Politics is about perception (and always has been). Official messages are carefully constructed to paint a specific type of picture. It’s the journalist’s job, theoretically at least, to find the flaws and the hidden distortions in that image.

But what if the picture is perfect and makes everyone happy? A hot prime minister meets a cool president, and they become instant BFFs. Their wives become new-found “soulmates.” It’s all jokes and smiles, glitz and glamour, flowers and champagne.

I get it–such coverage is the charm of a state dinner. It’s a story journalists have to write because it’s a change of pace from all the phobias and deaths front pages are too often filled with. And readers love it, as proven by the most popular lists on Canadian news outlets yesterday and today. It makes them happy. It makes me happy, for a little while at least.

The problem, though, is that such clickbait political coverage always gets taken too far. Newsrooms forget that even state dinners have foreign policy implications, which, if not obvious, need to be deciphered. While some of that was talked about, it was brief. Something about methane and the environment. A rumor about border control policies. Some announcement about Arctic goals.

Instead, in true BuzzFeed fashion, the Toronto Star gave us a play-by-play of how Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau saved new “soulmate” Michelle Obama from a nasty tumble off of the stage, seconds-apart pictures included. “Who needs the Secret Service with friends like this?” read the opening line of the article that would have worked better with GIFs. 

Maclean’s decided a special photo gallery was needed to document the youngest Trudeau child’s visit. “Hadrien goes to Washington,” it was called in Hollywood-movie fashion.  In fact, only 30 percent of the articles posted under a special heading on the Maclean’s website actually talked about policy discussion. The rest were photo galleries, fashion and decor coverage and transcribed speeches (see screenshot below), similar categories as coverage be the Star and others.

The problem isn’t new. This is what news dictated by clicks looks like, for the most part. It doesn’t have to be, and has been proven not to be, but it’s the easiest method of coverage, and difficult not to do when words like “bromance” are involved.

Having said that, caution needs to be advised and heeded. Pictures can be perfect, but politics isn’t. Canadian journalists need to get over how hot their new prime minister and his family are. Trudeau hugging pandas doesn’t warrant asking “Are the Trudeaus the cuddliest Canadian family of all time?” And do we really need additional widespread coverage of his attendance at the pride parade five months before it’s due to take place, when it was already announced at the end of last year? Maclean’s 60-second interviews were fun to watch, but where are the investigations on fiscal policy, or follow-ups on MMIW and other campaign announcements?

At some point the celebration of our picture-perfect prime minister and his government needs to end, and journalists have to go back to basics. Make us happy, but keep us informed.

I don’t know who’s telling the truth about the Liberal refugee plan.

On the one hand, there’s Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed‘s political editor, who published an article on November 25, 2015, titled “Someone Gave The Media A Bunch Of False Info About Canada’s Syrian Refugee Plan.” McLeod takes issue with a CBC report by Rosemary Barton that, days before the Liberals revealed their official refugee plan, stated “unaccompanied men seeking asylum will not be part of the (refugee) program.”

McLeod quotes an anonymous senior Liberal member who “said they don’t know where the information came from, but they suspect it was from someone who did not have their best interests at heart. In other words, someone trying to screw them.”

There’s one word being interpreted and responded to differently in the Liberal government’s Syrian refugee plan: “prioritize.”

Other reports also counter the CBC reports on the claim to exclude single male Syrian refugees. As a Vice article states:

Initial reports had suggested that the government would not be allowing in any unattached single men in under the program, unless they are a sexual minority.

Government officials confirmed Tuesday that wouldn’t be the case. While the government will “prioritize” families, women at risk, LGBTQ minorities, and those who are accompanying elderly parents, it will not be disqualifying any would-be refugee on the basis of gender.

The Toronto Star also made this clear: “Officials say [the plan] does not preclude men — including gay men and single men accompanying their parents — from admission.”

Power & Politics with Evan Solomon premiered on the day of a much-hyped rebranding that saw CBC Newsworld transformed into CBC News Network. It was also the same day as Health Canada’s troubled launch of the H1N1 vaccination program. Solomon’s debut, on October 26, 2009, began with a decidedly non-traditional approach. Rather than opening with the Health Canada story, he invited on three unknown environmentalists who’d staged a disruptive protest in the House of Commons over the government delaying the Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311), before security forcefully ejected them. “We will actually have some of those environmental activists coming up right after the break. One of them still has blood on his face!” announced Solomon, sounding perhaps a little too enthusiastic about the segment.

After a commercial break, he rose from his desk and strode over to a bright-red plastic bench installed at his behest. “This is our Front Bench,” he said with evident relish. “This is the place that we’ve reserved in our studio to talk to people who are affected directly by policies that are created in Ottawa.” Seating the environmentalists on the bench, Solomon vowed to put their concerns to the environment minister later in the show, declaring, “I think it’s really important we open up the dialogue.”

As he prepared for that debut, Solomon thought carefully about how to distinguish himself and his new show. “I didn’t just want people with suits and ties on. I wanted it to be accessible to everybody,” he says now. “I took a lot of crap for that—‘Oh, that was a stunt’—but I thought that was democracy. Young people concerned about an issue, bloody nose—sounds like television to me.”

After five years on Power & Politics, as well as stints at other CBC programs including his literary show Hot Type and technology show Futureworld, Solomon knows good television; it’s what helped win him this job. Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, chose him because she wanted a “different sensibility” for the flagship political affairs program. He didn’t come from political reporting, “which was sort of a plus and a negative at the beginning,” she says. To Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle, it was more of a negative, especially since Solomon was succeeding Don Newman, the well-regarded host of Politics, the network’s previous political affairs show. “As the whole country knows, Solomon is no Don Newman,” wrote Doyle in a critical review of CBC News Network’s launch.

McGuire knows such shows can alienate viewers. “What Power & Politics has done incredibly successfully is offer enough depth for the insider,” she enthuses, “but it is also entertaining enough that it brings in people who are more casual followers of politics.” Since 2009, the show has expanded its audience by roughly 65 percent—from 51,000 to 84,000 viewers, according to internal figures—while transitioning from inventive, egalitarian fare like the Front Bench to the more conventional: polls, punditry and panels.

The rise in viewership came during severe CBC cutbacks, thinning audiences for similar U.S. shows, and an increasingly toxic national political culture characterized by restricted access to newsmakers, enforced party message control and shameless displays of spin.

Although a 65 percent gain sounds impressive, the increase represents just 33,000 viewers, undermining McGuire’s assertion of incredible success. It’s positively anemic compared to the 800,000 listeners who tuned in to CBC Radio One on Saturday mornings this season for The House, a political affairs show also hosted by Solomon that features lengthier one-on-one interviews.

The assumption behind much of Power & Politics is that the core audience is politically informed, if not politically engaged. But to continue its ratings growth, the show will need to win more viewers outside its traditional constituency of Hill staffers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicos and assorted news junkies. As Alison Loat, co-founder and executive director of civic engagement non-profit Samara Canada told me, “Many political journalists are challenged with this question: how do you expand the audience for political news and political content beyond people who are already interested?”

***

Last October, I visited Solomon in his studio at CBC’s Ottawa bureau. A few blocks away on Parliament Hill, the Conservative caucus was debating renewed Canadian participation in the battle against the Islamic State. A morning meeting led by CBC Ottawa bureau chief Rob Russo lets out shortly after I arrive, and the parliamentary bureau team’s goal is clear: find out what was said behind the caucus’s closed doors.

As it happens, military operations, along with procurement, finance and intelligence, rank among Solomon’s topics of interest. He’s cultivated high-level sources in these difficult-to-penetrate circles and communicates with them off the grid. “You could call it an electronic black market,” says Solomon, scrolling through the BlackBerry he carries with him at all times, even on air. Often, watching the show in their Hill offices, his sources message him in real time: “Everybody is communicating with everybody,” he adds, “but nobody’s doing it officially.”

Taking cues from Russo, Solomon works his caucus sources, cajoling one chief of staff on the phone while firing off one-line inquiries over email. Solomon, Russo and the rest of the CBC team soon discover there’s broad agreement in the caucus for an expanded role in Iraq: MPs Rob Nicholson, then minister of defence, and John Baird, then minister of foreign affairs, both spoke in favour of a combat mission.

But neither Nicholson nor Baird will do an interview. In fact, Baird’s office pointedly refused requests for the former foreign affairs minister to appear on Power & Politics after a particularly combative interview with Solomon a few days earlier. “He’d better not do Don,” Solomon grumbles later, referring to rival Don Martin’s Power Play on CTV.

Executive producer Amy Castle’s goal is to open every episode with an exclusive or, failing that, a newsmaker interview that may advance a developing story. At the beginning of this morning’s pitch meeting, the team has neither. North America’s first case of Ebola has just been diagnosed and Solomon wonders aloud if Minister of Health Rona Ambrose could be their newsmaker. Again, the answer is no; the minister would not be made available.

“She’s unreal,” fumes Castle. Marker in hand, she considers the whiteboard where every episode is plotted out: it’s mostly blank, except for the “Power Panel,” a double-length segment featuring a rotating cast of talking heads. “It became quite clear to us that it was a destination panel,” says Castle. “So we’ve made that kind of a centrepiece in the middle of the program.” The whiteboard is divided into blocks. She writes a name into the mid-show block: Stephen Day.

Day, the former commanding officer of Canada’s national counter-terrorism and special operations unit Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), is due to arrive soon for a pre-taped interview. Solomon is clearly excited. “He’s seen a lot of bang-bang all over the world,” he explains. “Very, very rarely does anyone who was in JTF2 ever speak, ever go public about anything. We’re building a relationship with him.”

It’s similar to the relationship Solomon built with Ray Boisvert, former assistant director of intelligence at CSIS, who has since become CBC’s go-to security analyst, appearing frequently to discuss the spy agency’s opaque decision-making. Solomon hopes Day will become his “special ops” analyst (and in the months since, he has appeared regularly for that purpose). As the government inched toward approving a military engagement, Day—instead of cabinet ministers—would be explaining the combat mission to Canadians.

