She is attractive, young and engaging, her slightly bouffant hairstyle and classic pearls a touch old fashioned. He is suave and handsome, well groomed and polished, his bright silk tie complementing his jacket puff. They could be the perfect couple on the perfect evening, and in a sense they are. She’s Gail Smith, he’s Tom Gibney, coanchors of CFTO’s World Beat News, the supperhour news show that has been sitting proudly in Toronto’s first place rating slot for the last 15 years.

CFTO’s lead is no small feat, especially in the Toronto market, which; thanks to an extensive cable system, offers four local stations, several more area ones, and at least three American signals. Torontonians have more choice when it comes to early evening news than almost anyone in North America. There is potential for fierce competition. But a study of the local news market reveals some surprises: Toronto stations are not involved in a full-scale ratings war – in fact, they are a long way from being in the tigerish state of some of their American counterparts, which have been known to hire, fire, plan and replan on the basis of half a percentage point change in the ratings.

The BBM Bureau of Measurement is one of the main industry bodies for delivering broadcast ratings in Canada. Up to seven times a year the BBM informs the television stations that subscribe to the service how many viewers are watching their programs. The BBM survey released last fall didn’t reveal any surprises. World Beat News remained out front, pulling an average audience of 183,000 of a possible 3,900,000 18-and-over viewers in the survey area, which extends west to Hamilton, east to Oshawa and north to Uxbridge. CityTV’s CityPulse News was second, with 153,000 viewers, and CBLT’s Newshour trailed with 122,000. Global’s First News, which airs between 5:30 and 6 p.m. drew a dismal 61,100 but the audience for 6 O’Clock Edition jumped to 122,000.

With these numbers, advertisers can determine the cost of advertising with a particular station based on the number of viewers and the station’s fee. But Toronto advertisers are quick to point out that although the number of viewers is important, the type of people watching a particular show is equally so. This means that interpreting the ratings has become a very sophisticated process as advertisers pore over the stations’ audience profiles looking for just the right audience to sell their products to.

And it is these profiles that reveal the almost contented way the news programmers have consistently carved and served their markets. While the size of the servings is not equal, there are no losers. The Metro Toronto region is big enough to allow four different approaches, four miniature markets.

Of course, ratings are still a major concern of Toronto’s news directors, and much of the television news seen in this city is still the product of an endeavor to retain, if not increase, those magic numbers. But each of Toronto’s stations has its own style, which stems from what it perceives its segment of the market to be. Each has found an audience, is not disappointed with the ratings that audience produces, and is, therefore, happy to serve that audience to the fullest. In a way, the news programs have become almost parodies of themselves. And the news directors, when analyzing their goals, reflect this.

CFTO relies on glitter and gimmicks. It offers what the ratings indicate the viewers want: short news stories, upbeat musical themes, creative graphics, visual variety, a professional set and a gorgeous staff. Ted Stuebing, CFTO’s vice-president of news, is happy with this approach: “TV news has never communicated better. It is wonderful to see it communicate so well.”

CFTO, of course, is communicating with the largest audience for early evening news, and defines its target market as simply all adults between the ages of 18 and 49. Stuebing says that these watchers don’t belong to one social or economic group but come from all communities in Toronto.

One of the things these viewers may have in common is that CFTO’s evening news has become a part of their family’s evening tradition. When asked to explain the station’s success, most observers mention this theory. CFTO has been doing the same news, in basically the same style, for 20 years. As one news director put it, “It’s formula journalism.”

This fall the station extended its news programming to one hour and moved the already popular late-night news anchor, Gail Smith, to the early news desk. Any other changes in personnel would be hard to notice, as all the reporters have the same look: young, wholesome and white. It works.

While CFTO’s format is firmly based in tradition, Global adopted a new approach last fall and now claims to be offering alternative news programming. It presents three half-hour segments beginning at 5:30, broken into local, regional and national/international coverage. The whole idea is based on the premise that the three shows be independent of each other. They are not. On the first two shows, the more interesting stories are followed by teasers that promise another look or more details on the upcoming show. It comes across as local news striving to be national in The Journal mode, but ends up looking not much like either. It may be trying too hard for too much and ending up with too little. When asked about the changes, Raymond Heard, vice-president of news and current affairs, said, “The trouble with TV is that it is a mass medium. The Globe and Mail has a specific audience. It is harder with television.” Anchor Peter Trueman, whom Heard says is “extremely important” to the Global image, seems to disagree with his boss on the direction the show has taken. He doesn’t think it will work. Trueman is frank: “It’s no secret that lam not happy with it.”

The $5 million Global invested in moving to the three part approach was an attempt to broaden the news show’s appeal. The station has historically attracted the 25-andolder upscale men and women of Ontario. The half-hour of local news that now airs at 5:30 is aimed at people at home; the 6:30 national and international segment anchored by Trueman is directed at a different audience. Although the network won’t reveal the operating budget for the 90-minute segment, it says there is an annual $8.5 million budget for Newsweek, News at Noon, the 5:30 to 6:30 segments, the late news and any news specials. News from Ottawa, including the Trueman report, is funded from a separate budget of approximately $1.4 million.

CityPulse News targets a much more specific audience. The evening broadcast is directed at a young-18 to 40-group, mostly people who live in downtown Toronto, including the ethnic population in the city’s core. The show is an obvious attempt to present City as the station that cares. Its reporters get involved in stories and issues, and anchors tell you they are really concerned about the stories they’re reading. They do all this with the distinct air that they’re having a great time pulling it all off. Managing producer Steve Hurlbut is the first to admit that City tv produces a type of participatory journalism. “Our style is very, very important for TV. Through people’s identification with the reporter, they understand the story better. They experience it with the reporter.”

At CBL T the emphasis is on serious journalism, at least in theory. Newshour is not as glamorous as the other shows and there are not quite as many pretty faces. In keeping with much criticism aimed at the corporation, CBL T has been labelled inefficient, boring and ignorant when it comes to the profitable game of marketing. But Howard Bernstein, the executive producer of Newshour, argues that CBC sells journalism above anything else, and that it manages to do this quite well on the relatively low budget of about $3 million a year that CBL T has for all news operations. It is a certain type of viewer who buys the sales pitch. Newshour attracts, on average, an older audience-most in the 40 to 50 range. These viewers have a higher education and income, on average, than the viewers of most of the other stations. And when it comes to news, they have different expectations.

Bernstein says the viewers are attracted by experience rather than image. His anchors, he says, prove this point. Bernstein boasts that CBL T is the only station in town that has “two journalists each with 25 years experience doing the news.” One of the two veterans, Fraser Kelly, explains the anchor role as he sees it. “In this age of information explosion it is important that the people who deliver this information have credibility. 1 think they get the credibility by experiencing the news, seeing it and delivering it in a way that says, ‘l know what I’m talking about.'”

The news anchors play an important role in attracting the right viewers to the right station. They are carefully picked to suit the audience their station has pegged for itself. The news directors recognize that the credibility, entertainment value or just plain likeability of a station’s news anchor is often one of the biggest drawing cards for the evening news. Toronto’s anchors are paid in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year. Their jobs are high pressure and high profile. As far as job qualifications go, the anchors are, not surprisingly, as diverse as the portions of the market they address.

The men and women who deliver the evening news do not all have backgrounds in journalism. In fact, very few do. Tom Gibney was once a game show host, Dini Petty a helicopter-based traffic reporter and Global’s executives discovered Martha Howlett on an exercise show. The anchors’ experience is not really that important, at least not to some news directors. As long as the anchors do a good job and are well received, they are a success.

Toronto’s news directors have widely differing views about the importance and technique of anchors. Global’s Heard considers the anchors as “the second biggest factor in news-the first being news.” His show’s latest package is a curious mixture of anchors, beginning with personality and ending with the mundane yet sensible voice of experience: The playful yet concerned air of Martha Howlett and the three nice guys-Mike Anscombe, John Oawe and Bob McAdorey-in the first section is a startling contrast to the sombre tone of Peter Trueman in the third. Jan Tennant falls comfortably between the two extremes. It is hard to believe they all work under the same logo. But there is one thing these anchors have in common: when the red “on-air” light turns on, so does that hard-to-define television presence. These Global anchors deliver, and, for Heard, there is nothing in the ratings to tell him differently.

Heard is critical of the role newsreaders play at City. “An anchor is a guest you invite into your living room every night,” he says, “and no one comes in your front door and does a somersault.” But City’s anchors often cartwheel and backilip their way into Toronto’s homes. There seems to be endless chatter at the news desk, and the anchors contribute to the fun, wow, celebrity-style journalism that has come to be City’s hallmark. Says Dini Petty, coanchor of CityPulse: “City has a slight irreverence and that is why people like us. They know we’ll laugh at ourselves.”

CityPulse producer Hurlbut is amused when the importance of ratings is mentioned. He says there is no question about the aim of television news: “Well, of course it’s going for ratings. Everyone is going for ratings, even the CBC. Think about it. It all comes down to whether you are effective. If nobody is watching you, you are wasting your time.”

At the other end of the spectrum is CBL T’s Bernstein, who, when pushed, will admit to being just as interested in the ratings as any other news director. “Everyone watches the ratings. You’d have to be a fool not to.” But he’s quick to take the journalistic high road that is expected of a public broadcasting service: “I don’t want to do a show for ratings. I want to do a good show and hope the ratings come in.”

Ratings are paramount because they bring in the advertising. A 30-second commercial spot can sell from anywhere between $700 and $1,500. CRTC regulations allow 12 minutes of commercials-24 spots-for every hour of programming. Each of the local news programs, with the exception of Newshour, runs the full quota of commercials. (Latel y the CBL T show has been carrying between five and eight minutes of ads.) With their stable, satisfactory ratings and attractive demographics, the Toronto stations certainly make money on television news.

