Last August, 13-year-o1d Gary Rangasamy arrived at Scarborough General Hospital from his home in Guyana for a special surgical procedure to reduce the size of his right arm. It had grown to more than twice its normal size, a result of neurofibromatosis, better known as Elephant Man’s disease. The boy’s operation presented the media with the perfect “human interest story,” It also provided the perfect opportunity for the controversial practice of cheque book journalism. In exchange for donations of undisclosed amounts to a fund for the boy’s hospital expenses, CFTO-TV, The Toronto Star and radio station CFTR shared exclusive coverage of Gary’s story. They were the only media organizations allowed to film and photograph the rare operation, and to interview the boy, his family and his doctors. Other organizations were limited to picking up the story from them or reporting from a news conference held the day after surgery. This setup drew charges of cheque book journalism, and rebuttals from those who enjoyed exclusivity.

CFTO was the first to get involved, the result of a tip one of its reporters received from the hospital. The TV station negotiated a deal with the Rangasamy family, and then offered to share its rights with one newspaper and one radio station-the Star and CFTR. Before CFTO approached CFTR, however, it offered the radio rights to CFRB. But CFRB refused the opportunity. The asking price, says CFRB news director Don Johnston, was a $300 donation to the Gary Fund. “I don’t really like the idea of cheque book journalism, even if it is for a good cause, as it was in this case.” Johnston says free media access would have been the best way to raise money for the medical expenses because it would have provided for a wider audience, and would have set a better precedent. “I don’t want to see us getting into paying fortunes like the tabloids for memoirs and life stories. We shouldn’t even open the door slightly to this kind of thing.” Although he disagrees in principle, Johnston says he can understand CFTO’s decision. “I don’t want to get into a position of criticizing CFTO’s judgement. I sympathize with them because they were in on this thing right from the beginning.”

Ted Stuebing, CFTO’s vice-president of news and public affairs, says he has no qualms about accepting the exclusive rights. “It was a very good story-we were pleased to have it and make a contribution to a young lad who had a dreadful problem. It was an obvious decision on our part.” In response to an Aug. 23 Globe and Mail story headlined “Cheque book journalism bought exclusive stories on rare arm operation,” Stuebing says, “The charges of cheque book journalism were just sour grapes. ..I understand why there is repugnance at paying despicable people money for a story, but what has that got to do with Gary Rangasamy?” While Stuebing insists there was nothing wrong with what his station did, he refuses to release any details of the deal. “It’s private business,” Stuebing says.

Lou Clancy, The Toronto Star’s city editor, says the Star accepted the rights because, “For us, it was a good story. “If we didn’t take it, someone else would have.” Clancy says the Star had nothing to do with the financial arrangements; his newspaper simply made a donation to the Gary Fund. “The donation had nothing to do with our coverage of the story… as far as I know there was no price set on it. The Toronto Star is the biggest newspaper, so it was natural that it was brought to us, as well as the biggest radio and television stations.” Although Clancy “can understand why their noses would be put out of joint,” he says charges by the excluded media of cheque book journalism are unfounded, and adds that the Star has a policy against it. “Exclusivity is a word that goes right back to the early days of journalism. This is not cheque book journalism.”

CFTR news director john Hinnen says the station bought the rights from CFTO to give its listeners the best possible understanding of the operation. Although Hinnen says it was a “tough call” to decide whether to buy the rights, he doesn’t regret it. “I wouldn’t buy news if it meant someone who didn’t deserve to get financial assistance would benefit. But here you are dealing with a young boy who needed help.” Like Clancy, Hinnen is convinced that if he hadn’t taken the rights, the competition would have. He also says that because the arrangements for the story were made by Cf7.0, “certainly we can’t be charged with cheque book journalism. “We came in at the end.”

Susan Keeler, who works for the Scarborough General Hospital Foundation, which takes care of the hospital’s fund raising and public relations, says the Rangasamy family granted exclusive coverage because it feared a media circus. “It [exclusivity] enabled the story to be told on a more open basis. You just couldn’t have bombarded Gary like that, or his mother and uncle. “They also had more control that way. They could say, ‘You can’t use that picture or write that,’ to some extent,” Keeler says.

Keeler also says the family went to the press only to publicize the Gary Fund, and that it was appropriate that CFTO and the Star got the rights because they had been helpful to the hospital in the past. And, she says, “Their good coverage was the reason for the success of the Gary Fund.” Through donations from individuals and companies, $50,000 was raised. Keeler estimates the boy’s expenses were $17,500 and will be about the same when he returns for further corrective surgery this July. Any money left over will go to other children with rare diseases. “Normally we’re not for cheque book journalism,” says Keeler. “But CFTO and the Star were helping, and there was no profit for anyone. “

Gary’s uncle, Hilton Gopie, a psychology professor at Seneca College, says the hospital advised the family to grant the exclusive coverage to CFTO.

“We didn’t choose them,” Gopie says. “The hospital approached them.” After the hospital agreed to help with fund raising, Keeler, who worked at CFTO before joining the hospital’s public relations department, called a friend at the newsroom for advice on publicizing the operation.

“He [the CFTO employee] came down just to give personal advice, then he got excited when he saw some slides of Gary,” says Gopie. “It would have been completely public, but there was no initial interest, and this was a few days before the operation.” Gopie says that, in conjunction with the CFTO advisor, the hospital decided exclusivity was the best course. They told Gopie that allowing full access meant the hospital would have to find staff to do the coverage and distribute it to the news media to protect Gary from a barrage of journalists. “The general advice given by the hospital was, if full access was granted, everyone would be trying to get the jump on the others, and we would be hounded. We agreed with their decision, given the explanations, and left the hospital to handle the rest,” Gopie says. “We didn’t do any negotiating. We had no experience with the media. We were dependent on the hospital’s judgment.” Scarborough General’s executive director Allan Greve disputes Gopie’s version of the story. He says any advice given was confined to clinical matters, such as whether or not Gary’s health permitted media access, and to the setting up of the Gary Fund. He says Gopie, who lives in Scarborough, was familiar with CfTO and had his own opinions about who could handle the coverage. “The family discussed it at home to decide how to handle things. The guardian, or person responsible, was the liaison with the hospital. In this particular case it was Hilton Gopie because he understood the system. Basically, he represented the family.” Greve says all media arrangements were made by the family, and he doesn’t know the details. “That’s a family thing. We’re in health care, not public relations.”

Greve says CFTO made a donation of an undisclosed amount to the Gary Fund, but that “the arrangement was to tell the story, and nothing else.” He adds, “Mr. Gopie’s bottom line was that no one should profit from the fund raising.”

But Craig MeInnes, The Globe and Mails assistant city editor, says CFTO, CFTR and the Star did profit from the deal. “What they did was buy into exclusive coverage. No one argues with raising funds for an operation. But they bought into it knowing they would get something from it-it wasn’t a donation.” McInnes says the denials of cheque book journalism are invalid. “Once you’re in a position, you defend it, and that’s what they’re doing. Where the money went is of no consequence. ..it’s a dangerous precedent to pay for news.” Lester Pyette, executive editor of The Toronto Sun, says the Sun bought exclusive rights only twice; for the story of the test tube twins and for the discovery of the Titanic wreckage, but says that generally it’s a bad idea. “We try not to get involved in things like that. I hesitate to use the words cheap and sensational; but they apply to this case. From a media outlet’s point of view, it’s pretty shoddy.” The Sun was forced to scalp the story from the Star, Pyette says, and harass the hospital to release some photos.

The idea of bidding wars among media agencies worries Pyette. “To pay $10,000 to $12,000 to get exclusive rights means whoever has the most dough gets the story. It just doesn’t sit well.”

Peter Desbarats, dean of the Graduate School of journalism at the University of Western Ontario in London, says purchasing exclusive rights damages the credibility of the news media. Desbarats says buying information to provide news no one else has reflects badly on the media’s ability to use the traditional method of news gathering-investigative journalism. He says it is an unhealthy extension of the competition for an audience. “Cheque book journalism is an aspect of that competition,” Desbarats says. Although he believes there is an element of envy in the criticisms of CFTO, the Star and CFTR by the other media, Desbarats believes the reproofs are justified.

However, he says, there are different degrees of cheque book journalism. “Paying a convicted murderer for a story would really stink. “this story is not in that league at all. But this doesn’t invalidate the fact that cheque book journalism doesn’t work.”

Regardless of the ethical standpoints adopted by the various Toronto news agencies, one sentiment crosses the minds of even the opponents of exclusive coverage. Desbarats articulates it when he says, “I can’t help but think if I was a news director and was offered an exclusive story, even though I thought it was wrong, if I knew it would go to the competition, I would probably buy it. I can’t be too self-righteous.”

The item was legitimate news, there’s no argument about that. And it was also legitimately placed, well down in CFTO’s early evening line-up. If there was something “wrong” with the item, the viewers never knew it. But something was indeed “wrong.”

