Though there is nothing like a consensus on how pervasive libel chill is in Canada, it has nevertheless become the basis of a movement to liberalize our libel laws, particularly their onus on the media to prove the truth of what they publish or broadcast. American law, under which the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, is looked to as a model.

But many Canadian editors don’t want major revisions in the law, especially if they lead to adopting US standards, which the editors see as encouraging irresponsible reporting. And media lawyers, such as Stuart Robertson of Blake, Cassels & Graydon, make the case that having to prove truth ensures that the media are doing their job-namely, being accurate. Robertson, whose firm is one of the largest in the country with 240 lawyers, says “The law doesn’t do anything that the editors themselves don’t do…Not because they’re terrified of libel law, but because they want to get it right.” Viewed this way, current libel legislation is more a useful check on reporting than a hindrance.

And as Jock Ferguson made clear on Media File, it certainly didn’t hinder the Globe last fall when it ran “Behind the Boom,” an eight-part series exposing the corruption surrounding land development in York Region, a formerly rural municipality north of Toronto. Ferguson and co-writer Dawn King spent 10 months interviewing over 200 people, working closely with lawyers and even allowing counsel to meet three controversial sources, all so they could get the story straight. For their efforts, the Globe has been served with a libel notice to the tune of some $20 million.

But the story had another more important effect. After reading about the close ties between city councillors and developers, and about the conflicts of interest, voters were able to bring their outrage to the polls. The result: Allan Duffy, the mayor of Richmond Hill, and Carole Bell, the mayor of Markham, were defeated. Now both face investigation by York Regional and Ontario Provincial Police.

Under the threat of litigation, the Globe made sure its stories were airtight. “We wrote only what we could prove. There were a number of things we were close to proving, but we wrote only what we could prove,” says Paul Palango, the paper’s city editor. And that, as far as Palango is concerned, is as it should be. Being able to back up what’~ printed is a given. It doesn’t have to limit reporting. The “Behind the Boom” series is proof that the media can do their job within the existing legal framework. As for the Globe, it’s confident that if it should go to court it will win. Palango feels strongly that this kind of aggressive, thorough reporting is the best way to fight the chill. It all comes down to getting the goods, being determined and publishing the stories.

Many editors share this conviction. While those at large dailies such as The Montreal Gazette and The Toronto Star pride themselves that their own coverage is just as intense, others acknowledge that the chill is real.

So does Stephen Bindman, president of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and national reporter at The Ottawa Citizen. “Libel chill is certainly out there,” he says. “I think most reporters can give you an instance of someone saying ‘Oh well, I’ll sue you,’ and if it doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing the story, it at least gives you cause for concern.”

That’s the consensus among the CIJ’s thousand or so members across the country, according to Bindman. However, he stresses that there is no consensus on how widespread a problem the chill is.

For its part, the Globe isn’t worried about the 130 notices it’s received over the past five years. And it’s unlikely that any of them will go to court. This situation is typical of Canadian libel actions. Although there are no statistics, most media law specialists agree that over 90 percent of all libel actions never go to trial.

But for The Ottawa Citizen, the issue is not whether an action actually goes to trial: it’s the “cause for concern” Bindman speaks of. And that’s why the Citizen cited libel chill as one of the reasons why the laws should be changed. In its much publicized defence of a suit brought by former defence minister Robert Coates, the paper’s lawyers argued that current libel legislation infringes on the freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The charter challenge failed and the action was settled out of court but some important questions remain. Do the laws need revision? If so, should they take the American form?

Here’s what happened. While on an official tour of West Germany in 1984, Coates anda couple of his aides snuck off one night to Tiffany, a strip joint just outside the Canadian Forces base at Lahr. On February 12, 1985 the Citizen reported the escapade and said that the evening’s jaunt may have posed a security risk. Three hours after reading the story, Coates resigned his portfolio and announced his intention to sue. In his article “Reversing a Chilling Myth” for Content magazine last fall, University of Western Ontario law professor Rob Martin said the Citizen had an adequate defence within the existing laws to argue the case. It could have proven the truth of the statement or used the plea of fair comment to vindicate itself. Instead it spent a million dollars challenging the validity of the existing laws and accomplished nothing.

But the paper was looking to change legal history, to deviate from hundreds of years of precedent. It was fighting for reform-the American way. As it is, Canadian courts presume that the words printed or spoken in the media are false, that the defendant is acting out of malice and that the plaintiff is entitled to damages. In the States, at least in the case of a “public official”-and this can be anyone from a policeman to a movie star, there is no absolute definition-the situation is reversed and the onus rests with the plaintiff not only to prove that the words are false but that they were published or broadcast with malicious intent.

Critics of the Canadian system, the Citizen in particular, say the burden of proof is too restrictive. Knowing something is true and being able to prove it in court are two different things. Neil Wilson, one of the lawyers who represented the paper in its fight against Coates, says he knows of situations where stories have been pulled – stories that were accurate but couldn’t be proven in court. Going the American route would certainly make the journalist’s job easier, but there are still those like Marq de Villiers, editor of Toronto Life, who fear the consequences of such a move. De Villiers, whose magazine is facing the largest libel suit (launched by the Reichmann family) in Canadian history, says, “In the US, in some instances, it has gone too far and it has become virtually impossible to prosecute a successful libel claim and I don’t agree with that. The press should be held accountable and I think in the US it has made for sloppy journalism.”

It has also made for big financial problems. Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled that public officials could not recover damages unless they proved malice on the part of the defendant, the number of actions and the amount of damages have soared. The court decided to give journalists the freedom to make mistakes in the hope of encouraging open discussion and debate. With all of the onus on the plaintiff, the judges thought the number of libel suits would decrease and the libel chill would be warmed. That was 25 years ago and today the situation is worse. It seems that the right to err has led to the very sloppiness de Villiers fears.

According to the latest statistics, in the US since 1980 there have been over 30 damage awards of one million dollars or more in media libel actions, with three of those greater than US$25 million. The good news is that only one damage award over one million dollars has been upheld, and the average award after all appeals have been exhausted is just under $150,000. The bad news is that legal fees before trial have increased in the last six years to estimated $150,000.

That’s costlier than the highest damages ever awarded in Canada. Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the 1978 Quebec Superior Court award of $135,000 in the case of civic politician Gerald Snyder against The Montreal Gazette. Before the record Snyder suit, awards throughout the country usually ranged from under $1,000 to $75,000. But since there is no ceiling on damages, that could easily change pending the outcome of the Reichmann family’s action against Toronto Life.

The billionaire Reichmanns are suing the magazine for $102 million. The dispute is over an article that ran in the November 1987 issue. In it, freelance writer Elaine Dewar traces the rise of the Reichmann family fortune. The Reichmanns claim the legitimacy of their business dealings is being questioned and the family honor is at stake.

If Canada does move in the southern direction, the outcome will likely be more of the same: massive and numerous libel suits, making the Canadian media that much more susceptible to libel chill. And what about the quality of reporting? What happens when journalists are freer to make mistakes? In the US, Westmoreland vs. CBS et at and Sharon vs. Time are indications. In the first case, General William C. Westmoreland sued CBS for US$120 million. The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, a documentary that ran in 1982, charged the retired four-star general with lowballing estimates of enemy strength to show progress in the war. In other words, CBS accused Westmoreland of lying to his superiors, his president and the American people. In the second case, Time charged Ariel Sharon, then defence minister of Israel, with encouraging the massacre of hundreds of noncombatants, including children, in Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. He sued the publication for US$50 million.

In both cases, the media did not take the time to verify the facts or their sources; they presented what they thought was true, not what could be proven true. In the end, the credibility of both stories took a beating. Nevertheless, Westmoreland dropped his action in 1985 because, in order to win, he would have had to prove malice on the part of CBS, an impossible task. And a month earlier, the suit initiated by Sharon was dismissed. Again, even though he was able to prove that what the magazine had printed wasn’t true, he could not prove that Time published the story knowing it was false.

In her book Reckless Disregard, which examines both trials, Renata Adler says that CBS and Time were proceeding on dubious principles. It was their duty, or so they thought, to resist the chilling effect at any cost. And that resistance meant standing by their stories even though they were wrong.

That doesn’t happen here and Stuart Robertson says it’s because the same stigma isn’t attached to making honest mistakes. In Canada there is a greater readiness to admit a mistake, and to apologize or print a retraction for it. “In the US it’s a different story. There it’s not just a question of admitting you’re wrong. If you do, then that’s equivalent to admitting negligence,” says Robertson.

So the American media may be freer to make mistakes but the Canadian media are freer to atone for them. And while most Canadian journalists feel there is room for improvement in our libel legislation, they’d rather abide by the laws as they stand than see wholesale changes.

There is another argument for maintaining the laws Patrick O’Callaghan, former publisher of The Calgary Herald, feels that having to prove the truth is necessary not only to prevent sloppiness but to protect the rights of the individual: “I think it’s only right that the media should not have open season to libel and defame as they will, without expecting the person being defamed to have some rights under the law. You can’t expect a free ride by claiming the right to free and untrammeled speech.”

The World is Watching premiered at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals in September 1988 and since then has won two prizes at the Nyon International ~ Film Festival in Switzerland and a Gold Hugo from the Chicago Film Festival for best social/political documentary. Although critics in Canada have praised the film, most Canadians may never get to see The World is Watching. Private networks rarely show documentaries, and so far TVOntario is the only public broadcaster to air it. At the CBC, Bill Morgan, director of TV News and Current Affairs, rejected the film because he feels it omits important facts: “The difficulty for us is that he wants to sell one side of the story. We have an obligation to sell both sides of the story.”

Raymont does not accept Morgan’s criticism. To get his film on the CBC, however, he has offered to change the ending-an especially sore point for Morgan-but the CBC won’t bite. In his 18-year career as a filmmaker, Raymont has made 30 documentaries and won 15 national and international awards: although many viewers and critics find his point-of-view documentaries stimulating and praiseworthy, his approach is unacceptable to the CBC.

After years of battling TV News and Current Affairs on behalf of point-of-view documentaries, Raymont will soon be knocking on other doors at the CBC-this time to get funding for dramatic films. His desire to gain access to larger audiences for his work has driven him to feature filmmaking. “I’m a politically committed filmmaker,” Raymont says. “I’m just trying to broaden myself out so I have more tools at my disposal, to help people understand the world better-to make the world a better place.”

Raymont’s films are an extension of the documentary tradition that started in Canada with John Grierson at the National Film Board in the forties. Raymont also worked at the Film Board and, like Grierson, he believes films should have a social purpose. Although his earlier work was closer to reportage, his later films developed more defined points of view, ranging from the destructive effect of television on the Inuit culture, also rejected by the CBC, to a flattering portrait of Bill Mulholland, the CEO of the Bank of Montreal.

Now Raymont’s quest has brought him to the Canadian Centre for Advanced Film Studies where he is learning to develop a script and direct actors for a fiction film. In the sitting room of the huge, old stone mansion that houses the Centre, Raymont sprawls out on an armchair as though it were his own. With his legs stretched across the coffee table, he looks more likely to face an adventure in the wilds of northern Canada than a day of filmmaking in Toronto. He wears scruffy jeans and a rough red-plaid shirt with an undershirt peeking from under the edge. Unruly, wavy hair frames his face. The khaki fedora on the table with driving gloves beside it are the only clues to his urban roots.

“I think everybody has a point of view and for any journalists anywhere to think that everything they do is balanced and fair and equal is crazy,” Raymont says dogmatically. “I don’t believe in the notion of journalistic objectivity.” He goes on to say that documentaries are valuable because, unlike news reports, they give a wider perspective on a subject and can express a point of view. “The tragedy in this country is that people cannot see documentaries on Canadian television,” he says. “Documentaries are the soul of Canadian filmmaking, and when the soul dies, that’s it.”

Not surprisingly, Raymont has been described as “arrogant” for his forthright opinions. Usually calm and reserved, he loses patience when talking about petty bureaucracy and what he considers the closed minds at the CBC. Raymont’s concern about preserving the documentary spurred him to co-found the Canadian Independent Film Caucus in 1983 with six other filmmakers. The small but persistent group now has 80 members across the country who lobby provincial and federal governments and their agencies to ensure funding for independent documentaries. Partly as a result of their efforts, Telefilm Canada has begun to fund documentaries, one of the first being The World is Watching.

Despite these apparent successes in obtaining more funding for documentaries, Raymont is now moving into features. But the shift is typical: throughout his career he has avoided being pigeonholed and has tried to work only on projects that were true to his beliefs. Born in 1950, he grew up in Ottawa where his father is still a civil servant. The activism of the sixties had a profound effect on him and his turns of phrase often reflect that era. “There really was a revolution. I’ve kept that going,” Raymont says. “I’m just lucky I’m in a profession that allows me to be expressive, creative and an activist.”

His film career started after seeing two art films in an English class at Queen’s University-Federico Fellini’s 81/2 and John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving. “They really blew me away,” Raymont says dreamily. “I’d never seen films like that in my life.” He made films at Queen’s and after graduating became an editor and later a producer and director on contract to the National Film Board in Montreal. In 1974 he spent a year teaching film and video production to the Inuit in the Arctic, and has returned there on several occasions to make documentaries. “CBC news guys think that by living with people you’re losing your objectivity,” he says. “But I’m of the other school, like George Plimpton-1 believe in living with people to report on them.”

Eventually Raymont felt stifled at the Board and left to become an independent filmmaker, forming his Toronto-based Investigative Productions Inc. in 1979. From 1980 to 1985, Raymont also produced nine radio documentaries for CBC’s Sunday Morning -including profiles of filmmakers and a report on the Iran/Iraq war-but he never had problems airing material that expressed a point of view. One of Raymont’s Sunday Morning assignments took him to Nicaragua in 1984 to pick cotton with a brigade of Canadians organized by Canadian Action for Nicaragua, whose mandate is to educate Canadians about that country. In the few months they were in Nicaragua, Raymont and his friend, writer Harold Crooks, were struck by how different the reality there was compared to what they were accustomed to seeing on television. It was then that they decided to make The World is Watching.

