This glowing feature appeared on page one of The Toronto Star’s travel section last October 17. A week later, The Toronto Sun carried an equally flattering report on Les Trois Vallees, France, which, the story said, offers “the best skiing in the world.” The piece continued: “It’s a skier’s dream come true. Limitless hills and terrific off-piste challenges for the brazen hearted. Arrive at the lift when it first opens. Ski until it closes. Make every run different. There are still miles of hills left untouched and unseen.”

In both instances, the writers had been the guests of companies with a vested interest in positive coverage, although the stories didn’t mention this. Neither case is unusual; among travel writers, freebies are as commonplace as boarding passes. As Percy Rowe, travel writer with The Toronto Sun, says, “It applies to 99 per cent of [travel] publications in the world.” It is this practice that lies at the root of the air-brushed quality of most newspaper and magazine travel reporting.

A particularly vociferous critic of freebies is Walter Stewart, who occupies the Max Bell Chair in Journalism at the University of Regina. Suppose, he suggests, a writer were researching a profile of the Reichmann brothers. He could spend hundreds of dollars on transportation, hotels and meals. If the Reichmanns picked up the tab, would the story have any credibility? “Not unless you’re a moral pygmy,” is Stewart’s answer.

There’s nothing new about the freebie question. In 1976, Gerry McAuliffe, now a reporter with CBC Radio, filed a formal complaint with the Ontario Press Council regarding an article published by a number of Southam newspapers, including The Spectator in Hamilton, where McAuliffe worked as a reporter at the time.

The story, written by the late Frank Scholes, then travel editor for Southam Newspaper Group, was an account of a 20-day trip around the world. McAuliffe charged that the piece was unfair because it failed to point out that Scholes had traveled for free, that he had received treatment superior to what the average reader could expect, and that the piece had not mentioned any prices. While the council dismissed McAuliffe’s charges, in 1978 it issued a formal statement that said, in part: “All newspapers and news organizations should have firm general policies that they pay all costs of gathering news and other material for publication, and are opposed to accepting complimentary services or gifts. Whenever any significant free services have been used this should be indicated in the coverage.”

Ten years later, McAuliffe says, “I won the battle and lost the war.” Although his complaint forced editors to toughen their freebie policies for staffers, many newspapers haven’t extended these to freelancers, and few require that writers indicate whether they were on a flip. Of the 10 major Ontario daily news organizations surveyed for this story, all except The Toronto Sun forbid their staff writers to accept freebies. But only The Ottawa Citizen and the Kingston Whig-Standard extend this policy to freelance travel writers, and The Whig-Standard rarely buys freelance travel material anyway. The rest Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, The Hamilton Spectator, The London Free Press, The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the St. Catharines Standard and The Toronto Star-rely on freelance contributors for most of their travel stories, but do not ask these writers if they’ve accepted free services. “We wouldn’t knowingly accept something from somebody who had clearly been compromised,” says Ian Urquhart, the Star’s managing editor. But he admits that one could find travel stories printed in the Star that were the result of freebies. “I suppose you could accuse us of not being assiduous enough in seeing that we don’t [accept such stories].”

Publications frequently point to budget constraints when asked to explain their double-standard freebie policies. Yet, travel is big business and the Canadian media know it. According to Statistics Canada, during 1987 Canadians made almost 15 million visits longer than a day to countries around the world, and while there spent about $8.8 billion. Although the total revenues generated by travel advertising are unavailable, a quick look at an average travel section gives an idea of the money involved. For example, on February 20, more than two-thirds of the Star’s 24-page Saturday section was devoted to 142 ads; a full-page black-and-white ad costs about $20,000.

However, the big money hasn’t filtered down to the travel writers, who usually earn about $150 for a standard newspaper piece. While magazines such as the Globe’s Destinations and Toronto Life pay an average of $1,500 or more for a feature length piece, even that amount isn’t enough to cover expenses. Thus, freebies-treats forbidden at the city desk but embraced by the travel department.

McAuliffe believes that if a publication isn’t prepared to pay a writer’s way, it has at least a moral obligation to let readers know when a writer has been on a flip. “I’m not saying that makes it okay,” he says. “But readers have a right to know that whatever they’re reading is pure and clean. It gives them some understanding that the trip they’re reading about-the great raves-might be, in part, because of the contribution made by the people involved.” Stewart’s assessment is harsher. “The difference between a bribe which is paid in cash and a bribe which is paid in an airplane ticket is not discernible to me,” he says. “You’re providing a consumer service, and the reader has the right to believe that you’re providing it straight up. The issue is that journalists who allow themselves to take freebies are not real journalists. They’re the hookers of the trade.”

Glen Warner, a freelancer whose stories have appeared in Destinations and Moneywise, defends his and his colleagues’ virtue. “I don’t think any writer worth his salt is going to be compromised by a few nights’ worth of free hotels,” says Warner. “You tell it like it is.” The Sun’s travel editor, Jill Rigby, agrees. “There’s no bias in what we run,” she says. “There’s no feeling that we owe anything. If they don’t like what we run, that’s too bad.”

But not everyone is comfortable with this approach. One publication opposed to freebies is Latitudes, a two-year-old adventure-travel newspaper distributed free four times a year throughout Toronto.

“We’ve taken a strong policy against it,” says co-publisher Tom Scanlan. “I just don’t know how you can write an honest review when things are being offered to you free.” Media watchdog Barrie Zwicker is even more emphatic: “Only a psychopath has no feelings of guilt or obligation. Writers who believe they can’t be influenced are self-deluded or attempting to cover their ass.”

Air carriers and tourist boards often bring subtle-or not so subtle-expectations to their arrangements with travel writers. Takaish Nagaoka, a representative with the Japan National Tourist Organization, says he makes no specific demands of writers ”as long as they are going to write good things on Japanese tourism. I don’t want them to write about high prices in Japan, of course. If they’re going to do that, we just can’t help them.”

Chris Sochan, public relations officer with Lufthansa German Airlines, helpfully provides new writers with examples of how the company’s name can be seamlessly inserted into a story. Is the writer planning to attend a fashion show in Munich? Perhaps he might remark on the new uniforms worn by Lufthansa’s crew. A profile on the wine-producing vineyards of the Mosel Valley? A reference to the wine served on board Lufthansa jets might be appropriate. “The ideal thing is to get something in the story itself so that it fits in nicely,” says Sochan. “Some of them are very good at putting the name in, and it’s part of the story and you can’t take it out unless you take the whole paragraph out.”

Crediting a company that has provided free services is a touchy point with writers and editors. No one likes to be blatantlike nudity in the movies, it has to be part of the plot. Some editors sidestep the problem by giving a host company top billing in a how-to-get-there sidebar. Roberta Walker, editor of Real Travel, a year-old, Calgary-based magazine published quarterly, has another solution. She often asks the air carrier or tourist board involved to submit photographs, thus enabling her to identify the organization with the phrase “photo courtesy of.”

But Real Travel never explicitly indicates when a writer has traveled for free. Walker argues that such a disclaimer suggests a bias of its own, and undermines an objective account by signaling to the reader that the story may not be accurately reported.

Charles Oberdorf, senior editor at City and Country Home and an experienced travel writer, offers another popular defence of freebies. If travel writers must indicate when they’ve taken a freebie, he suggests, then so should the sports reporters and theatre critics who regulatly accept complimentary tickets. However, while sports reporters tell us when the home team was listless and nobody scored and theatre critics regularly skewer box office revenues with a well-turned savage phrase, most travel writing is relentlessly upbeat and positive: the beaches are white, the water turquoise and the locals invariably charming. “I really think a fault of the whole field of travel journalism is that it’s not critical enough,” says Percy Rowe. If stories mention anything negative, it’s usually minor irritants-long walks to the beach or leaky faucets.

Yet, there is a dark side to this tendency to ignore the unpleasant aspects of a destination: promoting travel in countries that have a terrible human rights record. Ronald Wright, a Port Hope-based freelancer and author of several travel books, points to Guatemala as an example: “I’m not saying I wouldn’t write about it. But if I did I’d make sure I mentioned there has been a lot of killing and exploitation. It would be unethical to promote it as a tourist locale full of color.” However, savvy writers know that pieces that might discourage potential travelers are rarely printed. As Jerry Tutunjian, until February editor of Leisure Ways, the Canadian Automobile Association’s travel magazine, says, “We wouldn’t waste our space by telling people, ‘Don’t go.’ “

Surely, though, identifying unpleasant destinations-the other pages of the newspapers tell us these exist-provides better service than a puff piece that slides past eyes glazed by one-too-many swaying palms. Limited space isn’t the main consideration here-it’s that the travel pages serve mainly the advertisers, whose dollars allow the travel pages to continue and who threaten to pull their ads if the stories-the annoying stuff between the ads -veer into unpleasant reality.

Many of those in travel journalism insist that, without freebies, the whole system would collapse-an argument reminiscent of the reasoning used to defend child labor and slavery. Perhaps the system deserves to die. Advertisers should learn to accept negative coverage and publishers must accept responsibility for the cost of gathering stories. And travel writers have to stop playing at being journalists.

Unfortunately, there are no signs that the rules will change. Helga Loverseed is chairman of the Canadian chapter of the Society of American Travel Writers. In her view, “We are not qualified, as travel journalists, to take a political or an economic stand. The bottom line is that travel articles are selling tools. They should make ~ people want to go to those places.”

Salutin, whom a friend describes as “full of paradoxes,” is aware of the seeming incongruity of his owning such a house. “As we look around-urn, I realize,” he starts. “I mean, I used to live in a smaller place and then I realized when J moved here that I had this fantasy. After I moved in I was going to invite over people, like Fulford, who have made it difficult for me to make a living. And I was going to say to them, ‘I want you to look around this place and see how solid it is. I just want you to know that I’m not going to be blown away.'”

For 18 years, Salutin, now 45, has been writing plays and articles that are sharply critical of Canadian society. At one time a self-described Marxist, though non-doctrinaire (” most Marxists I know sort of dismiss me as too much of a liberal”), Salutin regularly lambastes the government, big business and the media, which he feels toadies to both. He’s a nationalist who favored an independent Quebec. He’s a Jew who sympathizes with the Palestinians in Israel. Journalists who have reached almost cultural-icon status-Barbara Frum, Robert Fulford and Peter C. Newman-have been targets on his critical shooting range. His writing has appeared in such magazines as Toronto Life, Saturday Night and Maclean’s, and currently he’s a columnist for both Canadian Business and The Globe and Mail’s Broadcast Week, but his most consistent outlet has been the small, alternative This Magazine, where he has been a member of the editorial collective since the early seventies.

“He’s one of the most articulate critics of social crisis we have,” says June Callwood, who has known Salutin for 10 years. “He has a very clear view of what fairness constitutes and an intellectual analysis that makes him very powerful.” Toronto artist Charles Pachter, who has known Salutin since childhood, evaluates his friend’s contribution this way: “He’s made complacent people uncomfortable and in doing so has raised the consciousness. The end result is that he creates an arena for discussion, and that’s what really matters.”

But the role of the outspoken social critic involves a price. As Call wood says, “He could have been a much more successful man if he’d decided to wear blinkers. I hope his rewards are self-esteem in the knowledge that he’s moving in the right.”

The cost has been more than economic. In Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream, a collection of his work published ~n 1984, Salutin hints at the psychological toll he’s paid. “At times marginality can seem attractive, even romantic: marginal man, the existential hero, standing alone against the currents of the time,” he writes. “This may be fine for characters you create, or admire, but not for the character you are. Perhaps some artists of a nihilistic turn enjoy occasional marginality, especially if it is marketable that season. But most writers wish to connect, not withdraw. As a writer with political concerns, you want to affect your fellow citizens, join in the process of government and change, act as a member of your community. Being right…is no compensation for being miles from everyone else.”