The story, as introduced by newsreader Tom Gibney and narrated by reporter Jim Wicks for CFTO’s World Beat News, involved the re-introduction of the I.5-litre pop bottle, which had been banned as dangerous two years before. The bottles exploded when dropped, shooting shards of glass like shrapnel. Now, as Wicks reported, a new, improved and safe version was ready to go back on the supermarket shelves. Wicks voiced over scenes of the new bottles being laminated with plastic, and tested by men in white lab coats. No explosions, even after assaults with a drill.

Wicks then came on camera, for the first and only time, and did his wrap-up. Back at the anchor desk, Gibney moved on to the next story.

What was wrong? Unlike the story that preceded it, and unlike the one that followed, the I.S-litre bottle story was not obtained by journalistic means. What was shown on the screen was a visual hand-out, bought and paid for by a very interested party-the Canadian Soft Drink Association. It was produced, not by CFTO’s news team, but privately. However newsworthy, the item was not news.

This fact did not deter Citytv that night either. CityPulse used the same visual hand-out, with Anne Mroczkowski reporting, and gave it a little extra-a quote from Tibor Gregor, the president of the Soft Drink Association, also thoughtfully provided. Once again, there was no journalism involved, no reportage.

The source of the safer bottle “story” was a video news release (VNR) created by a public relations company called Canada News-Wire (CNW). And the real importance of the story was that it marked a new beginning for TV news in Canada: When it ran, in 1982, it was one of the very first VNRs to be produced and aired in this country. Since that time, quietly, VNRs have become something of a growth industry, increasingly used by government as well as private industry, trade unions, charities, and cultural institutions. Video news releases are so close to journalism that it’s difficult to tell the difference. They have a news angle, a lead, and are done in exactly the same fashion as regular newsclips on TV news. But instead of a reporter directing the content, in accordance with journalistic standards, it is directed by the subject of the story, the client. This is what makes a VNR different: instead of aspiring for “truth” and “objectivity,” the VNRs goals lie essentially in sales and public relations. They allow an organization to put its ideas or products on air without being subjected to the trained journalist’s tough or embarrassing questions, without critique and without analysis. Zenith Data Systems Canada Ltd. paid CNW $5,000 to produce and distribute a TV news clip promoting, however subtly, its microcomputer, datasystems 2. The focus was on how the computers had become an important part of the first-year curriculum at Queen’s University in Kingston, Onto The “hard news” involved a new program in which the new computers were used. Zenith’s public relations firm, Argyle Communications, made the arrangements with CNW. The Zenith VNR, says Ryan Wilson, a senior consultant at Argyle, was designed to raise the profile of the company and to “educate” the public about Zenith’s project at Queen’s. CNW, after producing the newsclip, distributed it to 31 Englishlanguage news programs in Canada. “Seven or eight” news programs ran the story, Wilson said. (And more than that, Argyle succeeded in getting Zenith’s computers into the newsrooms’ libraries of stock footage, so if pictures of computers are ever needed, “they’ll use Zenith’s computers.”) Within the Zenith newsclip, the company’s name was discussed, and its computers shown. The chairman of the applied science microcomputer committee at Queen’s, Dr. David Turcke, was paraphrased in praise of the datasystems 2, and made a talking head appearance. Other than Turcke, only students were quoted, all positively. Zenith’s name appeared on the and on various boxes. The advertising was very subtle, which was precisely what the producer wanted. And when the “story” ran on the news there was, of course, no mention of other competing computer firms, and nobody was there to ask about any problems with the university’s new program. The goal was not to “inform” the public, it was to “educate.” “Essentially, it’s advertising,”says CNW’s associate producer Howard Kalnitsky, who made and narrated the Zenith piece. But the advertising aspect should be kept as subtle as possible. If it appears too much like advertising, no news director will allow it to appear on air. “We will not send clips if it’s a commercial. We have turned down major companies [for that],” says CNW’s vice-president and general manager Gordon Eastwood, an ex-Ottawa Journal man who nostalgically keeps an old Journal highway mailbox in his office. So CNW must carefully walk the territory between the advertising firm and the news operation. If it leans too much toward advertising, its VNRs will lose credibility in the newsroom and they will not be used; if it leans too far toward being news, CNW will lose its source clients, the ones who pay the bills.

As its pop bottle VNR established, CNW has successfully maintained its balance while walking that fine line. It has been making VNRs since 1982 and is currently Canada’s largest producer. During its first year CNW made about one a month: now it makes about one a week. (Its competitor, Bob Carr’s Toronto-based Newsroom Two, makes about one a month.) Although VNR production is a significant part of CNW’s operation, it has been well established in the print news release business for 25 years. It has 210 teleprinters in print and broadcast newsrooms across the country and distributes print news releases in the same way the Canadian Press distributes stories. These print releases account for most of CNW’s revenue. CNW is a private company, controlled by two Canadian firms-Public and Industrial Relations Ltd. and Tisdall Clark & Partners Ltd. CNW has offices in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.

CNW and Newsroom Two each use freelance crews which, on a shoot, could easily be mistaken for a normal news crew. But because their allegiance is to the subject of the VNR, not to the consumers of news, they go very much out of their way to ensure the client and his product are looking their very best. After all, his company is footing the bill.

The cost of a VNR in Canada varies from $2,200 to $6,000, averaging out at $3,000. The total cost reflects the cost of production-a half-day shoot to a full-day shoot-plus the cost of distribution of sending it by courier to 15 or 30 news shows in one or two languages. The news stations don’t pay a cent.

In the U.S., usually a good place to look for future Canadian trends, the practice is more common, and more expensive (a VNR usually costs between $12,000 and $16,000 U.S. because of higher distribution costs). As well, there are companies there that specialize in the production of VNRs. MG Productions is one. Margie Goldsmith of MG was quoted in the Public Relations Journal as saying, “My clients come to me and say, ‘How can I get free air time’?’ I tell them about VNRs.”

Although public relations people are happy to talk about VNRs, news directors are somewhat more reluctant. Most claim they have never even heard of them. Carr attributes their reluctance to the fact that they don’t want to be seen to rely on outsiders to get their news. “You want people to believe that yours is a big, hustling news operation,” Carr says. CNW’sJim Warrick concurs: “They use our stuff quite a bit,” he says. “Of course, they’ll say they don’t use it.”

Stephen Hurlbut, director of news programming at Citytv, says simply, “We don’t use them.” He says the VNRs CityPulse receives will usually go into the library as stock visuals. The news director at Clobal, Reg Thomas, says they would use a VNR only in “extreme circumstances.” If control of the shoot is relinquished, he says, then “you’re just being a rewrite man.” Derwyn Smith, news director of CfTO’s World Beat Neil’s, says he treats a VNR with as much skepticism as any print news release. He would prefer not to use any of the footage, but would “if it was necessary.” And Ken Sherman, reporter for World Beat NeIl’s, insists “we want to be in control.”

“Many of the smaller stations which lack the resources to do the pieces themselves use the wrapped VNR as is,” says Carr. “It makes them look more professional.” One such station is CfTM-TV in Toronto. “We usually do use something from CNW because we’re a small station and don’t have the resources the larger stations have,” says assignment editor Renato Zane. “We don’t use them unless we have to, and when we do, we just try to use the visuals.”

Despite the apparent dislike of VNRs, they are used more often than news directors are willing to admit. Both Newsroom Two and CNW periodically monitor the networks to discover who uses their VNRs and how, but the results of this monitoring are used for internal and promotional purposes only. They are not shown to existing clients because, the producers say, it is too expensive to monitor for everyone. Most clients therefore hire a news monitoring company such as Bowden’s or MediaScan Inc. to watch the networks for them. The VNR producers also send out reply cards with their VNRs. This method of feedback, however, is not completely reliable; the stations are only asked ((they used the VNRs, not how. As a result of his monitoring, Bob Carr concludes that his success rate-the rate that his VNRs at least prod the TV news shows into covering his clients’ stories-averages about 17 out of 24 news shows for Ontario. CNW is less willing to estimate its success, which Gordon Eastwood says is entirely dependent on the nature of the VNR. Some get near total coverage, as did the Co Sensor, a device very similar to a smoke detector except it measures and responds to carbon monoxide in the air. Eastwood claims it got 99 per cent coverage.

This is not to say that all the stations aired the VNR intact. News directors are very reluctant to run VNRs in their pure, prepackaged form. They know that the same VNRs are sitting on all the other news directors’ desks and if every station ran them intact, they’d all look pretty cheap. As well, many news directors like to modify the clips to suit their audiences. More significantly perhaps, they are also under no obligation to use the VNRs as packaged by the producers. The producers, in fact, do everything they can to make it easier for stations to pick what they want from the package. Both CNW and Newsroom Two place the talking head (the interviewee) on one audio channel and the reporter’s voiceover on another. To further simplify the process, the VNR producers also send a timed script with every VNR so the journalists know the exact length of each visual and voice-over. The VNR producers try so hard to segment their VNRs because they know that by doing so, they are increasing the chance that they will be used. Most stations therefore only use segments of the VNRs. Often, even if the stations do not run any part of a VNR, they will use the story idea as a basis for one of their own reports. This in itself is considered an accomplishment by the VNR producers and their clients.