Crooks and Raymont, along with co-producer Jim Monro, approached various funding agencies as well as public broadcasters in Holland, Sweden, the United States and Britain’s independent Channel 4. But the obvious choice for funding and airtime was the CBC where Raymont talked to Paul Wright, then in charge of purchasing independent documentaries, about a presale. Wright rejected the proposal on the grounds that it was difficult to get hard data on a subject on which there were so many different opinions. Wright also said that, although the subject might interest journalists, it would not interest the general public.

The three producers secured enough funding from other sources, however, and Raymont shot the film in Nicaragua in the fall of 1987. Returning to Canada with 30 hours of film, he edited it down to 59 minutes and again tried to sell it to the CBC but was repeatedly turned down. “The film is flawed and untruthful in its one-sidedness,” says Morgan. ‘The people who stand accused have no chance to answer for themselves.” He points out that the CBC’s obligation to “sell both sides” derives from its own journalistic policies, the terms of the Broadcasting Act and CRTC regulations (see p. 43). “I get fired up when journalistic techniques are used to promote one point of view,” he says. “Raymont’s trying to do journalism and that’s not the way to do it.”

Morgan’s rejection of point-of-view documentaries concerns journalist Ann Medina, who also studied feature filmmaking at the Centre and appeared on a panel after a public screening in Toronto of Raymont’s film. A former correspondent and anchor at the CBC, Medina criticizes The World is Watching because Raymont “didn’t get his facts straight.” But she also feels that the CBC policy of rejecting point-of-view documentaries could reduce the number of controversial items aired by the corporation.

Raymont’s film is controversial, not just in its subject matter but in his treatment of it. Morgan’s objection is justified in that none of the ABC executives accused of pandering to advertising revenues and to the Reagan administration ever comment on how much these factors influence editorial decisions. And Raymont can be his own worst enemy. The film’s most powerful evidence for his case is the whittling down of the sequence at the farm cooperative to focus on a familiar cry of vengeance in order to fit a story line ABC editors had preconceived in New York. Unfortunately, Raymont blunts his argument by using this sequence to make the larger-and less credible-case that every news judgment reflects compliance with the Reagan administration. Nevertheless, the film does provide excellent insights into the world of journalists in the field as they make difficult decisions, flub their lines and worry about the competition. Moreover, by dissecting political and editorial pressures, the film breaks down the mystique of television-the public’s most trusted source of news.

Now Raymont’s power as a producer will be tested in the big leagues of feature filmmaking. The first dramatic film he hopes to make, On the Line, reflects many of his own political interests: a sixties radical is drawn back into political activism when he helps refugees from Central America enter Canada. Producing feature films in Canada means Raymont will still be making the rounds to various funding agencies, including the CBC. Perhaps his point. of-view approach will be more acceptable there when it reflects his own life rather than the lives of others.

Curled up on a couch in her den, Donna Tranquada, a Toronto radio reporter, watched the item with mounting distaste. What she saw-or more accurately, what she heard-left her disgusted and angry. It wasn’t just the reading of the names, one of which she recognized, that got to her but the manner in which they were read. “It was done deliberately,” she would say later, “and, it seemed to me, with great vim and vigor.”

Like many journalists in Toronto, Tranquada was alarmed at the way CFTO, the largest private television station in the country, was covering its own labor strife. CFTO appeared to be using highly selective reporting to sway its viewers’ sympathies and urge its dis-affected workers to cross the picket line. “They were basically using the air-waves as a weapon in their dispute with ~ their employees,” says Tranquada. “It was most unfair.”

If Tranquada was upset with CFTO’s name-reading, she was livid a few days later when she read in the Star that Metro police had not initiated those charges; in fact, they had been issued by a justice of the peace as a result of complaints laid by three working CFTO employees. In its report, CFTO had neglected to tell its viewers that these were its own private citizen charges. Tranquada spent a month struggling with her conscience over whether to become involved. Finally, her ethical concerns won out and on July 13 she wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. “I am appalled that this type of biased and inaccurate reporting can get on the air,” her letter said. “Are there no ethical or professional guidelines for broadcasters when their stations are in strike or lockout positions?”

It was a bitter lockout that lasted all summer. In the excruciating heat, tempers on both sides of the picket line came close to combustion. And when the battle was over, CFTO had clearly won-partly, many believed, because it had as ammunition control over Ontario’s top-rated news show.

The major issue was not wages but jurisdiction over CFTO’s nonunion production arm, Glen-Warren Productions Ltd. Local 79 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees & Technicians (NABET) wanted to expand its jurisdiction so that CFTO could no longer use nonunion employees at Glen-Warren. CFTO’s negotiators would have none of that and, after talks broke down, the union membership voted 81 percent last May 11 in favor of a strike.

On June 6, CFTO put forward a final offer-only, say NABET officials, so that management could add an ultimatum: unless a deal was reached by midnight the union would be locked out. With that deadline just six hours away, NABET’s negotiators balked.

The station locked out 296 employees and went off the air at midnight. Local 79-whose bargaining unit consisted of technical, production, office and news staff, including anchors immediately threw up a picket line. But when programming resumed the next day, the familiar anchors were in place; they had stayed on the job, asserting that NABET had never really represented them.

They were not alone. Other union members broke ranks to help management keep the station on the air. They were ferried across the picket line at CFTO’s suburban Toronto facility in dark blue buses with reinforced tinted windows. To further hide the identity of the passengers, black felt curtains were tacked up inside the buses-just one indication of CFTO’s well-laid preparations. Mobile homes appeared in the parking lot under the glow of added lighting, and extra security watched over a management team freshly trained on the station’s equipment.

All this had been masterminded by a management group reporting to Douglas Bassett, president and CEO of CFTO-TV Ltd., a licencee owned by Baton Broadcasting Incorporated. Bassett and his father John, CFTO’s founder, are involved in Baton, which is majority-owned by the department store Eaton family. The Bassetts and the Eatons are socially as well as financially close-knit, and both have successfully fought unions in the past. Thus Baton was ready for the lockout, and CFTO’s newscasts continued without interruption.

NABET responded by charging Baton with union busting and slanting its news coverage. In the second week of the dispute, Local 79 filed a complaint with the CRTC outlining examples of “gross abuses” in CFTO’s coverage. NABET’s international representative, Allan Foster, says the union’s position was that CFTO was “propagandizing their own newscast, using the public airwaves to demoralize the locked-out employees.”

The dispute dragged on for twelve weeks, during which time about a third of Local 79’s members crossed the picket line. On August 31, NABET settled for the same wage package it had been offered in June and surrendered its push for jurisdiction over GlenWarren Productions. Only about 50 of the remaining pickets went back to work, while about 120 preferred to take severance pay. As part of the settlement, Local 79 agreed to withdraw its complaint to the CRTC.

Still, the question remained: did CFTO use its access to the public airwaves to promote its cause during the dispute? With that in mind, the Ryerson Review of Journalism asked two experienced broadcast journalists to review tapes of CFTO’s early coverage on which the complaints to the CRTC were based. Neither Robin Christmas, a field producer at The Journal, nor Gail Scott, former host of Canada AM and now a professor in the School of Journalism at Ryerson, has any direct connection with CFTO or NABET.

Christmas condemned the coverage outright. The stories, he said, “couldn’t have been more directly representing the management position and totally ignoring the union.” They were “embarrassing. ..a parody of a newscast.” Furthermore, he commented, “The news organization allowed itself to be used as part of management’s strategy to win the dispute.”

Scott is a part-time member of the CRTC but didn’t participate in its subsequent investigation of the complaints. She viewed the same tapes as Christmas but saw them differently. “Those sins are committed nightly on every newscast,” she said. “I don’t think you can make a case that it was unfair to [the union]. No newsgathering operation ever tells the whole story. They were telling selective truths.”

A sin of omission is equally as much a sin,” Christmas countered. “It is equally inaccurate to omit important information.”

Though hardly a disinterested observer, one correspondent who was with CFTO for a dozen years and never went back recalled: “I was 10 percent angry at the station for using its transmitter and its newscasts against me as a locked-out employee. Ninety percent of it was just sheer disgust as a reporter at what they were doing.”

World Beat News, Tuesday, June 7, 1988: For its first report on the lockout, CFTO has made up a graphic that sits next to Smith’s well-known coiffure. It’s a photograph showing one of the dark blue buses surrounded by picket signs, and the red caption below it reads “Strike,” not “Lockout.” In the photo, the picket signs appear to be hitting the windows of the bus. The graphic implies a highly-charged atmosphere, but the taped footage of the incident which appears later in CFTO’s report shows a tired crowd of about 30 pickets simply circling the bus. The graphic is used a number of times during the early coverage of the dispute.

Night Beat News, Thursday, June 9, 1988: Anchor Christine Bentley introduces the day’s report on the lockout by mentioning that “one out of five union members has crossed the NABET picket line to return to work.”

She hands over to Tom Gould, a CFTO executive producer at the time, who then lent his estimable name to CFTO’s coverage. Gould finds two more ways to drive the point home: “When the dispute began at 12:01 Tuesday morning, there were 296 members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees & Technicians on the company payroll. As of this afternoon, 60 union members, or 20 percent of the total, had defied their union and endured the catcalls of the picket line to return to work”

Next comes a clip of news anchor Ken Shaw accusing NABET leader Allan Foster of withholding information from its members and not allowing them to vote on the company’s offer. “That’s when,” Shaw says, “most of the newsroom decided that it would disassociate itself from this union and come in and do our job.”

Bassett is up next, standing in front of a large CFTO sign and speaking into a mike held off-camera. “The employees out there are in a legal lockout,” he says, “and they’re entitled to come back to work whenever they want. I’ve asked them to come back to work. Not one of them has been fired and I want to make that perfectly clear.” What he does not make clear is that to get back in they must first leave their union.

A Tom Gould voiceover introduces Bassett’s next comment: “On Wednesday, Ontario premier David Peterson was quoted as saying government advertising on CFTO would be canceled. Today, Mr. Bassett said that is not true.” Bassett: “David Peterson reiterated to me this morning that the Government of Ontario will abide by all legal contracts which they [sic] have with our company.”

But that was not exactly the story. Peterson didn’t say that Queen’s Park would cancel its ads; he announced, in fact, that the government wouldn’t renew any contracts or place any new advertising until the dispute was settled. And he was as good as his word no new government commercials appeared on CFTO until November.

The entire lockout package runs two minutes and 41 seconds; the Peterson item, which other media found the most newsworthy, is relegated to a mere 18 seconds.

World Beat News, Monday, June 13,1988 – Gail Smith is reading the intro to an item on NDP leader Bob Rae’s visit to the picket line. In a softened paraphrase of Rae’s comments, the script has him saying that “the owners of the company just don’t like unions.” If Rae had anything to add, CFTO viewers never learn of it. They are not allowed to hear from Rae himself. What they see is a tape -picked up from another station which shows scenes of the picket and Rae talking to people on it. What they hear is not Rae’s voice, which I been wiped, but Smith’s. “The atmosphere on the picket line,” she rea “was more civil than usual as the NI leader made his call. Cries of “come out you miserable scum’ and other abuse directed at working NABET members were cleaned up for the opposition leader’s visit. No CFTO crew was sent the line. Mr. Rae has said that he w not be interviewed by CFTO.”

If the station’s viewers had switch! to Global News that evening, they would have heard and seen Rae sayinl “There’s no question this company an the Bassett family are anti-union. The don’t want to bargain. They don’t war to have a union. They don’t want t have anything to do with it. They don’ have a very twentieth-century attitude to the way the world works.”

NABET was never allowed to speak for itself on CFTO. The station made no attempt to interview any union spokesperson and no reports were made from the picket line. In the early going, most of the reporting-especially, it appeared, any aspect of it that involved Bassett-was handled by Gould. According to Gould, who had once been an outstanding correspondent for the CBC, it would have been feckless for any CFTO crew to approach NABET for comments. “What union representative,” he says, “would be willing to be interviewed by a scab reporter?”

Of the key players at CFTO, Gould was the only one who commented to the Ryerson Review, however briefly, on the coverage. Persistent attempts to interview Bassett and Ted Stuebing, vice-president of news and public affairs, eventually brought this response from Bassett: “I know you’ve been calling Tom Gould and Ted Stuebing. I’m calling to let you know that we don’t want to discuss anything with you. I know you want to see our tapes, but we won’t allow it… I will not discuss the merits of the coverage, ours or others, good coverage, bad coverage or biased coverage. I will not discuss it.”

The CRTC received three letters of complaint about CFTO’s coverage of the lockout. NABET and an individual member of Local 79 wrote to the commission in June, Tranquada in July. The CRTC contacted CFTO on June 21 requesting tapes of the newscasts and any comments the station wished to make. It gave CFTO 10 days to comply.. In his response on June 27, Keith Campbell, Baton’s vice-president of corporate affairs, said: “Let me assure you that the coverage over CFTO- TV is factual. The Commission should be aware that union spokespersons would not be interviewed by any CFTO-TV employee defying union directives.”

However, Gordon Hunter, NABET president, told the Ryerson Review that NABET did not issue anything to its union members telling them not to speak to CFTO crews.

