A Spectacle of Silencing: A Rural African-Canadian Woman’s Media Trial

Abstract

This thematic case study explores international, national, and local media coverage of a conflict between Barb Reddick, a rural, working-class, African-Nova Scotian woman, and her nephew over the ownership of a winning ‘Chase the Ace’ lottery ticket. Beginning from general media valuation of lottery winners, and Canadian coverage of the Nova Scotia CTA lottery ‘craze’, we find when Reddick goes off script as loving aunt she is pathologized and degraded in a dramatic reversal from soft to hard news story. Reddick’s habitus and trust in journalists to support her counternarrative became the dramatic content of media spectacle-making – what we call a ‘spectacle of silencing’ – as well as her deviance from Canadian white rurality, and class and gender norms. Rather than mere ‘misrepresentation’ of minorities, we conclude that the dynamics of counternarrative struggle are embedded in reportage itself as spectacle, reproducing the legitimacy and authority of journalistic institutions through a symbolic violence of consensus making.

Keywords

African-Canadian counternarrative lottery media Nova Scotia spectacle

I did not split with Tyrone for no Chase the Ace. (Barb Reddick)

At this point, I did not anticipate any dispute. (Tyrone MacInnis)

Introduction

The quotations at the start of this article are the juxtaposed voices of two lottery winners – 57-year-old Barb Reddick and her nephew, 19-year-old Tyrone MacInnis. In 2018, their lives suddenly became fodder for international and national media spectacle-making that arose around their family and the small community of Margaree Forks, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. At issue was a shared winning ticket in a community-based lottery called ‘Chase the Ace’. Chase the Ace (CTA), is a card game that started about 10 years ago at the kitchen tables of Canadian Maritime homes and became a major fundraiser for rural communities across Atlantic Canada. Typically, tickets are sold weekly, and the ‘take’ is divided three ways between the weekly prize, the growing jackpot, and the local beneficiary organization. The winner of the ticket draw receives the prize and can ‘chase the ace’ by drawing one card out of a standard playing deck. If the ace of spades is drawn, the winner also gets the jackpot; if not, that portion of the take is carried over to the next week. The longer the ace eludes being drawn, the higher the odds of winning, and the larger the jackpot grows. Hence, as CTA lottery popularity grew, so too did the prizes.

In July 2018, the Margaree Forks CTA drew the ace of spades. The winners of over $1.2 million (CAN) were Barbara Reddick of Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, and her nephew Tyrone MacInnis of Sydney, Nova Scotia. The photo, Figure 1, shows a beaming MacInnis and a sour looking Reddick holding the large novelty cheque for news photographers. Within minutes of lottery organizers issuing two cheques, splitting the winnings in half as required by law, Reddick’s anger became public. Apparently, she never intended for the jackpot winnings to be shared with MacInnis, only the weekly prize. As she explained to journalists, she had written MacInnis’ name on the ticket ‘for luck,’ and he was now taking advantage of her generosity, adding that he was ‘dead’ to her. In video coverage of this moment, Reddick speaks angrily to journalists, but is also visibly shaken, saying ‘He’s like a son to me (pause) . . . he was.’ Reddick also states that she will be taking her nephew to court. One-week later Reddick did sue MacInnis; the winnings were then frozen by the courts; ultimately the two parties negotiated a settlement after two months and MacInnis received $350,000.

Figure 1.

MacInnis and Reddick accepting the winning Chase the Ace cheque.

In this case study of an African-Nova Scotian family’s conflict over CTA winnings, we show that the international and Canadian news outlets created ‘a spectacle of silencing’. What began as a feel-good story of a family windfall became one of pathology and greed as Reddick refused to share her winnings with MacInnis. The young MacInnis was constructed as rational, deserving, and sympathetic, while Reddick was constructed as irrational, superstitious, greedy, and pathological. And, while neither Reddick nor MacInnis fit the imagined Canadian rurality that they were initially set up to play together, it quickly becomes apparent that MacInnis’ life story is favoured by media. As the conflict unfolded, Reddick came to stand for pathologies based on rurality, gender, class and race, while MacInnis was lifted from the rural as a neo-liberal, individuated figure. Media coverage denied Reddick a counternarrative on her terms, in effect silencing her and constructing a spectacle out of her particular habitus. The two statements from Reddick and MacInnis, quoted at the beginning of this article, are typical of how they came to represent contrasting social types with a hint at social class constructions in the form and content of their speech.

The contemporary media have ‘“ubiquitous” power . . . [that is] ambiguous in nature’ (Plummer, 2019: 17), meaning stories populate media content and proliferate, but also seem to originate from no obvious institutional context. North American journalism has historically legitimized itself to its audiences as the neutral narration of events – ‘[a]ccording to the objectivity norm, the journalist’s job consists of reporting something called “news” without commenting on it, slanting it, or shaping its formulation in any way’ (Schudson, 2001: 150). Journalists select appropriate cultural plots (Mishler, 1999), to entertain (Golding and Elliott, 1980), and advance the story to an imagined audience (Marmura, 2018: 67). Such narratives necessarily ‘frame’ reality by selected use of themes, images, and language (Gamson and Lasch, 1983). Moreover, the play between softer ‘human interest’ stories shore up the legitimacy of apparently emotionless and rational content of ‘hard news’ by way of contrast (Parks, 2019). In our analysis we explore the sociological issue of how the generation of meaning in everyday narratives is linked with the reproduction of the institution of journalism. This institutional reproduction takes on particular qualities within the context of Canadian journalism as national identity is built around an imagined White rurality.