From their viewpoint, the goal of a VNR is to have something discussed on the news, something the client thinks is important. This makes a lot of sense: the news is the most credible air time on television. Exposure on the news-especially uncritical exposure-is worth a hundred times its weight in commercials. To have a Knowlton Nash say on air, “everybody should own a Cabbage Patch doll, I do,” is a public relations man’s wet dream.

Which is close to what really happened (although Nash was never involved). The 1983 craze for Cabbage Patch dolls was enhanced in the U.S. by way of VNRs. Appropriate mob scenes were recorded on video and little stories written about “those amazing dolls.” This led to “Cabbage Patch fever” and further, larger mob scenes, which were recorded again for subsequent VNRs. The public relations man behind Coleco’s Cabbage Patch dolls, Robert Wiener, would sum up the campaign with, “When Bryant Gumbel or Jane Pauley says ‘Here’s the season’s hottest item,’ it means more to consumers than if Cole co says the same thing. The credibility that achieves far outweighs an advertisement’s.” The media coverage achieved with the VNRs (and conventional press releases) was so good that Coleco abandoned its regular advertising campaign for the dolls fully four weeks before Christmas. Sales of the Cabbage Patch dolls were nothing less than phenomenal. The dolls set a sales record for a new toy, $60 million (U.S.) in 1983.

Another early VNR made by CNW, paid for by Timex, was aired during the “spring-forward” change to daylight savings time. The peg was the centennial year of internationally-standardized time zones.

The tight, short piece simply reminded the viewers to put their clocks ahead that night. But, since Timex paid for the item, all the clocks and watches featured were Timex products. There was, however, no mention of the company. Global and CKND (Winnipeg) used the pictures and rewrote the provided script. CFCN (Calgary) and CFRN (Edmonton) used both the visuals and the audio. Timex got its name before the public in a nice friendly fashion, for the cost of production and distribution of the VNR. And what did it really matter? Aside from the question of subtly promoting one clock-and-watch maker over others, not much.

Not every VNR, however, is as neutral as the one from Timex. On Oct. 17, 1982, one of Amoco Canada Petroleum Company Ltd.’s gas wells exploded. Sour gas covered Lodgepole, Alta. Quickly, Amoco commissioned a VNR in which two doctors, or “authorities,” were quoted as saying there were no health hazards connected with the gas; that all alarm was unfounded. But a year later, in Maclean’s magazine (Nov. 14, 1983),the Pembina Area Sour Gas Exposures Committee disagreed, arguing that the potential health hazards had been swept under the carpet.

Admittedly, the video news release is no more than a TV version of the traditional print hand-out, a package to “assist” news directors in covering what the VNR’s sponsor considers to be “news.” But there is a difference between rewriting and running print releases-a practice far from unknown-and airing VNRs intact. Television is, quite simply, a much more powerful medium than print. The 1981 Kent Commission on Newspapers released a poll that showed 54 per cent of Canadian respondents considered television the most believable source of news, fully 20 per cent more than newspapers. The poll also reported that television beat newspapers 53 per cent t029 per cent on the question: “What news source is most fair and unbiased’?,’ And Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, co-director of the University of Toronto’s McLuhan program in culture and technology, says the two media, print and TV, have very different effects on an audience. The news in a newspaper is “already cleaned up,” and it forces an “intellectual involvement.” Television news tends to be “sensual and emotional; TV can reach an awful lot of people and give them a burst of adrenalin.” Television has impact. Despite the fact that he’s an ex-: newsman, Newsroom Two’s Bob Carr I defends the use of VNRs, charging the media shows “false pride” in criticizing them: he asks, for example, how a small TV news show is supposed to get pictures of the next space walk without visual PR help from NASA? “If there wasn’t some free input there wouldn’t be any news,” he contends. “The media couldn’t function without the input of others.” Gordon Eastwood argues that while VNRs present only one side of the story, they are accurate to that extent and don’t pretend to be the whole story. But, he admits, it’s “kind of deceitful” when news shows run a VNR with only minor cosmetic changes, letting the audience believe the story was “reported.”

This “deceitful” practice is unfortunately not uncommon within the Canadian television news circle. Because the VNR industry is so new to this country, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has not yet established any rules governing use. The television news industry itself has not established any guidelines either. The news directors are therefore under no obligation to run disclaimers across their screens denoting the fact that part of their “news” is actually an advertising supplement (a practice begun by some stations in the U.S.).

If the market continues to grow as it has, regulations and guidelines may become inevitable. But Bob Carr feels the industry will not thrive, or perhaps not even survive in Canada as it has in the U.S. There are, he believes, not enough stations to make production and distribution cost efficient for the client. Carr, in fact, fully expects he’ll be out of the VNR business, and that the industry will crumble within the next couple of years. There are so many other sources of news today, Carr says, journalists don’t need VNRs.

Eastwood, on the other hand, predicts that VNR production will flourish in Canada because “there’s a very open market.”

CNW, in fact, has already taken a large step toward expanding its own VNR production. On Feb. 18 it used satellite transmission for the first time in place of its regular courier service. It produced a VNR for Canada Safeway Limited, notified the client-specified news stations of what to expect, and then delivered the VNR to Satellite Delivery Services. For $1,700, SDS transmitted the video from its satellite dish to Anik D, a Canadian satellite, which relayed it to western Canada. Those stations wanting the item opened the appropriate channel and recorded. The two-to-three minute clip played over and over again for 30 minutes.

Satellite transmission has definite implications for the relationship between VNRs and television news. Because it is cheaper to send VNRs via satellite-reaching 82 English-language stations for one flat rate the VNR route becomes more attractive to I clients. Theoretically, anyway. So if Bob I Carr is wrong and Gordon Eastwood is I right, we have probably only seen the beginnings of a whole new media industry.

And now the word on (some of) their sponsors: the Ontario Ministry of Housing and Recreation, of Citizenship and Culture, of Natural Resources, the Canadian Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the National Gallery of Canada, HoneywelJl, Timex, Purina, Canadian Real Estate Association, Ontario Separate School Trustees Association, Sunnybrook Medical Centre, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, Paul Masson & Co., National Dairy Council of Canada…

THE HANDOUT IS QUICKER

THAN THE EYE How the government makes ‘news’ without flak from the opposition.

One of the better examples of how governments can bypass or attempt to bypass the journalistic process comes out of a video news release commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Transportation and Communications. The subject was a policy paper, released by the government on July 15, 1985 (the same day as the VNR), on deregulation of the railway and airline industry. It presented one side of a highly contentious and controversial issue, supporting deregulation and never acknowledging that there are experts who argue forcefully that deregulation in the United States has led to a serious decline in airline safety.

Under the direction of Argyle Communications, the ministry’s PR firm, Canada News-Wire produced three VNRs at a combined cost of about $10,000. The minister, Don Mazankowski, was featured, but obviously no opposition spokespersons or critics of any description were interviewed. The hand-outs were distributed to 71 English-language and 33 French-language stations, and each of the three was aimed at a different region of the country. What follows is a transcript of the VNR distributed to Eastern Canada.

Suggested studio lead into story: “Canada’s transportation industry should be opening under a new set of rules within a year, says the federal government.”

Reporter’s voice-over on transportation scenes:

“A policy paper released in Ottawa today outlines proposals to reduce regulations governing the nation’s airlines and railways, freeing them to offer more services to travelling Canadians, along with more competitive fares. Trucking and shipping companies will also be affected. The new deal is said to offer special advantages to Atlantic Canada. Transport Minister Don Mazankowski had this to say about the government’s plans:”

Mazankowski:

“Essentially, the new policy will reduce the regulatory burden quite substantially, allowing the transportation system more freedom to move, more freedom to grow and freedom to compete, and thereby providing more innovative and more competitive services right across the board. Atlantic Canada relies very heavily on transportation services and again, with the competitive forces of the market place we’ll certainly give them a better variety of services at lower rates and ah, particularly in the area of air services ah, in the commuter and regional and transborder context. We believe by scaling down the regulatory burden, freeing access, ah, Atlantic Canada will be much better served by air services. “

Reporter’s voice-over on transportation scenes:

“The sweeping proposals to reduce regulations represent the biggest overhaul in the history of Canadian transportation, Ottawa says. New airlines will be able to start up operations, and existing airlines will be able to launch new routes simply by showing they are ‘fit, willing and able.’ Currently, they must prove public convenience or necessity. And airlines will be able to set their own fares, although the government will review fare increases with the power to roll back excessive hikes. The new legislation will bring a lot of changes to the way Canada’s railroads do business. Railways will be able to sign confidential contracts with shippers of manufactured goods or natural resources who qualify for special low rates because of high volumes. This will assist Canadian shippers and bring back transporter business lost to American railroads. And if you’re served by only one railroad, you’ll be able to transfer your goods to another line if you can get a better deal. Canada’s shipbuilding industry is expected to benefit by measures to reserve the coasting trade. ..That’s anything up to 200 miles off shore, exclusively to Canadian ships. But most of all, the travelling public is expected to benefit from better and more frequent service, more competitive fares, and more efficient shipping of goods. The new transport paper also calls for replacement of the existing governing agency, the Canadian Transport Commission, with a new regulatory agency. It could be de-centralized, with offices in Western and Atlantic Canada as well as in Ottawa. The new National Transportation Authority, says Transport Minister Don Mazankowski, will promote competition and encourage the transportation industry to be more efficient in serving Canadian travellers and shippers.”