“I hate not knowing what’s really going on, or how things really work. And I hate more than anything having the wrong idea,” Salutin says as he hunches over his kitchen counter sipping cafe au lait. “I had that feeling when I was growing up: that almost everything we were told, why things work the way they work, was wrong.”

Earl Richard Salutin was born August 30, 1942, in Toronto. He and his younger brother, Lome, became the second generation of Salutins in Canada. Their grandparents, Russian Jews, arrived in 1910. That same year, Salutin’s great-uncle Victor escaped to North America after five years of Siberian captivity for participating in the 1905 revolution. Victor brought his younger brother, Sol, along with him to America. Once settled, Sol chummed with anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Victor later returned to Russia to support the Bolsheviks in the Communist revolution.

Rick’s father, Saul, and uncles Abe and Harry worked together on Spadina Avenue for 46 years as agents for Montreal dressmakers, and when Rick was born, his family lived on Montrose Avenue near Christie Pits. But in 1951, when some business success dictated a new address to show improved social standing, the Salutins moved to Forest Hill Village. The success had been modest, though: unable to really afford their new neighborhood, they rented an apartment in the south end of the village.

“So we were in that place, but absolutely not of it,” Salutin explains. “I was living in a situation where I felt I didn’t belong. I was the only person I knew who didn’t live in a house we owned, didn’t have a backyard, didn’t go to summer camp, didn’t go to Florida in the winter. If we’d stayed downtown, probably I would have felt like I belonged. Because we were in Forest Hill and all my friends were in this much more affluent kind of life, I was wondering, ‘Well, where do I fit in? I don’t fit in anywhere.’ I think that was useful. I’m very grateful to my parents for not fitting in anywhere. It gives one the kind of thing that turns one towards becoming a writer.

In 1975, Salutin would recall those teenage years of social estrangement in a Maclean’s article about his job at Camp White Pine in Haliburton, Ontario: “I am the counsellor for fifteen incredibly beautiful sixteen-year-old girls…all the girls I never could have when I was sixteen…at Forest Hill Collegiate and I wasn’t cool, didn’t belong to a fraternity and didn’t have a sports car my parents gave me for continuing at the Holy Blossom Religious School even after my bar mitzvah.”

His parents, who weren’t religious, were a little dismayed by their son’s intense interest in his Jewishness. “One form the passion for understanding how things work took was looking for religious explanations,” he says now. “But in a way, the basic question was still there: how do things work, what’s really behind it?”

In 1960, after a year at York University, Salutin entered the Near Eastern and Judaic studies program at Brandeis University near Boston. It was an escape made possible by money saved from summer jobs and teaching at the synagogue, supplemented with some loans and scholarships. “I wanted to go away to the States desperately,” he says, “because back then that was the definition of reality. If you were going to go away, why go away in Canada? Canada was pathetic. But the U.S. was real. It was the centre of everything. I just wanted to get out.”

For his third year, Salutin traveled to Israel to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After his graduation in 1964, he married his high-school girlfriend and they moved to New York City, where Salutin entered the Jewish Theological Seminary. “I don’t think I ever actually wanted to be a rabbi, like someone who goes to a suburban synagogue and gives sermons every week,” he says now. “But I did sort of want to know what rabbis know.” The religious intensity didn’t last. “There wasn’t a sort of blinding moment of un-revelation or disillusionment. The thing, the feeling, just dropped away.”

After leaving the seminary in 1966, he went on to complete his MA in religion at Columbia the next year. He spent the next two years working on his PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, but left the program without writing his thesis.

Around the time Salutin’s beliefs and academic life were ending, so was his marriage. What remained was the craving for understanding that had been nourished by his theological studies. “I think that my idealism, that longing to become part of the world, had taken this kind of vertical direction,” he says. “And when that dropped away, in some ways it went more horizontally, out in the world, in the society.”

The catalyst for this shift in outlook came in 1965 when he happened upon a protest against the on-campus recruitment of students into the armed forces. The police were called and suddenly the peaceful demonstration became an all-out battle. Salutin’s eyes narrow as he recalls the scene: “When I saw those cops throwing those kids on the ground and stomping on them, it suddenly became perfectly clear that all that stuff I’d learned from textbooks about how society works was absolute crap. And the basis was force and violence, and whoever controlled it had whatever they wanted. It was sort of like”-and here he laughs-“instant Marxism or something.” This was, Salutin says, “the first time I felt differently about how the world worked, but there was nothing to attach it to.”

But when he returned to Canada in October, 1970, he found there was plenty here to attach his new ideas to. The War Measures Act had just been invoked and he was dismayed at how passively English Canadians accepted the suspension of their freedom: “Going from the U.S. to Canada was like passing a kidney stone.”

“All those years in the States,” he writes in Marginal Notes, “I wrote not a word. Yet when I moved back 10 Toronto at the end of 1970, I began writing immediately. I felt I had a right to speak out, because I was at home. While I was in the U.S., I had thoughts but lacked confidence. Home is where-as Frost might have said-when you go there they have to let you talk.”

Salutin’s first article was a piece for Harper’s in 1971. He now chuckles about it: “It was just sort of a very heavy leftist analysis of Canada and the FLQ crisis and the War Measures Act and American imperialism in Canada. And the mood in the States was such that you could say things in Harper’s that you would be embarrassed to put in This Magazine today.”

In 1973, Salutin joined the editorial collective of This Magazine, which had recently been transformed from a chronicler of the free-school movement to an intelligent, critical publication at the forefront of the nation’s alternative press. Salutin’s “Culture Vulture” column has been a regular feature since 1975. The column is a consistent forum for his stinging social criticisms-criticisms that owe much to his early religious values.

“I think his zeal for the left is in many ways an outgrowth of early Jewish tradition,” says Pachter. “He was steeped in it. In the Old Testament, it is the role of the prophets to cry out against the excesses of money changers and tax men.” June Callwood echoes this idea. “He operates totally unselfishly,” she says. “I think he has a theological part of him that drives him-a principle of responsibility that comes from a religious heritage.”

Salutin sees his work this way: “I really think that writing is altogether a matter of telling the truth,” he says. “That’s all it comes down to. And if you honestly describe what’s there, then I think that’s your job, and that’s what helps people to improve things and to take hold of their lives. It’s not twisting towards a left or finding the left stuff in it. You don’t sort of have to pour it in or slop it on like paint. And if it’s not there in reality, then there’s something wrong with your analysis, not something wrong with reality. In the end, it’s an encounter between you and what you meet.” This quest for Truth has not made Salutin popular. “He’s critical of things many people don’t want to face,” says Pachter. “He surprises people, and he’s generated a lot of ill will in the middle classes because of his causes.”

But unlike many critics, Salutin does not just write about his causes. In 1974, for example; he helped the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union organize the McGregor Socks plant in Toronto’s Spadina district. For benefits, such as the one for striking Eaton’s employees in May, 1985, Salutin writes short plays to show his support. More recently, he linked arms with members of the artistic, literary and cultural communities in the fight against free trade. At “A Night in Defiance of Free Trade,” held at Massey Hall last November, he called MP Flora MacDonald “the Benedict Arnold of Canadian culture.” His longtime friends, actors Eric Peterson and Cedric Smith, roused the capacity crowd with an adaptation of Salutin’s 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt.

1837, a 1973 collaborative effort with Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, is one of 11 plays Salutin has written. In 1977, his Les Canadiens, which juxtaposed the rise of the Parti Quebecois with the victories of the Montreal hockey team, won the Chalmers Award for the best Canadian play; other works have included 1981’s The Organizer: Kent Rowley and a 1984 stage adaptation of friend Ian Adams’s S: Portrait of a Spy. In a review for Marginal Notes, the Globe called Salutin “a major pioneer in the creation of the improvised theatre form in Canada.” Like his articles, Salutin’s plays are usually about social change; unlike his journalism, they have reached a wide audience. Salutin offers this explanation for the lesser impact of his writing: “I’ve always felt I can write what I feel and vast numbers of ordinary readers out there will listen to it and be interested. They might not agree, but they’re quite willing to hear it and discuss it. It’s only those at the top of the tower-the gatekeepers-who really oppose.”

It’s these gatekeepers-the political bodies, the publishers, producers and editors-who Salutin feels have tried to silence him by making it difficult for him to write for a living. This suspicion was reinforced last July when The Globe and Mail reported that This Magazine’s editorial board and freelancers had been investigated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (an allegation CSIS denied). Salutin was outraged, but not surprised. In fact, in his view, the CSIS investigation explained some earlier incidents. “One of the things security services do when they put people under investigation is make inquiries at their places of employment,” he says. “That’s all it takes to make someone’s job insecure. And for myself and a lot of other people, there have been numerous cases where jobs that were right there just sort of disappeared overnight. For instance, that happened at The Toronto Star.”

Back in 1985, Salutin says, he made a deal with Alan Ferguson, then editor of the Saturday Star, to write a weekly column for the paper. The first column was about the Blue Jays. Salutin was told the piece had been typeset and his picture was taken to run at the top. But before the story was published, Salutin was told the column was canceled. “Now, I don’t know whether [Ray] Timson [at the time managing editor] read it and couldn’t stand it,” he says. “And I don’t know what Timson thinks. And one doesn’t know if Timson had a call from the RCMP or whoever it was at the time. But we do know these calls are made, because occasionally it leaks out.”

Ferguson offers another version. “We were looking for some alternative columns at the Saturday magazine [section],” says Ferguson, now an assistant managing editor at the Star. “I invited several writers to submit sample columns, but it is not to my recollection that he was at any time hired for a column.”

The incident at the Star closely followed Salutin’s dismissal from a column for TV Times, a weekly guide published by Southam and distributed through its 18 newspapers. “After six months, a memo came from Southam head office saying, ‘Get rid of him,'” Salutin says. “Was it a visit from the security service? I don’t know.”

TV Times national editor David Wesley denies that politics had anything to do with it. “There were complaints [from the papers that carried the magazine] that they didn’t want opinion pieces,” he says. “They had enough of them in their own papers. There may have been some latent politics in his dismissal, but nothing overtly political. We didn’t get the publisher calling him a communist or anything.”

But Salutin regards these incidents as examples of how the system works to keep his kind of thinking out of the mainstream. “And another way it works is that the people who are in the positions-I don’t mean the Secret Ruling Class,” he says, laughing, “I mean the editors and publishers and producers-they tend to be a close-knit social group who know each other and see each other and share opinions. And it’s very easy for the entire group to turn their backs on a writer.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” says Marq de Villiers, editor of Toronto Life. “There are things that are just shared in the air. With South Africa, for example, Rick is very much a part of the’ conspiracy’ that way. He believes in sanctions and so does the editor of Maclean’s. But I don’t think Salutin and Kevin Doyle chatted at a cocktail party and decided to get together on this. If we don’t agree with something, it’s a conspiracy. If we think it’s a good idea, it’s not.”

In fact, one reason Salutin may face chilly receptions at some magazines is that he can be difficult to deal with, both professionally and socially. But is this reputation for being hard to work with another result of his outsider role? As Salutin writes in Marginal Notes: “Marginalization starts to take an unforeseen toll, penetrating areas of your life unrelated to writing. Socially, when in doubt, you are surly: they expect it. You import the stance of outsider into your private life.”

In their long friendship, Pachter and Salutin have had their share of stormy moments. “He can be so intimidating and angry,” says Pachter. “If I don’t agree with him about something, we don’t talk about it. With Rick, there is a whole question of social ease. He can often be off-putting. He’s pretty good with good-looking young women, but not with others; He loves getting into confrontational situations and it’s a test of the other person’s mettle. He likes an intellectual battle, and if the other person measures up, it’s okay.”

