CBC’s the fifth estate visits first year class to discuss “Missing Black Boys”

Students in Assistant Professor Shari Okeke’s Multimedia News Reporting class were given a behind the scenes look at high stakes investigative journalism with a visit from CBC's the fifth estate. The producers behind the investigative documentary “Missing Black Boys” visited the first year journalism class in late March.

Professor Okeke extended the invitation to upper-year students, Master’s students and recent graduates of the program. 

The group screened the documentary in the Cineplex Cinemas theatre, where the JRN105 class takes place. 

“We watched the documentary, and then we had the guest speakers. I think that was really important,” said first-year student Nisa Younus. “You want to see the impact that they had and the work they did before you speak to them, and before you get to ask them questions.”

The documentary explores harrowing accounts of parents whose underage sons were lured by gangs to sell drugs in northern Ontario towns including Thunder Bay and Sarnia, hundreds of kilometres from their homes. For the students, watching the documentary immediately before the guest speakers arrived helped them feel more connected to the stories.

“It's so easy to separate yourself from the content and separate yourself from the people that make it,” said first-year student Aidan Mitchell. “It was very interesting sitting there at the start of the lecture and watching this documentary and feeling that sympathy, but then afterwards, being able to talk to these people who were there.” 

The screening sparked an important conversation about the way Black boys are portrayed in the media. First-year student Lauren Amitirigala said that hearing the parents' stories helped them understand the boys as "disappeared children.” 

“It really broke my heart, because I thought about these young boys similarly to how I would think of my brother at that age,” Amitirigala said. “Young Black boys are often adultified and masculinized and almost treated as these adults who are basically able to run drugs as full autonomous agents, which really they're not.” 

This visit also highlighted the unpredictability of field reporting. In one scene, Mark Kelley, a veteran journalist  and fifth estate host, is seen running alongside a community member he was previously interviewing, as the community member rushes to assist a person overdosing nearby. 

Aidan Nash, a first-year journalism student, said he found Kelley’s composure in the face of a traumatic event to be reassuring. 

“I know that when kids in my high school would overdose in the bathroom, I wasn't willing to talk about it at all to anybody because I was so disturbed by it,” Nash said. “So to see him exist in the same space as somebody actively overdosing, help them, and then be willing to share his experience with that –  it was pretty comforting, actually.”

The visiting team behind the documentary included Kelley, Adriel Smiley, Danielle Reid, Shelley Ayres, Jordan Hayles, Grant LaFleche and Executive Producer Allya Davidson. 

They shared some of the struggles they faced while working on this project.  

“Mark said at one point, that it's a story not a lot of people wanted to tell, but a lot of people wanted to hear. That’s something you can't access unless you build trust within communities,” Mitchell said.

Amitirigala appreciated that the guest speakers were transparent about the emotional labour involved in this work.

“I thought that it was very nice to see people talk about the pain and frustration and anxiety that actually goes into this work.” They said, “You can't avoid feeling things when you're connecting with a community. In fact, you have to go into the job with empathy.”

While guest speakers are a regular occurrence in Professor Okeke’s class, students said this visit gave them the opportunity to reflect on their own place in the industry. For Yusra Khan, a mature student in her first year of journalism, this visit was a moment of personal validation.

“It's been really comforting to me…seeing the different paths every single one of them took,” Khan said, “It feels like I made the right decision. It's really nice to see that reinforced in people who are successful in the industry and have had a similar kind of rocky or maybe uphill path.”

Beyond career validation, Khan says she saw a deeper lesson in the ethical responsibility of the work. 

“He [Kelley] was saying something along the lines of, everyone wants to tell this story…but not a lot of people are brave enough to do it and that fear brings silence.”

Kelley’s comments about the challenges of accessing interviews when there is a fear of speaking out resonated with Khan. 

"I think that so many of these things are connected with building trust and bonds and relationships within the community that you're reporting in. That's really the only way to overcome that fear and that silence that we struggle with,” Khan said. 

“Missing Black Boys” was released in late January and is available on YouTube (external link)  and CBC Gem (external link) .