 ***

Like many of the politicians he interviews, Solomon tends to romanticize his upbringing. He recounts his family’s history in a long narrative that culminates in a celebration of the “Canadian dream.” His father, Carl, was a lawyer, the youngest of eight and the first to attend university; his mother, Virginia, worked as an urban planner. He’s quick to acknowledge his “fortunate upbringing,” but it seems a sensitive point. “I only say that because people say, ‘Your dad’s a lawyer.’” But Solomon’s grandfather never lived to see his son called to the bar, after suffering a heart attack in a downtown Toronto sweatshop near where his grandson would later establish his magazine, Shift. As a child, Solomon play-hosted radio shows. Educated at Toronto’s Crescent School, Solomon earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in English literature and religious studies, both from McGill University in Montreal.

At a party on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in his sophomore year, Solomon met Andrew Heintzman. It was 1992 and the job market was bleak. Both men had written for campus publications; Solomon had dabbled in playwriting. After graduating, they launched their own magazine, a literary quarterly titled Shift. It was, Heintzman admits, a “crazy idea”—but the fledgling publication turned heads before its first issue hit the stands. The two founders appeared on the front page of the Globe’s arts section and on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Their host, a 37-year-old Ralph Benmergui, was by then already too old to write for Shift, which had vowed to publish only work by those under 35. With an initial print run of 800, their magazine, declared its two founders, was here to “kick in the teeth of the literary establishment.”

Today, Solomon and Heintzman laugh about this posture of youthful aggression. “I think, inevitably, there’s a young person who would like to kick in my teeth,” muses Solomon. “I work at CBC, I host a two-hour show called Power & Politics, I traffic in people of great power. That’s my world. This is about as establishment in my field as it gets.”

Still, as promised on Morningside, Solomon penned many righteous screeds against the sins of legacy media during six years as editor of Shift: “Mainstream media is not interested in the story of a black man from an obscure ethnic group in Nigeria who was fighting a multinational company; it’s interested in stories about business mergers and oil prices, in sending people to work listening to dazzling pop songs and tips on how to maintain ‘lifestyle,’” wrote Solomon in January 1998. “Debt-free media don’t cover sensitive stories so much as sensational ones. The curve of a president’s penis gets more ink than the curve of the unemployment rate,” he vented in June of that year.

By the time Solomon left, Shift had become a journal of late-’90s digital culture. In his final issue in June 1998, Solomon’s letter from the editor discusses the debt a journalist owes his audience: it is, he argues, “a different kind of debt, one which dictates that the truth can’t be traded for marketability. This debt has to be repaid not only by bearing witness to events, but by then transforming them into shared experiences.” It was a telling preview of the kind of change he would try to take with him to Ottawa.

 ***

“It’s shit,” says Solomon, looking askance at Day’s thick brown tie. “You look like you’re going on a date later.” Solomon’s own six-foot-four frame is clad in a well-cut suit, complete with a bright tie, which, he advises, looks better on television. The host has adopted a different tone than he had in the morning pitch meeting: jocular and laced with profanity. It’s part of an effort to build rapport with Day, whom other shows also want to book; he’d already appeared once on CTV’s Question Period.

Solomon, Day and Castle return their attention to footage from a rehearsal interview. Solomon explains his job as a journalist to Day: “When you go out on a mission and you say, ‘What’s my goal?’ They say, ‘Go get the bad guy, gag him up or kill him.’ Mine is: ‘What did you bring that no one else knows?’”

The difficulty is that Day’s best lines in the rehearsal—the stuff no one else knows—are laden in dense military jargon. Midway through the interview, he delivers a savvy answer about “talk[ing] the talk with warriors” to get “the ground truth.” Solomon hits pause. “That was fucking aces!”

He encourages Day to drop the jargon and illustrate points by saying more about his tours in Afghanistan. “They see you in a suit. They don’t see you in dusty boots,” says Solomon. “The key is: you’re talking to civilians who are watching TV, and they’re political junkies, and they wanna like you. They wanna love you.

“You’re hitting home runs on the brain side. But now, you gotta hit on the heart side.” Solomon thumps the left side of his chest. “Figure out what you can talk about. I don’t know the line. But you could say, ‘I remember—but I can’t say when. . .’ The more you describe something, and hide the details, the better it is: Dance of the Seven Veils,” he concludes. “All good television.”

 ***

For nearly as long as television has existed, there have been programs about politics. The longest-running show in U.S. history is NBC’s Meet the Press, broadcast since 1947 and the object of much gossip and commentary. It’s the most venerable of several Sunday morning shows, including Face the Nation and This Week. All are deeply influential in elite D.C. circles. Lately, however, ratings have sagged as viewers lose interest in what The Washington Post called “Beltway blabfests.” Over the first quarter of 2014, Face the Nation, Meet the Press and This Week collectively drew 9.6 million viewers, about the same number that watched Meet the Press in a single week in 2005.

Panic is setting in among network executives. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported that NBC president Deborah Turness hired a psychologist to analyze why then-host David Gregory was failing to connect with viewers. (NBC denies this.)

Producers are under pressure to alter the show’s format to recover the lost audience. The late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, to whom Newman might be compared for his patrician manner, spent lengthy segments grilling a single lawmaker. Today the trend is toward faster pacing, shorter segments and a wider range of topics. Many of the Sunday morning shows now rely on elements similar to the “Power Panel” to explain the intricacies of contemporary politics to casual viewers.

“I’m so bored with Canadian political coverage. I can’t connect with it. I can watch a lot of American political coverage,” media critic Jesse Brown declared at a Ryerson University talk, complaining about the jargon on Power & Politics and The House. “It’s this insider stuff. You’ve got to be a wonk. It’s not even about the policy—it’s about, ‘What are the optics of this move?’”

Brown hopes to crowdfund a politics podcast in time for the next federal election. “I want to decode it, demystify it. . . and put it into human language,” he said. He is still searching for a host, perhaps someone like his friend, a coffee shop owner named David Ginsberg, who is upset with the state of political coverage. Ginsberg, who Brown calls “a smart guy and an angry guy,” sounds like he has a lot in common with Solomon circa Shift.

 ***

Following Newman’s retirement in 2009, CBC management’s choice for a successor privately puzzled many. Although Solomon had been co-hosting CBC Radio’s Sunday news show for eight years, he was still identified with Hot Type. “When Evan first arrived in Ottawa, he was the guy at the CBC who had the book show,” remembers Ian Capstick, former press secretary for Jack Layton and now a “Power Panel” regular. “There was a lot of apprehension around Ottawa because Don Newman was a known quantity. And when Evan came in, he shook up the show.”

The consensus among the Ottawa chattering classes was that the new host had at most one year to prove worthy of Newman’s chair. “Nobody thought I would be able to do it—least of all me,” says Solomon. “So I didn’t try. I didn’t try to be Don.” Instead, he set out to create an entirely new show: one that would not only “bear witness to events” but actually transform them into “shared experiences,” to borrow Solomon’s own phrases.

The plan for Power & Politics was ambitious: air live from 5 to 7 p.m. five nights a week. Filling such a lengthy program with quality content is still an enormous challenge, given that producers have fewer than six hours to put the show together every day. Peter Harris, former executive producer at Power & Politics, compares it to “feeding the beast,” standing on the edge of “a black hole” sucking up infinite energy and fighting in “a war zone”; or, as Castle puts it, like “Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain.”

At the start, Peter Mansbridge gave contacts to Solomon, who dutifully made the calls. He also read House of Commons Procedure and Practice, the 1,206-page tome that explains, in exhaustive detail, Parliament’s Byzantine workings. “That gives you an idea of how paranoid I was about making sure I knew what I was talking about,” he says. “I had a gap and so I started with the basics.”

Today, Solomon is the consummate Ottawa insider and an astute political observer, adept at moderating debate on the “Power Panel.” On the afternoon of my visit, producers have convened the regular Wednesday members: Capstick, Rob Silver and Tim Powers—all career politicos—and Canadian Press journalist Jennifer Ditchburn. They spend most of their time in a debate over an apparent disparity between two Conservative comments on the number of “military advisers” already deployed against ISIS. Was it 69 or 26? As usual, the government was not exactly forthcoming, leaving the press gallery to puzzle out such mysteries.

The panel typically follows the same “casting” formula: three insiders whose views and careers align with each of the main federal parties—and one journalist to temper the partisan bickering. Sometimes during commercial breaks, Solomon will discreetly offer up his own take. The panellists know to play on that idea once they’re live again. Unlike Day, the panel needs no coaching in the Dance of the Seven Veils. Some CBC staff hesitate to use the P-word as a catch-all term for commentators, but there are those who have no qualms: “I pundit on things. I’m a talking head, for fuck’s sake! What else do you want from me?” exclaims Capstick. “I make entertainment. I make news analysis entertaining. That’s my job.” (Ditchburn and other journalists tend to offer more factual, less animated commentary.)

“The way the New Democrats or the Liberals or the Tories did something is just as important as what they did,” Capstick continues. “I want to pull back the curtain: Here’s how this message is being pushed forward to you. Here’s why they use the certain words that they do.” Senior producer Leslie Stojsic, who previously produced The National’s “The Insiders” and “At Issue” panel segments, says a good panel is all about “making you feel like you’re a part of the conversation.” That definition is a long way from the citizen engagement Solomon emphasized in his debut, an ersatz version of “open dialogue” and “shared experiences.”

Inevitably, the “Power Panel” attracts critics. “Watching CBC’s Power & Politics can be hard on the synapses,” complains iPolitics writer Andrew Mitrovica in his column. He takes issue with the panellists, “who ooze a haughty, know-it-all attitude that treats anyone outside of the Ottawa bubble with thinly disguised contempt.” Nevertheless, the “Power Panel” is regularly the highest-rated portion of the broadcast. That may be because other segments, such as newsmaker interviews or MP panels, can be unenlightening or uninformative.