Pachter, obviously, has measured up, and in fact, it’s his old house that Salutin purchased almost two years ago. Pachter bought it in 1976 and did much of the renovation that makes it the charming place it is now. Pachter jokes that the house is very much like many of Salutin’s clothes, which come from the closet of Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby. “Castoffs of the bourgeoisie are safe,” says Pachter, “otherwise it’s too self-indulgent.” Ruby has passed clothes along to Salutin since they were teenagers in Forest Hill. Ruby is one of Salutin’s many friends who are so fiercely loyal that they won’t talk about him. In return, Salutin is so protective of all who are close to him that he refuses even to name the woman and her teenage daughter who share his home.

In a protective move all their own, some unexpected allies jumped to the defence of This Magazine the day the Globe broke the news of the CSIS investigation. By 9 a.m., spurred by Penny Williams, then editor of Your Money magazine, the editors of Canadian Business, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Report on Business Magazine and Moneywise had signed a petition damning the investigation. “It was just the mainstream that within three hours got behind us and signed up,” Salutin says. “I thank them a lot.”

The action in part was evidence that while mainstream colleagues may not agree with Salutin’s politics and may not like his social demeanor, most readily admire his writing and his devotion to his causes. “I think his is an important point of view,” says de Villiers, “and his influence is quite significant. It has the power of reminding people of their ideological sins.” Salutin himself has a slightly different analysis of his place in the journalistic community. As he says in Marginal Notes: “In some ways the mainstream even requires you: to provide something different from time to time, and to prove they are open to many opinions.”

Among those proving they’re open to many opinions are the editorial staff at McClelland and Stewart, which will publish Salutin’s first novel in the fall. Tentatively entitled The Book of Heinz, it is a fictionalized story about his teacher at the Holy Blossom Religious School, who escaped the Holocaust and who, a friend says, “instilled a love of learning in Rick which I think he transformed into an intense love for Canada.” He’ll follow the novel with a book for Penguin on the next federal election. He is also helping longtime friend and former NHL hockey star Ken Dryden with plans for a book and a television miniseries-both about hockey-that they expect will be a couple of years in the making. And in January, Salutin began his tenth year of teaching an undergraduate course-An Introduction to Canadian Culture-at the University of Toronto. With these various projects, plus columns, freelance articles and returns from plays, Salutin is able to earn between $25,000 and $45,000 a year.

Salutin doesn’t seem concerned that he seldom makes his age in thousands. “The main thing about writing is you need to say certain things. You don’t write for money-at least I don’t,” he says. “You need money to pay the bills in order to keep writing. So it just seems to me obvious that as long as I’ve got enough money to live and pay the bills, I’ll keep writing whatever I feel I ought to be writing or want to write.”

Despite this outward assurance, Salutin sometimes has moments of doubt. “A couple of years ago, around the time I lost the TV Times thing and the Star thing, I got quite worried about being able to make a living and I started to think, What would it take to sell out so I could just make a living?” he recalls. “I’d never been so close to the line before that I’d even thought about it. And I thought, I’m probably not someone who is capable, not because I’m so moral, just because I don’t think that way. But I figured it out. It wouldn’t be that hard. I would write about the same things, but I would just take the edge off. I think I could do that. Write about the same things, sound angry, go through the same motions, but just not insult people in the same way, not dig underneath, not go that extra step whatever it is. And then suddenly you become iconoclastic, moral, outraged, but you’re suddenly not offending anybody in power. I never tried it,” Salutin says, smiling, “but I figured it out.”

It’s his voice that gets to you first. That clear, unhurried voice that manages to convey a sense of urgency with just enough of a clipped British accent to make it sound authoritative. It’s a convincing voice that still demands attention. Even now, more than 40 years later, coming over a speaker system in a listening booth in the CBC archives, it grabs you and takes you to another place, another time.

“Berlin on VE Day-May 8, 1945 Four out of five buildings…had been destroyed-that is, completely leveled or completely gutted. This did look like the end of the world. Through the rubble and ashes of Berlin I didn’t recognize famous streets I had known well. We were lost for a few minutes in that utter ruin and silence, in the end of the world. I was afraid.”

Suddenly I am no longer sitting in that safe little cubicle at the CBC listening to old tapes. Instead, I am moving with Matthew Halton into the “still-smoking and burning” city of five million people. His fear becomes my fear, his pain mine. The voice hypnotizes and the script-it is more like an essay-mesmerizes.

Today, three decades after his death, this journalist who was once venerated by a generation of Canadians is almost forgotten. His voice has become silent except for occasional Remembrance Day programs, when the CBC airs short clips from his reports. Halton-of whom it has been said, “Canadian journalism may never see his like again”-deserves more. His broadcasts document the role Canadians played in World War II as graphically and as eloquently as any movie or book.

As I listen to these tapes, carefully transcribed from the original glass discs, the years roll away and I am in the presence of a great storyteller. I picture the owner of the voice to be a tall, imposing figure, not unlike a stern English master at a British boarding school. In fact, Halton was slightly built, about five foot nine, with thinning hair that he often covered with a battered forage cap.

He was a man to whom image and appearance were important. There is a story, probably apocryphal, told to me by Kenneth Dyba, a CBC archivist, about how Halton once spent much time searching for the perfect trench coat for a foreign correspondent. After finding it in an exclusive store in London, he carefully mucked it up to make it look authentic. Writer and close friend Charles Lynch says that Halton wore his clothes with that air of casual chic that some men have, and many women find attractive. Pierre Trudeau has the same aura-an almost effeminate quality, adds Lynch.

“There was a streak of ham in him,” Lynch recalls. “In the heat of battle we would hear him spouting poetry or muttering that it was not a time to work, it was a time to live.” Sometimes when he was especially pleased with one of his broadcasts, he would repeat it over and over again to his colleagues. One of them finally became fed up with this posturing and suggested that if Halton kept re-fighting the battle of Carpiquet, one day he was going to get killed in it.

It was this flair for the dramatic that gave Halton’s broadcasts such depth and emotion. And his war lent itself to that kind of treatment. For him and his fellow journalists, reporting on the Second World War was a holy crusade. Today their reports might be considered somewhat less than objective. All the correspondents accepted censorship and discipline. They were accompanied to the battlefront by army officers. The army set up press camps, supplied communication equipment, transportation, combat uniforms and rations, in the hope reporters could get the home front to contribute to the war effort. Halton himself flew back to Toronto to participate in victory bond campaigns that featured such Hollywood stars as Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon. Halton would appear in full uniform-a glamour figure from the battlefield. “It was all considered part of the job,” says Lynch. “Often we were more of a cheering section than we were journalists. There were only good guys and bad guys-our people were the heroes.”

“The Germans were demons; the Canadians were possessed by demons,” Halton began his February, 1944, broadcast on the fighting in the Italian town of Ortona. “The more murderous the battle, the harder both sides fought. There was something different there, something heroic and almost superhuman and, at the same time, dark as night.”

The drama that Halton injected into his broadcasts was not always appreciated by members of the press corps in Europe.

“Matt either aroused affection or scorn,”says Lynch. “The top dog doesn’t always get a hell of a lot of sympathy from envious colleagues. Remember, this was the era before celebrity journalism, and critics felt Matt was prostituting journalism by turning it into entertainment.”

But Halton didn’t pay any attention to this criticism-he wrote and spoke exactly as he felt, says his wife, Jean, whom he married in 1932. “Matt was also awfully lucky. He always wanted to do just what he did. He loved words. He could quote poetry at a moment’s notice. In fact, he considered himself a failed poet.”

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No sooner was the editorial published, however, than Riley wished he could retract it. When he wrote it, he hadn’t bargained on the urban media’s response to the press conference. A suggestion by the investigation’s head, Detective Inspector James McCormick, that the suspect might “have a story to tell” was all it took for some journalists to engage in what one critic later described as “pack journalism at its worst.” Acting on rumors that a Chesterville mechanic had been under OPP surveillance, reporters headed for the village, which is 65 kilometres southeast of Ottawa. They camped outside the mechanic’s home for two days until the man-who had not been charged -went on local television to protest his Innocence.

Police had made his life a “living hell,” he said on Ottawa’s CJOH-TV “There’s no place I can drive without them being there. I have been watched from the air by helicopters. I’ve taken enough harassment over the past few months and I feel something must be done for my behalf. I haven’t done nothing.”

The legal community promptly denounced the police for violating the man’s right to the presumption of innocence. Some critics accused the OPP of deliberately staging the press conference to unleash reporters on the suspect so that he would somehow incriminate himself. (Superintendent Joe Crozier, head of the OPP’s criminal investigation branch in Toronto, refuses to discuss the allegation. “Everything we’ve said to the media has been twisted around,” he says.) Others, however, believe the press conference, far from being an OPP master plan, was hastily called to quell complaints from news agencies that the OPP was giving preferential treatment to The Ottawa Citizen.

These charges stemmed from a story that had run in the Citizen the morning of the press conference. It was the first article to contain an official acknowledgement that a serial killer might be at large in the valley. Based on an interview with McCormick, reporters John Kessel and Ian MacLeod revealed that police believed the three homicides in the area of Winchester, 10 kilo metres west of Chesterville, had been committed by one person. As well, the story indicated that police now thought that three other deaths, which had occurred between 1975 and 1983 and had been attributed to mysterious fires, were the work of the same killer, “an Ottawa Valley resident in his 40s who knew at least two of the victims.” The article did not identify the 44-year-old Chesterville mechanic by name. But, because he lived in the same area as the victims (on television he denied knowing any of them) and had been under police surveillance, it gave credence to the rumor that he was the OPP’s suspect. The damage to his rights and reputation was done even before the infamous press conference.

As to why McCormick gave him the information, Kessel can only speculate. Even before the press conference, he says, police had “invited” him to interview the suspect, who was refusing to answer their questions. Perhaps, Kessel surmises, the police intended to confiscate his notes and tapes afterwards. Then his paper “would’ve become part of the [legal] process, which is not what we’re designed to do.” So the Citizen resisted the OPP’s private overtures. The public ones, however, proved irresistible. The day after the press conference, Kessel and Macleod were the first reporters to stake out the man’s house, and the only ones to maintain a vigil through the night. Their quarry’s reaction was described in the next morning’s Citizen: he circled “the area earlier in the day, but was unable to get into the building without being seen until well after dark.”

By the following day, more than a dozen reporters had descended on Chesterville. They represented, among others, CBC Television and CBC Radio, CTV affiliate CJOH- TV and Le Droit, Ottawa’s Frenchlanguage daily. Swarming over the town, they questioned people on the street, in stores and in their homes. (“At first I wasn’t that concerned,” one woman told the Record. “But when I was asked for the sixth time if I was frightened, I became frightened.”) All day long, reporters lined up, three and four at a time, to use the village’s one pay phone. At lunch time, they crowded into Louis’ Restaurant on Chesterville’s main street. Meanwhile, two blocks away, the stakeout of the mechanic’s house persisted. At one point, as many as a dozen reporters-some with cameras at the ready-parked their cars and stood outside, spilling over into the road. Passing motorists slowed to take a look, creating a bottleneck. “The circus came to town,” wrote Riley in his next editorial.

Asked whether any of the participants suggested calling off the siege, the Citizen’s Kessel replies: “Why would they do that? We’re all in competition for the same story. People aren’t going to leave just because others leave-especially if their editor is saying, ‘Stay there and keep trying to get him.'” In fact, only when the mechanic retained noted Ottawa lawyer David Scott did the reporters back off. In a statement issued three days after the stakeout began, Scott accused the media of making the man and his neighbors “prisoners in their own houses.” And he threatened legal action against anyone who publicly associated his client with the murders.

By then, however, additional damaging information about his client had been published. On September 23, even before the television interview was broadcast, the Citizen further identified the suspect by printing that he “occasionally worked at a used car lot on Highway 31.” Ironically, this was in an article that criticized the OPP for its handling of the case and for “making it easy for the media to learn the suspect’s identity and whereabouts.”

Moreover, the article also revealed that the suspect had a criminal record dating back to 1960. “Although it consists mainly of property crimes,” the piece said, “it includes convictions for armed robbery, possession of a prohibited weapon and wounding.” Since a defendant’s record is inadmissible evidence in a court proceeding, had the suspect been charged with the murders, the Citizen would have risked a contempt-of-court citation for publishing information prejudicial to his trial. Because no charge had been laid, however, the paper was able to publish the record with impunity.

