On November 14 journalists, community activists, artists and concerned residents met at the Roundhouse Community Center beside False Creek to discuss the media's role in forming our perceptions of the controversial downtown neighborhood, Canada's poorest, referred to as the "Downtown Eastside".

The symposium grew out of the efforts of a Vancouver photographer who wanted to show an alternative to what is generally seen in the media about the Downtown Eastside: dehumanizing images of distraught, drug addicted women and men.

As Mark Townsend of the Portland Hotel Society remarked: "Images of the Downtown Eastside tend to be one-dimensional. Their focus is on people in alleys or sleeping on benches. The Downtown Eastside has much more depth than this. It is a community of beautiful, talented people. We hope these pictures, by simply focusing on people's faces, will show this."

Amir Ali Alibhai, the arts programmer at the Roundhouse, described the photos this way: "Images of individuals with their own stories, images that focus on the humanity of the people being photographed, not on their moments of weakness or darkness."

The panelists for the symposium included David Beers, the contributing editor for Vancouver Magazine; Bud Osborn, a local poet and activist; Sheila Baxter, an activist writer and self-declared poor person; Ian Mulgrew, columnist for The Vancouver Sun; Paul Sullivan, the Western editor for The Globe & Mail; and Jim Green of the Community Development Unit and proprietor of the Four Corners Community Savings located in the heart of the Downtown Eastside at Main and Hastings.

The debate was intense, peppered with personal experiences of those who have the most at stake: the Downtown Eastside residents represented in the audience. Sandy Cameron, a resident of the Downtown Eastside said: "The politics of hate are very dangerous. When people have great power over a history of a people they can destroy them."

"The vilification of the poor is used as a defense to the advantage of those who are wealthy," Cameron added.

Sheila Baxter, an activist writer and resident of the Downtown Eastside, says that that the images of the Downtown Eastside is being manipulated by the media in collaboration with real estate interests in a "deliberate creation for yuppie areas."

Bud Osborn agrees. "Situations of gentrification and displacement are about degradation of the people," he said.

Osborn added that "most cocaine and heroin users don't live in the Downtown Eastside." Osborn cited an example of an RCMP chemist who died of a combination heroin cocaine overdose. He suggested that because this person was in a high profile job it was never made a public issue. According to Osborn, Downtown Eastside residents are seen as drug addicts in the media because they represent poverty.

The panelists were divided in their responses to the problem of the media representations of a neighborhood that has been dubbed by the media as "The Killing Fields".

Ian Mulgrew of The Vancouver Sun and a resident of the West End was quick to defend the media's role in the representations of the Downtown Eastside. When questions arose around whether or not the media have the consent to take photographs of people in the Downtown Eastside, Mulgrew focused on the predominance of drug addicts in the Downtown Eastside by asking: "How does someone give consent when they may be mentally ill or an addict?"

Mulgrew also denied allegations that journalism in mainstream media is driven by marketplace interests. He did not believe that Conrad Black [the owner of Southam Press, publisher of The Province, The Vancouver Sun and The National Post] had any dictatorial control over information dissemination and he saw The National Post as a "thoughtful, reflective organ from all sides of the political spectrum."

Not all media representatives at the symposium felt this way. Paul Sullivan, the Western editor of The Globe & Mail also had concerns about how the media gets information, saying: "this has become a kind of ritual of news pornography."

"The reporter should be an investigator," Sullivan added. "The community should persuade the journalist that there's something interesting going on."

Jim Green of the Community Development Unit noted that the big problem of media coverage of the Downtown Eastside was that"we don't see the complexity of human beings," he said. "It's a beautiful community and there's a world of hope there for us."

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