I have done a variety of research – for news organizations, for governments, for community groups, and for traditional academic journals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My groundbreaking academic research on diversity coverage led me to develop a course at Ryerson University that won the 2003 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

My areas of specialty are: 

  • Minorities and the media
  • Ethnic publications
  • Journalism standards and ethical policies

 

Census of newsrooms 1994-2004

The first tracking of the race and gender of daily newspaper employees ever done in Canada. It showed that newspapers of every size were falling out of step with the demographic changes in their communities. This study was done in association with researcher Caron Court. I followed up by publishing an academic journal article here.





 Please email John Miller if you cannot download this.


Ipperwash and the Media

A case study of how the media got a story wrong. This analysis was done for the Ipperwash judicial inquiry and cited in Mr. Justice Linden’s report into the death of Dudley George. This was done in association with researcher Cybele Sack.
Ipperwash  

Terrorism and the press

An analysis of newspaper news stories of the arrest of the so-called Toronto 18 "homegrown terrorists" in 2006. It shows how overly dependent reporters were on anonymous sources, breaking many journalistic guidelines on their use. It skewed the coverage and accepted the government's political spin without checking with other sources.
Click here to read the paper.

A related analysis of opinion articles from the same newspapers. A significant portion of the published commentary raised unreasonable public alarm, cast suspicion on the followers of a major religion and impugned Islam itself, failed to subject the allegations of theCanadian government and security officials to rigorous scrutiny, and predicted guilt before the suspects were able to exercise their democratic rights to a fair trial.
    Diversity in coverage and decision-making in Toronto media

How much diversity is found in news coverage in the Greater Toronto Area--one of the most diverse regions in Canada? Who is making the decisions behind the scenes? I co-authored the Diverse City Counts research project with Prof. Wendy Cukier in 2010.
Diverse City Counts research project