On September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines flight 007 trespassed into Soviet airspace and was blasted out of the sky. Two hundred and sixty-nine people died. On September 2, the western press, reflecting international outrage, condemned the Soviets as murderers and barbarians. The Toronto press was no exception.

In the weeks following the incident, cold war rhetoric dominated the headlines, news columns and editorials of the three Toronto dailies. The coverage was generally biased and emotional. It also served as a blatant example of how the press has effectively worsened an already dangerous chill in east-west relations. The coverage of the KAL incident helped launch an anti-Soviet hysteria that has not been around since the 1950s.

For four weeks running, The Toronto Star,The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Sun ran a plethora of stories about the tragedy. Unfortunately, the majority of the accounts, particularly in the first week of coverage, fell victim to what is known in journalistic circles as the “U.S. propaganda machine.” The biggest news of the day was the White House reaction. The speeches, proposals and statements by President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Schultz dominated the front pages and generally made up the bulk of the coverage. There were stories datelined Moscow, Japan, Seoul, the United Nations and the Pentagon, but all came from American wire services.

There was also an abundance of “stories” from unnamed U.S. intelligence sources and Washington officials. Except for a few articles from foreign correspondents, analysis pieces, and some reports of the Canadian reaction, the coverage during the first days after the incident had an overwhelming American slant. Granted, the press had a major obstacle to contend with: initially the Soviets were not talking, or were at best evading and stonewalling. Yet by relying mainly on American sources for information, the Toronto press parroted Washington’s version before all the facts were in.

Joe Hall, foreign editor at the Star, is aware the coverage was one-sided. “I know the U.S. public relations machine very well. They are masters at exploiting the media.” Although he doesn’t believe the Star was manipulated by Washington, he argues that the U.S. version was all the paper had to go on. “The press was hungry for any detail. I don’t think there was any manipulation by the American government, but without a doubt, they took full advantage of the situation.”

Gwen Smith, foreign editor at the Globe, echoes Hall’s view. “We don’t want to be a Pentagon news service, but so much of the reporting depends on what you get. What are you supposed to do?”

Not only did the three papers rely too heavily on information from Washington, all three went out of their way to emphasize the American perspective. Some stories were more obviously biased and emotional than others. One that appeared on the front page of the Star on September 2 reported that Reagan was cutting his vacation short in order to discuss what sanctions the United States could take against the Soviet Union for its “horrifying act of violence.” There was no attribution for the quote “horrifying act of violence.”

The reader could not tell if the words were those of Reagan or the Star. In either case, the point was clearly made. Another story in the same edition, headlined “Americans condemn barbarism,” called the incident a “murderous act.” Again, there was no attribution. During the first week of coverage, the Toronto press extensively used as the basis for news stories comments from those who would unquestionably back the American version. An article in the September 3 edition of the Globe said, “Most major western governments said bluntly they had no doubt the Soviets were guilty of what West German government spokesman Juergen Sudhoff called an ‘inconceivable act of unsurpassed brutality.’ ” A story on September 5 said, “When the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people on board last week, the Soviet government brought home more than ever to Westerners its insensitive, barbaric nature, a U.S. Air Force official says.” Other sources included U.S. intelligence officials, military personnel, members of the rightwing John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, and the Conservative Caucus.

The use of headlines, pictures, and the general layout of the papers further accentuated the already biased news coverage. Typical front page headlines read: SOVIET SAVAGERY; SOVIET ACT “TERRORIST”; SOVIET STORY “FICTION”; MURDER IN THE SKY; SOVIETS LIARS AND TERRORISTS. U.S. PRESIDENT CHARGES; SOVIET SPYING CHARGE CALLED BRAZEN COVER.UP. The latest development in Washington was prominently displayed, while stories that questioned the Washington version were displayed lower on the page, with smaller headlines, or were buried inside the paper.

The Americans insisted that the KAL pilot was probably unaware that the plane was off course and that there was no evidence to indicate that the Soviets gave any warning before they fired. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said on September 6 that the radio transmission tapes between pilots and ground control proved that no warning was given. Hence the White House assumed the incident was a cold-blooded attack by the Soviets upon an innocent commercial airliner. The press patterned its stories on that assumption.

Then came the contradictions. The White House released a “revised” interpretation of the radio tapes on September 11. The new transcripts indicated that warning shots were fired by the Soviets six minutes before the attack.

Not only that, reports had come out on September 7 stating that Korean Air Lines had, in the past, used its airliners for spying. After a series of overflight incidents and warnings, KAL pilots had been given strict orders to stay away from Soviet terrority. Aviation experts doubted the 007 pilot and copilot didn’t know they were more than 1,000 kilometres off course. Other reports revealed that KAL had a reputation for trying to save money by making short-cut flights across Soviet territory. White House spokesman Larry Speakes admitted that an American RC-I35 reconnaissance plane was in the area hours before the KAL plane was shot down. He said the spy plane might have been confused with the KAL 747 by Soviet radar operators because the two planes were similar in appearance. The Soviets justified the attack by saying they thought the KAL flight was on a spy mission.

On October 7, U.S. intelligence experts admitted that the Soviets could not have known the KAL plane was a commercial airliner because the Soviet jet was behind and below the airliner when it fired, not parallel as was originally believed. They also concluded that Soviets assumed they were tracking the RC-I35 spy plane. At last, Washington was admitting there was another side to the story. So, finally, was the press.

During the height of the emotionally charged aftermath, all three Toronto dailies had run numerous pictures of Koreans burning Soviet flags, carrying placards denouncing the Soviets as barbaric murderers and liars, and storming the Soviet embassy. A large portion of the coverge consisted of the Korean reaction, which was, understandably, grief-stricken and hostile. Yet in the words of Robert Hackett, a media critic for the Edmonton Working Committee and professor of political science at the University of Alberta, “The focus on the victims suited the West’s ideological purposes. Every fresh report of pathetic wreckage or mutilated bodies washed ashore in Japan reminded us of the atrocity of the passengers’ deaths.”

While there is no question that 269 people died a cruel and senseless death, the fact remains that the press was initially all too willing to jump the gun and report on inflamed speculation instead of intensely probing the situation. The three Toronto editors responsible for the KAL newspaper coverage agree that it was, to a certain degree, biased.

Bob Burt of the Sun says, “Politically we are pro-Reagan on most things. Our philosophical and political bias comes from the right. In this instance, we thought Reagan had seen the light, We were remiss about not getting more background information. We should have had more stories about the Soviet side, but I don’t ever want to see this paper becoming apologists for the Soviet Union,”

Joe Hall at the Star says it was “clear as daylight” to him that there were some slipups, but he asserts, “We are a newspaper coming out with five to six editions a day. It’s easy for someone to piece through and analyze and balance the situation later, but at the time we had to deal with the information we were getting.”

Conceding that some of the news stories were “slightly biased,” Gwen Smith at the Globe says, “Copy editors and reporters are humans, and the initial reaction was a human one,”

In the weeks following the incident, the outrage subsided as new evider.1ce was uncovered, and the coverage became more balanced, The Star had the most stories !openly contradicting the Washington view, raising doubts about the events, and questioning Reagan’s political motives, Among them were analysis pieces, wire stories and stringers’ copy, including “Special to the Star” features. The headlines now read: SUSPICIONS MOUNTS-WAS KOREAN JET SPYING? AIRLINER UNRECOGNIZABLE. EXPERTS SAY; WHY? THERE ARE MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS IN THE RIDDLE OER JET’S FINAL FLIGHT.

The Globe followed suit with head. lines stating SOVIETS DIDN’T KNOW JET WAS 747. U.S. EXPERTS SAYS; AIRLINE PASSANGERS REGULARLY PUT AT RISK DEFENCE EDITOR SAYS.. On September 30, the Globe also published a full-page chart outlining how the story had changed during the four weeks of coverage. More important, the chart raised vital questions about the entire incident,

The Toronto Sun however, had virtually no stories that countered its initial view, while there was a genuine, if belated, attempt by two of the three dailies to present alternative view points, the body of the coverage remained focussed on the Americanized version. According to the University of Alberta’s Hackett, this was because “one factor making an event newsworthy is its consonance with preexisting expectations. The KAL flight 007 fitted spectacularly well the media’s stereotype of the U.S.S.R. as a brutal, totalitarian threat to world peace.”

For example, an editorial in the Globe said: “It may be too soon to expect answers to all the questions raised by the shooting down of an off-course South Korean passenger jet in Soviet airspace last Thursday. But it is not too soon to recognize the cold-blooded Russian decision to open fire on a defenseless passenger aircraft as another chapter in the long and dismal record of heavy handed Soviet inhumanity

As long as Russia behaves as brutally as it did toward the strayed KAL aircraft it can expect to have its aims and methods viewed by the rest of the world with deep and justified mistrust.”

It reads like a typical editorial published during the KAL flight 007 coverage. But it wasn’t. The editorial appeared in the Globe in April, 1978, after a KAL passenger plane trespassed into Soviet airspace near the Murmansk military zone, was fired upon, and forced to land on a frozen lake. Two people died, not 269, yet the response was the same.

Hackett believes the press covered the ’83 KAL story from three opposing political perspectives. One was the “evil empire” theme: “The destruction of KAL was a terrorist act to sacrifice the lives of innocent human beings, which exemplifies the U.S.S.R,’s willingness to use every available means to assert its power, spread its influence., export its despotism, subjugate people, and threaten the world.”

Another was the “Soviet justification” theme: “KAL was on a spy mission for the U.S. to justify an American hard line in arms talks, so the Soviet termination of the flight was a legitimate act of national self-defence.”

Last was the “reasoned response” theme: “Without seeking to excuse the Soviet action, its intention was to reduce the hysteria and self-righteousness of the west’s reaction.”

The Ryerson Review of journalism analyzed the Toronto papers” coverage from September 1 to October 1, and found the Star had 31 stories fitting the “~vil empire” theme, 9 fitting the “Soviet justification” theme, and 25 fitting the “reasoned response.” The Globe had 30 stories in the first category, 19 in the second, and 21 in the third. The Sun‘s breakdown was 18-4-3. Hackett says the dominance of the “evil empire” theme in the coverage of the KAL incident had helped “unleash cold war hysteria, poisoning North America’s political climate at all levels.” The Star‘s Joe Hall agrees. “Unfortunately, we lost that conflict because a lot of people who were beginning to view the Soviet Union in a better light reverted to a cold war mentality.”

Even though new evidence surfaced to discredit the “evil empire” theme, many members of the public still cling to their first response to the incident. This deeply troubles media critic Barrie Zwicker. As a writer, editor, and dis. armament activist, Zwicker has much to say about the way the press handles the cold war. “First impressions are tremendously important. It takes a long time to overcome them. If we keep in mind that most people get their information from the media, you see the damage is done when a story is played wrong from the start. It is a cliche, but there is a lot of truth to it: the refinements never have the same impact as the first story.”