Take, for example, an infamous appearance by MP Paul Calandra in September 2014. In the House of Commons, Calandra, the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, turned a straightforward question about Canada’s military involvement in Iraq into a cheap political point about the opposition’s purported anti-Israel bias. Then he went on Power & Politics. “Do you think it’s your responsibility, when you’re answering questions on behalf of the prime minister, to at least make an attempt to answer on the topic you’re asked, as opposed to completely changing the topic?” asked Solomon, openly incredulous. “Well, I disagree with you that the topic was changed,” replied Calandra, before segueing seamlessly into the same nonsensical talking points he’d delivered in question period. “Be reasonable!” exclaimed Solomon. Seated next to Calandra, NDP MP Paul Dewar buried his face in his hands and shook his head in disbelief, a moment captured in freeze-frame and widely retweeted. The incident crystallized public frustration over message control and spin.

In her bid farewell on The House, outgoing host Kathleen Petty admitted her policy against allowing politicians to “freely throw around talking points unchallenged” meant that MP panels had consequently become “few and far between.” But Power & Politics perseveres. “We know that, as frustrating as MP panels can be, it’s important to get those voices out there,” says Castle. The show’s mandate-—to hold decision-makers or their surrogates to account—sometimes means becoming a platform for PMO spin, despite Solomon’s vociferous attempts to elicit real answers.

***

By mid-afternoon, Castle has blocked out all slots on the whiteboard: the top stories are the mission in Iraq, Ebola preparations and the protests in Hong Kong. Day’s segment is prioritized and there are interviews with the chief public health officer and Canada’s former ambassador to China. The show ends with a moustachioed trapper arguing with an animal rights activist about the muskrat fur hats traditionally worn by RCMP officers. Castle and Solomon decide to use Day’s pre-tape footage instead of the second interview conducted after the review session. Castle prefers his initial explanation of the role of military advisers. “It’s a fantastic window on what could be happening on the ground,” she says to Day and Solomon. As an interviewer, Solomon had more success putting Day at ease in the studio and his critique may have undermined the expert’s confidence.

But making his guests feel comfortable has always been Solomon’s forte. His earliest television success came on Hot Type. Guest Tom Wolfe remembers Solomon as an “adept and provocative young host.” In his book of essays, Hooking Up, Wolfe recounts the time Solomon riled up John Irving: “His sexagenarian jowls shuddered. He began bleeping. It was all the show’s technicians could do to hit the bleep button fast enough,” recalls Wolfe. “Evan Solomon kept covering his face with his hand and smiling at the same time as if to say, ‘How can the old coot make such a spectacle of himself—but wow, it’s wonderful television!’”

Solomon has always known the recipe for good television. “Call it the Oswald Quotient,” he wrote in Shift in June 1996. “Watching Jack Ruby off Kennedy’s killer was television at its best, and everyone knew it.” Hence the bloodied protester on the debut episode—and the record-high ratings on October 22, the day of the Ottawa shootings. The capital was shut down and Solomon was on the air by 10:15 a.m. for a full day of coverage with Mansbridge. Later, he hosted a three-hour special edition of Power & Politics.

“The media are among the few storytellers left in our secular culture,” wrote Solomon in Shift in 1995. “If they chronicled less and imagined more, they might just find that people would become more interested in the world around them.” His challenge on Power & Politics has always been just that: make Canadians more interested in politics. Five years on, he seems to have given up on the high-minded ideals of “shared experiences” and “open dialogue.” Despite a commitment to original journalism, he chronicles less (frustrated by endless spin) and imagines more, shaping our national narrative through punditry with the help of the “Power Panel.” Its members, as Joan Didion says of the panel’s American counterparts, are part of “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”

Though his show has changed, Solomon insists he hasn’t, despite evidence to the contrary: “My life can be divided into a series of segments,” he tells me. From Shift to Futureworld to Hot Type, and then to Ottawa: a tidy narrative that begins with his grandfather in a sweatshop and leads here. “I’m not that different,” he maintains. “I feel like a 20-year-old version of myself wouldn’t say that the 46-year-old version of myself is unknowable.”

Late in the evening, Russo and Solomon are still working their sources. Solomon kicks his feet up on his desk, revealing brightly coloured striped socks. Grinning widely, Russo pulls up his trouser leg: “Look at this, kid,” he says to me. “Socks are the only form of rebellion we have left.”

Photo by Jessica Deeks

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.

By Loren Hendin Tabatha Southey hadn’t expected to hear anything back. She’d sent three children’s stories to a publisher, but, six months later, nothing. Oh, well, she’d sent them only at the urging of a friend anyway. She had been driving with writer and editor Jane L. Thompson, two toddlers, and a baby buckled up in [...]]]>

By Loren Hendin

Tabatha Southey hadn’t expected to hear anything back. She’d sent three children’s stories to a publisher, but, six months later, nothing. Oh, well, she’d sent them only at the urging of a friend anyway. She had been driving with writer and editor Jane L. Thompson, two toddlers, and a baby buckled up in the back, and Southey prattling away, as she is wont to do. “Do you write?” cut in Thompson.

“No, I don’t write,” Southey said sheepishly.

“Well, you should.”

So she wrote some stories she’d told her children. After six months of silence, the phone rang. “Hi, so we really like your stories,” said a voice. “But you didn’t put your name on them.” That rookie mistake could easily have been the end of her career; instead, Key Porter Books liked her writing, hunted her down, and published The Deep Cold River Story in 2000.

That’s the way it’s always been for Southey: people want her. A year earlier, she had run into an acquaintance, Andrew Coyne, then National Post national affairs columnist, who suggested that she write for his paper. “In my mind I thought, that doesn’t really happen,” she says. “One doesn’t just get to write.” But if you’re Southey, apparently it does.

“Drunk with Men,” the query letter she sent the Post, pitched doing what she thought she was most qualified to do: “I would like to be employed to get drunk with various men, and document my experiences, so that I may bring some of the wonders I have seen back to the general public and possibly raise some awareness in single-men-aged-15-to-26-who-will-never-get-a-date-until-they’re-30.”

Classic Southey. Her writing was a little more convoluted then, she used too many hyphens, and some paragraphs were so wordy you had to go back and reread. But there was that Southey voice. Ellen Vanstone, then editor of the Post’s weekend section, remembers thinking, “We should just publish the query letter.” After a tiny bit of editing, she did.

A quick wit and trademark voice were the only résumé that Vanstone needed. She started using Southey regularly, and in 2004 recommended Elle Canadahire her as the Elle Girl columnist, a role Vanstone was leaving. That led to work for Explore and The Walrus, and three years later, a coveted Globe and Mail column.

Today, the woman who forgot to put her name on her manuscript is one of Canada’s most hilarious political commentators. Although she’s written everything from the will of the last Pinta Island Tortoise to a discussion between giant squid, her political columns are the shrewdest. She’s known for her distinct style, humour, and insight, but it didn’t come from world-class schooling. She dropped out of high school after Grade 9, left Guelph, Ontario, for Toronto, and found odd jobs like nannying, serving, and retail. She says she learned everything she knows reading three newspapers a day behind various jewelry and vintage store counters, and tells a story about starting on the front page of the Globe and finishing in the classifieds of the Toronto Sun going, “Oh, look, I see Todd sold that Camaro. I never thought that’d happen!”

Entering journalism as an underdog gave her a point of view that is not only funny, but also relatable. She puts political discussions in a new perspective for readers who might otherwise be bored or confused by them. She gives them something to engage with in a way that many political writers do not, and as her following has grown, Southey has worked her way into the centre of Canadian journalism. The outsider is now an insider.

Southey’s writing makes you laugh out loud when she imagines Prime Minister Stephen Harper scolding Conservative MPs for calling their political opponents pedophiles—“No, no, ‘Nazi’ and ‘pedophile’ are the bad words, remember?”—or nod your head with her on the David Petraeus scandal: “We must either disassemble the Internet or decide that sex between consenting adults is often an excellent idea, always a private matter, and mostly not that entertaining to anyone not in the bed.” Sometimes you just admire her sentences: “Apparently, to Mr. Romney, hiring a woman is, in spirit, an exaggerated take-your-child-to-work day, and anyone hearing that respect for women in the workplace demands a gallant acceptance of their innate desire to be home to cook dinner at 5 o’clock might almost be forgiven for thinking that this dinner-at-5-before-all-else thing explains why women in the United States still earn about 72 cents to the dollar earned by men.”

Other writers have opinions on what Southey’s special something is. “Her take on things zeroes into the weirdness of the situation,” says Toronto Starcolumnist Shawn Micallef. “She often starts from an unexpected place with a subject and often reels her readers slowly into her point,” says her editor at the Globe, Carl Wilson. Adds Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells: “She’s got a bullshit detector that allows her to see through all the artifice and get to what’s really going on.”

If it were Southey, she’d probably say it’s her expert online shopping skills. She might make a sarcastic joke, crediting her success to her dog, Tulip, or her love of scotch. She points to The Goon Show, the absurd and surreal British radio program, for contributing to her sense of humour, and British singing duo Flanders and Swann for implanting their comedic pattern into her subconscious. Southey has also spent a large part of her life with what many people would consider the bottom rungs of society. “Down in the Ds, we’re an interesting group,” she says. “But I’m glad I did those years in retail, I’m glad I did all those jobs. I took a lot away from all those things.” For one thing, the wayward path led her to a six-year marriage to Dave Foley, best known for The Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio. Joking with him and his fellow comedians refined her sense of humour and comedic timing.

Applying those tricks to her own trade, Southey combines that humour with insight, as she sees news stories from a different angle. “She either articulates what you’ve been thinking but no one’s been saying,” says Helen Spitzer, editor of bunchfamily.ca, “or completely turns things around for you.”

Southey considers a column successful if she can make herself laugh out loud, so she explains things to readers the way she explains the obviously ridiculous to herself. She described Conservative MP David Wilks’s conflicting statements on the omnibus budget bill by comparing them to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, saying, “I have a dream, but I won’t bore you all with it, because I know other people’s dreams are never very interesting.” And she turned Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s follies into the city’s newest tourist attraction: “Now, the name Toronto is evocative to people, like other great cities’ names: I Love New York; Paris, the City of Light; Toronto, the City with the World’s Most Embarrassing Mayor.”

