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| Randal Marlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| John Grierson (Photo credit: y.mclean) |
In what are laughingly called the Western democracies (it
seems to me plutocracies would be a more accurate description) there appear to
be two broad sources from which challenges to freedom of expression can
emanate: one is the publicly controlled
information services, usually in the hands of governments; and the other
the private sector of corporate power with all its advertising, money and vested
interests.
This is a conclusion one has to
draw from the presentation of facts in Randal Marlin’s brilliant second
edition, recently published, of his book Propaganda
and the Ethics of Persuasion (published by Broadview Press, Peterborough,
Ontario, pps 368, $32.95.)
Marlin, as I have stated in
earlier posts, gives an exhaustive overview of everything pertaining to
propaganda and persuasion, fair-mindedly making the arguments of both sides.
But the overwhelming preponderance of the authorities he quotes are from
experts who have a negative view of propaganda, and who make it seem that
almost anyone wanting to persuade anyone else
of almost anything, is engaging in one or other form of propaganda. In his essay on definitions, which I have
previously referred to, he quotes 14 experts whose view of propaganda is
negative, three who define it in a
neutral fashion, and only two who define it favorably.
One of these two is John
Grierson, founder of Canada’s fabled National Film Board, a man who always said
he was in the business of propaganda, which plain statement of fact one would
have thought would win Randal’s sympathy. But he gives very short shrift to
Grierson, dismissing him almost airily in the following paragraph:
“Grierson wholly supported government information initiatives to
prepare for public acceptance of government policies. This could reasonably be described as
government propaganda. Grierson himself was discredited later for his involvement in the Gouzenko affair,
but the problem for democracies in combatting propaganda from private and
extra-territorial sources remains.”
There follows a quote from Grierson
in whch he outlines his plans to “present information that is news, and also
information that is pre-news in order to prepare people so that they are not
caught,” a statement for which Randal
presents a rebuttal from some American expert to the effect that Grierson would be “putting a
professional group of a very special kind between the government and the
media.”
Ten pages
later, Randal returns to the charge with a re-statement of his ill-defined comment
that “Grierson’s credibility was further weakened by his involvement in the
Gouzenko inquiry.”And in his third and last reference to Grierson, on page 281,
he returns to the charge once more, repeating --- just in case we hadn’t got
the message the first two times --- that, “as we saw above, his credibility was
further weakened by his involvement in the Gouzenko inquiry.”
This seems to
be an astonishing lapse in a book which otherwise is so carefully even-handed.
Because surely it should have been of some interest to Randal that Grierson’s
National Film Board, headed by people whom he selected, trained, and inspired,
managed to establish over at least four decades a space between the government
that controlled it, and its own freeedom
of expression which made it unique among government film boards around the
world.
I know
something of this, because after spending quarter of a century as an employee
in the daily journalism of the private sector, I spent almost twenty years
thereafter as a freelance employee of the NFB.
I cannot pretend that the private sector was any further advanced than
the public sector in creating space for free expression. In fact, based on my
experience, I would say it was rather the contrary, though I do not wish to put
that forward as a general principle.
The NFB
was the government’s film-maker. Any
government department that wanted a film made on any subject asked the Board to
do the job, and provided the money for the proposed film. On such an assignment, the department called
the shots. But in those days the NFB had a substantial budget of its own,
managed by a production committee composed equally of film-makers and
bureaucrats, and it was under this budget that almost all of the agency’s
greatest films were made.
I only once worked
on a departmental film. That was when the NFB was contracted to produce four
films for use in the centenary year of the National Parks, 1985. I did the initial research for this whole
programme, and I wrote, researched and directed one of the films, a history of
the National Parks. That film was designed to be the centrepiece of a massive
celebratory meeting towards the end of the celebratory year, but a series of
circumstances arose which held up completion of the film long enough that it
missed its deadline. The circumstances were these: the bureaucrats overlooking production
of these films (a very reasonable couple of young men, I must say, but they had
other less reasonable men breathing down their necks), objected to the fact
that as part of the recital of the history of the parks, I had chosen the
creation of 10 new parks in four years as a seminal event, and had interviewed
Jean Chretien, the minister responsible, for the film. This was clearly of
special interest, because if I remember correctly, it had taken previous
ministers more like 50 years to create four new parks. This was the era of the
Mulroney government, so the National Parks bureaucrats in charge of this
project didn’t want to publicize Chretien in any way. One of Mulroney’s poorer
appointments was to the ministry overlooking National Parks, a French-Canadian
woman called Suzanne Blais-Grenier. While insisting that we remove the
interview with Chretien, the bureaucrats insisted we allow Blais-Grenier to make
a statement in the film. She had been
making statements to the effect that mining and logging could be permitted in
the National Parks, and that did not sit well with the message of the rest of
the film.