Our discussion is informed by the cultural reproduction theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1980) and Stuart Hall (1977), as well as Simmel’s formal sociology. Bourdieu situates news media and their subjects as structured practices of domination or ‘symbolic violence’ (1979) that make use of hegemonic categorical distinctions to generate meaning. We argue that the symbolic violence of news media, as cultural ‘field’ (Bourdieu, 1980) meets Reddick’s habitus and facilitates her ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) of journalism as the mediator of truth. As its defender, Reddick is sacrificed symbolically by the very practices of reportage that shore up journalistic authority. Hall adds to this analysis by offering a method by which symbolic violence can be studied as a set of coding practices (Santoro, 2011), especially around spectacle in media (Hall, 1997). Hall directly links the reproduction of common-sense narratives and ‘consensus’ as the grounds of media legitimacy (Hall, 1977). An elaborate use of signs or ‘repertoire of encoding’ facilitates the recognizability of media narratives and functions to ‘set the encoder within the bracket of a professional-technical neutrality’ (1977: 344). Following Simmel’s formal sociology (1950), we argue that Reddick arises socially as a type, situated by structured patterns of intelligibility, including the intersection of apparently contradictory qualities. In Simmel’s classic figure, the stranger is interactionally generated as simultaneously far (not organically a part of the group from the ‘beginning’, general) and near (localized, particular, highly visible). As we will discuss, when Reddick ‘goes off script’ she becomes a complex social type as cautionary moral figure and spectacle, by way of her very attempt to directly engage with journalists. Like the stranger, she is simultaneously morally far and dramatically near.

Kellner defines media spectacles as a moral dramatization of struggle (2003: 59). While this is a useful definition, Kellner studies big extravaganzas, celebrity scandals, conspiracy theories and political campaigns, rather than the making of spectacle from ordinary people. The case of Reddick brings to light how media can make a spectacle out of perceived otherness: she is a rural woman of African descent, and she is working class in speech, demeanour, and dress. By making a spectacle of her, media are certainly espousing the ‘acceptable’ social values (Debord, 2014), positioning Reddick as shameful and inviting the audience to feel embarrassed by her actions (Elias, 2000). Ironically, the very media claims to objectivity allow a dynamic between Reddick and journalists by which Reddick’s counternarrative protestations are continuously shut down. Reporters take on the role of moral agents, publicly shaming and correcting Reddick. Hence, the ‘spectacle of silencing’ involves more than reporting on Reddick’s behaviour, but dramatizes the interplay between Reddick and media as spectacle. Her attempts to redress media framing feed into the further pathologizing of Reddick as unintelligible and irrational. So, while Reddick ‘hands’ journalists their story, she is also punished for attempting to use media as a direct mouthpiece of truth, refusing to defer to their power to shape the news themselves.

Reddick was born, raised and lives in rural Nova Scotia, having worked for the Canadian Armed Forces. She is highly committed to her community through fundraising initiatives like CTA and a proud promoter of African-Canadian military history. In her many interactions with the media she states directly and repeatedly that she has been very generous to her family over the years. On the surface, these characteristics should produce a ‘heartwarming’ story, and that is what journalists expected. However, when Reddick assumed she could enter the media’s field with her version of the CTA conflict and be heard, the media quickly coded her as an irrational and potentially pathological character. Her counternarrative and the grounds of media legitimacy, become the very means by which Reddick is made into a spectacle and ultimately silenced as her direct interaction with journalists become narrative fodder.

In order to examine the Reddick-MacInnis case, as well as media framing of lottery winners and Chase the Ace more generally, we collected data by a general internet search for English-language news media references using keywords ‘lottery’, ‘lottery winner’, ‘Chase the Ace’, ‘Nova Scotia/lottery’, and ‘Reddick’ and ‘MacInnis’ in these contexts. For purposes of analysis discussed in this article, media sources were divided into international, national and local (see Table 1).

Table 1.

News media outlets.

International	National	Local
• The New Yorker • Vice News • BBC News • UK Daily Telegraph • news.com.au (Australia) • Scallywag & Vagabond (American) • American Broadcasting Company (ABC) • Newshub (New Zealand)	• Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) • Canada Television (CTV) • Global • The National Post • The Globe and Mail	• Regional stations for national media • Cape Breton Post • The Port Hawkesbury Reporter • The Inverness Oran • The Antigonish Casket • 101.5 Hawke FM 98.9 XFM

We used these news features to examine the moral stories constructed around lottery winners by employing thematic content analysis. We found three cascading levels of media narrative: (1) general accounts of lottery play and winners, regardless of geographic locale, (2) framing of rural Atlantic Canada and CTA lottery ‘craze’, specifically, and (3) framing of the Reddick-MacInnis conflict as spectacle of silencing within the themes previously generated.

General Accounts of Lottery Winners

Symbolic violence and moral valuations run through the most general media accounts of lotteries and their winners. These accounts cut simultaneously in two apparently discordant ways: (1) media function as a supportive ‘shill’ (a ‘plant’ in an audience giving credibility to the event) for lottery corporations by promoting lotteries, and (2) media provide morality tales about deserving and undeserving winners. Taken together, these accounts are in reality complementary narratives that justify lotteries in general, shifting valuation to individual winners or pathologized social types.