On October 3, the CRTC wrote back to Campbell and reminded him that CFTO’s “privileged access to the public airwaves should not be used to promote its own economic interests under the guise of informing the public.” It also advised Baton that the complaints and correspondence would be put on CFTO’s public file and would be available for comment at the station’s licence renewal hearing. In fact, that hearing started on the same day the CRTC’s letter was dated but the complaints were not raised by the commission. Fernand Belisle, secretary-general of the CRTC, says that the complaints were not brought up because “they were in the process of being determined” by the commission. This process required another response from Baton, giving it a further chance to explain CFTO’s coverage.

On November 4, Belisle received a three-page letter from Bassett defending his station’s actions. “Firstly,” Bassett wrote, “you will find in reviewing the tape that we did present the union’s position on the labor dispute-namely that it was an attempt by CFTO-TV to ‘bust the union.’ That allegation, unfounded though it was, was contained in a number of our newscasts.”

Regarding the CRTC’s citing of the Ontario government’s position on advertising as an example of CFTO’s incomplete reporting, Bassett replied: “CFTO- TV did, in fact, provide complete and balanced, full and factual coverage of this issue.” On the station’s overall performance, Bassett’s letter said: “All of the news we presented during the labor dispute, including our stories on the dispute itself, were fair, balanced and above reproach.”

The complaints were finally put to rest on December 23. The CRTC wrote Bassett and attempted a weak scolding. Over Belisle’s signature, the letter said: “The commission feels compelled to point out that the coverage given to the labor dispute was hardly a sterling example of what you have described as a ‘full, accurate, balanced, judicious, fair and unbiased account.’ ” And there the matter ended.

NABET’s Foster feels the CRTC intentionally dragged its feet until the dispute was over: “The only way the CRTC would have had any absolute effect was to call CFTO on the carpet immediately. There is no excuse for having a complaint filed on June 15, on something that serious, really only get to the forefront come October-once this thing is already over.”

One of the complaints the CRTC’s letter did not address was Tranquada’s concern about those names Smith had read on the air. Tranquada was particularly upset about the implication in Smith’s script that police had laid the charges. “Metro Police did not issue any such warrants or make those charges,” she had written.

In fact, on June 14, as the lockout was entering its second week, three working members of CFTO’ s news staff filed complaints with a Scarborough justice of the peace against seven locked-out workers. The seven had been trailing CFTO crews and making it difficult for them to shoot on location without picket signs waving in the background. On the basis of the complaints, the justice of the peace issued arrest warrants. But none of this was reported on the CFTO newscast.

Constable Hugh Blake, the warrant officer at Forty-second Division, which had to execute the warrants, says, “We arrested them, which we had to do because there were warrants outstanding. They were citizen complaints. We, the police, didn’t lay the charges. I don’t know why they went down and laid them.” No officers were sent out to arrest the flying pickets, according to Blake. Instead, the seven were allowed to turn themselves in a few days later. Most of them were not even aware of what was going on until friends and family heard about the warrants on CFTO and passed the word along. Responding to CFTO’s actions, Foster says, “These people are absolute bastards. They were out to discredit the people who worked the flying pickets.”

Ken Shaw, CFTO’s outspoken anchorman, again takes issue with Foster. He says that if the same situation had occurred during a CBC dispute, CFTO would have reported the charges-and he asks if the station should have acted any differently just because the dispute was in its own backyard. “The answer comes ringing back ‘no!'” he says. “It’s obviously not a pleasant thing to do. Difficult decisions have to be made and hopefully they were made without bias.”

But for Robin Christmas the situation was obvious: “The business of laying a charge and then using that as an excuse to name individuals on air is just totally an attempt at intimidation. In fact, they were doing what they were charging. “

Three months after the dispute ended, the charges were finally settled in court. Last December 12 at Old City Hall, the seven accused faced a judge for the fourth time. There had been three remands plus mug shots, fingerprints and the threat of a maximum six-months’ sentence or a $2,000 fine.

With the three ex-colleagues who had laid the complaints looking on uncomfortably, the seven lined up before the bench. There they heard the Crown prosecutor tell the court that the complainants were dropping the charges. There was no property damage or physical injury, the prosecutor noted-and the complaints had only arisen from a labor dispute.

The front doors of CFTO’s Agincourt building have been locked since midnight on June 6. Anyone wanting to enter must first go through security clearance at the side doors. Unexpected guests are not welcome at “the family station.” In the lobby behind those locked doors hangs an imposing portrait of John Bassett, the founder. Under it, sitting on a pedestal and encased in glass, is CFTO’s trophy to itself: a foot-long model of a dark blue bus, complete with miniature driver.

When Wente finished speaking, the reactions around the room ranged from recognition to resentment. After all, the topic had been discussed by the board members before. But due to the success of the program, there had never been any pressure to find alternatives to commercial funding. Among the more seasoned members, the mood was definitely cross. Lynn Cunningham, executive editor of Toronto Life and a board member since May 1986, resented the Globe’s implications that “we were a bunch of unethical schmucks.” After much lively discussion, the board meeting ended with a resolution to form a five-member Endowment Committee including Wente-to investigate alternatives.

The Globe’s reservations wound up a year of controversy about media awards, set off in 1987 by the publication of Elaine Dewar’s article entitled “The Mysterious Reichmanns: The Untold Story” in Toronto Life. The Reichmanns slapped Dewar and Toronto Life with a $102-million libel suit. Because of the action, Dewar’s piece was rejected for consideration last spring by the Royal Bank-sponsored National Business Writing Awards. In the ensuing uproar, two judges resigned and nine publications representing 134 entries withdrew amid cries of censorship. By the end of the year, the National Business Writing Awards program had folded and another-the Canadian Food Writers Awards-was looking for a new sponsor.

Despite the controversy and the Globe’s criticism of the National Magazine Awards program, the problem is not the value of journalism awards-virtually all members of the Canadian media agree that they encourage and reward high standards of writing and visual presentation. The debate, particularly within the Toronto area, is instead over the sources of funding for the awards programs, and the degree to which a special-interest group or commercial sponsor becomes involved in the decision-making process. The issue splits the print media right down the middle. One side contends that as long as the sponsor remains at arm’s length-as a mere financial underwriter-the integrity of the program is uncompromised. The other side maintains that commercial sponsorship automatically taints the awards process by raising the spectre of potential conflict of interest.

But there are different kinds of commercial sponsorship, and the media industry itself makes distinctions. Generally, few awards programs might be justifiably accused of being directly influenced by the sponsor or sponsors. Those that might are usually sponsored by special-interest groups like the North York Fire Fighters Association or the Metropolitan Toronto Police Association, and are put down by most journalists. The fire fighters unabashedly reward favorable coverage of their members. The winners are chosen in four categories-news story, photography, television coverage and radio coverage-from a scrapbook and tapes kept by the association. And while the police awards try to maintain the appearance of neutrality by employing a three-member judging panel of former journalists with no direct ties to the police, all winners are cleared with the association before being made public.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the special interest group awards lie the pristine National Newspaper Awards-a program funded and administered entirely by the newspaper industry itself. The program’s money comes from a trust fund established in 1949 by the late George McCullagh, former owner of The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Evening Telegram. Over the years, many Canadian newspapers have also contributed to the trust fund. The Toronto Press Club administers the program. While the prizes ($1,000 for each of 13 categories) and administration together cost around $21,500 annually, the president of the press club, Manuel Escott, says the program consistently turns a profit on the dinner (costing an additional $12,500 or so) through ticket sales and advertising for the magazine, The Byliner, which announces the winners.

It is the middle ground that is being fought over programs like the National Magazine Awards, the National Business Writing Awards and the Canadian Food Writers Awards. The complaints are not with the programs per se but how they are funded. Single sponsors of awards programs are particularly vulnerable to criticism, and the withdrawal of a single sponsor is far more likely to kill a program if the sponsor decides that participation is no longer desirable. The possibility also exists that administrative decisions could be aimed at appeasing the sponsor rather than protecting the integrity or reputation of the program itself.

What happened last year with the Canadian Food Writers Awards is a case in point. The awards were established in 1985 for Nabisco Brands Ltd. by Argyle Communications Inc., a Toronto public relations firm. Argyle administers the program and selects the judges from the ranks of food and media experts. In 1987, Gerry McAuliffe, a reporter with CBC Radio and a long-time crusader against commercial sponsorship of journalism awards, asked the Ontario Press Council to rule on the ethics of this program. At the awards banquet last June, while McAuliffe’s complaint was pending and the uproar over the National Business Writing Awards was still in the news, Nabisco announced that it was withdrawing its sponsorship of the program. The company blamed corporate restructuring for the pullout, but it was apparent that the program was no longer yielding the goodwill Nabisco expected. Argyle, which owns the rights to the awards, hopes to find another sponsor to fund the approximately $100,000 in annual expenses.

When the controversy erupted over the banned Reichmann article, the Royal Bank wasn’t getting any goodwill either. The terms of its sponsorship of the National Business Writing Awards called for three bank representatives on the organizing committee; the Toronto Press Club, which coordinated the program, appointed three others. The committee in turn named 25 judges, most of whom, including the chief judge, Kenneth Barnes of Barnes Investor Relations Ltd. in Toronto, had legal or business backgrounds. After the Reichmanns sued Toronto Life and, subsequently, The Toronto Sun (for a review of Dewar’s piece) and the Globe (for a report on the first two actions), Barnes sought a legal opinion. He was advised of the possibility that the bank and the judges could also be sued if the story was admitted. On that basis, Barnes disqualified the piece. The judging panel wasn’t consulted in the decision. Both of the judges who resigned (Peter Desbarats and Robert Fulford) were journalists. And Escott, who was on the organizing committee, says neither he nor the press club was consulted. He defends the club’s lack of protest, saying that the whole thing happened so fast the club had no opportunity to take a stand.

Last September, the Royal Bank and the press club quietly buried the awards in a press release stating that the bank’s major goal in establishing them in 1972-to “underline the importance of business journalism as a distinct field”-had been fulfilled. The bank has refused further comment.

The news of the death of the National Business Writing Awards only served to remind the industry of the vulnerability of single-sponsor commercial programs, no matter how they are organized. David Olive, senior writer at Toronto Life and the new president of the National Magazine Awards Foundation, saw the dissolution of the program coming but nonetheless mourns its passing: “The bank folded completely in the face of this first significant controversy in the history of those awards I’m extremely disappointed in the Royal Bank of Canada.” Geoffrey Stevens, then managing editor of The Globe and Mail (one of the first to join the stampede of entry withdrawals on the heels of Toronto Life), says he was approached by the Royal Bank in an effort to salvage the program’s besmirched reputation but would have nothing to do with it.

The Globe’s quest for purity was reinforced by McAuliffe’s complaint and the Ontario Press Council’s subsequent ruling. In his complaint, McAuliffe states his belief that accepting money from corporations is a serious conflict of interest which can result in “selective journalism” and the loss of credibility in the eyes of the public for the writers and news organizations who accept such awards. In its ruling last November, the press council concluded that, while media sponsorship alone would be ideal, there is nothing to stop commercial sponsors from setting up their own programs. Prohibiting staff from entering such contests would be “impracticable” and “discriminatory.”

Drawing on submissions from several commercial sponsors (including the Royal Bank) and from media industry members, the council issued a seven-point list of guidelines to try to “ensure that commercially sponsored awards are free of direct control of sponsors.” Among those recommendations: having a committee to select judges that is independent of both sponsors and entrants; having the judging panel chosen by the committee and composed of journalists and/or those with “expertise in the broad field to be judged”; and notifying sponsors, who should have no right to overrule the judges, of the results at the same time as the winners are announced to the public.

The Globe used the press council’s decision as an opportunity to codify its policies on commercial sponsorship. In a November memo from Norman Webster, then editor-inchief, the staff is encouraged to aim for industry-sponsored awards. The paper, Webster wrote, plans to both publicize the winners and match the prize money for awards in this category. On the other hand, awards sponsored by special interest groups-such as the North York Fire Fighters and the Metropolitan Toronto Police-cast doubt on the credibility of the entrants and are to be avoided. Webster’s memo tried to reduce the issue to black and white.

For its part, the Ontario Press Council simply avoided the black: its judgment sidestepped McAuliffe’s primary concern about the ethics of commercially sponsored programs. His reaction to the ruling was predictable. “This changes nothing,” he says. “I’ll just have to continue making speeches and try to embarrass these people.)n conflicts of interest, there are no grey areas.”

But there are grey areas. Webster’s memo itself described a middle category of awards with arm’s length judging but commercial sponsorship. The Globe disassociated itself from this category, and staff members were urged to consult the Ontario Press Council’s guidelines prior to entering on their own. McAuliffe himself, in spite of his declarations to the contrary, has been faced with his own hazy boundaries. As a reporter with the Globe, he accepted a $1,000 National Business Writing Award in 1972-before he began his crusade against corporate sponsorship.

For the National Magazine Awards Foundation, the problem was resolved by what some saw as a clear moral victory over those controversial grey areas. The catalyst to the commercial sponsorship debate-Dewar’s piece on the Reichmanns-was allowed entry into the 1987 awards by the foundation’s board of directors. Dewar went on to win two categories: the Jackman Foundation Award for Investigative Journalism and the University of Western Ontario President’s Medal for Excellence in Magazine Articles. At the awards night last May, virtually everyone in the Grand Ballroom at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre stood up and cheered when the victories were announced. Dewar’s triumphs appeared to vindicate the awards foundation, which has always maintained that multiple sponsors-properly insulated from the administrative and judging process-are less vulnerable to bad publicity than single sponsors.

At the moment, the magazine awards program has commercial or private sponsors for 14 of 17 written categories and for six of eight visual categories. Each sponsor annually contributes $2,500 toward the program-$l,OOO for the gold (first place), $500 for the silver and the rest for administrative costs. Other than writing the contribution cheque and standing on stage to hand the prizes to the winners, the sponsors have nothing to do with the awards. The program is administered entirely by a foundation with a board of directors composed of members from a cross-section of the magazine industry. The board sets the criteria for categories and selects the judges. None of the commercial sponsors has representation on either the board or among the judges.