Still, this discussion of the man’s past was unethical, says Professor Klaus Pohle, who teaches media law at Carleton University’s School of Journalism. “Dragging his past through the media prejudices the reader against this particular person. There’s no doubt about that. It raises the question in the ordinary reader’s mind that, if the man has a criminal record, the police are probably right in suspecting him in the murders.” (Scott Honeyman, the Citizen’s managing editor, argued in an interview that, since the paper didn’t refer to the man by name, it was all right to publish his record. Yet, a few minutes earlier Honeyman had stated: “It was pretty obvious to everybody in that town who the suspect was. That’s where we found out the fellow’s name.”

Pohle sees no public benefit to the media’s undertaking what he terms such “quasi-criminal investigations.” And, he says, there’s a danger in this: once the media acquire the information, they’re tempted, in their quest for the better story, to publish it. The proper procedure, Pohle argues, is simply to report that the police have a suspect, giving no details about him. “The media have all kinds of information that’s never published for various reasons,” he adds. “It’s not that you have information, it’s what you do with it that counts.”

In the Citizen’s defence, Honeyman pleads the pressure of competition: “Put yourself in the role of a person working at this newspaper and deciding what to run. If people are getting loads of information off T~ out of the Star and out of the Globe, they ask you, ‘Why the hell haven’t you got that story?’ ” Pohle sympathizes with this dilemma: “Ethics is in the eye of the beholder. When something like this happens it’s difficult to take the high road, because people don’t understand you’re being more cautious than the other media.” Nevertheless, he points to the consequences of succumbing to the pressure: “Once this thing gets going it has a snowball effect; you’ve got to tell better and better and better stories, which leads to more and more questionable information being published.”

After the man’s television appearance, news editors wondered if his name still belonged in the category of questionable information. They went into a huddle, debating the legal and ethical implications of publishing it. Legally, most concluded, they were in the clear: the mechanic himself had publicly acknowledged that he was the suspect. Still, heeding David Scott’s threat, the Citizen maintained its no-name policy. (That it named Scott’s client once-on September 26 in a feature on serial murderers-was the result of human error, Honeyman says.)

The Chesterville Record also adhered to its practice of withholding the name of a suspect who has not been charged. Yet Riley believes the man wanted his identity revealed, at least locally. The mechanic himself had telephoned the CJOH reporter and requested the interview. Then-as Riley learned from the reporter-he had turned down the station’s offer to film him in silhouette. Says Riley: “I think he wanted to say, ‘Listen, these people are in front of my house. I know it and you know it. Let’s just get this thing out in the open.'”

That interpretation was behind The Toronto Star’s decision to name the man right away. Managing Editor Ian Urquhart has no qualms about the decision: “We weren’t compromising his rights by using his name. Far from it. He felt he was furthering his rights by going public at that point.” At first, The Globe and Mail reached a different conclusion. It omitted the name for fear of “adding to the hysteria” by identifying the man to readers who had missed the television interview, says Beverley Bowen, then acting city editor. Next day, however, the paper reversed its position. Its rationale: by then the man had been identified by the Star and, even more significantly, he was probably widely known in the community where it mattered most, his own. Bowen stands behind this decision. In fact, she thinks the name should have been used from the outset; it had become part of the public domain and the man himself had made it so. “You can’t get any closer to the horse’s mouth than that.” The Toronto Sun didn’t share that opinion. It withheld the name because, as Edward Monteith, the editorial director, puts it, “You have to protect people from themselves sometimes.” He says the man clearly lacked the civil-rights savvy to call a lawyer instead of a reporter, and the media took advantage of that.
Indeed, the mechanic lost an advantage when he turned to the media. In Pohle’s view, until then the man had solid grounds for a defamation suit because, while the original articles linking him to the murders did not identify him by name, they did contain enough specific information about him for people in his community to make the connection. However, says Pohle, by giving the interview he severely limited his legal options. “I would think that a judge and jury would not be terribly sympathetic to somebody who talks about the allegations on television and then turns around and sues.”

Maybe so, but to sue would have been to defer gratification. The president of the Civil Liberties Association of the National Capital Region, Donald Whiteside, agrees that the televised denial may have been a “tactical mistake” from a legal standpoint, but not from a psychological one. “He needed to lash out and say, ‘I’m not guilty.’ That was very satisfying for him.”
From where Wayne Riley stands, the tactic doesn’t look like a mistake: “If you’re being hounded by the media, you may as well use the media to relieve the pressure.”

And it certainly appealed to the community’s sense of outrage. “It was funny to see the shift in attitude locally,” says Riley. “After the interview, there was a lot of sympathy for the man.”

This sense of outrage extended beyond Chesterville. On October 2, Solicitor General Joan Smith issued a statement in which she apologized for the OPP’s part in the affair. It was an “error in judgment,” she said, to give out details about the suspect. And she ordered a complete review of guidelines governing the way police release information to the media. No review of the case, however, has been undertaken by the Ontario Press Council. Since it received no complaints from the public about this matter, explains Executive Secretary Mel Sufrin, the council has had no occasion to make recommendations for preventing similar trespasses in the future. Still, G. Stuart Adam, chairman of the Centre for Mass Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, insists that the presumption of innocence is its own recommendation; either you embrace it or you don’t. “If you accept the rule that a person has a right to his reputation and a right to a fair trial, you won’t abrogate it in the name of a story. That’s the rule. You don’t need other guidelines.”

Those at the Citizen who have broken the rule are unrepentant. Honeyman, the managing editor, says he “didn’t lose a minute’s sleep” over the likelihood that his paper helped to ruin a man’s reputation. Kessel, the reporter, blames the victim (since he “bragged” and “joked” to people in Chesterville about being the suspect, and further publicized it on television) and the detective who released the initial details (“he put his foot in his own mouth”). In “Inside Story”-a column that takes readers behind the scenes at the Citizen-Honeyman described his paper’s handling of the fiasco as “journalism at its best.” But Pohle of Catleton University sees it differently: “No one in this whole mess has covered himself with any glory.”

Least of all the media. For even if the man had already been the subject of gossip, the media, by their obtrusive presence, fanned it. Even if the initial identifying information came from the police, the media wantonly disseminated it. Even if the man himself confirmed on television that he was the suspect, the media stakeout drove him to it. Invoking the pressure of competition-though a mitigating factor-does not absolve news agencies of blame. A sign of regret, however small, might help to redeem their tarnished Image.

At least in Chesterville it might. Shortly after the urban reporters had departed, two Record employees were in Louis’ Restaurant, where, Riley says, they “took a pretty good ragging” from patrons and staff. “The consensus was that the media are out to sensationalize stories and create panic whenever they can. And we were lumped in with them.”

So when Wayne Riley sat down to write his next editorial, while he didn’t spare the OPP or the local gossipmongers, he reserved his harshest words for his fellow journalists. Their conduct, he wrote, “had created the impression that the media is a mongrel ready to rip through anyone’s garbage if there is any promising scent of a bone inside.”

Every weekday since September 14, Parliamentary News Service has been broadcasting a half hour of what critics have dubbed “Tory TV” to stations across the country via Telesat Canada’s Anik D satellite. Three to five minutes of each feed are “photo opportunities,” unscripted clips of ribbon cuttings, MPs arriving at work or chatting with the prime minister. The rest of the time is made up of four- or five-minute pre-taped interviews with cabinet ministers or PC backbenchers.

PNS is the brainchild of Ken Lawrence, a 47-year-old media entrepreneur who began his career in 1961 as a country-and-western disc jockey in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. In 1968, Lawrence became a parliamentary correspondent for Standard Broadcasting. Six years later he formed Ken Lawrence Enterprises, a TV news service, and in 1983 he was awarded a contract by Independent Satellite News, which packages political pieces for TV outlets.

Lawrence was offered a similar contract by the Progressive Conservatives when he approached them early in 1987. He says he came up with the idea of PNS after realizing that regional issues were being neglected by the national media, and in February he presented his concept to Jean Carole Pelletier, national director of the PCs, Senator Norm Atkins and other Tory officials. They were in a mood to listen: the party was at its lowest standing ever in the Gallup Poll-the choice of only 22 per cent of decided voters-in part because of what the PCs saw as Tory-bashing by the CBC. PNS, they decided, was a way to get their message to the people themselves.

One Tory backbencher has said this decision means a $500,000-ayear financial commitment, but Lawrence refuses to discuss the price tag because taxpayers’ money is not involved. It’s a private business arrangement between him and the Tory party, he says. The PCs pay for the expensive satellite link between Ottawa and local news stations, for the equipment and staff and for the satellite transmission.

Lawrence promoted PNS by sending letters to the country’s 60 television stations, offering them “access to PC MPs via satellite five days a week at no charge.” So far, 45 have used PNS at least once. The procedure is simple: news directors seeking an interview are accommodated on a first come, first-served basis. But in fact, only 50 per cent of the material PNS transmits is initiated by stations. The rest originates with Lawrence or the Tories themselves, although Lawrence says MPs seldom come to him with ideas: “People are always surprised when I tell them how little the Tories are involved. They rely on my judgment as to what are good stories.” In the instances where stations request an interview, they can either send in their questions for Lawrence to ask, or the local reporter can talk to the MP directly via a two-way feed. Angelo Persichilli, news director of CFMT in Toronto, used the latter method when he interviewed Minister of Multiculturalism David Crombie early in October. “If Crombie’s answer deserved a rebuttal, I wouldn’t get a chance to ask it,” he says. On the other hand, CKVR in Barrie always sends its queries in to PNS. “We feel okay if Lawrence asks the questions,” says David Scott, the station’s assignment editor. “We don’t need to come back with second questions because we hit them hard with the first.”

When Lawrence started the service, he must have realized it would raise ethical questions. Just after PNS was launched, The Ottawa Citizen quoted Liberal MP Brian Tobin as likening PNS to Gorbachev’s propaganda machine; the prime minister, Tobin said, was “the titular head of the new politburo on the Rideau River.”

And in early December, John Turner’s communications director, Raymond Heard, lambasted PNS on The Journal, saying the public will be watching subsidized news. While he is no fan of PNS himself, Hugh Winsor, The Globe and Mail’s national political editor, attributes the Liberals’ reaction to envy. “The Tories correctly assessed that a lot of TV stations were not getting access to their MPs,” he says. “They were smart to get their ministers on news programs. If the Liberals had the money they would probably do the same thing.”

The biggest uproar came from parliamentary press gallery members, who complained “pretty strenuously,” according to Don Newman, then president. In early September, Lawrence, a 19-year member of the gallery, was summoned to a meeting of the executive to review his membership. Although he produced letters from BCTV, London’s CFTL and Ottawa’s CKCK that stated they intended to continue using his services as a freelance correspondent, the executive decided Lawrence was now in the PR business, not news; Lawrence resigned at the end of the month. “We didn’t want to put him out of business,” says Newman, who notes that Lawrence is well liked on the Hill. “It was nothing personal.” Now, Lawrence gets a parliamentary press pass from the Conservative whip.

Still, the service has proved popular with small stations. Lawrence and his staff of three cameramen, two reporters, one producer and one part-time technician were producing an average of three or four videos a day in September; by January the number had risen to five or six. “The bulk are to do with local issues, things that don’t get covered by the national news at night,” Lawrence says.

Media critic Barrie Zwicker doesn’t object to PNS as long as TV stations clearly attribute the source of the stories they use. “The Tories are claiming to help the media,” Zwicker says, “but the real reasons are to improve their own self-image. They are interested in perpetuating their own fortunes. But the media is partly on the take, and this should be disclosed to the viewer with a legend saying this item is made possible by the Tory parry.”