Media take on, in Goffman’s terms, the role of ‘shill’ (1959), actively supporting a performance while pretending to be an audience to it. Local news media are routinely invited by lottery organizations to the giant novelty cheque award, a ‘pseudo-event’ (Boorstin, 1961), staged to generate photo ops and particular narratives. Such events serve media interests, in that a story is already located and thematically framed, and the interests of those doing the staging, with news media legitimating and advertising lotteries in general. While apparently a part of soft or human interest news, media accounts of big lottery wins also repeat well-worn moral tales, rooted in both pro- and anti-gambling traditions – answering questions like ‘Who is the winner?’ ‘Are they deserving?’ ‘What do they plan to do with the money?’ These questions may be answered to generate positive moral evaluation – ‘Park Ranger Furloughed During Shutdown Wins Lottery’ (National Post, 2019). Or, the undeserving justly suffer – ‘Woman Steals Credit Card, Buys Winning Lottery Ticket, Gets Arrested, Police Say’ (McCann and Cook, 2019). Or, winners may be dastardly – ‘$6M lotto legal battle: Ontario man moves out without telling girlfriend they won 6/49 jackpot’ (Dangerfield, 2017). Finally, narratives also position winners to become losers in the future as winners try to manage a massive windfall – ‘8 Big Lottery Winners Whose Money and Luck Ran Out’ (Sweet, 2018). So, even the ‘deserving’ winner is not safe, as the foregoing headline points to potential future narratives of excess, greed, and irrationality.

Media narratives about the lottery ‘big win’ are necessarily moral stories, as longstanding values toward money dictate that there be a positive connection between work and wealth within the ideology of meritocracy (Cosgrave and Klassen, 2001). The lottery win disrupts this cultural formula with the random windfall of large amounts of wealth generated by staking money on chance. In Canada, anti-gambling morality narratives resonate with traditional Protestant attitudes toward games of chance. For the early 20th-century reform movement, led by elite Protestant women and men, populations who were deemed congenitally irrational and lacking in self-control were potential ‘victims’ of gambling and needed protection from its evils (Morton, 2003). Narrative framing becomes necessary to make moral sense of the lottery win and this practice itself, lest ‘just deserts’ (Durkheim, 1951) becomes a meaningless ideal. Therefore, as will be shown later, the typical upbeat stories must defend the theme of the deserving winner and support the interests of lotteries themselves as the just redistribution of wealth at both the level of community and individual winners.

Much empirical research on media and gambling focuses on advertising. McMullan and Miller (2009) found Canadian lottery advertisements ‘. . . enticing people with the prospects of huge jackpots, attractive consumer goods and easy wins, showcasing top prize winners, and providing dubious depictions that winning is life-changing . . .’ (2009: 273). Nevertheless, results are inconclusive about the causal relation between advertising and excessive gambling (Binde, 2007; Derevensky et al. 2010; Fried et al. 2010). Of this literature, the most salient for our purposes are studies of a ‘third-person effect’ by which consumers of gambling advertising ‘paternalistically’ (Guerrero-Solé et al., 2018) imagine that these ads are more persuasive and harmful to others than themselves. Hence, many research subjects recommend the regulation of gambling advertising for the sake of vulnerable types (Binde and Romild, 2019; Fang and Youn, 2004; Youn et al., 2000). The real fate of lottery winners is less than clear. Hankins et al. (2011) found that US winners of between $50,000 and $150,00 were more likely than non-winners to file for bankruptcy between three and five years after winning. Yet, Furaker and Hedenus (2009) found that less than 12% of lottery winners quit their jobs. Arvey et al. (2004) found similar results, with most big lottery winners continuing to work, as life remained structured by valued work-a-day routines and relationships. But, while Hedenus (2011) finds little evidence that this nightmare scenario is more than a myth, lottery winners nevertheless make use of such ‘cautionary tales’ to regulate their own behaviour. Myth here may be ironically functional toward holding off the possible anomic nature of excess wealth (Durkheim, 1951).

Contextualizing Atlantic Canada and Chase the Ace

The history of Nova Scotia, as one of Canada’s oldest White-settler territories, is cut through with racialized oppression, most notably toward the Mi’kmaq indigenous population and African-Nova Scotians. While the first known person of African descent who came to Nova Scotia was Ghanaian interpreter, Lusofonia, in 1604 with Samuel Champlain, the first main wave of African-Nova Scotians arrived in 1783 as Black Loyalists after the American Revolution (Tattrie, 2016). Not all were ‘free’; more than 1200 enslaved Blacks were brought into Canada as property (Maynard, 2017). People of African descent settled in predominantly segregated communities that are still recognized as African-Nova Scotian towns: Lincolnville, Preston, and the razed Africville. These communities are predominantly rural and on land of inferior agricultural quality. While suffering years of racism, including environmental racism (Waldron, 2018) and heavy policing (Maynard, 2017), the communities developed a strong sense of identity (Morrison, 2002). Viola Desmond (currently on the Canadian $10 bill) from Pictou County is often known as Canada’s Rosa Parks, and the famous African American orator Marcus Garvey delivered the speech that became the basis for Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ in Sydney, Cape Breton (Tattrie, 2016). Despite these people advocating justice and equality, Nova Scotia’s mid-20th-century policy of ‘tartanism,’ promoting all things Scottish as a consumable folk identity (Beaton and Muse, 2008; McKay, 1994), white-washed the African-Nova Scotian communities out of the official history.