Yet, just as the board members were congratulating themselves on their successful program formula, along came The Globe and Mail to dampen the enthusiasm. Olive, the president, says the concerns of the Globe, which it had voiced before, are valid. Nevertheless, he felt some resentment when the “new kid on the block” came in and tried to change a fundamental aspect of the program. Olive finds it ironic that the Globe is taking this stand given that, since its formation in 1985, the paper’s magazine division has been quite actively participating in programs such as the National Magazine Awards and the National Business Writing Awards.

Indeed, Webster’s classification of awards programs reflects the Globe’s own ambivalence concerning the whole issue. For example, the National Magazine Awards are mentioned in the memo as an example of the desirable category despite the Globe’s being on record as dissatisfied with the way that program is sponsored. Still, Olive would not like to see the National Magazine Awards program without the Globe’s participation (the threat implicit in Wente’s statement). For Olive, that would cheapen the program because not all of the best magazines would be competing.

There are several options available to the foundation’s Endowment Committee. But appeasing the Globe’s desire to eliminate commercial sponsors will not be easy. The yearly costs, including the annual awards banquet and salary for Sandra Eikins, the program’s executive director, run in the $160,000 range. The short-term options include hiking the entry fees (now $25) or the dinner ticket prices (from $60). Magazine industry sponsors, such as Key Publishers and Telemedia, which already contribute to the administrative costs could be asked to increase their annual donations to cover all the costs of the program. A more long-term possibility-and the foundation’s ultimate goal-is the establishment of an endowment fund: Olive says $800,000 would be needed to allow the program to be completely self-sufficient and to hedge against inflation.

Other options include seeking government funding or drastically cutting back on the awards banquet-with its flashy sound-and-light show-to the type of volunteer-run, bare-bones presentation that the National Newspaper Awards puts on. Olive dismisses these last two choices as unlikely. He says there is already a long lineup for government handouts-many of them more deserving than the magazine awards. And to scale down the awards presentation dinner would be unacceptable since it represents the height of the industry’s celebration by and of itself. In fact, says Olive, the foundation would like to seek ways of making the dinner even more first-class once the program’s long-term financial health has been assured.

The most likely short-term option calls for pooling the contributions of sponsors to end the association of individual corporations with specific award categories. That would likely meet with mixed reactions from the current sponsors. For example, Murray Stewart, public relations manager for Canada Packers Inc., says his company wants to support “excellence in journalism, and that means factual and balanced journalism” in a category that relates directly to the company’s own business. Although Canada Packers has never sought any influence over the administration of the program, Stewart makes it clear that the company’s interest is exclusively in the food writing category it sponsors. Given Stewart’s position, it’s possible that any change in the approach to sponsorship might result in the withdrawal of Canada Packers’ financial support.

However, the pooling option should still be acceptable to other sponsors-the Toronto Dominion Bank, for instance. The bank sponsors the humor award, a choice it deliberately made, according to the bank’s public affairs representative Susan de Stein, in order to “avoid any kind of suggestion of conflict.” As a participant among a pool of contributors, the bank would remove itself one step further from any possibility of perceived conflict. According to Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail views this option as a step in the right direction.

The discussion concerning the ethics of commercial sponsors and the viability of alternatives is fascinating for Wayne Grady, the editor of Harrowsmith. As one of Wente’s fellow inductees to the National Magazine Awards Foundation board, Grady just sat and listened, for the most part, to the debate around the room. He recognizes that Wente and the Globe have a valid point, but he knows from his experience at Harrowsmith before its purchase by Telemedia Publishing that many magazines operate on a shoestring. He has concerns that if the industry itself takes over the program’s funding exclusively, the smaller independent magazines -This Magazine, for example-might be shut out of the decision-making process by the affluent members. Olive disagrees, pointing out that the board of directors always seeks a fair representation of large and small magazines as members. In fact, Lorraine Filyer, managing editor of This Magazine, is a veteran member of the foundation’s board.

Regardless of the alternatives being discussed by the foundation, there will be no changes in the program and awards dinner this May for the 1989 competition. Still, the issue of commercial sponsorship continues to nag at the consciences of many board members, including Grady. He won a National Magazine Award for a piece about tobacco farming and migrant workers entitled “Tobacco Road” which was published by Saturday Night in 1982. The story won the silver medal in the agriculture category then sponsored by Canada Packers. Grady recalls he had no worries about the sponsor nor any compunction about accepting the award at the time. Still, he muses about his possible response if the sponsor had been, say, Macdonald Tobacco. Or, he wonders, what if the story had been about milk-fed veal?

That attitude, along with public trust in the press itself, came into question in the 1960s. In a pioneering essay, A.H. Raskin, assistant editor of The New York Times editorial page, suggested that the role of ombudsman could help make the press more accountable to the public. Modeling the concept after the ombudsman used in Swedish government, Raskin wrote that newspapers should have an internal critic to police the quality of the papers’ service to their communities and the authority to make changes when necessary. The first news ombudsman, a former senior editor, was appointed at The Louisville Courier-Journal soon after in 1967.

But it was not long before another American newspaper ombudsman tested the limitations of the role and encountered difficulties. In 1972, Ben Bagdikian left The Wa-shington Post after less than one year as ombudsman, frustrated by the restrictions on his criticism. “I had a feeling that there was no point in pursuing it,” says Bagdikian, now a communications professor at the University of California at Berkeley, “unless there was greater openness to the kinds of things I thought were important to write about.”

Bagdikian wrote about black employees at his paper who felt they were, being discriminated against-but he also defended the. paper on a related issue of racist coverage. Later he suggested in a seminar at Harvard that economic boycotts would be effective in getting all papers to listen to the public. These actions alienated him from his employers, and some of his more critical columns were killed. The Post management could not take the medicine it had asked Bagdikian to administer, and he resigned.

Borden Spears was Bagdikian’s Canadian counterpart. In 1970, the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media headed by Keith Davey placed the question of media accountability before the nation. Spears was a significant contributor to the Davey inquiry, and was appointed as the Star’s ombudsman in 1973. Wary of the dangers of government regulation and concentrated ownership, he devoted his career to the issue of freedom of the press and urged the public to demand better performance by the media. Spears showed that success in the position depended on how strongly individual ombudsmen expressed their views, and certainly no one at the Star could have stifled him. Unlike Bagdikian, he spoke out against abuses in the system and was allowed to remain within it.

Two more Canadian papers appointed ombudsmen- The Edmonton Joumal in 1978 and The Montreal Gazette in 1981 -but many problems raised by the Davey committee remained unresolved. A second national inquiry into the state of the press, the Royal Commission on Newspapers headed by Tom Kent with Spears as a commissioner, was launched in 1981 and again questioned whether the media were serving the public interest.

The Davey inquiry had proposed a national press council, but the Kent Commission recommended even stronger legislation that included the ugly possibility of censorship through compulsory press councils. The media considered both voluntary press councils and ombudsmen to be less painful measures than government regulation, and a cautious new era of self-policing began. “It seems that dozens of publishers across the country discovered the merits of press councils and rushed to join existing ones and create such agencies where none had hitherto existed,” wrote the late media critic Dick MacDonald. “Coincidence, of course, pure coincidence.”

Since the Kent Commission, three more papers have adopted ombudsmen: The Calgary Herald in 1983, The London Free Press in 1985 and The Winnipeg Free Press in 1987. More are unlikely. Of the III daily newspapers in Canada, only those with a circulation of over 100,000 are considered able to sustain an ombudsman. Removing a highly paid senior staff member from the editorial process, setting up an office and writing off administrative costs is an expensive proposition. In fact, there are only about 50 ombudsmen employed around the world.

As well as the economic constraints on the appointing of ombudsmen, the mandate of the role has diminished. In direct reference to the example Spears had set at the Star, the Kent Commission envisioned an ombudsman as a freewheeling critic, “a role of free rein to take up issues hitherto not made public, to interpret and arbitrate points of view, to fight with operating editors if need be.” But the fight has changed for today’s ombudsmen since they rarely address the industry’s larger problems. “I don’t know how realistic it is to ask individual ombudsmen to start breaking taboos which the industry as a whole regards as unbreakable,” says Desbarats. “I don’t think that is how the employer sees their role at all.”

All ombudsmen work according to individual agreements with their employers but their mandates are similar. Canadian ombudsmen claim that there are no restrictions on the subject matter of their columns, and most report only to the publisher. Editors check the copy for factual and style errors but are not permitted to tamper with the content. On the other hand, ombudsmen cannot alter newsroom policy and, like press councils, have no authority to effect lasting improvement.

On the larger issue of public trust, no ombudsman disputes the need to make changes and rebuild credibility; But they feel that the best method is “to give the reader a voice within,” according to Barry Mullin, ombudsman for The Winnipeg Free Press. “The ongoing thing we are working towards is strengthening our ties to the community and our credibility by reporting accurately and quickly confessing to our mistakes.” The office of ombudsman, then, has become a bureau of justification whose function is to explain to the public the internal factors affecting a story. Adds Mullin, “You become an apologist for some of the failings of the newspaper.”

The ombudsmen react to complaints but do not often initiate criticism. “You sit here and wait for people to respond,” says Mullin. “You can see a glaring error and yet no one will call in about it.” But there is no lack of calls: when he became the first ombudsman at the Free Press, Mullin found “a pentup need” for someone to handle complaints: “The feeling I got was of a little boy with his finger in a dike with 20 holes instead of one.” In his first 10 months in office, he handled 1,200 calls and letters.

The load is typical. At The Montreal Gazette, former ombudsman Clair Balfour handled more than 3,000 complaints in 1987. Balfour believes in addressing the larger issues by fixing small problems first. “Borden Spears was operating at a different level,” he says. “That’s not to knock what he did -but he wasn’t down there getting his hands dirty with individual problems. The long-term fallout is that if you solve enough problems in a consistent way by demonstrating over and over again the way things ought to be done, it establishes patterns and standards.”

Wading through day-to-day complaints is the staple of an ombudsman’s life. There’s always the one from the reader who says that the newsprint keeps rubbing off on his hands, or the person who calls to complain that the TV guide is missing. Most complaints are about routine coverage rather than journalistic principle. It’s not surprising that, since The Toronto Star’s current ombudsman, Rod Goodman, used to be the consumer help columnist, readers sometimes confuse his new role with the old.

The consumer help aspect that has taken over the role also has benefits for senior staff members-the ombudsman deals with irate customers so they don’t have to. Also, from the publishers’ point of view, by deflecting heat from their readership ombudsmen get senior editors out of the kitchen and make the operation run more smoothly. As a result, ombudsmen may lose sight of their first concern-the readers. “There are some who seem to be doing mostly promotional columns that in the end boost their paper,” says Bagdikian. “Nobody ever reviews the paper itself.”

Having graduated from the ranks of senior editors, most ombudsmen are certainly qualified to review the paper and dish out criticism. But this experience also limits critics suddenly stranded in the middle of a newsroom full of old colleagues whom they are required to judge in print. The appointment means questioning career-long loyalty, and ombudsmen may not address certain problems because of the relationship with their employers. If they represent that paper at a public function or before a press council, their loyalty can jeopardize the neutrality that gives them their authority. For years Goodman represented the Star before the Ontario Press Council but stopped last year. “I realized it was sort of hypocritical,” he says, “for the ombudsman to go and defend the Star in a case where I believed they were partly wrong.”

Frequently ombudsmen end up completely isolated from their colleagues. “It’s a very lonely occupation,” says John Brown of The Edmonton Journal. “Sometimes you seem to be ranged against the entire newspaper.”

Generally he doesn’t socialize with people in the newsroom and has removed himself entirely from the editorial process. “Distancing myself was difficult-I know lots of people who just can’t do it. They keep writing about what ‘we’ did, when they mean what ‘they’ did. They just can’t separate themselves from their colleagues.”

Bruised egos heal very slowly, as Jim Stott discovered at The Calgary Herald: “I’ve had editors cross me off their Christmas lists when I’ve taken shots at them and columnists write outraged memos to the publisher demanding that I be fired and run out of town.”

One solution to the problems of an in-house ombudsman has been to appoint an outsider. In Sweden the first newspaper ombudsman was, in fact, a judge. When Bagdikian left the Post, he suggested hiring outside ombudsmen on two-year contracts that can neither be canceled nor renewed, to ensure the integrity of the position. Since then, the Post has had ombudsmen from the competing daily, The Washington Star, the government, universities and outside industries. These ombudsmen are free to comment on the larger issues facing the media without fear of losing the job. However, having outsiders come in and sift through their pages is too dangerous for papers that don’t want to wash their dirty linen in public.

Almost all newspapers still hire their ombudsmen from inside, expecting that a fellow staff member can command respect and cooperation. “An ombudsman is not in any sense a disciplinarian,” says Balfour. “It is an office that operates on the basis of perceived moral authority.” Ombudsmen defend their position within the ‘newspaper, saying that if the position were held by an outside media critic, the news staff probably wouldn’t heed the advice. “It’s got to be a senior editor,” says Goodman, “so that, if they had to, they could pull rank.”