Last November, John Best, then news director at CHCH-TV in Hamilton, disagreed with Zwicker, calling him-quite incorrectly-a self-styled critic who has never worked in the media. “We didn’t even consider putting a super on the screen. I spend $3 million a year gathering news, so a few free props from Ken Lawrence don’t bother me,” he said at the time. But in January, Best, by then vice-president of news and public affairs, and his successor as news director, Michael Krizanc, arranged with Lawrence to start paying for PNS. “We thought it wise to start paying our own way,” says Krizanc, “so that there can be no criticism that someone else is pulling the strings in our newsroom. We want to prove we are calling the shots.”

Krizanc is rather defensive about this decision. Asked whether he felt the need to prove his station’s independence to the public or to other news organizations, he shot back: “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. I just want to demonsrrate that we are making our own decisions.”

Persichilli at CFMT was just as skeptical of Zwicker’s views on using superscripts. After debating their use, he decided they were not necessary. “PNS isn’t supplying us with a feature,” he says. “The journalistic skills are on our side, so if the report is biased, it’s our fault. There are no strings attached to the service, we maintain complete editorial control and I don’t feel we are misleading the public by not using a super.”

But without that identification, viewers don’t know that what they’re watching is more an electronic press release than journalism. “What I fear most,” says Zwicker, “is that some stations will not say this was a freebie from the Tory party. The media is full of people willing to take freebies, stations are set up to make the maximum profit and cut costs.” Lawrence counters that no acknowledgement is considered necessary when information from a written press release is used on air. Hugh Winsor dismisses this argument. “I think the people who use these things and don’t attribute them to the Tory party are absolutely shameless,” he says.

“They should say on the TV screen that they are using propaganda paid for by a political party. Now that would take guts. I think the station owners are laughing all the way to the bank-they’re too cheap to have an Ottawa correspondent, either independently or collectively, so they take a free ride on the tail of the Tory party. You can’t blame the Tory party-the service was a smart move on their part. Blame the news directors.”

But even if the source is acknowledged, will news directors on the receiving end of a free interview avoid asking tough questions? “It shouldn’t happen, but it might,” says Peter Oesbarats, dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario. Winsor says he hasn’t heard of reporters going soft; at the same time he points out that local news reporters are often on a chummy, first name basis with their local MPs. “Anyway, it’s in the Tories’ interest for reporters to ask tough questions, so they can be seen handling them well,” he says.

MTN news director Al Thorgeirson says, if anything, his reporters ask tougher questions on PNS: “Our viewers wouldn’t pull any punches if they were talking directly to Charlie Mayer, so we don’t either.” Still, there is the question of balancing these Tory handouts with interviews with Liberal and NOP politicians. News directors of larger stations like CFMT and CHCH try to get opposition viewpoints, but critics still wonder if the smaller stations can’t afford to rent satellite time in the first place, can they afford to get both sides on every issue?

PNS’s radio service, launched October 18, has many media people even more concerned. For this, Lawrence and his staff daily package two or three English and one or two French items that are indistinguishable from legitimate news reports. “When Lawrence took his service a step forward with his radio stories, I became alarmed,” says Oesbarats. “In effect you get very partisan, biased reports. There is an element of misrepresentation in that. I fear the next step is production of the same type of packaged stories for TV:” This prospect especially bothers him. “I don’t think radio or TV stations should be using canned reports from tainted sources,” he says.

Oesbarats feels radio stations have even more limited resources than TV; so the temptation to use the PNS service is almost irresistible. Zwicker believes that economics alone doesn’t explain PNS’s popularity. “I think the Tories have found a legitimate fault in the media,” he says. “There isn’t enough coverage of smaller issues, or less influential politicians. The media overreacted at first, but that’s because they harbor the false conceit that they are already doing a very good job.”

Then, on a humid evening last June 16, following a preseason game between the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Toronto Argonauts, the harassment took an ugly turn. “I came downstairs, and as soon as I walked into the Ti-Cat dressing room, it exploded,” Ormsby recalls. “The players were screaming so loud the other reporters had to turn off their machines.” But there was more to the yelling than the decibel level. “Players were calling me a fucking slut, fucking cunt, fucking whore, and were performing mock rapes and masturbating themselves. The whole thing went on for 12 or 13 minutes.” At one point, a naked player confronted Ormsby at the locker-room door, refusing to let her out. The three other reporters in the room stood silent and did nothing. Not that Ormsby expected anything: “Why should they stand up for me?” she would say later. “It’s like asking someone to fight my battles for me.” So Ormsby fought her own battles. She stayed on in the locker room, interviewing Ti-Cat safety Paul Bennett and quarterback Tom Porras. To Bennett’s credit, he made several attempts to quiet his teammates and, on one occasion, told them to “act like professionals.” But the abuse continued.

Ormsby left the room in a rage, but with her deadline looming, there was little time to dwell on what had happened. She got her story off well enough. The next day, though, she was at the point of tears. “I refused to do any football for the rest of the week because I was in quite an emotional state.” Still, she called Ti-Cat head coach Al Bruno and told him about the conduct of his players. Bruno immediately apologized and vowed that it would never happen again. CFL policy calls for a 20minute period after each game during which all reporters are allowed in the locker rooms to conduct interviews, and Bruno knew Ormsby was well within her rights. “I know Al gave his boys a talking to,” she says. “In fact, he apologized to me several times after that.” But what bothered Ormsby most about the incident was that some of the Hamilton staff later claimed that most of the players involved had been rookies who were cut the next day. Ormsby knew better. “I knew there were veterans involved because I saw them with my own eyes. I just hoped it wouldn’t happen again.”

Unfortunately, it did, though not with the same viciousness, nine days later in Toronto. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who had just defeated the Argos 38-30 in the home opener, had agreed with Ormsby to have players brought outside the dressing room for individual interviews, which is common practice. While waiting in the hall, Ormsby caught a glimpse of Bomber quarterback Tom Clements through the open locker-room door. Since her agreement with the Blue Bombers didn’t preclude her going in there, and not wanting to miss anything Clements was saying, Ormsby eased into the room. Clements didn’t notice her, but a couple of other Winnipeg players did. “One player tapped me on the shoulder and said something like, ‘You’re a little bit close, aren’t you?’ I ignored him and continued doing my job. Then a couple of other players started having temper tantrums with Winnipeg’s public relations man, Kevin O’Donovan. That sent me over the edge. I decided to stop putting up with it. I realized I have the right to work with dignity.”

So she wrote a column that appeared on June 27 under the headline “It’s Time for Boorish Footballers to Grow Up.” In it, she recounted the events of the previous 11 days, including the indecent actions of the Ti-Cats, and stressed what she called the stone-age mentality of professional football players. “My job is to interview players to report their side of the story or their insight as experts [Ormsby’s emphasis]. If the harassment had anything to do with a story I had written, I’d take it in stride that is part of a reporter’s lot. But to be shouted down simply because I am female is illogical and, frankly, out of date.”

Despite the boldness of her piece, Ormsby had wrestled with the idea of slamming the teams in print. She had approached Gerry Hall, the Star sports editor, who gave her full support. “Mary was just a reporter doing her job,” Hall says. “If an athlete refuses to talk, that’s fine; it’s his right. But when comments are along the lines of sexism, you have to wonder what cave the players crawled out of.”

Both Ormsby and Hall sent letters to the CFL commissioner, Doug Mitchell, calling for action. Mitchell wrote back condemning the incidents and, as Bruno had before him, promising it would not happen again. However, Mitchell took exception to a line in Ormsby’s column that implied possible league inaction in dealing with the situation. In reference to the CFL’s possible response, Ormsby wrote, “For some reason, I’m not holding my breath.” Mitchell’s indignation turned out to be misplaced; true to Ormsby’s assertion, very little happened. “We talked to the teams,” says John Iaboni, director of media and public relations for the CFL, “but were unable to find out who was responsible in Hamilton. As far as Winnipeg was concerned, they completely denied the incident ever happened.”

Ormsby continued to cover the Argos for the rest of the season and had no further problems with the players. But the scars remain. “Now when I go into a dressing room, I am a little bit more wary and on edge. The worst part of everything is that those guys weren’t attacking Mary Ormsby, but the fact that I was female. In a way, the whole experience was good for me. It woke me up and I’m no longer a wimp who will put up with that garbage. Hopefully, I’ve made it easier for other women in this business.”

Speaking for the CFL, John Iaboni can give no such assurance. “Our viewpoint in the league is that we don’t want to see it happen again,” he says. “But it may. We just hope it doesn’t.”

In 1986 alone, according to a study by University of Missouri journalism professor Vernon Stone, 2,000 full-time positions in radio news disappeared. Stone also found that more than 20 per cent of all major-market radio stations made cutbacks in news broadcasts, while only four per cent increased their coverage. Indeed, from 1985 to 1986 fulltime news staffs dropped by nearly half-from an average of 2.7 people to 1.4. In fact, since 1981, whole news departments have been put on the street. This is bad news for American radio journalists, but what is the situation in Canada? Here, radio news directors are thankful that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission exists to control content, and they trust that the CRTC will not take our broadcast news industry down the FCC route. CRTC Chairman Andre Bureau gave this assurance in a 1986 speech to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Toronto, where he said the commission regards news as an integral part of Canadian culture and identity. And Richard Frith, a senior planning officer at the CRTC’s radio policy planning and analysis department, says, “I can’t see the commission allowing a station to eliminate news altogether. It wants to see stations providing well-rounded service to the communities they serve.” But is the news directors’ faith in the CRTC well placed?

The latest regulations, published in 1986, contain nothing about news content nor any rules governing the minimum number of hours a station must devote to news. While all stations must submit a Promise of Performance, which outlines their specific programing plans, adhering to the PoP is a condition of licence for FM stations only. If an FM station wants to reduce the amount of news it has agreed to air by 20 per cent or more, Frith says it has to make prior application to the commission; for any change below 20 per cent, stations just inform the CRTC. As for AM stations, he says they “can do pretty much what they want as far as reductions go during the licence term, but when that term is up they have to explain what’s going on if the commission wants to talk it over with them.” Frith says that a station’s own perception of what its audience needs and wants, combined with CRTC regulations and market forces, controls news on AM stations. There’s evidence that at least in some cases stations’ commitment to news is gradually being eroded. For example, according to its 1979 PoP statement, CKEY, a Toronto AM station, broadcast 13 hours and 54 minutes of news each week; at the time of its most recent licence renewal, in 1985, it pledged only 12 hours and 17 minutes. And in 10 years Toronto’s CHUM-FM has reduced the amount of news and information programming It runs Monday to Friday by nearly half, from 8.3 hours to 4.5 hours.

The CRTC defines news as “the recounting or reporting of information on recent local, regional, national and international events, with little or no interpretation.” Frith says many stations meet their PoP agreement by supplementing news content with softer material such as human interest and so-called enrichment programming, which encompasses everything from items on new developments in medicine and science to business and entertainment features. While the CRTC doesn’t disapprove of this practice, at licence renewal time a station is expected to show why lifestyle news rather than hard news is appropriate for its audience. Brian Thomas, CHUM-FM’s manager of news operations and public affairs, says some stations have cut back on news with permission from the CRTC. “The way the commission sees it, times have changed,” he says. “There are more stations now and listeners have many places to get news.” Some argue that where a strong AM news station already exists in a crowded market, it’s redundant for music-oriented stations to carry news. “I think most programmers would say they do news because they feel an obligation to their audience,” says Henry Mietkiewicz, radio columnist for The Toronto Star from 1983 to 1987. “But I think if they had the choice, they’d drop most of their information programming. Basically, music stations don’t really want to be bothered with news.” Cutting news content to zero, even if it were allowed by the CRTC, would likely mean losing listeners. There is a point beyond which no station is going to go. “Even those listeners least interested in Amount of it,” says Pierre Nadeau, senior vice-president for radio at the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. Nadeau says he wouldn’t be surprised to find that some FM stations have reduced their commitment to news, but he also wouldn’t be surprised if some AM stations have increased theirs.