While historically invisible, African-Nova Scotian women have long been a spectacle for media. Analysing media portrayal of African-Nova Scotian women in the 19th century, Morton demonstrates that ‘[i]n creating the image of the unladylike woman, race is reinforced and worked together with class so that the bonds of womanhood were narrow’ (1993: 74). The ‘unladylike woman’ is coded to mean not White, not middle class, without manners, inappropriately dressed and farcical. This is very much the combination of Hall’s (1997) racialized mammie and clown. It is recognizing this historical media framing of African-Nova Scotian women that the spectacle of the media’s silencing of Reddick must be situated.

Economically, Cape Breton Island has hosted industrial and agricultural economies. Most of the population has experienced decades of outmigration, industry collapse, and economic precarity (Harling Stalker and Phyne, 2014; Phyne and Harling Stalker, 2011). In 1955 Cape Breton was linked by a highway and rail causeway to mainland Nova Scotia, and industry and government worked to develop a tourist industry around the aforementioned ‘tartanism’. The state-national CBC and the Massey Commission Report of 1951 also supported the folksy framing of Cape Breton as part of a cultural nationalism and state cultural bureaucracy that emphasized regional cultures that supposedly made up the national fabric. The Broadcasting Act of Canada (1991) still requires the CBC to ‘reflect Canada and its regions’ back to Canadians. It is not surprising then that CBC featured more than 300 stories about CTA lotteries between 2015 and 2018. As Cormack and Cosgrave (2013) find, it is in the lighter CBC content that the most earnest nation building is found, with the CBC turning to regional stereotypes to forge a national whole out of far-flung regional parts. Canadian national identity is discursively rooted in the official state policy of multiculturalism, produced by spatial and temporal imagery with whiteness as the ‘core’ (Bannerji, 1997) around which this relational difference is articulated. As urban multicultural spaces reflect Canada’s contemporary national story, rural ‘nonmulticultural’ spaces uphold its frontier narrative. While rural spaces are critical to structuring tolerant and diverse urban spaces, this relationship cuts a number of ways. Rural spaces are positioned as idyllic, safe places that uphold true Canadian (White) values contrary to multicultural discourses (O’Connell, 2010). Again, the CBC is especially likely to reproduce these themes as it is expressly charged with preserving a national whole through imagined regional diversity.

News media interest in Atlantic Canadian, and especially Cape Breton’s CTA events well antedated the Reddick-MacInnis scandal. Coverage of the CTA lottery that first appeared in 2013 described a regional practice and apparently told readers about Atlantic Canadian particularities. Most famously, media told of the town of Inverness, Cape Breton (about 1500 residents) overrun in 2015 by 10 times its population as ticket-buyers arrived in droves. Eventually, as the town struggled to support the numbers of people arriving to participate in the draw, the lottery was capped and the last few cards were drawn during one event, forcing a win of $1.7M. Canada’s National Post picked up on the famous Cape Breton kitchen party culture, labour outmigration, and extended kinship networks:

Cape Breton cousins, twice and thrice removed, and some fresh back from Alberta’s oil patch, can be found catching up on the town’s clogged main street. Buskers busk. Barbecues smoke. Bands play at the arena. (O’Connor, 2015)

Coverage of CTA lottery described the draws and ticket sales as celebrations and attractions of their own, making the winning moment a part of a broader characterization of community and culture in Cape Breton. Evidenced in the foregoing quotation, Cape Bretoners are apparently highly integrated, migrant workers, who will use any opportunity – even a ticket line – for a party. The New Yorker adds alcohol, accents, and folk music to the exotic mix:

Early on, the drawings lasted a couple of hours. In this village with Scottish roots and a lingering brogue, they were an excuse to gather, have a drink, and listen to Celtic music. (Hannon, 2015)

In its coverage of Newfoundland CTA, Vice turns to environmental determinism to explain the lottery’s appeal and then to a moral warning about the decline of community in the outside world:

Maybe it’s that Newfoundlanders have always lived at the mercy of a fickle and cruel sea, where feast or famine could turn at any moment with the wind, and it bred into us a defiant longing for long odds . . . The grounds of St Kevin’s were filled with people of all ages, out mingling together and reveling in the flesh-and-blood social bonds in a world where that kind of public space is otherwise disintegrating. It feels more like a rural music festival than a church basement fundraiser. (Brown, 2017)

As this narrative continues, the ‘darkest magic’ of lottery has taken the place of religious belief, rendered as superstition that exploits the poor:

Is it really so surprising to see the promise of salvation for a people swamped in debt reappear, demystified, in a million dollar jackpot? What is a lottery but the commodification of hope leased out disproportionately to the poor? The Lord may or may not hear our prayers for absolution but someone has to draw that Ace, and maybe it could be me. (Brown, 2017)

Here the journalist characterizes ‘the poor’, a nebulous and generalized, but powerful ‘social category’ (Simmel, 1965), as losing rather than recirculating and investing the money in community. And, in the tradition of the moral reformers, their irrationality is rooted in their rural Catholicism. Yet Davis (2006) found that Newfoundlanders used gambling to redistribute community wealth in the years after the cod-fishing moratorium imposed by the Canadian government. Introduction of video lottery terminals (VLTs) in the 1990s, were used to ‘affirm local ties’ (2006: 503) as winners were obligated by custom to spend their winnings on others. Davis concludes that this practice resisted not only the media and government frames of VLT gambling as pathological, but also the government’s attempt to force unemployed fishers to leave their communities in search of employment.