The impact of the KAL tragedy, combined with the nuclear arms race, increasing international tensions, and the press’ willingness to accept the line of the “authorities” without question, has created a dangerous synergy in which the world’s future is now standing on a very shaky foundation. Gary Lautens, executive managing editor of the Star during the KAL coverage, says the cold war and the nuclear arms race are the “number one moral issues of the day.” Of the press’ response to the KAL tragedy, he says, “I don’t think people in Russia have a bloodthirsty attitude. By reacting this way it seems we are programming ourselves to some cataclysmic end. No doubt tensions are high and to start inflaming them is creating an emotional atmosphere we could do without.”

The press, Lautens says, has to be “very wise and patient. We have to criticize both sides. The Russians are not murderers, and the Americans aren’t angels. We have to be reasonable and understanding, and not pop off without any information.” His views on cold war tensions were summed up in an interview in Sources. “There’s no way that I as a journalist, as a human being, as a father, and as a husband can stand back and be passive andjust record this insanity. I’ve got to try to stop this insanity. And I do it the best way I can. I try to do it with facts, but there’s a gut passion and feeling about it, that this is madness and somebody’s got to stand up and say stop.”

To avoid a recurrence of the questionable journalistic practices so obvious after the KAL incident, Barrie Zwicker thinks the press must adopt some new values. “One is we need to adopt a global perspective. Journalism practised within the blinders of the state is tunnel vision journalism, written from the point of view of ‘our side.’ We also need to be aware of serving the leadership or status quo, under the guise of telling the truth. To unduly report only the statements of leaders is not telling the truth. Skepticism is a basic requirement of a journalist. And I think we need to adopt a more historical sensibility. We have to extend our perspective back in time.”

The impact of the KAL incident upon both east and west has been devastating. But it may have taught the members of the media an invaluable lesson. As long as skepticism, criticism and evaluation remain sacred journalistic tools, we can go along way toward making the press part of the solution rather than part of the problem.~

Press failed to ask questions: Zwicker

As a democratic/socialist, calling himself a “western dissident,” media critic Barrie Zwicker, editor of Sources and former editor of Content magazine, strongly criticized the way the Toronto press covered the KAL tragedy. The following are excerpts from a recent interview with the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

REVIEW: You recently said in Now magazine that the Toronto coverage of the KAL incident was a “megaphone for Washington.” How so?

ZWICKER; To far too great an extent, the members of the press are carriers of the line of the authorities. They failed to ask questions at anywhere near the rate they should have. And they are still failing to ask questions. Even the media themselves said there are so many unanswered questions, where are the answers? Why don’t we still know? What I see is the media doing nothing but providing the standard statements from the top, even when these statements are ludicrous. We just get the standard, stale perspective, the administration’s perspective, constantly in what are called the news columns, and it is really getting boring.

REVIEW: A number of stories did question the Washington version. Why do you think the coverage remained biased, even as the story changed?

ZWICKER: We all impose form on content. Once the media get the notion of how the story is, they get locked into it to a certain degree. They have a vested interest in it, and perceive a certain shape to it. Early on they perceived this story as the brutal Russians shooting down innocent people, after that everything would be played accordingly. The first story is the one the media go with. They don’t ask enough questions. The media should suspend judgment far more often than they do. They rush into a story and impose a shape to it, and after that it’s almost impossible to get them to adjust that shape. For that matter, it’s too late for the public anyway.

REVIEW: Do you not agree that there were some very good pieces in the Star and Globe that did raise some important questions about the incident?

ZWICKER: Obviously there are what I call interstices in the coverage. These consist of opinion columns, news features, and letters to the editor. There are what I call fugitive paragraphs in a story where once in a while you’ll see something that contains a serious question that you would otherwise see very seldom in the media. Or you might get a specific news story that is just a little off the wall by comparison to the standard, repetitious line.

REVIEW: You said that the KAL incident is a good example of cold war journalism. Why?

ZWICKER: The western media are so terribly one-sided and hypocritical insofar as the cold war is concerned. Wrongdoing on our side is downplayed, ~ while stories of Afghanistan and 9; Poland are big news. It’s not just the g KAL thing, it’s a whole series of things. ~ There is a massive distortion, so massive that most people in the media don’t E know they’re a part of it, or perpetuating it.

Of the many talented women who hold responsible jobs on major daily newspapers in Canada, surprisingly few have managed to reach the upper editorial echelons. Dona Harvey has been editor of the Winnipeg Tribune and managing editor of the Vancouver Province, Lise Bissonnette is the editor of Le Devoir in Montreal, Barbara Amiel is the editor of the Toronto Sun (which in some quarters isn’t even considered a newspaper). And then, there’s Shirley Sharzer.

Shirley Sharzer is the first woman to be appointed to the job of associate managing editor on Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Her title conveys authority, some power and undeniable prestige. A Jot of newspapermen and women would sell their souls, mothers and investment portfolios (and not necessarily in that order) to have her job. For now, it’s Sharzer’s. She won it with her intelligence, talent, exacting professionalism and dedication. She also possesses much natural warmth, kindness., humanity, and the admiration of friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, Sharzer is not content. She wants to be managing editor of the Globe, but she has been passed over for the job twice in six years.

“I don’t want an epitaph that reads ‘ever insistent,’ which is what it’s clearly going to be,” says Sharzer with a laugh. “I want it to say I really did run the show once,” she adds without laughter over a cup of tea in the living room of her second-floor Georgian apartment in Lower Forest Hill.

With Sharzer, such pessimism is fleeting. She thinks both pessimism and cynicism are unhealthy. But twoGlobe editors in succession have chosen not to award her the job she wants so much. Their decisions have left her feeling passed over, and wondering. Why didn’t they promote her? Wasn’t she talented enough? Didn’t she have the right skills or enough experience? No one ever told her.

A tinge of pessimism didn’t always obscure Sharzer’s view of her future at the Globe. In 1978, well on her way to becoming the first woman dean of the University of Western Ontario’s graduate journalism program, she was lured to the paper by then editor Richard Doyle. During her four years as the assistant dean, her talents had not only been widely respected, they had been in great demand. According to Doyle, “Editors were going to her for advice.”

His decision to hire Sharzer was prompted by a phone call from writer June Callwood. Callwood, who had known Sharzer professionally for several years, told Doyle that she might be interested in leaving Western. Says Sharzer, “I missed the real world.” Doyle told Callwood that he owed her at least a bottle of champagne for giving him the tip.

“One of the most brilliant things I did was to hire Shirley Sharzer,” says Doyle, now the Globe‘s editor emeritus. He praises her administrative flair and her talent for training new reporters.

Sharzer, 56, says she couldn’t decline an offer to become the assistant managing editor of a paper she had always respected. She found the mystique surrounding the Globe irresistible. Sharzer’s longtime friend Andrew MacFarlane, dean of Western’s school of journalism at the time, is more blunt about why she accepted the job. “She knew there was a good chance she would end up running The Globe and Mail.”

It appears this was not to be. Two years later she was passed over for the job of managing editor. Doyle promoted executive editor Cameron Smith to the post. Sharzer was made associate managing editor. “They gave me a title,” she says matter-of-factly.

A second opportunity came and fled last year when Doyle stepped aside as editor-in-chief. Norman Webster succeeded him in August. In October, as part of a wider shakeup, Webster removed Cameron Smith from the managing editor’s job and replaced him with the Globe‘s sports editor, Geoffrey Stevens. Sharzer stayed where she was.

Being passed over the first time hurt her but the second time was worse. She now knows that, barring unforeseen circumstances, she will never be The Globe and Mail‘s managing editor. Being left out probably hurts her as much today as it did th~ first time it happened, 40 years ago.

Shirley Sharzer was born in Winnipeg on January 23,1928, the third of four children of Russian immigrant~ Abraham Jack and Judith Lev. By the age of 16, she had entered the University of Manitoba to study English and, to her great surprise and pleasure, was being rushed by a sorority. The unexpected recognition ended abruptly. The sorority discovered Sharzer was Jewish. The sorority did not admit Jews. Being dropped and ignored after all the attention deeply affected her.

“That was my first experience of being ostracized and it hurt. A lot,” she says quietly.

Finding herself emotionally unprepared for university at such a young age, Sharzer quit a year and a half later and was lucky enough to snare a reporting job. When a printer’s strike at both the Winnipeg Tribune and Free Press closed the two newspapers on November 8, 1945, the printer’s union

started a bi-weekly newspaper, the Winnipeg News, to keep its members working. Shy and inexperienced, Sharzer applied for a job as a reporter and got it.

The job at the News was the start of a career in newspaper journalism for Sharzer. While it has been a career of many rewards, it has also been one of setbacks and frustrating discrimination. When she was at the News, she was led out of preliminary hearings by police to prevent her hearing descriptions of sexual or violent crimes. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have the brains to say no.” When the strike ended, she was hired as a day editor by British United Press, now United Press Canada, but was fired within days because head office decided she was too young to do the job. Sharzer was crushed. “I remember going home and thinking it was the end of the world.”

Not one to pine or whine about lost opportunity, she found a job at the Hudson’s Bay Co. in the complaints department, then worked briefly for the Winnipeg Citizen, a short-lived, left-leaning newspaper. At 20, she was hired as a reporter by the Winnipeg Free Press. After covering city hall, she became the first Manitoba newspaperwoman to be assigned to the provincial legislature. In 1950, at 22, she married Meyer Sharzer, the paper’s city editor. Four years later she met discrimination again. She became pregnant, and that effectively ended her reporting career.

“They never said it in so many words, but the Free Press didn’t want me out reporting while pregnant,” says Sharzer. “It was suggested that I go to work on the desk,” She was quietly moved to copy editing from the reporting she loved. After her son was born, she opted out of the newspaper business for ten years to raise him and a daughter born almost two years later. She and her husband moved the family to Montreal and then Toronto. In 1964, tired of doing unpaid community work while paying for expensive babysitters, she took a job at The Toronto Telegram.

Hired to write cutlines, Sharzer progressed through the Tely’s editorial ranks until, in 1967, she was being considered for a job on the newsdesk. Her career almost stalled again. A senior editor was strongly opposed to putting a woman in such a high-pressure position. Sharzer later discovered he was convinced a woman would be too emotional for the newsdesk, would cry a lot and would not work effectively.

Andrew MacFarlane, then managing editor, says that kind of reaction was typical of the times. “It was what old-line newsmen thought of women.” But he had a solution. “I said, news editors are always in here crying to me, so it won’t make any difference.” MacFarlane promoted her. He was never sorry.

When the Tely folded in 1971, Sharzer was hired by The Toronto Star as assistant features editor. Three years later she was made features editor. But during her last year at the Star, she was passed over for the jobs of city editor and assistant managing editor.

“With hindsight, I think I wasn’t promoted because I was a woman,” she says. There are former Staremployees who agree with her, one of whom believes “she should have been the first woman city editor but there was no way they were going to appoint a woman.” Ray Gardiner, the Star‘s ombudsman who was then assistant managing editor in charge of features, disagrees. He maintains the Star never opposed putting a woman in the city editor’s chair.

