To a writer who prizes accuracy and precise detail as much as Stroud does, the accusation was more than just a shock; it was a betrayal. “She neither confirmed nor denied the truth of the statements, but simply denied ever speaking to me at all,” he remembers. “So Michael Enright-he was the editor then-called me up, understandably concerned. I mean, I’d never written for the magazine before-this was several years ago and I didn’t have any more reputation than anybody else-and he said, ‘Well, what about this?’ and I said, ‘This is outrageous.'”

Luckily for Stroud, he had taped his conversation with the nurse-something he didn’t often do back then. Enright phoned her, told her all her comments were on tape, and that was the end of that.

Well, nearly. The episode forced Stroud, who has since gained a reputation for being scrupulously exacting in his work, to ensure he’d never leave himself open to accusations of misquoting someone or, worse, making up what someone had said. And it reinforced his own policy about how to handle quotations, a topic newspapers and magazines grapple with every day: don’t touch them unless you absolutely have to. Bad grammar, incorrect words, screwy turns of phrase-Stroud keeps them all in his stories, and he goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure he’s got these less-than bons mots correct.

He sometimes carries two tape recorders to interviews. He sets one on the table between him and his subject. If the interviewee is scared off by being taped, Stroud shuts off the recorder on the table and switches on another one strapped to his calf and controlled by a wired trigger that runs down his sleeve to his hand. “I guess it’s kind of a dubious proposition, but it has two advantages,” he says. “First of all, I get the cadence of the speech exactly right, and, secondly, I have proof that I was there and this was said.” If Stroud’s method is questionable, his intent is honorable: to get quotations right, and keep them right when he incorporates them into his stories. “My overall policy is, if it’s in quotation

marks, you can’t play with it. If you get in there and impose your sense of grammar or cadence or expression on someone’s speech, then you’re just jerking around with what the guy really is-whatever he is. I’ve never said, ‘Let’s sweeten this up a bit,’ or, ‘Let’s fix this.'”

That’s something not easily said by most editors and reporters who work for newspapers and magazines across the country. Remarkably few publications have clear policies on handling quotations, and these policies are usually so oblique and unenforceable that they are, in practice, meaningless. It’s not clear at all how sacred quotations are at Canada’s major dailies and magazines. Do reporters routinely fix bad grammar, substitute more appropriate words for incorrect ones or juxtapose out-of-context quotations in their stories? Are these practices repeated by editors once the stories have been filed? And is it becoming increasingly difficult to tell if what was said was actually what was said? The answer to all these questions, in a word? Yes.

“In the main, we don’t fool around with quotes,” says Shirley Sharzer, associate managing editor of The Globe and Mail. “Occasionally, where poor English or incorrect grammar can be seen as making someone look foolish, we clean it up-unless it’s a politician or somebody who should know better. When public figures use improper language, I guess they’re fair game.”

The Globe’s position on quotations is fairly standard for a Canadian newspaper, but it’s not a firm policy; rather, it’$ just an unofficial guideline. What writers and editors do to quotations is up to them, and their handling of quotes is guided by little more than a kind of journalistic scout’s honor. When new reporters start at the Globe, they’re given a copy of the guideline “and we expand on that in a preliminary talk,” Sharzer says. But at no point are staffers told exactly what they should and should not be doing to quotations. The newspaper favors using brackets to insert “correct” words and ellipses to signify that some words have been dropped, but there is no way to determine if all reporters and editors do this.

The same is true at The Toronto Star, where even the official line on quotes is wobbly: “Except for slight changes to protect grammar, quotations should never be changed,” the policy handbook states. But Rod Goodman, the Star’s ombudsman, says the policy is not rigidly followed. “We don’t know on the desk if it’s not an exact quote. How can we know? Most people who are interviewed wouldn’t remember exactly what they said anyway. It’s only if their words were twisted they’d know something was wrong.” Goodman says it doesn’t matter if what people say is nipped and tucked or dressed up a little before it gets in the newspaper as long as the meaning isn’t changed. For example, it’s “a matter of discretion” on the writer’s part whether he slips words into a quotation without bracketing them or eliminates the ellipses when he drops words.

“A lot of reporters take down full quotes, but a lot of others take down key words and fill it in when they get back to the office,” Goodman says. “As long as it’s the flavor of what’s said, then that’s okay.” The flavor, though, can turn a little sour when people call up the newspaper claiming they’ve been misquoted. Even here, finding out just what was said is difficult-it’s the reporter’s word against the complainant’s. The only surefire way to prevent being accused of misquoting someone is to “take confident notes, and if you have a tape recorder, refer back to it,” Goodman says.

But “confident” notes do not ensure that quotations won’t be tampered with. Brackets and ellipses are ugly, and they destroy the flow of good quotations-why shouldn’t reporters and editors be tempted to leave them out when there’s nothing to stop them from doing so? Flabby policies may sound official, but they don’t do much. A staffer at The Vancouver Sun who wished to remain anonymous says the newspaper’s policy is “don’t quote without the name of the person being quoted.” It’s as simple-and simplistic-as that. The Kitchener- Waterloo Record, which has a policies and ethics manual-an unusual thing for a medium-size daily-doesn’t address the issue of quotations at all. The closest it comes is this: “Accuracy must be our constant goal. There is no such thing as a minor inaccuracy inasmuch as every error tends to erode the newspaper’s credibility.” (The paper’s manual is currently being revised and is expected to have a section on quotes.)

Policies at Canadian magazines are not much more encouraging. The handling of quotations at Saturday Night, for example, is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, says Executive Editor Dianne de Gayardon de Fenoyl. The magazme prides itself on its accuracy, but when it comes to changing quotes, its position is fuzzy. “We’re probably, on the whole, stricter on leaving quotes alone than most other magazines,” says de Fenoyl. “It’s hard to draw the line on whether to change something-we usually just check everything.” One of the magazine’s researchers confirms all the facts in the stories the magazine runs. (The practice is standard at many magazines, which have the luxury of time that newspapers don’t.) Checking sometimes includes finding out if what a person said is really what he said, but Saturday Night doesn’t read back quotes to sources. Instead, the checker asks the source in a roundabout way to confirm what he’s already said.

The magazine corrects factual or grammatical errors in quotations, usually inserting square brackets so the reader knows the quotation’s been touched. It rarely uses “sic,” which trumpets mistakes to the readers and makes quotations look clumsy. But although Saturday Night tries to be scrupulous once manuscripts are with the editors, it doesn’t tell writers how they should handle quotes. Says de Fenoyl, “We sort of trust them. We assume they know what they’re doing.”

The editors at Toronto Life, where quotes are similarly sacred, assume the same thing. “We trust our writers. There’s no way we can run after all of them to make sure they’re being good little boys and girls,” says executive editor Jocelyn Laurence. “Some writers like to put in ellipses if they’ve removed something from a quote and others don’t bother. We don’t desperately worry-it doesn’t throw me into a panic.” The magazine’s editors toyed with the idea of a guideline for its writers last year after two writers gave copies of their stories to their subjects to read a practice universally frowned on. A two-page memo on ethics was put together and circulated around the office for a while “but we never took it very seriously,” Laurence says. “It had a kind of feel of bureaucratic zeal that we didn’t like.”

Such zeal, though, isn’t such a bad thing if it ensures accuracy in quotations. It’s a zeal that editors at 10 Canadian news outlets probably wish they’d imparted to their reporters before they sent them to cover the 1984 Colin Thatcher murder trial in Saskatoon. A study by Peter Calamai, who covered the trial for Southam News, shows that 57 per cent of the quotations in news stories on the trial contained errors. Calamai, who did the study while appointed to the Max Bell Chair in Journalism at the University of Regina in 1985-86, was rather forgiving in deciding what constituted an error: he didn’t include cleaning up for grammar or clarity without inserting brackets or ellipses. He compared 1,551 paragraphs of news copy that contained at least a phrase of direct quotation with 2,053 pages of official trial transcript. What he found was, as he understates now, “distressing.” Reporters routinely added and omitted words, used incorrect words or got the order of them wrong. Nearly half of these errors changed the meaning of what was said. The Calgary Sun was the worst offender, with errors in nearly three-quarters of all the quotations it ran. Sixty-seven per cent of those were classified as major misquotes. But the Toronto dailies were not far behind. Of the 10 news outlets studied, only Canadian Press and Southam News (Calamai’s own stories) were found to have printed correct quotes most of the time, and both just barely. Here’s an example of what actually was said (as recorded in the trial transcript) and what was printed in some of the newspapers:

An exchange between Defense Attorney Gerry Allbright and his client, Colin Thatcher: Q. Where were you at six o’clock on January 21st, six p.m. January 21st, 1983 Mr. Thatcher?

A. Having dinner.

Q.Where?

A. In my kitchen.

Q. In Redland, in MooseJaw?

A. In MooseJaw, yes.

Q. And who was with you at that time?

A. Sandra Hammond, my son Greg and Regan.

The Regina Leader Post reported it this way: “I was having dinner with my housekeeper Sandra Hammond (now Silversides) and my sons Greg and Regan,” Thatcher said.

But newspapers not only pieced together quotes; sometimes they assigned guilt and other times they even attributed quotes to the wrong people. (Calamai himself was guilty of this, once attributing testimony of Thatcher’s son Regan to his other son, Greg.) And reporters didn’t only misrepresent testimony; sometimes they even changed the questions that lawyers asked.

Allbright: “Witness, what kind of a woman sleeps with a man she’s not married to, when she knows in her mind if what you tell us is true, that that man has just committed murder? What kind of woman does that, witness?” To the Globe the question became: “What type of woman would sleep with a man who has just murdered his wife?” The Moose Jaw Times-Herald put it similarly: “What kind of woman sleeps with a man she knows has just committed murder?” And The Calgary Sun had the murderer confessing his crime: “What kind of woman sleeps with a man who has said he’s just committed murder?”

Guilt was assigned in other instances, too, even when witnesses carefully avoided incriminating themselves. Small-time hood Charlie Wilde testified how he and another man, Cody Crutcher, had stiffed Thatcher by promising to arrange his ex-wife’s murder: “Yeah, and he [Crutcher] had no intentions of committing the murder; he was just going to steal the money that was upfront, or whatever.”

But The Toronto Sun made Wilde the guilty one by printing this: “I had no intention of doing the murder. We just wanted to steal the money.” In the Globe report, though, the theft disappears, and instead the paper has Wilde saying that his friend “had no intention of doing the murder. He just wanted the money.”

Another report in The Toronto Sun made it sound as if Thatcher was challenging Crown Prosecutor Serge Kujawa to a fistfight. According to the trial transcript, Thatcher, enraged that Kujawa had accused his sons of lying in court, shouted: “Why don’t you step out on the Court House steps and say that, where you don’t have immunity?” But the Sun reported Thatcher shouting: “Why don’t you step out on the court house steps and say that?”

What’s even more revealing than Calamai’s findings is how editors across the country reacted to his study. While some questioned the results, others questioned the accuracy of the trial transcript itself. And John Swan, managing editor of the Leader Post, doesn’t necessarily believe what’s between quotation marks is always verbatim.

Oddly enough, Calamai is not touting his findings as a plea for more accurate reporting and less fiddling with quotations, but as a means of getting improved conditions for court reporters. Prompted by the study, the Centre for Investigative Journalism, an Ottawa-based group devoted to improving Canadian journalism, has promised to lobby to get better media seats in courtrooms, earphones to carry amplified sound to reporters and permission to tape record proceedings. (At present, taping is only allowed in the Supreme Court of Canada.)

But where do reporters and their obligation to report the news accurately fit into all this? Will taping mean more accurate handling of quotations? And should other measures be taken, such as making shorthand mandatory for court reporters-or all reporters? The Star’s Rod Goodman doesn’t believe so. “I don’t think you should force anything on anyone. Most people have their own little system of taking notes where some half-as sed word means something else. If you’ve got a reporter that makes that kind of error [that changes meaning], he’ll make it with or without a tape recorder. He’s just a bad reporter as far as I’m concerned.”

Reporters themselves are inclined to agree with that, and most stand fiercely (if a little defensively-several refused to be interviewed for this article) behind their personal policies on quotation handling. All said they’d never cooked quotes, and most said that when they clean quotes up for grammar or misused words they insert appropriate punctuation so the reader isn’t misled. And all made it clear were at pains to make clear-that they never read quotations back to sources: that would only give interviewees the chance to deny saying what they’ve already said. If reporters need clarification of something their sources say, they usually ask their clarifying questions in a roundabout way. (Other journalists, though, like June Callwood, sometimes read back quotes to their sources, especially in stories where friendly sources have given them sensitive information.)

“I guess I’m old fashioned,” says John Picton, a 34-year veteran of the newsroom, who’s been at the Star for the past seven years, “but as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one style for quotes: accuracy.” Unlike many of his younger colleagues, Picton doesn’t tape his interviews. And he doesn’t touch quotations. “I make a point of not changing them because of law cases-you’d better have it in your notebook.” But Stanley Oziewicz, a Queen’s Park reporter at the Globe, where he’s worked since 1976, likes to have everything in his notebook and on tape. Although it’s time consuming to transcribe taped interviews, the transcript is “a good backup” to the notebook, he says. “You simply can’t write as quickly as people talk. It’s impossible. So I’ve developed a form of shorthand.” If he’s not able to decipher something he’s written, Oziewicz won’t use it. “I learned a long time ago, if in doubt, leave it out. Or paraphrase.”