Most early CBC coverage of the CTA lotteries explained the technicalities of the lottery to the national audience, emphasizing its regional particularity, for example, ‘understanding the craze’ (Thomson, 2016a). In other words, Cape Bretoners are both different from the reader, but at the same time not so different as to be unknowable, the classic CBC regional trope. After the repeated explanation of the workings of CTA lottery, the CBC – and to a lesser degree the other national media – then populated Cape Breton with winners of various types – deserving, humble, honest, superstitious, and pathological.

In many cases, deserving winners were signalled by their blue-collar labour, poverty, illnesses, or plans to share their wealth with friends and family:

Englishtown, N.S., woman operates puffin boat tour company, husband battling cancer. (CBC News, 2015c, 3 October)

MacKay, a truck driver who works the night shift making deliveries, said he planned to go back to work after picking up his winnings. (CBC News) (Weeks, 2017)

The apparent humble lifestyles of Cape Breton lottery winners also supported the deserving winner narrative:

A non-drinker and non-smoker who lives modestly, she says Inverness’s contest became her ‘big splurge’ (Globe & Mail) (Van Praet, 2015)

A Modest Celebration: On Sunday night, the Orams hosted their friends for a celebration dinner of soup, tea and a little wine. . . (CBC News) (McMillan, 2016a)

Quoting one winner:

It just doesn’t make sense to fly to Paris to pick up toilet paper. (CBC News) (Thomson, 2016a)

Many accounts featured religion/superstition:

A Sydney Mines woman says she’s making an exception to her non-superstitious ways after winning $79,000 in the Chase the Ace lottery on Saturday. ‘My mother was looking down on me and said, “She needs a break,”’ Mary Margaret MacIntyre said, pointing to the sky. (CBC News, 2015a, 31 August)

‘Only in Sydney would you see people praying for someone else to get the ace, and that they were’, she said. (CBC News) (McMillan, 2016b)

In some cases, Celtic mysticism and luck are invoked together:

The party’s over in Inverness, Nova Scotia. The contest that clogged its streets and buildings with visitors from near and far, bringing thousands together under a spell of fiddle-playing and a dream of getting rich . . . (Globe & Mail) (Van Praet, 2015)

While these characterizations focus on superstition or magic, in that supernatural forces intervene in chance, the following stories involve honest people who uphold promises to share their winnings. Personal fate is tied to moral choices:

‘I was taught from a young boy to be honest and it worked because I had a great, great life,’ he said. (CBC News, 2015b, 7 September)

On not honouring one’s promise to share, one winner says:

‘I truly believe you’d have a lifetime of terrible, terrible luck if you did that,’ she said. ‘It was an agreement between lifetime friends — never any question.’ (CBC News) (McMillan, 2016b)

This winner is also quoted as saying that she is glad she did not draw the ace because the money will be distributed more evenly in her community.

Finally, researchers or medical practitioners are cited to support the view of CTA as an addictive form of gambling. In Foucault’s sense (1977), lottery players are ‘known’ and produced as subjects by expert disciplinary discourses:

This lottery is so in your face and so advertised that anybody who says there’s not going to be problem gamblers or people spending their kid’s lunch money on this is just not well informed about how these things work, said [Dr.] Milburn. (CBC News, 7 May) (Thomson, 2016b)

Dr. Will Shead, professor of psychology at Mount Saint Vincent University . . . ‘When people who don’t have much money drive all the way to a small town, truly believing it will solve their finances — it’s problematic,’ he said. (CBC News) (MacIvor, 2015)

In contrast with national and international media, local news media more typically framed the CTA as the recirculation of wealth and visible reassertion of community. For example, the Cape Breton Post reported that the town of Reserve Mines had struggled for years to buy a new fire truck, until they ran a CTA lottery and raised $60,000. As the chief explained – ‘this is your truck’ (Montgomery-Dupe, 2016). Compared to news stories from outside Cape Breton, the focus here shifts to the intentionally planned fund-raising projects for the community rather than the apparent characteristics of individual lottery players as figures of general rurality. Typically, in the Cape Breton Post, more space is allotted to describing the event itself, the winning organization, and the effort of volunteer organizers than the winner. In some cases, Cape Breton Post headlines do not mention the individual winners, but rather the winning organization:

Inverness legion, workshop each take home $1.27 million. (MacLeod, 2015)

Ace pays dividends in Reserve Mines. (Cape Breton Post) (Montgomery-Dupe, 2016)

Money raised from lottery pays for renovations at Ashby legion. (Cape Breton Post, 2017, 3 June)

Other headlines remind readers of their ongoing responsibilities to organizations that have received CTA moneys in the past:

Horizon Achievement Centre in Sydney relaunching building campaign. (Cape Breton Post, 2017a, 13 November)

The Cape Breton Post also reports that community organizations like the Royal Canadian Legion (a war veteran organization) have been able to re-establish themselves as community centres, using CTA moneys:

Legions are closing down across Canada a lot and there’s been a drop in membership,’ said MacInnis. ‘We want to make this more of a community spot . . . Just come here, sit down and relax. We just want people to come. (Cape Breton Post, 2017b)

When CTA players are directly discussed, they are framed as rational, but communal actors:

‘I’m chasing the dream,’ she laughed. ‘My husband is out west and I’m trying to bring him home. That’s what I’m doing. He’s working out there, back and forth. I’ll win this and keep him home.’ (Patterson, 2017)

This story goes on to explain that players understand the odds of winning are low, and that ‘chasing a dream’ of uniting family and achieving geographic stability is worth the cost of the tickets. The payoff is not described in terms of wealth, but rather the capacity to remove one’s family from the vicissitudes of their labour experiences in the boom-bust western Canadian oil fields, over 5000 km from Cape Breton.