Sharzer says the late Martin Goodman, then managing editor, told her she wasn’t given the job because the pub1isher, Beland Honderich, didn’t think she had the required administrative skills. Sharzer was shocked because she thought she had been showing her administrative skills through the handling of a staff.

“That was the first time I knew I was passed over,” she says. When the position of assistant managing editor became vacant, Sharzer competed for it with a male colleague she prefers not to identify. Both were rejected in favor of Geoff Stevenson, now managing editor of the Hamilton Spectator. On the surface her sex wasn’t the reason, but Harry Goldhar, who worked as a copy editor under Sharzer, isn’t certain.

“She would have done a better job than some of the people who got the managing editor’s job,” says Goldhar, who now owns a chain of community newspapers in Toronto. He added that when a talented woman is not being promoted, you assume it’s because she’s a woman.

In 1974, Sharzer decided to leave the Star and test academic life at Western, only to return to newspapers four years later and experience being passed over again. But was she denied the job of managing editor at the Globe because of her sex? According to MacFarlane, who still teaches at Western, it’s a distinct possibility. “You have to assume that’s the reason, failing a professional one,” he says. “If someone gets a job and the only difference between the two is he’s a man and she’s a woman, you come to this conclusion.”

While it’s a conclusion that can be readily and understandably drawn, it may not be entirely accurate.

Last October, Shirley Sharzer’s office gave new meaning to the word claustrophobic. Directly across the hall from the managing editor’s, it was small, cramped, and had no carpet or comfortable chairs. The art on the walls consisted of a poster by Hunderwasser, a Van Gogh reproduction and an art department illustration.

By contrast, Geoffrey Stevens’s office was spacious and tastefully decorated. The colors were appropriately muted. There was a couch, carpeting and a large authoritative desk. The paintings on the wall included a sky scene by Geoffrey Armstrong. Clearly, it was an office befitting Stevens’s position while, just as clearly, Sharzer’s was not.

The startling difference has been equalized over the past few months. A wall has been torn down to give Sharzer more space. She has a comfortable, plum-colored sofa and chairs, a chrome and glass coffee table and a pearl gray carpet. A new desk with a mahogany finish and desk-front chairs have been ordered to replace her regulation office furniture.

It is obvious to even the least cynical observer that Sharzer is being compensated for not being promoted. She refuses to place this interpretation on the changes, although she admits that it could be perceived that way. Redecorating is one of the ways the Globe is telling her that it wants her to stay.

“There are some people you’d be happy to see leave,” says Norman Webster. “She’s not one of them.” He adds that this has been made clear to Sharzer.

If Sharzer is so highly valued at the Globe, why have two editors risked losing her? And why hasn’t she left? Sharzer doesn’t hide the fact that she receives an annual offer from the Montreal Gazette, has been courted by an American newspaper and has received a substantial offer to work in a business outside journalism. But she refuses to use her sex as an

excuse for her lack of advancement at the Globe because “it’s very easy to pin everything on that.”

There has been much speculation at the Globe about why Sharzer hasn’t been promoted. The two dominant opinions are that it’s because she’s a woman and that she was never meant to be more than a token. Doyle solidly rejects both views and says the men chosen for the job of managing editor had worked for the paper longer although, “seniority is not the deciding factor.” He doesn’t want to give one encompassing reason why Sharzer wasn’t promoted because there were too many factors involved.

“I don’t think in the weighing of things that you could argue that she was passed over,” he says, adding that “Shirley wasn’t hired to sit by the door.”

When she first arrived at the paper, Sharzer filled in for the managing editor when he was away and acted in his capacity on Sunday. She attended and sometimes ran the two daily news conferences. She oversaw the foreign desk, photo desk and lifestyle section (in fact, Sharzer initiated the Globe‘s City Living section). Her duties remained substantially the same when she became associate managing editor. With Stevens, she will run the hard news side of the paper. Webster says the Globe wants Sharzer “to take a stronger and more active role in the whole management of our news operations.” These are not the duties of a token woman.

In fact, Webster seems shocked and angry at the mere mention of tokenism. “I would put that statement into the category of the bizarre,” he says, adding that no one with Sharzer’s qualifications comes into a job only because she’s female.

Unlike Doyle, Webster had a clear-cut reason for not promoting Sharzer. He knew categorically that he wanted Geoffrey Stevens as his new managing editor. He considers him a superior talent in the business and he never seriously thought of anyone else. He emphasized that it wasn’t a matter of considering Sharzer for the job and finding her wanting. “Not choosing Shirley had nothing-t6 do with a lack of ability,” he says, “I didn’t pass over Shirley. I went directly for Stevens.”

While Webster had known Stevens for many years, he had only a two-year acquaintance with Sharzer. He points out that Stevens had extensive editorial experience at the Globe. Since joining the paper in 1962, he has been a city hall, Queen’s Park and Ottawa reporter, a national political columnist, associate editor in Ottawa, national editor in Toronto and sports editor.

If being a woman hasn’t held Sharzer back, then what, on top of circumstance, has stalled her? Perhaps part of the answer can be found in a comment made by June Callwood. The Globe knows that Sharzer’s ability is more than adequate to justify a promotion, says Callwood. She thinks Sharzer’s management style is getting in her way. “She’s the kind of person who believes in a conciliatory, respectful, warm approach to people. Her style is marked by consideration for other people’s feelings. In a male world, this is seen as a weakness. If she’d acted tough and belligerent, she’d have been promoted.”

Despite the frustration, Sharzer enjoys her job and the people with whom she works. These, along with her love of Toronto, appear to be the two main reasons she’s still at the paper. If Webster and Stevens give her the responsibility they’ve promised, and more recognition, Sharzer will probably remain for quite a while. Even though she doesn’t have to.

“If she wants to go further and doesn’t think she can at the Globe, she doesn’t have to stay here. She’s one,. person who can pick where she wants to go and not many people can say that,” says Doyle with admiration.

In this situation at least, Sharzer has the last word. “At some point I may say I’m tired and haven’t had the recognition so maybe I should go elsewhere,” she says. “But I’m not ready to quit yet.”

The twenty-fifth anniversary convention of the Canadian Ethnic Press Federation in Ottawa last November ended amidst a heated argument between the editor of a German-language paper from Vancouver and the editor of a Yugoslavian paper from Toronto. Though the raised voices had strong European accents, the nature of the argument was unmistakably Canadian-a squabble between westerners and easterners. Baldwin Ackerman, editor of Pazijzsche Rundscau (Pacific Review), was taking exception to the election of yet another Torontonian, Vladmir Mauko, editor of Slovenska Drzava (Slovenian Country), to the presidency of the CEPF. That such an issue should turn this meeting of otherwise dignified and orderly people into a name-calling shouting match is a fitting indication of just how much a part of Canadian life the ethnic press has become.

Tempers had barely subsided when David Collenette, named Minister of State for Multiculturalism only 10 weeks earlier, addressed the closing luncheon. Perhaps more out of a desire to please and impress his audience than a deep understanding of the situation, Collenette suggested that a new era of multiculturalism was about to begin. He did not elaborate.

The majority of the 27 editors present at the convention were from eastern or central European countries. Over the past quarter century their commitment to their adopted country and their dedication to their respective heritages have added a rich dimension to Canadian cultural life. But the post-war immigration boom is over. The last 15 years have seen a 1arge increase in the number of Asian and black West Indian immigrants. If there is to be a new era in multiculturalism in Canada, the editors and publishers of these minority groups will be the key players, not the European editors.

With a bold black, yellow and red sign adorning the outside of its new storefront office on Bathurst Street north of Bloor, Contrast has the look of upward mobility. The 15-year-old weekly serving the black community of Canada now publishes 24-page issues compared to the 16-page ones of a few years ago, a direct result of increased advertising. Denham Jolly, the aggressive publisher who bought the paper in the spring of 1982, is confident it will get even bigger. There are an estimated 300,000 black people living in the Toronto area, 12,000 of whom buy Contrast. Another 18,000 read it.

Jolly feels the community will always have use for a paper like Contra.st. “The children of black immigrants will be Canadians but they’ll still be black and there’ll still be a need for a black perspective to the news. We’re sort of glad that perspective isn’t provided by the mainstream press because it allows us to continue publishing.

Last summer Jolly invested $50,000 in computerized typesetting equipment; last fall he hired Dudley Byfield, a prominent editor in Barbados, to take over Contrast’s editorial policy. Once criticized for being too narrow in its focus, the paper now has a multicultural slant and deals with more Caribbean and African cultural and political issues. New staff has been added, including Norman “Otis” Richmond, an award-winning entertainment writer and CKLN disc jockey, bringing the number of full-time employees to 20. “Our situation in a predominantly white society does not really get any easier in successive generations, which is why Contrast will probably be around for a long time,” says Jolly. He’s willing to bet on it.

No one knows for sure just how many ethnic newspapers there are in the country. Frank Kowalski, president of Lingua Ad Service in Toronto, says he is the national advertising representative for 210. There are scores of others that suddenly spring up out of publishers’ basements then die.

At any given time there are papers publishing in more than 50 languages. Dr. Joseph Kirschbaum, past-president of the CEPF, says their combined circulation is more than 500,000. But as Stan Zybala, a senior adviser in the Multiculturalism department in Ottawa, points out, “Ethnic publishers are notorious for keeping accurate circulation figures a secret.” Zybala, former editor of a Polish-language paper in Toronto, now monitors the ethnic media for the federal government. He says the media’s two main purposes are to provide immigrants with news about the old country and information about Canada. This formula seems to be handled differently from paper to paper, although it is characteristic for eastern European papers to include more stories about the old country and western European ones to write more about life in Canada.

The size and importance of a paper is usually determined by the size of its community. In larger ethnic communities there is even a selection of papers available, each aimed at a faction with distinctive regional or old country political biases. For instance, Toronto has Chinese-language papers for immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.

There is also an important publishing motivation not nearly as tangible as the size of the market and the potential to make a buck. Many editors and publishers are social or political exiles in Canada, dedicated to the fight for freedom and justice in their homeland. Zybala says, “As long as there is a cause to fight for there will be ethnic papers in Canada.” Sometimes it is a lonely fight. On the first floor of a triplex in a particularly seedy section of Toronto’s west end, Martin Radovan toils by himself, seven days a week, to put out the Slovakian-language Kanadsky Slovak (The Canadian Slovak). The weekly, which has been publishing for 42 years, is devoted to the cause of Slovakian independence from Czechoslovakia and an end to communist rule.

Radovan, who writes, edits, typesets and lays out the paper, was involved in dissident activity in Czechoslovakia before he fled to Canada in 1981. His office is small and bare except for one corner where the wall is covered with snapshots and letters from people involved in the Slovakian independence movement allover the world. But he and the Kanadsky Slovak no longer get much support from the tiny Denham Jolly, publisher of Contrast, is confident that Toronto’s black community readership will continue to grow

Slovakian community in Canada. Circulation is only about 1,200. With a note of resignation in his voice, Radovan says, “I think I’m going to have to start publishing more stories about Canada and more stories in English.”

