Vehicles are stopped at a blockade west of Hinton, Alta on Highway 16 to Jasper National Park on July 25, 2024. At the checkpoint, RCMP turned away anyone without a respirator, citing deteriorating and hazardous air quality from the Jasper townsite fire.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail
Last week, the Alberta wildfires that engulfed the iconic mountain town of Jasper were the biggest news story in the country. But there were no photographs of those fires on the front page of The Globe and Mail or at the top of our homepage.
That was not because Globe editors thought the conflagration enveloping Jasper wasn’t newsworthy. No, the reason that images of the massive fires weren’t prominent for Globe readers was that the photojournalist sent to cover the fires was limited to reporting from outside the (aptly named) exclusion zone.
An exclusion zone establishes a safe distance from a fire – a perimeter overseen by emergency services personnel, beyond which only people actively fighting the fire are permitted. Such zones are obviously designed to protect residents and to help firefighters do their jobs.
But they also prevent journalists from doing theirs. No journalist can get close enough to a wildfire to accurately describe it, and no photojournalist can get close enough to capture images.
Parks Canada has failed to understand that it needs to strike a balance between reasonable safety concerns and reasonable access for journalists. Instead, it has effectively thrown up a smokescreen, shrouding the firefighting effort from public scrutiny in real time. It’s an unfortunately common situation in Canada, where reflexively secretive bureaucracies hoard information that should be freely available.
Typically, government agencies (in this case, Parks Canada) provide photographs of their own to news organizations. But the Globe does not recognize those handout images – the visual equivalent of a press release – as legitimate news photographs.
Photojournalism is, simply put, news communicated through photographs. A government photographer is not a photojournalist. No matter their intent, they are directed by an organization with a vested interest. Because of that inherent bias, the Globe only rarely runs a handout photo on the front page (and provides an explanation in such exceptional cases).
In the absence of journalism, misinformation rushes in to fill the vacuum. Many Canadians saw images out of Jasper on social media, including a July 25 video of someone driving through town in the aftermath of the fire. And many media outlets picked up a 60-second clip from this video that showed extensive damage. But the full video actually showed that much of the town remained intact. Without reliable reporting, some Jasper residents erroneously concluded that their homes were among those destroyed.
The next day, the media was allowed on a supervised tour, with officials showing a constrained and controlled view of the damage, four days after the evacuation was ordered.
Ultimately, there is no replacement for on-the-ground photojournalism. Without the imagery captured by Jesse Winter, for example, the Globe’s story on what Canadians can learn from Australian fire management would have been far less impactful.
Of course, there are legitimate safety issues in such assignments and news organizations have a duty to ensure journalists are properly prepared. Nor should firefighters be hindered from doing their jobs under very extreme conditions. But every photojournalist the Globe assigns to such stories has received training – from risk assessment and hostile environment preparedness to a comprehensive media wildfire safety course. Some even have basic fire suppression training.
Other jurisdictions such as California strike a much better balance between safety concerns and press access, with journalists allowed to enter exclusion zones. There, journalists are seen as part of the emergency response.
The United Photojournalists of Canada, a freelance photojournalist labour organization, has advocated for a comparable relationship in Canada that would significantly improve how wildfires are covered here. The organization, along with representatives from The Globe and other major media outlets, have signed a letter proposing a model for responsible media access that would require appropriate training for journalists and proper protective gear. Meeting those conditions would ensure access within the exclusion zone.
The public cannot understand what it is not allowed to see. Trust is built on such understanding – and that trust is built on credible journalism.