As a result, any changes in their formats will probably be very slight. The stations are like amoebas, quietly assuming whatever shape they can in the space available to them. The situation in Toronto is such that each station’s market share is virtually ensured. The ratings are important enough that no station can risk major change. Because of the relative satisfaction of the stations with their share of the ratings, the shows have become self-serving.

Speaking from behind the number one news desk, Tom Gibney sees a basic problem in television news: “We are so busy serving ourselves to the point of saying, ‘Didn’t we look good?’ that we forget that it is the people out there that count. We don’t count.”

It’s been described as unique, essential and on the leading edge. Some compare it to a pulpit. Others say its community is made up of eccentric, committed people who honor intellectual curiosity and share a social conscience.

The object of their esteem is, surprisingly, a radio program. The show is Ideas, now in its twentieth year, and currently heard on CBC Radio between 9:05 and 10 p.m. from Sunday to Thursday.

Even media executives resort to a certain hyperbole when discussing the show. Eric Friesen, from 1982 to 1984 head of the CBC’s Features and Humanities Department and now executive vice-president of American Public Radio, calls Ideas, “an oasis of thoughtfulness, enlightening radio,” adding, “Its producers are so bright and know so much, it was often intimidating to listen to them.”

What about Ideas elicits this uncommon reverence? After all, its material is often standard fare: the economy, international politics, the environment, social trends and the arts. But Ideas stands apart because its producers share certain assumptions about journalism. They are not interested in getting the story first, or even getting the same story. The show seeks to answer questions that are not usually being asked, to take what journalist A.J. Liebling called “a good, unhurried look at the world.”

The mandate of most forms of journalism is the “perfection of immediacy,” often resulting in superficial coverage, Ftiesen says. Ideas goes deeper and further. According to Bernie Lucht, a producer with the show since 1971 and its executive producer since June, 1984, “We at Ideas set our own agenda.” The Globe and Mail’s radio critic, Elina McNiven, agrees: “You will never hear the party spiel on Ideas.”

Its respectably sized audience is proof that this philosophy works. Roughly 222,400 listeners tune in for some portion of the show in an average week, according to the BBM Bureau of Measurement. This compares favorably to As It Happens, which draws 604,000 listeners, and Morningside, which has about 900,000, since both these CBC shows are on at peak listening times.

The unit receives about 400 letters a week, many of them long and impassioned. Although the program has sometimes been criticized as elitist or specialized, Lucht points out that the producers hear from farmers, blue-collar workers and students, not just the older academics and professionals who represent the majority of CBC’s listeners. He’s reluctant to generalize about the Ideas audience, yet the listeners do have something in common, maintains writer and teacher Varda Burstyn, who has prepared several series for the show: “They are people who don’t want to be condescended to.”

Ideas has a curious history, evolving from Town and Gown, a filler series introduced in 1958, which, incongruously, ran after hockey broadcasts on the AM network. Three years later, Town and Gown became The Learning Stage, a nightly venture on CJBC, one of two local Toronto stations on the old Dominion network. In 1965, the show’s name was changed to Ideas, and it moved to an hourly weeknight slot on CBC-FM, as well as filling an hour-long spot once a week on CBC Radio.

Some of the early shows were less than riveting. Staff members still cringe when they recall a slow-moving 1973 three-part series entitled “Rivers.” About other shows, Lucht says: “I still can’t believe what they let me get away with in the beginning. I was virtually learning my craft on the air .”

The majority of presentations were more successful, as the program’s many awards attest. Ideas has attracted some impressive talent over the years. Poet Phyllis Webb was an early executive producer. In 1967, Glenn Gould presented “The Idea of North,” an innovative program that is still requested by U.S. and Canadian audiences, and which later inspired a television film. Writers Arthur Koestler and Margaret Laurence, scientist Niels Bohr, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Marshall McLuhan have all been guests on or have written for various segments.

The working atmosphere at Ideas has been termed remarkably familial, but several years ago the show experienced some uncharacteristic upheaval. In 1983, Geraldine Sherman, the show’s executive producer since 1974 and the individual to whom many attribute the show’s stature, was removed from her post and appointed executive director of literary programming. Although there are those who say Sherman often did not share the same vision as the other producers, others claim her departure created a “scandal” at the CBC. “Sherman was central to Ideas. She fought for the concept of in-depth programming done in an exciting and critical way,” says one freelance contributor, who, like others, finds this issue difficult to discuss and would not comment for attribution.

Why was she let go? Sherman would not be interviewed, saying only that her reasons for silence are “complicated.” One contributor says Friesen did not understand the show’s concept under Sherman, that he found her “difficult” and that he wanted a “sexier” show.

But Friesen, who made the decision to “relocate” Sherman, denies this assessment. “She’d done a wonderful job, but she had been there a long time. I felt the time had come for a change. There was no unusual friction between us,” he now comments. He does admit, however, that he had some concerns that certain topics-most notably feminism and supply side economics-“were dealt with from only one point of view.”

Today, Lucht agrees Friesen wanted some antifeminist material. “The management has rights and so you’re always negotiating. We heed our executive environment,” he notes. Four months after Sherman’s departure, the show moved to the AM network, increasing the audience by 80 percent. Friesen appointed Robert Prowse, who had been a senior producer of Morningside for two years, executive producer of Ideas. But Prowse’s contract was not renewed after the first year. He now explains: “There was a misunderstanding over my role. I was more interested in production and the creative end of the show. I didn’t have any administrative experience.”

Friesen agrees with this assessment. “I had made a mistake. There were indications Prowse was not a success as an administrator.”

Despite his lack of management skills, Prowse’s lasting legacy was his introduction of Lister Sinclair as host of Ideas in 1983. Sinclair is a formidable talent with more than 30 years’ broadcast experience, and he has given the show a higher profile and an increased following, and with the appointment of Lucht in 1984, harmony returned.

The unit operates out of a 1,200-square-foot space on Jarvis Street in Toronto. The hallways and small offices are decorated with tapestries, and the place is filled with shelves of books on everything from particle physics to dramatic theory. At times the area resembles a university faculty office, the quiet occasionally broken by the sounds of tapes being edited. Other days it’s like many newsrooms, with telephones ringing, typewriters clattering and writers trooping in to deliver material.

The unit’s producers share an array of skills and are central to Ideas’ character. Lucht works with four in Toronto: Max Allen, Damiano Pietropaolo, Jill Eisen and Sara Wolch. They are joined by regional producers in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Halifax, senior technician Lome Tulk (who has worked with Ideas since Town and Gown days), and two production assistants, Susan Crammond and Alison Moss.

Lucht says that the producers hold varying political views. But they do share a belief that the public deserves more than it is getting from mainstream media. “Journalism is a form of behavior that has nothing to do with what we do at Ideas,” says Allen, a former story editor at As It Happens who has been with the unit since 1977. “We try to explain things, to empower people to work in their own best interest. ” Allen likes some forms of print journalism, but he dismisses most broadcast news as “amphetamine, music, flash. Its metamessage,” he continues, “is that the world is a dangerous place.” When asked if more of Canadian journalism would benefit from the assumptions inherent in the ideas’ agenda, he replies: “It’s like asking whether I wish Genghis Khan had been the pope.”

There is no formal criterion for the show’s mix, except to present programming that covers politics, science, the humanities, social sciences and the arts. The producers meet throughout the year to “talk about what’s important and what will be important,” according to Lucht. “We are interested in everything. We have to address the obvious, like unemployment or ideological shifts. But there are other issues which touch a deeper chord with our audience,”referring to shows that examine significant social and cultural concerns.

Lucht adds that the Ideas staff “makes no pretense at objectivity,” because they don’t believe it is possible to achieve. They are, however, obliged to present a variety of perspectives. As Donna Logan, director of information programming for CBC Radio, comments: “Ideas is governed by the CBC’s journalistic policies. If it didn’t offer several points of view over a season, I’d have something to say about it.”

To plan the approximately 130 new shows Ideas airs each season, Lucht and the producers hold major story meetings in February and at the end of September, during which they assess approximately 300 proposals annually submitted by freelance writers, as well as professors and other nonjournalists. Each year the unit accepts between 30 and 40 of these, which ultimately become shows varying in length from one to five parts. Producers often also write several series each season; the remaining slots are filled by specially commissioned lectures.

The unit’s annual operating budget is $400,000, which covers freelancers’ fees (they receive up to $2,000 per show), travel, guest honorariums, telephone calls and all other expenses besides staff salaries.

Lucht says in the past many of the program’s freelance contributions came from people with no broadcast experience, but lately the producers have started to increasingly depend on a group of proven writers. The program’s senior freelancer is Dayid Cayley, a former CBC current affairs producer and host, who writes an average of 10 shows annually for Ideas. He is generous in his praise for the show: “I have found a collegial relationship with the producers and a respect for the individual voice. I am grateful for the opportunity to do the show and get paid for it.”

Other contributors are equally admiring, if not entirely uncritical. “The producers do tend to light their holy candles a bit, and it’s like a calling for some of them,” notes Penny Williams, currently the editor of Your Money magazine, who has prepared more than two dozen shows for Ideas since 1968. But she was always willing to put up with what she affectionately calls the “hothouse” mentality of the unit because “I’ve never found any other documentary vehicle like it. We’d be poorer without Ideas.”

What many freelancers appreciate most is the freedom they are allowed at Ideas. Says Burstyn: “Although the CBC is better than other networks, the political pressures and homogenous quality of the corporation means radical or liberal ideas don’t get explored in a way that adequately represents their importance. Ideas is one of the few vehicles willing to explore.” To this end, each show reflects the view of its writer, who is usually also the on-air narrator.

Once assigned a story, freelance contributors often have months to prepare it. When finished, they bring their tapes and research material to the assigned producer, with whom they work closely during the investigative period. The producer then spends hours editing and, in some cases, revising written drafts and rough tapes. Post-production editing is often done on the day of airing.