She satirized accusations that women can’t take a joke about sexual harassment: “The next time one of your superiors presses his pelvic area against your bottom as he passes behind you at the photocopier, burst out laughing loudly.” After Julian Fantino, then associate minister of national defence, endorsed longer sentences to deter criminals, she asked if he imagined “would-be criminals sit down at their desks and carefully plot out their next moves on a spreadsheet, doing a lengthy cost-benefit analysis of armed liquor-store robbery versus enrolling in that pastry-chef course they’ve always dreamed of, and perhaps opting for a little light shoplifting as a compromise?”

Often her distinct view comes from something she has done, said, or tweeted. When a friend mentions a broken toilet handle, she says, “I can fix that, I fixed a handle last week. I can fix all your toilets, even the deep, inner parts.” Then adds, “I looked it up on Google.” You half expect the rest of a 600-word column to come tumbling out of her mouth right then. Her columns flow so effortlessly that they read as if she writes them on a napkin over a bagel and coffee—but that is far from the case. Her office, on the second floor of her sumptuous Victorian home, is lined with green leaf-patterned wallpaper and covered in vintage photos and children’s artwork. Her bookshelf bursts with books stuffed into every open space and her large, sloped wooden desk—reminiscent of a teacher’s desk from the days when students used individual slates—faces the bay window.

After filing her column on Thursdays, she will start looking for that week’s topic the following Monday. As soon as Wednesday night hits, she is holed up in her office, pumping out her piece, not to be seen or heard until Thursday. She reads her columns aloud eight or nine times, believing, “Bad writing cannot stand being read out loud,” and she sometimes Googles her jokes and checks Twitter to ensure no one else has used them. Then, between Thursday, when she files her column, and Saturday, when it appears, she lives in fear that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert will crack one of her jokes. “There are so many columnists who are happy to be the 13th or 14th columnist to write the same thing,” says Wells. “She’s never been like that.”

Political satire has been around since there were leaders to make fun of. Two of the best are P.J. O’Rourke and Calvin Trillin. O’Rourke, one of America’s only Republican humourists, started as an editor at the National Lampoon, before working for Rolling Stone and writing 16 satirical books, and Trillin, who writes much of his political humour in poetry, is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a columnist for The Nation, and author of 18 books. They’ve helped sustain a market for insightful, yet scathing, satirical writing.

From The Onion to The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section, humour is everywhere, but Southey claims her reading of choice is dark and dry. Still, she admits to liking P.G. Wodehouse, best known for his novels about wealthy Englishman Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, but also for parodying politicians and the mid-20th century in his storylines. David Sedaris, another of Southey’s favourites, has mastered the personal essay by satirizing his own life. In Canada, The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes make fun of politicians on TV, Scott Feschuk writes political humour forMaclean’s, and Terry Fallis’s novel, The Best Laid Plans, won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, but otherwise, political coverage isn’t very funny.

Canadians miss out on more than good laughs. Lance Holbert, a professor of mass communications at Ohio State University and specialist on political satire, says visible, relevant political humour benefits democracy by generating awareness, increasing knowledge, and even getting people involved and out to the polls. Often without even realizing it, people who read political humour expecting something funny end up more aware and engaged.

Southey is under no illusions she’s responsible for the political knowledge and participation of Canadians. She will set up her columns with a few brief sentences, but expects her audience to be relatively informed. Sometimes she writes to illuminate a topic in the news she believes isn’t getting enough attention, sometimes she tries to make a dull topic more exciting, sometimes she is simply trying to understand an issue better herself. Above all, her goal is to be funny: “I think it is almost impossible to chronicle the world with any accuracy, and not end up with something that is at least occasionally funny.”

Southey sits in a dimly lit corner at the back of House on Parliament pub in Cabbagetown, a Toronto neighbourhood full of Victorian homes and cozy cafes. Staff here keep picking up the maroon knit scarf that she can’t manage to keep safely on the back of her chair. “This is my local,” she says. She talks about her career humbly, eyes darting to her lap, to the wall and back, and mentions eight times over the course of an hour how lucky she has been.

But when she thinks about the Globe’s decision to discontinue her column in 2010, she becomes exasperated, throwing her hands up and raising her voice. “I was fired, I was devastated,” she says. “I kept thinking, ‘That last column I filed, it wasn’t very good! It should’ve been better!’” Gabe Gonda, editor of the Focus section at that time, initially denied killing Southey’s column, then conceded that it was “suspended briefly,” then gave a “no comment,” and finally said the paper “briefly toyed with the idea of changing the column and running another column in that space.”

But others speculate. The Globe, which was launching a major redesign, may have been looking to clear out some old voices and bring in fresh ones. “Maybe the people making the decisions didn’t share Tabatha’s sense of humour quite as much, so they didn’t see the appeal,” says Wilson. Wells thinks that by starting to run columns by bigwigs like Irshad Manji and Chrystia Freeland after Southey left, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse was trying to buy prestige with brand names and glistening CVs. “Unfortunately for that theory, Tabatha can write better than the next 15 columnists combined,” he says. “And the Globe just simply needed their readers to tell them that.”

And they did. Colleagues and loyal readers started a Twitter uprising not quite as powerful as the Arab Spring, but significantly stronger than the Jian-Ghomeshi-for-the-Canadian-Bachelor movement, and deluged Stackhouse’s inbox with angry emails. They weren’t looking for “fancy people with fancy job descriptions,” as Wells calls them. Within weeks, Stackhouse sat down for drinks with Southey and invited her back. She says Stackhouse gave her the impression he didn’t know she’d been fired.

To be fair, anyone who has devoted fans also has devoted critics. One commenter attacked her for questioning Ann Romney’s statement that she and Mitt once had an ironing board for a dinner table: “Stick an iron in it, Southey.” Another advised her, “Open a small business because you can’t write.” Her convoluted sentences and sense of humour are definitely a particular brand. Her politics lean to the left, giving her some critics from the right. One of Jason Kenney’s people once ominously warned her: “We’re watching you.”

But how effective is a political satirist in a paper whose average reader is 51 years old and has an annual household income of about $96,000? What purpose is left for Southey if her readers are already explained, informed, and engaged? Andreas Krebs is one of the creators behind The Satire Project, which has partnered with rabble.ca  to publish videos, cartoons, and columns to reach Canadians who don’t read newspapers. He argues that since her readers tend to be older, affluent white people—and informed—Southey doesn’t achieve what he believes is satire’s purpose: engaging those who are fed up with traditional politics and news. Perhaps the school dropout has become too exclusive for her own people.

Nonetheless, after five years and hundreds of columns, her followers are eager for the day she writes without constraint of word count or weekly deadlines, and publishers have been approaching her almost since the day she began. She has considered fiction, non-fiction, and an anthology of her columns, but Southey’s in no rush.

In the meantime, both Elle and the Globe have more or less given her free rein to write whatever she wants. Wilson knows columnists are important to analyze the news, to inform, and to entertain—and serve as familiar faces to identify with in a sea of bylines. That’s especially valuable in the paywall era. Southey is your Canadian girl next door who taught herself everything she knows by just reading the newspaper, but perhaps coming from no status or prestige gives her that highly sought-after insight. It has certainly contributed to her being so damn funny.

“Let me check on my cheese puffs.” Southey parts the crowd in her kitchen and reaches the oven, where her cheese puffs are cooking away. Moments later, in her lobster-motif apron, she serves them on a red ceramic dish in a red-oven-mitted hand: “Cheese puff? Cheese puff? Try a cheese puff.”

The crowd is here to watch the results of the American election. Her home is carefully kept; decorative plates adorn the walls, antique lanterns hang from doorways. The space is filled with Toronto journalists mingling and glancing at the mini-TV above the fridge. Even so, all eyes are on Southey. She sympathizes with a just-fired friend while cutting up more cheese for the immense platter, calls out for an election update as she washes glasses for the never-ending stash of wine, and, of course, never forgets about her cheese puffs. Her guests seem to hover near her like a cloud of electrons around a nucleus, vibrating around her as she circles the kitchen. She disappears into small groups of people, sending them into fits of laughter before being drawn to the next.
Helen Spitzer met Southey as she was leaving the National Magazine Awards gala. Spitzer and a group of middle-aged male journalists stepped into the elevator and faced that famous head of red hair. “They were all abuzz with being in the elevator with Tabatha. Everyone’s attention was drawn to her,” she says. Presented with a private audience, Southey nailed it with witty one-liners about the evening. “It was like seeing a bunch of puppy dogs run into the elevator and start wagging their tails.”

Southey is a study in opposites: a shopper at Holt Renfrew who bikes there, a high school dropout with a national column, humourous while making a serious point, a regular joe outside the journalism world, and a celebrity inside it. On Twitter, she banters with other journalists (frequently outwitting them), and come Saturday morning, big names retweet her column—their equivalent of a thumbs-up. Yet, she still has the same voice and outlook she did 10 years ago, and writes about omnibus bills the same way she wrote about getting drunk with men.
Inside the kitchen, Southey is off in a corner chatting away, iPhone in one hand, picking at the remnants of pasta with the other. “Tabatha, they announced California and Obama won!” someone shouts. All heads swivel for her reaction as she cuts for the TV.

Minutes later, Southey whips out her iPhone and posts a new tweet: “Has anyone checked on Lindsay Lohan?”

Of course, Lohan, a Romney supporter, would be the first thing to pop into Southey’s mind. And the result is a six-word tweet that’s different, takes a new perspective, and is hilarious. The line that others will wish they’d written. Once again, Southey nails it.

Photographs by Darrin Klimek

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In the belly of the red sandstone Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, down two flights of stairs and hallways that twist and turn, computer hacking meets political activism at Citizen Lab. The hum of 20 computers reverberates against the clickety-clacking of fingers on keyboards as Nart Villeneuve, the lab’s director of technical research, opens a virtual world that is not as free as you might think. Hunching in one corner of the basement research facility, Che Guevara mug at his side and Zapatista T-shirt on his back, the 32-year-old displays on his computer monitor the difference between Google searches here and in China: a request for “Falun Gong” on google.com renders over three million pages; its Chinese counterpart fetches under 75,000. Searches for “democracy,” “overthrow” and “freedom” return similar fractured results.