Whether ombudsmen are hired from inside or out, the major issues have not changed since Borden Spears wrote: “No question about it, the popular press is not universally popular. Its credibility is under attack, its motives are suspect, and its influence is often seen as destructive.” But since today’s ombudsmen define their roles as problem-solvers, they are so bogged down with paperwork they can’t address the larger issues-nor are they encouraged to do so by their employers. Balfour believes that if more senior managers felt secure about their product, there might be more ombudsmen and a wider mandate. “The industry needs more publishers and editors with more self. confidence,” says Balfour. “It’s the people at the top who set the tone for criticism and change.” But until then, the voice of dissent will have to remain a mumble. “

“The hills are alive… with the sounds of young couples and their new families enjoying life on the shores of Lake Simcoe. It’s Alcona Woods, the latest project by Econ Homes, and the quality ~ houses aside, it’s a location that’s drawing attention for its vibrant mix of rural and urban. In fact, even empty-nesters – are showing interest in the locale, which is only an hour from Toronto, 10 minutes from Barrie and right smack dab in the middle of Fun Country…

“Econ is offering certain quality items in these brick-and-siding houses as standard specifications. The bricks are clay. The wood using [sic] for framing is kiln-dried, which means bye-bye nail pops and other nuisances caused by green wood drying out. The subfloors are made of o/a-inch tongue-and groove plywood, for squeak-free sturdiness. The basement boasts a rough-in for a two-piece bathroom, and a ceramic backsplash embellishes the Eurostyle kitchen. And to top it all off, every homes [sic] comes with a fireplace brick front with mantel.”

Sloppy prose aside, the place sounds great. If the newspaper says glowing things about the project, developer and location, they must be good, right?

Not necessarily. One of the primary goals of these sections is to make money, and the best way to do that is to keep the advertisers happy. As a result, the editorial content may become a public relations vehicle. Although homes sections across the nation tend to fall into this trap, the effect of the sections in The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun is more widespread because they are operating in the most active real estate market in Canada. The stories in both sections are surprisingly flattering to the builders and their products. They tend to make both sound flawless.

No one can attest to the positive nature of new home reports (also known as site stories) better than the builders. “They write nice things about whatever project or builder they’re writing about,” says Alex Amon, vice-president of marketing and sales at Georgian Homes, a frequent advertiser in both papers. “It’s a form of free advertising.” Dellbrook Homes has never had anything negative written about its projects in the homes sections either. Perhaps that’s because all the information for the site stories is provided by the builders.

Even The Toronto Sun’s New Homes editor David Henderson acknowledges that site stories are a form of boosterism, a freebie for the builder. “These stories are supposed to be accurate but they’re very positive,” says Henderson. “It’s like a lawyer trying to put someone’s case in the best possible light.” Unless there is a way of making something negative sound positive such as “the homes offer easy access to the GO Train” instead of “the proximity of the GO Train will rattle your brain “-these undesirable features stay out of the stories. “Sometimes you can do it obliquely,” Henderson adds, “but we tend not to mention railway lines.” As New Homes editor, he is responsible for the editorial content of the section: choosing wire copy, sorting through press releases, turning out a column and writing site stories or assigning them to freelancers. What his position doesn’t include is the selection of site stories-that’s left to the advertising department.

Sales representative Dan Chirnomas determines which builders get site stories and when, and he bases those decisions on advertising. It’s quite simple. The more you advertise, the more “editorial support” you get. “Obviously, the guy who runs the most ads, I have to take care of,” says Chirnomas. “I have to prioritize; I can’t ignore a company that does three times as much advertising as anyone else.” Thus Greenpark Homes, which runs four to six pages of advertising in the Sun per week, demands and gets 12 front-page site stories a year. Geranium Homes takes half as many ads as Greenpark. “As long as they maintain that level,”says Chirnomas, “I will allot Geranium half as many front-page stories.”

At The Toronto Star, the New In Homes editor Warren Potter and his assistant choose the site stories. The selection process occurs in one of three ways: Potter and his assistant go through the ads in the section and assign some of the sites that either haven’t been covered recently or haven’t been covered at all; they also sift through requests for coverage they receive in the form of press releases or brochures and assign stories from among them; and finally, Potter says, “Now and again, one of our salesmen will say ‘Hey, so and-so is a good customer. Can you put him in a site story?’ I say, ‘Sure, give me the details,’ and I assign it.”

The Star prides itself on keeping editorial independent of sales in the New In Homes section. But David Henderson, who was Potter’s assistant at the Star before joining the Sun, says it’s almost impossible to keep advertising and editorial totally separate. Though he acknowledges that the link between site stories and advertising was less direct at the Star, he doesn’t think that makes much of a difference. In his experience, Henderson says, the Star was still publishing “advertising freebies.”

To its credit, the Star risked the wrath of advertisers and attempted to assert some editorial autonomy when Dennis Morgan took over as assistant managing editor of editorial special sections in March 1988. He removed site stories from the front page of the section, and both he and Potter have been reminding writers “to cut out the flowery bullshit” so that site stories don’t sound so much like rave reviews.

Morgan is also thinking about other possible changes to the section such as printing floor plans in addition to artists’ renderings so that writers can spend less time describing homes and more time describing locations-including such hitherto unmentionable details as the proximity of railway lines and industrial sites. “We should start mentioning those sorts of things,” he says, “but these things have been done in such a way for so long that it takes a while to reeducate people.”

In the meantime, homes sections continue to draw healthy revenues. The base rate for a full-page black-and-white ad in the Sun’s New Homes section is approximately $3,500, and the section generates around $3.5 million in annual advertising revenue. A full-page ad in the New In Homes section of the Star costs $14,000 on average, but the Star won’t reveal exact advertising revenues; it does admit, however, that the section drew somewhere between $10 million and $20 million in 1987.

But none of this is new, and profit driven sections are accepted in the industry precisely because of their long history. “Years and years ago, when The Toronto Star was an exemplar of fierce and independent attitudes towards advertisers,” says media critic Walter Stewart, “it nevertheless gave away the homes section.” In magazines, revenuerelated sections are generally considered acceptable if they are clearly identified as such, and if the body type is different from the publication’s standard type face. Stewart argues that the same guidelines should apply to newspapers-that every site story in the homes section ought to be identified with a reverse white-on-black line in at least 18-point type saying” Advertising Feature.” Adds Stewart, “That might help some, but if the body type is the same as the rest of the newspaper, what we’re trying to measure is, how dumb is the reader?”

Readers aren’t that easily hoodwinked, according to Mike Strobel, managing editor of the Sun: “Any reader who is in a position where he or she can buy a house is intelligent enough to realize that virtually all homes sections, regardless of which newspaper they’re in, will essentially be advertising vehicles.”

Yet the Sun’s section editor disagrees -Henderson says there’s a danger of misleading the public. That’s why he put a little disclaimer at the end of each site story in the November 27, 1988 issue of the Sun saying they were based on information provided by the builder -an idea reminiscent of “fine print” tactics, and a rather feeble warning when compared to Walter Stewart’s 18point reverse white-on-black label. Even such a small change, however, was discontinued after that issue. Henderson’s boss, Sunday Sun editor Mike Burke-Gaffney, believes that readers are aware of the nature of homes copy so there’s no need to tell them. That’s the stock answer at the Star as well. Morgan agrees when Potter says, “Most people with a grain of sense realize that these are not endorsements. Why put something in that’s fairly obvious?”

But is it? Despite what the editors say, site stories do lend builders credibility and, for many readers, appear to be an endorsement of the product. The advertisers know it. David Henderson has received letters from advertisers saying “Thanks for running that site story. We sold $7 million in homes last week.” Debi Jones, marketing director of Dellbrook Homes, agrees, adding that site stories work 100 percent better than ads: “It’s one thing for a builder to say I’m wonderful but it’s another thing for somebody else to write about it. A site story gets into the prospective purchaser’s mind that this project must be good if the Sun or the Star is writing about it.”

The Sun’s sales rep knows it, too. “People tend to be naive,” says Dan Chirnomas. “Rather than a pandering piece of advertorial, they see [site stories] as literary gospel.” And, even if the decision-makers also acknowledged that readers see site stories as endorsements, the Sun wouldn’t risk making editorial changes that might upset advertisers. “Before we implement a change in format or content,” says Chirnomas, “we always go to the builders first and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, what do you think?’ “

Now the damage has come full circle and advertisers are generating their own pseudo-editorial copy. Some are designing ads to look like site stories with a headline, an artist’s rendering 01 the home and body copy set in columns. But you can’t blame the advertisers-they know what works.
Whether they admit it or not, homes section editors realize the PR they pump out is baiting the builders’ hooks. They even attempt to exonerate themselves by counteracting the blatant biases in the site stories with general warnings in their own columns. Without naming names, they constantly urge readers to check the builder’s history and not to trust the sales agent, who will say almost anything to make a sale. Very commendable. But it’s the builders themselves who provide all the information for the site stories.

One way to mitigate the damage would be to cover only reputable builders. At the Star, Morgan claims they know who the good builders are and do tend to concentrate on them. But Potter, the day-to-day decision-maker, contradicts Morgan: “If we get a request for a site story, as and when we can fit it in, we fit it in. If we chose only the really good builders, we’d be fairly limited.” Still, he doesn’t feel it’s his job to sit in judgement. The majority of new homes are now sold from plans, he says, so the paper is writing about homes that haven’t been built yet. Even if a builder has a bad reputation, it may redeem itself in a new development. “Besides,” he argues, “we cannot, in my column or anywhere in the section, say ‘This builder’s a lousy builder, don’t buy from him’ because we’d get sued.”

As they stand now, neither paper is at risk of a libel suit for anything in the homes sections. The builders couldn’t be more pleased with the content if they wrote it themselves. If nothing negative is written about builders, and the privilege of editorial coverage is not reserved for only the “good” builders, then readers are clearly being misinformed. It would be a sorry paper that bolstered advertisers to such an extent in its news pages. Yet obvious exceptions are made when it comes to homes sections.

The changes at Sunday Morning are not isolated but confirm a trend to blunter edges on CBC’s current affairs journalism. The trend is not new, nor is it confined to radio. Ever since the cancellation of CBC-TV’s Document, Inquiry and This Hour has Seven Days in the 1960s, and the reduction of NFB social documentaries on air in the 1970s, investigative stories and point-of-view journalism have been disappearing from the network’s information programming. Today The Journal sets the standard for CBC-TV documentaries scrupulously balanced with a minimal point of view, the program looks more like an extended newscast than a current affairs show.

CBC managers claim they would like to broadcast more controversial documentaries but are restricted, according to Bill Morgan, CBC-TV’s director of news and current affairs, by the CBC’s mandate and its lack of resources. Morgan’s interpretation of the Broadcasting Act, CRTC regulations and the CBC’s own journalistic Policy manual is that “the CBC has to base documentaries on the principle of fairness, representing all points of view – and more so when the subject is infrequently dealt with and highly controversial.”

But the CBC’s critics – and its supporters-are not convinced. “The CBC uses the constraint of balance as an excuse for not putting on controversial programming,” says Gerald Caplan, former cochairman of the federal task force on broadcasting policy, whose comprehensive report appeared in 1986. Caplan sees the CBC’s narrow interpretation of balance and fairness as a form of self-censorship.
Eager to please whatever party is in power, and fearful of budget cuts that could further reduce

programming and staff, the corporation ensures that its own journalists-and independent producers whose programs the CBC might coproduce or purchase-don’t appear politically biased. The most powerful weapon in accomplishing this aim is to impose narrow interpretations of its mandate on their work-all in the name of maintaining professional journalistic standards and ethics.

As the 1989 federal budget approaches, the memory of the devastation wreaked by the Tories in 1985 is still vivid. That budget severed $85 million from the CBC’s spending allowance and eliminated 1,150 jobs. Among 1he laid-off employees were veteran television journalists who had done investigative work for programs such as Marketplace and Man Alive. The cuts were not intended to touch programming but by 1986-87, 77 hours of English and 45 hours of French TV network programming, along with 1,000 hours of regional programming, had disappeared.

At the same time, socially important programs with limited audiences such as CBC Radio’s Our Native Land which was about native affairs-also disappeared. And, having completed a major initiative to produce The National and The Journal in the early 19808, the CBC announced that television drama would henceforth be its “most critical priority.”

That goal was also announced to the CRTC at the CBC’s licence renewal hearings in 1985. Figures submitted to the CRTC showed that one hour of drama cost the CBC $374,000 to produce-and current affairs was the next most expensive at $282,000. Already in 1982, the investigative unit at Sunday Morning had been cut, ostensibly for financial reasons; as the CBC’s Journalistic Policy manual explains: “Investigative journalism must not be conducted without adequate resources and time available for exhaustive research.” And since drama generates higher ratings and far more advertising revenue than documentaries, it’s not surprising that under severe budget constraints extra money for drama should be picked from the pockets of current affairs.

Many journalists and producers feel, however, that the CBC has not just been shuffling program priorities but adopting a “don’t rock the boat” attitude to appease the Tories’ well-known hostility towards the corporation. Concerned that the budget slashing was intended to curb the CBC’s supposed “left-wing” image, the National Radio Producers’ Association attended a meeting in 1985 with Donna Logan, program director of CBC Radio, to discuss the situation. Asked how the producers could counter charges of “liberal-left” bias, Logan replied that the best defence was to be “absolutely sure that the material presented was fair and balanced according to the CBC’s journalistic policies.”

That’s how CBC Radio vice-president Michael McEwen recalls the exchange. But Fillmore, late of Sunday Morning, also attended the meeting and feels the implication of what Logan said is more important than the actual words: “She knew and the producers knew the impact of what she said was, in effect, that if there is any liberal-left stuff, we don’t want it on the air.”

The CBC does not officially acknowledge that being accused of a liberal-left bias causes it problems with the government-or might have an effect on its budget. But any party in power wishing to hobble the public broadcaster has no need to apply direct political pressure -it just has to persuade Parliament to approve a budget reducing the CBC’s annual allocation. And just as no government, Liberal or Conservative, has been willing to place the CBC on a five year budget, the CBC keeps many of its current affairs producers on one-year contracts rather than hiring them on permanently. Although the rationale for contracting out services in this way is financial, the effect of job insecurity is to chill programming that might give the corporation image problems either within cabinet or with other MPs.