What emerges is a show that may use narrative, interviews, dramatic readings, panel discussions, music, sound effects and newsclips to achieve what Lucht calls a marriage of form and content. Ideas’ closest literary cousin is the essay. Characteristic of this approach was an Ideas show aired in December, 1984, entitled “Death by Decree.” The capital punishment debate had resurfaced after a series of police murders across the country. For months before the Ideas show, media coverage of this volatile issue had consisted of little more than sensational stories and clips spotlighting angry policemen and grieving families.

By contrast, “Death by Decree,” produced by Sara Wolch and prepared by Stuart Allen of CBC Radio News, was a reasoned examination of the death penalty from a social and historical perspective. Host Lister Sinclair began the show by reading the “eye for an eye” passage from Exodus 21:23. Then Allen presented the history of the law and attitudes toward capital punishment since the mid-nineteenth century. Everyone interviewed-MPs, lawyers, professors, a prison guard who favored abolition, and relatives of murder victims-discussed the issue in an atmosphere of calm. The father of a boy killed by Charles Manson said that revenge equals justice, while a criminologist argued that a civilized society does not condone state-sanctioned murder. At the conclusion, Sinclair read from Matthew 5:39-“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also “then the show ended with four minutes of a poignant Bach violin concerto. The mood of “Death by Decree” was reflective, but the pace was vigorous. Typically, it challenged listeners to think.

A number of Ideas’ supporters fear the recent CBC budget cutbacks introduced by the Mulroney government will result in the show being “vulgarized” or even dropped altogether. According to Logan, however, Ideas’ survival is assured, at least for the near future. Logan says she is “personally convinced there is a place for Ideas within our schedule. There’d be an outcry from the public if we took it off the air .” Friesen echoes this view: “The show is as sacrosanct as the news.”

The only immediate change planned for the show is that, as of September, it will be heard from Monday to Friday. Its department has been combined with that of drama for budgetary reasons, but nobody yet knows what effect this will have on the program; Lucht’s immediate goal is to “fine tune,” by improving production quality: “We’re interested in making the show entertaining, as in what’s pleasurable and intellectual.” According to some media critics, this approach works; they say the show has become tighter and sharper over the last year. For the present, Ideas survives as an “oasis” where, as Cayley puts it, journalists may still “dream dreams.”

“We are fringe, we’re in an air bubble up here, and we’re very fortunate,” Lucht says. He adds, “None of us could ever go back to regular journalism.”

When a corporation goes broke, it declares bankruptcy. Or goes under. Or is “forced to shut its doors.” But when the same thing suddenly happens to a magazine (and the event is usually sudden), people use the words “died” or “was killed.” Which is an odd use of the terms.

The people who describe the endgame of a publication as a death mean something very particular. They mean that a magazine or a newspaper is something more than its inanimate parts, something almost human.

Without torturing the metaphor, it is fair to say that magazines and newspapers reach out to people and form very real connections with their lives. When that connection is broken, there is a palpable loss. The emptiness is felt first by the people who made the words and the pictures. It is felt later by the readers of the expired publication. Everybody loses something.

On November 6, 1984, it was announced in a hushed boardroom in north Toronto that Quest magazine was going out of business, was going to die. Later in the day, it was announced that Ronald ‘Reagan had been reelected president by the largest margin in the history of the U.S.

Both announcements were upset ting to me, but let’s not lose our heads. Quest was only a magazine. I was its second and final editor.

Quest began its life-if we may call it that-as a men’s magazine. What was unique about this new magazine was the way it was distributed. Instead of being sold through the traditional means-subscriptions and newsstands -it was given away to selected homes across the country.

This kind of distribution, controlled circulation, was the brainchild of Comac Communications Ltd., Quest’s publisher. The theory behind it was that advertisers did not want to advertise to everybody, or just anybody. They wanted to reach only those people who had the requisite amount of disposable income to buy their products.

Two things happened. Advertisers bought the concept and, second, Comac made a smart move. It decided that Quest could not be just another free magazine. It had to have editorial merit built on the best editorial content. The approach Comac adopted made sense: people would only read the magazine, including the ads, if the content was strong.

Quest flourished throughout the ’70s and Comac clung to its editorial commitment. In 1980, however, company officials were becoming impatient with the magazine. They felt its standardized formula of service and self-help journalism was becoming something of a bore. Readers, they felt, were interested in more than RRSPs and how to have a healthier lawn. There were, of course, the shared concerns of money, family, careers, health and so on, but there was a wider world and Quest was not speaking to it on behalf of its readers.

As it was later put to me, Quest was becoming predictable.

I had never worked for a publication that people didn’t pay for. I had toiled in magazines, Time and Maclean’s, and in a number of newspapers. It had never occurred to me that something given away could be any good in terms of the kind of journalism I wanted to follow.

I was convinced otherwise by a man named Jeffrey Shearer, Comac’s executive vice-president and editorial director. Shearer was not a journalist; he was a marketing expert. But he was smart enough to know that the quality of audience Quest had to reach in order to keep its promises to its advertisers demanded quality in everything, including its journalism. His argument was persuasive and energetic. I took the job.

The first thing that struck me was that while Quest had a national circulation of 710,000 and more than a million readers, it seemed to be written by a few people who lived in Toronto. Much of the writing was excellent, but everything turned on a Toronto perspective. The other thing that intrigued me was the lack of narrative reporting, of simply telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. As any bartender can testify, people love to be told stories.

Narrative journalism is probably the toughest kind of reporting because it means reducing abstraction to form. Instead of merely reciting facts, the writer has to create a context, a landscape against which those facts stand out. At its best, it takes the magazine piece within shouting distance of the novel. Done badly, it sticks out like a vinyl thumb.

When I joined Quest, its managing editor was Lynn Cunningham. She too seemed somewhat bored within the confines of the old Quest formula. We decided that if the magazine was going to have any hope of credibility and authority, it had to come from the writing. To find new writers, Cunningham made several trips across the country. To the old regulars we said Quest had changed. We said the magazine was still open to them but their work would have to improve to conform to the new standards we were trying to create. Some longtime Quest contributors were incensed by the new rules and never wrote for the magazine again.

Slowly, the new Quest began to extend the reach of the magazine. People who earlier had ignored it because of its methods of distribution became readers. Quest began to be quoted by columnists and journalists in other media.

The subject matter was as varied as the daily lives of ordinary Canadians. We began to assign stories on national politics in a way that made politics accessible and, at the same time, compelling. The old Quest had been notoriously unfunny. We began to treat humor as a sensible topic for discussion; in 1982, the magazine won a gold medal for humor writing. We told writers that research consists of more than quoting from academic texts or serving up warmed-over newspaper clippings. We wanted original reporting.

We started publishing some of the best names in Canadian print journalism: George Woodcock, Harry Bruce, George Bain, Norman Snider, Margaret Atwood, Jay Teitel, John Lownsbrough, Katherine Govier, Doug Fetherling, Silver Donald Cameron, Erna Paris, Joey Slinger, Matt Cohen. We printed fiction for the first time in the magazine’s history. We raised the payment rates to $2,000 for a 3,000-word piece. We hired the best photographers and illustrators in the business for the graphics.

With the exception of Saturday Night, Quest was the last national general interest magazine in Canada. Where other magazines were rushing to single-interest subjects, usually business, Quest clung to the heresy that intelligent readers wanted to read interesting stories about people, politics, entertainment, issues.

The mix was eclectic-some said eccentric. We were daring enough to create a magazine that would allow people the simple, glorious delight of reading. For example, we wanted to do a story on something Canadian that was unique in the world, the best of its kind. We didn’t care what it was, only that it be the best. A writer named Matthew Hart proposed profiling a particular cow that was the best dairy producer in the world. The resulting piece, “Rhapsody in Moo,” was a brilliant, hilarious treatment of a spectacular lady cow. After it appeared, editors phoned me asking, “Who’s this guy Hart anyway?” At another point, I learned that sportswriter Earl McRae had written a profile of Bobby Orr in retirement that the publisher of Today magazine had killed because he thought it too tough on Orr. I read it, bought it and ran it as a cover story entitled “Poor Bobby.” That one piece brought us more angry mail than anything we ever did. People threatened to blow up our offices. But the magazine was being read. And making an impact.

As with any controlled-circulation publication, Quest was accused from time to time of being under the thumb of its advertisers. I was aware of that danger and was overly sensitive about it. I did not want Quest put into the same category as such magazines as Goodlife and Avenue. Both the publisher, Hugh Rosser, and Shearer were resolute in insisting that our obligations to advertisers ended when we cashed their cheques. One time we profiled the Canadian auto expert Phil Edmonston, who criticized a number of new car models. The piece was scheduled to run in the very issue that carried a number of new car ads. Rosser was concerned. He did not order me to kill the story, thus relieving us both of a moral crisis. I agreed to hold the story until the following issue. It was for me an easy and sensible compromise out of a difficult problem.

We continued to win awards, both for writing excellence and graphics. The first signs of trouble appeared in June, 1983, when the Print Measurement Bureau released its readership survey. The PMB is the bible of the magazine industry-what the Nielsen ratings are to television. It purports to be able to tell editors, publishers and, above all, advertisers, how many people are actually reading a given magazine. It is on the basis of the PMB numbers that advertisers decide which publications to advertise in.

Advertising is a lucrative and important ally to magazine publishing. Without it there would be no magazines. But its members comprise the most conservative, frightened, sheep-like group I have ever encountered. There is little innovation, no chance-taking and very little creativity in Canadian ad agencies. No one dares make a move with a client’s money unless everybody else makes the same move on behalf of their clients. Agency people do not read the magazines they recommend to their clients. Sometimes they do not even look at them. Their only interests are costs and readership. PMB exists to serve those advertising agencies. They read the numbers and spend their clients’ money on the basis of those numbers.