That’s also a rule used by Luisa D’Amato, who covers the welfare beat at the Kitchener- Waterloo Record. D’Amato says she learned two things about dealing with quotations when she was pursuing her master’s degree in journalism at New York’s Columbia University: it’s okay to correct poor grammar, and there’s no need to put ellipses between connected chunks of quotes as long as the quote is not out of context. At the Record, though, she says she’s “a lot less free” about splicing quotes. She’s not convinced that taping interviews means reporters will more accurately quote their sources. “I have a lot of problems with tape recorders. I will use them if I think I might get sued and I need real good proof. But I’d rather spend my time perfecting what I’ve got and calling more people than taking notes from a tape recorder. I find that to be a real tedious, lengthy thing.”

For many reporters, tape recorders are a bother for another reason, too: even with good hookups, telephone conversations sometimes come out fuzzy when they’re taped, and that makes them infuriatingly difficult to transcribe. Then there’s the problem of whether to tell a subject the conversation is being recorded. (All reporters interviewed for this article said they don’t think it is necessary to tell sources because taping is just a backup to note-taking.) What’s more, tapes aren’t always more accurate than notes: it can be difficult to hear plurals, for example, and those can sometimes change the meaning of sentences.

The problem plurals can pose became a case for the Ontario Press Council in 1978. At a press conference-one that was taped by the electronic media-on April 19, 1977, John Diefenbaker said of David Crombie, then mayor of Toronto: “I look for him to come to the House of Commons Dominion of Canada.” A Globe reporter, knowing a tiny perfect quote when he heard one, dropped the “s” from “positions,” making it sound as if Diefenbaker were touting Crombie for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. The Star, not wanting to be outdone, “shortened it up and smartened it up,” says Fraser MacDougall, the council’s executive secretary, and the next day the newspaper had Dief proclaiming “one day Crombie would ‘hold the highest office in the Dominion of Canada.'” The press council upheld a complaint by the former prime minister’s executive assistant that the Star story misrepresented what Diefenbaker had said-lion the grounds that you shouldn’t fool around with anything in quotation marks,” MacDougall says. Although the council doesn’t have a code of ethics member newspapers are expected to follow, it does have a common-law system of ethics. Its ruling on how to handle quotations, as decided in the Diefenbaker case, is “that to maintain credibility with the public, newspapers ought to do everything possible to ensure the words they publish within quotation marks are the words used by the person they are quoting.”

What, then, can publications do to ensure that just what was said appears in print correctly? Should newspapers force reporters to record all conversations and then have editors check their stories against tapes, as checkers do on magazines? That would be time consuming, impractical and, worse, telegraph to reporters that they are not to be trusted. Should publications implement rigid quote-cleaning policies and question any writer whose quotations smell a little too sweet? Or should newspapers and magazines simply tell their readers what their quoting policies are: that just what was said is sometimes what-was-said-as-we-want-you-to-hear-it?

There’s no easy answer, that’s clear. Editors simply have to rely on the honesty of their reporters, who in turn have to wrestle with their consciences when they handle quotations. Carsten Stroud says that’s the only real choice. “I think that in any story that’s a substantial piece involving real people, you get scrupulous about reporting them accurately because, hell, they could blow you right out of the water if you don’t-and that’s the end of your career. I don’t think in this business there are very many quote cookers. It’s no fun, you know. It’s no fun trying to make up stuff. It’s no fun faking dialogue.”

Last September, it was difficult to imagine that joyful shout. At an editorial meeting for the November issue Hannon’s 131st-he could barely be heard. Sitting at one end of a long pine table in TBPs meeting room, he was pale and still, and the startling green of his contact lenses did little to add a spark to his eyes. Around the table, five editors of TBPs ailing reviews.and features section shifted uneasily in their chairs.

“Any ideas?” Hannon whispered. The editors avoided the emerald eyes and said nothing. They seemed to be waiting for the truly brilliant idea to spring from someone else’s coffee cup or page full of doodles. Hannon scanned the table impassively. “We have to move fairly quickly,” he said finally. “You should know we could be bankrupt in a very short time.” Just shy of TBPs fifteenth anniversary, a collective that had fought hard for the liberation of gay men and lesbians was fighting for its life.

Although many of the collective members were fairly new, the three men on the front lines each had devoted a decade or more to the paper: Rick Bebout, 37, a thin, bespectacled stick of dynamite; Ken Popert, 39, the cool and stubborn common sense of TBP; and Gerald Hannon, 42, the paper’s enigmatic heart.

They called themselves the dinosaurs of The Body Politic but it was their paper that became extinct.

In the tenth anniversary issue Qanuary/February, 1982), Hannon explained what the paper had set out to do and why he’d stuck with it for so long: “I got hooked, I guess, on empowerment, the transformation of The Helpless Queer with no history and an unlikely future into Someone, into a group of Someones, who uncovered a history, who found heroes, who grabbed today and shook it till tomorrow fell out of its pocket and there was a place in it for us.”

It was on June 27, 1969, that gay men in a Greenwich Village bar decided to grab the day and shake it. To the shock of New York police-who paid regular visits to the bar to harass them-customers in the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street fought back: they threw things at the cops and, later that night, distributed flyers and demonstrated. The modern gay liberation movement marks Stonewall as its symbolic birth; over the next four years, as the movement bloomed, gay journals sprang up over the world.

In October, 1971, 13 men and two women came together in Toronto to start a paper that would speak for Canadian lesbians and gay men. “At that time in the movement,” Paul Macdonald, one of the founders, has written, “there seemed to be a kind of revolutionary hangover from the hippie student radical days.” The 15 founders organized as a loose collective; everyone had a say and since no one had any newspaper experience, they learned as they went.

The premier issue-a 20-page newsprint tabloid, primitive in design-hit the streets and bars barely a month later. “Page after page of political harangue,” Herb Spiers, another of the founders, wrote of it in retrospect. Some welcomed TBP; many did not. Peddling the paper, the collective encountered more hostility from gay men in bars than straights in the streets. “It was perceived as too radical,” Hannon recalls. “The conventional wisdom at the time was: keep your mouth shut, lead a quiet life, don’t rock the boat.”

Launched with a shout, The Body Politic refused to shut up. Along the way, it learned more eloquent ways of urging homosexuals to affirm their identity, fight oppression, and get involved in the movement. Political harangue gradually gave way to an investigation of the real lives of gay people past and present.

Ken Popert joined TBP in 1973. What he and Hannon most remember of the early years is the sheer labor, unpaid and exhilarating. “We often worked 24 hours a day, with catnaps here and there,” says Hannon. “We were steeped in the world view of the ’60s and we thought the workers could really control the workplace. It was an absolute necessity in those days. It had to work. And it did.”

The year 1975 was a watershed. TBP hired its first full-time, paid staffer and organized as a non-profit corporation. They chose the name Pink Triangle Press in honor of men who had died in Nazi concentration camps-men identified as homosexual by the pink felt triangles sewn on their uniforms. The words of Kurt Hiller, a German gay activist writing in 1921, were placed on the masthead: “The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals themselves.”

By the end of 1976, with five years of publishing under its belt, the collective was doing its work remarkably well. The Body Politic had evolved into a successful blend of news, columns and editorials, and historical pieces-tempered by cartoons and reviews, photographs and personal stories. “The combination of men and women vitalized the paper,” says Hannon. “A lot of gay male magazines turned into bar and sex rags.”

Over the next five years, part- and full-time staff grew to seven, including Hannon, Popert and Rick Bebout. “We worked crazily long hours for peanuts,” Bebout, who joined TBP in 1977, has written, “but it never occurred to us to think we were crazy. This wasn’t a job, it was our lives.” (Of the three dinosaurs, Bebout alone left staff -in 1985.)

With the help of a large pool of volunteers, the collective turned TBP into a paper with an international reputation. (In 1978, Martin Duberman, a New York playwright and historian, called it “the most sophisticated, courageous, and incisive gay news periodical in existence.”) TBP attracted such high-calibre writers as Canadian novelists Jane Rule and American historian John D’Emilio to supplement the work of the collective-despite an inability to pay them. Though critically acclaimed, the paper was never quite “popular”: circulation hovered stubbornly around 7,000. TBP failed to attract much of the large num ber of gay men not involved in the movement. “They disliked our finger waving element,” says Ed Jackson, who came to the paper with Hannon and left in 1985. Many lesbians, on the other hand, resented TBP’s predominantly male concerns. Gays and lesbians alike often complained that it was too literary, too shrill, too intellectual. “It wasn’t for everybody,” says Tim McCaskell, who joined the collective in 1974 and left last summer. “We were speaking to the leaders of the community.”

Determined to probe all aspects of sexuality, TBP refused to steer clear of such controversial (and to some, distasteful) topics as transvestism, sadomasochism and pedophilia. In 1977, even those readers who applauded the collective’s brashness hoped they would play it safe: Anita Bryant was on the road, painting a lurid picture of gay men as child molesters and ruthless recruiters. In this hostile atmosphere, most gay people felt it was a time to be silent-or to choose words that would not provoke.

Gerald Hannon did not. In the summer of 1977, he wrote “Men Loving Boys Loving Men “-a sympathetic and explicit article on three men who loved boys. Hannon attacked the popular notion that pedophiles are either psychopaths or pathetic losers, and their victims “hapless children diverted from the straight and narrow by the corrosive touch of some predatory homosexual.” The relationships in “Men Loving Boys Loving Men”-presented as loving and based on consent-had nothing to do with child molestation, Hannon argued: “Every homosexual’s sexuality has been interfered with-impeded, strangled, diverted, denounced, ‘cured,’ pitied, punished. That is molestation.”

Anticipating controversy, the collective put “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” on hold. Then in August, four Toronto men were charged with the sexual assault and murder of Emanuel Jaques, a 12-year-old shoeshine boy. In the months ahead, press coverage seemed to implicate the entire gay community in the murder. The climate for the sexually explicit “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” could not have been worse; yet after much debate, the collective decided to run it in the December issue to open up a dialogue. On the eve of publication, Hannon was “excited and apprehensive. But it had sat so long it seemed old hat by the time it was printed.”

Old hat to Hannon, but not to the gay community in Toronto. “Many of us were upset,” recalls George Hislop, who ran as an openly gay candidate in the municipal election of 1980. “The community was so insecure and the article was like throwing gasoline on a fire.”

If gays were angry, Toronto Sun columnist Claire Hoyan early nemesis of TBP-was incensed. In his column of December 22, 1977, Hoy described “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” as “filthy garbage, not only sick but criminal.” Two days after Christmas, the Sun dubbed TBP “The Bawdy Politic” and the following day, then attorney general Roy McMurtry told The Globe and Mail that he was “appalled” by the article.

On December 30, the police raided TBP’s office and seized records, manuscripts and subscription lists. On January 5, 1978, charges were laid against Pink Triangle Press and three of its officers-Hannon, Popert and Jackson-for “possession of obscene material for distribution” and “use of the mails for purpose of transmitting anything that is indecent, immoral or scurrilous.” “The life of The Body Politic changed abruptly and forever,” Jackson later wrote in Flaunting It!, a 1982 anthology of TBP pieces. “Where once the worst we could expect was low-level media harassment and a bland refusal to acknowledge our existence, we now faced palpable risks. Our right to publish had become an issue.” Many in the gay community felt the paper got what it deserved; in the months ahead, the collective had its hands full convincing them that freedom of the press-their press-was the issue, and pedophilia was not.

Through 1978, messages of support poured in from gay groups around the world, and from Canadian broadcasting and publishing figures. And money: a TBP defence fund, set up to cover legal expenses, would raise $110,000 over the four-and-a-half years of hearings, trials and appeals that were to follow. (As the collective’s notoriety grew, so did the paper: with the October, 1978 issue, TBP expanded to a 48-page tabloid-with a modified format, more photography and a crisper design-and called itself a magazine.)

On February 14,1979, Pink Triangle was acquitted after a flashy, much publicized trial. “That trial was symbolic,” says Jackson. “We represented the little guys against a constellation of forces wanting to bring us to our knees.” It was a happy Valentine but the elation of winning was shortlived: then attorney general McMurtry appealed the acquittal in March, and a year later, Pink Triangle was ordered to face a new trial. (Appeals by Pink Triangle to overturn this order would delay the retrial for 27 months.)

On February 5,1981, Toronto police conducted a series of brutal, senseless raids on four bathhouses: 266 men were charged as found-ins and 20 others as keepers of common bawdyhouses. The following night, more than 3,000 pro tested in downtown Toronto, their rage building to near-riot level. It was a year of rage; it was a year in which Pink Triangle worked overtime-organizing demonstrations and producing pamphlets as well as publishing-and proved its mettle. Never before was TBPs readership so assured and its role so clearly defined. “We were like Grand Central Station,” says Jackson. “Everything was orchestrated from TBP.”

In November, 1981, The Body Politic celebrated its tenth anniversary. The best years of the paper had come to an end. In TBPs eleventh year, the collective continued to fight for its right to publish-but with less support. In May, 1982, three weeks before the retrial of “Men Loving Boys Loving Men,” the entire collective was charged with “publishing obscene material” in the April issue. The charge referred to “Lust With a Very Proper Stranger”-an article on the etiquette of fist-fucking, written by the pseudonymous Angus MacKenzie. In June, a provincial court judge acquitted Pink Triangle and its officers of the charges against “Men Loving Boys Loving Men” a second time; acquittal came for “Lust With a Very Proper Stranger” in November. “It was a fabulous show,” Ken Popert recalls, “but by then we were out of the ratings.”