For CBC management, however, the only issue is maintaining high professional standards of balance and fairness. But what is the corporation’s definition of these concepts? The CBC’s mandate is derived from the Broadcasting Act, which states that programming provided by all Canadian broadcasters should be “varied and comprehensive and should provide reasonable, balanced opportunity for the expressions of differing views on matters of public concern.” With specific reference to the CBC, the Act states that it should be “a balanced service of information, enlightenment and entertainment, for people of different ages, interests and tastes covering the whole range of programming in fair proportion.”

This broad mandate as interpreted through CRTC regulations is the foundation of the CBC’s policy on balance and fairness. But to help journalists apply that mandate in day-to-day situations, the CBC provides a more detailed explanation in its 1988 Journalistic Policy manual. This document distinguishes two kinds of balance and fairness in information programming. The first applies to the work of individual journalists, who are required not to let their own opinions and attitudes lead them into bias and prejudice. This is a complex subject: good journalism is always selective, and maintaining sound, objective judgement while making choices is a constant challenge. How much leeway the CBC allows in this area, especially in regard to point-of-view documentaries, is hotly debated (see p. 49).

The manual’s other definition applies to the CBC as an organization: on the subject of “fair and balanced programming,” it states that “program balance should be achieved, where appropriate, within a single program or otherwise within an identifiable series of programs.” Apparently, the writers of the manual have narrowed the interpretation of “balanced programming” in the Broadcasting Act down to a requirement, in certain unspecified instances, for balance within just one program.

Again, Caplan considers this an unjustified reduction of the CBC’s mandate: “I think the CBC is wrong to equate balanced programming with a balanced program in this way,” he says-and the task force reinforced this viewpoint. The report recommends that the principle of presenting a “balanced opportunity for the expression of differing views on matters of public interest” should apply to “each broadcaster’s overall programming and not to every program broadcast.”

How the CBC’s restricted definitions of balance and fairness work in practice can be seen from the changes that took place at Sunday Morning when Bernstein took over in January 1988. Soon after arriving, he circulated an irate letter from a former listener citing “the universally left-wing approach to every item” and “the level of sheer boredom” as the listener’s reasons for switching stations. Bernstein attached a memo stating that the letter was typical of those he had received and that he agreed with the criticisms. “The show got the image by story choice,”

Bernstein explains. “There were a lot of Latin American stories in 1987. If they were done fairly, they would be anti-American. If it’s anti-American, people make the connection of it being left-wing.”

Whether or not Bernstein felt the story choices made in 1987 were unsound, he did feel that, overall, stories were too long and drawn out. His guiding principle was that henceforth story choices-and the time assigned to them – should be based on their relative importance. In his view, Latin America did not deserve as much time in 1988 as in the previous year, so Sunday Morning’s coverage was substantially reduced. But Fillmore and other Sunday Morning producers, citing the Arias peace plan and the fate of the Contras as significant developments, challenge Bernstein’s decisions on story choice and claim the area warranted more coverage. They believe Bernstein was under constant pressure from senior management to tame the show’s radical image. It was not enough that the program won awards for balanced and fair journalism, but perceived objectivity was important as well-and too many Latin American stories gave the program, in the eyes of senior management and certain sections of the public, a “liberal-left” bias.

Perceived objectivity is a crucial issue at the CBC, but the Journalistic Policy manual does not address it in those words. Instead, it states that “credibility” depends not only on balanced and fair reporting but also on “avoidance by both the organization and its journalists of associations or contacts which could reasonably give rise to perceptions of partiality.”

Citing this section and related policy on the hiring of persons associated with pressure groups, Logan roused controversy last fall when she told Dale Goldhawk, the host of Cross-Country Checkup, to withdraw his services from the show until the election was over.

The reason given was his position president of ACTRA, which had con out strongly against free trade. Aft, the election, Logan gave Goldhawk choice-either the ACTRA presiden( or his job. He chose the latter.

Although Logan was publicly critcized for her actions, she had every right under the CBC’s current journalist] policy to ask Goldhawk to make choice. The problem is whether the po icy manual goes too far in restricting journalists’ activities. Roy Bonistee host of Man Alive, certainly thinks so. After 22 years at the CBC, he announce, in February he would resign, saying that he was “fed up” with middle management executives telling him no to speak publicly on religious values ethics or social issues.

Even very high-profile figures like David Suzuki are not exempt. Three days after Bonisteel’s resignation, a repeat program on The Nature of Thing, about nuclear power was rescheduled shortly before airing so that an eight minute panel discussion could be added to it. After the initial showing -with. out a panel-in November 1987, representatives of the Canadian Nuclear Association complained to CBC president Pierre Juneau about the program. A spokesman for Juneau denied the visit had any connection to the program’s rescheduling. But the move was widely interpreted as a concession to the nuclear power lobby, which felt that the program lacked balance and that the credibility of host David Suzuki, a board member of Energy Probe, was in question.

One CBC reporter fired on the grounds of questionable credibility fought the corporation in the courts and won a decision that suggests the CBC’s obsession with perceived objectivity not only unduly restricts its legislated programming mandate but violates human rights as well. On May 13, 1988, the Federal Court of Appeal ordered the national network to rehire Rosann Cashin, a Newfoundland-based writer and radio broadcaster. Cashin’s contract was dropped in September 1981 because her husband Richard, a prominent union leader, was appointed to the board of directors of PetroCanada. In defending the CBC’s actions, Logan testified that in such cases “there has to be a form of control.” The fact that Cashin’s husband was well known and that she used his last name was sufficient grounds to deny her a job.

In his judgment, Mr. Justice Mark MacGuigan concluded that the issue was whether “perceived objectivity” constituted a “bona fide occupational requirement” for work as a CBC journalist. In rejecting the CBC’s argument to that effect, MacGuigan pointed out that “perceived objectivity” is almost impossible to measure, and that “the CBC decided that Mrs. Cashin might be perceived by the audience as lacking objectivity on the basis, not of any evidence, but rather a gut reaction.

MacGuigan went on to say that the only basis for judging objectivity was the journalist’s work, and that any other standard was “a wholly subjective one, unredeemed by any objective element. It is, as the saying goes, no way to run a railroad. For a broadcaster to succeed in such a case, it would need either better evidence or, more likely, better standards.”

When the CBC goes to these lengths in applying its balance and fairness policies, it is not surprising that the broadcast of social and investigative documentaries is on the decline. By contrast, the newly-established Vision TV network finds nothing in the Broadcasting Act to prevent it from showing such material, and this winter scheduled 10 hard-hitting NFB social documentaries in its series The Cutting Edge.

The CBC has not slammed the door on all such material, however, and NFB social documentaries may also find a window at Newsworld, the CBC information channel scheduled to start this fall. In explaining why Newsworld can carry material shunned by the main network, deputy head Michael Harris says, “The major problem for the CBC in showing NFB films is that so much of it is point-of-view documentaries that don’t meet the CBC’s balance and fairness criteria. If you’re going to do just one piece on abortion this week, it had better not just praise Morgentaler.”

Harris points out that the main network does not have enough time in its schedule to present both a pro-Morgentaler documentary, for example, and an anti-Morgentaler piece-or a follow-up panel discussion that would allow other viewpoints to be aired. But he says that Newsworld, on the other hand, will schedule enough time for both point-of-view documentaries and reactions to them.

Caplan’s argument is that the CBC’s mandate does not require one program, pro or con, to be immediately balanced in this way as long as its overall programming does not favor just one side of a controversial issue such as abortion. But the CBC’s schedule on the national network does not allow even that option: the pressure, whether generated by economic factors or self censorship, to fill the schedule with news, sports and entertainment is gradually squeezing out social and point-of-view current affairs programming. In the age of infotainment, what has happened to the CBC’s mandate to not just inform and entertain but to enlighten as well?

In April, the Conservative government is bringing down its 1989 budget which promises extensive cuts in social spending. Moreover, as the 1988-89 fiscal year ends, the CBC faces a shortfall of $136.9 million. But at the time of writing, it is impossible to predict whether the CBC’s self-censorship will please its masters sufficiently to tip the financial balance in its favor.

There are other uncertainties as well: Marcel Masse, who supervised the 1985 cuts, is again the minister of communications-and chairman of the new Cabinet Committee on Cultural Affairs and National Identity, a title that echoes the Liberal thrust in the 1970s to make the arts subservient to political strategies. Furthermore, by midsummer both the CBC and the NFB will have new presidents.

But new ministers, presidents and budgets may have little effect on a broadcaster that has already reduced its mandate and role in current affairs to that of paper tiger. Given its current journalistic and programming policies, the CBC does not need further cuts or a hostile government to ensure that it remains a public broadcaster unwilling and unable to rock anybody’s boat.

He could add crisis management to is the list. In his first 10 months at the magazine, Fraser had to contend with an extremely unstable masthead. In June, publisher Peter White quit to become the prime minister’s principal secretary. What’s more, senior editor Barbara Moon was off work for five months after tripping over Fraser’s portable computer and breaking both wrists, two editors went on maternity leave, award-winning senior writer David Macfarlane defected to Toronto and art director Bruce Ramsay quit following the magazine’s redesign.

But Fraser’s biggest challenge has been learning his new craft while under the intense scrutiny of the country’s magazine community. Fraser loves the attention. “Gossip is what keeps the whole world going,” he says. “For anyone to dismiss gossip is to dismiss themselves.” Certainly nobody is dismissing Fraser-he’s been a staple of industry chat since it was learned that he would be replacing Robert Fulford, who resigned shortly after Conrad Black’s purchase of Saturday Night in July 1987.

First there was the rumor that Fraser’s deal with Black included a salary of $125,000 a year plus a car: some said a BMW, others a Porsche (Fraser admits to the car-a Volvo-but says his salary is “much less”). Then the buzz centred on Black’s statement way back in 1973 that he wanted to buy Saturday Night and turn it into a National Review clone. Under the guidance of Fulford and former publisher John Macfarlane, Saturday Night had established a reputation for publishing some of the finest journalism in the country. What everyone wondered was whether Fraser could maintain those standards and at the same time create a book that would boost circulation and advertising, both of which had been soft for years.

Much of the speculation was due to Black’s involvement. Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger Inc., does not seem the archetypal savior of a national cultural-political magazine, particularly one that was losing as much money as Saturday Night (in 1986 it lost more than $750,000). But Black didn’t put down $1.4 million expecting to make a lot of money, or even any at all: “Hollinger is a rather prosperous company, and the losses at Saturday Night are just not-I don’t want to sound blase, of course I find any loss fundamentally unsatisfactory-but it is not a loss that is frankly material to us at all.” He believed that he could pare the losses if the magazine were positioned properly and financed adequately. “I thought it was a bargain, not in operational terms but because it had some value as a national franchise,” he says.

After Fulford quit, Fraser’s appointment really was no surprise. He’d gained editing experience at The Globe and Mail, won three National Newspaper Awards, enhanced his reputation with his 1980 book, The Chinese: Portrait of a People, based on his time as Globe bureau chief in Beijing, and most recently spent three years as the paper’s West European bureau chief. More important, though, he was friends with Black, a friendship that dated from the days when both were schoolboys at Upper Canada College.

Fraser protests that their relationship became mythologized in the wake of the sale: “It was very close when we were very young boys, under the age of 11 or so, and then there was virtually no relationship for a couple of decades. I really only got mixed up in his affairs when I reported on his takeover of the Telegraph in London.” He also makes it clear that he never shared the concern about Black’s agenda: “All sorts of people made all sorts of assumptions on what I was and my relationship with Black. My line at the time was that I subscribe to Bruno Bettleheim’s thesis that ‘nightmares embellish the quality of middle-class life.’ If Conrad Black didn’t exist, we’d have to create him for people to be fearful.”

When he signed on, Fraser insisted on a hands-off clause in his contract-“The editor is solely and exclusively responsible for the direction and integrity of the total editorial product, process and staff”-but he says he did this to reassure the public and his staff rather than to protect himself: “When I was a regular reporter, I was the one likely to burn the bridge first when someone thought they knew or controlled me. That independence also gives me the freedom not to be frightened by an association with someone like Black.”

Fulford says, regarding his replacement, “Black rightly saw that Fraser was talented, and had known him personally for 35 years. Fraser also has one hell of a reputation. And those three things are a pretty good combination.”

There was a fourth reason why Fraser was an attractive choice. Black says he felt that “the goodwill and regard of the rather diminutive intellectual journalistic community-around Toronto especially, and to a lesser degree Ottawa-would automatically accrue to the magazine because Fraser has been well regarded by those people.”

Having readers accrue as well may be Fraser’s most important-and toughest -assignment. Between mid-1987 and mid-1988, circulation dropped almost 20,000 from 134,009 to 115,083. Fraser notes that this was by design, and explains that the circulation had previously been inflated by a number of “trash” subscriptions sold cheaply through a direct-mail agency. “It shows up as actual circulation although everyone knows it’s junk,” he says. “When I arrived here, a lot of it was coming due. We made the decision not to go for the trash and to build up quality circulation, and make our advertising pitch to that.”

It’s a strategy that may backfire, according to Judy Goddard, associate media director at McKim Advertising, the largest ad agency in Canada. “A drop in subscriptions often is an indication that the readership isn’t there, so that’s a concern,” she says. Victoria Munger, the magazine’s associate publisher and director of advertising, naturally disagrees. “[Advertising] people want Saturday Night’s readers, so when we say that the circulation is going down on purpose because we are cleaning our list, that doesn’t upset them,” she says. Rob Wilson, who has covered magazines in Marketing for 10 years, points out that with the changes Saturday Night has gone through a drop in circulation was to be expected. The job now, he says, is not to let readership drop below the 100,000 mark: “If they fall below that, advertisers will be bailing out like crazy. Quality only sells to a certain extent. The trick is the numbers-that’s the second step.”