Mazankowski:

“We believe that ah, transportation system is mature enough and it can provide the kind of innovative services right across the board and ah, and with the freedom to compete, freedom to grow, freedom to experiment and provide services right across the country that were not heretofor provided.”

Our attention is first commanded by a sound vaguely resembling a gong. A flash of deep blue follows, and a graphic movement unfolds. It’s 7 p.m. and time for Peoples China to sit down to watch the news. There’s no glamor here, no middle-aged beauties like Jan Tennant, no sexually provocative types like the late Jessica Savitch. China’s chief newsreader is about 45-years-old and faintly dowdy. She’s always neatly turned out (though sometimes with a few rumples), and she does wear lipstick. But her normal on-air wardrobe is a mannish suit, complete with tie. (In China, when women wear men’s clothes, they are usually just that, right down to the zipper in front.) She spends a good deal of the newscast reading from a script-there are no teleprompters sitting in front of a blank blue background. Rarely, if ever, are her items punctuated with slides or chroma key. The first half of the 30-minute newscast is usually devoted to domestic matters. And, as the western viewer quickly comes to realize, domestic Chinese news gathering is dominated by a commitment to “good news.” In fact, Hu Yao Bang, general secretary of the Party, has decreed that all internal news should be 80 per cent good and 20 per cent bad. Television news tends to be 99 and 44/100 per Cent pure, a task made easier by the observed fact that everything seems to occur at an endless succession of meetings: of the Party, of the State Education Commission, of the esperanto society, of the Shijiazhuang local merchants society. When there are visuals they are inevitably long shots of large groups of men sitting at large tables with large tea cups in front of them. From these meetings we learn that a steel plant has ove rfulfilled its quota, or that millions are now speaking esperanto like natives, or that the local merchants of Hebei province are rolling in the money.

While the subjects’ lips are moving, it is extremely rare for the viewer to hear what they are saying. The “voice-over” is king (or queen) here. (One reason is the variety of dialects in the country: leaders such as Hu speak Chinese with a heavy Szechuanese dialect, which most Beijingers find incomprehensible. Another reason, it seems, is simply that China’s producers prefer the voice-over, even when the voice is over singers.)

Suddenly we are shifted from meetings to an Anhui coal mine, celebrating some unparalleled new achievement. Tons and tons of coal rollout of these clean, well-managed shafts and everybody is smiling. But again all is silent except for the ubiquitous newsreader who rapidly reels off the statistics of success. Then, if we are really lucky, we are taken to a local market, where peasants are buying, selling, touching, and tasting pigs’ heads, guts, feet, tongues, and ears-a good news vignette to show us the vast array of meat products available to the average Chinese on the free market. The camera work is usually remarkably good, certainly up to CBC and CTV standards.

What we don’t see is that day’s public trials for an assortment of accused criminals, people ultimately found guilty of everything from massive fraud to rape and robbery. (This is not to say that such events are not reported to the public at all, it’s just that television cameras never seem to be there.)

While China appears on TV as a kingdom of heavenly peace and harmony, the rest of the world arrives in Chinese homes in a hellish state of chaos, mayhem, violence, flames, and sudden death. The second half of the 30-minute newscast is international and the service used is the infamous British VIZNEWS, the cheapest service available. It’s not so much that the Chinese producers want to portray the rest of the world as hell; it’s just that VIZNEWS itself sees the world as a crazed inferno. Propaganda points are easy to come by.

Chinese television news thus presents a remarkable contrast to the concept of newsworthiness as we define it in the west. There is no evil master plan of “Newspeak” here, just a very different culture. And in spite of years of revolution followed by years of purging of the “olds,” there still remains in this country a respect and craving for harmony, for dignity, and for recognition of those who are older, and who are in positions of authority. This, unfortunately, often leads to dull, somber, colorless journalism. (The “fortunately” part is that the Chinese are not ready for CityPulse or Eyewitness news.) The average consumer seems to want his or her heavy dose of factual and statistical information. That, however, appears to be changing: more lively, people-oriented, non-institutional news is beginning to emerge, in print if not on screen.

For example, the prestigious Party Central Committee organ Ren Min Ribao, (the People’s Daily) has dropped in circulation from nine million in 1981 to a mere four million today. Other staid voices of State and Party have also suffered serious losses in readership. Millions of people are turning to bright journals such as the Beijing Evening News, with its features, profiles, and lots of local news. And the Chinese love magazines, everything from the Red Flag, the Communist Party journal of theory, to the enormously popular Women of China, to the more esoteric Chinese Literature. (The popular sports magazines provide the prudish Chinese with revealing looks at the comely torsos, legs, and bums of both men and women.) There is also a thriving business for the “unhealthy publications,” those dealing with stories of two-headed animals, quack cures, and endless Kung Fu tales.

Recently, investigative journalism has been given a life. In print journalism at least, even in the old mother People’s Daily, there have been numerous exposes of party corruption, state fraud, and official excesses. Last June, for example, that paper reported in great detail a case of police brutality against a lawyer in Fujian County. The police used an electric prod on the young man simply because he was a lawyer and because he had demanded to see their identification papers. The deputy police chief was arrested. The Beijing based Workers Daily exposed an elaborate scheme of self-promotion by leading functionaries and department heads of the huge Xishan Coal Bureau in Shanxi County. In Shanxi province, the People’s Daily correspondent dug up a horrifying tale of a senior Party official using his position to demand sexual favors from a young female secretary. Even in the Pollyanna world of television there has been a certain toughening of attitude.

As China opens its doors to the world, look for more and more domestic “bad news” coverage. The Chinese want to learn from the west, and they realize they may have to accept some of the “negative” aspects of westernization, including western journalism. The media in China will remain for a long time in the “service of national goals,” but there is no doubt that “national goals” are being re-evaluated in such a way so as to provide for development of a more relevant and popular press.

Gerald B. Sperling is a professor of journalism and political science at the University of Regina, and Maggie Siggins is a Canadian author. Her latest book is A Canadian Tragedy: Joanne and Colin Thatcher, A Story of Love and Hate. Both currently work and live in China.

In the vast majority of cases, court coverage presents few problems for reporters. Once a trial or hearing commences, virtually anything said by the judge, lawyers, and witnesses on the stand can be reported verbatim, without fear of retribution. Like Parliament and the legislatures, what is heard is “privileged,” which means the laws of libel and slander, as they apply to all other stories, can only be invoked under the rarest of circumstances. Even the standard restriction-no outside information can be included in stories while the case is in progress-tends to work in the reporter’s favor: it prohibits further digging. Covering court, therefore, is usually a straightforward procedure. Such was not the case for journalists covering the well-publicized and sensational “cannibalism” hearing that began last fall in Hamilton, Ont.

The case involved two girls under the age of 16. They alleged that their natural parents (and later, the mother and her boyfriend) forced them to participate in a series of vile acts that included the ritualistic murder of other children in a graveyard, and cannibalism. The children related these stories to a foster mother in whose home they had been placed in February, 1985. She immediately passed the information on to the local Children’s Aid Society (CAS). The CAS, in turn, filed an application to make the girls wards of the Crown, and through that, a hearing ensued. During the hearing, horror stories began to surface.

The proceedings commenced in camera. Unified Family Court Judge Thomas Beckett followed the provision under Ontario’s Child Welfare Act in matters relating to child abuse. Child abuse was alleged, to say the least: the girls claimed they were forced by their parents to witness mutilations and dismemberments, to eat human flesh, and to participate in sexual orgies involving satanic rituals. They also alleged they were forced to perform oral sex, submit to vibrators being shoved into them, and to having faeces and urine smeared on them while a video camera rolled.

It was the kind of case that gets talked about. Eventually reporters began to hear some of the talk. The first journalist to hear about the case was a Hamilton Spectator reporter named Denis LeBlanc. LeBlanc heard about the hearing in early October. He sat in on two days of testimony, although he was not allowed to report on it, and then convinced his newspaper to take legal steps toward lifting the in camera restrictions. Brian MacLeod Rogers of the Toronto law firm Blake, Cassels and Graydon appeared before Judge Beckett on behalf of Southam Inc., the Spectator’s parent company, and won the right to cover the story on Oct. 8. He cited The Child Welfare Act, which provides for coverage by no more than two media organizations at anyone time. (The organizations can decide among themselves which two, or have it decided for them by the presiding judge.) Rogers also cited the Federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms which, since its enactment in 1982, has increasingly been used by media organizations to open in camera proceedings to coverage. The Spectator ran its first story in early October. It was picked up by The Canadian Press (CP) and immediately the competition began to seek similar access. Judge Beckett adjourned the hearing until Oct. 24, when he heard the new submissions.

Kathryn Feldman, the Toronto Star’s lawyer (also of Blake, Cassels and Graydon) explained that by the time the lawyers appeared collectively before Judge Beckett, “It wasn’t a matter of coverage, it was a matter of how much coverage.” Feldman said, “The main concern of the judge was that nothing be published which would identify the children or anyone connected with the children, including the social worker and psychiatrists.” In the end, Jldge Beckett agreed to allow reporting by all six organizations that had appeared before him on Oct. 24 -The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Hamilton Spectator, CBC, CHCH-TV, and CHML (a Hamilton radio station).