Times had changed. “After the bath raids and trials,” says Jackson, “the steam seemed to go out of the movement.” Although gay life had been brought to the public consciousness, hoped-for law reform hadn’t followed. (Of the provinces, only Quebec had amended its civil rights act to include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for discrimination.) After a decade of fierce lobbying, gay and lesbian activists were disheartened; some directed their frustrations at TBP. “There was a lot of bitterness,” George Hislop recalls. “Time, money and energy had been diverted from the movement to fight for The Body Politic’s right to publish. People thought TBP was out of control-doing its own thing-and out of touch with the community.”

Out of touch with a more secure, varied and complacent community than before, with a host of organizations to turn to, and less passion for the cause of gay liberation. A community soon to be battling a mysterious new foe which, by the end of 1982, had been given a name: AIDS. A community served by other magazines, gay and straight, covering its issues and its interests. As Rick Bebout has written, “the clear historical moment when a single magazine could try to be all things to all lesbians and gay men, to touch them with the spirit of something wonderful and new, seemed to have passed.”

In its final years, The Body Politic attempted to change with the times. “We decided we wanted to get out of our readership ghetto and show we were ‘one of the guys’ out at the bars,” says Jackson. A slicker TBP covered more pop culture than before and printed more personal stories. Still, circulation fell.

To many, TBP would always remain that goddam magazine with a shit-disturbing collective that published “Men Loving Boys Loving Men.” A magazine short on humor and long on bad news. “People wanted to hear success stories,” says Jackson. “We were always looking at things going wrong.” AIDS magnified the problem: since many gay men would rather not think too much about that dark cloud, TBP-obliged to reflect it-became something to avoid. Many lesbians, on the other hand, stopped reading it when the anti-porn debate of the 1980s heated up: TBP, resolutely anti-censorship, had little to give-and much to anger anti-porn, lesbian feminists.

The collective, drained from the years of legal battles, wrote less. At the same time, many of TBPs most valuable contributors were drifting away. “I didn’t have time to stroke them anymore,” says Bebout, who edited many of the best, “and for whatever reasons, they weren’t as interested in writing for us.” Some were contributing to other magazines; others, who had used TBP as a training ground, had since become professionals-with neither the time nor the desire to work for free. The younger writers the paper attracted lacked a sense of history, in Bebout’s mind, and “didn’t seem to be able to write propaganda in the positive sense-that is, to affect how people think and maybe what they do.” He grants their task was more difficult: earlier writers had the advantage of speaking out for the first time, and it became increasingly unclear in the ’80s what needed to be said, how, and for whom. “There’s only one real issue right now-AIDS-and it’s difficult to say anything challenging about that.”

The collective realized the need for Pink Triangle to diversify and, in 1984, launched Xtra!-a free, biweekly guide to gay life in Toronto. A bar rag, and slightly embarrassing to the dinosaurs until Popert took over in 1985 and began adding more news. As Xtra! improved and found an audience, The Body Politic deteriorated. Although the collective had retained a pro-sex stance, the writing to illustrate it was frequently “rhetorical and shrill,” according to Jackson, and TBP failed to develop a clear response to AIDS, often ignoring all but the statistics. And although the news section remained valuable, reviews-and-features-once TBP’s drawing card became a ghost of itself. Too often, flabby and under-worked articles found their way into the paper to fill pages. Editorial meetings became exercises in inertia and frustration: if original ideas were elusive, writers to carry them out were even more scarce.

The largest controversy stirred by TBP in these years came not from the publication of an article but a classified ad. In the February, 1985 issue, a gay white male requested a “young, well-built BM [black male] for houseboy.” The ad not only enraged non-white gay groups but sparked a debate within the collective on racism, the role of TBP and the nature of gay liberation. Ken Popert believed (as did Hannon and Bebout) that although he regretted offending oppressed groups, the ad should continue to run. “Sexual desire is just there,” Popert wrote in the April; 1985 issue. “It is not there to be morally evaluated and either glorified or condemned Desire is inviolable.” Chris Bearchell-involved with BP on and off since 1977 and often its sole lesbian voice disagreed. So did Tim McCaskell. “What The Body Politic is about is gay liberation,” he wrote. “That means we must respect all sectors of our community and see to it that the ‘desire’ of dominant sectors does not run roughshod over the sensitivities of others and contribute to further fragmentation and division.”

The debate neatly illustrated a split in the collective between those who thought TBP was a community mirror and those who thought it was, in Popert’s words, “a catalyst, free to go off in any direction.” When the collective decided to monitor ads, Popert went on “an intellectual strike”: he remained on staff but left the collective and did not return until August, 1986. “They were making sure that no one frowned on us,” he says. “In a sense, our trials scared people away from anything controversial.” With the internal split, the dynamics of The Body Politic changed. Collective meetings became more of a chore than a challenge.

If the group was no longer unified, it was also not regenerating. Wary of outsiders, the dinosaurs rarely took time to welcome new volunteers and fill them in on TBP’s mandate and history. “We expected people to drop off the trees politically developed,” says Bebout, “and of course nobody does.”

Many found this attitude icy or arrogant and left after a time. Those who stayed-and were able to mesh with the dinosaurs-were invited to attend collective meetings; after six months of religious attendance, they were invited to join. But in the ’80s, fewer volunteers expressed an interest in doing so.

By 1986, circulation of TBP, never more than 7,000, had dropped by a thousand. Xtra!, on the other hand, had tripled its initial circulation of 3,500. However shaky, the real body of The Body Politic was still the collective-supported by a shrinking number of volunteer editors and envelope stuffers, typesetters and writers. In June, 1986, the body doubled over. It was Hannon who delivered the blow.

Hannon had taken over subscriptions, promotions and finances in 1981, as a break from editing news. Covering the bathhouse raids and trials-65 hours a week, with only a day off each month-he’d nearly snapped. He hadn’t intended to stay away from editing long but “you take these things over and then they have babies.” The budget Hannon drafted for 1986 was an optimistic one, setting total revenue for Pink Triangle at close to $374,000-an increase of $60,000 over 1985. The $60,000 would come, Hannon planned, from more advertising sold in both TBP and Xtra!, and an increase in TBPs newsstand sales. Pink Triangle’s expenses would also rise by $60,000, due to higher production costs and the expansion of full-time staff from five to seven to keep up with Xtra!

The budget was highly unrealistic. Only an increase in advertising lineage in Xtra! was likely: it was luring Toronto advertisers away from TBP. And in December, 1985, the press sold 3,117 copies of TBP on the newsstands-about 300 less than in December, 1984.

No one thought to question the soundness of the budget. If the collective had always been hot for the cause, it had always turned a cold shoulder to the details of business; the staff kept absurdly informal books, not adhering to any recognized accounting principles. This lax financial management was part of a larger flaw in the set-up of Pink Triangle Press. “With a collective,” Hannon says, “there’s a lack of a sense that anyone individual holds all the strings and no real job descriptions or management strategies. It was easy for us to get into trouble. And we did.”

Hannon first realized something was wrong when Pink Triangle’s accountant, Robert Brosius, failed to deliver his first-quarter report last July. Staff wanted to press Hannon but did not. “You don’t go poking into other people’s jobs here,” says Popert. Accordingly, no one thought to poke into Brian Flint’s affairs as Pink Triangle’s advertising manager; advised that TBPwas top priority, Flint concentrated on it and was slow in collecting owed ad revenue from both papers.

At the end of June, Brosius delivered his report and Han:’ non delivered the blow: in the first three months of 1986, Pink Triangle’s operating expenses had outstripped its income by $12,000. (Advertising revenue from TBP was $6,000 short of its mark; Xtra! had brought in only $10,000 in ad revenue of an expected $67,000 for the year; and newsstand sales of TBP were $2,500 less than expected.) In September, Pink Triangle’s new accountant, Marvin Blackstien, delivered the second-quarter report: the press’s operating expenses for the first half of 1986 were $23,000 over Income.

Through the summer, .the collective met to discuss the uncertain future of Pink Triangle Press. Plans included expanding Xtra!, replacing TBP with a new national publication, lighter in tone, and-most radical of all-moving the press to a more formal structure. Blackstien’s report in September gave them further cause to believe that maybe collectivity had had its day. With no line of bank credit to go into overdraft, Pink Triangle was in serious trouble: it was not bankrupt on paper-assets exceeded liabilities by $22,000-but if deterioration continued at the same rate, it would be by the end of the year.

At the end of September, the collective gathered at Chalmer’s House in Toronto”ln an emotionally charged meeting, they voted to drastically scale down the operation and start a restructuring of Pink Triangle Press. Two staff members would have to go and a drive to solicit advertising begin.

A new structure devised by Bebout called for a publisher (appointed by a board of directors chosen from the general membership of the press) and an editor (appointed by the membership itself); both would be clearly empowered to hire and fire and decide policy. Hannon, silent and still through most of the meeting, sounded a note of regret. “In the past,” he said sadly, looking at no one, “our fingers were into everything. We felt much more plugged in to the operation.” TBP editor John Allec lingered after the meeting. “Do you get the feeling,” he said, “that The Body Politic has done what it set out to do? That it’s dying a natural death?”

Two nights later, the collective assembled at the long table in TBPs office. Popert, appointed interim publisher, presented a proposal for spending cuts amounting to $5,000 per month. The day before, Brian Flint and production staffer Ian King had volunteered to resign by the end of October and continue part-time without pay. “We knew we had to do something dramatic to save the paper,” King said quietly.

After the meeting, Popert sat with his feet up on his desk and talked of TBP’s reputation. “We’ve always had a coterie of people who hate us. They see us as powerful. And we are.”

He smiled slightly. “You know,” he said after a beat, “people would be terrified if we closed, especially those who hate us. We’re like parents-they count on us to be around to kick. Our real value is not that we publish but that we’re here.”

And if TBP did fold?

“No one would leap into the gap,” he said, “because the expertise doesn’t exist;” He mulled it over, frowned, and then brightened. “I don’t believe we won’t be here next year. Too many of us care too much.”

By the end of October, the one who had cared the longest seemed like a different man. “We’re getting better at dancing on the edge of the abyss,” Gerald Hannon said. “We’re executing ever more graceful pirouettes.” Pink Triangle’s debt had stabilized-it wasn’t getting any larger-and TBPs creditors were surprisingly sympathetic. Plans included a fundraising drive and a redesign of Xtra! to accommodate more advertising. Though it was too early to tell, there was a sense that Pink Triangle would pull through.

As morale improved-less so of a tired staff, soon to be reduced to five-doubts about the new structure set in. “What remains of the tattered collective?” asked Popert, a dinosaur reviving an old debate. “Are we still to have a plurality of faces? I would hope so.” Hannon worried that “without the collective, there will be no particular incentive for people to come here. Yet I’m willing to give it a try.”
Sitting in the meeting room, his eyes alternately sad and
devilish behind his glasses, Hannon reflected on his 15 years at The Body Politic. He had many fine memories and no regrets. “Yes we’re called dinosaurs,” he said finally. “But you know the thing about dinosaurs? They lasted a long time.”

They wanted to last a little longer. By the time the collective presented plans for restructuring at the annual general meeting in November, the role of editor had become a collective. They had invited about 200 people as members of the press and observers; only 20 or so attended. That was disappointing but Popert’s news was not: revenues of Pink Triangle were now exceeding expenditures, allowing the press to whittle away at the debt.

Near the end of the meeting, an observer cut through the mood of somewhat shaky optimism: “People buy The Body Politic as a gesture of faith. No one reads it anymore. There aren’t that many new things to talk about.”

On December 2, there was something new to talk about and to celebrate: the Ontario legislature voted to pass an amendment to the provincial Human Rights Code, protecting lesbians and gays from discrimination in housing, employment and services. (The amendment was the most controversial part of Bill 7, bringing Ontario statutes in line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.) This boosted staff morale only briefly: exhaustion had set in.

On December 9, Hannon tendered his resignation, effective at the end of June, 1987. “I’ve been vacillating for several months but have finally decided it’s the best thing to do,” he wrote to staff and collective. “It’s money mostly. [Hannon made only $16,000 in 1986.] I have lately been wondering what I would live on in my fifties and sixties-and they’re not so far away.” In the next week, two other staff members expressed a desire to leave.

On December 16, Bill 7 officially passed into law. That same day, the January, fifteenth anniversary issue of TBP came back from the printers. “Reason To Celebrate!” the cover line read. “Ontario Says Yes To Rights! We Turn Sweet Fifteen!”

That night, the collective met. With staff’s urging, they decided to reduce staff to three-Hannon, Popert and production manager Dale Bolivar-by the end of January. Pink Triangle Press would continue to publish Xtra! and, with hope, something else down the road. It was time, they realized, to “stop trying to put a tutu on a hippo,” in Hannon’s words, and let go of The Body Politic. The February issue would be the last.

Later that night, Gerald Hannon wept.

Following a 36-hourmarch, much of it under sniper fire, the Lenca infantry battalion of the Salvadoran Army was bivouacked atop a hill called Ocotepeque in the northeastern province of Morazan. There were five journalists along for the trip-two Mexicans, an Argentine, an American and me-an army sweep north toward the Honduran border, through territory controlled by the People’s Revolutionary Army, one of five Salvadoran guerrilla forces. This morning we were simply hanging around, waiting until the army got itself reorganized so we could head out, aiming for a guerrilla-controlled town called Corinto, nestled in a valley to the north.

