As the lights dim in the auditorium of Halifax’s Micmac Native Friendship Centre, a chanter breaks into song. It’s graduation for 24 native adult students. Anita Martell, a 32-year-old mother, is one of them. Graduation, after years away from school, is a significant achievement. It’s an event that would have been well covered and widely read In the Micmac News. But :here is no one here to record it-the 21-year-old paper has shut down.
A few streets south of the Friendship Centre, the Halifax bureau of the Micmac News is closed, the telephone disconnected. The receptionist for the four businesses that still operate out of the basement address points to the desk formerly occupied by the paper’s editor. He packed up a couple of months after budget cuts took effect.
The graduation wasn’t the only thing readers of the monthly tabloid missed. There was no report on talks between officials at the Department of Indian Aff’airs and Northern Development and Micmac politicians over treaty claims. No January issue of the News to report on the wrangling between native chiefs and Federal bureaucrats. Nothing all issues concerning fisheries or the environment. The Atlantic paper is one of 11 native newspapers and two magazines that lost all their funding after the February 1990 federal budget cuts. In an effort to control spending, Secretary of State Gerry Weiner scissored his way through native, women’s and youth programs. The Native Communications Program was axed. It was a savings of $3.45 million and it was deemed necessary to help reduce the country’s staggering deficit. The Micmac News, The Saskatchewan Indian and Ye Sa To in the Yukon Territory, which combined have brought news to natives for more than 40 years, folded within months. Three more papers were rumored to be on the verge of collapse. As some fought hard to keep from shriveling up, others embraced new and unfamiliar business strategies, hurling themselves into the dollar-driven arena of the publishing world. Observers say if this is the future of the native press, it’s a dismal one. Out east, the Micmac News was the only form of communication for more than 20,000 Micmacs scattered throughout Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Quebec’s Gaspe region. It was used to explain treaty issues, promote health, publicize education programs and publish stories by elders about Micmac legends and history. It was also invaluable in achieving justice. All have firm convictions that the Micmac News was integral in having Donald Marshall, Jr., freed. The government cuts to such a service, natives say, are an obvious attempt to weaken them.
Ottawa denies native accusations that the cuts were designed to keep them silent. Because of the cuts, natives got more publicity than ever, the Secretary of State’s press secretary, Len Westerberg, says. “If they had gotten the money, they wouldn’t have made any noise and no one would have known they existed.” Something had to be cut. Nothing was cut from programs for the disabled, race relations and official languages because, Westerberg says, they need government money, but “native communications have alternatives.” Westerberg says natives have to go after a larger circulation and get advertisers.
The funding cuts to the region’s traditional paper were welcomed by the Micmac Confederacy, a political organization in Nova Scotia. It didn’t think the News gave it adequate coverage, so when a void was created in September, the Confederacy decided to launch a paper of its own. But many Maritimers question whether the Confederacy’s Micmac and Maliseet Nation News has the financial resources to do what the Micmac News used to. The paper is operated by one person who is also the Confederacy’s self-government adviser and employment and fisheries officer. The challenge is extraordinary. The mandate of this young paper is to serve two nations, divided into 31 bands, spread over the eastern provinces, every month. Until the last half of the twentieth century, native papers published by natives were rare. In fact, it wasn’t until the communications revolution of the 1960s that aboriginal communications surged. To this day, the development of native media has been paralleled with a steady development in the communities. Ray Fox, president of the National Aboriginal Communications Society, credits the native media for the hundreds of land claims that have surfaced in recent years. Robert Rupert, a journalism professor at Carleton University and an expert on native news, echoes Fox’s sentiment. In the last 15 years, natives have made substantial progress, says Rupert. But without good newspapers, that will change.
Half a dozen Indian tribes in the Yukon now have only television and radio as sources of native information. The 18-year-old magazine Ye Sa To (translated as the “voice of the people”) teetered for months, struggling to survive from issue to issue. Finally, with the release of her latest issue in October 1990, managing editor Doris Bill was planning an official announcement of the demise of the territory’s only native publication. Bill can’t even imagine what the impact on the already isolated communities will be. She says Ye Sa To was instrumental in teaching the Yukon’s illiterate native population to read and inform themselves about treaties and land claims.