Other European papers that started up in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s advocating an end to communist domination in Iron Curtain countries are a)so losing both their influence and their readership. Even their publishers and editors realize that Canada is a good place to raise their children, that the fight is an ocean away.

Dr. Kirschbaum, an active participant in the ethnic press since his arrival in Canada in 1949, is realistic about the future of many of these small papers. He says, “After a while it’s hard to keep fighting. It’s rare that second or third generations are interested enough in their forefathers’ battles to keep writing about them.”

Members of visible minorities do not have the Europeans’ opportunity to blend into the mainstream of North American life, but they too are injecting religious diversity and cultural flair into Canada’s Anglo-French heritage. Islam International is a monthly magazine devoted to encouraging Moslem traditions and values. In the eight years it has been publishing out of Willowdale, its circulation has soared l00 per cent to 6,000. Editor Mohammad Qaadri, who emigrated from Pakistan in 1965, is also president of the 140-memberOntario Multicultural Association. “Islam is a strong cause to fight for,” he says. “It is more than a religion in the western sense, it is a way of life.. We want people to know that Islam is not for Moslems only. We want to put the whole world on fire.”

Qaadri attended the CEPF convention, where the most striking feature apart from the advanced age of most of the European editors (including one who helped form the Ukrainian government-in-exile in 1923), was that he and the edititors of two Japanese papers were the only non-whites there.

The fact that only 27 of the CEPE’s 120 members turned up for its silver anniversary indicates that many of its members’ publications are so small they couldn’t afford to travel to Ottawa. It also indicates that it is neither an effective nor a cohesive organization. Even so, its membership is fairly representative of the ethnic press in Canada as a whole. European-language papers form the largest group, which is still true for the sum of ethnic papers in the country. No communist or anarchist papers are allowed membership, and while Canada has few such papers, they do exist-for instance, the communist L ‘udove Zvesti (People’s News) competes with Kanadsky Slovak for the tiny Slovakian readership in Canada. As well, the majority of CEPE members come from Toronto and Vancouver-Winnipeg having far fewer than it once did-and that is also the case for non-members. Since the first foreign-language paper was published in Canada in 1787-the German-language Der Neuchottlaendische Calendar (Nova Scotia Almanac)-European-language papers have dominated the field. There are now a handful so popular1″that they will undoubtedly survive for some time. Such Toronto papers as the Italian Carriere Canadaese, the Spanish El Popular, the Portuguese Mundo, and the Ukrainian Homin Ukrainy, and in Winnipeg the German Kanada Kurier, have large circulations and sufficient financial resources to withstand changes in their readership.

However, the papers serving the non-European communities are growing in both size and number. In 1971, only 14 of the 116 foreign-language publications listed in Canadian Advertising Rates and Data were in non-European languages. By 1983 that 12 per cent had grownto50 of 165 listings or 30 per cent. For years Canada’s only foreign-language dailies I were Carriere Canadaese and the Chinese Shing Wah Daily News published in Toronto. But just over a year ago Carriere Canadaese cut back to three days a week and there are now four other Chinese dailies, in Vancouver and Toronto, as well as a Korean daily in Toronto.

According to Statscan census figures, seven of the eight Asian languages spoken by more than 25,000 people increased in use by more than 100 per cent between 1971 and 1981. In comparison., only four of the 14 European languages spoken by more than 25,000 increased at all. And the growth in the use of one of them, Spanish, can be attributed to a large extent to immigration from Central and South America.

Though the decline in readership of European-language papers has not yet fallen drastically enough to cause general alarm, publishers with an eye to the future are already taking some action. The largest Polish-language paper in the country, Toronto’s Zwiazkowiec (The Alliancer), is about to start its first English-language section since it began publishing 27 years ago. Established Italian, German and Ukrainian papers are planning to do the same.

Many of the publications serving the new minority groups, Contrast and Islam International among them, already publish in English. This gives them an advantage in typesetting, advertising, circulation and administration.

Along with these noticeable shifts in Canada’s ethnic publishing scene, there seems to be another transition shaping up.. Last summer’s announcement by the federal government that advertising expenditures in the ethnic media would quadruple to $2 million seemed to be just one more case of the Liberals trying to endear themselves to new Canadians- DrKirschbaum says of federal government support, “Generally, if we are serious, we can’t complain- There has been much goodwill on the side of the government, and more goodwill if there’s an election coming up.”

However, this latest scheme to revive that old adage that the “Liberals always get the ethnic vote” may have backfired.

It was primarily due to James Fleming’s efforts as multiculturalism minister that the extra $1.5 million was found. He spent two years persuading the departments of Employment and Immigration, Health and Welfare, and National Defence to divert some of their advertising budgets from other media. Spokesmen for the CEPF expressed positive feelings about the work Fleming was doing for them. Then, one month after his August 1 announcement, Fleming was unexpectedly removed from the cabinet. His replacement, David Collenette, has had very little contact with ethnic communities. And the initial excitement among ethnic editors about the new money has disappeared because of delays in implementing Fleming’s policy as Collenette gets settled into his portfolio.

His luncheon address at the CEPF convention in mid-November was one of Collenette’s first public appearances as multiculturalism minister. Though it was a low-key affair with fewer than 50 people in attendance, those 50 had the potential to reach thousands of voters. But not only did Collenette have little to say, his aide had to remind him to announce that the ministry had approved a grant for the CEPF to write a history of the organization.

Six days later, Progressive Conservative leader Brian Mulroney and his Yugoslavian-born wife, Mila, were hosts to a huge reception for the ethnic media at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The 300 guests responded enthusiastically to Mulroney’s promise to include ethnic people in important decision-making bodies when the Tories get into office.

The contrast between the two gatherings may be a sign of things to come. Collenlette’s appearance at the CEPFc onvention was stiff and uninspired. Mulroney’s party, better attended than a similar one thrown by Trudeau a year before, was just that-a party. The response from editors who attended both functions ought to be enough to send the Liberals back to the drawing board. Jacek Brozecki, editor of the Polish Zwiazkowiec, a staunchly pro-Liberal paper in the past, was impressed by Mulroney. “He sounded veryoptimistic about involving ethnic representatives in the go’-ernment. Sure he was politicking, but he did it well.” Borzecki wrote an editorial for Zu’iazkou’icc that amounted to nothing less than an endorsement of the Tories.

Fleming, who seems genuinely concerned about preserving a vibrant ethnic press, is still hopeful that the European papers will survive. But, he says, “We’re at a crunch period. If heritage languages fade, and to get into Canadian society you set that behind you, then in time those older papers will fold because there’ll be no one there.”

So no matter how much money the Liberals hand out or how many promises the Conservatives live up to, the survival of the old papers and the success of the new will ultimately be decided by the immigrants of the next few decades.

Christie Blatchford is used to being candid in print. Eleven years after her column first appeared in a campus paper known for its raw look at student life, she is writing for Toronto’s irreverent newspaper, the Sun, enticing readers four times a week with a peek at her personal experiences. But just how often Sun readers glimpse her real personality is questionable because, for Christie, “life-lies and sanity go together.”

Usually displayed beside the newspaper’s daily tribute to a stripped down, macho Sunshine Boy, Christie’s column reveals to more than 250,000 readers anything from unfulfilled ambitions (she has never rollerskated) to relationships (with her parents, Mad Kay and Rancid; her companion, The Boy; and her friend, The Cret, to name a few).

Although friends say she has mellowed in her time at the Sun, Christie’s hardened, I’ve-been-around side still cuts through the column on occasion. She is using the same weapon, the lifelie, that helped her survive earlier times. In one five-day period during her years as a top hard news reporter for The Toronto Star from 1977 to 1982, she interviewed the horror-struck parents of a baby thought murdered by a drug overdose at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children then flew to Washington as the world and President Ronald Reagan recovered from his assassination attempt. Earlier, at The Globe and Mail in 1975, she had been hailed as the first female sports columnist in the country, and at the same time reviled particularly by one abusive Philadelphia Flyer. Newspaper writing demanded an aggressive, hard, personal style tempered with understanding. She gave the papers the necessary performance and the public bought it. It was easy to give, for a while, since she came by it naturally.

Christie’s parents, Ross and Kay Blatchford, still figure prominently in her writing. They appear as Rancid and Mad Kay in her Sun column for the same reasons she once gave in her Ryerson column. Kay Blatchford is a small, sharp-featured woman in her mid-60s with the restless energy of someone much younger. Even the white streaks in her hair have yet to catch up with the blonde ones. Her attention to detail is always overflowing into the lives of those around her. She admits to the occasional check on her daughter’s overdue library books and is responsible for a daily wake-up call to Christie’s apartment where three alarm clocks often fail to accomplish the desired effect. Ross Blatchford still carries himself as ramrod-straight as he did during World War II when he served in the 422nd Squadron coastal command. A fringe of white hair on his upper lip and well-worn laugh lines soften features surrounded by a bald expanse.

The Blatchfords read the Sun but only on the days Christie’s column appears. Ross Blatchford prefers the Star, or the Globe for its minor hockey league schedules. He had reservations about his daughter working for such a “strange” newspaper. “There’s no news in it as far as I can tell,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a columnist’s newspaper, though. I like to read Doug Fisher, Worthington, Porter, Buckley and link-he’s almost as far right as I am.” Politics is one of Christie and her father’s favorite battlegrounds. In his opinion, her politics swing far left, though she claims to be more conservative than most people her age.

Although the Blatchford family loves a good argument, they stick up for their own. “I know Christie can appear to be a hard-bitten woman but some of the stories she’s worked on tore her heart out,” Kay Blatchford confides. A friend of Christie’s agrees that her toughness is part of a “natural northern Quebec swagger that is only skin deep.”

Born on May 20, 1951, Christie grew up with her older brother Lesley in Rouyn-Noranda, the small Quebec copper mining town. She describes herself then as a chubby little rink rat in a pink tutu whose father, manager of the Noranda Recreation Centre, paid her 25 cents for every figure skating lesson she attended. Although she enjoyed sports like basketball, swimming, badminton (and not the tomboy attempts at hockey and baseball her readers might now expect), she never considered herself more than an average athlete. Anyway, in Noranda athletic prowess did not necessarily help if one was trying out for the high school cheerleading squad as Christie, who had alJ the cute little moves but not the cute little figure, found out to her utter devastation. And her “most liberated of the liberated ladies” life-lie was not there to make light of the situation.

High school was interrupted in the eleventh grade when her father moved the family to Ontario and became manager of the North Toronto Memorial Arena. Christie completed high school at North Toronto Collegiate after acing English courses and dropping maths and sciences. She went on to Ryerson, she says, out of spite. Queen’s, York and the University of Toronto accepted her, while Ryerson turned her down. She reapplied and was accepted. Ryerson, she remembers, was a wonderful place to make her mistakes when they did not matter.

Christie studiously avoided a lot of her courses at Ryerson. She suspects J.D. MacFarlane, journalism chairman at the time, turned a blind eye to her poor attendance in courses like sociology and typing-she was later chosen for the Perlove Award, a prize for the top graduating journalism student. She worked hard on her reporting skills.