Spectacle of Silencing Reddick

Prefigured narrative was in place with the Reddick-MacInnis win, with the added bonus of two winners and close kinship ties. But, journalists on the scene were handed a potentially far more entertaining spectacle by overt disruption of the anticipated narrative. What was to be a relatively local story then grabbed national and international attention, as Reddick refused to play along in her role as loving aunt and instead shouted directly at the news cameras that her nephew was ‘dead to her’ and that she planned to sue him. These narratives had a two-layered character, beginning with what was expected and then adding the layer of drama as the staged event went off script. Certainly, it is not a foregone conclusion that international media would be attracted to this situation. Relative to other contemporary lottery jackpots, this one was not large, so the dollar amount itself would be unlikely to draw attention, as evidenced by only local media attending the novelty cheque award. And, family conflict over money is hardly news in itself, except when generated by already famous people, thus providing celebrity gossip (Turner, 2004). Even litigation within families is not newsworthy typically. And yet, the following international headlines appeared:

Watch This Awkward As Hell Family Feud Erupt Over Lottery Win: A $1.2-million Chase the Ace win in Nova Scotia took a dark turn. (Vice News) (Tierney, 2018)

‘See you in court,’ Nova Scotia lotto win aunt tells nephew. (BBC News 2018)

Canadian woman plans to sue her own nephew after refusing to split her winnings. (news.com.au) (Carey, 2018)

Canadian woman threatens to sue her nephew over shared lottery win. (UK Telegraph) (Alexander, 2018)

‘Nothing for you!’ Chase the Ace winner aunt sues nephew for his half of $1.2m winnings. (Scallywag & Vagabond) (Koulouris, 2018)

Canadian family’s bitter divide over massive lottery win. (Newshub, 2018)

‘All three of them, they’re dead to me’: $1.2 million lottery prize splits family. (ABC, 2018)

These headline sources run the gamut from mainstream journalism, like BBC, to scandal-oriented press, like Scallywag & Vagabond. One common denominator across all these news accounts is their use of the novelty cheque photograph, which is dense with signifiers. As Sontag (1977) argues, photography is a powerful rhetoric of truth because it seems to mirror reality in an unmediated way. In contrast with Reddick, MacInnis did not speak to journalists, so the only ‘direct’ impressions of him are visual, mostly an amiable-looking young man, smiling as he holds the over-sized check with his unsmiling aunt, minutes before she announces that she will sue him. This repeated image of MacInnis and Reddick sets up the victim–villain juxtaposition to follow. Visually, readers find on the left, a tall, lighter-skinned, thin, young man. On the right is a short, darker-skinned, stout, late-50s woman. In this case there is an irony and double bind at work in the play of objectivity around the photographic image and the journalist reportage. Reddick’s behaviour is taken at face value – that is, as captured by the cameras. On the other hand, that Reddick turns to the cameras and journalists to plead her case means her positioning vis-à-vis media technology, journalism, and truth can itself be treated as unsophisticated, naïve, and entertaining. Three interrelated observations are salient here: (1) the ambiguity of the photographic image, (2) the play of symbolic violence, especially around Reddick’s body, and (3) Reddick’s apparent trusting relationship to news media as habitus.

In his analysis of the photograph of disgraced Canadian-Jamaican Olympian, Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for drugs, Hall demonstrates that such static images can hold contradictory meanings simultaneously. ‘[The photo] wants to say something paradoxical like, “In the moment of the hero’s triumph, there is also villainy and moral defeat”’ (1997: 228). Similarly, the single photo of Reddick, taken by local photographers at the photo-shoot, came to tell the before–after stories of family triumph and her apparent violation of her kin obligations in a turn toward greed. The synchronic snapshot allows for contrast and drama told as temporal narrative. McRobbie explains such media effects as symbolic violence that work around ‘corporeal styles’ (2004: 105) to generate the ‘abject person’ with a ‘mismanaged life’ as generalized social type (2004: 102). Such women whose habitus deviates from middle-class, White standards of femininity are objects of disgust, moral correction and paternalistic regulation. Reddick’s embodied habitus as physique, speech, dress and style of speech and interaction works in contrast with that of MacInnis in the photograph to allow such symbolic violence. Her apparent trust of news media compounds this construction because she signals her willingness to take media claims to objectivity at face value.

All media accounts highlighted family conflict, regularly using terms like ‘family feud’ to shape and heighten drama. The rural-inflected notion of feud plays on a supposedly tight-knit community that is prone to irrational and even violent internal conflict, especially if worldly influences like sudden wealth are dropped into the moral economy. The most fabled such feud in North America is the Hatfield-McCoy murderous conflict that is said to have started ridiculously over the ownership of a hog. Of course, Nova Scotia is thousands of kilometres from Virginia, and Reddick is not ‘White trash’, but as Gans (2005) argues, race signifiers are often code for class, as evidenced by the ‘social blanching’ of many ethnic groups as they climb the socio-economic ladder in North America, with the exception, he argues, of African-Americans.