Right off, we
simply didn’t agree that she should be allowed to make a statement, when
everyone else in the film had to submit to an interview, including any awkward
questions that might arise. But we also objected on the grounds of what his
particular minister might be expected to say. At one point, during the argument
that went on about this, I asked the bureaucrats if they could guarantee that
she would still be minister when the film was finished. They dismissed the question as
irrelevant. After a lot of back-and-forth
about this, we gave ground on the Chretien interview, but stuck to our guns
over Blais-Grenier, insisting she should be interviewed, if they absoutely
insisted on having her. So I did an
interview with her --- she had nothing of any interest to say --- and we began
to cut it into the film. Suddenly, she was fired. I phoned and asked the same
bureaucrats if they would like us to take her out of he film, and they
responded resoundingly: “Yes, please!” We had not begun to cut Chretien out of
the film, so we left him in.
So, we won this
argument even on a field on which we had no right to be questioning content,
since it was a film made at the request and the cost of the department.
The NFB had to
confront government interference, however, even when operating on their own
budget. My first NFB job had been to do
research for films for the Challenge for Change programme, an NFB innovation whose avowed object was to
make films designed to prepare Canadians for social and other changes. (A
typically Griersonian aim, established decades after his disappearance from the
Board!) One of the programme’s major
innovations was to change the relationship between the makers and the subjects
of films, the idea being to give the subjects editorial control over what was
happening to them.
Any department
that wanted to take part could do so by putting $100,000 into the kitty, and 14
departments were members at the time concerned, creating a budget of $1,400,000,
roughly divided between making standard documentary films, and video
experiments which were working on the processes of social change.
I had two
relevant experiences, one concerning the video side of things, the other the
film side. When the James Bay hydro scheme
was launched in 1971, the half dozen or so Cree villages in northern Quebec had
never in all their long history held a political meeting to discuss their
concerns. Since this project promised to bring them massive change, it was
tailor-made for Challenge for Change, and their video experts swung into action, promising to
train a Cree to work a video camera, and giving him the budget to travel from
village to village showing his videotapes so that the Cree people could be made
aware of the general feelings about the project among the various
villages. I was at the meeting at which
this was set up, and a reliable Cree
person was chosen for the job.
Two weeks later
I returned and asked how it was coming along. “Oh,” they said, rather shamefacedly, “I’m
afraid we have had to can that project., at the request of Ottawa.” This was all taking place after the
insurrection of the FLQ, who in 1970 had kidnapped a British diplomat and
executed a Quebec cabinet minister, and the federal government was desperate
not to do anything that might upset the Bourassa Liberal government in Quebec
City. So that was the end of that
project.
Later, when I
was researching a proposed film on Aboriginal Rights that arose from my
research, I was told by the director of research at the Justice department, a
personal friend of Prime Minster Trudeau
with whom he had been dining the previous evening, that we should not make such
a film because there was not a smidgen of credibility in this claim that the
Aboriginals had legal rights. A few days later came word that the project had
been suspended on orders from “the highest
authority in Ottawa,” which we all took to be the Prime Minister.
Work stopped
for a couple of weeks, but Colin Low, the director of Challenge for Change, who
might be described as a Grierson man, had spent his working life in the NFB and
was wise in the ways of government. He suggested we could recast the idea.
Instead of one film on Aboriginal rights, we could make four films on the place
of Indians in Canadian society. I agreed, and he circulated the 14 members of
the departmental committee for their agreement, which he obtained. We then
decided that our first film should deal with the Indians and their life on the
land. And we went ahead and made the film we intended to make in the first
place.
That was not
the end of the story. When we had almost finished the film the Indian Affairs
representative on the committee objected to it, said it was full of errors, and
refused to vote for its release. Other members of the committee said Indian
Affairs would have to justify their opinion with facts.
And that was not the end of the story. Meantime, Colin
Low attended a conference of goverment information officers from the third
world in Stockholm, and he took the rough cut to show them the NFB’s work. It
created a sensation. None of them had ever seen anything like it, and they
could not believe it was a government film, so critical was its tone of current
and past policies.