Generally, Nadeau says, listeners tune to AM stations for news and information and to FM for music. “Rock and pop stations don’t consider news a strong part of what they do,” says Mietkiewicz. “They don’t consider it important for their audience. So to criticize them for not covering local events as well as they ought to means nothing, because they are doing exactly as they intend.” Certainly, Toronto’s music oriented CHFI clearly intended last October to drop its 9 a.m. newscast in favor of a commercial free half hour of music. “Let’s just say the change was made to fit various programming competitive strategies,” News Director Ben Steinfeld says. Then he adds, “Go talk to the program director. It was his decision.” The morning the newscast was cut, Steinfeld went to the mike to read the nine o’clock news only to officially learn it no longer existed. In Metropolitan Toronto alone, there are 16 private radio stations competing for a slice of the market, plus another half dozen or so nearby. For all of them, producing news is costly. “News directors have to fight like hell for what they want and they don’t always win,” says Warren Beck, news director at Hamilton’s CHML from 1966 to 1985, and now coordinator of broadcast journalism at Hamilton’s Mohawk College. “But management sees the newsroom as the area where they can cut back.” Steinfeld believes the problem lies with the programmers. “They only understand numbers,” he says. “What wins is going to stay, what loses is going to go.” The only way to convince them news is worth keeping is by getting good ratings. “Programmers will say, ‘Those blankety-blank CRTC rules.

If it wasn’t for them, we’d be able to play more music.'” Steinfeld says that if the CRTC rules were dissolved tomorrow, half the news broadcasts now aired would cease to exist. News directors also have to contend with radio consultants “modern-day rainmakers,” Steinfeld calls them-who tell their bosses less news means more profit. Their “propagandistic drivel” includes cutting the news and playing the hits. But radio consultant David Oakes, president of Toronto’s Forecast Communications Research, has this to say: “The best thing for journalists to do, from my way of thinking, is to go out into the real world and leave their journalism behind.” According to Oakes’s research, what people want right now are updates. To him, news directors who think it’s their role in life to tell people what’s going on in the world are using their natural human egoism as a defence against change. He says there is only so much news an audience will take. Getting to the main stories and getting “the hell off of them quick” is the key. However, John Hardy, Warren Beck’s successor as news director at CHML, says one-minute news updates cheat people: “It takes 40 seconds to tell them the weather details, and the news in 68 seconds is almost an insult. You may as well not say anything at all.” Steinfeld agrees: “You’re just giving them the hits and misses.” News directors believe they might be less vulnerable if management came from the newsroom instead of the sales department; however, this is not often the case. Beck suggests instead that news directors get out of their cocoons and find out what the rest of the station is doing. “If you’re not involved in management decisions, your department is the one that’s going to be hit the hardest.” You have to spend money to make money, but Pierre Nadeau says few stations have strong enough financial backing to commit the millions of dollars needed for the long term-say, five years -to develop a top-ranked newsroom. “You certainly wouldn’t get there without ulcers,” he says. “You could pump $5 million a year into it and still not know what the results will be.”

The future of news on private radio stations doesn’t rest solely with the CRTC. The decision to make the necessary investment in news budgets to pay for the labor-intensive news coverage rests with station management. News directors, take heed.

Violins pitch and drone eerily behind his commentary. Now you’re on the ground, about 10 metres from a shack where a large black woman is standing in the doorway. She’s looking right at you, waving her left arm, pointing into the house, talking excitedly. But you can’t hear her, only the narrator. He says she is Beverly, the 22-year-old daughter of Bartholomew Hlapane, former executive member of the African National Congress. He goes on to explain how she opened that door on December 6, 1982, to find herself face to face with a gunman. The narrator stops mid-‘sentence, for effect, and the woman’s voice comes up: “He pointed at me with the gun and just started shooting …not caring who he hit.” The camera pans to show holes in the wall, then cuts to a still: a file shot of Beverly’s father, Bartholomew, lying dead on the floor with shotgun wounds to his chest. His wife was killed in the attack, his other daughter paralyzed.

The narrator is Peter Worthington, former editor of The Toronto Sun, politician manque, freelancer and editor of Influence magazine. The dramatic reenactment of the Hlapane murder begins The ANC Method-Violence, a half-hour Worthington editorial on videotape that paints the African National Congress as a vicious, communist-controlled terrorist group. The brutally graphic production has been virtually ignored by the media. South African expatriates and the ANC have labeled it propaganda; Worthington prefers to call it “a personal view.” Hugh Winsor, national political editor for The Globe and Mail, who covered South Africa for the now defunct Toronto Telegram, says: “It is not srraight-up journalism. I would have seen it as more valid if he indicated where he got the footage and where he got the help.”

“Historically, it’s a new kind of war, a new kind of morality,” says narrator Worthington. “The war zone is the world, the aggressors are the PLO, the IRA, the ANC, the Red Brigade and a host of other revolutionary terrorist organizations.” Sirens howl in the background. On the screen flash pictures of chaotic street battles and their repercussions: the dead and wounded lying on the ground; a limp, bloody body dropped into a coffin. Worthington continues: “The front lines remain undeclared and the victims can be anybody.” The violins sing their ghastly sear. Worthington guides the viewer through a series of “terrorist” acts. The aftermath of a bombing at the Rome airport. In South Africa, a woman lying on the ground, severely burned and swollen but still alive; she has been “necklaced,” collared with an oil-soaked tire that was then set afire. The hijacking of a jet in the Middle East. Though the ANC is not explicitly linked to terrorist groups, Worthington’s words and the file clips connect, in the viewer’s mind, the South African political movement to terrorism.

Worthington appears, dressed in jacket and tie, stating out from the television screen. His voice is deep and smooth, with the hint of a lisp catching the occasional “s”, his delivery flawless. “I’m afraid I’m convinced that the Western media, Western politicians and academics, and all too many church figures are not so much interested in a peaceful solution to South Africa’s problems, but want bloodshed and an overthrow of the system-at any price-even if it ends up being a Marxist regime.” Then to a shot of Beyers Naude, a top official with the South African Council of Churches. He is speaking to a crowd, pledging “peace, but peace with justice,” his head framed by the hammer and sickle on a banner behind him.

Craig Williamson, a burly white South African with a bushy brown beard and an English South African accent, appears in the video speaking out against the ANC. His knowledge of the topic is intimate: he is, according to the identification on the screen, a “former member of the ANC/ SACP [South African Communist Party].” Why he left is not revealed, but the impression is that he became disgruntled, as Bartholomew Hlapane had. In fact, Williamson was a spy for South African government intelligence who infiltrated the ANC for two years, a fact not mentioned in Worthington’s production. “He’s an articulate man, and I thought that the information [Williamson had] was what was relevant, not the reasons why,” Worthington says now. “It’s the information that’s important, not the source. [But] I wish, in retrospect, I had put that in.”

Worthington is adamant that the video was never intended to show both sides, just a different view. “I don’t expect anybody to accept it as the oracle,” he says, “but I think most of the stuff can be supported. There’s no question that I’m not trying to do the ultimate pros and cons. When you start getting into that kind of thing, you get into a great, long documentary kind of thing, which I don’t have either the knowledge or the resources to do adequately.”

He says he made the video on the spur of the moment, out of frustration with Western media coverage of South Africa. While in the country last summer on a “six or seven” week assignment for Reader’s Digest, he met up with four journalists who shared his view of Western news reporting. According to Worthington, they agreed to pool their resources and produce the tape, using their employers’ film, cameras and editing equipment (which is why he refuses to name his crew, except to say they are “private individuals” from England, Australia and South Africa).

“It’s just a question of staying after hours,” Worthington says. “It was done very quickly.” He wrote the script one morning, then read it to camera that afternoon. And while he went about some interviews for his Reader’s Digest piece (which in early March the magazine had neither received nor scheduled) a cameraman followed. The rest of the film was made up of file footage, some of it from the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation. Most of the editing was done in South Africa, with only the final cut, made in Canada. Worthington had the finished product in his hands, having spent virtually nothing out of his pocket. “If it cost me anything, it cost me a cab ride,” he says.

Distribution cost him even less. That was handled by Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, a tight-wing organization based in Toronto. CFAR agreed to the task after Worthington’s attempts to get his taped views aired on public television got nowhere, says Paul Fromm, CFAR’s research director. And while the television producers were saying no, CFAR’s members were nodding yes, snatching up 4,000 copies of the tape and its 12-page companion booklet in five months. Members of Parliament were each sent a copy, and 400 more went to major media outlets across the country.

Meanwhile, Worthington was also circulating copies to his friends, and this was how it caught the attention of David Somerville, a former employee of Worthington’s at The Toronto Sun. Somerville is president of the National Citizens’ Coalition, another rightwing pressure group in Toronto. He offered the tape to his membership, which numbers 36,000, at $12 apiece (“at cost”). The NCC sold 600-more than double what it expected. Somerville calls the video a “journalistic effort at setting the record straight on the ANC.”

Others argue differently. The ANC’s Canadian representative, Yusuf Saloojee, says, “What Worthington is doing is working the South African government propaganda machinery. It’s a distortion of reality, of what is really going on in the country. He totally stays away from state violence.”

The video is not concerned with the truth,” says Peter Harries-Jones, a former journalist in South Africa. “It doesn’t want you to believe all of it. All it wants to do is put a quote in your mind: ‘I, Peter Worthington, believe the ANC is a Marxist organization run by savages.'” Harries-Jones, now professor of anthropology at York University, believes the video could not have been made without some assistance from the South African government-a notion Worthington denies. Since censorship and other press restrictions were imposed under the state-of-emergency regulations, he says, scenes such as the ones in The ANC Method-Violence would be difficult to get. “In order to go into the [black] townships as Worthington has done, he had to have permission-particularly to get the scenes of violence.

Toronto Life editor Marq de Villiers, an Afrikaner and a former correspondent in South Africa, comments: “The video is a combination of truth, half-truth and misrepresentation.” He feels Worthington truly believes the arguments in the video. “I don’t believe he’s a liar. He’s sincere. But that doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth.”

But today the glass door is closed. Visitors are ignored, phone messages go unanswered and the pile of paperwork grows. Webb and writer David Olive are hammering out the final draft of an adaptation from Olive’s book, Just Rewards: The Case for Ethical Reform in Business, slated for the November 1987 issue. Although Webb works closely with every writer she edits, this time it seems even more important: corporate morality is a subject she feels strongly about (her father died of asbestosis acquired from working as a pipe fitter), and Olive is a writer she admires and would love to have on her staff.

At the time, however, Olive worked for one of CB’s most visible competitors, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine (he has since left there to become senior writer at Toronto Life magazine).. Some observers thought it unwise for Webb to run the adaptation because of Olive’s connection with RoB Magazine, but Webb is more interested in high quality journalism than in what others think. She wants the best for her magazine. And although she runs CB on a tight budget, she succeeds in delivering awardwinning journalism to its readers.

Olive, a boyish 30-year-old, steps out of the office for a break; he looks distracted, a bit tired. Webb is a perfectionist who will work into the night to get a piece just right. Olive stretches, lights a cigarette, then crushes the butt in a nearby ashtray. As he returns to Webb’s office, he peers over a divider at a desk cluttered with manuscripts and editorial schedules; with a wry grin he says to no one in particular: “Is there anything lying around here I shouldn’t see?” And the door shuts again. About two kilometres west of CB’s offices, which are in a fashionable block of renovated, rosy brick buildings in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market district, is The Globe and Mail building, a pale rectangular structure that exudes a corporate air. The area is filled with the sounds of construction (the domed stadium is going up nearby) and the only spot of color is a corner billboard trumpeting the Globe’s glossy upscale magazines, including its most successful venture: Report on Business Magazine.

