kilometer natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the sparsely populated Mackenzie River Delta of Canada's Northwest Territories to market. The Mackenzie Gas Project is currently under simultaneous regulatory review by Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) and a specially convened Joint Review Panel (JRP). The latter is charged with considering the environmental and social effects of the project for the communities along the proposed pipeline route. Because the affected communities are largely indigenous, so are five of seven members of the panel. The review process has taken longer than initially anticipated, but is expected to wrap up by the end of 2007 and result in governmental approval for the energy project. This will clear a major hurdle in the decades-long drive by energy companies to develop these natural gas reserves.
The Mackenzie Gas Project story concerns a diverse set of issues, including environmental protection and regulation, economic and social health of northern indigenous communities, North American energy security, financial and commodity markets, corporate investments and profits, economic integration of the United States and Canada, international relations, and consumer issues, among others. Yet the reporting about the proposed pipeline has been framed narrowly as a struggle between the proponents and opponents of economic development. Significantly, reporters have been both puzzled by and at pains to explain to readers the positions of the several indigenous communities that appear at times to both support and oppose the development. There are two key points of this coverage. First, the indigenous communities are not recognized as part of the "public" and thus do not hold a public interest in whether or not the pipeline is built. Rather, indigenous communities are presented as either obstructions or economic opportunists or both. Second, the economic interests of the multinational corporations that aim to build and profit from the pipeline development are rarely mentioned.
I became interested in reporting about the Mackenzie Gas Project generally, and about indigenous peoples specifically, after reading feature stories in two U.S. papers: the Christian Science Monitor (Walker 2001) and the New York Times (Krauss 2003a). The focus of both stories was the supposed incongruity of aboriginal participation in the development project. In Krauss's New York Times account, northern aboriginal communities have been driven into an unholy alliance with pipeline developers as a result of animal rights campaigns by environmental activists. Using language intended to remind readers that northern indigenous peoples are hunters, Krauss describes the animal rights campaigns as having "snared the native populations in sanctions" and labels their accusations against the environmentalists as "having hit like harpoons to the soul." He completes the image of indigenous peoples as primordial hunters in a modern world with a visual metaphor, a photograph of a dog sled moving across the tundra; in the background looms an oil or gas derrick. The photo caption reads: "A symbolic scene in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Their livelihoods in danger, Native Canadians are welcoming oil, gas and mining interests." Walker's Christian Science Monitor story, which is far more positive, concerns the ways that northerners are learning to work with the oil and gas industry. It, too, cannot avoid the allusion to hunting: an accompanying photograph shows an Inuk (singular of Inuit) standing beside a snowmobile. He is about to thrust what appears to be a harpoon into the snow or ice. Only by reading the caption, "Hunting Hydrocarbons," do we discover that the "harpoon" is a seismic probe and the Inuit "hunter" an employee of a gas exploration firm.
In order to explore more fully how the relationship between northern indigenous peoples and the Mackenzie Gas Project is understood, I began collecting media stories about the current pipeline effort. My goal was to treat the media coverage ethnographically, to attempt to appreciate how the media participate in the culturally shared, taken-for-granted knowledge or discourse about native peoples. Using several searchable electronic archives, Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, Proquest, and Newsbank, I attempted to identify all of the English-language newspaper reports referring to the current Mackenzie gas pipeline proposal published in either Canada (n = 3,657) or the United States (n = 118) between January 1, 1999, and December 31, 2006. While many of the published stories are versions of a single report distributed by a wire service such as Canadian Press or Bloomberg, editing at the various newspapers served to highlight or erase some facts or images provided in the original version. For example, it is not unusual for a story to be 800 words long in one newspaper, but cut to 200 words in another--both carved from a longer wire service story. I am interested in how media stories writ large draw from and contribute to culturally shared knowledge. Thus, I have treated each published version as a distinct story Nonetheless, the large number of stories about the Mackenzie Gas Project in Canadian newspapers made it necessary for me to sample them. Stories about the
pipeline that appeared in magazines, trade journals, or electronic publications are not included in this analysis. I also omitted reports in broadcast media.