The PMB ’83 showed that Quest had lost 600,000 readers since the PMB survey issued in 1981. This absurdity quickly became received truth in the advertising community. The ads began to dry up and Quest’s revenues fell. No one at Quest or indeed in Comac believed it was humanly possible to lose so many readers in two years. None of that mattered. The advertising agencies believed the numbers. Throughout the early part of 1984, the prognosis for Quest’s health worsened. Projected ad pages evaporated. Revenue estimates were woefully out of line.

Every facet of Quest-advertising, research, marketing, promotion, editorial-was examined by the company. Quest set out to woo back its lost advertisers. We began to print on better stock. The magazine was redesigned and we introduced features geared to a business-oriented audience. But by then Comac had lost the will and the imagination to deal with the magazine’s problem.

Teledirect, the subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. that owns Comac, knew nothing about publishing unless you consider the telephone book. Its only interest was black ink. If the company could make a profit with a living Quest, that was fine. If Quest had to be killed, well, that was fine too.

I was told about the magazine’s imminent demise last October. The closing came a month later. Most of the staff, including the art director, the managing editor and myself was fired. The same day Quest was killed, Comac announced the launch of a new magazine called Ontario Living, aglitter, upscale magazine that would concentrate on furniture, home decor, recipes and conspicuous consumption.

The relationship between a magazine and its readers is a delicate thing. It can disappear like a puff of smoke in a cathedral. Or it can be destroyed by an insensitivity that treats readers as robotic consumers of products. Handled with intelligence and sensitivity to the concerns of readers, the relationship can flourish.

But in Canada at the moment, publishing is in the hands of businessmen, MBAs with calculators who plot costs per-thousands and demographic reach. These are the bloodless ones who feel secure only within the comfortable confines of measurable numbers.

Quest tried, I think, to give its readers something worthy of their time and energies. It tried to move, to educate, to delight, to disturb.

It has been argued that Quest went beyond its time. According to marketing logic, the general-interest magazine has become a vestigial holdover from some muted golden age. That may be true. But I would like to think that, given publishers who know what a magazine is and advertisers un-intimidated by surveys and editors who know from instinct what is quality and what is not, such a magazine could again flourish.

If not, then journalism has been reduced and our lives somehow made smaller…

Last January 3, a swarm of reporters scrambled up and down the ski slopes of Banff, Alberta, in pursuit of two Toronto newlyweds. Mr. Justice Samuel G.M. Grange had just delivered his long-awaited report on his inquiry into the 1980 and ’81 baby deaths at the Hospital for Sick Children, one of the most controversial public inquiries ever held in Canada. The media were frantic to know what nurse Susan Nelles, a key commission witness then on her honeymoon, had to say about it.

The media’s relentless preoccupation with Nelles began in late March, 1981, when Metropolitan Toronto Police charged her with murdering four of 36 babies who had died mysteriously on the hospital’s cardiac ward between July, 1980, and the following March. As Toronto Sun columnist Christie Blatchford wrote the day after Grange’s report was made public, “Within hours of her [Nelles’s] arrest, she had become the ‘accused babykiller,’ and the operative word there was not ‘accused,’ it was ‘babykiller.'”

When Nelles was discharged for lack of evidence after a 42-day preliminary hearing held in 1982, Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry called a public inquiry to investigate how the babies died and why Nelles was arrested. “The goal,” said McMurtry later, “was simply to provide the public with the fullest accounting of what happened.”

To that end, Grange permitted radio and TV reporters to film and tape the hearing from its beginning on June 21, 1983. On April 9, 1984, just as Nelles was beginning her second week of testimony, he took the unprecedented step of allowing continuous live television coverage, which continued until the inquiry concluded on September 27, 1984. The testimony of 64 witnesses would fill 44,000 transcript pages before the 1S-month hearing ended. A radical contrast to the frustrating secrecy of Nelles’s preliminary hearing, the Grange inquiry drew public criticism for being a trial by media. But for those reporters who covered all or part of the marathon, it was more a trial of than by the media.

Only two journalists attended the hearing on each of its 191 days: Ted Bissland, a court reporter for CBC’s The National, and Kevin Cox, a Globe and Mail general assignment reporter. Both admit that however fascinating the Grange assignment was, they were relieved when it finally ended. “It became my life,” says Bissland, 51, a 30-year television veteran who joined the CBC 22 years ago. “It was a helluva story, but thank God it’s over.” Bissland filed a Grange report almost daily, but on the rare occasions he didn’t because the hearing hadn’t produced a story, viewers called the CBC demanding to know why. “So then we got stuck with the situation that good, bad, indifferent or lousy, you’ve got to put something on every day so people know what transpired at the Grange. Even if it was next to nothing, you’ve got to tell them it was next to nothing. The story became so big you couldn’t get out of it if you wanted to.” He had previously covered two high-profile murder trials: the 1978 trial of four men charged in the slaying of 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques, a Toronto shoeshine boy, and the 1974 trial of Mississauga contractor Peter Demeter, now serving a life sentence for arranging the murder of his wife. Neither, he says, compares with the intellectual challenge posed by the Grange, with its technically complex, often contradictory, occasionally tedious testimony. The inquiry was also by far the most sensational story he’d ever covered.

That sensationalism was inherent to the subject and not a consequence of the way the media reported it, claims Cox, 31, who has nine years reporting experience, the last four with the Globe. “It was the most bizarre murder case I think we’ll ever see in this country. You can’t sensationalize this. You’ve got mass murders of innocent little babies, quite probably by somebody who was taking care of them, a case that’s impossible to crack and all these people come up here and you nail them with every possible accusation and they won’t] budge. You’ve got all this talk of conspiracy of silence among the nurses, you’ve got cops stumbling over each other trying to figure out how to deal with medical practice. If you put all that in a novel, nobody would believe it.”

(Writing in the evenings, Bissland did put it all in Death Shift, a nonfiction account he started in October, 1983. Released two weeks after the inquiry ended, it’s the only summary and analysis of the proceedings published to date.)

For Cox, the toughest challenge of the Grange was keeping his perspective and ensuring his reports were fair and balanced. He says he often spent weekends reviewing the previous week’s stories, checking for any imbalances to adjust in longer analysis pieces. “You couldn’t take sides. You couldn’t stay sane if you did-you just couldn’t write. It’s hard not to take sides because you feel very sympathetic toward everyone. But you have to basically put that to one side. And you deal with the mental and emotional confusion by yourself and you try to keep it out of your work.”

He says had he known at the beginning that the hearing would be so difficult to cope with on a personal level, he would have been “leery” about accepting it. He describes the “emotional turmoil” of deciding what to include, what to omit, calling it a “stomach churning thing. You stop thinking of the individuals involved as people, real flesh and blood. They’re names. And it’s only when they testify and when you talk to their families who happen to be in the hearing room that you realize the immense impact of what you’ve done. This is not just some cardboard character out there. This is a real person who has a real life to lead.”

Bissland, by comparison, says that in the course of the inquiry he became “de-nerved” to the prospect that what he was reporting might be tainting reputations. “You couldn’t let it bother you. I could not control what was transpiring. It was my job to report it and I was doing that as balanced and as honestly and as accurately as I possibly could, and that was my responsibility. You may not like the system but we weren’t controlling it.”

Cox justifies what he calls “a trial by commission” on the basis that every witness eventually had a chance to “turn the tables around,” to give his or her own account. Consequently, he refused to report anything that wasn’t said by the witnesses on the stand: “I wasn’t going to try the case outside the hearing room. I didn’t like the idea of contradicting evidence heard in the hearing room with stuff that I might get from an interview outside if that person didn’t have guts enough to come up before Grange and say it point blank.” Cox also had to justify to himself why he sat there day after day. For the first time in his career, he was forced to ask himself why he was writing a story. He says the answer was that 36 sets of parents had a right to know what happened to their children. “Grange tried in every way he possibly could to get to the bottom of what happened to those kids and he had to take people right through the emotional wringer, and he did.” He says more people were cleared than were branded in “a useful exercise” that was a sacrifice of a few for the greater public good.

How well did the media serve the public? Ken Cox, 37 (no relation to Kevin Cox), who covered most of the inquiry for AM radio station CFRB, believes the overall quality of reporting by all media throughout the inquiry was high. For Cox, with 11 years’ experience as a general assignment and legal reporter, the last seven with CFRB, his biggest challenge was to distill “reams of evidence into a very small package in a very short time.” On weekends, he had about four minutes to analyze the prior week at the Grange; on weekdays, he had 50 seconds. And he filed three daily reports from the station’s broadcast booth at city hall, a five-minute jog from the inquiry’s Dundas Street West hearing room. Cox claims that as a news medium for a long-running court story, radio is both a curse and a blessing. Deadline for his last, and what he wanted to be his best, report of the day was 4:50. But to leave the hearing before it adjourned at 4:30 was to risk missing “the 4:30 zinger.”

However, the media often pounced on these last-minute snippets of news, only to learn when the hearing resumed the next day that they were misleading, inaccurate or just plain conjecture. As a radio reporter, Cox was at least able to file corrections immediately, thereby minimizing the damage done by the previous day’s erroneous reports. Print reporters weren’t as successful.

Kevin Cox cites an example. During her cross-examination in February, 1984, nurse Meredith Frise testified that she believed there could have been a conspiracy of two nurses responsible for murdering infants. Virtually everyone ran with the story because it was the only significant testimony of the day. Back on the stand the next morning, Frise admitted she had no basis for that belief. “In 10 seconds, she blew out of the water that day’s headlines,” Cox remembers. Cox says there’s not much that could have been done to prevent “the incredible damage” caused to witnesses’ reputations in these instances because there was no guarantee the reader would even see the correction when it was finally published. Bissland believes the reporting of the inquiry was generally responsible and attributes this to most news outlets’ policy of assigning only one reporter to cover it. The Sun’s’ Heather Bird, for example, followed the story from the day Nelles was arrested, and covered most of the inquiry. Peter Goodspeed started the assignment for The Toronto Star, but was then sent to the Falkland Islands. John Munch took over, staying until the end of the first phase. Two other reporters filled the vacancy before the end of the inquiry. While the Star’s coverage was ”as consistent as you can be on such a long-running story, it would have been preferable to have one person,” says Lou Clancy, city editor. CFTO- TV, however, randomly assigned different reporters, what Bissland calls “drop-in journalists,” who attended the hearing only when there was something sensational to put in a 30-second clip.