Buck Johnson, Christie’s reporting instructor for two years, remembers a fearless twosome called the Gold Dust Twins. Christie and classmate Marcy (Marcia) McGovern often went on assignments together. For one team effort they took turns posing as a pregnant teenager to do a survey of abortion services available in Toronto. They earned a centre spread in The Ryersonian, a second-year reporting prize and an entry in the Ontario Legislature’s Hansard.

Now an exercise classmate of Christie’s.. Marcy McGovern is a warm wide eyed young woman buried under correspondence for the United Way of Greater Toronto. She describes Christie during her years at Ryerson as most comfortable in jeans, with a crocheted wool skull cap over-it’s true-a blonde, dutch boy-styled wig worn in first year and about which she is still teased. Although Christie was a popular, ever kidding, drinking and smoking personality around Ryerson, Marcy remembers her more formidable side, too. This quality was the key to her success when, just two years out of school, Christie became Canada’s first female sports columnist, the object of great attention-and abuse.

Oddball sports features is how Christie describes her first assignments for The Globe and Mail in 1973. A Christmas internship and a summer job at the paper the year before had helped her get the full-time position. She went “cityside” next as a general reporter for two years until an opening at Weekend Magazine came up. But at her going-away party, a last-minute move by managing editor Clark Davey landed Christie the coveted sports column. Since “mentor” is too trendy a word, Christie prefers to think of Davey, now publisher of the Montreal Gazette, as her “angel.” She credits him with the idea of a female sports columnist for the Globe, thereby giving her the biggest break of her career;

Davey remembers her as a bright, dynamic writer. Although he admits female sports writing was old news in the United States and he had already hired Mary Trueman, a religion reporter from Windsor, to cover sports, he was pleased when Christie’s appointment attracted a lot of attention from the Canadian public and media. Christie acknowledges her promotion was something of a gimmick, but it worked. Barrie Zwicker, then a freelance writer for Maclean’s magazine, heralded Christie, at 24, as a member of the “gutkick” school of journalism who, as one of the hottest journalism prospects around, had already lived ten days with a Canadian army unit and was not put off by locker room talk. Even today, Christie meets people who remember her best as the crusading sports columnist.

She was not always basking in limelight, though. Christie made many of the same sports realm enemies her columnist predecessor, Dick Beddoes, had. She remembers one incident with Dave Schultz, a Philadelphia Flyer who was kicked out of a playoff game against the Toronto Maple Leafs. While the crowd was littering the rink in disgust, Christie climbed close to the penalty box hoping to glimpse Schultz’s reaction. Seeing her, Schultz went berserk, screaming “Blotch face, Blotchface” while his arms jerked insults. Shocked at the time, Christie finds the incident amusing now. Schultz obviously had his regrets-an apology to her was included in his 1981 book, The Hammer: Confessions of a Hockey Enforcer.

Her sports column ended abruptly in the fall of .1977 when a Globe copy editor made last-minute cuts in her copy without her consent. The following day she withheld her copy and phoned the Star to ask for a job. She feels now that she behaved unprofessionally. But changes in her personal life had also prompted the move. That June she had married Jim Oreto, a {riend from her North Toronto Arena days who many say is like her father. Her life at the Globe had been hectic. She hoped things would change at the Star.

Christie did not work at The Toronto Star. She lived there. Colleagues remember her as someone who often watched the sunrise while sweating out a story. She had a reputation for being so tough on the job she intimidated.

dated both the competition and several in the ranks of her own newsroom. Star foreign editor Joe Hall, whose British accent still sends Christie into fits of laughter, remembers her as a junkie in need of a regular front page fix. And since she always delivered excellence, many of the big breaking stories were hers. He liked to work with her, he says, because her work often reflected well on him.

Hall figures that, if she had to, Christie would do 50 interviews to find five good quotes. After the Three Mile Island radiation scare in 1979, she was sent to Middletown, Pennsylvania, where there w~re so many journalists the townspeople were wearing makeup for television shots. But Christie found Joe and Irene Wynes, a couple who had just moved from Manhattan to live in a cleaner environment for their son’s allergies, And after the Reagan assassination attempt, she found Terry Moore, a young black from Washington whose brother had been shot in a robbery the same day John F. Kennedy died. Both were interesting twists necessary for a good story.

So assignments like the Italian earthquake disaster, the Bobby Sands/Ulster riots, the Royal Wedding, and the day Terry Fox ended his Marathon of Hope (the story of which she is most proud) became Christie’s as well.

Rumblings that “Blatch” and a select few always landed the plum assignments were heard in the Star newsroom. She was accused of going to great lengths on a story not so much because it was good journalistic practice but because she just liked to screw the competition. Christie admits that the accusations were correct. She was aggressive and liked to succeed where others failed but says her job demanded this.

Several of her successes are still admired by those who witnessed them. There was the time the baby deaths at the Hospital for Sick Children first came under investigation. The Star rushed Christie to a small town near Owen Sound, where the parents of Justin Cook soon entrusted to her every picture they had of their dead baby son. She told the Cooks to tell other reporters to call the Star if they needed photos. Steve Petherbridge, now a journalism instructor at Ryerson, was on the Star’s night desk at the time and remembers fielding calls from irate Sun and Globe reporters. The pictures, of course, were never surrendered, and Christie describes her coup that day as better than sex.

Joe Hall still remembers the day Christie was out of the office while a big story was breaking. A Mississauga man had murdered his wife and child in their home, then killed a woman driver in a car accident while trying to kill himself. In true Star fashion, Hall recalls, 15 reporters were sent to cover every angle imaginable. Upset that she had missed the action but determined to get involved, Christie sat for a moment and analysed the possibilities. Her angle, she decided, would be an interview with the husband of the innocent driver who had been killed. And since everyone reading the interview could imagine themselves as that unlucky driver, her story hit the front page. It had just the right amount of schmaltz, Christie recalls.

There was also a year-long interlude when she tried her hand at a joint column with Helen Bullock, who, like Christie, was a special status writer out of the Star city pool. While sitting at adjoining desks doing exposes on teenage crime and cults, they had become (and still are) close friends. Always plotting, the pair decided the column would mean less work for equal pay. Helen remembers being surprised when they sold the idea to the paper. But she was even more shocked to discover their plan meant more work. Since the Bullock/Blatchford Report was to be a tag for the daily top news story, they often waited hours for a good break or changed the topic two and three times as better stories came in.

Christie is glad the column lasted only a year. She remembers it as a sob sister, “poor-little-welfare-mother-of-five” column more often than the incisive reporting they had planned.

The column’s death was not mourned by many. Gordon Sinclair commented that the Bullock/Blatchford Report had been creating jealous rifts in the newsroom. In his opinion, the paper was better off without it.

After five big-story years at the Star, the front-page highs began to wear off. Christie’s marriage had collapsed in 1981-not, she says, because of her harried existence. If anything, she feels her career flourished because Jim understood her job commitments too well. He demanded very little. She did not work at the relationship. Still confused, she wonders if they ever should have married. But she was tired of the Star’s fast pace. A life where plane trips meant only .vacations was an appealing prospect. And there was David Rutherford. She had met him through Marcy a year after her marriage broke up. She wanted this relationship to last and felt spare time would be an important factor.

Taking a $25-a-week cut in pay, she sold her column idea to the Sun (where she now earns $40,000 a year). The editors were thrilled to get her. There was an element of defusing a dangerous weapon by inviting her into the Sun’s camp. Still, her friends were surprised. Most felt her talents were best showcased as a hard news reporter. Joe Hall still worries she will lose her interest in her column and be stalking Star reporters in no time. Christie says the temptation has been there but she’s wary of trodding on the Sun reporters’ turf.

Her new paper’s lifestyle editor, Pat McCormick, remembers being slightly in awe of Christie when she first invaded his pages. He enjoys sole male rule over an all-female section, a dubious position that earned him the Lone Ranger nickname in Christie’s column. But he prefers Mad Dog. Somehow that name stuck, too.

McCormick does what he calls “salami” inspections of his columnists’ copy-there are a few things considered too rude to run at even the Sun. Otherwise he seldom alters their work. Christie likes to watch over his shoulder while he checks her column. McCormick found it unnerving at first, but now enjoys the ritual as long as others don’t try the same trick. He too wonders whether Christie’s column will continue to challenge her.

Christie agrees with critics that her column is self-absorbed. But she hopes her readers relate to her experiences because they “watch the same crummy TV shows and have bizarre things happen in their .lives too.” Then again, a day when column ideas are scarce might produce “Urgent Questions About Sex”-in short, flippant expediency. Her column is far from the best work she’s ever done. Still, it allows her the time to live an ordered and predictable life. It’s what she wants.

She lives not-so-quietly with David, an advertising copywriter alias The Boy (he’s younger), in a house near Dufferin and Dupont-little Italy, Portugal and the Caribbean, she calls it. Her plans for the future are uncertain. For now, she’s happy at the Sun. But her biggest fear is that someday she will write irrelevant raunch like columnist Paul Rimstead. “What a horrible thing,” she says.

We can add the Davey Committee and the Kent Commission to the “boneyards of broken dreams,” the description the Davey report gave to most Canadian newsrooms.

It is true that had it not been for the two inquiries, the first on the mass media in general, the second on the daily newspaper industry in particular, we would probably be without the press councils which now cover most of the land. Also, the cabinet directive to the CRTC against cross ownership of newspapers and television or radio stations can be traced to a Kent recommendation, which was preceded by a Davey recommendation along the same lines.

But these are rather slim pickings, especially from the menu of reform set out by Tom Kent and his Royal Commission on Newspapers. What went wrong? I will try to give some answers in terms of the work of the commission, for which I was director of research, and in terms of the political, administrative and juridical environment in which the recommendations were made and considered by the government.

In 1980 Kent and his fellow commissioners, Laurent Picard and the late Borden Spears, saw themselves picking up where Senator Keith Davey and his Special Senate Committee on Mass Media had left off a decade before: updating its information, broadening and deepening its lines of inquiry, particularly into the economics and organization of the daily newspaper industry, and looking at the newspapers both in the world context of what response there had been to concentration in other countries and in the context of the rapidly changing technology of computer communications. As the commission gained information through its hearings and research program, it became steadily more impressed by the impact on journalism not simply of concentration of newspaper ownership, but of the concentration of ownership of newspapers and other media and, more alarmingly, even larger interests outside the media. Some papers faced the twin dangers of being used as cash cows to build other parts of the business groups to which they belonged, and as shields to protect their owners from adverse publicity. The commission took an institutional and organizational approach toward concentration, seeking to determine whether it might lessen the diversity and independence of the community’s sources of journalism. It deliberately did not try to sit as a kind of super press council, passing judgment on editorial content. And It painstakingly steered clear of the role which would be that of the courts: to see whether any existing law had been broken. I think the approach was right, though unexciting. But-with hindsight-it would have been more effective if the commission had not been trapped by its tenth month deadline, a point to which I will return later.

