Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation Len Kuffert Conway, Kyle –Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Pp. ix, 217. Kyle Conway’s Everyone Says No is an illuminating, nuanced study of a thorny and conceptually-challenging subject. It examines how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [End Page 432] and Radio-Canada translated news items from one official language into the other during Canada’s late 1980s – early 1990s bout of constitutional fever. Charged with the task of informing viewers as the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords lived and died, the networks’ most prominent news programmes, The National and Le Téléjournal, adopted different ways of translating and interpreting commentary and statements by government figures and experts speaking, respectively, French or English. In an increasingly diverse and media-saturated Canada, especially at grave ‘existential’ moments like the unravelling of Meech Lake, when news producers knew most sets were tuned to shows like Law and Order at 10 pm, public service broadcasting was (and remains) an especially thankless task. Yet presenting national or regional issues in depth, night after night, to those who may not be intimately acquainted with them was (and remains) part of public service broadcasting’s mandate. Such coverage is effectively a frill for private broadcasters, who do not reckon their own utility in the same way that public service broadcasters must, i.e., in terms of what Conway calls the “creation and maintenance of a shared cultural identity” (p. 4). While it would be unfair to suggest that Conway characterizes the peddling of Canadian identity as the only purpose of programmes like the ones he profiles, it is difficult not to see the ‘failure’ in his book’s title as an indictment of public broadcasters who could not help viewers reach a better understanding of the other national solitude. In other words, even sensitive attempts to break down the agendas and positions of the various actors in the constitutional dramas – to tell English Canadians ‘what Québec wants’ and vice versa – were not enough to overcome the cautious tribalism of the early 1990s. Commercial broadcasters failed just as surely, but viewers expected next to nothing of them. How often did the networks run stories on Meech Lake or Charlottetown? Who used subtitles? Did the anchors or reporters abridge or seem to alter the meaning of material in the translated segments? We are not left wondering about questions like these for long, as Conway marshals his evidence (the newscasts in which translations were used) after outlining Canadian broadcasting history in an early section which relies perhaps a bit too heavily on Marc Raboy’s 1990 work Missed Opportunities. We might consider Everyone Says No to be a kind of a news-focused extension of Raboy’s lament for what public broadcasting could not accomplish in Canada. Journalists at the CBC and Radio-Canada were asked to report not only on the ‘games’ taking place in Ottawa and elsewhere, but to predict what the next plays in these chaotic struggles would be. The future of Canada depended, or so we were told, upon the outcome of the accords, and especially in the case of the 1993 Charlottetown referendum, on voters understanding positions that may have been quite ‘distinct’ from their own. Conway captures the drama surrounding those moments well, and more importantly, brings us among the journalists trying to deliver coherent translations. Everyone Says No was at one time a dissertation, but we are wisely spared long wallows in what Paul Ricoeur might have thought about Clyde Wells. What we get instead is Conway’s take on translated news about the accords. The problems plaguing attempts to translate the news about Elijah Harper or the polls leading up to the 1992 referendum are presented as rooted in their political and historical moment, and read in the light of what audiences expect from a public service broadcaster. The attention paid to the terms distinct society/société distincte is worthwhile, not only for those interested in how television journalists handled the obvious potential for slippage, but for students of Canadian...