Boyce Richardson

Boyce Richardson, CM (born March 21, 1928 in Wyndham, Southland, New Zealand) is a Canadian journalist, author and filmmaker. While he was a boy his family moved to Invercargill, New Zealand.

It was in Invercargill that Richardson began his career in journalism at the Southland Times and later the Southland Daily News. After a brief stint as a reporter in Australia, he went to India to live and work at Nilokheri, a co-operative community north of New Delhi. In 1951 he moved to Britain, where he had great difficulty finding any kind of employment as a result of the depressed, still rationed, postwar economy. Of this period in his life he subsequently wrote in his autobiography:

"I suppose this experience of unemployment was valuable for me. I discovered that it is almost the most debilitating experience a person can have in life, totally sapping one's self-esteem, and plunging one into a maelstrom of depressive thoughts and feelings from which, eventually, one despairs of ever emerging. It certainly gave me a respect for the problems of laid-off workers, so airily dismissed by the media and their consulting economists, during times of what they nowadays call 'economic downturn'. Full employment should be the first social good of any decent government."

He answered an ad in the New Statesman that landed him at Newbattle Abbey College where he studied writing under the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir. In 1954 Richardson emigrated to Canada, first joining the Winnipeg Free Press then the Montreal Star . From 1960 to 1968 he was the newspaper's correspondent in London. He returned to Montreal but as noted in his Memoirs:

"I had also come to some conclusions about my profession. I had a strong distaste for the myths that most journalists seemed to believe about their importance. I had found journalists motivated more by vanity than by a lust for public service, and they tended to be childishly susceptible to flattery from men of power. So far as they believed they were free to write what they wanted, and that they were the first line among defenders of freedom of expression, I thought they were suffering from a massive occupational delusion. I had concluded that freedom lies only with the rich men who own the media, who hire sycophants to do their bidding.
The idea of journalists being better informed than your average citizen is a big part of the myth. A daily newspaper, written by these supposedly super-informed people, gives at best a sketchy view of what is really happening; and that view is fatally deformed by the interests of the media owners, and by the intimate relationship that journalists maintain with men of power. In addition, I knew that journalists do not have the influence they pretend to have. The media at large do have a huge influence in setting the political and social agenda, and they form one of the main barriers to improvements in the quality of human life. But individual workers within the media have limited influence on anything, in my experience. My opinion of the profession I practiced had become, then, slightly anarchistic."

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