The Toronto Sun sent its lawyer before Judge Beckett a week later, but this time coverage was refused. “We weren’t aware the judge would be limiting seating,” said John Paton, the Sun’s city editor. “The story wasn’t very interesting in the beginning.” Paton said the judge’s ruling was unfair because it allowed the Sun’s two competitors, the Globe and the Star, to do what the Sun was prevented from doing. Although the Sun was told it could appeal the judge’s decision, it didn’t. “By the time an appeal date was set, the case would be over,” explained Paton. The Sun ended up using CP wire stories instead.

“I would have preferred to see all news organizations get a fair crack at the case but I could see the judge’s concern,” said Kathleen Kenna, the Star reporter who covered the case. “He was worried that a large number of reporters meant just that many more people who could give out details [by word of mouth].” Kenna, the Star’ Ontario beat reporter for just over a year, recalled how emotionally draining the Hamilton case was. “It was hard to listen to the sexual abuse allegations, especially as a woman, because they are female children. You just can’t imagine,” she said with a disgusted look. She added quickly that because she was in court all day and had to concentrate on the very involved testimony, she didn’t get much time to reflect on what she was hearing. “I had to be careful just to get who was saying what to whom.”

Kevin Marron, the Hamilton freelancer who covered the case for the Globe, agreed. “There was no time to worry about emotions. You professionally shelve them. It’s later in the day, when the work is done, that you say, ‘My God, what did I hear today?'”

Each reporter had an incident imbedded in his or her mind of a time during the case they found particularly difficult. “It was the video tapes of the children [in therapy with il1e psychiatrist] that got to me,” Marron said. “I found it haunting.” Marron had previously covered murder trials in which he had heard gory testimony but he had never seen any victim going through such trauma before. “I would go home at night and hear the voices of the children ringing in my head.”

Kenna, on the other hand, recalled the time the natural mother’s psychiatric evaluation was shown to the court on video. The woman was telling the psychiatrist about the sexual and physical abuse she had experienced as a child. “The mother cried in court for most of the time,” Kenna said. “It was heart wrenching to watch someone listening to her past, to something most of us won’t ever experience.”

After the first few stories, Kenna and the Star began to impose their own restrictions on her reportage. “I wasn’t told to cool it, but the editing showed,” Kenna said. An early front-page story, which appeared Oct. 29, contained most of the children’s allegations, complete with graphic details much as they were presented in court. But after the STar’s switchboard and its ombudsman’s office were swamped with calls from shocked readers the following day, the graphic details were dropped from future stories. From that point forward, Kenna and the Star referred only to “bizarre sexual allegations,” without details, in deference to their readers.

Marron said his stories were edited for space and that his detailed descriptions were also replaced. He continued to include details of the sexual abuse, knowing his stories would be heavily edited; at least his editor would know the extent of what was heard in court.

By exercising their discretion, Kenna, Marron and other journalists who reported the “cannibalism” hearing established that even the most bizarre and sexually twisted case need not be an occasion for a media circus. Along with their organizations, they went beyond judicial restrictions and imposed their own judgments. The question is, however, did the public really need to know what the media contended was its right to know? “Sexual abuse is much more common than we care to think,” Kenna replied. “And that’s why we, as a newspaper, felt strongly about the coverage. I’m sorry if it made people sick in their cornflakes, but if these things do happen, maybe the public should know about it.”

For very close to 20 years now Toronto Life has been unchallenged as Toronto’s city magazine. Toronto Calendar provided some rivalry, at least in the listings area, but it merged with Toronto Life about four years ago. Avenue, a controlled-circulation magazine for those who frequent Yorkville, was started in 1981 but has recently suspended publication indefinitely. TO., which publishes only eight times a year, and is geared toward younger, trendier readers, seems to be holding its own after a year-and-a-half; it has done little to change Toronto Life’s upscale market position. But now a new challenger has appeared-The Globe and Mail’s Toronto. Its editors feel confident it will equal, if not surpass, Toronto Life’s success and status. The Globe and Mail has certain advantages over most other publishers in launching a magazine. Because the hew monthly comes enclosed in the paper, distribution costs are eliminated. Mailing to subscribers costs Toronto Life from $6,000 to $9,000 per issue and distribution to newsstands, about $3,000 per issue. The Globe has an established circulation base of 200,000 in the city of Toronto with which to attract advertisers, plus huge financial resources on which the magazine can draw. The Globe’s assistant editor Les Buhasz had the luxury of being able to say that he wouldn’t know his start-up costs until well after the first issue came out. These same advantages helped the Report on Business magazine make a small profit in 1985, its first full year out-a rare feat in the magazine business. They should help sustain Toronto.

And Buhasz says his magazine enjoys other advantages over Toronto Life, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary this November with a 350-page issue. First, he cites the fact that Toronto Life must compete with hundreds of other magazines on the newsstands. Second, he insists that his magazine has a better defined and more attractive [to advertisers] target audience, “those at the upper end of the income/educational scale.” In fact, both magazines share a nearly identical reader profile. Toronto Life’s readers are primarily in the preferred 25-to-49 age range, with high levels of post-secondary education and annual household incomes in excess of $48 ,000.

As far as newsstand competition goes, Toronto Life editor Marq de Villiers says that his magazine does have to try hard to catch people’s attention on the newsstand, but that even controlled-circulation magazines like Toronto have to make people pick them up. De Villiers points out that it’s difficult for those magazines to prove to advertisers that people are really reading them, especially in the early stages before reader surveys have been done.

Says de Villiers, “At least we can prove that there are X number of people out there who have paid for the magazine on the newsstand or by subscription and therefore presumably read it. I think Toronto’s people will have a harder sell [to advertisers] than they think.” (His point brings to mind the death of Quest, a controlled-circulation magazine published by Comac Communications Inc. Advertisers began pulling out when a 1983 Print Measurement Bureau study showed Quest had lost 600,000 readers since 1981. A complete redesigning of the magazine and lower advertising rate failed to save it. Publication stopped in late 1984.)

An earlier city magazine published by a newspaper, The Toronto Star’s The City, lasted only two-and-a-half years, and “never made money,” says Joey Slinger. Slinger, now a Star columnist, was editor of the weekly magazine, started in 1977. He says, “If you’re an advertiser looking to reach the BMW market, there are only about 75,000 households in Toronto in that market-that’s the audience Toronto Life goes to. You don’t care about the other thousands the newspaper goes to, and you don’t want to pay for advertising to those people.”

But Buhasz isn’t worried about attracting advertisers. “It’s true reader acceptance will be hard to judge,” he says. “The magazine is part of the paper and we won’t have newsstand sales. But advertisers had one Globe and Mail magazine product to look at, and were given flats to show them the appearance, tone and quality of Toronto.”

Buhasz also believes Toronto will be superior in quality to Toronto Life. “We’ll provide a listing service as well, but we won’t be doing any service pieces, that is no where-to-get-your-plumbing-fixed pieces; but we will have some where-to-get interesting-buys pieces, where you can get something different and unique.” (At Toronto Life service pieces are a staple. Its annual “Where To Get Stuff Cheap” issue is one of its best-sellers.) Buhasz continues, “I think our magazine is a little more substantial and serious in content.” Quite simply, “We can put out a better product than anything else on the market now.” For that to happen Toronto will have to be good-Toronto Life won three gold medals and four silver at the 1985 National Magazine Awards.

Toronto aims for quantity as well as quality, that is, for a higher percentage of editorial content than Toronto Life: a 50-50 ratio of advertising to editorial space. And Buhasz thinks this will also attract readers. “They’ll go broke with a ratio like that,” de Villiers predicts. Toronto Life has 43 per cent editorial content to 57 per cent advertising. That doesn’t seem much different than 50-50, but to a magazine like Toronto Life, one per cent is about 15 pages a year. And 15 pages of advertising can mean as much as $25,000 in revenue. De Villiers doesn’t expect to lose any advertising to Toronto- “I don’t believe there’s just a small pool of ads out there” and says he didn’t prepare any new strategies to combat the magazine’s launch in March. In fact he claims to be anticipating the rivalry. “I think it’s going to be fun,” he says “We’ve been without competition forever.”

Had the story been ready on time, it would have kicked off W5’s 19th season opener on CTV. It was-or at least it had the ingredients of-a very good piece of journalism, one of those coveted stories that makes news as it breaks news. The only reason it did not open W5’s new season last Sept. 22 was, quite simply, that it wasn’t ready on time. But it was ready a week later -ready for air and ready to make waves. At 10 p.m. on Sunday night, Sept. 29, 1985, as it has for so many years, the familiar WS logo flashed on TV screens across Canada, and the equally familiar theme music rolled in. Seconds later, the music ended, and the full-faced logo came to a stand-still, its white characters now overlaid with a red W5. An authoritative male voice announced, “W5. Episode 615.” The three stories of the night were introduced in 3D-second blocks, separated by flashes of the WS logo. Jim Reed came on screen to introduce the hosts. The theme music resumed and shots from previous shows sped past. They were accompanied, by clips of the four hosts, Reed, Bill Cunningham, Helen Hutchinson, and Dennis McIntosh. As the theme music ended, Bill Cunningham appeared, script in hand, and began the story of how Canadian uranium was being used by the U.S. military-in nuclear bombs.