But even that
was not the end of the story. When Indian Affairs failed to document their
objections and since the film had already gained so much kudos for Canada
abroad, the committee ordered the film be released, and Indian Affairs, anxious
to be credited with this success, put up $30,000 to ensure they were given a
credit as sponsor of the film.
This is an
encouraging story, because although it is a fact that a determined, tyrannical
leader can impose himself on the work of those under him (as we are seeing in
the current federal government), in practice even the Prime Minister of Canada
did not succeed in stopping production of a government-funded film that did not
meet his purposes.
I am not sure
such a result could ever have been achieved in the private sector: in my
experience, if the publisher of a newspaper wanted or didn’t want something
published, his word was law, no argument about it.
These men who
managed this public system, I repeat (unlike Randal I will not repeat it three
times, just the mere once) had been selected by, trained by, and inspired by
John Grierson, the man given such short shrift by Randal in his book. Apart
from anything else, Randal is untypically careless in suggesting that
Grierson’s fall from grace in
Ottawa was caused by the Gouzenko affair. In fact, Grierson resigned from the
National Film Board on August 7, 1945, and Gouzenko was never heard of until he
defected from the Soviet embassy on September 5 of the same year. In addition,
Randal should have noticed that at the time Grierson was not only accused of
being a Communist sympathizer, but by others of being “an out-and-out CCFer’, and still
others, of “running an organization with Fascist tendencies that gave
preference to Nazis.” An all-purpose
whipping boy, was Grierson, and the whipping still goes on, apparently.
A woman who was
for a short time a secretary in Grierson’s office was implicated in the Soviet
spy-ring, but it is said that when she suggestd that Grierson might be
recruited as a Soviet spy, the response from Moscow was “stay away from
Grierson.” She thought this proved he
was not an agent; but to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, obsessed with Communism,
it proved that he was already an agent.
On such flimsy material is Grierson dismissed in Randal’s book.
I should add
that I met Grierson twice, and both meetings were memorable. Ten years after
his resignation from the NFB the Hudson’s Bay Company gave him a contract to
tour the Canadian north and write some articles for their company paper, The Beaver. By the time he arrived in
Winnipeg he had already over-spent his expense allowance, and so far had
written nothing. A friend of mine, director of public relations for Hudson’s
Bay, who had set up his tour, phoned and said he would agree to the Winnipeg Free Press interviewing
Grierson, as long as I was the interviewer.
So I went along to his hotel room where we sat for a couple of hours
drinking Scotch and chatting, with him telling me all sorts of hilarious
stories about his past. I went back to
the office, full of whisky but no notes,
and wrote a pretty funny story about the interview in which I quoted him
as saying, among many other things, that the Canadian officer class in the war
was the most cowardly in the world. When
I took the paper around to him later in the day he seized it as he opened the door,
and said, “My God, what have you been doing to me, laddie?” He had already been
contacted by a Toronto reporter asking him to explain himself. “Were you ever
in the services?” he asked the reporter.
“Well, then, did you never think of your officers like that?”
He came around
to my small apartment that night and entertained a few of my friends with a
non-stop monologue which charmed all of us.
Five or six
years later I ran into him as I was going up the steps of the Assembly Hall in
Edinburgh for a Shakespearean play. He hadn’t yet stopped drinking, as he did
later, and was slightly the worse for wear. He had been running a show on
Scottish TV, This Wonderful World, consisting of extracts from documentary films
gathered from around the world, and was introduced every week as Dr. John
Grierson, in reference to one of his many honorary doctorates.
We agreed to
meet at the interval at a pub that was accessible through a small door in the
back of the theatre. When we found our way there we were just settling down for
a chat when an old lady who looked like she seldom moved from the pub sidled up
and asked politely in a thick Scottish accent, “Are you Dr. Grierson?” On being told it was he, she said, “I’d like
a word with you, please.”
“Yes, my dear,
what can I do for you?” Grierson asked.
“It’s me
arthritis,” she said. She may have been
under the weather when she first talked to him, but by the time he had finished
with her, telling her how many things she should be grateful for, she was feeling on top of the world. Maybe it
was Grierson’s gift of the gab, his wonderful way with words, that got him into
all that trouble.
Randal should
have known, too, and as a university man should have respected, that in the
late 1960s, when Grierson was almost flat broke, he was given a contract by
McGill university to conduct a class. At the beginning he was merely a
curiosity. But pretty soon, his lectures were attracting 800 students every
week. It is a lasting regret of mine that I was away from the city at the time,
and never had a chance to be charmed by him again.
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