“It’s difficult to assign just one reporter,” claims Derwyn Smith, CFTO news director. “The CBC did it and it helped a person write a book, I suppose, but we weren’t interested in that aspect. We had to be flexible-we always are.” He says he doesn’t think this approach was a problem for his reporters, who could brief themselves at the research desk. Further, he says it helps to have someone fresh, who hasn’t become “too close” to the story, to bring it a different perspective.

While CFTO’s Jim Junkin, who was periodically assigned to the Grange, admits it would have been easier to cover had it been a full-time assignment, he doesn’t think CFTO’s coverage suffered as a result. But CFRB’s Cox disagrees: “There’s no way you can have the depth, the understanding, if you’re flying people in and moving them off to another story almost daily. CFTO’s people almost had to be spoon-fed around the inquiry. I can’t fault the reporters-they’re told to go and they show up and they don’t know who anybody is. I often thought they depended on other reporters’ reactions to the story.”

CFRB’s Cox admits the Grange was, in some respects, a comfortable beat because he didn’t have to scrounge for news. But he says he never lost his perspective by getting too close to, or bored with, the story. If he’s glad to be back in different courtrooms, it’s because his coworkers at the station lost interest in his reports, and their apathy was deflating. “Toward the end, newscasters’ eyes would glaze over as soon as they heard the word Grange,” he says. Kevin Cox admits he was often bored with the routine of knowing where he’d be going every day, noting that in the first five months of the hearing, during doctors’ testimony and before murder had been established, “most reporters were almost somnolent.” But he made sure he wrote other stories to remind him that “there’s another world out there that doesn’t care about the Grange. You think everybody’s a [Grange] groupie because that’s all everybody’s talking about. 1 didn’t want people here to think that was the only thing 1 could do-there has to be life after this thing.” Citytv’s Lome Honickman agrees. With four years’ experience as a general assignment and legal reporter, Honickman, 31, covered the hearing sporadically for the first six months and then daily for the last year. “Luckily for me, the commission often did not sit on Fridays, and Fridays I was allowed to do a different story, which was very important for me because you lose perspective sometimes when you’re on one story.”

It wasn’t a loss of perspective that led to what Kevin Cox calls the “homogenized news” that often emerged from the Grange. He blames the omnipresent television camera and a videotaping room located beside the hearing room for making it too easy for some electronic media members to be lazy. “They could come in at the end of the day, pull a 30-second clip, have no idea what relevance it had or where it came from, and throw it on the air. It happened all the time.” He says the synthesized stories produced by reporters covering the hearing from in front of the television monitor made him aware for the first time of the danger of pack journalism, or what Honickman prefers to call cooperative journalism. Says Cox: “There seems to be a feeling at desks around this city, and probably it’s peculiar to this city, that stories have to be the same. This place [the Globe] doesn’t do it that way. I think it’s important, certainly in something like this, that everybody is entitled to their own interpretations, their own analysis and their own opinions.”

Bissland disagrees. The onus on the media is to be accurate, he says, and not to be too interpretive. And the camera, he believes, ultimately raised the caliber of reporting by providing a reference against which reporters could check the accuracy of their stories. Kevin Cox initially welcomed the camera; by the end of the hearing he had changed his mind. He now believes cameras are dangerous in court, especially at a trial, where witnesses are intimidated enough without having to worry about their media image. “People rarely make up their minds on the guilt of individuals based on what they read but they get perceptions of people on television because they see the face. A lot of people make up their minds based on what the accused looks like.”

Bissland maintains it was the camera that effectively expanded the hearing room’s seating capacity to millions, thereby catering to the public’s right or desire to know, but he admits the viewing audience became the “electronic jury. That’s not the way our system should work, but it did work that way.” Honickman defends the camera because it provided the inquiry with an element of realism by showing the public a cast of ordinary human beings. For him, televising the inquiry was a “15month experiment that worked. It’s the greatest proof of one of the reasons we should have cameras in courtrooms.”

Ken Cox says attendance at the hearing was poor for all but the most sensational testimony, with only a few “hard-core Grange addicts” attending every day. He speculates that most people preferred to watch the proceedings in the comfort of their own living rooms. Says Cox: ‘I think if our institutions are public then they have to be totally public. Anything that you’re allowed to see as a spectator in a courtroom, you should be allowed to see via the media.”

For Rogers Cable Television, providing the broadcast pool-feed to which all media had access was one thing; televising the hearing live was quite another. “We’re not in the business of providing entertainment, and this was entertainment in its purest sense,” says Matti Kopamees, who served as RCT’s executive producer of the Grange coverage. Agreeing to televise the heating live was a difficult decision for RCT, whose broadcast criterion, according to Kopamees, is simple: the event must affect the community in general. He says it was “an innate fascination people had with the process rather than with what was being said” that ultimately convinced RCT to air the hearing in order to help demystify the legal process. ‘1 don’t think we thought of the consequences. It was let’s do it because we can.”

What of the consequences? Kopamees says the public now knows everything there is to know about the baby deaths. As to any damage to reputations, he thinks the public had already made up its mind “long before Rogers got into the act.” Asked to evaluate the media’s role in the Grange drama, he says, “It was a very cooperative effort from all perspectives-a big media team effort-a positive experience. When it really comes down to it, all the media were the executive producer.”

In his report, Grange borrowed a quote from Austin Cooper, Nelles’s lawyer at her preliminary hearing, to sum up the inquiry: “You did your job. I did mine. The police did theirs. The judge did his. The system worked.” But did the media-the collective executive producer-do their job? The magnitude of the assignment precluded perfection. For those reporters who sat through all or most of the drama, the inquiry was a grueling beat. For those who dropped in and out, it was a formidable assignment. For all, it was a professional and personal challenge. “It interfered with my sleep,” says Honickman. “When you’re working, you’re an elastic band-it’s the nature of the job.” But off-camera, as the father of a 20-month-old boy, he thought of the parents and wondered, “What in the world would I do if it were me?” He says if the public lost perspective, it was that the parents were the most important people in the inquiry. “Perhaps the public had too high an expectation of what the hearing was going to give us.”

Bissland sympathizes with the grieving parents, who understandably wanted justice: “The Grange inquiry wasn’t designed to provide them with justice and that has to leave them frustrated.”

He says while the inquiry didn’t accomplish as much as the public expected it to, it went further than any trial would to answer the public’s questions.

Despite the highly publicized Court of Appeal decision prohibiting Grange from answering the ultimate question by naming names, the public seemed determined to have a trial. When the judicial system wouldn’t or couldn’t give it one, did it turn to the media as a court of last resort? To label the inquiry a trial by media seems not so much a criticism of the media’s coverage of it, but rather a confirmation of the public’s refusal to accept its limitations. Says Kopamees: “The point of the exercise is to prevent anything like this happening again.”

Bob Barnes stood near Runway 06-R, at what was then known as Toronto International Airport, and watched the DC-3 descend. It was June 22, 1983-the second day of summer-and, though not yet nine in the morning, already hot. Barnes and his maintenance crew had been grading a road near the runway when they stopped to watch the plane approach.

In his 12 years at the airport, Barnes had seen thousands of planes land. As the DC-3 was coming in, he realized something was wrong: “It was making a peculiar noise and going too slow.” When the plane passed 250 feet above his head, its engines suddenly thrust and it climbed another 350 feet. For a moment the DC- 3 hung motionless. Then it plummeted, crashed on its belly and burst into flames.

Even before the plane hit the ground, an air traffic controller, seeing the erratic approach, had pressed the alert button in the tower. Flight information was quickly relayed to emergency crews: DC-3 owned by Sky craft Air Transport in Oshawa… two on board.. .no hazardous cargo… carrying parts for Ford Motor Company. ..inbound from Cleveland. Airport firefighters doused the flames within minutes, but the ambulances that arrived shortly after were not needed. Half an hour later, a priest performed last rites over the bodies of the pilot and copilot of the Skycraft DC-3.

At 9:50 a.m., Canadian Press reporter Eaton Howitt and Richard Crabb from Broadcast News were in a cab on Highway 427, heading north toward the airport. They had been assigned 20 minutes earlier to cover the plane crash. Howitt had to file a story by 10 if it was to be carried in that day’s southern Ontario papers.

Howitt is an inveterate newsman with 38 years in the business. He knew they would be late if they drove through heavy traffic to the far side of the airport to receive the official public relations welcome. Aware that the crash had occurred on airport property not far from Highway 401, the two reporters decided on a shortcut. They told the cabbie to turn on to the 401, pull off to the side of the road and wait. As Howitt approached the airport fence-a seven-foot high barrier topped with three strands of barbed wire-he noticed a gap beneath the fence through which he could just squeeze. But he knew that the fence, dotted with No Trespassing signs, was also a legal obstacle. To enter airport property there was to break the law. Howitt, a firm believer in the credo that the story is all-important, slipped under the fence. “A reporter has a job to do and he does it. You don’t draw the line,” he says. Crabb followed him.

Still half a mile from the crash site, the two reporters began to run through the tall grass. Howitt slowed when he saw a figure walking toward them from the direction of the crash. The figure was an RCMP officer. “He came up and asked us who we were and if we had any identification. Then he told us we were under arrest for trespassing.”

