Skip to content

This is the Life: Making the news

Along with everyone else in the province, I breathed a sigh of relief to learn that three-year-old Kienan Hebert is home safe...

Along with everyone else in the province, I breathed a sigh of relief to learn that three-year-old Kienan Hebert is home safe.

But I am still outraged at the way CBC Radio manipulated the heart-wrenching story of the possible abduction in Sparwood.

As I followed radio coverage of the story, my eyebrows were first raised with one particular report on Thursday that included a quote from an unnamed neighbor of the little boy’s family.

She expressed dissatisfaction that the Amber Alert warning wasn’t issued immediately after the child was reported missing.

“If it was my child, that’s one of the things that I thought would have been done right away,” she said.

Hmmm, I thought. Reporter Bob Keating had been asked by someone in the CBC Radio newsroom only about an hour earlier if there was concern about the length of time it took to issue the alert. Not that he had heard, Keating replied.

As soon as RCMP Cpl. Dan Moskaluk arrived on the scene he was asked about the timing and explained what criteria had to be met before an Amber Alert could be issued.

Personally, I thought it was remarkable that police, within about 10 hours, had responded to a call from Kienan Hebert’s parents — to this point there has been no indication whatever that they themselves suspected anything other than the likelihood that he had wandered away. He has a history of sleepwalking but had never actually left the house in that state, it was reported.

So, in less than half a day, police investigators, at the same time a massive search was being co-ordinated, gathered enough information to convince them that there was a strong possibility that Kienan had been abducted, and connected a local bad guy to the incident. They also identified Randall Hopley’s car.

It’s easy enough to understand why a mother in the neighborhood would respond emotionally to the situation, and question the time it took for the Amber Alert to be issued. But this story has all the markings of having been directed by someone in the CBC newsroom. Find someone, anyone, who wants to gripe about the police and get it on tape — that is what I feel happened to veer the coverage of the actual crime toward the actions of the RCMP.

On Friday morning, the CBC Radio website’s first story on the Sparwood item was headlined “Delay in Amber Alert for B.C. boy questioned”.  Not “Search for possibly abducted Sparwood child continues”, which is just about all we really knew. As early as Thursday, CBC Radio was asking residents what they thought about the presence of the suspect living in their community. In not much more than 24 hours the story morphed from a missing child who might be abducted into one designed only to inject more drama into the narrative, as if the story wasn’t compelling enough. And, of course, more Sparwood residents were only too happy to speak into the microphone, decrying the fact that Hopley was living in their midst and demanding to know why they hadn’t been informed.

I am not saying that there won’t be a time to discuss how police and other institutions responded to this incident, and also to ask for details about Hopley, if it turns out he was involved. But to this faithful listener and CBC supporter, it seems like someone other than those reporting the story (Keating covers the entire Kootenay region — an area in which at least a dozen newspapers report on their community’s news — and does a remarkable and very professional job) was manipulating the news for reasons that aren’t apparent to me.

Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.