As it battles to keep the numbers up, the magazine is also spending a lot of money to dispel its image among advertisers as a stiff, stodgy read. Although Saturday Night was respected, Fulford himself admits that it was also perceived by many as “dull” or “highbrow.” For a number of years, Saturday Night’s superbly crafted “important” pieces routinely won more National Magazine Awards than other publications but these simply didn’t translate into circulation or advertising revenue. In his 19 years as editor, Fulford says he came away with only one firm conviction advertising people don’t like Saturday Night: “Their gut feeling is ‘I don’t like this’ so getting them to buy an ad is an unbelievable project.”

McKim’s Goddard confirms that some advertisers don’t like the magazine and “if they don’t like it personally, they have a hard time dealing with the fact it’s on a buy.” She says the uniqueness of the product may actually be a detriment: “Its kind of articles are certainly not going to be found elsewhere. But I don’t think it becomes ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to buy that book because you’re not going to get anybody if you don’t.’ It’s a very select audience.”

Maybe too select. Ron Bremner, senior vice-president of media and research at Vickers & Benson, says that when advertisers choose Saturday Night it’s a decision of “class versus mass.” Although the magazine has good demographics, its audience is so small that, as Wilson says, “Anyone who’s interested in politics may be a regular Saturday Night reader but they’re probably also a Maclean’s reader. And Maclean’s has a circulation of 619,000.”

What Black and Fraser are trying to do is spend their way around this problem (the magazine’s budget is confidential but Fulford estimates that last year it lost at least $2 million, more than twice what it dropped during any year of his tenure). “The problem with Saturday Night,” says Munger, “is that it never had enough money to really promote the product in the proper way. It’s like everything in life-you can have an excellent product but if you don’t tell anybody about it, then who’s going to know?”

There are signs that this spend money-to-make-money approach is working. In Fraser’s first full year there, the magazine contained roughly 290 pages of paid ads. While this was down from 357 in the previous year, the 1987 figures were skewed by the special l00th anniversary issue published in January which had 82 pages alone. But for the October, November and December 1988 issues-the first three of Fraser’s redesign-the average number of ad pages per issue was 42, compared to 33 for the same period in 1987. The January and February 1989 books had 20 and 21 pages respectively, compared to 15 and 14 the year before-a respectable showing for what are traditionally slow ad months.

One reason for the increase no doubt is Black’s deep pockets, but another is the editorial changes that have come about as Fraser has put his stamp on the magazine. He has expanded the books and letters sections, added regular politics and travel coverage, introduced a poetry page and his own column “Diary,” and brought back the crossword puzzle. Fraser’s influence permeates the pages of the magazine.

Once a respected “duty read,” it’s now hipper and has more of an edge. “His personality is about what’s happening today; he likes talk and gossip,” says Ann Anderson. “He’s mischievous and likes to see people talking about issues.” The result is a substantial shift in the magazine’s tenor. As John Macfarlane says, “It’s a very different magazine than it was when Bob Fulford and I were there. There’s less journalism and more commentary.”

Such a shift is potentially dangerous. The magazine is considered by many to be a national treasure, and it stirs proprietary feelings in both readers and contributors. At the time of the sale, fears that the magazine would become the battering ram of the New Right in Canada emerged, then escalated when Fulford announced his departure. “People put two and two together and came up with five,” says Ottawa editor Charlotte Gray. “They put together the fact that Conrad Black had bought it and that David Frum was on staff they’re both well-known right-wing ideologues. “

Fraser was aware of these concerns and has made a conscious effort not to succumb to the critics’ expectations. While Saturday Night has developed a slightly stronger right-wing voice, it has hardly become the National Review of Canada. When the phone rings Fraser will joke: “It’s either my family or Conrad Black”-and Black does call to critique each issue. But Fraser says Black is one of the least intrusive owners of a publication in Canada: “If he doesn’t like certain articles he talks about them constructively-but they’re private views between the editor and the proprietor.”

Writer Rick Salutin, a long-time critic of the “old” Saturday Night, finds th new direction preferable in some ways: “I think the Fulford Saturday Night, was a highly ideological organ, the PUI pose of which was to suffocate every body under a sense of awe and respect for everybody with wealth and power in Canada. In the new one, you’re directly attacked by the right-wing horde with out [the magazine] pretending to have a neutral, above-it-all voice.” Salutin believes this “explicit, reactionary babble” is not the only voice emanating from the pages of the magazine, just the strongest. “There’s a wider range-it’s more open on both the left and the right than it was under Fulford,” he says. “The magazine is infuriating, which is better than being condescending and boring.”

As the voice of the magazine has changed, so have the criteria for what comprises a Saturday Night article. “I think they are making an effort to be brighter and less dull, a little less intellectual,” says Rob Wilson. “The old Saturday Night had these great monolithic articles that seemed to go on for four days.” Fraser’s aim is to open the magazine to polemical debate and to get people talking about it. Hence articles like Danielle Crittenden’s “REAL Women Don’t Eat Crow,” which succeeded in infuriating both feminists and REAL Women members; Linda Frum’s diatribe on Canadian universities, “Reach for the Mediocre”; and “The Fixer,” in which Norman Snider attempted to psychoanalyze Brian Mulroney-pieces that two years ago Saturday Night would never have run.

“I like tweaking people’s noses – I always did,” Fraser says. “It’s important to have a certain number of articles that are studiously provocative, that rouse people to come to terms with their own thinking, get them to write furious letters to the editor-either in support or against. To me, that’s a healthy climate, that’s a readership in touch with what they’re reading.”

Although Eraser won’t criticize his predecessor’s editorial direction, he does admit he found the look “uninteresting” and uncontemporary. Fraser has tried to make the inside of the book

brighter and less static by breaking up the grey blocks of type that once characterized the magazine: there’s been a move to garish pictures and more illustration, particularly cartoons. The redesign was done by Bruce Ramsay, who resigned in August before the October issue showcasing the new look was published. “:He wasn’t used to the editor being intrusive in the art process,” says Fraser, “But wasn’t so much intrusive as I was curious. We just didn’t really hit it off.”

At one point, Fraser says he planned to fire Ramsay and conducted interviews hoping to find a replacement but soon discovered that Ramsay was “among the best there is.” Ramsay says he didn’t resent Fraser’s “intrusion” but found his “extremely literal” visual sense very confining. An example of the literal style that may have offended Ramsay’s sensibilities was the May “REAL Women” cover, which featured a supremely banal image: beatific mom with babe against a pink background, overlaid by a red circle with a slash through it. In the industry it was widely believed to be Fraser’s concept although he maintains “we all sort of liked the idea.”

The new look includes a brassier, more aggressive cover style designed to garner a larger percentage of newsstand sales, which in 1988 averaged a dismal 6,700 copies per issue. “There’s no question that the old cover design was more beautiful,” Fraser says, “but we’ve made a calculated decision on a certain kind of cover. On newsstands, you have to sell yourself to death.” Fraser claims that more recent sales have been above 8,000 although it’s too early to get confirmation from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Toronto designer Art Niemi, former art director at Quest magazine, is not alone in pronouncing the new covers “aesthetically a failure.” Many people attribute their unattractiveness to Fraser’s inexperience in the magazine business. Certainly Fraser has made other blunders that a more seasoned editor would have avoided. There was his decision to flank a pro-smoking piece in the July issue with cigarette ads, which Fraser says he did “to make a statement” against the tobacco advertising ban. Instead they created the impression that the magazine had sold the ads on the basis of editorial content: the error in judgment had the magazine community tut-tutting, and earned Fraser a slap on the wrist in Marketing. There was also the story of his expressing regret that a writer on assignment in New Brunswick couldn’t file his piece by laptop computer-a comment that suggested a fundamental lack of understanding of how magazine writers go about their craft.

Fraser has also tentatively assigned stories, only to renege. “I take it as a sign he doesn’t yet have a grasp on the space he has available, and he really doesn’t know yet what he wants to do with the magazine,” says author and journalist Erna Paris. There have been other problems too: complaints from some writers that their payments were delayed and from others that months would go by before they got a response to their queries; instances of articles being rewritten without consulting authors; and at least one case of an editor inserting right-wing opinions in a piece. While Fraser apologized to the writers involved-“He’s very good at apologizing,” says one-the incidents were the mark of a rookie editor and were gleefully reported on the gossip circuit as more proof that Fraser was floundering.

But Saturday Night associate editor George Galt says Fraser’s lack of magazine experience has its positive side: “It made the first few issues quite bumpy and made him, I think, a little vulnerable to dubious advice at the beginning. On the other hand, not having a lot of preconceptions and not being dug-in the way people who have been in a job 10 or 20 years are, he was able to turn the magazine around and make some important substantive changes in a relatively short time.”

In so doing, Fraser has earned his place in the magazine community. His magazine still has problems, but there’s no question he’s put his own mark on it and in some ways made it better. “To follow in Bob Fulford’s footsteps is a very difficult thing to do,” says Erna Paris. “A lot of people were watching very, very critically.” Fraser’s job has no doubt been made harder because of his predecessor. Yet through all the turmoil he managed to get the magazine out-despite being educated in public, his mistakes both visible and subject to scrutiny. “My sense is that we have the right to make mistakes, that I’m in the business of not only saving the magazine but making it a vital force in national life,” says Fraser. “As long as I’m responsive to my own errors, or errors that emerge in terms of marketing, what we need is not caution but a sense of daring.”

Never mind that the newspaper, in its eagerness to expose the goings-on in the hotel dining room, got some of its facts wrong. Or that it failed to report a single word about the far more important story-behind-the-story of why the dinner was being held in the first place. The newspaper’s intrepid “investigative” reporter lovingly detailed what ~ he described as a “gala affair” with g “free, all-you-can-drink bar” and a “three-course dinner of fresh market ~ salad, poached Nova Scotia salmon, ~ buttered potatoes and carrots and 1 herbed zucchini.” Leaving no journalistic stone unturned in its relentless pursuit of truth, the Herald then tracked down the province’s attorney general, Terry Donahoe, to get his reaction to what the newspaper described as a publicly-financed “three-hour soiree.” Donahoe] said he did not wish to comment,” the paper reported “because he might say something too provocative. All I can say is that I have no : reaction which is printable.”

Not printing provocative comments -or the real story-is a tradition at the Chronicle.Herald, once described in a Financial Post Magazine headline as “the paper Nova Scotians love to hate.” One of the last remaining family owned major daily newspapers in the country, the Dennis newspapers -the Herald and its afternoon sister paper, the Mail-Star-have a long and unenviable reputation as two of the worst newspapers in the country.

Unchallenged by rival dailies for most of the years since World War II, the newspapers found it easy-and profitable-to avoid negative news and to assume a comfortable role as defend. ers of the status quo. In 1970, Keith Davey’s Senate Committee on the Mass Media in Canada concluded that the Chronicle-Herald was guilty of “lazy, uncaring journalism.” Although the launch of a more aggressive tabloid competitor in the early eighties has done much to improve the Herald, the Davey Committee’s observations still ring true, especially when it comes to sensitive stories such as the Marshall case.

What the Herald’s front-page expose boiled down to was a modest little welcoming dinner for 15 guests-the total tab was $37.17 per person, including drinks. Moreover, the Herald neglected to mention in this sensational story of royal commission waste and extravagance that the dinner was a prelude to anything more than “consultation ser. vices” for the commission’s report.

In fact, the purpose of this intense, three-day “consultation”-which included among its more than 80 participants everyone from former British Columbia Justice Tom Berger and prominent Toronto defence lawyer Morris Manning to Mohawk Grand Chief Joseph Norton and the executive coordinator of The Ontario Race Relations Directorate, Dan McIntyre-was to help the three commissioners come to terms with the seminal but seemingly insoluble and endlessly complex question of what role racism played in Marshall’s treatment at the hands of the Nova Scotia criminal justice system.

All too typically, of course, none of this made it into the story the Chronicle Herald ran that day.

By now, most Canadians have heard about Donald Marshall Jr., the Micmac Indian who spent 11 years in jail for a murder in 1971 he didn’t commit. It was only after the government finally -reluctantly-appointed a three judge royal commission to look into the affair in 1986 that the reality and magnitude of the injustice done to Marshall finally became clear. The commission’s year-long round of public hearings (its final report is expected this summer) has put the province’s justice system under a microscope and shown it to be seriously flawed. But the inquiry process has also, almost inadvertently, turned the spotlight on the province’s news media-and shown it to be at least as flawed.

For a metropolitan area of fewer than 300,000 people, Halifax should be incredibly well served by its media. The city boasts three local daily newspapers, four separate television stations, nine English-language radio stations, Frank, a twice-monthly political gossip sheet, and Cities, the monthly local lifestyles magazine I edit.

Despite the number of news outlets and more than 300 journalists, the simple truth is that the Halifax media can’t claim to have made a single, significant contribution to the development of the Marshall story. Why? My own opinion is that the Herald, as the largest and most influential of the media outlets, still sets the tone for most news coverage in Nova Scotia. There is still a feeling among readers, newsmakers-and, to a certain extent, other journalists that it isn’t news if it isn’t in the Herald. Whatever the reasons, the reality is that while Canadians from coast to coast were reading seemingly endless stories about testimony at the Marshall inquiry, the story often wasn’t even front-page news in Nova Scotia.

Consider just a few examples of how-and from whom-Nova Scotians have learned about important parts of the ongoing Marshall affair.

Nova Scotians first learned that young witnesses at Marshall’s original trial had signed false statements implicating Marshall from the pages of The Globe and Mail in 1982. Michael Harris, then the paper’s Atlantic bureau chief, and freelancer Alan Story got their material simply by being good reporters. They tracked down those witnesses more than a decade after the court case and asked them to go on record with what really happened.