“If our opposition to nuclear weapons is not to be hypocritical, we must be meticulous in ensuring that none of the Canadian uranium winds up in the U.S. military stream,” Cunningham said. “We have a treaty with the United States to ensure that it doesn’t. But if you follow the trail of our uranium south of the border, it’s hard to escape the conclusion of one U.S. critic that there may be a little piece of Canada in every nuclear bomb!”

It was easy to see why Canada’s longest running newsmagazine wanted to slot the item at the top of its season opener. It was a story of international significance. It was a story about hypocrisy in the Canadian government. It was a story about nuclear war. W5 hoped it would generate the kind of public and political outrage that had followed the rancid tuna scandal, broken by the fifth estate (W5’s CBC competitor) only 12 days earlier. Canada was selling uranium to the United States and part of that uranium was winding up in nuclear weapons, violating treaties stretching back 20 years. (W5 used a 1965 clip of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to articulate our policy on uranium trade: No country shall buy uranium from Canada unless it agrees to use it for peaceful purposes.)

This should have been a major story. But it wasn’t. Part of the reason was that W5 got some of it wrong. Canadian uranium was helping the U.S. build bombs, but no treaties were being violated. This largely irrelevant reporting error allowed the government, or more precisely External Affairs Minister Joe Clark, to side-step the issue. The daily media returned to its preoccupation with bad tuna and all the follow-ups that it generated.

WS was technically wrong about the treaty, but it was essentially correct. If no treaty was being violated, a long-held public assumption was-the general Canadian belief, reinforced by political leaders, that we are not involved in the nuclear arms race. Treaties aside, WS showed its audience of almost 1.2 million Canadians that we are involved. But despite Canadians’ purported concern with nuclear war and the arms race, public indifference was resounding.

Close on the heels of Cunningham’s introduction, viewers witnessed antinuclear protestors gathered in the dark near Kingston, Onto Down by the riverside they sang quietly, while a truck carrying spent radioactive fuel crossed the Thousand Islands International Bridge. Antinuclear activists had known about the story for several years. (They say External Affairs makes no secret of it, if the right questions are asked. After all, the government doesn’t think it’s doing anything wrong.) One of those activists, a reporter named Paul McKay, found out about the story through his involvement with the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG). He walked into W5’s office one day last summer and offered to sell his personal research. W5 bought the material for an undisclosed price.

On Aug. 2, when McKay’s 76-page folder was W5 property, Gillian Cosgrove became the story’s producer, and Mike Moralis was assigned as the researcher. (He often gets the quick, tough stories.) The wo have worked together as an investigative team since Moralis joined CTV almost two years ago. Bill Cunningham would do the interviews and host the segment. He’s been with W5 since 1980. He began as the executive producer and, after three years, became managing editor and reporter/ host. Cunningham’s credentials as a television newsman match or surpass anybody’s in Canada. He has distinguished himself on all three Canadian networks (C’BC, CTV and Global) for well over 20 years.

Once W5 had established there was indeed a story to be done, Cosgrove and Moralis got started. They were excited about its possibilities; so were their coworkers. W5 believed it had an opportunity to reveal government hypocrisy, to tell Canadians that all was not right with the world. John Darroch, the show’s associate producer, said later he would have liked the story to have helped put the issue on the upcoming (and now current) Canada-U.S. free trade agenda. Cosgrove wanted to address, however remotely, people’s fear of nuclear war. And, if nothing else, she wanted to get the story on the record.

Moralis quickly discovered that McKay’s research traced the path of plutonium into warheads. But after a series of phone calls to nuclear institutions and organizations, the information he got contradicted McKay’s. However, he did discover the trail of Canadian uranium to the U.S. and that was an easier trail to follow. It became the focus of W5’s story.

Uranium is mined and milled in Key Lake, Sask. Nearly 12 million pounds are Jrought out of the ground ever’] year. The ore is mechanically and chemically milled to produce yellowcake, powdered natural uranium. From Saskatchewan, it is rucked in bins or large containers to Nouthern Ontario, to Crown-owned El Dorado Resources Ltd., the nuclear refinery at Port Hope. There, it is converted for use in nuclear reactors. Part of the uranium stays in Canada for domestic use. Uranium oxide is used in CANDU reactors. The rest, converted into uranium hexafluoride gas, has to be enriched before it can be used by foreign customers in their reactors. Canada has no enrichment plants, so it is exported to whatever country the customer chooses. Most of it goes to the U.S. Before being shipped across the border, the gas is cooled into a liquid, then poured into cylinders. The liquid, under its own pressure, turns into a solid as it is transported in the trucks.

Days after leaving Port Hope, the trucks pulled into Paducah, Ky. the location of one of the three U.S. enrichment plants. In his report, Cunningham said the W5 crew “followed the shipment.” They did not, in fact, physically follow the trucks. Arrangements were made to visit each site, but not in the sequence they appeared on air. Nevertheless, the four-man crew made it to Paducah, where footage of the enrichment process was shot. Cunningham explained how Canadian uranium is “blended with uranium from other sources as it’s fed into a continuous stream of miles of tubes and pipes. The end product is U-235, a radioactive material that’s capable of sustaining an explosive chain reaction. To get one part of U-235 you discard 140 parts of U-238, a non-explosive material known as depleted uranium.” The uranium is heated, then filtered several times over. The enriched uranium hexafluoride is then converted into small ceramic pellets of uranium dioxide. The pellets are inserted into tubes to form fuel rods for use in light water reactors to generate electricity. Over time the fuel will burn up and the rods will be replaced. The fuel rods are still highly radioactive; they will remain so for hundreds of thousands of years.

The enriched uranium is sent to the purchasing country. The metallic tailings of depleted uranium are stockpiled.

These tailings make up the material in question-the Canadian material that ends up in American warheads. It’s extremely dense. It’s two-and-a-half times heavier than steel, one cubic foot shields radiation is effectively as 12 cubic feet of concrete.

Unlike enriched uranium, depleted uranium is not a fissionable material; it cannot sustain a chain reaction. It can be safely used as tail weights in airplanes. But it’s more popular use is as a casing for the hydrogen bomb.

Depleted uranium is converted into fissile plutonium (Pu-239) during the second phase of the blast. It boosts the bang by 50 per cent. Depleted uranium can also slowly be converted into Pu-239 in a nuclear reactor.

Depleted uranium from various sources is combined during the enrichment process and stored in cylinders at another site Fernald, Ohio. “It’s here that they’ve located a key facility for the building of America’s nuclear weapons,” Cunningham said. “And it’s here, too, that Canada’s so-called peaceful uranium is diverted into America’s nuclear weapons program.” thousands of barrels of depleted uranium were shown stacked in the yard. Cun1ingham told his audience that 4,000 tonnes would arrive this year-“What percentage is Canadian is anybody’s guess.”

Indeed the uranium in those barrels was not just Canadian. This fact provided the political “out” that Joe Clark took to get his government off the hook.

From Fernald, the material-now in metal fuel cores-goes down to Savannah River, Ga., where it is used in military reactors to breed weapons-grade plutonium. Another stream of depleted uranium goes to Oak Ridge, Tenn., to be made into metal bomb components. Then all the parts head on to Amarillo, Tex., for final assembly into warheads. That’s where W5′:,’ trail ended.

The trail was one part of the story. The other part was the treaties, which were a little more difficult to follow. The treaty outlining civil uses of Canadian uranium in the U.S. was first signed in 1955. It has been updated eight times since, and now runs to 49 pages. Clauses and sub-clauses have been endlessly amended. This treaty, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are meant to prevent countries without nuclear weapons from developing them. An agency called the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) makes sure the treaty isn’t being violated.

India exploded its first nuclear bomb on May 18, 1974 in the Rajastan desert. Canada was embarrassingly implicated. We had sold a nuclear reactor to India in 1972; India used it to extract plutonium to build its bomb. The Indian government had agreed to use the reactor for peaceful purposes only, but the agreement was very vague. Canada announced new safeguard policies that same year with IAEA inspectors overlooking the process. India refused to comply and all nuclear co-operation ceased. Now Canada sells uranium only to countries who agree to abide by the NPT, or bilateral agreements limiting use to peaceful purposes. Such an agreement exists between Canada and the U.S. But reading it, and understanding it (as well as following up on some of the extremely vague clauses) is tricky. That’s where W5 ran into trouble.

Time was running short. With five days to go before show time, Cunningham had interviewed all but one of the people the story needed-Joe Clark. With four days to go, he was finally cornered at a UN conference in Washington. The film crew may have been managing well, but back in Toronto, people were ready to drive their fists into cement walls.