Despite having committed similar transgressions “many times” in his career, Howitt had never before been arrested. “As long as you stay out of the way, there usually is no problem. It never would have happened if we had been alone.”

But Howitt and Crabb were not alone. Eight other journalists were also being rounded up by the RCMP. They had all chosen a shortcut, some because they had heard that airport public relations officials had inadvertently escorted reporters to the wrong end of the airport after a previous crash. Several had even climbed the fence. At 10 a.m., Howitt’s deadline, he and his nine colleagues were being loaded into a van and taken to the RCMP’s airport headquarters. Outside the fence, a cabbie waited with his meter running.

On September 24, 1984, seven reporters, photographers and cameramen-Jonathon Craven, Al Clouston, Stan Coulton and Danny Cook from the CBC, Jim Russell from The Toronto Star, Richard Crabb from Broadcast News and Eaton Howitt from the Canadian Press-were convicted of trespassing in Peel Provincial Court and fined $200 each. Three others-Kenneth Kerr of The Toronto Sun and John McGhie and Al Hogan of The Brampton Daily Times-were acquitted when they could not be properly identified in court. In his decision, Judge Kenneth Langdon noted that “each of these gentlemen has an obligation to gather and disseminate news. …The media has a recognizable interest in getting to it [the news] quicklyThese people are not criminals. “

The story of the plane crash was front-page news in Toronto, reported, ironically, by members of the press who were escorted to the site just after the others had been taken away by the RCMP. The coverage given the subsequent court proceedings was less prominent. Yet the case of the “Skycraft Seven” raised some interesting questions about the media’s place within the law. Are there instances in which journalistic trespass can be justified? Do members of the press, as self-proclaimed champions and informers of the public, enjoy any special treatment if they are charged with trespass or similar offences? Should they?

When asked about breaking laws to get a story, many members of the media exhibit a paranoia worthy of a Mafia informer. They become suspicious, lower their voices and, if in a public place, glance furtively around them. Reporters prefer to remain silent, fearing both legal entanglements and reprimands from their editors, who say they do not encourage their staff to break the law.

Nevertheless, most editors and newsgathering agencies are tacitly supportive of reporters who defy laws in pursuit of a story. The case of the airport trespass was no exception. Lawyers from the prominent Toronto firms Blake, Cassels & Graydon, and McCarthy & McCarthy, as well as John 1. Laskin, son of the late Chief Justice Bora Laskin, were retained by The Toronto Star, the Canadian Press and the CBC to defend the staff members charged.

Moral support was equally forthcoming. When Eaton Howitt returned to CP after his arrest, editor Michael Brown backed him up “100 percent,” excusing Howitt’s actions by saying he was “simply trying to get the story.” For Brown, the problem was not his reporter but an overzealous RCMP officer. Similarly, Toronto Star deputy managing editor John Miller thinks photographer Jim Russell was justified in taking extraordinary measures because the plane crash was a “legitimate case of public interest.”

Globe and Mail editor emeritus Richard Doyle believes reporters should sometimes “interpret” laws that might restrict access to newsworthy events. “There is a role that the press has played at its peril in which it makes the police force more sensitive to the public’s right to know. In certain situations, a reporter must consider whether the importance of the information to be gathered is greater than the risk involved in gathering it.”

Doyle considers the scales were tipped on the side of the information when Globe reporter Robert Stephens visited the Carswell Printing Company’s Don Mills plant on the evening of May 4, 1983, and removed some bags of garbage. The bags contained proofs of the soon-to-be-released Ontario budget, portions of which the Globe published. The legality of Stephens’s actions has never been determined. Though Carswell, contractually responsible for shredding such proofs, did sue the Globe for $18 million in damages, the two sides settled out of court in May, 1984, for $10,010. Whether technically legal or not, Doyle contends the reporter’s actions were justified. “I felt in that instance the question of whether budget secrecy was being maintained was an important one. Once you set up a system for disposal of budget material, it must function effectively.”

While many journalists would agree that, on occasion, the end justifies the means, some would go further, arguing the end can necessitate the means. In 1983, media critic Barrie Zwicker told his CBC radio audience that reporters not only have the right but the duty to occasionally break such laws as the Trespass to Property Act. According to Zwicker, this duty exists when a perceived good exceeds a known wrong, especially in cases where “government, industry, organized crime or any organization or person is plotting against the public good.”

Though journalists sometimes trespass when they believe the public good requires it, few are charged, according to Stuart Robertson, a Toronto lawyer and author of Courts and the Media. Robertson attributes this immunity to special treatment often accorded members of the press. Those with identification are regularly allowed past official barricades. Others are permitted, even invited, to visit restricted areas. But while such privileges are understood to exist by reporters, they are not officially recognized, as the Skycraft Seven discovered. Journalists who climbed a fence to cover a protest at the Darlington Generating Station in 1980 were similarly enlightened. Police arrested demonstrators and reporters alike as they passed through the main gate after the protest.

Some media analysts in the United States have expressed concern that prosecution for trespass could become an effective weapon in denying the media access to events of public interest. There have been more cases of reporters being charged for trespass in the U.S. than in Canada because, as Robertson explains, “the right to enjoyment of property is more firmly entrenched there.” David Rubin, chairman of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at New York University, predicts it won’t be long before a reporter charged with trespass employs a defence of freedom of the press. Such a case would test how far the First Amendment goes in protecting the newsgathering rights of the media.

Canada’s sickly cousin of the First Amendment is the brief reference to the freedom of the press in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Media lawyers can cite few cases in Canadian judicial history in which considerations for a free press affected the outcome of a trial. Pacific Press Limited v. the Queen et al., heard by British Columbia Supreme Court’s Mr. Chief Justice Nemetz in 1977, is a rare example. In ruling that a warrant could not be issued for the search of newspaper offices until “reasonable steps” ha,d been taken to obtain the desired information elsewhere, Nemetz acknowledged that the newspaper deserved protection not given other businesses or the general public. In his decision, Nemetz referred to a judgment by Lord Denning of the English Court of Appeal: “Next there is the special position of the journalist or reporter who gathers news of public concern. The courts respect his work and will not hamper it more than is necessary.”

Respect for the work of the reporter has been at best subdued in cases of journalistic trespass. After the trial of Eaton Howitt and the six other reporters, CBC lawyer G. Michael Hughes, who did not act on the case, wondered if the court had not been harder on the members of the press than it might have been on others. “They were fined $.200 each. The normal trespass fine is $50 to $100 for a first offence.” Stuart Robertson believes the judge may have been giving the media a message.

Does the threat of prosecution for trespass hamper a reporter’s work and limit the freedom of the press? For those who believe the freedom to publish becomes meaningless without the freedom to gather the news, the answer is yes. Thus far, no journalist in Canada charged with trespassing has used a defence of freedom of the press. In defending Howitt and his co-accused, lawyers argued primarily that the provincial Trespass to Property Act could not be applied to the airport, an area of federal jurisdiction. Torstar lawyer Blair Mackenzie says the case was not a good one for invoking the Charter of Rights because the reporters were confronted by No Trespassing signs.

But Bert Bruser, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in media law, predicts it is only a matter of time before a case of journalistic trespass is defended on constitutional grounds. Such a case could be critical in determining the media’s limits in pursuit of a story and in resolving the conflict between the public’s right to know and the rights of privacy and security. With the present judicial attitude toward the press, it is unlikely a decision would favor the media unless the information gathered by the journalist proved to be of exceptional public interest. If it is anything less, a precedent might be set that would make subsequent defences of journalistic trespass even more difficult. As Bruser says, “Bad cases make bad laws.” The result could be that freedom of the press would be even further restricted.

On May 28, 1982, Jenny Isford, 19, was discovered on a lawn five doors from her home in North York. She had been raped and strangled. Less than a month later, the body of Welsh nanny Christine Prince, 25, was found floating in the West Rouge River near the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo. On July 12, bride-to-be Claudia Gebert, 21, was found molested and stabbed to death in her home. The body of Judy Ann Delisle, 38, mother of four, was found in a laneway in Toronto’s east end on July 19. Lee Marie Di Palma, a 31-year-old nurse, vanished September 21 after dropping her son off at a Barrie nursery school. Five days later, Delia Adriano, 25, an Oakville secretary, also disappeared. The severely beaten body of Kathy Alma Brosseau, 17, was discovered October 10 in the Don Valley, just south of the Bloor Viaduct.

The Toronto papers had a field day. As each attack occurred, their frenzied response mounted. By the end of October, the seven tragedies had resulted in close to 400 stories in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun. Of the three, the Globe, characteristically, was the most circumspect: its 50 pieces were generally confined to reporting details of the attacks and the subsequent investigations. The Sun and the Star exercised no such restraint, the former logging 177 items, barely beating out the Star’s 164. In a year when the number of rapes reported to the Metro police was actually slightly lower than the previous year’s total-167, down from 174the impression created by the papers, particularly the Sun and Star, was that Metro was being swept by a sudden surge of violence against women. The nature and volume of their stories reveal much about the ingrained sexism that continues to color news reporting of violence against women.

Analysis of the coverage generated by the seven incidents indicates that the papers were culpable on several counts. They could not, of course, have chosen to ignore the incidents. But while standard newspaper practice dictates that graphic details of a murder and the circumstances in which it occurred be placed high up in a story, and that details of earlier murders be repeated in accounts of subsequent killings of a similar nature, this convention was inappropriate in the case of 1982’s attacks. By adhering to this approach, the papers essentially blamed the vic~ tims by implying that had they behaved differently-not used public transit alone, for instance, or not been out late at night-they would not have been murdered.

In many cases, the authorities quoted in stories about the attacks rein~ forced this view. Sophia Voumvakis, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, conducted a study of the three Toronto papers’ reporting of the 1982 attacks on women. She found that more than 7S percent of police and justice officials interviewed about the incidents implied that the victims were responsible because of their dress or behavior at the time of the attacks.