Presently, a white minibus bounced up along the long rock trail that scales the southern wall of Ocotepeque. Inside was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television crew doing a documentary for The Journal. Lieutenant Colonel jorge Adalberto Cruz-sort of a Latin version of Peter Lorre, decked out in battle fatigues-led us out along the northern edge of the hill to a rocky cliff overlooking northern Morazan. In the distance, mainly obscured by brown, sun-burnt hills, we could just make out the white chalk and red clay smudges of Corin to.

Cruz had one of those little retractable pointers that normally he wore tucked in the breast pocket of his fatigues, like a ball-point pen. Now he produced it, played it out to its full length and used it to indicate points of interest on a plastic-laminated map. He stood on a ledge of rock above the journalists and periodically waved off to the north as he explained how the rest of the counterinsurgency sweep would be conducted. Below him, the CBC cameraman was huddled over his camera, almost at Cruz’s feet, shooting up at the officer to get a dramatic effect. The soundman held the boom microphone in the air a yard or so in front of Cruz, who declaimed his imminent tactical plans as though he were running for office.

Eventually, however, the cameraman and the soundman, neither of whom understood Spanish, appeared to lose interest. The microphone swung away and the camera stopped rolling and was shifted into a neutral position. Cruz, a battle-hardened counterinsurgency officer wi th a pin t or two of blood on his hands-and who would later be behind at least one rumored coup plot-promptly faltered and then halted in mid-sentence. He gazed down at the TV crew, who at this point were chatting between themselves in English, oblivious to the seasoned Salvadoran warlord looming above them. Cruz’s grizzled face seemed to drop. His hand, clutching his pointer, fell to his side. He seemed utterly lost. “Should I go on?” he asked in Spanish-uncertainly, just as though he were requesting permission to leave the room. “Should I go on?”

That’s television. I don’t believe that the print media are able to instill quite so much respect in their interlocutors (nor, on every occasion, is TV). Still, that morning in Morazan almost three years ago reminds me now of the press’s inherent ability to direct what it ostensibly is trying to trace: the real world. During almost five years as a Globe and Mail correspondent based in Latin America, I periodically had examples of the press’s real or assumed power thrown back at me; they were always a surprise and often a shock.

On occasional trips home to Canada, I would sometimes hear things I had written-judgments I had made or conclusions I had drawn-being quoted in conversation. Because they had appeared in print (and presumably because they tended to corroborate what the person quoting them already believed), my stories were trotted out as persuasive proof that, say, the Salvadoran guerrillas were militarily superior to the army, or that the Guatemalan refugees in Mexico had no direct links to their country’s guerrillas, or that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua are good and God- fearing men.

I was always taken aback, because I knew how much simplification, hearsay and conjecture can find their way into a 1,200-word article on an excruciatingly complicated theme. Of course, we do the best we can. We weigh our sources and try to second-guess their information and their opinions. But the craziest things can happen.

Once, during the 1982 Falklands Malvinas war between Britain and Argentina, I put together an article assessing the political interplay of Argentina’s three armed forces and its impact on the way the ruling junta came to its decisions. At one point, I observed that the air force commander, General Basilio Lami Dozo, was considered politically weak and did not seem to play an important role in essentially political issues. One afternoon some weeks later, I happened to be at the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires and I bumped into the Canadian ambassador. I asked him his opinion about some question of the moment the war was still on-and in the course of his reply he mentioned, just by the way, that General Lami Dozowas not a powerful player politically. Then the ambassador hesitated, as though recalling a dim memory. He glanced at me. He said: “But it was you who wrote that, wasn’t it?” So it was. Not only that, but the unnamed source I had been quoting when I wrote it was none other than the Canadian embassy’s political counsellor, who, of course, had merely been expressing his own opinion at the time.

The most mind-wrenching story I had to cover in Latin America, however, was unquestionably Nicaragua. Looking back now on my repeated and often lengthy visits there from 1981 to 1985, I think I can see a little more clearly than perhaps I did at the time just why that small, beleaguered land was such agony to analyse and write about. There were probably countless reasons, but a lot of them boil down to the plain fact that most of the patterns I consciously or unconsciously used when shaping stories about other Latin American countries simply ceased to make sense in revolutionary Nicaragua. One common journalistic pattern is to divide the story (or the world) into good guys and bad guys, taking care to tarnish the good guys slightly and to redeem the bad guys just a little, for verisimilitude. That worked fine in Guatemala, where the good guys were barefoot, dirt-poor, helpless and desperate, and where the bad guys carried Galil automatic rifles, wore camouflage khaki and waded through the Indian hamlets like a Praetorian guard. For a time, at least, Guatemala was as close as a story gets to being black and white.

But in Nicaragua such easy conventions did not seem to help. Nor could I simply fall back on another standard journalistic format: hewing a middle line. In Nicaragua there really isn’t one. The nine Sandinista commanders are either angels of a new dawn-or hounds of a Stalinist-inspired hell. The U.S.-backed contras are either heroic freedom-fighters-or blood-thirsty mercenaries. For a Canadian journalist steeped in that cozy western liberal convention that the truth lies somewhere slightly to the left or to the right of the midpoint between the two extremes, it was more than merely jolting to be faced suddenly with a story in which there really is no middle ground, and where I found myself being tossed relentlessly from one side to the other.

Another common journalistic habit-a way of positioning ourselves on a story-is to work out where and what the power structures are and then to shape our stories in reaction to them. We do it all the time. We bounce our questions against the people in power-from the government in Ottawa to the majority on city council. We examine what they are doing and why, and we hold them to account. That can be difficult enough, particularly in countries where the power structures are either very weak or extremely strong and not well disposed to answering questions. But in Nicaragua, it was especially complex.

Since 1979, the local source of power in the land of Sandino has unquestionably been the Sandinistas. But the real power in the region, the power that can and no doubt will determine Nicaragua’s future, resides in Washingtonand in this case it is not united with but diametrically opposed to the local power. That constant tension pervades all elements of Nicaraguan life and it makes covering the country a neverending scramble of confusions, contradictions, conflicting allegiances and confounded sentiments.

It was always a kind of agony to try to chop all those competing elements down into a 1,200-word feature, news story or analysis piece that made internal sense and somehow got Nicaragua “right .” Sooner or later, though, I had to haul out my laptop word processor, hold my nose and plunge in. When I was off the mark-as inevitably I was-1 simply tried to compensate the next time out. And that, I suppose, is what makes journalism the rough, unfinished craft it is. We never really do get it right. We just keep trying.

Oakland Ross was The Globe and Mail’s Latin American correspondent from 1981 to 1985. He is now the Globe’s Montreal bureau chief.

Last June 25, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill giving $100-million to the contras, the terrorist group fighting to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua. After four months of debate and intense lobbying, arm-twisting and promises by President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government had taken another step to prevent what Reagan calls the consolidation of a communist beachhead on the North American continent. The next day The Toronto Star carried two stories covering the event. One was from the British wire service, Reuters; the other was filed by Associated Press, an American wire service.

There were no pieces by Canadian reporters based in the U.S., Canada or Nicaragua. If it was disappointing that Canada’s largest newspaper should settle for such slight reporting, it was not unusual. According to the Star’s foreign editor, Joe Hall, the paper relies “primarily for its foreign coverage on the wire services, especially AP, for its hard news coverage.”

The consequences of this policy are greater than once-over-lightly stories. For example, the June 26 AP dispatch that describes events leading up to the vote in Congress reflects what Hall refers to as an “almost inevitable bias.” Filed from Washington, the report attempts to give readers background information on U.S. government and CIA involvement with the contras. The story begins by repeating Reagan’s frequent claim that the Sandinista government is bent on exporting revolution throughout Central America, an assertion strengthened a few paragraphs later. “The anti-government Contra guerrillas were organized by the Central Intelligence Agency as a secret force in 1981 to halt the flow of smuggled weapons from Nicaragua’s government to leftist insurgents in EI Salvador.” Ostensibly this is true, since it was the rationale given by the CIA and Reagan for the creation of the contras. However, since only one arms shipment was discovered after 1981, Reagan was forced to produce a new explanation for continued contra support: the contras were needed to press for Nicaraguan elections. Elections were held in 1984; Reagan now calls for the replacement of communism by “real democracy” led by the contras.

The article notes that although “former Somoza supporters still occupy key military positions [among the contras), the force has been augmented by Sandinistas who have defected.” But these leaders are not simply Somoza supporters; they are former members of the National Guard, responsible for propping up Somoza’s brutal 45-year regime. The top military commanders and the heads of logistics, intelligence, training, operations and special forces are all ex-National Guardsmen. The AP writer also states Reagan’s claim that there are now 25,000 contras, with many more anxious to join. Although the reporter says the number is disputed, he offers no estimates by alternative sources, which have placed the contras’ strength at less than half of that number.

Joe Hall admits there are problems with bias in U.S. wire stories. Both he and editorial page editor Ian Urquhart agree that unbiased reporting of any story is an almost impossible goal. “I defy any journalist to say he is totally objective,” says Urquhart. “Whether it’s the headline, what you choose to lead with or the order of the rest of the story, there’s always going to be a bias.” Hall says readers must be aware of the possible slant in American wire stories: “They have to be a little sophisticated and realize there is an almost inevitable American slant and bias within the stories.” Yet this doesn’t push him to increase the Star’s coverage from a Canadian point of view.

In March, 1986, the month the contra aid bill was first introduced in the House of Representatives, the paper ran 27 stories focusing on Nicaraguan affairs and Nicaragua’s relations with other countries. Six originated in Canada-with four written by Star reporters and two short pieces coming from Canadian Press; two others were prepared by Steven Donziger, an American stringer for the paper living in Nicaragua; and one special report was filed by a Canadian freelancer in Costa Rica. The other 18, with the exception of three Reuters stories, were all American. Of these, 10 articles are datelined Washington, one New York and two Honduras. Three analysis pieces and two excerpts from an American book, With the Contras, completed the list.

Wire stories about Nicaragua in The Toronto Star are usually straight news reports, often containing quotes or paraphrases from President Reagan’s speeches. Reagan’s comments may be juxtaposed with opposition arguments, but the actual content of his statements is never questioned. So, on March 17, an AP story states: “[Reagan] accused members of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua of selling illegal drugs to Americans, using their country as a terrorist command post, and threatening the security of the Western alliance by seeking to spread revolution through Central America to the Panama Canal.” In fact, it is the contras who have been proved to be heavily involved in the drug trade, not the Sandinistas, and it has never been shown that Nicaragua is exporting its revolution. None of the wire stories ever touches the question of why the tiny country of Nicaragua is such a threat to the U.S., why the “malignancy in Managua” is, in Reagan’s terms, a “mortal threat to the entire New World.” Although some of the reports contain dissenting views, none challenges the underlying assumption that Nicaragua is somehow a problem needing a solution and that America is in some way responsible for finding this answer.

The four Canadian news stories the Star ran in March present an alternative approach to U.S. coverage. Three pieces focus on appeals to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney by churches and prominent Canadians that he urge Reagan to end military intervention in Nicaragua. The other article details a conversation with two Nicaraguan clerics who deny U.S. reports of government persecution of the church. The articles portray Nicaragua as more than a U.S. domestic affair and show the existence within Canada of organized opposition to Reagan’s policies.

Stories of an alleged invasion of Honduras by Nicaraguan troops at the end of March, the same time the contra aid bill was being debated in the U.S. House, also illustrate differences between Canadian and U.S. reporting. The Star carried four items covering the event: two from AP in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, one from The Washington Post, and nine days after the invasion, one by stringer Steven Donziger. Perhaps because reporters were not, at first, allowed to enter the Nicaraguan-Honduran border area and yet were compelled to “get a story,” the AP reports are a confusing jumble of numbers, claims and contradictions. They rely heavily on unnamed official American and Honduran sources, and paint the Nicaraguan army as a vicious aggressor. The Post article, picked up by the Star one week after the first AP story, begins to seriously examine the event, indicating that the Nicaraguan “invasion” had been overblown and suggesting that the timing was suspiciously close to the U.S. vote on contra aid. Two days later, the Star’s Donziger files a report from Managua in which Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega claims that one contra base was destroyed as part of a “defensive operation.” Most of the piece is devoted to Ortega’s explanation and defence of Nicaragua’s actions. This may be one-sided, but it is the first opportunity readers have had to consider the issues involved and to hear Nicaragua make its case.

Canadian reporting often brings out information not mentioned in American wire stories. This, in part, may be a function of the tremendous demands placed on wire service reporters, who must write stories quickly to meet the deadlines of hundreds of papers around the world. These reporters may not have the time to do the digging and analysis necessary to produce more complete articles. Foreign correspondents writing regularly for one publication have a better opportunity to come to grips with issues instead of chasing events. More specifically, a reporter writing for a Canadian paper such as The Toronto Star has more freedom to take a critical look at American foreign policy and its effects in Central America. American reporters are often hesitant to criticize or question activities of their government (with notable exceptions). Pastor Valle-Garay, consul-general of Nicaragua to Canada, believes American opinion, including that of journalists, has been manipulated by Reagan. “Reagan has been able to threaten both reporters and congressmen into seeing his side of the story, mostly by calling them un-American or communist sympathizers,” he says. As Toronto writer and media critic Rick Salutin told the Review last October, a reporter “wouldn’t be accused of being a disloyal Canadian for not supporting the contras. Being a Canadian isn’t a religion the way being an American is.”