What is basic to both the Davey and Kent recommendations is the principle of the public’s right to a free flow of information and opinion from a diversity of sources. Davey had recommended the creation of a Press Ownership Review Board empowered to prevent mergers or takeovers of newspapers, and periodicals as well. Kent called for creation of a g Press Rights Panel with broad power to prevent mergers and takeovers of newspapers, prevent cross-media ownership, order divestment in certain cases of concentrated ownership, and oversee a system of editors’ contracts and local consultative committees for papers that constituted a minority of their owners’ interests; Kent also suggested some tax measures and subsidies to offset the effects of concentration. From the outset of the Commission’s work, most journalists had been skeptical that there would be strong recommendations, or that the government would act on them if there were. Kent, on the other hand,. felt the government’s concern about concentration was genuine, its willingness to act firm. My own impression from some recent inquiries is that enthusiasm for the Commission may have run a bit higher among the powers behind the throne-James Coutts and Michael Pitfield-than in the Cabinet, where one senior minister, Allan MacEachen, then in charge of Finance, held the view, “Why get into it at all?”

As the Commission’s public hearings got under way, it became clear that there was no great public constituency for action against concentration. The Consumers’ Association of Canada took a firm position in favor of diversity and competition, as it had before Davey. But no newspaper in Canada was about to rally opinion under this banner, and the issue proved of no great interest to the other mass media.

It seems to me that this absence of organized public concern was the critical factor in sending the Kent recommendations to the boneyard. The newspapers themselves unleashed a tremendous barrage against the Commission’s recommendations as well as lobbying furiously against them. One public official told me he was “astonished by the vehemence of feeling against Kent personally.” He felt the publishers and editorialists had for the most part failed to recognize genuine concerns about lack of newspaper accountability to the public and the consequences of too much ownership in too few hands. Even after the government had sought to meet their objections concerning “intrusionist” recommendations, the papers had continued with exactly the same objections they had had to the original Kent recommendations.

With the Trudeau government sinking in public favor, the Liberals were less and less keen to invite the disfavor of the press by espousing measures which, in any political atmosphere, would have been highly controversial. The opinions obtained by the government from its own constitutional experts in the Justice department, and from two independent experts, were that the many recommendations of the Commission depending on an assertion of federal capacity to I legislate to enhance freedom of the press were actually unconstitutional interference in provincial jurisdiction over property and over regulation of a particular industry. Unfortunately, even under the new access to information legislation, legal opinions received by the government are confidential. No government spokesman has chosen to give the reasoning under which several of the recommendations were rejected even before consideration of their political palatability. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the Commission should have had longer to consider its recommendations with the aid of expert opinion. At the same time, however, it seems to me that one does not expect royal commissions to come up with recommendations that can be immediately translated into legislation. What counts from such an inquiry is the grounding, analysis and direction contained in the report and recommendations.

The Kent recommendations received the usual consideration by an interdepartmental committee representing all the departments with an interest in their subject matter. But at the time of the Kent recommendations, the Justice department, and the whole government for that matter, was engaged in the biggest constitutional reform in Canadian history since 1867: patriation} and all that. Asserting questionable jurisdiction over the press against the provinces was the last thing the government wanted. The Consumer and Corporate Affairs department was moving for the umpteenth time toward new competition legislation and did not wish to be sidetracked by some special and controversial provision applicable only to newspapers; besides, the department was already deep into the newspapers affair through the pursuit of Southam and Thomson under the Combines Investigation Act. The Communications department, which might have expected to have responsibility ‘for the Kent report in the first place; Was by this time deep in the Applebaum-Hebert exercise of producing new cultural policies, offending quite enough people without taking on publishers as well. The Finance department was standing on guard, as always, against the use of the taxation system for non-fiscal purposes and, after the disastrous “reform” budget of November, 1981, all the more leery of unnecessary tax innovations that might get it into trouble.

When it launched the Kent Commission, the Trudeau government was still in the first flush of its February, .1980, restoration. Three years later., after the major battles of the New Energy Policy, the Constitution, and the Crow, and after the political wear and tear of the worst recession since the Thirties, it had become less and less disposed to displease the press with measures that seemed to have no vote winning power. In the summer of 1983, Jim Fleming had floated a “Proposed Daily Newspaper Act,” but it had the status of no more than a discussion paper.

Anyway, Jim Fleming was soon gone from Cabinet. Responsibility for the government response to the Kent Commission passed to Consumer and Corporate Affairs Minister Judy Erola . The responsibility for administrative back up to the responsible minister passed from the Privy Council Office to Mrs. Erola’s department. Coutts and Pitfield, backers of dealing with concentration of the press, had left. And on behalf of the prime minister in waiting, Perrin Beatty was saying to the Canadian Daily Newspaper Publishers Association, “Brian Mulroney has asked me to tell you how the Progressive Conservative Party intends to proceed. We are opposed to the [newspaper] bill in its entirety.” My best information is that Mrs. Erola does not regard the bill as a priority for reconsideration. It looks like a dead parrot up to the election, and quite likely an even deader one thereafter.

But there are those who still believe, of course, with the Kent Commission, that ” freedom of the press is nota property right of owners. It is a right of the people. It is part of their right to free expression, inseparable from their right to inform themselves.” They believe with the Commission that “the key problem. …is the limitation of those rights by undue concentration of ownership and control of the Canadian daily newspaper industry.” they believe that such undue concentration mocks the guarantee of freedom of expression, and freedom of the press and other media of communication, now entrenched in the Canadian Constitution. And if they are right in those beliefs, then some day they will prevail; for there must be some constitutional remedy for a constitutional wrong.

In a small room midway down a hallway at the University of Western Ontario sits a solitary journalist monitoring Canadian Press wires and writing and rewriting agricultural news. Judith Pratt is compiling Westex, Canada’s first news service adapted for the twoway electronic medium, videotex. Some of Western’s journalism students

spend time in this second-floor newsroom at Middlesex College, but for the most part, Pratt communicates only with her video display terminal. It punches out 20 to 30 stories per day for Grassroots, an agricultural-business videotex service for farmers. Each story is short, 150 words or fewer, but taken together they may signal the beginning of the end for newspapers as we know them.

Today, February 14, Pratt’s top story is on an international trade agreement. Her headline reads “U.S. to accept canola oil.” Three screens of print – electronic pages – tell the rest. The first page has only two sentences: “The efforts of canola growers in Western Canada to lobby the U .S. Food and Drug Administration into permitting importing of canola oil will soon pay off /space/ The U.S. regulatory body is preparing to lift its embargo on the oil, which can be used for cooking or as an ingredient in processed foods, says the U.S. ambassador.”

Page two starts with the subhead “Huge annual revenues,” page three with “Opens world markets.” Pratt is not completely happy with the story, but it’s adequate. It’s short, the lead is positive, there are no flowery words, f the sentences follow a simple subject, verb, object regimen-videotex style.

Most often Pratt rewrites the wire stories, either from CP or one of several on-line wire services available to her instantly through a gateway system called Dialcom. But some copy originates through newsletters, phone calls and information gleaned from one of the data bases to which she has access through her editing terminal. She might do some terrific reporting for a story, but her readers will never see her name. She doesn’t get bylines on Westex. Every day at 4 p.m. a phone call hooks up the university computer, in which an average 67 pages of news are stored daily, to its counterpart at the University of Guelph. From there, the news is relayed to a Winnipeg computer -the central base for all information that goes onto Grassroots.

Westex News grew out of a discussion between Peter Desbarats, dean of Western’s School of Journalism, and representatives of the Canadian videotex industry. The service started in March, 1982, with a mandate to “explore ways” in which the new technology can be used efficiently and effectively to transmit news.” It is also “an experiment to test traditional journalistic values and goals in the new technological context, the computer data base.” An initial grant of $80,000 from Western’s Academic Development Fund has since been supplemented by grants from Canada Manpower and the federal Department of Communications. CP offers its national, international and prairie regional news wires for low research rates and for progress reports on the new techno1ogy. The university donates space in both its college and computer. This year Westex is also being paid $1,250 per month for .four months by Infomart, the Toronto-based owner of Grassroots. Agridata, a data base in Mi.1waukee that receives another news service from Western called Candat, also pays $1,250 per month. The combined fees cover operating costs. Westex couldn’t survive without continued grants and the money from databases it services. In his first annual report last March, its senior editor, Henry Overduin, commented that “one of the major difficulties experienced by Westex is related to advertising.” Quite simply, advertisers aren’t interested. They would have their name and logo displayed on the bottom of pages on ‘which the news might be bad, thereby associating them with something unfavorable. Another reason is the small audience; even now Grassroots has only about 1,800 subscribers. “Given there’s such a small group of users It doesn’t really make much sense to sell ads,” says Overduln.

The Prairie farmers who receive Grassroots in their homes have 176 categories of information to choose from apart from Westex, including data from companies selling chemicals, fertilizers, equipment, real estate, seed, feed, grain and livestock. Weather and commodity exchange prices are constantly updated. The farmer can bank and shop on Grassroots, calculate what his costs on a particular crop in a given year might be, or send messages through the system to neighbors and business partners. Subscribers sign on to Electrohome Telidon terminals an average of 2.5 times per day and pay Manitoba Tele. phone five cents for each minute used.

The farmer who doesn’t want to spend $1,500 to buy a terminal can rent one for $89 a month. If he already has a Commodore 64 or IBM personal compu ter, he will soon be able to buy a decoder for between $99 and $250 that will allow him to communicate on any Telidon system, including Grassroots. The only other thing he needs is a modem, a device; that allows him to send and receive messages through a telephone.

Most of the Grassroots material is paid for by the companies supplying the information. In that sense the other “information providers” are subsidizing Westex. That’s fine with Infomart, because farm news is Grassroots’ fourth most popular category , after commodity sales, farm management programs and marketing analysis. Westex gets “hit” on or looked at about 3,000 times per month; the live feed of the Broadcast News wire service is also popular. Studies of systems in the U.S. and Britain reflect the same preferences.

In the news business now, news and advertising are a partnership. Newspapers appeal to a wide audience, including an identifiable group of consumers who will be influenced by certain advertisements. The Toronto Sun, for instance, is generally read by a different consumer group than The Globe and Mall But, unlike newspapers, where the news delivers a readership that advertisers buy, news on videotex can’t guarantee such an audience. Newspaper readers browse through pages, their eyes catching advertisements that motivate them to go out and buy. In a videotex system advertisements don’t need to be adjacent to the news because their readers choose to see them specifically. For example, if a farmer wants to buy fertilizer, he simply calls up the appropriate electronic page, which has been paid for by a fertilizer company.

It is this different relationship between news and advertising on videotex that will affect newspapers, says Jean Lancee, a management consultant with DMR and Associates in Toronto. In a speech to a videotex conference held in Toronto in January, she asked the question, “Who owns the bottom line?” And she answered, “Not necessarily the news business.” In videotex, Lancee said, advertising plays an informational rather than the traditional motivational role. Eventually the marketplace could be omitted altogether, with videotex shoppers buying directly from the producer. Already, Grassroots subscribers can shop at The Bay, and in the U.S. Compustore in Columbus, Ohio offers direct computer ordering and 50 percent discounts on more than 20,000 items.