“The Internet is not an open, unrestricted environment,” says Professor Ronald Deibert, known as “hacker prof” around campus. “It’s a network of filters and choke points.” The 42-year-old father of four was interested in “how power is exercised on the Internet,” and wanted to examine web surveillance and filtering on an international scale. So he started Citizen Lab in 2000. Villeneuve, one of Deibert’s former students, caught the prof’s attention with an essay he wrote on censorship in China and Saudi Arabia. Now, with books, 11 major country reports, research projects, and even one U.S. congressional testimony behind them, the two are known as the foremost Net censorship experts in the world.

Here in Canada, the proliferation of the Internet has meant easy access to information. We navigate cyberspace without hindrance. However, in countries that want to repress political discourse and social change, getting around on the Net isn’t as easy. Web content is filtered and blocked, and the open spirit of the web is threatened. “We need, as citizens worldwide, to protect the Net if we want to preserve it as a means for information and space for communication,” says Deibert. His 10 employees and volunteers fight to unlock the Internet.

Amid suspended motherboards and black and white Soviet spy satellite photos at the subterranean hideout, Villeneuve visits a website for SmartFilter, the filtering software libraries use to shield children from provocative sites. Now, nations such as Tunisia – a repressive dictatorship – use the software to block citizens from web content. “First, they start out blocking porn,” says Villeneuve. “Then they make their own categories,” blocking human rights sites, opposition groups and international media.

Filtering is a necessary part of the cyber experience – it keeps spam out and search engines use it to bring us the most relevant results. The problem arises, Villeneuve says, “when the filtering process is not transparent.” Thailand, for example, implemented filtering to deal with sex tourism. The country had an initial list to block of sites that enabled this exploitive practice. “Now, sites not on the list are blocked too,” says Villeneuve. Similarly, blocked sites on the Internet in China look like regular error pages. This secretive filtering and blocking jeopardizes the openness of the Internet, and Villeneuve argues, democracy, free speech and human rights.

Another unintended yet critical outcome of the filtering process, Villeneuve says, is that systems like SmartFilter shut out perfectly acceptable sites. He types teenpregnancy.org in a web address checker that shows how sites on this system are categorized. The site is classified correctly as a health resource. Then he checks an individual page on teenpregnacy.org and it falls into the sex and pornography category. “That’s just dumb-ass,” he says.

One of the lab’s most publicized projects is the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) in partnership with Cambridge,Oxford and Harvard universities. ONI explores and challenges Net censorship practices in about 40 countries by connecting with volunteers and computer servers in the nations in question. Through applications developed in the lab, they run a series of tests on the Internet there. First, they test general categories, then country-specific categories. In the places that ONI monitors, pornography is the most blocked category on the Internet, followed by gambling, anonymizers, provocative attire and humour.

To combat net censorship, Villeneuve, Deibert and others at the lab developed a computer program called Psiphon. Slated for release in December, the program turns home computers in uncensored countries into servers that display websites to people in censored places. So journalists, activists and bloggers in unblocked countries can install Psiphon for free and then create a “network of trust”—friends and counterparts in censored countries—who can log in and check out sites they normally wouldn’t be able to access. Psiphon, he says, is targeted at Chinese- and Iranian-Canadians, or those who are living here with connections in net-censored nations.

Villeneuve is vocal about safe play on the net. “Journalists need to know how to protect themselves online,” he says, “how to communicate securely.” For this, he contributed to the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents by Reporters without Borders. The introduction of the booklet says, “Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure.” Villeneuve’s section examines circumvention technologies, which allow people to get around net censorship and surveillance, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. According to the handbook, Iran’s filtering systems “block access to hundreds of thousands of websites?. The regime is capable of the worst censorship and also set a record in 2005 by throwing nearly 20 bloggers in prison over the preceding 10 months. Three of them were still there on August 1, 2005.”

A 10-minute walk west of Citizen Lab, at the Tik Talk Cafe, Iranian-born blogger Hossein Derakhshandiscusses the choked-up web in his country. “You can’t really use the Internet,” he says, “except for maybe email.” Like Saudi Arabia, China and Kazakhstan, the Iranian regime blocks and filters the Internet. The 31-year-old Canadian citizen realized this when he returned home and searched for his blog online. He was led to a red and blue page that said the site was forbidden. “It’s really suffocating,” he says.

Derakhshan, a website designer and freelance journalist, began blogging about technology, pop culture and Iran when he moved to Toronto from Tehran six years ago. Before he knew it, his English and Farsi blog posts on Editor: Myself consistently grabbed the attention of over 7,000 daily visitors, along with 12,000 people on his mailing list. Then, with the emergence of Internet filtering back home, where many of Derakhshan’s readers reside, his readership was abruptly cut in half. Despite these limitations, the self-described outsider is credited with igniting the blog movement in Iran with his guide to blogging, published on the site November, 5 2001. Now, there are at least 70,000 active Persian blogs – more than the number of blogs in Spanish, Chinese, Italian, German or Russian. “It’s mainstream there,” he says.

Derakhshan uses three metaphors to describe how blogging changed Iran: windows, bridges and cafés. Blogging facilitated a window effect, inviting outsiders to look in, and vice versa. Bridges connected communities that never communicated, like men reading women’s points of view. And then the café effect: blogs started debate that was otherwise absent in Iran “because of the government’s monopoly on the public sphere,” he says.

The even-tempered agitator acknowledges the pressures on Iranian bloggers, and he says most know the lines they cannot cross. For instance, they can’t insult the Supreme Leader; for this, Derakhshan was detained and questioned by an intelligence ministry official on his last Tehran trip, then banned from leaving the country until he wrote an apology. But the blogger is careful to underscore that the Iranian government isn’t as harsh as westerners may think: he says most of the 20 Iranian bloggers were arrested for other things – they just happened to have blogs.

More than politics, Persians tend to write about their daily experiences. “Because the government wants to control your life as much as it can,” Derakhshan says, “anything you do that challenges that authority is political. Even if it’s not really about politics.” For the star blogger, that’s good enough. He thinks journalism is something people should do on the side, like blogging. With the December release of Psiphon, perhaps we’ll hear more voices rise over state-controlled media and web censorship in the new form of journalism: the blog.

Len Gold looks nervous as he stares into the black eye of the camera. Wearing a leather jacket over a Vancouver Canucks T-shirt, he recites his question for the leaders of Canada’s four main political parties. Framed by mountains meeting the ocean in Gibsons, British Columbia, Gold says, “My concern is safety for people in this country, to be able to walk down the streets at night and being safe in their homes, and I’d like to know what the government plans on doing, dealing with these criminals and the light sentences being handed down to them by the courts.” His is one of just six questions chosen from over 6,000 submitted to the Broadcasting Consortium for the only English-language televised debate in the 2011 federal election.

Gilles Duceppe, then leader of the Bloc Québécois, tells Gold, “The American model imported to Canada would be an important error. We can’t accept that. Their philosophy is more guns and big prisons and I think that is a dangerous social cocktail.” Then Stephen Harper, who calls the man “Len,” takes his turn. “We have mandatory penalties that involved gangs and organized drug crimes, for sexual predators. We want to repeal the case where criminals can get pardons automatically.” Harper, referring to an omnibus bill later titled “The Safe Streets and Communities Act,” says, “These are bills sitting before Parliament. When a re-elected Conservative government gets back, we’ll package these bills together and get them passed.” While the other candidates dismiss Gold’s question, Harper exploits it; he answers with what his party is doing about “lighter sentences” with his push for mandatory minimums (without talking about if they work or not). He’s direct, he looks compassionate and, according to many studies and criminology experts, he’s completely wrong about what it takes to reduce crime.

If the news reported the most common offences, we’d drown in drunk driving stories. We’d hardly ever hear about rapists hiding in bushes attacking strangers; instead, women would be warned to guard against the people they trust the most. Serial killers would almost never come up. But Christopher Schneider, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, explains that the news gives us stories that feed our fear and capture our attention. So we get serial killings, not drunk driving, which killed 714 people in 2009, according to the Traffic Injury Research Foundation. “We’re generally the safest, healthiest human beings, especially in Canada, to ever walk the earth,” Schneider says. “And yet we’re the most afraid.”

Crime was clearly a wedge issue during the campaign, something that Harper used to separate the Conservative agenda from the rest of the pack. His platform document devoted six pages to crime. Meanwhile, as Ira Basen wrote in a cbc.ca piece, the Liberal Party’s platform was “silent on all of the red-meat, law and order issues that the Conservative government has been pushing for the past five years,” even though it helped pass (or at least didn’t block) many of the 21 crime reforms the Conservatives pushed through during their minority tenure. Harper may have been aided and abetted by the so-called liberal media because, while crime continues a decades-long downward trend, coverage of it remains a staple of our news diet. But does “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism favour right-of-centre politics by putting a conservative bugbear in the limelight? And does the way journalists cover crime affect policy-making and the political landscape?

In Canada, as in most Western countries, crime is declining. Many theories purport to explain this—from legalized abortion to the phasing out of leaded gas—but the most sensible reason, to me, is demographics: fewer young men, who are most likely to commit crimes, in an aging population. The most recent statistics showed that the amount of crime reported to the police in 2010 fell five percent from the previous year; the severity of those crimes fell by six percent. With a population of just over 34 million, Canada had 554 homicides that year; by comparison, 865 people were murdered in the state of New York, which has fewer than 20 million residents. Drug crime, though, was up by 10 percent in Canada, mostly because more people were busted for marijuana possession. Child pornography, gun crime and sexual assault all increased, but not enough to influence the overall downward trend. Canadians haven’t seen a crime rate this low since 1973.