Although the Star’s Hall realizes the limitations of wire service stories and the advantages of staff correspondents, he says: “It hasn’t been possible in my mind to justify opening a bureau in Central America. Nicaragua and EI Salvador are continually interesting, but not in my judgment sufficiently interesting to have a staff bureau there.” The Star has now assigned one reporter, Gordon Barthos, to report on Central America. He can travel to the area a few times a year and write reports both from Central America and from Toronto. Unfortunately, Barthos is also the paper’s foreign affairs and arms control expert -a heavy load.

So The Toronto Star’s readers will continue to receive a contradictory mélange of news on Central America most of it containing American perceptions and bias and some reflecting the Star’s more liberal and critical views. Peter Desbarats, author and dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Graduate School of Journalism, put it in context in an interview last fall: “I think it’s extremely dangerous for us to take all our international news, without editing or commentary, from American sources. It really inhibits the ability of the Canadian government to formulate an independent foreign policy if the whole population is conditioned to look at things from the American perspective.”

So wrote Michele Landsberg in her weekly Globe and Mail column last September 13. Landsberg’s comments were typical of how the media explained what went wrong at Studio D. Fingers pointing, they implied that a sexist film board was ruining the women’s unit by slashing its budget.

Coverage was convincing. It seemed astonishing that Studio D was frozen, with no money to continue making the bold, stirring documentaries for which it was renowned. The antinuclear If You Love this Planet not only won a 1983 Oscar, it was labelled political propaganda by the Reagan administration and blacklisted in the U.S. Not a Love Story, a controversial documentary on pornography released in 1981, has had a major impact on the pornography debate in Canada: in 1981-82, it was booked more often than any other National Film Board offering. Yet the real story of how such successful filmmakers wound up with their hands tied has more to do with mismanaged money and attitude problems than with sexism.

Studio D’s funds have not been cut off. The real reason the unit has no money is “extensive overspending,” according to Dwight Clermont, financial officer for English programming.

Yet the press has consistently reported otherwise. As The Canadian Forum wrote in its August/September, 1986, issue, “Three years ago Studio D received 10 per cent of the English language division’s allocation. When this share fell to six per cent [Executive Producer Kathleen] Shannon protested. She was first told there must have been ‘an accounting error’ and was then assured that things were going to be different. She managed to get the seven per cent portion the studio has now. Even 10 per cent, she says, would be just ‘marginally fair.'” In The Toronto Star of February 22, 1986, Doris Anderson wrote, “This year, instead of having its budget increased, Studio D has had its budget cut.”

The media’s misrepresentation of the story probably has to do with their misunderstanding of the way NFB budgets work. To set the record straight, each fiscal year, which runs from April 1 to March 31, Parliament allots the NFB’s budget. NFB Chairman Francois Macerola then splits that figure among English programming, French programming and administration. Both the French and the English directors of programming then allocate money to the individual studios within their divisions. Amounts given to each studio are based on how many filmmakers it has, the types of movies it makes (some, like drama, are more costly than others) and the NFB’s attempt to distribute money evenly between headquarters and the regions. English programming-under which Studio D falls-has 10 studios, five at the Montreal headquarters on Cote de Liesse and five in regions across the country.

By the time any studio receives its funding, overhead for salaries and NFB technical services has been taken off the top. What is left is called “free money” and it’s used to pay the key expenses of making films: contracting freelancers, travel and buying film stock. In 1984-85, Studio D’s free money totalled $344,000, in 1985-86 it jumped to $554,000 and in 1986-87 it was $580,000. Over those three years, the unit’s free money increased by 43.2 per cent.

Under Executive Producer Shannon, who stepped down exhausted last June, Studio D has been seeking more free money since its inception in 1974. Mainly, that’s because of how the unit sets up productions. While most studios use film board staff for crew, Shannon usually didn’t. Often, the producer and perhaps the writer were the only NFB staff assigned to a film. This means all other crew members-director, narrator, soundperson, cinematographer, editor, lighting person-must be free lancers whose pay came out of Studio D’s free money. One reason for this was that almost all NFB technical employees are men, and very often, Studio D’s productions demanded all women crews. Abortion: Stories from North and South and Behind the Veil: Nuns, both released in 1984, are two such films. As well, part of Studio D’s mandate is to hire women.

Despite these costly needs, Shannon managed to turn out some 70 films in 11 years without going significantly over budget. Then in 1985-86 the studio exceeded its $554,000 budget by $308,000. Shannon cites two reasons. The first: “a serious cut from which we never recovered.” But that cut was only $20,000-from $364,000 in 198384, to $344,000 the next year. The second: the unit was let down by Peter Katadotis, director of English programming, who had implied that it1 1984-85 Studio D could expect a substantial boost in free money. Based on that, Shannon undertook three new films-but says the increase never came through. “It was like a time bomb. I was trying to keep everything up in the air simultaneously. We juggled and juggled and juggled. At some point it was bound to come to rest.”

But in 1985-86 Studio D’s free money did jump, from $344,000 up to $544,000; the same year that frantic juggling collapsed into overspending. “It was no surprise that we came in over budget,” says Shannon. “It was a conscious decision.”

Yet in the financial statements Dwight Clermont received monthly from each studio, “the indication from Studio D was one of equilibrium. They weren’t expecting any problem.”

For some time, the unit had been telling the media that its budget was cut; that its percentage of English branch free money dropped from 9.9 in 1983-84, down to 6.2 the following year. While those percentages are accurate, they must be viewed against two facts. One: in real dollars, Studio D’s free money increased during that same period, and two: its percentage decrease was part of an overall political plan for the film board to decentralize and allocate more funds to its five regional studios. Until then, the regions had been receiving less than their share of the pie. In reports mentioning Studio D’s budget cuts, the media didn’t include either of these facts.

The NFB dictates that each studio must follow specific guidelines when it receives its free money. If a unit over spent or borrowed money from the film board the year before, it must pay that back before doing anything else. Next, it must earmark funds for “carry-in” costs. Those are funds to complete films begun in a previous fiscal year. Because productions often take two to three years to finish, most studios begin a new year with several projects already underway. Carry-in money is set aside for work planned on those films within that year.

Toward the end of the 1985-86 fiscal year, Studio D-hoping to reduce its expected deficit-borrowed $111,000 from the NFB. By the time the studio paid its overspending and loans bills at the start of 1986-87, it had $271,880 left. Within three months that was gobbled up by huge carry-in costs; the three films Shannon had taken on in 1984 were not completed.

Budgetary problems were compounded by Shannon’s attitude and the way the place was run. At the unit’s inception, Shannon had been a natural choice for executive producer. She had worked at the NFB for 18 years as a sound editor, picture editor, producer and director, but never as a manager.

In her new administrative position as executive producer she was required to deal extensively with male managers. Studio D’s Bonnie Sherr Klein, best known for directing Not a Love Story, says: “Kathleen was unable to communicate with men. She was so angry that she alienated them [from the women’s unit].” A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy was at work, according to Klein; Shannon believes that men invariably oppress women, so she expected it to happen to Studio D. With that expectation, she pitted her unit against the film board. “Studio D became a thorn in the side of men because we gave them no credit-we said we’d done it in spite of them,” says Klein. Ginny Stikeman, staff editor since 1975, says of Shannon’s attitude toward men: “It’s negative, I’d say, with men having all the bad attributes.”

One man who has worked with Shannon is John Taylor, now executive producer of the Ontario region. During the 10 years he headed the Pacific region he sat across from her in many meetings. “I think sometimes she’s felt very lonely and I think sometimes she’s been very upset.” Shannon describes her feelings differently: “Probably often I felt frustration and impatience at the difficulty of communicating my perspective. It was a source of stress, and anger often.”

It’s likely that those feelings contributed to the tense atmosphere at Studio D meetings. No one around the table would say what she really thought for fear of upsetting Shannon. “It was like a regime,” says one former freelance editor who refuses to be named. “No one wanted to rock the boat. Freelancers were scared.” Some voiced criticisms of the studio’s management. She says their contracts were never renewed.

There is no doubt that despite these conflicts, Studio D has produced a wealth of poignant, relevant work. Beverly Shaffer’s I’ll Find a Way, about a gutsy nine-year-old handicapped girl, won an Academy Award for best live action short in 1978. Sylvie’s Story, directed in 1986 by freelancer Barbara Doran, is a sensitive and instructive look at one battered woman’s efforts to change her life.

It’s the instructive side of films that the studio focuses on; the group is dedicated to inspiring social change. Judging by demand, Studio D’s audience clearly thirsts for this type of documentary. In her 1986 masters thesis on the studio done for Carleton University, Chris Scherbarth found that as of March, 1985, the unit’s films on average were booked twice as often as other English NFB movies. When Scherbarth excluded Studio D’s two most popular films-Not a Love Story and If You Love this Planet-the remaining ones were still screened 50 per cent more than other NFB films.

During Shannon’s time as executive producer, the unit grew from three women tucked away in a small basement office at the Montreal headquarters, without enough money to make a 30-minute documentary, to an internationally respected group of 13 filmmakers.

Formal recognition of Studio D’s success abounds. In 1984 Shannon received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University for having “fostered the work of women filmmakers in Canada and encouraged the production of films which speak to people all over the world against sexism, violence andracism.”Last July Shannon was named a member of the Order of Canada.

If Studio D is to continue producing work that deserves such plaudits, it will need a new executive producer willing to inherit a financial mess and a damaged relationship with the NFB. She will have to be capable of repairing both.

This year’s Ryerson Review of Journalism reflects the interests and backgrounds of the small group of students who created it. After two intense years of reading every magazine and newspaper that came our way, painfully learning reporting and interviewing skills, struggling over leads, transitions and the sheer hard work of writing, we embarked on the production of our own magazine-the Review. Many of us brought to the task a healthy skepticism of mainstream media, fostered in part by our own experiences and in part by our reading of other journalism reviews and media criticism. Some of us were concerned about the integrity and ethics of large media and those who work for them; others were suspicious of the power of the media and the biases contained in the news they present.

As we worked on our stories our suspicions were often borne out. Calgarian Leah Bradish, in a painstaking investigation of The Globe and Mail’s national edition, examined its claim to be Canada’s national newspaper. The Globe’s top management assert their paper is national in attitude and content. But the deeper Leah dug the more convinced she became that the paper is dominated by a central Canadian focus and voice. The Globe, for the most part, does not respond well to the interests of populations west of Ontario and east of Quebec.

Anna Kohn has new reasons to worry about the accuracy and thoroughness of the media. Researching a story about funding cutbacks at the National Film Board’s women’s studio-Studio D-Anna found a complicated mess of figures, theories, assertions and denials. She also found that no one in the media, whether or not they were sympathetic to Studio D, had done enough homework. Journalists had accepted many of the answers before they even started asking questions. The result was a misrepresentation of Studio D’s financial problems and the way they have developed.

Mark Bastien, in his examination of the use and misuse of quotes, introduced another area of concern. He discovered that too few publications have rules or policies to help writers and editors decide what is acceptable practice. As a result, reporters are sometimes guilty of gross inaccuracies.

Many of the Review staff looked to alternative media for another side of a story or for news and opinions unavailable elsewhere. Thus Michael Totzke’s story of The Body Politic, Canada’s first and only national gay magazine. The growth of TBP in the 1970s and ’80s marked the coming of age of the fight for homosexual rights in Canada; the magazine’s death this winter signalled the end of a chapter in that struggle. Doug Bennet found another member of the progressive press in much better shape. In its 20th year, This Magazine, a gutsy little left -wing publication, is in the midst of a new beginning. Mathew Ingram wanted to know why a group of Indian-owned radio and TV stations and newspapers merged last year to form the National Aboriginal Communications Society. Its goal, he reports, is to produce and distribute news, entertainment and cultural programming by and for Indians.

We were encouraged by the ability and determination of alternative media, but we were also impressed by the talent and integrity of some members of the mainstream. Documentary maker Christa Singer, for example. As Marie Caloz’s profile shows, Singer has been producing sensitive films about some of Canada’s least fortunate people for the last 30 years. Singer’s work has won wide acclaim internationally but few Canadians have ever heard of her. Guest columnists Oakland Ross and Terence Dickinson describe some of the pitfalls inherent in journalism; both writers are anxious to make improvements. And many of us spoke to media critics and academics who also offer solutions to problems with contemporary journalism. Putting out the Review has deepened our understanding of the way journalism works, and although this knowledge is at times disheartening, we are convinced it is possible to do a thoughtful and accurate job of telling stories that will inform, amuse and touch our readers.

When Robertson got to his usual seat just to the third-base side of the press box, the phone rang. It was Gross, known as the Baron for his aristocratic ways. “Guess who your new boss is?”

Gross said. “Are you sitting down?” Robertson felt a little faint. “It’s Wayne Parrish.”

Robertson was confused and angry. After 30 years in the business, the last five of them with the Sun, didn’t he deserve at least to have been consulted? For courtesy sake, if nothing else? He told Gross he wasn’t up to writing a column that night. Then he packed up and left.