More failures are predicted, but there are some publications whose stubborn editors refuse to let the government paralyze them. They are sure they can pull through. Some will survive, Rupert says, but those that do will have to change their mandates. “Two or three papers have a chance at survival, but that’s by going commercial.” And going commercial means becoming mainstream-attracting a readership and then selling the numbers off to advertisers. Fox says for natives to do so would be to sell their souls. But that’s the way most papers are going. The Press Independent in the Northwest Territories has already adopted this strategy of mass appeal. Before the cuts took effect in September, it was a biweekly paper serving 15,000 Indians in 26 communities and covering 560,000 square kilometres. It used to be called the Native Press. An extra sales representative was added and overnight it was marketed to the Northwest Territories’ 15,000 non-native population. The paper’s editor, Lee Selleck, says that the former name restricted readers to the native community. With some changes, he is sure the paper will draw a larger readership, including non-natives. The paper has gone weekly and is growing thicker with more general news, arts, entertainment and comic strips. So far it’s working. Ad sales have doubled and now The Press Independent may get a government business loan.
At the same time, The Wawatay News, which covers more than 300,000 square kilometres in northwestern Ontario, is doing some serious restructuring.

Yet, it is deemed one of the papers that can least afford to. The population is scattered over vast regions, speaks three languages and has the highest suicide rate among native teenagers in the country. A reduced staff of four has been putting out a 24-page newspaper in two languages every two weeks, without a travel budget.
Since the news broke that their annual $100,000 government grant was cut, they scurried to put together a market development plan. What they’re after is increased circulation, and they’re looking at centres like Timmins, Thunder Bay and Winnipeg to get it. As a result, the character of the paper has changed. The communities are no longer directly reflected in the paper. John Rowlandson, an assistant director for Wawatay Native Communications Society, worries about this. “A lot of people here live in fly-in communities. When the road ends, you turn your car around, but north of the road are 16,000 people,” says Rowlandson. “Without a newspaper these Indian people disappear.” Rowlandson knows he has a lot working against him. He avoids making predictions.
Things may look grim for the native press but it’s not all the fault of the government, according to some. Inefficiency, large travel and administration budgets and the wavering integrity of some papers ruined it for the rest, critics say. Clint Buehler, the founding editor of Alberta’s self-sufficient Native Network News, says cuts to his competition, the Windspeaker, give his paper a greater chance at fair competition. He says there are a few papers, such as The Wawatay News, that may really need funding, but their chance has been spoiled by the fat cats. Buehler refutes the argument that aboriginal publications cannot command big bucks from advertisers because Indians are among the country’s poorest. Natives, he says, have control over a large amount of money. “Even people on welfare have money to spend and they make decisions where they want to spend it.”
Back at the Friendship Centre in Halifax, an injured press touches personal lives. Anita Martell is disappointed about the turmoil the native press is in. But a more immediate disappointment is that the Micmac News isn’t there to record the memory of the day she worked so hard to achieve. “It would have been nice for them to take pictures,” she says. “I would have cut mine out and saved it.”

It was no surprise when police dropped charges against NOW magazine last September. The surprise had come when the charges were laid: essentially they amounted to charges of soliciting-“communicating for the purposes of prostitution.” The “communicating” law was introduced in 1985 to curb street solicitation by and of prostitutes, without making prostitution itself illegal. The law states that anyone who “stops or attempts to stop any person or in any manner communicates or attempts to communicate with any person for the purpose of engaging in prostitution or obtaining the sexual services of a prostitute” is liable to a jail term of six months, a $2,000 fine, or both.
Although the communicating law clearly threatens freedom of expression, in May 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that “the elimination of street solicitation and the social nuisance which it creates” justified this limitation, granted by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s less clear that prohibiting ads like the following one from NOW would justify the limitation.
The case surrounding NOW is unprecedented. On Friday, August 31, 1990, police entered the paper’s headquarters on Danforth Avenue and charged NOW’s publishing company and its four directors for soliciting. In total, 14 counts of communicating for the purposes of prostitution were laid. NOW’s business/personal classifieds section suddenly became a red-light district smack in the centre of controversy.
