Conversations with three feminist reporters covering the Pickton Trial

By Jessalynn Keller
June 2007

The Missing Women trial in Vancouver involves the key issues of second and third wave feminism: sexual abuse, violence against women, sexuality and the roles that race, class and gender play in power relations. Why then is the media coverage of the case still so reflective of dominant cultural stereotypes of women, violence, sex and race?

I decided to find out. I interviewed three women journalists, self-identified as feminists who are covering the case against Robert Pickton, who is on trial for the homicides of six women, and awaiting trial for the murders of another 19 women. All of the women went missing over of 30-year period from downtown Vancouver. Most of them were poor, racial minorities, and had been sexually abused as children or young women. Many of them had been engaged in sex work that left them vulnerable to violence. Almost all of them had limited access to social systems that most women and Vancouver residents take for granted.

All of the women journalists I interviewed, who represent three of the key print media outlets in Canada covering the trial – the Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press wire service – self identified as feminists. The good news is that they also said they were explicitly trying to assert feminist values in their coverage of the case.

The issues seem to cloud when they try to articulate these values through a mainstream media lens. They see their power residing primarily in practical journalistic decision-making such as language choices. The result is feminism light - news content without the conceptual tools or framework to help readers see and understand the structural challenges the Missing Women faced, the role of feminism historically and the continued struggle of many women in Vancouver today.

Women in a Man’s World?

Each journalist saw her gender as influencing her reporting of the story. “Women are natural storytellers,” says Stephanie Levitz, a reporter covering the trial for Canadian Press (CP), who believes that her gender lets her do contextual stories easier than men. “They have always been transmitters of history and culture to the next generation and that’s what makes women good journalists.”

She adds, “women can connect to the community in ways that a male journalist can’t.”

Lori Culbert, who has been covering the case for the Vancouver Sun, the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in Western Canada, for several years, agrees. Similar to Levitz, she sees her gender as an aid to understanding where the Missing Women came from and how they got to the Downtown Eastside.

“I’m not suggesting that men can’t do this, but as someone who has a great respect for women I feel it’s essential to report on the women living in the Downtown Eastside with respect and try to highlight the circumstances that lead these women there,” Culbert says.

Jane Armstrong, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, one of two national newspapers in Canada, also sees her gender as informing her journalism. While she acknowledges there has been great coverage done by men, she credits feminism as sparking her interest in many of the contextual issues of the story, such as women’s addictions.

Fact or Fiction? Gender and journalistic norms

While all agree gender influences their reporting on the missing women, the reporters remained committed to traditional journalistic responsibilities such as objectivity, accuracy, and facts.

“As a journalist, I believe that you shouldn’t proclaim your ideology from the rooftop,”
Levitz says. “I don’t want someone to think they can’t speak with me because I’m a feminist.”

Culbert agrees. “Because I’m a reporter I try to keep my own opinions and background out of my writing. That said, I do have a strong belief that, in this case, the victims are very important and I try to make that a strong message in my writing.”

Armstrong also discusses her obligation to accurate reporting, even if this approach has earned her some criticism.

“Families have gotten mad because I wrote the women were ‘drug addicted prostitutes’” Armstrong says. “You can’t sugar coat it either, you can’t say that they weren’t drug addicted prostitutes, because they were.”

Armstrong’s loyalty to a strict, traditional newsroom definition of the ‘facts’ reveals the power that masculinist newsroom culture has over journalists, even those who identify as feminist. While this disconnect between feminist values and news norms was hinted at by a couple of the women, none of the journalists directly challenged traditional new norms as a model that may influence ‘getting at’ the story of Vancouver’s Missing Women. Indeed, their analysis of their own feminist strategies remained within the norms of traditional news reporting.

The power of language?

All of the reporters felt that language was an area where they could exercise their feminism. Each reporter revealed a different strategy for describing the missing women, and all had considered their choices carefully.

In contrast to Armstrong’s literal interpretation of ‘facts’, Culbert chooses to avoid ‘prostitute’ unless the term is in a quote. When police officers in an interrogation tape played for the courtroom called the missing women “girls,” Culbert said she consciously chose to paraphrase the quotes, avoiding using the word “girls.” If she had to quote directly, Culbert put the word in quotations to denote that it had been said by someone else. “I try not to even use the words sex trade workers or drug addicted. They’re [the women] not on trial here,” explains Culbert.

Levitz concedes that both ‘prostitute’ and ‘sex trade worker’ are loaded terms, but she prefers ‘prostitute.’

“To me, sex trade worker implies choice – but these women weren’t working or making a choice, they were surviving.” Levitz says that in making her language choices she continually asked herself how to present the women fairly and remain true to who they were as people.

“I would never use the word ‘hooker’ but unfortunately, that word sometimes has the right amount of characters for a headline,” she says.

Women like ‘us’… or not? Framing decisions and context

Along with language, all three reporters talked about public identification with the story. This concern follows a traditional journalistic belief that the public must be able to identify and relate to the people in the story in order for the story to have significance. Thus, making the story have ‘relevance’ was a major goal for each journalist.

“One of the biggest challenges for everyone is to try and make this story have resonance with the mainstream population, and I don’t know if it ever will,” says Armstrong. “Not many people can identify with this kind of life.”

Levitz sees it differently. She is adamant that murders of this nature could happen to any woman, viewing the problem as structural rather than issues based solely in the Downtown Eastside.

“Would this have happened if these women weren’t on the streets? Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy weren’t prostitutes and look what happened to them,” Levitz reasons.

Levitz connects the story with violence against women and consequently sees her role as a woman journalist as uncovering these social issues and making connections to the broader society.

“A woman [journalist’s] role goes beyond covering the day-to-day trial proceedings,” Levitz says. “There are other issues that are more important than sitting in a courtroom listening to DNA results on socks.”

In this sense, Levitz strays from the more masculine ‘just-the-facts’ reporting, adopting a more contextually driven storytelling style that attempts to make the story about everyone, rather than just about the Downtown Eastside.

But keeping contextual issues alive becomes difficult as the trial is continually pumping out more crime facts that must be reported.

“How do you keep the victims front and centre throughout the trial?,” Culbert asks. Her strategy has been to keep the memories of the women at the forefront by including the names and pictures of the women and their relatives in her work whenever she can.

This type of ‘humanistic coverage’ - depicting the women as mothers, daughters, and sisters - increased in the weeks leading up to the start of the trial.

But while ‘humanistic’ coverage is useful in reframing the mainstream narratives, it often individualizes the women’s problems, positioning them as objects of pity. “I try to stay away from framing the story like these women need to be rescued. They were in the DTES as a result of choices – not necessarily their own individual choices - but choices we’ve all made [as a society]” Levitz says, countering the individualist framework many stories about the women have employed.

“As journalists, we spend too much time focusing on the DTES and not on how these women got there. Where were we 26 years ago when these women were children?”

So with feminists in our major newsrooms why aren’t we seeing more feminist-oriented coverage of the Pickton trial? The first thing we might consider is whether we need a new model of feminist journalism.