Secondary coverage was equally message-laden. Each attack prompted a new round of sidebar stories that tended to focus on, and fuel, women’s fears for their own safety. Such cover~ age, too, is standard fare whose function is to answer questions raised by initial news reports. In the summer of ’82, one of the most pertinent questions was, “How can these attacks be prevented?” Not surprisingly, the police were approached for answers. (As Voumvakis pointed out in her report: “It is as ‘obvious’ for them [police] to tell women to take precautions. ..as it is for them to tell break and enter victims to buy more and better locks.”)

But in this case such stories simply served to promote the idea that women must accept limits on their freedom if they want to be safe. A case in point was the June 24 edition of the Star, which contained an entire page of stories about frightened women taking precautions to avoid attacks. “Fear Stalks Women on the TTC: Female Riders Terrified at Night Following Brutal Murders of Cheerleader and Nanny” screamed one headline. It echoed a piece run a day earlier in the Sun that had been slugged “Women in the Grip of Fear, Many Shun Transit since Slayings.” Typical of the quotes in these pieces was one from a woman who said, “l never take the subway or streetcar in the evening. It’s really, really scary.”

What is most remarkable about this period of media hysteria is that the papers’ reports contained virtually no statements from women who suggested they were not taking precautions. Of2S women interviewed by the Star for a June 3 article headlined “Fear Stalks Metro Women after Cheerleader’s Slaying,” only three said Isford’s death, six days earlier, had little impact on them. (All three explained they avoided reading the papers and listening to the radio so as not to learn some~ thing that might frighten them.) One Sun reporter recalls, “There I was being told to go up and down the streets of a neighborhood and ask, ‘Are you afraid?’ If an editor wants a particular angle, you keep asking until you get someone to say it.”

While the Globe did not fan women’s fears to nearly the same degree as the Star and the Sun, neither did it provide much coverage giving a different perspective on the issue of violence against women. Murray Campbell, at the time the paper’s day city editor, says now that he was aware women were scared. But, he admits, he was perplexed about how to cover the murders in an intelligent way. “We tried to show, by example, that the Globe wasn’t going to do fear and loathing stories. But we were hamstrung by our inability to come up with alternatives. In the end we did nothing in place of fear stories. We just didn’t do any stories at all.”

By contrast, senior staff at the other two papers don’t see anything wrong with their coverage. Sean McCann, the Sun’s assistant city editor in ’82, pro~ tests that his paper’s stories weren’t meant to scare women, but to educate them. Similarly, Mary Deanne Shears, then city editor of the Star and now assistant managing editor, says, “We were criticized a lot that summer, but people don’t realize how determined we were not to do just fear stories, not to jump on the scary bandwagon.”

Even more disturbing than this lack of self-examination are the startling biases revealed during a discussion of the papers’ roles after the murders. Shears, while claiming she believes Isford was an innocent victim, in the next breath says: ‘1sford was looking for trouble. These were innocent people, but at the same time, if you had your blouse half off and were walking down the street at two in the morning, you might be enticing. Wasn’t Isford wearing a gold lame pantsuit?” Jim Wilkes, a Star reporter who covered many of the murders, seems to share this interpretation: “Would you as a woman walk down a dark alley in the early morning wearing a bikini? I certainly wouldn’t invite robbery by walking through a dark alley with $50 bills hanging out of my pockets.”

Ian Harvey, a Sun staff reporter who wrote many of that paper’s initial reports, now believes that his paper didn’t act as responsibly as it should have: ‘1 had a bad feeling about the direction the coverage took. I think it was pushed in the direction of fear and loathing.” Globe reporter Kirk Makin, who covered the subsequent court cases, agrees that the press acted irresponsibly. He says it seemed to him that editors escalated the situation to fill pages that are traditionally skimpy in the summer.

Whatever the papers’ motivation, the result was that women were terrified. Susan Cole, cofounder of Broadside, a Toronto-based feminist review, recalls, “Women weren’t going for many walks alone,” and holds the media responsible for this. “Their use of the word fear exacerbated women’s feelings. Fear is a loaded word, and in that case, the wrong one, too. Fear wasn’t stalking women, men were.”

Debbie Parent, a volunteer with the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre for the past five years, also charges that the newspapers distorted the situation. “‘Women are raped and assaulted all the time, but only when a woman is raped and murdered do the media jump on it,” she notes. “Never once did the papers reassure women by telling them that, in fact, only two percent of rapes end in murder. These reports told women that the world was set up in a way that makes them targets. If you believed this, how could you live your life without constantly looking over your shoulder?”

One direct consequence of the climate of terror created by the media’s coverage of events in 1982 was the formation of the Metropolitan Toronto Task Force on Public Violence against Women and Children in August of that year. Lawyer and police commissioner Jane Pepino, who headed the task force, says, “The media got the public hysterical and the public put the pressure on [Metro] to create the task force.” She believes the press should warn women if some loony is on the loose, but not to the point of scaring women into constraining their activities.

Cole agrees, and further argues that the precautions suggested by the papers, while apparently sensible, are both unproven and unacceptable. “Rape is one thing you can’t protect yourself from because there’s nothing an individual woman does that causes her to be raped,” she says angrily.

In her report, Voumvakis suggested that one reason the papers carried so many stories was that reporters took their cue from their colleagues at other papers. The Sun’s Harvey and the Globe’s Makin agree. “Every time a murder happened, we all rushed out there to cover it, not just the Sun,” Harvey recalls. Says Makin: “When you have one or two papers making a big thing of a particular theme, pretty soon you get all the papers and radio stations covering it.” Although Harvey says that what he calls the “frenzy feeding” approach used by the papers was wrong, he adds, “It’s the old chicken and egg thing. Does the public get whipped into a frenzy by the media, or does the media just pick up on the frenzy already out there? It may not be a good use of the press, but that’s the nature of the beast.”

The nature of the beast hasn’t changed much.

The people who determined how coverage would be handled during the media-inspired panic of 1982 are still there. Each subsequent attack results in sensationalized-and sexist-stories that keep many Metro women off the streets and behind locked doors.

Susan Cole, for one, feels that in every case the papers were unable to get beyond the sensational. Nowhere was there a systematic analysis of rape because that isn’t news or what sells papers. “You can’t ask the papers not to report the rape-murders, but you can blame them for perpetuating, with the aid of the police, terrorization of the whole female population.”

Nor is Cole optimistic that this will change. “Newspapers instinctively love a rape,” she says. “Everyone in marketing gets a rush because it sells papers.”

The phenomenon is well known and well documented: when a number of police are murdered in the line of duty, the murders inevitably result in yet another campaign for the return of capital punishment. Although often guilty of a certain sensationalism, most media vehicles try to maintain at least a semblance of objectivity in the way they cover police killings. Not The Toronto Sun.

For one month-from August 19 to September 20, 1984, a period during which three Metro area policemen were murdered-the Sun conducted a campaign to convince its readers of the need for a free parliamentary vote on capital punishment. In that time, the paper ran 41 capital punishment-related items: 24 stories on the police murders (14 were featured on the first five pages, six had front-page color photos); three editorials advocating capital punishment; six stories on the noose with such unequivocal headlines as “Call for the Return of the Hangman”; and several letters to the editor, all urging the reinstatement of the death penalty. No letters opposing capital punishment were published. (“We received letters opposing the death penalty that we were going to publish. I just don’t know what happened,” says Marilynn Figueroa, assistant to the executive editor.)

On September 19, this concerted drive culminated in a front-page ballot that asked readers if they favored the return of capital punishment. Of the roughly 15 percent of the paper’s readers who responded, 97.3 percent said they favored the return of the noose. The results were hardly surprising, for three reasons: such biased surveys tend to attract the extremists, the letter-writers, the very vocal; the Sun‘s regular readers presumably agree with the paper’s reactionary line; and the sensationalistic methods of persuasion employed by the paper virtually guaranteed such a response.

It is the right of any paper to cater to what it perceives as the needs of its particular readership. But it is another thing to evade the general editorial responsibility that is a part and parcel of the ownership of a newspaper. In the words of the 1981 Kent commission’s report on newspapers, papers have a responsibility to “ensure their readers are fully and fairly informed about the conditions of the society in which they live.” In carrying out its one-sided campaign, the Sun failed miserably in its social responsibility.

Persuasion is without doubt an important function of any newspaper, but the Sun strays far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. Although most newspapers confine their lobbying to the editorial page, the Sun persists in using the entire paper as a forum for the propagation of its views on everything from capital punishment to communism.

In a front-page editorial that ran on September 19, former editor Barbara Amiel positively roared for the return of capital punishment. “We want it because it’s vengeance-by which we mean that society shows that it will not take the slaughter of its citizens lying down. We want it because it’s necessary and right.” Immediately beside the editorial was a photo of Gary White, who had shot a policeman the previous day; the bold headline read: “Quiet Kid Cop Killer.”

Directly below was the ballot that asked simply, “Do you favor capital punishment?” Amiel’s editorial echoes the views she had aired in a September, 1975, article far Saturday Night entitled “In Defence of Vengeance”: “Two hundred years ago Johnny would have hack his hand cut off for stealing a loaf of bread. Whatever that lacked in justice and appropriateness, it did make subsequent thefts difficult.” Amiel has a right to her strongly held beliefs. But the question remains: Should an editorial opinion be expressed throughout a newspaper?

“So long as an item is marked editorial, it doesn’t matter where it appears,” says Peter Worthington, the Sun‘s cofounder and former columnist. “But if you’re disguising it as a news story and presenting a slanted story, that’s wrong. I don’t think we did that.” Media critic Barrie Zwicker disagrees. He feels that’s exactly how the Sun handled the capital punishment controversy. “The Sun places the capital punishment issue both in its columns and editorials, using its persuasive power anywhere it can.”