As videotex beco~es the channel within which buying and selling takes place, the systems operators will be running the show, not the information providers. If people, begin to turn to computers more often for news, the operators will continue to provide news at their own expense. As traditional newspaper advertisers move to the new medium, especially those who use classified ads, newspapers will suffer from the stiff competition. Lancee believes this will inspire better, though thinner and less frequent papers. “The bottom line will belong to the owners of the new economic distribution channels,” she says. The data base will deliver the audience, changing the traditional partnership between journalism and advertising.

Infomart is the only distribution channel of significant size in Canada, and the joint Southam- Torstar venture has poured nearly $100 million into developing videotex on Telidon since 1975. Despite the investment, Infomart has failed to turn a profit. Videotex, dubbed a solution in search of a problem, is still struggling to find its audience and its niche among the media.

“I think content has to be better structured. The kinds of things a consumer wants to see have to be available easily and conveniently,” says Don Angus, vice president, marketing, at CP “It’s wonderful wizardry. The potential is unlimited. But there are very real drawbacks in how it’s structured and where it’s aimed.”

Grassroots, as North America’s first commercial videotex service, is perhaps closest to finding its niche. Infomart has also had some success with a system called Teleguide, which provides a visitor’s guide to Toronto using public access terminals located throughout the city. Infomart operates a third system for the federal government, called Cantel. Terminals are located across the country and provide government information to the public. However, Grassroots is still the only system to offer a news service.

As the market slowly develops, large newspapers are making sure they have a hand in developing the new technology. In the U.S. the Los Angeles Times and Knight-Ridder Newspapers have large videotex audiences. “If anybody is going to make any money out of this,” says Angus, “the news providers in existence now will be in the forefront battling all the way.” Western’s Desbarats agrees. “I’m sure that the large media corporations will attempt, as they are now attempting, to have as dominant a position in the new medium as they have in the existing one. Right now Westex has to rely on CP, and CP is owned by newspapers across Canada. The newspapers themselves will try to control the development of videotex if they feel it will be a serious competitor. It’s not a very healthy situation when the old medium is controlling a new medium that might become competitive.” In other words, Torstar and Southam can decide who is allowed on their data bases.

Though Desbarats worries that videotex may become “a parasitical medium living off the wire services,” he’s more convinced than ever that videotex journalism will grow. Every micro computer owner with a modem is a potential customer for a service of some kind, he points out. The selectivity and immediacy videotex offers are the strongest arguments for its survival as a news medium. “We produce a specialized farm newspaper for a farming audience every day and we update it constantly. I think that makes it more than competitive with print.” Yet he doesn’t think videotex will replace newspapers. “A farmer won’t look at Westex unless it relates to his livelihood. He’s not looking for funny stories.”

Busy, information-hungry people in a busy, information-filled world may turn more and more to computers for easy access to news. Simple, direct, instant, focussed information is a luxury that may become a necessity. But there is another set of adjectives at work here. As Richard Levine, head of the editorial team that produces the Dow Jones News data base, says: “PeopIe will tire quickly of the razzle-dazzle of technology and it will simply become a quaint, unused gadget if it does not deliver useful, accurate, reliable, needed services.”

It is not yet clear how important journalism and how effective advertising will be on videotex. As that relationship is defined, the fate of newspapers will be decided.”

When CBC’s Vietnam war correspondent Bill Cunningham left the plush surroundings of Phnom-Penh’s Royal Hotel in April, 1970, he knew he was taking a calculated risk. With his cameraman and an American reporter, he was setting out to document the presence of North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia.

“The day was hot, dusty and sleepy. We stopped half way for a lunch of chicken and red wine before hitting the road again. I was asleep in the back of the car when my cameraman shouted, ‘Jesus Christ, who are those guys?'” They had driven headlong into an ambush of Viet Cong guides and thousands of North Vietnamese regular army troops.

“When the shooting broke out I screamed for the driver to stop and jumped out with my hands up, shouting in French that we were Canadian journalists. One of the soldiers grabbed me and threw me on the ground. Another guy had a pistol right on my temple. He was all set to blow my head off.”

At that moment, a high-ranking officer stepped forward to hear the explanation that Cunningham was frantically fabricating. “I took out my passport, told my American friend to shut up, and told the officer that we were all Canadians. I deliberately lied because if my buddy was exposed as an American they would kill him and then have to kill us.”

After a few hours, and some skilful fast-talking, Cunningham had convinced the officer that the journalists were looking for supporters of Cambodia’s deposed leader, Prince Sihanouk. Cunningham said nothing of the army’s presence, which he knew was a violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. “I told the guys to turn the car around while I kept the troops busy. I started shaking hands with the North Vietnamese, trying to make eye contact. I mean, somebody really has to be a monster to look you in the eye and just kill you.” The last 30 seconds were agonizing. The officer could still have ordered his troops to open fire as the three drove away.

It was a terrible breach of security for the army to let them go, says Cunningham. But because they were freed unharmed, the journalists waited 24 hours before filing their stories. That gave the officer time to move his troops before the Americans acted on the news and made an air strike. “It wasn’t my role to bring the heavens down around his ass. It felt right to wait.”

Cunningham was lucky. In the four-month period that followed, he says 54 of the 125-member media corps in Vietnam were killed, many of them in similar situations.

And in September, 1983, Canadians were made painfully aware just how hazardous are the lives of the men and women who bring them foreign news. Clark Todd, London bureau chief for CTV, was wounded in heavy crossfire in the Shouf Mountains while covering the war in Lebanon. He died before help could reach him.

Todd had anticipated that a heavy fight for control of the Shouf area would come after the Israelis withdrew, but he had not entered the region foolishly. “It was not a conspicuous act of bravado,” says Cunningham. “It was a legitimate assignment. Clark Todd was an exceptional correspondent.” Now a producer and on camera reporter for CTV’s W5, Cunningham stresses that TV networks don’t push their correspondents into dangerous situations. “Nobody says, ‘Go out there and get your ass shot off.’ The time you decide if you want to take that chance is before you accept the job.”

Because of the medium’s visual nature, the television correspondent must often take extra risks. “The thoughtful print correspondent can take a look at the action and go back to the command post and write about it.” An added danger is that, from a distance, TV equipment looks like weaponry. “It’s very easy for a gunner to say, ‘There’s a guy down there with a mortar,’ and let you have it.”

Cunningham has had other close calls. During the Tet offensive in Vietnam he and several other correspondents were covering a large fire fight. “At one point we came sailing around the side of a building, and the first four or five guys around the corner were stitched with machine-gun fire. I. would’ve been next if I hadn’t stopped.” He says that, in a way, that experience was more frightening than being captured by the North Vietnamese. “The stuff was exploding all around us, and you can’t surrender to artillery.”

Despite these brushes with death, Cunningham doesn’t consider himself very brave. “The noise of war is so frightening, it takes your entire willpower to keep from running.” He says the correspondent has to be extra careful because it’s too easy to be attracted by the excitement of the danger. “When you come out of it, you’re on a terrible high. The girls are better, the booze is better, and the music’s better.”

However, this lust for adventure can distort a correspondent’s coverage. “You can become a kind of adrenalin freak. The ones who have gone for the danger, for the most part, have gotten killed. You’re not paid to get killed, you’re paid to shed some enlightenment on the subject.” He equates the war correspondent with the scholar. “It just happens that what you’re studying is taking place in front of you.” The best correspondents are thought-provoking and probing. “Governments and armies lie about what is really happening, and the correspondent feels an obligation to tell the truth.”

The life-threatening situations Cunningham has found himself in over the years have helped him to appreciate life .” more. “You don’t want to waste it, you’ve got to be much more spontaneous.” He jokes that it’s very easy for a correspondent to sit in a bar and talk bravely, but things change when you get out there on your own. “You lie in bed at night wondering if this will be your last night on earth.”

Cunningham left reporting on war to become chief news editor of the CBC, a change he describes as trading “one kind of excitement for another kind of intellectual excitement.” The world of life and death he describes seems far away from those flickering satellite pictures on the nightly news. But for him it is very real. “I can still see that pistol that guy had at my temple. And it still brings the hair up on the back of my neck.”

He had built him out of spaghetti. The great opera singer, Luciano Pavarottiwas nothing but a mass of noodles, long and stringy, oozing out of a classic black tuxedo. The cartoonist looked at his creation and almost smiled. He leaned back for a moment and glanced out the window of his studio in Clarence Square. The trees across the road reminded him of the east Texas woods and he thought of home. Papa hadn’t looked well when he’d left him a few weeks ago, after Mama’s funeral. He knew his father missed her. Then the phone rang. Papa was dying. He had to fly back as soon as possible. The cartoonist took one last look at the pile of pasta on the page. Yes, the Globe would print it. It was silly. And no newspaper really wanted anything more. He signed his name, Franklin.

“That man never had one good word to say about me,” Franklin talked about his father as we walked to his studio after lunch. “But it doesn’t. bother me now because he’s gone. ..You know, after my mother’s funeral in Texas, I looked for some of my old friends. It was strange. They were all dead.” He was quiet for a while. I tried to break the silence and bragged about my new little niece and upcoming wedding. I laughed nervously, stupidly. Franklin seemed far away. “It’s strange,” he said at last. “You talk in terms of life and I see everything in terms of death.”

For Edward Livingston Franklin, editorial cartooning is just one more thing he sees dying. It has been his work at The Globe and Mail for 16 years, and he believes that editorial policies, deadlines and interference are destroying his art. form in Toronto.

Now 62, Franklin was born in a logging camp in Chireno, Texas, near the Louisiana border and grew up to drive trucks, trailers and tractors in his father’s lumber and ..timber business. Self-taught in art, his flair launched him into newspaper cartooning when he returned home after serving in England during World War II. He began working for the Houston Press after winning a contest for drawing Lena the Hyena, a character in an Al Capp comic strip. From the Press, Franklin went to the Houston Post and then to New York to study illustration at the Pride Institute. He married and had two sons, and in 1959 moved his family to Toronto where he found work in the city’s engraving houses. He began to freelance for the Globe in 1966 following a phone call its then cartoonist Jim Reidford, but he wasn’t hired full-time until he’d spent 18 months at The Toronto Star filling in occasionally for Duncan Macpherson.

Franklin believes that neither his American background nor his age influence his work. The two other Globe cartoonists, Phil Mallette (a freelancer) and Tony Jenkins, are 28 and 32 respectively. “I think I might have a different point of view about some things but I don’t think that has to do with the fact that I was born in the States,” he said as we sat in his studio. “What lam is my Credo, that’s all.”