Despite all this, crime shows up everyehere, especially on local TV. It’s a broad category, too; there are reporters on justice, crime, police and courthouse beats producing breaking news, daily articles and features. In a 2006 study of local TV news in the United States, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) analyzed the content of 24 newscasts on one day in three cities: Houston, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Bend, Oregon. Crime took up 42 percent of all the newscasts. It’s a small study, but as a report on media coverage of organized crime, commissioned by the RCMP in 2002, noted, “even the relationship between the media and crime/justice has not yet been thoroughly explored.” The study found that journalism favours straightforward and violent crimes over environmental and corporate ones and concluded that the media aren’t reflecting “the true criminal reality of our society.”

Of course, sensational crime stories have been in vogue since the “murder” pamphlets of the Renaissance. One of the most popular, published in 1551 by a German Lutheran minister, featured this long headline: “A True and Most Horrifying Account of How a Woman Tyrannically Murdered Her Four Children and Also Killed Herself, at Weidenhausen Near Eschwege in Hesse.” Just as we are with horror stories around a campfire, we’re drawn into and terrified by true crime accounts, and that interest never seems to be sated. Frank Magid, a social psychologist turned news consultant, took this time-honoured truth to local television stations. By the 1970s, he was remaking the 6 p.m. news: it was cheaper and flashier with a steady stream of weather and traffic—but mostly crime. Magid taught the now-standard TV approach: visuals of guns, crime scenes, lights flashing, short hit from a reporter interviewing shocked onlookers and victims’ family members.

Though he recently died, his company, Frank Magid Associates, continues. CBC hired the firm for its news relaunch in 2009. But Magid’s wisdom has come under fire. A 2007 PEJ study, “We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too,” found that Magid may have been underestimating local TV news audiences. The five-year analysis across 50 different American markets found that trend pieces actually garnered higher ratings—especially among younger people, a prized demographic for advertising—than the scandal of private citizens and racier stories. One of the main findings was: “Flashing lights, yellow police tape, and so-called eyeball-grabbing visuals do not by themselves attract viewers.” The study is also careful to point out that though “too much crime” was a common concern among local TV producers, there was still a way to cover it that improved ratings and the quality of journalism at the same time: provide context, choose cases involving public malfeasance over breaking news about violent crime and explain the relevance of the event to the audience.

Aaron Doyle worked the police beat at the Etobicoke Guardian andother community newspapers before he went to graduate school. “I spent a lot of time reflecting on my former sins as a journalist,” jokes the criminology professor at Carleton University. More seriously, he explains, “We know that people who watch a lot of TV tend to be more afraid of crime, but it’s very hard to actually prove scientifically that watching a lot of TV causes them to be afraid of crime.” Elderly people, for example, tend to watch a lot, but do they think crime is rampant because of what they watch? Perhaps they stay home because they’re afraid to go out or because it’s harder to get around. It’s likely, though, that the fear, however it started, is reinforced by TV. With so many other factors in people’s lives, academic study has hit an impasse figuring out the cause and effect.

In his 2003 book, Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera, Doyle found a way around this, showing a kind of feedback loop between television news, the police and policy-makers. He doesn’t think politicians are only swayed by journalism through voters, i.e. the audience; they are, after all, news watchers, too. “If an issue gets a lot of media attention, political actors and people in the justice system tend to start responding to that without waiting to hear from the public,” Doyle says. “Often there can be a kind of bubble in which there’s the media and the key players, and the key players are sort of just reacting to the media coverage.” In other words, politicians consume news, too, and heavy coverage might push them to react with a policy change or new initiative, either to try to fix the problem or to appear proactive and get more attention from the same journalists who got the ball rolling. This might help explain a startling statistic in the 2009 StatsCan “General social survey on victimization”: despite many assumptions to the contrary, 93 percent of Canadians are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their personal safety. It’s an idea that complicates how journalists affect democracy. Not only does journalism inform citizens, who appeal to or vote for politicians, politicians react to the news while courting it.

To get a closer look at crime journalism, I spent two sunny spring mornings in the basement of the Fredericton courthouse sandwiched between linoleum floors and acoustic ceiling tiles with Michael Staples, 21-year veteran crime reporter with The Daily Gleaner. He’s dressed in his usual suit and tie as we sit in the public gallery of the provincial courtroom, in the farthest pew from the entrance, right at the front to better hear the proceedings. The mundane bureaucracy of shuffling case documents and schedules and the perfunctory exhortations to “keep the peace and be of good behaviour” take up most of the time, but it’s the horror that Staples is here to recount. The first case he expects to write about—a sexual assault a fellow reporter told him had something to do with the internet—is dismissed in the first five minutes of the first day. On the second day, after a few hours of scheduling, we witness the verdict of a sexual assault of a minor by her stepfather. Staples mostly keeps his head down, furiously writing notes in an illegible custom shorthand while I watch the lawyers uncomfortably recount the nauseating details, most of which appear the next morning in Staples’s front-page story. As we walk out, he says it is one of the worst cases he’s covered in his career.

At a café down the street, Staples tells me how crime reporting has changed. “Back in the ’90s, for example, it was very much sensationalized. You could put pretty well anything in the paper. And I printed some pretty gross stuff,” he says, eyes earnestly wide. “And then at the start of this new millennium there was less interest in that. Now we seem to be easing back into that again.” But, I ask, where do journalists draw the line about what to print? “We try not to sensationalize it,” he says. “I think the public has a right to know about those types of things that are going on.”

I hear much the same answer from other journalists. Sam Pazzano, a court reporter for theToronto Sun, calls his work a public service. And when I ask Catherine McDonald, a Global TV crime reporter in Toronto, whether crime is over-covered, she says, “In the 11 years I’ve been here, we’ve reported, I believe, the same amount of crime. If it’s a newsworthy crime, it’s a crime that will outrage people, then we’ve reported it. If it affects people, we’ll report it. We haven’t changed our criteria.”

Tim Appleby, who’s worked the beat at The Globe and Mail for close to 30 years, says journalism has become more competitive, which changes the kinds of stories that get coverage: “It certainly has become more graphic. When I came here, we wouldn’t show photographs of dead bodies,” he said. “We wouldn’t name people who had been charged, but not convicted. So yeah, they didn’t cover it or they covered it right. Certainly that’s changed.” Appleby uses the trial of Russell Williams, disgraced colonel and serial killer, as an example of just how graphic crime coverage can be. He wrote A New Kind of Monster: The Secret Life and Shocking True Crimes of an Officer…and a Murderer, a book that despite its tell-all headline-style title and its meticulous cataloguing of Williams’s torture and killing, doesn’t dwell on the sickening details. “It was largely unprintable,” he says, adding that the Globe also decided against printing many of the photos that came out in the evidence. Despite that restraint, competition often trumps decency. “I don’t think we have any choice,” says Appleby, “because if you don’t print it, somebody else is going to.” The Toronto Star, by contrast, published a self-portrait of Williams on its front page, posing for his own camera in stolen lingerie. In defence of the decision, public editor Kathy English quoted publisher John Cruickshank: “It’s a story that we shouldn’t turn our heads from. And it’s for that reason we made the choice that we did.”

As to whether their reporting affects policy decisions, there’s much less consensus. Pazzano hesitates before admitting, “I mean I guess I think to a certain degree [it can]. You can get a skewed view of the world.” But ultimately he says he’s just telling the facts, and his job is “to present the story.” When I ask McDonald if she thinks crime reporting changes what the public thinks or politicians do, she vehemently doesn’t know. “I don’t cover politics. So I don’t report thinking about the political implications. And I don’t cover the political side of crime, either. I cover the crime scene. I don’t cover what the politicians are saying about crime.” She contends it’s rarely an election issue and low on the political agenda, anyway.

But when I ask Michael Staples if his work affects public policy, he answers simply: “Absolutely.” In 2002, a front-page series he wrote on the consequences of cuts to New Brunswick’s RCMP budget on underserved rural communities and overworked, stressed-out cops contributed to a reversal of the decision. And Appleby believes his feature stories can affect policy, too. He uses a long article he’d written for that week’s Globe as an example. It’s about murder in subsidized housing, a great piece of crime journalism that took several months collaboration with freelancer Stephen Spencer Davis. Using data from freedom of information requests, they showed how neglect and poverty lead to violence in city-owned housing, where tenants are four times more likely to be murdered than other Torontonians. It puts a face to a societal trend while staying rooted in meticulously researched numbers and covers the issue from a variety of angles with interviews from tenants, academics, spokespeople from the city and community activists. It treats crime as a social issue, not a series of events. But it’s a rarity. Citing a small staff, Appleby says his work is “almost entirely breaking news and court stuff.”

Luckily, there are many journalists who can go beyond the “quick hits” and latest stabbings to create pieces that orient crime within the constellation of societal factors, statistical trends and personal lives. The June 2011 edition of The Walrus featured Rachel Giese’s cover story, “Arrival of the Fittest,” which linked the dropping crime rate with increasing immigration. John Macfarlane’s editorial reflected on how shortcomings in crime coverage and readers’ and journalists’ misunderstanding of statistics drive Canadians to support policies that are punitive—and don’t work. (A 2010 Angus Reid survey showed that a majority of Canadians support the death penalty for murderers, up from just under half in 2004.) In a Globe column about the newest statistics, Jeffrey Simpson laid out the relationship between the Conservative agenda on crime and journalism’s coverage. “The average citizen, especially those who favour the Conservative Party, is told by political leaders that crime is on the rise, and needs to be fought with a bevy of harsh new measures,” he wrote. “Then they watch the television news, where ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ dominates local coverage. Then they turn to the tabloid press, or tabloid elements in the so-called serious newspapers, to read endless stories about crime. No wonder some people believe a crime wave is washing over Canada.”

The Toronto Sun dutifully reported the falling crime rate, though it seemed to more often highlight the specific crimes that were increasing, while other newspapers didn’t or relegated it to the requisite counter-argument paragraph close to the end. Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein kept his opinion constant, if not his reasoning: a Statistics Canada survey showed a slight increase in crimes not reported to police, but Goldstein claimed there was an “alarming” and “statistically significant” jump in unreported crime. Then, in July, when research showed that crime was continuing its downward trend, Goldstein undermined the statistics: “What does the crime rate matter to a rape victim who discovers unsupervised temporary absences and early parole make a mockery of the sentence the judge pronounces in court?” As Simpson wrote in an online discussion with readers, “We all live with the tyranny of the anecdote.”

