To answer that question, I will go back to the example of the Oka Park situation.
When you look at the media coverage, you can see that the Mohawk council had a lot of trouble getting its message across and explaining that its position was founded on a responsibility to protect its members' health and public health. Many articles and news reports presented the situation as more of a holdover of the land disputes between Kanesatake and the municipality of Oka. Generally speaking, I see the same issues that I raised in my presentation to the Viens Commission, which dealt with the relationship between Indigenous people and certain public services in Quebec.
The most obvious observation, when looking at media coverage of Indigenous people, is the presence of bias in journalism. Personally, I think that biases come in three broad categories: those that can be categorized as ignorance; those that come from cultural differences; and finally, those that are more ideological in nature, which can include racism.
In addition to the biases in the media coverage, Indigenous leaders also have difficulty being heard in the media. We often perceive a kind of indifference towards them, which makes it hard to portray Indigenous issues properly in the media, even if it is in the public interest.
As you know, a few years ago, Richard Desjardins produced a film on First Nations entitled The Invisible People about the Anishinabe.
Indigenous people are invisible in the media and in the public sphere in general, and this is still a very real issue that poses a number of problems. The biggest problem, I feel, is the distorted image that people have of Indigenous people, an image that is strongly influenced precisely by what the media does or does not convey.