None of the local media bothered to do the same.

Last year, the royal commission made public its decision to compare Marshall’s treatment with that of such high-profile figures as Nova Scotia’s deputy premier Roland Thornhill. Alan Story, by then a Halifax-based reporter for The Toronto Star, decided to go back and look into the details of the original Thornhill case.

A former stockbroker who became deputy premier when the Conservatives came to power in 1978, Thornhill got into personal financial difficulties shortly after that election. Four major chartered banks then made a deal with him to write off more than $100,000 worth of debts at 25 cents on the dollar. Both the RCMP officers who investigated the deal and the Crown prosecutor in charge of the file wanted to lay charges of accepting an illegal benefit against Thornhill, but they were overruled by higher officials. Story’s report in the Star, which appeared months before the commission got around to hearing witnesstes in the case, was so damning that Thornhill was forced to resign his cabinet position.

The local media? They continued to look the other way. When Thornhill’s deal with the banks was first investigated by the RCMP in 1980, the story was the main topic at local cocktail parties for months before the Herald finally reported that a cabinet minister it didn’t name was being investigated in connection with some allegations it didn’t explain.

If powerful figures such as Thornhill benefit from the provincial media’s benign neglect of important stories, the less powerful-Donald Marshall, blacks, natives, the poor-all suffer for it.

Consider another recent criminal case that was the subject of some discussion at the Marshall inquiry’s consultation on racism. It involved a black man who’d been killed by a white man in southwestern Nova Scotia. In spite of the fact that the black man bled to death while the white man-by his own admission-failed to call the police or an ambulance because he would have had to walk over his freshly painted floor to get to a telephone, an all-white jury freed the white man.

The only newspaper reporter to respond to the black community’s outrage over the verdict by investigating the case himself was again Alan Story from The Toronto Star. Story’s interview with the judge-during which the judge dismissed the black community’s criticisms by telling Story: “You know what happens when those black guys start drinking”-created another national furor. But it failed to arouse much passion in Nova Scotia, where it got little coverage in the Herald, and was therefore easily dismissed as yet another case of snooty Upper Canadian journalists trying to embarrass Nova Scotia in the eyes of the nation.

Newspaper readers in the province may have been outraged by Story’s revelations, but they didn’t show their feelings at the ballot box: Roland Thornhill, along with John Buchanan’s scandal-plagued government, was reelected in last fall’s provincial election and reappointed to the cabinet.

Are Nova Scotians apathetic and cynical because Nova Scotia journalism is so bad? Or is Nova Scotia journalism so bad because Nova Scotians are apathetic and cynical?

Interesting questions. But don’t expect to see them discussed in the pages of The Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Its reporters are too busy skulking around hotel kitchens trying to find out what’s for dinner.

Stephen Kimber, a widely-published freelance journalist, is also the editor of Cities magazine, a monthly serving the Halifax Dartmouth area.

At 40, Verdun is a tall, gangly man, meek in appearance until he starts to talk about his craft. He folds his arms tightly into his chest as his voice deepens in a stern I-mean-business tone. “There is this view,” he says, t at somehow weekly newspapers can only restrict themselves to good news. That’s unreasonable. Even in the smallest communities, there is corruption.”

“Bad news” is front-page news at The Independent, where small-town boosterism gives way to the shortcomings of the municipal powers that be. This at a time when “good news” and PR puffery are feeding the presses at most Canadian weeklies caught in the current trend toward concentrated ownership and humdrum blandness.

Verdun and his wife Carol, The Independent’s publisher, have been fighting that trend since they started the paper 14 years ago with a borrowed typesetting machine and a $6,500 loan. Their brash editorializing has not gone unnoticed in this generally conservative town of 7,200 just north of Kitchener Waterloo. At one time, the opinion ~ pages of The Independent, which has a 9 circulation of 7,500, featured columns by Verdun’s “political animals” – his own horse, cow and sheep dog Oliver. Oliver Dog later gained notoriety when his master ran him for mayor. Another regular feature entitled “Regrettable Racism of the Week” displayed snapshots of black lawn jockeys perched in front of their Elmira addresses. And Verdun’s progressive ideals clashed with community tradition last fall when he not only denied coverage to the Elmira Fair beauty queen contest but denounced the event in an editorial as “insulting and demeaning.”

Verdun’s eccentric messages have also found a country-wide medium in the national edition of The Independent, a monthly publication “for thoughtful Canadians” he and Carol launched three years ago. The paper is a bizarre mix of international and local news. In one issue, a story about a local collector of jukeboxes runs on the same page as a wire photo of child beggars in Bombay. Despite his flair for the unusual, Verdun is a newspaperman who takes his role seriously. “The first duty of a newspaper is to keep the community fully informed about what is being done with the people’s tax dollars,” a statement on the front page of the first edition of The Independent read in 1974. The statement of goals also promised the paper’s readers a commitment which it argued couldn’t be delivered under the stranglehold of chain ownership. Just three weeks before, Verdun had been fired as editor of what was then the town’s only weekly, The Elmira Signet, for insulting a general manager who wanted more fluff and less opinion.

Verdun pioneered his crusading journalism at the University of Waterloo’s now-defunct campus newspaper in the late 1960s. A first-year engineering student fresh from his home town of Aylmer, Ontario, he marched into The Chevron’s office determined to learn the craft, and took to the job with gusto. For one of his first stories criticizing CBC-TV for canceling Nightcap, he picketed the final taping of the late night variety show in Toronto. By his second year he realized finding news angles was more fun than aligning sewer drains, so he dropped out of engineering to go into journalism fulltime as editor of The Chevron.

It was the same blunt writing Verdun had refined at The Chevron that cost him his Signet job and would later gain notoriety and subscriptions for The Independent. Advertisers responded well too, and over several years they switched allegiance from the Signet to The Independent. When the Verduns took on the Signet, they also took on Fairway Press (now The Fairway Group Inc.)-a newspaper chain that owns all but two of Waterloo Region’s seven weeklies and forms part of the company that also owns the area’s only daily, The Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

The rivalry gained national coverage and spurred a piece in the old Canadian section of Time which observed: “Verdun does things to the Signet that would be unthinkable in the mutually protective world of big city newspapers. He tells his readers when the Signet merely runs a press release and when it fails to cover municipal township meetings.” In 1982, the 91-year-old Signet folded. “We were a real newspaper,”Verdun says, still savoring the Signet’s demise.

The Independent’s victory not only asserted the strength of the individually owned newspaper but proved that hard news still had a place in community journalism. While sports results graced the front page of the Signet, The Independent’s lead stories gave blow-by-blow accounts of town council meetings. Its first editorial, headed “The Taxpayers Are Not Suckers,” has set the paper’s tone to this day.

Last year, when Pilkington Township’s council drafted a development plan designated for land owned by some town officials, The Independent was hot on its trail. Detailed articles chronicled the shady plan and Verdun was characteristically blunt in his weekly column, “Sweeping the Printshop Floor”: “It is flagrantly obvious,” he wrote, “that most council members’ first priority is the financial well-being of their colleagues.” In a later editorial, Verdun suggested the municipality change its name to The Pilkington Soviet Socialist Republic.

“If everybody took Bob Verdun’s opinions seriously, I don’t think anybody would run for government,” Woolwich mayor Bob Waters says with a wry chuckle. But he credits Verdun for providing a keen opposition to local councils: “There’s no doubt that he’s raised the quality of politics here.”

Other local politicians aren’t as quick to acknowledge The Independent’s contribution to democracy. “As far as I’m concerned, Bob Verdun doesn’t exist,” grunts former township clerk Len Day, who resigned from Pilkington council after articles about the plan were published. Albert Erb, a frequent target and long-time mayor of Wellesley Township, is equally disenchanted with Verdun: “He’s very unfair, but he seems to sell papers.” Despite Verdun, Erb says he likes The Independent: “Other than his editorials and the things he writes, it’s a good paper.”

Verdun’s audacity is the reason Shaindel Zimmerman regularly picks up the paper from the newsstand. “He takes on issues other local papers won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. The other papers are piss poor. All they tell you is who won the local curling match,” says Zimmerman, who has lived in Pilkington Township for 18 years.

While curling scores and strawberry socials frequently appear in the pages of The Independent, the paper prides itself on being a watchdog for the community. An Elmira manufacturer, Martin Feed Mills Ltd. (described by Verdun as the town’s “leading capitalist”), shelled out $13,500 in fines after articles about nighttime noise at the loading docks encouraged residents to complain. And after a front-page story appeared, a steep road the paper deemed as hazardous to Mennonites in horse-drawn carriages was reconstructed by the Region.

Verdun insists that the paper’s first priority is hard news-and lots of it. With four full-time reporters, there is rarely a shortage of stories: in many issues, news accounts for as much as 50 percent of the paper. In contrast, the Ontario Community Newspaper Association (OCNA) requires its members to run as little as 30 percent news, leaving the rest of the space for ads. The Independent’s bulky copy trades off substance for style, but that suits Verdun just fine: “We’ve never put a high priority on appearance, not in the conventional sense.”

A quick glance at the front page of a recent issue confirms that the paper is anything but conventional. The wide broadsheet is a blur of grey, punctuated only by headlines and a photograph which is sometimes foggy or overexposed. Set in characteristically tiny type, the headlines convey more information than the lead paragraph. Screaming they are not: “Renovations for Arena Just Under Budget as Tenders Total $140,000” is typical front-page fare.

The standard 25-inch stories are enough to make another editor reach for the closest Exacto. But Verdun has made it a policy never to cut copy-he makes it fit. He disregards “the graphic obsessions” of the industry for one simple reason. “I don’t think the readers give a damn,” he says.

That assumption has made Verdun the odd man out in the community newspaper business, where the emphasis has been more on slick packaging than tough muckraking. “If Bob Verdun was marketing Corn Flakes, he’d sell them in paper bags,” remarks fellow newspaper owner Terry McConnell. McConnell, a former OCNA president and publisher of the nearby Tilbury Times, is pragmatic about the trade. His paper relies on 60 percent ads. “The bottom line is you gotta pay your bills or you don’t exist,” he says. “If the paper isn’t making money, all the goodwill and high ideals become moot points.”

The price of principle has cost The Independent. Verdun jokes that the paper “is as close to a nonprofit organization as it can get.” The Verduns live off revenues from North Waterloo Publishing Ltd., their publishing and printing firm which, besides the newspaper, prints the prosperous KitctenerWaterloo Real Estate News and a monthly publication called The Farm Gate.

Profit-oriented papers have been making money at the readers’ expense, Verdun says: “They simply do not put enough back in. Thomson is a classic example. Thomson gets away with it and it’s expected of everybody else. Even if we’re only half as bad as Thomson, we’re still bad.”

Ever critical of his media colleagues, Verdun has tried to shift the focus of news from the urban powers to a small community perspective with the national edition of The Independent. He prefers to ignore the “Toronto tribe” of journalists in favor of a national sampling of views by unpaid contributors from British Columbia to Newfoundland.

Verdun uses the national edition to expose the mistakes of other newspapers. In her column “Working with Words,” Carol assiduously compiles embarrassing faux pas from Canadian and American publications. Once she gave The Ottawa Sunday Herald an award in creative spelling for printing “paraphernalia.” After The Globe and Mail printed a story which said lawyers were “pouring over” the manuscript of Reign of Error, Carol scoffed at the typo: “What are they pouring? Their martinis? Their morning coffee?”

Even Robert Fulford, widely hailed as one of the craft’s best, does not escape the Verduns’ wrath. In a scathing, full-page article they lambasted “Toronto-based scribes” for attacking the Stratford Festival and accused Fulford of “failing to meet the basic standards of journalism” when an incorrect date appeared in a review of the festival he wrote for The Toronto Star.

The Verduns have a reputation for being equally tough on their own reporters. After the non-word “alot” appeared in an Independent article, a notice posted in the newsroom warned the reporter responsible to seek shelter in “a well-fortified barracks” should the mistake appear again. Such less-than-tactful managerial ways have meant a high staff turnover in recent years. Verdun, who freely admits to being a poor manager, says he has tried to hire team players to pick up the diplomatic slack.

Not that he’s one himself. He’s a se described loner who confesses to “da when I wish it was a small enterprise when I could do it all myself.” Which in fact, he did. In the first few years ~ business, he handled most of the r porting, photography, editing and eve advertising sales. During lulls in cow cil meetings, he sketched the paper layout. Now, with coverage extended from one township to four, that loa would be physically impossible. As it is The Independent saps most of Verdun’ time, leaving the national edition simmering on the back burner.

By Verdun’s own account, the pail subscription of the monthly is stagnant at 1,000. He doesn’t advertise outside his own paper, and direct mail campaigns are beyond his reach. Instead he relies on word-of-mouth and chance publicity to draw subscriptions. Where he first started the national edition as ~ fortnightly, he had hoped to gain 1,OOC new subscribers a year. But withou1 any marketing resources, that turned out to be a pipe dream.

The Verduns had also hoped the 12page ‘edition would sound a national voice for other community journalists across the country by “getting the story and viewpoint from the place of origin” as opposed to the urban media centres. But, by his own account, the national Independent, which frequently attacks free trade and the use of nuclear submarines, has evolved into a more left-of-centre publication than he intended. “The government certainly isn’t even-handed and two-sided about the issues, so I don’t mind that we’re not,” he says.

None of this, however, seems to faze Bob Verdun. Described by one colleague as “a man with a mission,” he exhibits a quixotic drive that seems to know no bounds. He attacks a counsillor’s proposal to have a fire hydrant removed from in front of his house with the same zeal he brings to patronage in Mulroney’s government. For Verdun, stirring society’s complacency doesn’t stop at just conquering the next township in the Region. “It starts in my own community,” he says, “and extends to the world.”