“That’s the way the Sun does business. It’s not the way we’ve done business, ” says Norman Webster, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail. But Webster is quick to add in the Sun‘s defence: “The editorial directors of the Sun feel it’s an important issue. Though it is a newspaper’s responsibility to present both sides of an issue before taking a position, the Sun may well feel that the other side has been well reported over the years and there’s no need to repeat it now.”

The Sun‘s particular brand of one-sided and simplistic coverage of important issues is a symptom of a serious deficiency in the media, according to Zwicker. “The Sun legitimizes, reflects and perpetuates that ignorant stand by only presenting one side.”

Robert Burt, the Sun‘s former executive city editor, insists the campaign was not one-sided. “We just wanted to show Parliament what the people of the country think of capital punishment.” Editorial director Ed Monteith takes this ideal even further: “The paper is there for the people. The social responsibility is in giving them a chance to voice their opinion.”

Before one can voice an opinion on so controversial an issue as capital punishment, one needs to be exposed to a fair and balanced presentation. In the September 19 editorial, the Sun said it favored capital punishment because it is a deterrent. In so doing, it chose to ignore a 1976 federal report on capital punishment by the solicitor general’s department that said: “Most existing research has concluded either that the existence of capital punishment legislation does not deter homicides or that there is no direct relationship between such legislation and homicide rates.” In fact, the report found that the largest number of murders of policemen since 1961 were committed in 1962, when 11 policemen were killed. That year, capital punishment was still in effect and two men were executed, one of them for killing a policeman. Zwicker isn’t surprised the Sun ignored the report. “The Sun doesn’t deal with grey areas. It has a simplistic, black-and-white approach to issues like capital punishment. [It’s] irresponsible in that it fails to recognize some statistics that are of the utmost importance. There’s no subject that can be approached without a context.”

Worthington admits that the Sun‘s campaign was in part motivated by a desire to “stir things up,” but doesn’t see anything wrong with this. “Capital punishment is a big issue in this country. You try to create a bit of interest, as a public service. The ultimate aim is not to not sell papers. I think the ballot is a safety valve. It’s a legitimate way for people to let off steam,” he says. Worthington thinks it was far more dishonest of the Sun to run a front-page editorial on the famine in Ethiopia that announced the paper’s intention to join in fund raising efforts, as it did late in 1984. “That’s more a question of a circulation gimmick. That’s far more cynical.”

Of course, the Sun regularly milks famine, crime and murder stories for everything they’re worth. It often relies on emotional quotes from grief-stricken people, ignoring statistics and facts that might present a different view. For example, on September 19, following the murder of Metro Police Constable David Dunmore, the Sun quoted Dunmore’s neighbor: “I certainly hope justice can be done. I think they [the killers] should be hanged so others won’t do itAs citizens we wonder where it’s going to end.”

The Sun makes the most of sensational headlines and gory photos of murder victims. Like the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era, it exploits the public’s appetite for horror stories. Such reporting can serve a positive purpose, according to Ottawa criminologist John Fleischman. “The reporting of crime is not an incorrect thing for newspapers to do. In reporting crime, newspapers delineate the boundaries of social acceptance, telling people what is allowed and what isn’t,” says Fleischman, who recently completed a revised report on capital punishment for the federal solicitor general’s department.

“But papers like the Sun take things out of context to sell newspapers,” continues Fleischman. “That’s the immorality of them. The irresponsibility is in the misrepresentation of the facts. The notion is that if capital punishment were reinstated, people would stop killing.”

In stripping the capital punishment issue down to its elemental, primeval features, the Sun effectively abdicated its claim to merely fulfilling its moral or social obligations. No amount of self-serving rhetoric about only acting as the voice of the people can disguise the fact that front-page ballots and screaming headlines give the newspaper’s circulation a nice little jolt. But, beyond that, the Sun knows its readership well. It’s a classic case of giving the people what they want. The Sun‘s readers read the paper to have their biases confirmed. The Sun obliges by presenting a narrow-minded, distorted world view: as upholders of the law, the police are the only thing standing between an orderly, safe and clean society and a degenerate, lawless, anarchistic environment. The Kent report noted: “Without social responsibilities, the press would be but a business like others and the market its only law.” But if Fleischman is correct in stating that papers such as the Sun manipulate the facts to enhance their profits, then perhaps the Kent commission’s view of what newspapers ought to be is merely a utopian vision.

The CBC’s coordination of the TV coverage of Pope John Paul II’s 12-day visit to Canada last fall, touted as the biggest media event of the decade, could have drawn considerable criticism. But most of the stations that had to rely on the public network were surprisingly uncritical. This harmony existed from the outset. When the pope’s plans were announced, the Department of External Affairs sought a network to coordinate coverage in conjunction with the Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops. A series of meetings of representatives from TV networks and stations produced the consensus that the CBC was the best choice. Even the other obvious potential contender, CTV, the country’s largest private network, agreed. According to Henry Kowalski, a CTV producer, the job rightly fell to the CBC because it is the country’s public network.

Using a $12-million “special allocation” from the federal government, CBC created a separate “Host Broadcaster Unit” to be solely responsible for covering the papal visit. The corporation finished $1 million under budget.

To avoid creating a media circus, CBC adopted a “host first” approach. Its cameras were given “prime site locations” at each of 60 tour events, and daily visual summaries were made available to foreign and domestic broadcasters, known collectively as “unilateral broadcasters.” A fully equipped media centre, complete with monitors, transmission facilities and technical staff, coordinated the unilateral broadcaster’s activities at each of 13 major city sites; another 13 mini-centres were established at locations where the pope celebrated mass.

Despite the constraints the CBC’s approach placed on unilateral broadcasters, they seemed largely content with the way coverage was handled. George Szostak, a reporter with Hamilton’s CHCH-TV, afterward described it as “better done than in any other place the pope has ever visited.” CTV’s Kowalski also praised the CBC’s organization and product.

Kowalski’s only complaint was about the noncontroversial nature of the commentary that accompanied the visuals the CBC supplied, comparing it to the sort of coverage that usually is reserved for parades.

However, it can be argued that CBC’s bland approach was typical of commentary generally. Few media chose to challenge the pope’s more contentious statements during his visit. In the CBC’s defence, its supporters argue that viewers were primarily interested in seeing the tour, not hearing an analysis of it.

In the end, the CBC carried off the biggest public relations job in its history in a creditable manner, no doubt assuring its direct involvement in future blockbuster events.

Reporting public opinion polls is a firmly entrenched element of election campaign coverage. But whether polls influence election results is the subject of a continuing debate.

Alan Frizell, codirector of the Carleton School of Journalism poll, told The Toronto Star that after the 1980 federal election the school did a poll asking people why they voted as they did. Only four percent of the respondents admitted they were directly influenced by polls, but a further 68 percent said they believed polls might have subconsciously affected their decision.

Some critics argue that news agencies should be prohibited from publishing poll results during elections because the media tend to overemphasize the leading candidate, creating the so-called bandwagon effect. According to proponents of this view, undecided voters get caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding the poll leader and vote for that candidate because he or she seems assured of success.

When addressing the Canadian Public Relations Society in Ottawa last fall, Allan Gregg, president of Decima Research Ltd., dismissed this idea: “Historically that doesn’t hold. Only political barbarians would switch votes to go along with a pack. But polls have an indirect impact in that the notion of who is going to win a campaign structures media coverage.”

Critics of extensive reporting of polls also argue that when the media concentrates on poll results, not enough attention is paid to the important issues of a campaign and how effectively a potential leader can deal with them. Former industry minister Sinclair Stevens, an opponent of the use of polls in election coverage, says, “I think they are not necessary. It’s more important that people assess the issues and come to their own conclusions on the relative strengths and weaknesses of a leader.”

Geoffrey Stevens, managing editor of The Globe and Mail, doesn’t believe polls have a direct effect on voters, but he does feel they can lead to the underdog syndrome, whereby votes swing to candidates who do badly. Stevens believes John Turner’s poor standing in the polls last summer helped him pull off a victory in his Vancouver-Quadra riding. When it appeared that Turner might not even win in his own riding, some voters felt they should help Turner out, says Stevens.

Toronto Star national editor Ian Urquhart also doesn’t believe polls directly affect voters but thinks they can demoralize workers in the party that isn’t doing well, who consequently may not conduct as strong a campaign as they might were they feeling more confident. “So in that way polls indirectly influence the election,”

says Urquhart. He adds that last summer there was “such a proliferation of polls, to the point where people would have been confused. Television stations indiscriminately led off newscasts with reports of the latest poll, no matter who did them.”

To help its readers make sense of the varying results of the different poll takers last summer, Urquhart says the Star used the most recent Gallup poll on the front page and other polls on the inside pages: “By putting the Gallup poll on the front page, we’re signalling to our readers that the Starconsiders that poll the most valid.”

As for polls other than Gallup, such as those done by journalism students at Carleton, CROP (Centre de recherches sur l’opinion publique) and market researchers, Urquhart says the Star prints them because “they are part of the public record. If we didn’t carry them in the paper, readers would start to ask some very real questions about why they weren’t there.”

Joe Fletcher, a political scientist at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, says although a lot of people feel opinion polls influence some voters, “no one has ever been clever enough to prove it.” He says comprehensive and sophisticated studies would have to be done to prove conclusively that such an influence does or does not exist. Fletcher suggests that those conducting such studies would have to carefully determine what variables have an impact on voters, because any influence would be very subtle. In addition, he believes a control group, completely isolated from news reports on campaigns and the results of polls, would also have to be studied. “It’s a very sticky methodological problem,” he says.

Although there is no concrete proof that polls influence voters, we must consider the possibility that they do because so many people suspect that such surveys exercise at least some indirect influence. It’s time the media started reporting poll results with more discretion. To predict an election winner based on campaign polls, as the media so often do, is nothing less than irresponsible.