“When you’re treated like that,” he’d say later, “when you’re told, ‘Here’s your new boss, like it or lump it,’ there’s a message in there. It eliminated any loyalties I might have felt to the Sun.”

George Gross was moving on to be corporate sports editor of the three Sun papers. He says now he had no choice but to call Robertson about Parrish’s appointment. “I was afraid he’d find out elsewhere. Unfortunately, the quickest way was by phone. It could have leaked out.” He hadn’t talked to Robertson about the job because he’d never really considered him for it. “I just never thought of John Robertson as a sports editor. He once told me that’s the last job he’d want.” Besides, Wayne Parrish, The Toronto Star’s award-winning columnist, had been his man from the beginning. “I chose Wayne because he’s very bright and an excellent writer,”

Gross says. “Having watched the type of story he broke in the Star, I figured he had what it takes to come up with the kind of stories that beat the opposition. I wasn’t sure about his administrative talents, but that’s the type of thing one can learn.”

If one wants to. When the Sun approached Parrish in mid-August, he wasn’t at all certain. “The writers often sit around late at night on the road over a few beers, discussing departments and the way they’re run,” he says. “You all have your own ideas and you bitch and complain. Suddenly someone comes along and says, ‘Here, you do it.’ I was amazed and intimidated.” But after three meetings with Gross and the Sun’s brass, President Doug Creighton and Publisher Paul Godfrey, he was a good deal less so. He accepted the offer on September 3, just hours before Gross caught up with Robertson in the press box.

Gerry Hall, the Star’s sports editor, got the word the same day and the same way Robertson had-by phone. He was on vacation when Parrish reached him at Woodbine racetrack. “It was right out of the blue,” Hall says. “He didn’t play one paper off against the other. He just told me he’d accepted the job.” Hall asked Parrish to wait a few minutes before breaking the news to Ray Timson, the managing editor. He wanted to call Timson himself. Parrish waited 15 minutes, then crossed the newsroom to Timson’s office. When he left, he went over to the sports department to let his colleagues know he was leaving. Then he called Paul Godfrey. It was left to George Gross to inform the Sun’s sports staff. The one person Gross couldn’t find was John Robertson.

Gross wasn’t the only one with Robertson on his mind. Gerry Hall had been thinking about him since he found out he was losing Parrish. “Robbie was the only guy that really scooped us on the baseball beat,” Hall says. “It’s fine to write well but you’ve got to look for people who’ll produce scoops. Someone to come up with things you can’t find elsewhere.” He put the idea to Timson the next day. Although neither Hall nor Timson was aware of the previous afternoon’s press-box phone call, they thought Robertson might be open to a show of interest. And Milt Dunnell, the Star’s octogenarian sports columnist, was just the man to make the approach. But when Dunnell phoned, Robertson’s wife, Betty, told him her husband was meeting with Paul Godfrey.

After Gross’s graceless call, Robertson took his anger straight home. He rang up Godfrey and passed it on. At the publisher’s suggestion they met the next morning. “But in the back of my mind it was 90.10 that I couldn’t live with the situation,” Robertson says. “As we were sitting there, the phone rang. It was my wife who said that Milt Dunnell had called. She said, ‘Call the Star before you do anything.'”

Robertson was glad the feeler had come from Dunnell: “When you hear something from Milt, you know it’s the straight goods.” So he was well set up to hear from the Star-it was Gerry Hall this time-that afternoon. He had lunch with Hall and Timson the next day. “It was such a wonderful feeling to sit across from them, with them telling me they want me to write for the Star,” he says. For his part, Hall recalls the only advice he gave Robertson: “There’s just one thing I want you to change in your writing-nothing.”

At 53, Robertson isn’t about to change. Those three decades of covering news and sports for newspapers, radio and television have won him four ACTRAs and a National Newspaper Award. He writes with emotion, making his readers see, hear and feel what’s going on. To some these are moments of great intimacy; to others, flights of fancy. But Robertson lives the way he writes. “He’s had a rollicking history,” Gerry Hall says. “He’s been a drinker; now he’s a church-goer. He exists in those sorts of extremes.”

Robertson is the epitome of the oldstyle newspaperman. His practical jokes are legendary. One of his best-known came in 1966 when he was departing the old Toronto Telegram: he used the first letter of the first word in each paragraph of his column to spell out “FUCK YOU EVERYBODY.”

George Gross was in the Tely sports department at the time, so he’s long been aware of Robertson’s antics. But their differences surfaced when Robertson went to work for Gross at the Sun. “We were like two cooks in the same kitchen, arguing about how the meal should be done,” Robertson says. “It’s no secret I didn’t agree with a lot of the things George did as sports editor. The fact that I stood up to him on a few occasions didn’t enhance my chances of getting the job. With George, it’s ‘My way is the only way.'”

That’s what still rankles. Not only was Robertson passed over, he wasn’t even consulted. “I wanted some input into who the new man would be, to see how I would work with him. I would bear the direct consequences of who they chose.”

He isn’t alone in the way he feels. “The Sun’s treatment of Robbie is an example of how people are treated in this business,” says Globe and Mail writer Larry Millson. “From a people point of view, newspapers leave a lot to be desired. Often, they’re not up front with you. In the communications business, we’re lousy communicators.”

Gerry Hall likes his end of the Parrishfor-Robertson trade. “John’s someone who’s established himself over a few decades. He’s Mr. Baseball as far as Toronto readers are concerned. I don’t have any doubt we’re winners in this deal.” Predictably, he down plays the loss of Parrish. “Wayne’s a nice writer, he’s got some style. I don’t know about his commitment to sports writing, but if he sticks with it he could become one of the best in the country.”

He already is. At 31, Parrish has won back-to-back National Newspaper Awards (1984-1985). As a columnist, he’s ice to Robertson’s fire, a detached and thoughtful writer with a sure descriptive touch. Extremes are not his game. As far as he’s concerned, there was only one trade involving him and John Robertson-and that one never made the papers.

On the Sunday after he accepted the Sun’s offer, Parrish went to the Star to clean out his desk. He chose a time, about 9 a.m., when the newsroom was usually empty. As he was finishing up, he heard voices coming his way. “I recognized two of them,” he says, “Gerry Hall and John Robertson.” He turned in his chair to face where they would come out, about three metres away. “Hi guys, how ya doing?” Parrish said as Hall and Robertson came into view. Robertson walked over to say hello. The portable word processor Parrish had brought to leave with Hall sat on the desk. He noticed Robertson eyeing it and handed it to him. “Now this means you’ll have to give me yours,” he said. That evening, Robertson had his son drop the machine off at Parrish’s house.

The neon proclaims it The Rosedale Oyster; the public apparently couldn’t care less. On a cold Thursday evening in mid-January, four patrons linger at the bright stand-up bar, but in the darkened dining room for 85, only six brave souls have chosen to ignore The Globe and Mail’s warning. Killer Kates has struck again-or so it seems.

In a classic, caustic review of the restaurant last October, Joanne Kates took deadly aim at not only the food but also at Toronto’s preppy Rosedale crowd who make up the Oyster’s clientele. At year’s end she took another shot at the restaurant, giving it the distinctly dubious award for “Worst Meal Of The Year.” “There is nothing more disheartening,” she wrote, “than a snazzy-looking restaurant with awful food.”

The staff is morose, milling here and gossiping there. But as the clock makes its way from seven to eight a sort of miraculous transformation occurs. A party of four arrives, followed by a birthday group of 10. While the waiters argue about who will take what, another couple arrives, and then a party of six. Spirits soar and the boys break out the smiles. Maybe the rent will get paid.

The saga of The Rosedale Oyster is a strange one-by all accounts it should be dead. In a cutthroat business, it’s the critics who decide who many of the winners and losers are. Damien McGoldrick, part-owner of the Oyster, admits to at least a 20 per cent drop in his business following the two reviews. Further south, on Church Street, L’hardy’s and Quenelles are still gasping for breath after Kates went for the jugular first in a November review and then again at the end of the year. Brian Watley, manager of the two upscale restaurants in a turn-of-the-century mansion, says business has dropped more than 10 per cent; he wouldn’t be more specific.

Restaurant critics are a fearsome lot. Combined, their opinions can make or break a place faster than you can say reservation. And for better or worse, readers trust these opinions. But should they? Restaurant critics are hard to define; they are not united by common tastes or training, they are by no means uniform in their judgments, and these days are as pervasive as Beaujolais Nouveau in November.

One reason for the rising popularity of restaurant reviews is the sheer size of the market. There are about 5,000 restaurants in Metropolitan Toronto alone, with 900 new ones opening every year and almost as many closing. With choice like that, consumers look for advice before spending what is increasingly a lot of money for a meal. But what kind of advice are they getting? And who are they getting it from?

In the areas of art and culture, critics are expected to be experts in their fields. Not so with restaurants. For the most -3 part, reviewers are knowledgeable amateurs. Only Joanne Kates has formal food training, having studied at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and later having worked in the kitchen of the esteemed Three Small Rooms at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto. Otherwise, most critics have learned their trade on the job, acting more as reporters than actual critics. The Toronto Star, for example, uses a network of untutored reporters for its daily “Table for Two” column. “What does the average person know about food?” asks Peeter Tammearu, the Star’s restaurant critic for the Friday “What’s On” section. “Not much,” he answers. Tammearu is no expert but he likes to cook and has been reviewing restaurants for more than two years. In his opinion it’s not important that a critic be an accomplished saucier but rather that he give an accurate description of what his readers are likely to find at a given restaurant on any given night. The Globe’s occasional food critic, Jay Scott, agrees with him: “You’ve got to have eaten out a lot but you don’t need to know how a dish was made-1 usually do, but it’s not necessary.”

There are those, however, who disagree vehemently. David Kingsmill, the Star’s head food writer and restaurant critic, insists critics have to know a lot about food before they can purport to review it. Kingsmill has no formal training, but researching and writing food features every week in the Star’s test kitchen has given him a definite advantage over the Star’s regular reporters. Says Kingsmill: “I’ve had a bone to pick with the Star for a while. These guys are reporters with no knowledge of food; it’s puff writing, it’s atrocious. You might as well get a chef to do a music review and a ditch-digger to review a restaurant.”

This equation with other forms of entertainment is actually misleading, as Jay Scott knows. Scott, the Globe’s regular film reviewer, was named Restaurant Critic of the Year at the 1985 Canadian Food Writers’ Awards for the reviewing he did while Joanne Kates was on a one-year sabbatical in Europe. He shared the duties with John Allemang, now the restaurant critic for the Globe’s Toronto magazine. Scott knows that a favorable review means people will be going out to spend as much as $100 for a meal-not the usual $5.50 that a movie costs. The other main difference, as he sees it, is the elusive quality of the subject: “No other form of criticism strains the writer’s credibility in the reader’s mind as much because the restaurant business is such an ephemeral one.” Restaurants, after all, are not like films; meals change from night to night, depending on the chef, the ingredients, even the waiter.

Credible or not, restaurant reviews attract readers: they are now carried by almost every major newspaper and magazine in Toronto. In a crowded field, each publication tries to cover the same ground in slightly different ways. TO magazine takes the smart, trendy approach; it’s not the food that counts but the style. Now looks for the ethnic, the cheap and cheerful, while Toronto Life keeps tabs on the places for the older, more affluent crowd. Toronto’s three dailies, however, compete head on to be the first to cover the new hot spots. And this competition raises ethical questions about which some reviewers disagree.

Is it fair to review a place that has just opened its doors, running the risk of damning it before it’s operating smoothly? Most critics don’t think so. The benchmark waiting period seems to be three months, after which any new restaurant is fair game. But city magazines, facing up to three months’ lead time, sometimes jump the gun just to stay current. As Allemang points out, “If a restaurant is open for business, charging full prices for a meal, then it is open for criticism. Besides, most restaurants wouldn’t get off the ground without a review.”

Just ask Barbara Gordon, the Vancouver restaurateur who came to Toronto to launch Beaujolais, last year’s big winner in the restaurant sweeps. Beaujolais openedJanuary 20. Three weeks later the kitchen was humming but there was no one to cook for. Gordon called Scott for a review. On February 16, the day after his rave appeared, she was turning people away.

But the fact that a restaurateur called a critic to solicit a review raises the question of ethics again. Is it fair to request a review? Scott’s integrity had been tested before; he gave a negative review in September, 1985, to one of his good friends, Yael Dunkelman, owner of the upscale diner The Daily Planet. Scott’s review put a strain on their relationship, but in the end Dunkelman had to accept Scott’s judgment; in fact, she took his advice and made some improvements.

Anonymity is another ethical consideration. The assumption is that if a reviewer is recognized, the restaurateur will go to special lengths to impress him or her-special attention an ordinary patron is unlikely to receive. One critic who takes pains to protect her identity is Joanne Kates. In the picture that runs with her weekly Globe and Mail’column “On the Menu” her face is hidden beneath the brim of a fedora. And for a guest appearance on The Journal last November, Kates wore a wig, glasses and what looked like a rubber nose.

Not only can a lack of anonymity affect the meal and service, it can inspire the owners to ply a critic with free cognac or dessert (a bizarre gesture, considering the critics don’t pay for their own meals anyway). “I have two basic operating principles,” says Kates. “I never take a gift and I never let them know who I am.” In fact, wine will sometimes arrive at her office following a good review but it goes straight into a cab and back to where it came from. One critic who has a harder time concealing his identity is Jeremy Brown, restaurant editor of Goodlife magazine and restaurant critic for radio station CKFM. His distinctive voice is often a giveaway. But Brown insists that anonymity is not essential: “Cooks cook as well as they can regardless of who you are.”