It is from within this context that media coverage organized around the theme of Reddick’s greed included the sub-themes of spectacle and disgust. Only a few minutes after this photo was taken, Reddick began to provide quotable one-liners for the press. Reddick continued to repeat the ‘he is dead to me’ utterance for the media in the days following the cheque award fiasco, including on a CBC radio interview. Reddick pulled truculent facial expressions, addressing her words directly to the cameras. At times her grammar suggested she was uneducated: ‘I said split with the 50/50 draw, not with no Chase the Ace.’ And while MacInnis’ refusal to talk with the media at all might risk not having his position heard, media coverage universally characterized him as the victim. Reddick did willingly give interviews, but her tendency to shout at the cameras threatened to highjack journalistic power to frame the story. Hence the characterization of Reddick as ‘ranting’ (Edmiston, 2018). Class inflection was also provided in Reddick’s penchant for outfits like bright, colour-filled patterned sweaters paired with animal-print leggings, worn to formal occasions like a court appearance. At this occasion, MacInnis was photographed wearing dark trousers and a formal white shirt, in line with middle-class understated aesthetics (Holt, 1998) and the strategic use of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986).

Meanwhile, MacInnis’ unbroken silence allowed the press to construct the situation along simple lines of victim–villain. Even relatively local press got into the act:

MacInnis was valedictorian at his high school, works part-time at Tim Hortons and is entering his second year in the Bachelor of Science program at Cape Breton University on a full scholarship. (Truro News) (Beswick, 2018)

While MacInnis is a lottery winner and can be seen as irrationally betting against the odds, this emphasis on MacInnis’ work ethic frames him as investing in the long-term profits of a university education. MacInnis is ‘betting’ on himself by making use of institutionally legitimate means of making his future (Bourdieu, 1986). That he is a ‘valedictorian’ also supported by a ‘full scholarship’ adds to the image of MacInnis as worthy of support. Understood in terms of modern ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) in which individuals are expected to make long-term decisions in such a calculating manner, this framing of MacInnis resonates culturally. As a neo-liberal actor, MacInnis is unencumbered by the complexities and ambiguities of kin responsibility that render Reddick unintelligible. Moreover, MacInnis apparently does not count on luck, so the lottery winnings would presumably be invested in his rational life-plan. In reality, MacInnis’ choice to pursue higher education may well put him in the position of leaving Cape Breton in search of suitable employment, sacrificing local social capital for career advancement in a trade-off that is not as clearly rational as it appears (Corbett, 2007). On the other hand, very few accounts mentioned Reddick’s career in the Canadian military or any of her backstory like that provided for MacInnis. Her readily accessible social media entries strongly support commemoration of African-Nova Scotian military service as well as community-based lotteries and draws. So, while MacInnis is praised for building a future for himself that may well remove him from being supported by, and acting as a support to, his rural community, Reddick’s past commitments to community and nation are overlooked.

Certainly, Reddick’s side of the story, as reported, is less than coherent. Apparently, Reddick asked MacInnis to use her money to purchase the CTA ticket and write both of their names on it. Later Reddick claimed that MacInnis was to win only the lottery draw part of the prize, but not the jackpot. She asserted that his name was on the ticket to act as ‘luck’. Further, Reddick justified her refusal to split the winnings by explaining that she had for years generously supported her brother’s family (Tyrone’s parents) and felt exploited. And while her story of exploitation is not explored, the idea of Reddick as exploited appears in secondary narratives as Reddick as victim of gambling itself. MacInnis fully escapes this framing, even though he purchased and wrote his name on the ticket. And, while Reddick’s account of her choice to put MacInnis’ name on the ticket ‘for luck’ is internally illogical, since his name magically causing the win would imply that she should share the winnings with him, Reddick was never challenged on this point. Rather, the irrationality of luck and the use of a talisman to control chance, stands itself to condemn her account. Notably, when local academic and race activist, El Jones, tried to intervene in the media framing, pointing to racist themes and poverty, the story quoting Jones drifts toward pathology talk, suggesting that Jones herself had privileged pathology discourses over issues of race and class (Rankin, 2018). This is noteworthy because in our general analysis of CTA news coverage we found superstition and faith in luck framed as charming qualities of Cape Breton folk who were apparently deserving CTA winners.

No media account takes seriously Reddick’s claims that she is responding to having been overly generous to her relatives in the past. Reddick makes this position clear – that Tyrone was like a son. Ironically, then, the narrative is rooted in Reddick’s apparent violation of the norms of familial sharing, when her refusal is rooted in her sense of having been exploited on these very grounds. Few journalists sought out a backstory that might make her claims appear reasonable. Those few that did were local journalists:

The pair, formerly close, fell into bitter spite. When Reddick tried to talk to her nephew on the phone, his mother hung up. The following day, Reddick declared that her nephew was ‘dead to her.’ A week later, she sued him. (Inverness Oran) (Farries, 2018)

This positioning of Reddick allows a secondary narrative that inverts her agency into victimhood. She is not a victim in the same way as MacInnis, but a victim of gambling itself. While there is no evidence that Reddick suffered from a gambling addiction, but rather the promotion of local draws like CTA as community-building projects, she came to stand in for the populations said to be vulnerable to such problems. A National Post account states that there is very little information about the conflict, but apparently requires no backstory to diagnose the cause:

. . . a relationship was broken by the hazards of the jackpot, not in a slow, fraying way, but instantly, and on television. (Edmiston, 2018)

Reddick’s account, in contrast, is exactly that there was a ‘slow, fraying’ of her kin relations.

