in info-heavy times

With the average Canadian bombarded with news from television, print, radio, and the Internet if they’re cyberminded, information overload has the potential to be the undoing of the ’90s news documentary. Theoretically, ‘a seen it, heard it, know-all-about-it-already’ mentality could dilute audience interest in a lengthy presentation on an already familiar story and make it tempting for them to reach for the remote.

But according to the frontmen on the two Canadian news docs up for an award at this year’s Banff Television Festival, the finer points traditionally attributed to news documentaries – point of view and breadth of information – will save the genre from extinction due to the proliferation of information.

cbc and the CTV Television Network are nominated for documentaries on subjects already familiar to the characteristically information-hungry Canadian audience.

Rwanda – Autopsy of a Genocide, produced by cbc for CBC Prime Time News, re-examines the massacres in Rwanda by exploring whether the war might have been averted if the United Nations had acted differently.

Campus Codes – The Speech Police, produced by ctv for W5 with Eric Malling, explores the impact of groups mandated to enforce politically correct sexual and racial codes of behavior on university campuses.

According to veteran cbc journalist Brian Stewart, who reported the Rwanda piece, knowing that graphic pictures of the massacres happening in Rwanda had previously caught the attention of everyone with a television set, didn’t deter the team from putting the piece together.

‘We knew we had a whole new angle on what was, by the time we broadcast, a familiar story. We set out to trace the paper trail behind the events. As journalists, we felt we had the responsibility to show how the event happened, to explain what led up to the stories people had been reading for months,’ Stewart says.

The fact that the mainstream press had been on the story worked for the cbc team instead of against them, says Stewart. The graphic images pebbling newscasts for months before Autopsy of a Genocide was broadcast allowed the audience to tune in with a sense of familiarity with the whole issue. There was a great deal of consideration given to how many of the horrific images of Rwanda that stood out in people’s minds to use in the piece, says Stewart.

The intent was to use enough of them to put the doc in a context the audience was acquainted with, to bring back the original feelings of horror and concern, ‘and at the same time bring in an angle that hadn’t been thoroughly fleshed out by the daily news and explain a very complex story.’

Similarly, Campus Codes – The Speech Police, looked to get deeper inside a story the local press had covered extensively, says executive producer Peter Rehak.

‘Yes, it was out there already. But it’s the angle you take on the story that makes the difference. At W5, we have the freedom to take a hard-edged point of view on a delicate topic like sexual harassment that not many news stories are able to take.’

Essentially, says Rehak, you pick your topic, look for solid, interesting experiences through which to tell the story, and if it’s done properly, it’s relevant to a wider audience than those directly involved.

The Speech Police was understandable and poignant to a wider Canadian audience than the university community, because its underbelly was the wider issue of special-interest groups imposing their agenda on the community.

‘Everybody has experience with political correctness,’ he concludes.

The idea of marketing news docs internationally doesn’t occur to the journalists putting them together, even with subjects international in scope like the Rwanda piece with its focus on the u.n., says Stewart.

Sometimes a documentary can deliver an overview and provide a kind of ‘helicopter shot’ of events and issues, but normally their value is in explaining something very complex, he says. ‘We are able to bring into sharper focus, details of a story that have gotten lost in the general clutter of reporting.’