What did the treaty say? John Darroch demanded to know. Were the Americans violating the treaty or not? The story was built around that assumption. Cunningham would tell a million-plus Canadians that “Our agreement with the United States is clear. No Canadian uranium, not a single molecule, is to be used for military purposes.” But was that really true? No one was really sure. Under pressure from Darroch, Moralis made a decision: The treaty means whatever you want it to mean: That wasn’t good enough. So W5 decided to go with the intention of the documents, that no uranium shall be used for non-peaceful purposes. Moralis was still bothered by the wording of the treaty. But a nuclear policy expert for the U.S. Library of Congress, Warren Donnelly, confirmed that the intention was reflected in the words. “That was encouraging to me,” explained Moralis. “If I was wrong, it was a debatable right or wrong. It was a matter of interpretation, of convenience as to how it was interpreted.”

Not exactly. W5 reported that depleted uranium falls through the cracks of the treaties, thus implying the government was negligent, that an important process was overlooked when that international document was being negotiated. But the treaty does cover depleted uranium. The most recent amendment (1980) says that designated nuclear technology and material will not be used for any military purposes. Depleted uranium is a designated source material and is therefore covered.

That was one technical error. The other was more serious. W5 overlooked a clause that justified the U.S.’s use of Canadian uranium. External Affairs knew it was there but federal NDP Leader Ed Broadbent didn’t. Cunningham briefed and interviewed the NDP leader on camera on Sept. 24, five days before the story went to air. He told Cunningham, and eventually all of Canada, that, “We should be insisting that all our uranium that goes to the United States be segregated from any uranium that they use for military purposes. That’s what the treaty says and we on the Canadian side, our government, should be enforcing that.”

The next day, Sept 25, in the House of Commons, Broadbent raised the issue. He asked the Prime Minister if it was Canadian policy to export uranium to the U.S. to be used for peaceful purposes. Mulroney answered, “This policy has been unchanged. It goes back to a decision by Mr. Pearson in about 1965, and that is the general thrust of what successive governments have followed.” Then Broadbent asked, “Will the Prime Minister assure the House that he will have people in his office look into this immediately to find out if the evidence, which I understand to be quite conclusive, is conclusive?” Mulroney said Joe Clark, who was in Washington on Sept. 25, would address the issue in the House the next day. The next day, as promised by the Prime Minister, Clark reiterated for the House what he had already told W5: “Over the last 20 years there has been no evidence of any breach of the language or obligations of that treaty.” The issue did not arise in the House again until Sept. 30, the day after W5 aired its story. Ian Waddell, NDP energy critic, was incensed: “He (Clark) said that he saw the program in question last night. Did he not see the pictures of the barrels of depleted uranium? Did he not hear the American official say that Canadian uranium was being mixed in and was in fact used for nuclear bombs? Did he not hear Americans say that there was a piece of Canadian uranium in every American nuclear bomb?”

Clark again insisted that everything was in order. “I have heard the allegation that the Canadian treaty assurances are not being respected. That allegation is false.”

Then he seized on that irritating treaty detail that had caused W5 so much grief. “I have learned that there is, in the treaty, a requirement for administrative arrangements to be put into place that deal with the residue as well as the original uranium those administrative arrangements are in fact in place.”

Those arrangements have to do with something called fungibility. Clark compared the process to putting a dollar in the bank. The dollar you get back isn’t the same dollar, but it’s still a dollar. Dave Sinden, manager of the Office of Safeguards and Physical Security Operations (which makes sure the safeguards that are in place are not being violated), compared it to putting sugar in coffee. Once the sugar has been stirred in, there’s no way you can get it back. But it’s there. The same principle applies to depleted uranium. There is Canadian material in there but it’s mixed with depleted uranium from a number of other countries; it can’t be extracted. What the Canadian and American governments agreed to do was set aside a little less than ten per cent of all the depleted uranium, call it Canadian, and never touch it. The 1980 treaty does have provisions in it for such an arrangement.

The arrangement, however, is stated in very general terms. The pertinent clause says, “The appropriate governmental authorities of both parties shall establish administrative arrangements to implement this Agreement.” It’s not difficult to see how W5 failed to spot this clause.

Cunningham said on air, “W5 was told that the principle of fungibility does not apply to depleted uranium.” External Affairs thinks it does. The United States thinks it does. And apparently so do some newspapers. The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail reported the confrontation between the opposition and Joe Clark, both before and after W5’s story aired. But once Clark denied-or defused-the story, the papers dropped it.

Gillian Cosgrove was disappointed in the story’s lack of impact, especially in comparison to the fifth estate’s tuna scandal that had broken about two weeks earlier and was still making front page news. But then tuna is tangible, she conceded, everyone eats it, everyone has it in their kitchen. Peter Rehak, the executive producer ofW5, had a different theory. He said Clark hit on the crux of the matter in the House when he was being questioned by Pauline Jewett, the NDP external affairs critic, about W5’s story. He answered her queries by asking, “Why are you opposed to 7,000 jobs in Saskatchewan?”

The Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources estimates that the value of Canadian uranium export contracts in 1984 was $900 million. Because the industry is so vital to the Canadian economy, it would clearly never make it on to the Canada-U.S. free trade agenda, as associate producer Darroch had hoped. When he was asked a few weeks after the show aired what effect the story would have, he closed his thumb and index finger around a big, fat zero.

Clark neatly sidestepped a potentially damaging story. But that September, the uranium issue could only have added to the Tories’ already lengthy list of problems: the tuna scandal, a pair of bank failures, and the resignations of Fisheries and Oceans Minister John Fraser and Communications Minister Marcel Masse. It was a month Brian Mulroney will not easily forget, with or without the uranium story. The Tories were saved by a clause in the treaty. W5 may have been technically wrong, but it was essentially correct. Loopholes were written into the treaty so the government could justify trade; Canada is still directly involved in the American nuclear arsenal build-up, regardless of what the treaty says. So the question remains, why did the public not rise up angry at the revelation? Why didn’t we care?

It’s not that we don’t care about nuclear war. A study done in 1984 in Metro Toronto indicated that young people between 12 and 18 were as worried about nuclear war as they were about unemployment. And in a 1985 poll conducted by Decima Research Ltd. for Maclean’s, a significant 1-6 per cent of the respondents said the fear of war, particularly nuclear war, was their greatest fear. It was “the most frequently cited specifIc concern,” Maclean’s reported. Interestingly, however, the non-impact of W5’s story may have been explained in the Maclean’s article that accompanied the poll. It concluded with: “No matter how they describe it, the underlying concern of poll respondents was that, somehow, they could lose control of their lives.”

If Canadians already feel helpless and afraid, and not without reason, why would they want to escalate those feelings by dwelling on the very real possibility that Canada is playing a role in the very thing they fear most? How much easier it is to turn away. Tuna, as Cosgrove said, was different. Tuna was something people could do something about. They could stop buying Star-Kist and the other publicized brands that were involved. They could punish the “bad guys.” They were not helpless. Tuna is “real” and so is food poisoning. Nuclear war is just an idea, and for most of us, an unthinkable idea. It can’t be touched.

The media had a chance to focus on our contribution to a potential nuclear war using the W5 story as a catalyst. But the media did not pursue the issue. When it does pursue issues such as rancid tuna, impaired driving, and even cigarette smoking, the public perception does begin to change.

Fred Fletcher, a media analyst at York University, confirms that the print media can often keep a story alive by running follow-ups. Then, as these stories feed back to television and radio, the cycle will continue. Then-and only then-people begin to pay attention. That was what happened with the tuna story.

That’s what didn’t happen with the uranium story. It did surface on the radio news on Sept. 26, three days before W5’s broadcast, a result of the Broadbent briefing. The newspapers carried it as well. The Toronto Star’s headline read, “Our uranium used in A-arms, Broadbent says.” But all Broadbent managed to do was give Clark his chance to deny the entire story before CTV even got its show to air. Clark continued to deny the story (and help keep it alive) for a few days afterward, but only one television station even carried Clark’s denial. CHCHTV in Hamilton reported the story the day after W5′, Sept. 29 revelations. The Toronto Star and The Gazette in Montreal ran a CP version the next day. And that was it.

While standing in front of Fat Man, a replica of one of the world’s first atomic bombs, Bill Cunningham ended the story by saying, “These days, the Reagan administration is committed to a further build-up of nuclear weapons, and it’s reasonable to assume that there’ll be a little piece of Canada in all those too. If nothing is done to inhibit this process, it makes a hollow mockery of Canada’s position as a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons.”

Off-camera, months later, Cunningham still believes the story was important. But the issue, he said, was just too complicated for people to deal with. “Do we care? We say we care, and our foreign policy politically says we care.”

But the question remains: how do we wake Canadians up to the reality of where our uranium is going, and most important, exactly what it is being used for?

Looking over the pallid prose that poses as print journalism in this country, it seems to me that most news and feature stories that get published contain a good deal less than meets the eye. We must do better. It is simply no longer enough to arrange facts into logical sequences, or to report events and hope that somehow the reader can judge what to accept.