On the top floor of the Globe building, Margaret Wente, 38, known as Peggy everywhere but on the masthead of RoB Magazine, occupies an unassuming office she half-jokingly refers to as “the penthouse.” Wente and RoB Magazine belie their newsprint-grey surroundings. Since she’s taken it over, the magazine has lost some of its stodgy self-importance. She’s added show biz, says her counterpart at Canadian Business.

Wente also knows what it’s like to be in Webb’s position-she edited CB for almost four years with few resources at her fingertips. But that’s not a problem at RoB Magazine, where she has two staff writers, a pool of talent and information to draw from at the newspaper and the option of using freelancers. “I knew it would be terrific here,” Wente says, “but I underestimated how terrific.” If one of her writers needs to interview a subject in Vancouver, he can hop on a plane. “It’s only $1,000,”she says.

Olive says Wente didn’t seem pleased when he told her of Canadian Business’s interest in Just Rewards. But she’d clearly rather not talk about it. “It’s fine with me,” she says quickly. “Anything to help David’s book.”

There is an implicit-and perhaps unavoidable-sense of rivalry between these two national monthly magazines and the hard-driving, ambitious editors who run them. Although Canadian Business is geared towards the business reader and RoB Magazine has a more general focus, both magazines essentially compete for the same readers, advertisers, stories and writers. “You can’t be a good journalist and not be competitive,” says Webb. “Both Peggy and I want to be number one.” Being number one has sometimes meant raiding the other magazine for talent: shortly after Wente joined RoB Magazine in the fall of 1986, for example, she hired away CB’s art director, Cate Cochran. CB countered by bringing in Jim Ireland, who designed the original RoB Magazine for Saturday Night Publishing Services, which contracted it for The Globe and Mail (the Globe has since moved the design and production in-house).

Canadian Business has a history that goes back 60 years. It was a Canadian Chamber of Commerce publication based in Montreal until 1977, when it was purchased by CB Media Ltd., a company formed for the purpose by Michael de Pencier (president of Toronto Life and Key Publishers), journalist Alexander Ross and businessman Roy MacLaren. As the new editor, Ross created the magazine’s personality-informative and thought-provoking business stories mixed with just the right amount of humor and irreverence. Its broad definition of business allows Webb, the third editor since Ross, to explore many avenues of journalism, from strong service pieces on how to run a business to long, hard-hitting investigative stories. Explains Calgary-based business writer Robert Bott: “Joann is interested in the issues-the politics of a piece beyond whether it works as a magazine article.”

And she, like Ross, is not afraid to experiment. Last fall, for example, she ran an operetta-like satire on the free-trade negotiations called “Die Freitradermaus.”

“Canadian Business has an edge, it’s more gutsy and has a fun tone. It was the first to really think of exploring the rock and roll business, as it did in the October 1987 issue,” says Rob Wilson, who writes the “In Print” column for Marketing magazine. “But RoB Magazine is moving a bit more in that direction. Peggy is injecting that entertainment element.”

RoB Magazine is -a relative newcomer, first published in March, 1985. It’s the flagship publication of the Globe’s growing magazine division, which currently includes city (Toronto) and travel (Destinations) titles, to be joined in September by Domino, an upscale fashion book. RoB Magazine was intended to ride on the reputation of the highly respected Report on Business newspaper section, and under its first editor, Peter Cook, it was a combination of in-depth national and international business stories. Wente’s goal is to make the magazine appeal to all The Globe and Mail’s readers with business stories and profiles, usually under 3,000 words. “Some people said that RoB Magazine was becoming more like CB and vice versa. I think there is plenty of room for both of them,” says Wente. “We’re simply going to try to satisfy that hunger for information and good wri ting and good packaging.”

The Globe’s resources have given her the freedom to create a sort of Vanity Fair of the business wotld. “The magazine is a more professional product in the sense that it’s crisper. She’s fussier about art, she’s more particular about display copy. It may be better edited,” admits Cook, who now writes a column in the RoB section of the paper. “A vast improvement.”

Jim Ireland says RoB Magazine’s sleek, modern look has caused CB to rethink its overall packaging. Perfect binding and higher-quality stock were introduced last year, and a new logo and design were unveiled in January, 1988. Ireland and Webb have launched some strong covers to try to improve the magazine’s newsstand sales. One early example was the April 1987 “How to Get Money out of the Government” cover, which advised: “Let’s face it: if you don’t grab it someone else will.” And indeed it was grabbed up on newsstands, selling 47 per cent higher than the same issue in 1986. But RoB Magazine has had a few sassy moments of its own, even though Cochran says it must maintain a more corporate image to suit the Globe’s readers. The shot of Toronto clothier Harry Rosen wearing nothing but a very wide tie in last October’s issue may have been the result of a serendipitous photo session, but it took a sure hand to publish it.

“She has an easier job because she does not have to survive on newsstands and I do,” says Webb. “I have to get people to pay [$3] for the magazine. I consider you have to work very hard to make somebody want to buy something if they think they can get something just as good for free. We have to be that much better.” She admits she’s envious of RoB Magazine’s automatic circulation in The Globe and Mail and Wente’s access to the newspaper’s resources, but insists she prefers the challenge of a paid-circulation magazine.

RoB Magazine’s distribution with the Globe has more advantages than meet the eye: because it goes out to more readers, it can command high ad rates. According to the newspaper’s own research, 880,000 people read RoB Magazine, and although Wente admits this figure is “a bit optimistic,” the magazine can claim a guaranteed distribution of 320,000. CB’s circulation from subscription and newsstand sales is just over 88,000 and it has an estimated readership of 403,000, according to research by the Print Measurement Bureau. That means RoB Magazine can charge almost double CB’s rates: $14,000 compared with $8,000 for a four-color, full-page ad. Last year, however, CB carried more pages of advertising-1,020 (an eight per cent increase over 1986) versus RoB Magazine’s 727.

“In school, I had the kind of competitiveness that made me want to get five stars in kindergarten,” Margaret Wente said in a 1985 article in City Woman magazine. A friend calls her an ambitious achiever-“a type A.” Wente went after the editorship of RoB Magazine just when Peter Cook was itching to return to the Globe’s newsroom and she had become disenchanted after a two-year stint in television. Born in a suburb of Chicago, the daughter of two business people, she moved to Toronto at 15. Wente’s mother became a financial vice-president of a mid-sized company, so Wente was sure that she too was careerbound. After earning an MA in English literature at the University of Toronto, she worked for a book publisher, then edited books at the Royal Ontario Museum, where working on the members’ publication, Rotunda, gave her a taste of magazine editing. It felt right, and in 1977 she joined The Canadian magazine as a copy editor.

Wente moved to Canadian Business in 1978 and two years later, at 30, became its editor. She was lucky, she says-opportunities like that are rare at the more established magazines. Wente worked hard to consolidate the magazine and strengthen Alexander Ross’s creation. After six years, however, she’d reached a plateau and took a $15,000 pay cut to go to CBC Television as a senior editor on the business program Venture. It wasn’t what she expected. Linda Sims, a producer-reporter for Venture, says Wente had the ability to take often-dry business information and turn it into a “tale with drama and passion,” but Wente found the atmosphere rushed and unfriendly. “TV is very hard on people, and TV people are very hard on each other,” she now says. Just the same, the experience did give her a stronger visual sense and improved her ability to focus stones.

Wente is proud of RoB Magazine’s progress under her direction and is not afraid to say so. She is especially pleased that many of the Globe’s reporters have turned out to be good magazine writers. “Some of the journalism is even better than I expected,” she says. One example is Stephen Strauss, the paper’s science writer, who complained to colleagues that he was in “magazine hell” for six weeks while producing an article for the magazine on scientist Tak Mak for the October 1987 issue. Despite his baptism of fire, Strauss now says that Wente and her staff were supportive throughout.
David Olive, who has worked with both Wente and Webb, says he always left Wente’s office “supercharged” and certain of how to proceed with a story. “Peggy is quicker to offer her own strong ideas,” says Olive, who is now also a contributing writer at Canadian Business. “Joann makes minor suggestions and would rather you seized on ideas yourself.”

Webb’s style is more chatty and personal, compared with Wente’s businesslike approach. Wente, who has never been married, doesn’t mix her social and professional lives and seems reserved, even a bit shy, when the subject steers away from the journalistic world. “She is more of a malelike manager,” remarks Olive.

But some view Wente as blunt and intimidating. “Peggy can insult you with snarky comments about your work,” says a writer who has worked with both editors, and who asked not to be identified. “She doesn’t have the sensitivity of Joann.”

Webb grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Toronto’s east end, the second of four girls and a boy. “Joann has always been kind of fierce about her background,” says a former co-worker. “When she was younger she had a reverse snobbery about being what she considered ‘poor,’ and I think to some extent she still carries that around with her.”

But Webb managed to put herself through Carleton University’s journalism program and in 1974 joined Weekend Magazine in Montreal as a copy editor. Liz Primeau, who was copy chief at the time, remembers Webb as hardworking, intense and idealistic. “We always used to tease her about a green dress she wore incessantly, and she got pretty sensitive about it,” says Primeau. “But she was so conscientious about paying off her student loans and helping out her family that she wouldn’t buy any clothes.”

Webb moved back to Toronto from Montreal and took a job at Maclean’s. She became managing editor of Toronto Life in 1977, but quit in 1979 because of a personal conflict with the upscale values of the magazine. She returned to Maclean’s until 1981, when she became editor of Harrowsmith. That lasted a year, until former editor James Lawrence regained ownership of the magazine in a divorce action. She then went on a year-long Southam Fellowship-a journalism sabbatical awarded in association with Massey College at the University of Toronto. In October, 1984, she joined Canadian Business as a senior editor and left on maternity leave eight months later. She was named editor in January, 1987. Webb finds her roles as editor and mother to her daughter Callan, now 2, “constantly exhausting” even with a lot of help from her husband, writer John Gault. Her competitive nature makes her push herself and her staff to the limit. She explains: “Mostly I compete with my own standards, which are so rigorous that I never meet them. I always, always, always want things better, better, better.”

When Webb joined CB, she had little experience with business journalism and admits to an aversion to numbers. Overseeing the magazine’s last annual issue on the country’s top 500 businesses was “a descent into hell,” she says. To complement her generalist background, she hired Wayne Gooding, a former editor at The Financial Post and partner in his own business, as managing editor. She relies on experienced and loyal writers, people like Mike Macbeth, who has written for CB under each of its editors and won’t write for a competing magazine. She calls Webb a writer’s editor who never insults and always consults before making changes to a manuscript. “I’ve won six or seven awards for business writing in the last two years,” she says. “I was never even nominated for one before working with Joann.”

When it comes to industry awards, Canadian Business is winning the competition hands down. In 1987, it picked up three gold National Magazine Awards, a National Business Writing Award, two first placings at the Authors’ Awards, four Canadian Business Press Awards and top placings at the Canadian Food Writers’ Awards. RoB Magazine, while winning top awards for its art, has lagged behind on the editorial side. Wente finds this lack of industry recognition a bit discouraging, but has learned over the years to be philosophical about awards. But Webb is ebullient: “I am very proud we cleaned their clock over awards.”

Even with the inevitable rivalry between them, Webb and Wente are hardly enemies. “But we don’t have lunch and trade story ideas,” Wente says with a laugh. They are just respectful acquaintances who recognize each other’s talents.

Webb and Cate Cochran, however, remain close friends despite Cochran’s move to RoB Magazine. Explains Webb: “Cate wants to be the art director of the best magazine and I want to be the editor of the best magazine. On that level we’re in direct competition, but not conflict. I think we have survived very well. We’ve brought in one of the most gifted people ever as our art director, and that was our bold countermove. It’s a small world.” Then she adds with a slight smirk, “Touches of incest.”

Although he continues to write his “Media Watch” column for Maclean’s, wine pieces for Toronto Life and EnRoute, and weekly political commentary for two Halifax dailies, the void of not working for the Globe-a newspaper he’s been associated with for most of his career-is painful. “I’ve lost a feeling of respect and affection for a newspaper that I had a large measure of admiration for,” he says. “I also regret that a person like Norman Webster, who I thought was a good friend, treated me in such a deplorable manner.”