Table 1 provides a description of the final sample. It consists of all 118 stories that I was able to identify in U.S. daily newspapers, as well as 326 (or 9 percent) of the stories that appeared in English-language Canadian daily newspapers. I sampled the Canadian stories by week, choosing the first week randomly. I then selected every tenth week and included all the stories about the Mackenzie Gas Project, including opinion pieces, published during each of 32 sampled weeks. In my review of these stories I recorded their explicit content--what events, relationships, issues, and concerns were reported--as well as the implied or tacit content--what shared, taken-for-granted, cultural knowledge about aboriginal peoples was assumed by the writers and editors.
In thinking about the role of news reporting in shaping public discourse, I have relied on the ideas of Yale University literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner (2002). Warner provides a way to think about how news reporting and other modern public forms of address construct their audience. According to Warner, the audience for most texts, speeches, performances, sermons, and so on is the public, or rather a public comprised of a self-selecting group of strangers who are constituted as a public by nothing more than that they recognize themselves as having been addressed. Warner builds a concept that Marxist social theorist Louis Althusser (1971) termed "interpellation." Individuals who recognize themselves as having been addressed are interpellated into a particular public. Through multiple acts of self-recognition, a public becomes a real social entity, though one with unknown and unknowable boundaries.
Newspaper readers are assumed to, and most likely do, recognize themselves as the one(s) being addressed. If not, continuing to read would, in most circumstances, be a bit odd. But there is more going on than self-recognition. Warner tells us that "[i]t is equally important that we remember that the [text] was addressed to indefinite others; that in singling us out, it does so not on the basis of our concrete identity, but by virtue of our participation in the discourse alone, and therefore in common with strangers" (2002, 58).
Newspaper stories are discursive because they do more than inform individual readers. The information contained in the stories, or at least parts of it, circulates. It circulates in letters to the editor, in conversations between intimates, on late-night talk shows, in popular culture, and in subsequent reports in the same and other newspapers. It both draws from and contributes to already circulating ideas or "frames." These frames constitute a type of metaphor or key symbol which "operates to sort out experience, to place it in cultural categories, and to help [readers] think about how it all hangs together" (Ortner 1973, 1339). According to Purvis and Hunt (1993, 495), "Common sense (or popular discourse) is both the medium of social action and constitutive of the social relations that they reproduce." There is, of course, circularity to this process of audience and frame construction which keeps shared knowledge about peoples and events alive while making the emergence of new discursive frames rare.
A Bit of History about the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline
A Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline was first proposed in the 1970s. It followed the 1968 discovery of substantial quantities of oil and gas in Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope and the subsequent discovery of smaller, but still significant, natural gas reserves in the Mackenzie Delta. (1) While the Alaskan gas reserves were deemed to be large enough to justify their own pipeline (which would have had to traverse Canadian territory in order to feed into the North American trunk lines in Alberta), only the most optimistic at that time believed that Mackenzie Delta gas existed in sufficient volume to finance a separate pipeline. Still, the Government of the Northwest Territories and the Canadian federal government, along with pipeline construction firms, oil companies, and other members of the hydrocarbon industry, were intent upon developing Mackenzie Delta gas fields. Those entities joined forces to produce plans for a pipeline that would move Alaskan gas along the Arctic coast to the Mackenzie Delta, where it would be joined by the Canadian gas, and the output of both nations would then flow south in a pipeline along the Mackenzie Valley. A competing application to develop only the Alaskan gas proposed building a pipeline adjacent to the Alyeska or Trans Alaska oil pipeline and then cast along the Alaska Highway to Alberta.
Neither gas pipeline was built, although Foothills Pipe Lines, Ltd., did obtain regulatory approvals for the Alaska Highway Pipeline Project in 1977. The Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline...
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