G8 Research Group

The civil society groups I interacted today with continued to be vocal about their disappointment at being segregated from the international media in the Alternative Media Centre. Several groups posted their reactions online:

David Olsen of Global Health Council posted the following on Blog 4 Global Health:

We don’t understand why the Canadian government felt it necessary to segregate the NGOS in separate facilities. The International Media Center — the “real” media center — is across the street from the “Alternative” Media Center (where the NGOs are congregated and from where I write this) but the “real” center is surrounded by a wire fence and concrete barriers, apparently to impede aggressive NGO representatives, who have to be invited in by journalists.

The Harper government seems to be going in a different direction from the United Nations, which last week opened its process leading to September’s summit on the Millennium Development Goals to civil society and the private sector for the first time, with informal and interactive hearings to get various perspectives on how to accelerate progress towards achieving the MDGs.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Amy Boldosser of Family Care International:

Those of us representing civil society groups have been assigned to work in the “Alternative Media Center” which is across the street from The International Media Center, the “real” media center, separated by a busy street, more high fences, and concrete barricades. This means we have little or no access to international media outlets.  Many of us who are activists and advocates pride ourselves on being a bit alternative, but in this case the Alternative Media Center is the Canadian government’s inelegant solution to concerns that civil society representatives from a broad range of issues would generate negative media coverage of G8 and G20 and their failure to meet past commitments.  We are receiving the live news feed from the G8 meeting but there are no speakers so we are huddling around the televisions-the leaders need to speak up, literally and figuratively.

The lack of access to the media was also acknowledged by Kimberly Hunter of ONE, who blogged:

We’re currently in the Alternative Media Center which separates the NGO community and civil society from the media.

From my own discussions with Amy Boldosser, I uncovered that InterAction, a large coalition of U.S-based development NGOs, elected not to send representatives to Toronto to cover the G8/G20 Summits out of concern about the segregation of civil society from international media.