Bain had been making weekly contributions to the Globe from his home in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, since 1981, when his familiar byline reappeared on the editorial page. It had been missing for six years during his time at The Toronto Star. When Report on Business Magazine was started in 1985, Bain was asked to do a monthly national affairs column. Both of his columns dealt with the vagaries of political life in Canada, as seen from the perspective of a long-established observer.

Though Bain was now far from the centre of power-and his pieces sometimes suffered from it-his thoughts were always informed by vast experience and articulated in the cadenced style his readers had come to expect. Nevertheless, in the early months of last year, the work of the man whom Allan Fotheringham once called “the wittiest columnist ever to grace Ottawa” vanished from the pages of The Globe and Mail.

Officially, George Bain decided to give up his editorial-page column, but his decision was the result of frustration at the end of a year-long battle over its future. The negotiations began amicably enough in May, 1986, when Bain met with Webster in the Globe’s Toronto headquarters. Among the things they discussed was the issue of retirement. It pertained not only to Bain, then 66, but to other senior Globe writers, including fellow page-six columnists Richard Needham and Jean Howarth, business writer Ronald Anderson, sports columnist Trent Frayne and society watcher Zena Cherry. “He [Webster] was dillydallying about what to do with Needham, who apparently had promised that he wouldn’t stop writing until he dropped dead over his typewriter,” Bain says now. “I didn’t want to end up in the same embarrassing situation, so I suggested that we talk later in the year about my eventual phasing out.” Webster agreed, but the talk never took place.

Instead, Bain received a curt letter, dated September 24, 1986, from the new editor of Report on Business Magazine, Margaret Wente. She wrote, in part, “When it came to hard choices, we could not justify two columns on national affairs, and the one that seems to have the strongest rationale in our magazine is Peter Cook’s column on finance and the economy. Although we have enjoyed your column very much, we have decided that we will not continue to carry it after the January issue. On behalf of our staff and readers, I would like to thank you for your valuable contribution over the past issues.”

The shock of the first letter had barely subsided when Bain received another, dated October 10. This one was from a regular reader, who claimed to have heard Richard Needham speaking in Sarnia. Needham, wrote the reader, had told his audience that Bain had been fired from his editorial-page column.

Bain sent an anxious letter to Webster on October 18 in an attempt to get some clarification about both matters. Concerning Report on Business Magazine, he wrote: “I had heard quite a few good comments on what I was doing there, and none from anyone on the magazine to the contrary, and I certainly hoped that whatever else happened, my association with the magazine would continue. Since then I have had a letter, not from Geoff Stevens, who asked me in the first place to do that column, but from the new editor, a person I have never met, nor even spoken with on the phone, saying, in just about so many words, ‘thank you very much for your contributions, but we do not need you any more.’ Labor relations have never been the strong suit of The Globe and Mail, but I think I deserved better than that-and better than to have heard via a reader of The Globe and Mail that a staff-member, evidently chattily, is telling others that a decision affecting me on Page Six has already been taken.”

Webster took almost two months to reply. His letter, written on December 9, acknowledged that the Globe has had problems with labor relations but denied Needham’s alleged remarks. Webster wrote, “This particular embarrassment is made worse by a mischievous elderly gentleman who does not know what he is talking about.” But he went on to say: “We have a lot of Ottawa comment these days, and our Focus section should give more emphasis to Ottawa coverage in general. The time probably is coming to phase out your column. 1 would suggest we think about the summer parliamentary break as a reasonable time to do so.”

On the subject of the magazine, Webster confirmed that Wente had been given a free hand. She had chosen to kill the Angus Reid Poll as well as Bain’s pieces. “I told Ms Wente to make her own decision,” Webster said. “I am sorry she apparently conveyed it to you with little grace.” He also apologized to Bain for the way things had turned out and for any hurt that may have been caused.

Bain could not be placated. On the contrary, Webster’s comments about Richard Needham, who has since given up his Globe column, infuriated Bain. Stoking his anger was Bain’s belief that Webster had used him as a lever to get rid of Needham. On January 7,1987, he wrote to Webster, accusing him of pulling just such a trick. Bain stormed: “You wrote, in effect to say that it was all untrue, the work of a mischievous old man, no such words had ever passed the lips of Norman Webster-but that, by the way, yes, you’re fired. In the circumstances, you really couldn’t expect me-could you, really? To regard your apology for ‘the hurt this may have inflicted,’ other than as a piece of rank hypocrisy. In talking with Jeff Simpson, I called you a son of a bitch, which adequately reflected my feelings, but was imprecise. Let me amend that to say that the weak and devious way in which you have dealt with this matter has been contemptible.”

Bain’s rage had an effect. Webster replied on February 20, calling Bain’s letter insulting and constructed around a ridiculous conspiracy theory. He denied any connection between the Needham and Bain cases and reaffirmed the editorial control given to Wente. Then he went much further. Webster explained what was behind his suggestion to stop Bain’s column by summer recess: he and his senior editors believed that the column “wasn’t all that great; that there were [sic] a lot of tap dancing without as much content as one expected from a Bain column.” Ironically, Webster ended the letter by saying the quality of Bain’s column had improved “in the past couple of months” and offered to keep it going until the end of 1987.

Managing Editor Geoffrey Stevens, who took over Bain’s Ottawa column in 1973 for seven years, confirms the Globe’s opinion about the declining quality of Bain’s work. “He was writing what was to be a national affairs column but he ran into a copy supply-line problem. He was out of touch with what was going on in Ottawa by being down east and his columns were beginning to reflect what was near and dear to George Bain.”

In spite of the slight, Bain accepted Webster’s offer but did not relent from his earlier views. He wrote two more months’ worth of columns but gave up, disheartened, in late April. “I was sitting at the typewriter when I asked myself, Why am I doing this anyway? I didn’t like the people I was working for. I was only doing it half-heartedly. So I threw away what I’d been writing and wrote my last column.” It was a farewell to his readers and he sent it in at the end of the month. Remarkably, it was spiked. Bain found out when he made his customary phone call to his editor, Alastair Lawrie, to check on the column’s arrival. He was passed on to Associate Editor Laszlo Buhasz, who told Bain that it was long-standing policy at the Globe not to print farewell columns. Bain’s only recollection of such a thing involves his move to the Star in April, 1973. Dic Doyle, then editor and now a senator, asked Bain not to write a final column to give Geoff Stevens a chance to take over the space smoothly. Bain complied as a favor; he believes this to be the birth of the “policy.” Geoff Stevens says otherwise, that the Globe will not publish first and last columns that declare themselves to be thus.

Bain’s column did run in Douglas Fisher’s space in The Toronto Sun of May 11, 1987 (it also appears opposite). Fisher introduced the piece by praising Bain’s informed, fair and witty writing, and he added a postscript: “An honest, modest departure, I say.” As for the Globe, there was no published word on Bain or his departure. Curious readers who wrote to the paper were given the simple explanation that he had stopped writing his pieces.

George Bain is one of the pioneers of the political column in this country. He began, in the 1950s, by filing straight stories from Ottawa. The Globe and its readers liked his insightful, to-the-point writing style so much that the paper eventually allowed him to write a regular column. His ability to spot the inconsistencies between political words and actions combined with good reporting to earn him a grudging respect in Ottawa.

Without George Bain, there would be no Jeff Simpson. Thirty years ago, he set the standard by which political columnists still abide. He was one of the first to resist the subtle co-optation that comes from observing powerful people in close quarters. He cast himself as an unofficial opposition, carefully monitoring the activities of the government. “If I could claim anything, it would be that I popularized Ottawa watching,” he says now.

His newspaper career began with a copy boy’s job at The Toronto Telegram in 1936. He eventually became a regional stringer in rural Ontario, then a salaried reporter. After he returned from the war, in which he was a bomber pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bain worked again, briefly, for the Telegram, then signed on with the Globe in 1945.

Bain first went to Ottawa in 1952 to join the paper’s two-man bureau. He quickly developed a reputation for strong-willed but well-balanced reporting. Clark Davey, who went on to be the Globe’s managing editor for many years, joined Bain in 1955 as junior correspondent. Davey, who is now publisher of The Gazette in Montreal, recalls Bain’s legendary intensity and integrity. Davey says that Bain would often become physically ill when he got wrapped up in a piece. Bain was sometimes found in the marble-lined stalls of the press gallery men’s room throwing up in mid-story.

Davey particularly remembers Bain’s treatment of the Herbert Norman story. Norman was the Canadian ambassador in Cairo who committed suicide in 1957 after being accused of being a communist spy. Bain was so livid over External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson’s lukewarm defence of Norman that he wrote a column demanding Pearson’s resignation. Later he regretted the piece, written in the heat of the moment, and wanted to tender his own resignation to the paper. Only after much persuasion and reflection did Bain decide to stay on.

“George has a personal integrity that still comes through in the stuff he writes for Maclean’s,” says Davey. “He’s the closest thing we have in Canadian journalism to a conscience right now.”

The Sun’s Douglas Fisher, who shared a television program with Bain on Ottawa’s CJOH ftom 1964 to 1969, has similar views about him. Fisher thinks that Bain’s courage and integrity made him the Globe’s first serious columnist in Ottawa. “He was the pioneer and the symbol of the Globe’s political reporting when there was little coming from the Hill. Younger people [at the Globe] may think that Bain spends too much time rehashing history, but they don’t realize what kind of beacon-a lighthouse-he’s been to the paper. Today, political columnists are a dime a dozen. Thirty years ago there were none. He was the first bona fide political columnist in Canada.”

Bain’s tenure in Ottawa was interrupted by a posting to London from 1957 to 1960 and to Washington from 1960 to 1964. He returned and stayed until 1973. That year, the Star lured him away; it offered a lot more money to the man its reader research showed to be the most-read writer on the Toronto papers. He was made editor of the editorial page. Bain now thinks of this period, which lasted until 1979, as a mistake. “I should have done it earlier in my career or not at all. I was used to life as a columnist. A columnist conceives a piece, writes it, sends it in, and usually doesn’t hear from anyone about it.”

Bain so disliked the committee process of writing editorials that he got himself sent to Europe again, between 1974 and 1977. When he came back to Canada to write a daily column, he found himself increasingly at odds with the paper’s editorial stance. Unlike the Star, for example, Bain was particularly critical of the way the Trudeau government handled the repatriation of the constitution. The gap continued to widen until, as Bain says, “I sort of gradually fell out of the relationship with the paper.”

He began to think more seriously about the overtures he’d received from John Godfrey, now editor of The Financial Post but then president of the University of King’s College. Bain went to Halifax in late 1979 to become director of the school of journalism. “We viewed him as the dean of Canadian journalism. He was the person who could command respect and who had the contacts that would be important to the school in its early days,” says Godfrey now. “We also felt that he was the perfect role model because he would remain a practising journalist by appearing in the Globe. He was a terrific teacher- patient, with high standards and the students adored him.” Bain formally renewed his Globe associations when he first took the director’s job, reappearing in the paper in September, 1981. This arrangement worked well enough until the bitter dispute of 1986.

Bain stepped down as director after five years, but he and his wife, Marion, liked Nova Scotia so much they bought four acres of land over looking Mahone Bay harbor, an hour’s drive from Halifax. They live in a Cape Cod-style house that Bain designed himself, surrounded by trees and rhododendrons. His legendary wine collection is safely stored in the basement. He often stomps about the countryside with his Airedale terrier, Jake, enjoying the pleasure of solitary thought. His freelance pieces keep him bent over the computer in his den for close to 40 hours a week. He leads a good life, fleshed out by the memories of an accomplished career. But there’s an air of disquiet about George Bain now. It is the hurt felt by a reflective and cultivated man whose dignity has been deeply offended.