These pathology narratives shift from the sin of greed to Reddick’s incompetence. She can only be corrected by regulation of lotteries so that, for example, wins are smaller. This fits the longstanding view of lotteries as a tax on the poor who cannot understand that they are throwing their resources away, a view that neglects to see lottery as local recirculation of wealth and the reinscription of bonds of obligation, in the context of the CTA lottery. One CBC story ends with a quotation from a law professor that Reddick’s litigious ‘feud’ is also irrational because the desired money will be lost: ‘And they all end up with a lot of money going out the door to the lawyers’ (Bradley, 2018).

Conclusion

We have argued that large lottery wins provide dramatic content for news coverage. Such narratives simultaneously promote lotteries and generate morality tales around the attributes and behaviours of winners. In our analysis, we found media accounts of the Chase the Ace lottery winners in Atlantic Canada played on romantic themes of a White, rural folk with close kinship ties. As deserving winners, even their apparent magical thinking and faith in luck were cast as harmless and charming parts of Celtic tradition. But, these rural tropes were also easily turned toward the pathological, ignoring the practical community-building nature of local lotteries as recirculation of wealth. It is worthy of note in this context that the most infamous linking of lottery and rurality is found in Shirley Jackson’s popular 1948 short story, The Lottery, where community members are ritually sacrificed by lot to ensure a good harvest. In her account of the story’s reception, Jackson reported many readers wrote to ask where they could go to witness such a stoning (Jackson and Hyman, 1968), pointing to the seemingly bottomless capacity of rural people to act as abject entertainment and spectacle. We suggest that without the rural context, Reddick’s apparent violations of reason and obligation would not have the same moral resonance and appeal.

At the level of the national, and especially state, media coverage of lotteries, we found rural figures remain on the periphery of Canadian society to work as signifiers of remoteness, whiteness, and particularity, in contrast to urban multiculturalism. How then do media accounts initially accept Reddick and MacInnis as part of the rural despite the fact that they are not White? The news media, particularly in Canada, are often perceived and represented as a liberal institution, and as such start from the point of ‘colour-blindness.’ Initially, this CTA winning is a lovely story about an aunt and her young nephew hitting it big. The familial narrative is the original media focus, but it quickly turns to one of spectacle and silencing.

It was within this context that the Reddick-MacInnis conflict was framed and became what we have called a ‘spectacle of silencing’. This silencing worked from both the content of Reddick’s behaviour, as embodied habitus, and the form of her relations to news media. Reddick’s ‘dead to me’ dramatic turn allowed media to tell the story of her own apparent refusal to uphold kinship obligations as well as repress her counternarrative of having been exploited on the very grounds of intergenerational familial responsibility. A diachronic effect, supported by the novelty cheque photo, allowed readers to follow the turn against Reddick as she goes off script and feeds journalists lines that generate a spectacle of anger and frustration. The full irony is that Reddick’s relationship to reportage allowed her to appear as the clown because she was both trusting, but also apparently naïve and disrespectful of the journalistic claims on storytelling. By treating journalism as a mouthpiece for her complaints, Reddick threatened to control the story. Moreover, the turn from light to apparently serious reportage constitutes both the legitimating grounds for journalism and situates audiences as consumers of both the entertaining and corrective effects of silencing itself. The turn to serious issues of pathology makes Reddick a spectacle palatable as morality lesson and as public health issue, but not as agent of counternarrative.

We also found that rational calculation and instrumental action are treated as both a pathology in these accounts, when applied to Reddick, and a virtue, in the case of MacInnis, as the latter is morally removed from this rural script by the framing of his use of resources toward individual ends. As neo-liberal subject, MacInnis is lifted out of the apparent irrationality of the rural and implicitly praised for investing in himself, but Reddick cannot claim to be repaying herself with her lottery winnings. The cultural capital that MacInnis displayed in limited and articulate statements to media, his understated dress, and status as post-secondary student, allowed a high contrast with his aunt. Reddick’s seeming lack of cultural capital and her refusal to hold a cynical relationship to narrative – including her own social media narratives of community lottery as community self-building and Black history as nation-building – could be seen as a resistance to the cynical code and fear of becoming spectacle that drove MacInnis away.

Ultimately, Reddick was offered up as an example of public humiliation, allegedly of her own making. As a rural, working-class, woman of colour the symbolic violence she attracted became a spectacle in itself as she was thus processed by media accounts. We have demonstrated through this case study that when studying media accounts of those perceived to be on the periphery, as Reddick is, we need to include the dynamics of counternarratives as embedded in the reportage itself. These counternarratives are found between the lines, as are media’s methods of suppression or inversion. The cultural positioning of media subjects involves more than their apparent lack of cultural capital within the journalistic field. It is rather that there is a struggle for control over the narrative, albeit on an uneven playing field. Or, as Reddick herself put it when answering a reporter’s question after the court settlement, ‘It was for the principle. Don’t lie on me. He was my son, almost my son . . . He broke my heart’ (Lowthers 2018).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to extend their gratitude to Lisa McCormick, the article’s two anonymous reviewers, Jim Cosgrave, Stephen Marmura, Evan Curley, Emma MacDonald, and Megan Landry for their immeasurable assistance with this article.

Funding

This research received generous financial support from the St. Francis Xavier University Research Council (UCR2018-15B Winter).

Author biographies

Lynda Harling Stalker is an Associate Professor of Sociology at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She researches cultural work, rurality and narratives particularly in the context of North Atlantic islands.

Patricia Cormack is a Professor of Sociology at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She researches media, celebrity, politics and state in the Canadian context. She has published (with J Cosgrave, Trent University) Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Other recent publications may be found in Cultural Sociology, Celebrity Studies, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, and Media, Culture & Society.

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