His Credo is a poem he wrote in 1970 for The Globe Magazine: “I like to draw/and my subject is people/more often political-always well known people/pompous people grown fat with privilege/or floundering in disparity between promise and production.” Unfortunately for Franklin, trying to live up to this and to his desire to “provoke and compel” his audience is becoming harder each day,

“When you make apolitical statement with an editorial cartoon, you’re supposed to be coming right down in a particular direction,” he said in a soft Texas accent, “But the newspaper business has changed so much over the past century that it may just be they don’t want anything that controversial anymore.” He stopped to light a Winston and put his feet, clad in dark leather boots, up on the wooden coffee table. “I really think editorial cartoonists are not as good as they used to.” He likened them to children in art classes whose unleashed originality is molded by those in charge until they lose their own point of view, their own sense of right and wrong. The free pen and paintbrush belong to past decades, not to today’s newspaper business. The Globe is respected in influential business and political circles because it revels in conservatism-its editorial policies, its choice of story coverage, even its good grey layout are confined to a traditional framework. Franklin admires the paper’s reputation, yet mourns the fate of cartooning placed in its hands.

“The Globe has an open mind about issues, and I think it is an excellent newspaper,” he said. “But to make political and social statements in cartoons, it would be better to have a completely free hand. And this you can’t have at the Globe,”

I could see the issue bothered him as he grappled with his opinions in silence. It was the simple irony that good editorial cartooning must shock and question, yet can survive financially only inside the newspaper establishment. “I’m not entirely happy with the cartoons I draw at The Globe and Mail,” he said finally, “I’m not entirely happy with any of the cartoons at The Globe and Mail. I really believe we are all too contained, too controlled,” Franklin suddenly let out a gut laugh, remembering one “think tank” held by Globe editors. At it he suggested that the cartoon space on page six be used by any illustrator who submitted an honest, fresh piece of work. “The publisher, Roy Megarry, just looked at me and said, ‘Why shouldn’t the cartoon be edited? Everything else is.” Franklin knows editing is unavoidable. “Sometimes, they edit the vitality right out of a cartoon,” He was simply suggesting the Globe print editorial cartoons that make valid statements even if they are not in line with the paper’s policies.

The smile that had been on his face a moment ago was gone and a disheartened look filled the rough creases. ‘1 don’t even know why they have a cartoonist,” Franklin said, looking out the window, “Maybe they just want something light and giggly to go on the editorial page.”

Franklin and the other Globe cartoonists don’t often join the daily editorial conferences. Franklin usually reads the front page for topical issues, then draws up one or two ideas for the next day. The artists take their rough sketches to whichever editorial board member (Norman Webster, Jean Howarth, AI Lawrie, Sheldon Gordon or Warren Clement) is in charge that day. But, says Joan Hollobon, assistant city editor and one-time member of the editorial board, “If Norman Webster, the editor-in-chief, doesn’t like their approach in the cartoon, well, they’ll just have to change it.”

Deadlines bother Franklin too. “I would like to be able to do something fine, finer than what I’m doing now. But at the Globe, you’re expected to knock it out fast. Sometimes, they dump something [a viewpoint] on you and expect you to produce it. I mean, it might be something that you could spend two or three days on and rightly should, but under the circumstances you can’t.”

Franklin wishes he could chose a subject, go to the library and research it fully. “I’d like to get all the information I thought I needed, come back and develop that particular subject, that idea, as far as I could to my own satisfaction. Then I’d go in and say without pomposity or arrogance, ‘This is what I’m doing tomorrow,’ rather than going in with half developed ideas saying, ‘This is what I’d like to do tomorrow. Please, Mr. Webster, may I?'”

Franklin is sure that if his cartoon angles were basé more often on well “researched judgments, there would be fewer criticisms of his work. “If I did a cartoon about Menachem Begin, the Jews would come down on me like crazy,” he said. “I have Jewish friends and they’re very sensitive. They’ll come to me and say, ‘You know, it’s not what you said, it’s that you really don’t understand what is going on.'” He agrees with such criticisms of himself and his profession. “An editorial cartoonist should be an original thinker in politics. He should study all kinds of politics, all kinds of governments, all points of view… I really don’t know much about anything, and maybe I don’t want to. I’m a child. I want some mystery,”

But Franklin has something more than mystery. He and other editorial cartoonists have power. According to Ben Kayfetz, executive director of community relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, they have a lot of power. “A man who has the skill can be powerful enough to influence public opinion,” he says. “One has only to look at the Jewish community and see that they have been stereotyped in caricatures for decades.” While the Congress as a whole does not actively complain about the work of Toronto’s cartoonists, Jewish individuals occasionally take offence, Kayfetz maintains. “It’s such a delicate issue, you understand. We want to be fair because cartoonists do need leeway. And we ‘realize that although they like to exaggerate and ridicule Israeli leaders by putting a skull cap on their heads or a Star of David on their clothing, editorial cartoonists do not mean to be anti-Semitic-it’s just the nature of their profession. They have to distort and they have to burlesque; otherwise, they are useless.”

There he was, Leonid Brezhnev. He was standing stark naked, with a dreamy look on on his face. And he was holding his genitals inside a hot dog bun while squeezing mustard out onto them. “O.K., America,” he was saying with his tongue still half out of his mouth. It was embarrassing. It was direct. It was penned by Terry Mosher (Aislin) of the Montreal Gazette. The caricature did not appear in the Gazette; it was published many months after it was drawn in Croc, a Montreal humor magazine. “It doesn’t upset me that

many of my cartoons are rejected by the Gazette because I can always have them published in my cartoon books,” says Mosher, The Montreal cartoonist is a great admirer of Franklin. “Ed doesn’t practice the sledge-hammer approach to drawing, but is very delicate. He adds a lyrical quality to his work, but is still a true cynic.”

Back at his studio, Franklin let out a hefty laugh when I reminded him of the Brezhnev cartoon. “Terry likes to draw the four-letter word, That’s not my bag. Even if I was working for the Gazette it wouldn’t be. But Terry got his reputation by being a radical. And even Andy Donato of the Toronto. Sun likes to shock.”

Yet shocking an audience can border on libel and civil defamation, 130b (;ale, a Toronto lawyer who advises several magazines explains that “under the laws, if a person is exposed to hatred, contempt, ridicule or has his reputation injured, he can sue for damages.” However, he says, while editorial cartoonists frequently defame their subjects, they are not charged because they did not actually libel them “Libel is a tort and you cannot commit a tort if you have a defence. In the case of political cartoonists, the saving defence is that of fair comment if the subject and situation are matters of public interest.”

Canadian politicians have launched many legal suits over cartoons, but because they place themselves in the public eye, they become fair game and have difficulty winning. A Gale points out, “The role of an editorial cartoonist in poking fun at politicians is regarded as almost a sacred tradition in Canada,” It dates back to 1849, when John Henry Walker’ political cartoons began in Punch in Canada. From 1873 John Wilson Bengough carried on the admired art as editor an illustrator of the political cartooning periodical Grip. Both attacked issues just then beginning to surface-east-west alienation, the French-English conflict, the America influence-and especially, the antics of politicians. Then see now, the favorite target was the prime minister.

The only time that a Canadian politician successful sued an editorial cartoonist and newspaper publisher was the William Vander Zalm suit against the Victoria Times. (June 22, 1978, the paper ran an editorial cartoon by Robe Biermarn depicting the then provincial minister of Hum; Resources gleefully pulling the wings off flies. But although Vander Zalm won his case in 1979, the verdict was overturned on appeal in 1980.

Franklin shook his head when we discussed the B.C. cartoonist. “It’s terrible what they did to Bierman.” Defantion laws should not be applied to editorial cartooning, said. “That’s what cartooning is all about-it is to ridicule Take a guy who is operating in a place that affects us or law-making procedures, Well, there he is and he’s bumbling. So you try to show him he’s a bumbling idiot. A cartoon is I made to say nice things about people. The very idea of a cartoon is to make a guy look bad, to ridicule him, to show the quickest, simplest way you can that the guy is do something wrong or that he is out of his element in that job.

Franklin glanced at the large framed cartoon lean against the wall, the color cartoon that had run after patriation of the Constitution. “Just look at those guys,” he says with a smile. “What a bunch of kids.” The premiers shorts and knee socks and with bandages across their faces, arms and legs, stand in a line looking humiliated while beaming Trudeau kneels, arms outstretched, in front of Queen holding the Constitution. “You know, at the Globe automatically hated Trudeau. They would support anyone but Trudeau,” he said, laughing. “And when we support a candidate for an election, we wait about six months and then rip the hell out of him.”

January 28, 1983, is a day Franklin will never forget. Norwill Joe Clark. In Winnipeg’s convention centre, the Conservatives were meeting to decide whether Clark’s leadership would be challenged. And in Toronto staunch Clark supporters were phoning the Globe to complain about Franklin’s cartoon strip depicting Clark as a decisive leader coolly preparing for an important day-and arriving at the elevator with no pants on. “Some people at the convention called and said the guys who were after Joe had made copies of the cartoon when the paper arrived and posted it around the centre,” said Franklin, laughing heartily. Later that day, the Tories voted to hold a leadership convention. Clark was on his way out.

“You know, he’s probably a really nice guy, but I just didn’t think he was right to be prime minister,” said Franklin, adding quickly that he still didn’t believe his cartoon had any influence on the outcome of the Tory vote. “They were going to do that to him anyway. I don’t think I brought Joe Clark down, that’s ridiculous.” The cartoonist laughs whenever he thinks about the Tories. “What a vicious bunch of guys. They’ve got their knives out all the time.”

Knives are sharp but pens are slaughterous, argues Denis Massicotte, until recently press secretary to Ontario Premier Bill Davis. While maintaining that Davis has a good sense of humor and is seldom affected by political cartoons, Massicotte firmly believes that “editorial cartoonists can certainly damage a politician’s credibility. Joe Clark is a classic example. The man was always unjustly portrayed as a weak leader-with simple eyes, a droopy chin, a flabby face, and, yes, even with mittens. How can you take a man like that seriously? And what’s worse is that the public is so vulnerable to what they see in the newspapers. They will quickly pass judgment on a politician according to the way he is presented in the press, whether it. is in a photograph or .”

caricature. While Franklin doesn’t enjoy ridiculing a person’s physical appearance, if a subject is fat or short or crippled he must honestly show him that way. “Sometimes, I’ve done caricatures of people and maybe they didn’t even see them, but I still .felt lousy for having done them.” But, he maintains, a politician’s fate is largely in his own hands and editorial cartoonists don’t have the power to ruin a career solely by ridiculing someone’s appearance.

Franklin stood up and lit another cigarette. “I’ve never really stopped and figured out what I’m all about in cartoons. To me, it’s just like having ajob and going to work every day. I don’t believe that I’m going to move anything or shake anything up. But Mosher would, though. Donato would. Maybe even Macpherson would think he’s doing something. I’m really not sure I do.”

He touched the stack of editorial cartoons on the table and looked at them pensively. “No, I don’t believe I have any power, but I do know some cartoonists who think they have some kind of power, which is really nothing more than having a big ego. I think the editorial cartoonist is. Largely ineffective and the newspaper industry could just do without him altogether.”

Franklin walked over to the window and looked out at the trees in the park. He seemed to be quietly searching, and then he found the statement he wanted to make.. “A lot of us now are just trying to be funny, just going through the motions,”

He paused.

“Sometimes, I think cartooning is dead.”