Cooking, however, is not a critic’s sole concern. Jay Scott articulates a popular notion among critics when he says: “Restaurant reviewing is not just about food. There are very few purists who go out just to eat. Dining is a total experience.” And while most restaurateurs would agree with Scott, many feel there is an invisible line over which some critics often stray. For instance, in her review of The Rosedale Oyster, Kates spent nearly 400 words of the 950word column assailing the preppies who ate there; she took shots at their clothes, their careers, even their conversation. It was a review that infuriated the restaurant community. Part-owner Damien McGoldrick says: “We are in the public domain sowe are open for criticism, but as a private operator I have no recourse, I cannot defend my customers.” John Maxwell, proprietor of Joe Allen, called the review shocking: “Joanne Kates is totally irresponsible, vindictive and spiteful; she goes way beyond the confines of food criticism into areas of social comment that have no place in a review.”

For her part, Kates offers no defence. She says none is necessary. “I write to entertain myself. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to read me. I don’t think food deserves 800 or 900 words. There are more interesting things to write about. I try to capture the semiotics of a place, the social signifiers.”

Furthermore, says Kates, who is often accused of dancing on restaurants’ graves, “I don’t get a charge out of damning a place. It’s serious work and people’s livelihoods depend on it. But it’s not my job to temper my impressions. I call it as I see it.”
While newspapers still indulge in negative criticism, city magazines do not. Toronto, Goodltfe, TO and Toronto Life all have policies, either implicit or explicit, against printing strongly negative reviews. The reason, according to Goodlife’s Jeremy Brown, is that they are providing a service to readers by telling them where to go, not what to avoid.

In that case, the question of trust and ethics is again raised because conflicts-real or imagined-often surface between the supposedly separate editorial and advertising departments. Sharon Thomas sells restaurant ads in Toronto Life. She admits that advertisers often assume their ad will guarantee them a review-and when the editorial side doesn’t comply, they threaten to pull their account. But Thomas insists the ad side can’t put pressure on editorial. The result, sometimes, is lost advertising.
Joseph Hoare, the magazine’s food editor, says that eventually all restaurant advertisers are reviewed, but makes no promises those reviews will appear. “I can think of an example where we sent different people to a place three times, but the results were consistently poor and so we’ve never run a review of that restaurant.”

Toronto Life’s policies are clearly spelled out at the beginning of its review section. Other magazines are not so candid. TO runs reviews by staff writer David Smith, which are followed by a series of capsule reviews written by freelancers. They have no connection to advertising, according to Co-editor and Publisher Bobby Rotenberg.

Goodlife and Toronto, on the other hand, adopt a different approach. Both magazines run formal reviews but eschew capsule review sections. Instead, they sell that space as an advertising feature, which amounts to editorial-style ads surrounded by display ads. Yet both magazines refute the notion that these are advertorials. “They are an advertising feature, there is absolutely no connection with the editorial side whatsoever,” insists Toronto Editor Ray Mason. To Mason’s credit, each page is clearly marked “advertising feature” and the copy is set in a different typeface from the editorial text. Goodlife is a controlled circulation magazine and exists on its ad revenue alone. It is not as careful as Toronto. Its section is labelled “advertising feature” only once, on the first page. And the copy, written by Goodlife’s editorial staff, is set in the same typeface as the rest of the book, if slightly smaller. But Goodlife President Gary Zivot has no trouble with his magazine’s policies: “There are two kinds of publishers: those that are philistines and those that are philistines and hypocrites-we are the philistines, not hypocrites.”

Are readers then putting their trust and money in the hands of philistines? “If you’re looking for somewhere new, you have to trust the reviews,” says Jay Scott. The Star’s Kingsmill suggests people use them merely as a guide and that they stick to the one critic with whom they agree most often-otherwise confusion will be the only reward for compulsive readers.

By this measure, Joanne Kates says, reviewers have a responsibility to “be consistent and reveal their biases.” Kates won’t speak for other reviewers, but she thinks restaurants can be fairly assessed. “If you’re sharp about food, you can usually call it; [for example) you’ll never get a really bad meal at Beaujolais. You might not get a great one, but certainly not a bad one.”

All of this is to say that, yes, maybe the critics can be trusted. And trusted or not, they are certainly read. “That’s because they appeal to a mythical urban lifestyle,” says Joe Allen’s Maxwell. “The first thing the Yuppies do on Saturday morning is turn toJoanne Kates,” adds Beaujolais chef and part-owner Bob Bermann. “Then they look to see if we’ve been bombed by the Russians.”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study In Scarlet

Being a teenager in suburban Toronto in the 1950s is a fate I would wish on no one. My favorite escape was those black-and-white science-fiction movies with titles like Invasion of the Saucer Men and It Came from Outer Space that Hollywood was churning out almost weekly for the drive-in market. I think I saw everyone ever made. The one consistency about them-apart from wooden acting and bogus special effects -was scientific illiteracy. The astronomy goofs were especially abundant. The leader of the extraterrestrials would say, “We are from the star you call Ursa Major.” Now any Boy Scout knows that’s wrong. There is no star Ursa Major: it’s a constellation of many stars. I used to wonder why the script writer never spent a few seconds to look up terms like that in an astronomy book or even an ordinary dictionary.

Around the same time I started reading the newspaper. I noticed the same thing. When a new astronomical discovery was reported one could almost always find a glaring (to me, anyway) conceptual blunder, such as calling a planet a star or using light years as a measure of time instead of distance. To someone who knew something about the subject, significant parts of the story made little sense. They must have made even less sense to anyone else.

A lot has changed over the last Quarter century. Movies have made a remarkable transition. To keep pace with what Hollywood calls “a new audience sophistication,” millions of dollars are lavished on films such as 2010 to achieve accurate portrayals of celestial environments and scientific dialogue.

cience writing in magazines is, in general, also vastly superior to the stuff appearing a generation ago. Science 86, which folded last summer after a seven-year run, achieved what was probably the highest standard of science writing of any large-circulation specialty publication. It packaged the top writers with clear, instructive graphics and sharp editing. According to insiders, its demise was due to timidity on the part of the publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rather than lack of acceptance of its product. Losses were far less than those of Discover, its arch-rival, which ultimately absorbed Science 86’s subscription list. Discover, published by Time Inc. since 1980, now has the field to itself, and occasionally serves equally brilliantly crafted pieces. Other sources of the best in the field are the rare but splendid science pieces in The New Yorker, some of the longer features in Popular Science and Omni, and a wonderful little weekly, Science News.

Unlike the situation 30 years ago, most major newspapers now have fulltime science writers who care about getting it right and know a bungled story can, among other things, mean the loss of an important source. For quantity as well as competency, nothing beats the Tuesday science section of The New York Times. But there is still one big problem area: wire-service stories generated by stringers or general reporters. The way they treat science is, for me, one of the mysteries of the universe. Wire-service stories run by newspapers still read as if they were written in the 1950s. The worst offenders are AP and CP, the two most used services in Canada. Almost daily they grind out gee-whiz pieces of questionable merit. Some of this stuff can make it to the front page, a prominence that a flawed political piece, for example, seldom achieves.

An illustration of what I mean occurred last October. I suspected one of these inept reports had hit the wire after I started receiving phone calls from local radio stations about an “exploding star that will be visible tomorrow night.” Indeed, the source was an AP item about researchers monitoring the star system Cygnus X-3, which was expected to repeat one of its periodic eruptions. The piece stated earth would be bathed in radiation from the stellar explosion in the constellation Cygnus. Crucially, what it failed to point out is that only special detectors on observatory telescopes could monitor the blast. There was no way it could be seen by well-equipped amateur astronomers, let alone someone standing in a backyard gazing at Cygnus. Yet the clear implication was that the whole sky would light up if you went out to look at the right time. And that’s what those people were calling me to find out. This scenario is repeated in one form or another several times a year, almost always originating with a wire-service item.

It’s also clear that major wire services still treat science as a fringe interest. In its year-end compilation of the 200 top Canadian and world news stories of 1986, CP listed only one science item: University of Toronto chemist John Polanyi’s Nobel Prize. Significant omissions included the federal cuts to the National Research Council budget and the ensuing uproar, and the Voyager spacecraft encounter with Uranus, certainly the year’s outstanding science and technology achievement. Halley’s Comet, which generated millions of words of worldwide newspaper copy in 1986, wasn’t mentioned either. In the broad technology classification, the inventory included the Challenger disaster (two entries), Chernobyl (three entries), the Titanic photos and the Voyager round the-world flight. Advances in medicine rated one entry: Canada’s first artificial heart implant.

Maybe I am overly biased in feeling something is amiss when South African issues, for example, merited eight separate listings in the CP roll while science, technology and medicine got a combined total of nine-five of them due to the worst spacecraft and nuclear disasters in history. That, plus the persistent inaccuracies, confirms for-me science’s fringe status.

When science writers talk shop at scientific meetings or around a bar table, variations of this same theme emerge time after time. It is the vocation’s Loch Ness monster story. Holmesian editors don’t know anything about science, and could care less, the story goes. If they knew more, or realized the level of their readers’ interest in science, they would com. mission more items. Science writers would get more work and the reading public would be better served in this important area.

There is certain justification for the grousing, but the contention that more science reporting would automatically improve the situation is debatable. The enterprising reader can seek out dozens of magazines and countless books on every conceivable aspect of science. I once had subscriptions to 42 science and nature publications and three daily newspapers noted for their science coverage. I couldn’t read them all. I still get about 20 magazines and the pile yet to be read beside my desk is constantly a foot thick.

The issue is not so much the quantity of science writing but how good it is. Today, the worst of it is seen the most. Given the obvious ghetto science occupies with the wire services, I wish they did less. In the 1950s, when I used to complain about ignorant extraterrestrials, my movie-going buddy Fat Ted would just laugh. “Who cares?” he would say. “It’s only a movie.” But the movies got better. Unfortunately, the wire services-‘-the source for most readers’ science writing-haven’t caught up.

Terence Dickinson has won several national and international awards for science writing. He is author of six astronomy books, writes a weekly column for The Toronto Star and is a regular contributor to Equinox magazine.

Laments the Road Not Taken, will be published in October. The Ryerson Review of journalism assigned Anna Kohn and Lisa McCaskell to talk to de Villiers about his perceptions and analysis of media coverage of South Africa.

REVIEW Do you have one predominant criticism of press reports on South Africa?

de VILLIERS Even the best of coverage lacks the kind of historical context that makes it understandable. All we know are events. For instance, we read about the school boycott. Millions of black kids stay away from school. Why? We don’t know. We assume they are staying away in political sympathy with their elders, but we’re not told. We don’t hear about their struggles against the government’s insistence on education in their vernacular [indigenous] languages. We don’t understand that the blacks feel the vernacular traps them in a ghetto. We don’t understand that the whites, especially the Afrikaners, have a complex attitude towards language-that they fought so long and so hard for their own that they find it genuinely difficult to understand black ambivalence [toward indigenous languages]. If coverage tracked antecedents, readers would be given a historical context in which to understand those attitudes, so that when President Botha made a statement of policy, about whatever, calculated to appeal to his complex domestic constituency, it would be understood in terms of that constituency’s fundamental needs and desires and in terms of its history. Without this, Botha’s words will only be heard, not understood. Editors in Canada don’t understand this context themselves, and so don’t insist on it in the work of their reporters. I don’t think this will change. There’s little incentive for the media to do better. They’re closed off, imprisoned by their preconceptions. I think particularly of CBC Radio here.

REVIEW What historical information would you say is missing from media coverage of South Africa?

de VILLIERS It’s obviously very difficult to try to summarize this to the degree that we’re going to, but the kind of understanding that’s missing is some sense of how the Afrikaner people arrived at their assumptions and preconceptions and world view they now have. Any understanding of this has to go back to the very beginning. You have to get some grasp of how the Afrikaners, as a people, were formed. Their entire history is one of protection against outside exploitation. They felt exploited-whether they were or not is another matter-exploited first by an essentially corrupt colonial company, the Dutch East India Company, then by the British, then in a series of wars with the newly discovered black cultures pushing down from the northeast. Finally, after the Afrikaners withdrew into the interior, they were fol. lowed and fought two colonial wars against the British [in 1880 and 1899].

REVIEW How did the Afrikaners respond to this series of challenges to their survival as a group?

de VILLIERS To the Afrikaner or the Dutch settlers, escape always seemed a legitimate option. In that sense their history and the history of conquest or of avoided conquest by withdrawal has been central in determining their view of themselves. One of the roots of apartheid has been that it is a psychological withdrawal. They’ve defined their identity in terms of survival of the group. If you define yourself in that way, your central allegiance is not to the individual or even to an idea but to the group as the highest expression of what you are.