The essence of the craft of journalism is that it refuses to arrange facts in straight lines but seeks instead to recreate events- and we must recognize that interpretation is inseparable from fact and that the journalist himself or herself becomes part of the action he or she is describing. Ideally, this new-style journalism should employ many of the techniques that were once the exclusive terrain of the poet and novelist: tension, symbolism, cadence, irony and so on. It should pit the sensitive writer-all his or her feelings and intelligence-directly against an event. It is experience in all its complexities that has to be communicated, not just irrelevant housing projects of facts bereft of essence. We must, in other words, look at ordinary things in an extraordinary way, and this does not, incidentally, imply merely reaching for effect by developing an obtuse style.

At the same time, this brand of inspired journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not-or must not be-fiction. It must be as solid in research as the most reliable reportage, though it should seek a larger truth than is possible through mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations and adherence to the rigid organizational style of older formats. Truth, we must realize, is not necessarily the sum of all the ascertainable facts. This “new journalism” requires an act of boldness that will get our craft unstuck from forms of communication developed in and for a social context very different from the present. It must retain its authenticity and, above all, its sense of audience, but it must also win the attention of its readers if it is to have any effect.

What this may mean is that the “reporter” in the traditional sense has become obsolete. “News” has been transformed-sometimes subconsciously-into “interests” and “viewpoints.”

The old distinction between “writers” and “readers” also needs to be redefined.

Readers should write more for other readers-ratepayer groups, the “poor,” the hobbyists, the nursery school teachers and mothers, the police, the trade union movements, businessmen and postal clerks. They should all have their say, in their own words and images. “Unprofessional journalism” it may be, but new voices, new ideas and much more local interest will be the result.

In fact, the very notion of the modern community may be defined as the extent to which people live in and through each other. The instant involvement created by the media, the wide-ranging concern and vicarious participation in events on a global, continental, national, regional and local scale, create in turn a multidimensional community. Viewed another way, we have created a series of overlapping but distinctly different communities.

The terms “media” and “news” have become in many ways synonymous. This is not to ignore many other cultural, entertainment and commercial functions which the media serve today, but to point out that the very idea of “news” is itself a modern notion. The creation of the mass circulation daily newspaper and magazine and in particular the electronic media is, in historical perspective, a relatively recent phenomenon.

All of this casts a heavy burden of responsibility on the modern journalist. There is, of course, a great deal of nonsense spouted about freedom of the press. It seems to me that there exists a kind of genial myth about the members of the so-called Fourth Estate, namely that they speak for the people of this country. The fact is of course that they speak to the Canadian people, not for them. That this should be so seems elementary because most people have nothing to say about who our publishers and editors, reporters and columnists are to be. We can’t admit into our constitutional system room for something called the Fourth Estate which has no democratic base.

It is going to become more difficult to maintain the kind of general-purpose press that can exist only if readers support its credibility. If there is no such thing as objective truth, we must anticipate that, in an age of controversy, the newspaper still aimed at “general circulation” will have to serve up several varieties of truth-or that newspapers of separate identity will arise to do that job instead.

If daily newspapers and magazines are not to become the house organs of a fragment of the upper and middle classes in a society where each fragment is increasingly intolerant of the others, they must make a determined, conscious and calculated effort to keep attuned to middle and lower class morality, culture, impulse and inclination. The press at one time achieved the result by being overwhelmingly middle class; now it is going to have to send into the undiscovered country of the poor and alienated at least as many correspondents as it sends abroad. It is going to have to accomplish by direct effort what it once achieved by osmosis

Canadian publications must develop some kind of coherent philosophy-or, at least, outlook-about Canada’s place in the world, and sharpen their way of looking at the internal and external problems threatening to engulf us. Otherwise, the constant pressure of events will drive readers into either a state of indifference, which is a menace to democratic government, or into a condition of constant anxiety, which destroys both tolerant public opinion and private tranquility. With the age of consensus ending, it is going to be increasingly difficult for journalists to retain the confidence of a reader-audience of dramatically diverse views.

The conflict between those who make and those who report the news is as old as human speech. The press must reach out for a new mandate. It must provide a sense of prophecy for individuals who are losing their grip on the rapidly fading and evolving social institutions. This, in time, will generate a sense of confirmation for the same individuals who read of a change in their newspaper or magazine-and then experience it in their own lives.

Peter C. Newman is a senior contributing editor at Maclean’s, and author of a number of best-selling books like The Canadian Establishment, and True North: Not Strong and Free. His latest, Company of Adventurers, is volume one in a history of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

(FLASH) “Right hand a bit lower on your bum Suzie.” (FLASH) “That’s it, head up, smile.” (FLASH) “Good now turn a little to your right and show us what you’ve got.” (FLASH) “Fantastic!”

The studio on the second floor of the Toronto Sun building is small, dark and cool. But the air is filled with energy that smells of coconut, sounds of mellow music and looks like Suzie. She is 19. Eventually she wants to be a model or an airline stewardess but today, through the practised eye of Sun photographer Michael Peake, she is transformed into a Sunshine Girl. The tropical smell comes from Suzie’s tanned body which is coated in a rich, shiny oil. The quiet music comes from a stereo receiver hidden in a cupboard near the door. “Mood music” Peake calls it.

Clad only in a string bikini, patterned after a leopard’s spotted skin, Suzie moves like a professional though she has never done any modelling before. She is the eighth Sunshine Girl Peake has shot this year. Half-an-hour and three rolls of film later it is all over. Suzie gets dressed and Peake takes the film across the hall to the photo department for developing.

It was a simple and fun shoot but a photojournalist’s days are not all filled with sunshine (or Sunshine Girls) even when he or she works for The Toronto Sun. Under the searing heat of the Colombian sun, the air filled with the stench of thousands of rotting corpses, Peake slogged through the mud that had buried the town of Armero after a nearby volcano erupted. His Nikon recorded images of a disaster-the frantic efforts of rescue workers, the bloated bodies of children, the shock-dulled survivors. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done.” It was also the only thing he could do, during those brutal aftermath days. But unlike many other photojournalists, Mike Peake does not separate himself from the reality he covers. He would never stand by and take pictures of someone in a life threatening situation, he insists, not if he could help.

But even then, sometimes, journalistic instincts take over and the journalist keeps taking pictures. A recent shoot in Toronto’s High Park had all the elements of a Sun production: a beautiful girl in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes, walking through the snow towards a huge Siberian tiger that lounged in the foreground. No one knew, not even the trainer (who stood just out of camera range), that the tiger was in a playful mood. As the motor drive on Peake’s camera whined, the tiger sprang up and threw itself on the girl. The trainer threw himself on the tiger. Peake threw himself into his work and kept his finger on the shutter button. It was allover in a few seconds, the tiger calm, the girl cold and shaken, the trainer very embarrassed.

“It happened so fast there was no time to think,” Peake says, unsure that he had captured the action until the film was developed. “I don’t remember taking the pictures, just lowering my camera after it was allover because I felt self-conscious.” Peake will get about $2,500 out of the shots, which were picked up by papers around the world. “It was a slow news week,” he says. Like a great deal of photo journalism, the “lady and the tiger” had been a question of being in the right place at the right time which was also a factor in bringing Peake to the Sun 11 years ago.

In 1975 he was in his final year of the journalism program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. As well as being the photo editor on the campus paper, he worked as a freelance photographer for the Sun. Though he did not graduate, (“never was scholastically inclined”) he was lucky enough to be home one day the following summer when the Sun called and offered him a job. “Since then I have only worked about four shifts that I have not had to take a picture.”

For the photojournalist the pictures not taken are often as important as the pictures taken. Peake recalls the time he was asked to photograph a woman as she answered the door of her home, what’s known in the trade as a “grab-shot” “But, when I got there and she came to the door, I asked if I could take a picture. She refused and I left. The editor tells me what he wants. But he gets what I give him.”

Still, Peake has had to make some compromises over the years. In the past, for instance, he would never “arrange” a photograph, preferring to shoot things as they were rather than how he or an editor would like them to be. Today, especially when shooting people, he has no problem with moving them around to make better pictures. “Knowing what you want and getting it tells the story much better than taking what you get, just as long as you tell the real story and not a new one.”

Peake loves his job. He loves the freedom and the adventure of iL He has photographed mountain climbers in Tibet, followed the Pope throughout his visit to Canada and covered the Barrie tornado disaster. When not working for the Sun he writes, publishes and illustrates Che-mun, the newsletter of Canadian Wilderness Canoeing. Peake is an avid canoeist and spends his vacations traversing the many rivers of Canada compiling stories for his newsletter. He took over Che-mun, which is Ojibwa for canoe, almost two years ago and uses the facilities at the Sun to produce the newsletter which goes out to more than 200 paid subscribers-including Pierre Trudeau. Last summer, Peake, his brothers Sean and Geoffrey, and three friends spent 55 days canoeing more than one thousand miles through the Northwest Territories. The trip resulted in a two page centre spread in the Sun and lots of interesting copy for Che-mun. Peake speaks with enthusiasm about his work. “Once you have lost that,” he says, “it is time to quit” And after II years, he’s still excited by the certainty that anything can happen. On a few hours notice he may find himself half-way around the world. The downside is that he’s probably there because a lot of people are suffering, or someone important has died. But then a photojournalist is just a journalist, the camera is his pen and the pictures are his words. And having to deal with the realities of the world “is just part of the job.”