But another way to put that is an old adage of good journalism: put a face to every story. Romayne Smith Fullerton, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, is editing a collection of essays on crime coverage. She says it’s difficult for a journalist to sell a story about the statistics. “Oh, that’s a good news story: ‘Hey, guess what? There are less robberies than ever!’” she says sarcastically. “So what’s the timely peg for that? What’s the angle? What kind of photograph are you going to run with that kind of story? You’ve got nothing. It’s got no sex appeal at all.” But without those stories, “we journalists completely play into the hands of politicians like the Conservatives” who, she says, take the stories as evidence that we need to get tough on crime.

The high-stakes competition in North American journalism only makes it harder, but it’s not the only way to report today. In other countries Fullerton has researched, stricter rules reduce sensationalism. In Sweden and the Netherlands, for example, it’s rare for news outlets to name the accused or the victim. That refocuses a story, bringing it out of the personalized, emotional realm and letting the implications of the crime for society out from under it.

When crime coverage becomes too overblown, too emotional and too out of proportion, what citizens and politicians alike may end up with is the current California prison system, radically changed by the “three strikes, you’re out” law passed 19 years ago. In 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted from her home, raped and murdered by career criminal Richard Allen Davis. The media coverage was high-pitched from when she went missing through the two-month-long search for the girl to the moment Davis was convicted of first-degree murder, smirking and flipping the bird to the TV cameras. In response, California enacted the “three strikes” policy, an extreme version of mandatory minimum sentencing: commit three offences (the first must be serious, the last could be shoplifting) and you’re in jail for life. It’s a simple, catchy baseball metaphor that puts criminals away; criminologist Aaron Doyle calls it “sound-bite justice” because its pith is easily captured for the 6 p.m. news. President Bill Clinton even invoked Polly’s name during a State of the Union address to shame the House Representatives into passing a national crime bill, which became law shortly after. “Polly’s legacy is immense,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1994.

The policy had many advocates in the media, according to Doyle. “And it was a public policy disaster.” The law pushed California’s prisons to 200 percent capacity, causing miserable crowding and a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national average for prisoners by 2010. Meanwhile, the prison system has nearly bankrupted the state. In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that broke along ideological lines, ordered California to reduce the number of inmates to 137.5 percent of its prison capacity because the conditions have caused “needless suffering and death.”

Polly’s legacy even reached Canada. In 1994, the Reform Party adopted a resolution calling for a similar three-strikes law, though it downgraded the punishment from life in prison to an indefinite sentence in a bid to “be more saleable and defensible in mainstream politics,” according to a Globe article filed from the party’s convention. At the time, MP Harper was Reform’s chief policy officer. Once at the top of a western protest party, today Harper is mainstream. But even conservative Texan lawmakers are warning Canadians against the tough-on-crime approach championed in their state. “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come,” one Lone Star State Republican representative told cbc’s Terry Milewski. “They’ll be filled, okay? Because people will send them there.”

Designing new prisons has been a large part of my architect parents’ livelihood since 1992, when they built their first penitentiary in Joyceville, Ontario. I was five years old. As a tween, I got a prison toothbrush as a souvenir of my dad’s business trip to Indianapolis; the handle was less than an inch long and round like a loonie, he told me, to make it impossible to sharpen into a shank or choke a grown man. But my parents won’t compete for federal prison projects anymore. In anticipation of more overcrowding after the omnibus bill passes (the problem is getting worse thanks to two reforms already in effect), the federal government has been building cookie-cutter cell blocks across the country, without incorporating the sustainable architecture or rehabilitative design that have become my parents’ hallmark. Their designs incorporate “small gestures,” my dad told me, which make prisons—and thus prisoners—less aggressive and intimidating, features such as real wood doors, windows without bars that actually open and a set-up that lets inmates get outside without a guard, all without compromising security. Some jobs have to be done right, goes their thinking, and housing inmates—the vast majority of whom will be released one day—is one of them. Crime journalism is the same: nobody wants to pay for it, but it’s still worth doing right, even if it doesn’t make our politicians happy.

The morning Question Period at Queen’s Park ends and reporters scrum politicians streaming into the halls. The exchanges aren’t rapid-fire shouting matches, there’s no staccato of camera flashes and politicians aren’t trying to outrun reporters chasing them down and barking questions. About two dozen journalists swarm Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, some holding television cameras that bathe him in a chilly white light. His mouth is the target of a dozen or so voice recorders, held by the tips of fingers as steadily as the journalists can as they try to get closer without toppling forward. Duncan answers their questions in a relatively calm rhythm. Several address the province’s massive projected $24.7-billion deficit. Does he know anything about the reports of General Motors paying back bailout money to U.S. and Canadian governments?

“Nothing formally, no. I just read that in The New York Times, and I take it for what it’s worth.”

How about that for a statement vague enough to be an adept deflection—  or a jab at every journalist in the scrum?

Deb Matthews is next, but the health minister enjoys a crowd half the size of Duncan’s. The rest of the reporters have left to speak with other Members of Provincial Parliament—a single journalist can’t be in two places at the same time, after all. Only half a dozen reporters and one camera greet New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath and as the numbers thin, the pace of the questioning slows down as well. Soon, all but the stragglers are gone.

At Queen’s Park, home of the Ontario legislature, scrums are now shorter, smaller and quieter. It’s a symptom of a dramatic drop in press gallery membership, as well as restrictions on the lines of communication between journalists and politicians, which make context and leads harder to come by. As multi-person bureaus become single-occupancy caverns, and experienced journalists with the know-how to navigate the intricacies of Canada’s second-largest government leave the hollowed halls, the breadth and depth of the coverage declines. Stories are now more narrowly focused on Toronto and only the biggest scandals and controversies get much attention, depriving citizens of the information they need to hold their representatives truly accountable.

* * *

When the new legislature building opened in 1893, the handful of reporters who regularly worked out of Queen’s Park often supplemented their salaries with odd jobs such as writing MPPs’ speeches. Until the 1960s, reporter-politician relationships were unabashedly close, and journalists often had to pick and choose what insider information they could disclose without risking that cozy coexistence. The love-in cooled as journalism became more adversarial, especially in the wake of Watergate. With the press taking its role as watchdog more seriously, coupled with swelling numbers of political support staff, the gallery grew in size as well.

The press gallery lounge used to be a storm of activity, according to past president Richard Brennan. Reporters crowded around the large table in the centre of the room, poring over the day’s papers, discussing the goings-on of the legislature. Today, the lounge is usually empty save one or two people shuffling through un-crinkled issues, or using the microwave in the corner to heat up their lunches.

An old boys’ club atmosphere persisted into the early 1990s and stories about reporters and politicians partying together after late-night sittings abound. Brennan notes that mickeys in jacket pockets and heavy drinking were common, but “papers don’t tolerate those shenanigans anymore.”

A bucket filled with bottles of beer sat in the lounge and—from early morning on—reporters, politicians and staff would drop in, crack open a cold one and shoot the breeze. The boys even played hockey together and would “sit around naked in the change room drinking beer afterward,” says Toronto Star columnist Jim Coyle. Since politicians and reporters talked with each other more, that meant more scoops, though not necessarily better coverage. Friends protect friends. “Before I came here,” says current gallery president  Randy Rath, “[Premier John] Robarts would have affairs left, right and centre and nobody would say a word about it.”

Today, a glance at the membership list reveals a large number of “vacant” entries beside bureau phone numbers. Full-time reporters, researchers, columnists and camera crews have also disappeared from the legislature building, which some affectionately call the Pink Palace for its sandstone exterior. In 2001, the gallery had 88 full- and part-time members. It now has 45.

CTV Ontario’s team included four reporters and four full-time camera operators in the ’90s. Today, only Paul Bliss remains, aided by a cameraman until 2 p.m. CBC Television is now gone, leaving only CBC Radio’s Mike Crawley to regularly represent the crown corporation. When TVO replaced its provincial affairs programStudio 2 with The Agenda with Steve Paikin in 2006, the Queen’s Park segment “4th Reading” went with it. TVO’s final departure from the Park in 2008 raised eyebrows, though Paikin, a former Queen’s Park correspondent and the author of a book on Robarts, still offers insightful comments about provincial politics on his robust blog.

Many newspapers, including The Windsor Star, the London Free Press and The Hamilton Spectator have also left. Today, one reporter from the Ottawa Citizen and another Canwest reporter, filing for the National Post and the rest of the chain, are the only ones left. “You’ve got fewer people chasing a diversity of stories,” says former Globe and Mail correspondent Richard Mackie. “They have less and less time to go after stories that might interest them and they have to spend more time on the stories that everybody else is writing. It’s frustrating when you hear about something but you can’t write about it.”

Some prominent veterans recently vacated their desks as well. CBC Radio’s John McGrath took a retirement package in July 2009. An 11-year veteran of Queen’s Park, he got his first taste of provincial coverage in 1995 following Mike Harris, who led the Progressive Conservatives from third-party status to power. “It was the biggest change in Ontario politics, and I was on the bus.” McGrath says CBC waffles on coverage of Queen’s Park. “There are times it thinks it’s important, and times it doesn’t give a damn.”

The Globe once enjoyed a bureau of three reporters, one columnist and one researcher. In March 2009, management shuffled columnist Murray Campbell out of Queen’s Park. He resigned and is now the communications director at the Ontario Power Authority. Hearing rumours that the Globe wouldn’t replace Campbell, the party leaders told publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley the move was a mistake. “They all recognized that he had a very long institutional memory of the place,” says Graham Murray, president of G.P. Murray Research Ltd., which releases the subscriber-only newsletter Inside Queen’s Park every two weeks. “He wrote very well, had a good sense of the place, a good political gut and he, in various ways, had a lot to bring to the process. Also a charming fellow.”

