More CanWest action

Hey folks,
I was a little surprised to see the student paper at the University of Manitoba ran a story last week on the CanWest donation to UWO. For those interested, here it is.
Hope you all have a great holiday,
Rob

From the Manitoban
CanWest donates $1m to UWO media program
Student group raises ethical concerns over scholarships
Tessa Vanderhart, Staff

CanWest announced on Friday that it will be donating a total of $1 million to the University of Western Ontario’s faculty of information and media studies.
The Dec. 2 donation will be permanently endowed to two scholarships: the CanWest Global Fellowship in Media, and The David Vienneau Journalism Scholarship, according to Geoff Elliot, vice president of corporate affairs for CanWest.

The David Vienneau scholarship honours a former Ottawa Bureau Chief for Global Television, who passed away one year ago. This year, the scholarship has been awarded to Quentin Casey, a Master’s student in journalism at Western.

CanWest Global Communications Corp is Canada’s largest media company, and its headquarters are in Winnipeg.

Paul Davenport, president of the University of Western Ontario, said that he couldn’t be more proud of Casey for being awarded the scholarship. He added that the scholarship will continue to enrich students of media at Western for many years to come.

Francisco Javier Rivas, the vice-president external for University of Western Ontario’s media, information and technoculture student council, questioned the donation, as a “well-read media studies student.”

The student group learned about the donation a year ago and circulated petitions, as well as sending a letter to the dean’s office, to try and prevent the donation.

“As a faculty of media studies, it would be difficult for us to properly critique media organizations if they were the ones that were funding us,” said Rivas.

He said that CanWest’s “troublesome” reputation was the main reason for the protestation, making reference to editing-in words like “terrorist” in wire stories.

He added that the donation will benefit graduate students most, and as such should not have been allocated to the faculty of media and information studies.

“We don’t want people to think that CanWest is the dark force in the world — they do have some good,” Rivas noted.

“We just don’t want it to be that, now that they have donated, that that’s the only option [for internships].”

“If you want to have a good level of debate, which is integral for democracy, you’re going to need some independent thought,” he concluded.

Stephen Ward, professor of journalism ethics at UBC, said that the donation does not seem to be ethically questionable.

“First of all, I’m happy for the media studies at the UWO, because journalism programs need all the money they can get these days to support their programs,” Ward noted. “Private donations have been around for a long time, and will continue in the future.”

But, he cautioned, it is important to note that the money is handled and distributed by an independent board — a common procedure for donations like this, intended to block the donor from influencing how the money is spent in the future.

He also noted that there is always the possibility of friction, but most journalism schools are assured of their independence from large media corporations and sustain mutually friendly relationships for students hoping to get jobs after graduation. And, this is an issue with all university programs.

“It’s not just journalism,” he noted.

“If there are no strings attached to the donation, then I think it could be a great contribution to Canadian journalism,” said Jonathan Yazer, who is the opinions editor at UWO’s student paper, the Gazette.

“I think the journalism professoriate at Western is sufficiently intelligent to accept a corporate donation without becoming uncritical devotees of that corporation’s agenda, assuming it even has an agenda in the first place.”