REVIEW Could you talk a bit about the Boer War [1899-1902] and how that affected the development of the Afrikaner consciousness?

de VILLIERS The Afrikaners attempted to escape into the interior of Africa, not once, but three or four times, and were constantly followed by the [British] imperial culture. Each time they withdrew farther into the interior and each time they were followed and overtaken. The Boer War was the final stand. When I was growing up, we never called it the Boer War. Only the English called it that. We called it the Second War of Independence. The first war we won 19 years earlier. The Boer War was a pure colonialist war. There’ve been very few as nakedly aggressive. The British simply had no interest in occupying the Transvaal until they discovered gold there. Suddenly it was a question of bringing civilization to the backwoods. The British, under Kitchener, in order to suppress the commandos [Afrikaner guerrilla fighters] in the field, adopted a scorched earth policy. As they burned farms and houses they put women and children into concentration camps. Three times as many people died in camps as died in the field of battle. The only solution [for the Afrikaners] was to regroup psychologically and impose a very tight and strict discipline on their own psyches. That’s where the group cohesion came from.

REVIEW What got lost in the translation from the protection of group identity to the execution of policies that really were terrible?

de VILLIERS If you examine the history of what the Afrikaners did to other people, they never impinged on other cultures in the same way that, say, the British or even the Portuguese did. They never intended to do some kind of cultural makeover, partly because they didn’t have the stomach or muscle for it, and partly because it wasn’t in their own conception of how they should operate as a people. One of the interesting things about their history is the way it has transformed the politics of survival into the politics of privilege. Now, to their astonishment, they are the oppressors, and they don’t know how to deal with it.

One of the problems has been that until recently the entire focus of the Afrikaner people was on the English and not on the blacks. That is, to modern ears, really amazing; the blacks were simply not a factor.

REVIEW But surely the very presence of black Africans should have made them a factor?

de VILLIERS There’s been a foolish debate among historians in South Africa for years-about who owned the place or who was there first. It’s a silly debate because it really doesn’t matter. There’s no doubt the blacks were first, at least in parts of South Africa, for millennia before the whites got there. When the whites departed for the interior it was uninhabited for two reasons. The primary one was that about 30 years before, the Zulu empire had suddenly exploded into a militaristic frenzy and depopulated large sections of the interior. Entire tribes were wiped out. Huge cities were found abandoned. The whole central part of South Africa was a shambles. Of course, the whites had no understanding of how this came about or the forces that had set off the Zulu explosion. They simply assumed this was the way things had always been and so, of course, they acted as if the territory was theirs to take by right. Even after the Zulu empire began drifting back to their homes, the whites kept treating these people as if they were somehow interlopers.

REVIEW How did the apartheid system become what it is today?

de VILLIERS The apartheid system in its origins-not in its execution-was an attempt to preserve the Afrikaners’ sense of identity. This is not understood and it’s very hard to see now because it’s so caught up in the simpleminded racism that has developed out of it. It’s obviously complicated, on the one hand, by a kind of European racism and, on the other, by a clear class differentiation. When the Afrikaners took over the country and the British were vanquished electorally [1948 elections were won by the Nationalist Party], when the new black proletariat started coming into the towns, it was out of that protective emotion that apartheid grew. What you got was the politics of privilege emerging out of the sour history of defeat. Today, you get one more cycle where the politics of privilege is being transformed into the politics of survival, because what is truly at stake is group survival. No Afrikaner believes in the bland assurances of the outside world or of the African National Congress that somehow, miraculously, their rights will be preserved in the transformation to come. While it’s possible, although unlikely, that individual rights will be protected, group rights certainly will not be. So what you’re asking the Afrikaners to do is to commit group suicide.

REVIEW How do the South Africans themselves view apartheid today?

de VILLIERS The curious thing is that nobody, or virtually nobody, in South Africa any longer believes in apartheid. Few Afrikaners believe in it, only the radical right. Few in the government believe in it. But they have nothing to put in its place. They’re all looking for a way out. What you’re left with is conflict, confusion and a kind of ideological deadness; there’s no centre, or rather a hollowness at the centre. That’s why the initiative, the momentum, has now gone over to the opposition. As long as the Afrikaners believed in what they were doing, they were in control-others have proved that oppression works if you have the stomach for it. But they’re implementing policies they truly no longer can believe, and so they no longer have the stomach for the game. The blacks sense this. That’s why they think their time is coming.

REVIEW What can be gained by the western media developing a deeper understanding of South African history and politics?

de VILLIERS Unless you understand what motivates people, your policies toward them will present only unpleasant surprises. It’s not the media’s role to make policy, obviously. But it is the media’s role to present sufficient information to allow policymakers to make informed decisions and to produce an informed electorate. Too much of the press simply acts as if South Africa were one great civil rights problem-Selma, Alabama, writ large-and seems to believe that if only the world got cross enough the racists would back down and give everyone the vote and the issues would disappear. It’s those false assumptions that are simplistic and are bound to lead to hardening ideological attitudes rather than to solutions.

REVIEW Do you think the Canadian government’s view of South Africa is similar to that of the Canadian press?

de VILLIERS Canada’s government is more ignorant than Canada’s media. It is also more sanctimonious. Many western governments share this dismal posture. Some are better, some worse. The press doesn’t help. It doesn’t allow governments to see clearly. The press still believes that this is a colonialist struggle, that Afrikaners are indivisible, that sanctions will automatically bring about solutions.

REVIEW Would you say Canadian media coverage has contributed to our government’s decision to impose sanctions on South Africa?

de VILLIERS I think the media coverage has very largely brought about the imposition of what modest sanctions Ottawa has imposed. From listening to Mulroney, I don’t believe he has the faintest clue about South Africa. He is following, not leading. And because the media are so relentless in their single-mindedness, their coverage allows no nuances, no shades of grey. It has gone beyond hating apartheid to hating its practitioners, and beyond that to hating all Afrikaners, practitioners or not. And once you’ve argued yourself into that hard an ideological bind, it’s difficult to find a way out. It’s because of this that the relentless superficiality of the media coverage is so damaging.

REVIEW Who among the Canadian media is particularly guilty of this?

de VILLIERS The Journal is an offender. The CBC coverage is thoroughly bad. Oddly, American broadcast coverage is slightly better than Canadian. Possibly the complexity of their own society, their own race problems, has forced them to take a closer look than Canadians, who are smug about these matters.

REVIEW How did this situation develop?

de VILLIERS The anti-intellectual nature of so much reporting precludes deeper understanding-the bias is expressed this way: What you see, is. You can understand what “is” by close observation. It leads inevitably to error. What you get, therefore, are the dramatic events, while the broad themes are omitted. In the mid-’70s I was invited to appear on As It Happens after a visit to South Africa. The producers were convinced South Africa was then on the brink of collapse, on the brink of revolution, rather. I tried to tell them this was a misreading. They wouldn’t listen. It conflicted with what they were “seeing” for themselves. They still didn’t understand that seeing wasn’t enough to bring understanding. They had already decided what was happening and saw no reason to change their minds. If I disagreed with them, I must be in error. It’s very troublesome for them to reformulate their ideas.

REVIEW Is there any in-depth Canadian coverage of South Africa?

de VILLIERS There is good work being done. Valpy [The Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy] is getting better all the time. His first year there was poor, in my opinion. He lacked historical understanding. But he has found his way to many of the people within the country, white and black, whose own understanding is profound. The academics as well as the politicians. Valpy has been putting them to good use. His coverage has probably helped Canadians who are beginning to perceive that the situation is more complicated than they had first thought. Still, he hasn’t managed to persuade his own editorial board, who still seem to be fighting the Boer War. And his coverage, I hope, will help to counter the superficiality of television news..

REVIEW Why has coverage been escalating during the past few years? Is it that violence in South Africa is markedly on the rise?

de VILLIERS I think it’s that and not that. It’s hard to see why South Africa has become as fashionable an issue in Canada as it has. To some degree, the violence within South Africa now is no greater than the previous round, the Soweto riots of 1976. Still, there is a difference in the nature of events, I think. The Soweto riots flared up and were suppressed. The current round of violence is not going to stop, I believe. Violence has now become endemic. To some degree that is because the Afrikaners lack the heart and the stomach to stop it-it is part of that deadness at the centre I mentioned. And now in South Africa, everyone senses what is to come. You hear people referring to The Change, with a cap T and cap C. Many of the whites, of course, are watching with trepidation. But what’s new is that some are now looking to it with anticipation. To the extent that these changes are real, the international press, in its increased coverage, is reflecting reality. Sometimes South Africans look upon the press as vultures gathering-but then vultures do gather for good reasons. On the other hand, the international press is also reflecting the ideological biases of their home societies; South Africa is satisfying because it is one of the few unifying factors in international affairs, one of the very few issues everyone can agree on.

REVIEW Are the media reluctant to tell the Afrikaner side of the story for fear of being labelled apologists?

de VILLIERS Yes and no. The anti-South African forces will seldom tolerate opposing views and the press is clearly nervous about this. But it’s more complicated than that. The reporters share the views of the opposition. It’s less a worry about seeming apologist, therefore, than it is a question of unthinking conformism. An example: the Globe has taken a lot of flak for publishing a piece on the op-ed page last fall by a Canadian visitor to South Africa, a tourist, whose views conflict with the majority. They published numerous letters criticizing the piece and the paper for printing it. That might seem like refusal to be cowed. But it wasn’t. The piece was very easy to criticize because it was naive-and that made its critics feel righteous. The Globe gained points from the event without contributing to understanding. But when I suggested they publish a piece by, say, Piet Cillie, who used to be editor of the Afrikaans newspaper in Cape Town, Die Burget; and who has written his own mea culpa about apartheid, a piece that would have done a lot to explain how the Afrikaners thought and about how Afrikaner critics now think, the Globe declined. Possibly it conflicted with their view of what Afrikaners are.

Still it’s true that debate is far from open on the issue. If journalists do attempt to explain the situation in South Africa in a way that doesn’t match the view of the pro-sanctions opposition, they are written off as collaborationists and racists. Few reporters want to risk that. I don’t particularly want to risk it -who does? I don’t wish to become an apologist for the apartheid regime. I agree with the critics that apartheid is an evil system.

REVIEW Has the South African press played any role in ‘galvanizing change?

de VILLIERS The press has never been a radical force in South Africa. It has always been relatively conservative. This goes for English language as well as Afrikaans papers. It was never a force for social change nor a kind of advocacy press.

REVIEW Are the South African media able to report any meaningful news?

de VILLIERS Until last year, South Africa still had a relatively free press. In East-bloc and African terms it still is, but in western terms “free” is now a mockery. Reporters and editors are surrounded by so many regulations and caveats. The state of emergency has clamped down on all real reporting. But as recently as ’85 and early ’86, the press was still relatively free and, therefore, free to do its work. The editor of the Cape Times, Tony Heard, published in late ’85 an interview with the head of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, a “banned” person in South Africa. Heard was even then prohibited from publishing anything Tambo said. He ignored these restrictions “in the public interest” and was duly prosecuted. But he was charged with the lesser of two possible offences and will very likely never be sentenced. It put the government into an awkward situation. They had to prosecute or their system of security laws would breakdown utterly. But they wanted to preserve some semblance of a free press. So they vacillated. It was a risk Tony took and, of course,. since then the state of emergency has been declared and the government finally decided to give up on the idea of preserving some international reputation. They say, correctly in my view, that it was a losing battle-no one was listening.

Immediately after the Heard interview with Tambo, the government changed its tack. It started harassing reporters instead of editors. It was considerably better for their [the government’s] image, they thought. Prosecuting a senior editor was tricky, and likely to spoil your image abroad still further. Breaking a few reporters’ heads was easier-it could be excused in the heat of the battle. You rough up a reporter and throw him in jail for a couple of days. You can just say: “The guy got into trouble, and our guys just had to smash his head. Too bad. Them’s the breaks.”

REVIEW How can the outside press better inform readers?

de VILLIERS What you have to encourage among reporters is for them to take the longer view, to think beyond the daily headline and to contribute some fresh insights. When I was there last November [1985], I spent time with Ismail Ayob, who is Nelson Mandela’s family lawyer. Ayob was representing Winnie Mandela at the time. She had just defied a banning order and was refusing to go back to Brandfort, the village to which she had been ordered. Ayob told me that as of November last year, no foreign correspondent had interviewed him. He was quite taken aback by this because, after all, he’s acted for the Mandela family for 20 years.

REVIEW Why would journalists overlook so important a source?

de VILLIERS Because they’re too busy watching people throwing stones in the townships. So what you’ve got are a lot of ironies. While I was there the authorities had passed very stringent restrictions on television access to the townships. They had a very strict set of guidelines determining who could and couldn’t go into the townships. The net effect of that, ironically, was instantly improved coverage of South Africa, because television crews no longer had the easy way out; charging in and watching a riot. They had to start talking to people for a change. They finally discovered Ayob and all kinds of other people, like Hermann Giliomee, who wrote a book called The Rising Crisis of Afrikaner Power. He’s now been “discovered.” Now everybody wanted to talk to him: CBS, The New York Times. And he was really angry because what they wanted him to do was tell them what was going on. He said: “I’m not a journalist, all I do is analyse social trends and policies.” He’s a political analyst but they wanted him first to tell them what the events were. These were foreign correspondents, basically from the U.S. and Britain. Nobody was trying to understand what was happening. They were just trying to watch what was happening.

REVIEW What exactly should the press and readers do in order to put the transitory hot news into context?

de VILLIERS It starts with editors. It is often a discouraging thing to talk to newspaper foreign editors. Few of them have much knowledge of the world beyond a tourist’s view. Few of them read books. Their academic training, where it exists, is seldom in international affairs. It starts with editors who will demand more of their writers. It needs proprietors prepared to invest in the necessary resources. And the public? Don’t rely too much on newspapers. Don’t rely at all on television. Get the background..