Past and present correspondents speculate that the Campbell controversy was one reason behind the end of Edward Greenspon’s days as the paper’s editor-in-chief. And whether or not the Globe was bowing to pressure from the politicians or from readers, Adam Radwanski took over the column in September, which he supplements with a blog on theglobeandmail.com. He and reporter Karen Howlett are now the only full-time members of the Globe’s bureau.

Even the politicians seem worried enough by the changes to voice their concerns in public. “What government relies on at the end of the day is an informed and caring citizenry. And that depends on you folks doing your jobs well and having the resources you need to do that job well,” commented Premier Dalton McGuinty at a press conference the month Campbell left. “But, mostly, I’ve seen a lot of you go. That has not been a healthy development.”

* * *

Beyond the most-frequented halls and visitor-friendly sections of Queen’s Park, the venerable building can be a maddening asymmetrical maze. A stairwell may lead to several press gallery offices or into the stern gaze of a gentleman in a security uniform politely asking visitors to turn right around and go back the way they came. Lacquered wooden door frames, reaching from floor to ceiling, and beige walls evoke a sense of foreboding. If Queen’s Park was a source, it would radiate a don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you vibe.

Rath, also a correspondent for Hamilton’s CHCH-TV, speeds through the twisting halls and half-mazes as he goes about his daily business. His office, which he shares with Global’s Sean Mallen, is a mess of papers, press releases and television equipment. His desk is particularly cluttered, accented by a Barack Obama bobble-head, and a medical face mask hanging from a shaded lamp. A tacky navy blue corduroy recliner sits beside it. Mallen’s desk is similarly cluttered, but surrounded instead by calendars and Ontario party rosters with scribbled notes on MPP mug shots. The two are an odd couple: Rath is tall, clad in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans and greets people with, “Hey, how ya doing?” The shorter Mallen—who, along with contributing stories to Global’s evening news, single-handedly produces segments for his weekly show Focus Ontario—is well-dressed in a clean suit, has nary a hair out of place and has voice intonations that are simultaneously friendly and eerily made-for-TV.

As the gallery thins, the number of potential stories isn’t slowing, and journalists left behind, including veterans such as Rath and Mallen, struggle to keep up, often chasing only the biggest story or two each day. The amount of information available online or through Freedom of Information requests has grown, but reporters are frequently too busy to use it. And if they can’t do the research, their readers and viewers will never know what’s going on beneath the surface. “The news media have a very important role in a democracy,” says Rath. “If they’re not shining a light on what’s happening, then nobody can.”

The 29-year veteran cites the eHealth Ontario scandal as an example of the kind of story the press gallery needs to bring to light. The investigation of misspending and untendered contracts at the agency created to develop a provincial health record database began with Freedom of Information requests filed by the Tories. The revelations led reporters, notably Bliss and the Star’s Tanya Talaga, to start digging. Talaga’s first investigative story, headlined, “Health agency paid consultant $2,750 a day, documents show,” ran May 29, 2009 on page A6. The ensuing flurry of reporting culminated in an Auditor General’s special report that documented significant waste in the $1 billion spent by the agency since 2002. The scandal dominated headlines for months and led to the resignations of Health Minister David Caplan and eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer.

For his reporting, Bliss relied on sources he’d cultivated as well as leaked documents, but with no colleagues in his bureau, he also had to provide daily coverage of the legislature. “It’s tough because sometimes there will be three or four stories here, and I have to focus on one, but still maybe write two or three,” he says, giving credit to his bosses, who let him spend months on eHealth. “The station let me dig. I’m happy they backed me on that.”

Bliss has worked mostly full-time at Queen’s Park for seven years. But Graham White, who was a procedural advisor in the Clerk’s Office at the legislature from 1978 to 1984, worries about the high turnover in the press gallery. Now a political science professor at the University of Toronto, he points out that many reporters consider a Queen’s Park assignment a stepping stone towards their real goal: covering Parliament Hill.

* * *

As bureaus diminished in size and eventually left Queen’s Park, so did the journalists who staffed them. Many of these reporters worked for news outlets outside Toronto. Now, for example, the Spectator, like all Torstar papers, runs copy from the Star’s bureau. Even Coyle, whose column often appears in other papers, sees a problem with this. “I don’t mind saying it: I don’t have a Hamilton perspective. I’m an east Toronto guy, working for a Toronto paper, and that’s what I write about. The interests of Hamilton are not at the top of my mind most days when I’m writing. I don’t think the papers are terrifically served.”

Not all of his colleagues see this as a recent or crippling situation. “It’s always been a bit Toronto-centric, I think, just because there are so many reporters here from Toronto,” says Sun Media bureau chief Antonella Artuso, who points out that people who cover Queen’s Park from the gallery need to live in or near Toronto anyway. Sun Media papers will often take copy from her and add local sources or details, but articles exclusively written by staff from the London Free Press, for example, are few and far between. And many of the stories coming out of the legislature have equal importance anywhere in Ontario. “Are there stories that, if I were working for the Spectator, I would write?” says Star correspondent Robert Benzie. “Perhaps, but I would argue that stories about all-day kindergarten are just as applicable in Waterloo or Windsor as they are in Toronto, regardless of who’s quoted in them.”

Jim Poling, managing editor at the Spectator and a former Queen’s Park reporter, doesn’t believe a full-time office is essential for quality coverage. In September 2009, one of his reporters, Steve Buist, compiled a four-part report on the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, featuring people whose lives fell apart because of addiction to the slots. And in 2008 and 2009, thepaper produced dozens of articles covering a C. difficile outbreak, a few of which appeared in the Star. Meanwhile, Maria Babbage’s Canadian Press piece about the sit-in against the harmonized sales tax staged by two Tory MPPs, for example, would have been no less critical or entertaining a read whether it appeared in the Spec or on Yahoo! Canada News: “For all its bluster and bathroom humour, the political circus over tax harmonization that dominated the Ontario legislature for 44 hours ended Wednesday with a whimper, rather than the populist-fuelled bang of a legislative desk.”

But other members are convinced that a full-time presence is better than occasional visits. According to Mallen, a reporter making a one-off visit to the legislature doesn’t know the long-term context of most current events. The ensuing story might be weaker than if a correspondent had been following it for a week, catching comments that had already been refuted or over-quoted days earlier. Adds Bliss: “If you’re on the phone you’ve got to be polite; you can’t interrupt. It’s a lot less of a conversation. You gather a lot from body language or voice intonation. The physical discomfort of being in a scrum can sometimes loosen the lips of a politician.”

* * *

The late-night drinking culture and the beer bucket in the lounge are history. Even night sittings are, for the most part, a thing of the past, to better accommodate a family-friendly workforce. “I want to pick up my kids at daycare, I don’t want to sit around drinking beer with the minister of widgets,” says Benzie. “Frankly, I’m not sure you got better coverage from that sort of clubbiness.”

At the same time, the government controls its message more carefully than ever. The premier leads almost all press conferences instead of sharing the spotlight with his ministers. And since Question Period moved from the afternoon to 10:30 a.m., reporters have less time to prepare questions for scrums. Before, they had a few luxurious hours to research and gather details to better grill their targets.

While the government may benefit from less scrutiny, the smaller press gallery creates problems for the opposition parties. Gilles Bisson, NDP representative for the northern riding of Timmins-James Bay, says, “Back in 1990, you could push an idea and get someone to write about it.” With fewer members—about half of the crowd he remembers when he was a part of Bob Rae’s government—“it’s hard to get them to write about anything other than ‘the big story.’”

When smaller, local stories do make the news, a single article doesn’t have the same resonance with readers as long-running scandal investigations. “Critical media are essential to democracy, and we have less and less of it than 20 years ago when I was elected.” Bisson compensates by appearing on local radio talk shows or dropping in on the newsrooms in his riding for informal chats. He doesn’t worry about getting quoted in Toronto papers: “Nobody would read them at home.”

While Bisson may have found his own way around the problem, Graham White believes the reduced coverage of smaller and local issues undermines the democratic role of journalistic watchdogs. “If people really don’t know what’s going on other than in very broad-brushstroke kinds of ways, it’s very difficult to keep government accountable.”

* * *

In early December 2009, Progressive Conservative MPPs Bill Murdoch, in a kilt, and Randy Hillier, his bespectacled wingman, end their two-day camping trip inside the legislature. That Monday, during Murdoch’s statement on the harmonized sales tax, he called McGuinty a liar, the equivalent of walking into Question Period with a sandwich board that reads, “Hey, jerks, suspend me.” It’s a perfect storm of looming taxation, partisan skulduggery and the media’s itch for salacious drama combining to create a Queen’s Park story with more fervour to it than usual.

A scrum gathers around the visibly fatigued MPPs, who declare victory over…something. Coyle’s column that morning spared no words for the stunt: “It’s no great victory for [Opposition leader Tim] Hudak that his PC party now wears the flushed and foolish faces of Bill Murdoch and Randy Hillier. They were faces of raving irrationality that any woman abused by her mate would recognize.” The online version of the article attracted 43 comments, more than any other Coyle column that month.

The scrum is a little larger today and the main event comes as Murdoch and Hillier call Coyle out for the column.

“How can you stand here and say the things you’re saying when you’ve been complicit in the same kind of thing?” asks Coyle.

“Because we have democracy,” replies Murdoch. “And how can you write the crap you write? Because we have democracy, that’s why.”

How’s that for a double-edged swipe from an elected representative?

Hillier delivers the second jab. “I wouldn’t even talk to you,” he says, then harps about “gutter journalism.”

They certainly don’t sound like old boys who’ll gather in the press gallery lounge to chat over beer any time soon. Though the sit-in ends uproariously, the Star’s website keeps the story of embattled golfer Tiger Woods at the top of its front page for most of the day. Readers apparently prefer gossip about a celebrity’s clandestine girlfriends to news of what goes on in the province’s central nervous system. The machinations in the Pink Palace can be just as lively, and sometimes just as scandalous—but they can’t cut through the din of pop idols. And informing citizens won’t be any easier if the press gallery continues to shrivel.