Never before in Canada had such a charge been laid against a publication and many viewed it as police a harassment against a paper that had frequently been critical of the police. And unless the communicating law changes to encompass soliciting through classified ads, it may be the last time police try to control the sale of sex in the business/personals.
Understandably, NOW publisher Michael Hollett heaved a sigh of relief that the heat was off his unorthodox 10-year-old weekly paper. Not everyone was as relieved or as satisfied with the outcome. Women’s groups sensitive to sexism in the media say that although the wrong kind of ads were targeted in this instance, the battle against sexual exploitation in the press is justifiable and not yet won. Such groups believe it’s more crucial to eliminate sexually exploitive display ads than to eradicate business/personals placed by legitimate sex-trade workers.
Over the summer, the national feminist organization MediaWatch succeeded in persuading Molson Breweries to withdraw its “Rare Long-Haired Fox” ad from Toronto subways. Members of the volunteer group say the ad, which portrayed a slim, halter-top-clad brunette photographed from the waist up, made the “Fox” out to be a lustful, preying animal.
The “Rare Long-Haired Fox” was intended for newspaper and magazine insertion too, but before it appeared in NOW or the Toronto Sun-two of the media in which it was supposed to run-Molson’s pulled it as a result of the furor.
MediaWatch and groups like it often succeed in getting sexist ads pulled from public property like the subway system and bus shelters, which are responsible to taxpayers, but they have difficulty persuading newspapers and magazines to follow suit. They’d already lost a skirmish with NOW.
In June 1989, approximately 35 men and women picketed NOW offices to protest a full-page display ad for the Lizard Lounge, a Toronto bar. The ad depicted a nude, pregnant woman caked with mud. She stood in the middle of a field on one foot-like a flamingo-with her arms outstretched and a forced smile on her face. Above the photo was the caption “Rock ‘n Roll Breeder Bar,” and below it were the words “where women meet men.”

The publication received several letters to the editor protesting. One was written by Debbie Wise Harris, currently MediaWatch’s Ontario representative. Harris, writing as an individual at the time, described the ad as the “oh-so-titillating, mud-covered pregnant woman who presumably hangs out in the Lizard Lounge.” In her letter, she commends NOW for having a pro-feminist editorial policy, but questions why that same policy does not extend to advertising. Hollett, who made the final decision to run the ad, says NOW is a nonsexist publication whose staff is very concerned about the images of women in the media. “The Lizard Lounge was selling their club with the image of a pregnant woman, not in a debased way,” he says, “like not spread on the roof of a car. It was an extremely positive image. And if there is any sexuality implied, that it be implied in a pregnant woman was, to me, a very radical thing.”
Hollett’s “Mother of the Earth” argument is a simpleminded arid irresponsible excuse, says Harris. It’s no justification for running such an ad; the connection to the degradation surrounding mud wrestling is far too easy to make. Alison Kerr, coordinator of Resources Against Pornography (RAP), made a similar connection. “The ad gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. The mud was degrading and there was no dignity involved. It just looked so much like the pornography I see all the time.” Kerr, who arranged the demonstration at NOW in response to complaints she had received, enlisted eight other women’s groups to endorse a press release to various media, including NOW The Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and the YWCA of Metropolitan Toronto were among the groups that signed the release.
But despite pressure to pull the “Breeder Bar” ad, Hollett refused. The nude, pregnant woman appeared again the following week. And this time, the nude woman in the ad was larger than in the previous issue. Hollett says he’s serving democracy by not limiting advertisers’ access to his paper. “We would rather accept advertising than not accept it.. It’s a fundamental concept.” And the money’s not bad either. The Lizard Lounge was one of NOW’s regular customers. So are prostitutes. Hollett hates to even consider limiting access to NOW classifieds. “I’m not going to be the sex cop that tells someone their particular way of seeking pleasure is more twisted than mine. I don’t believe in it.” But most publishers do. Although The Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun and even the Yellow Pages carry escort service ads, which some speculate are fronts for prostitution, police say they acted on a complaint they received specifically about a NOW classified. They would not say how many complaints they got nor would they divulge which ad was the subject of the complaint. Perhaps this was the type of ad they were after:
Although he would not permit such an ad in his paper, David Jolley, publisher of The Toronto Stat says, “I thought the charge was preposterous. The law is meant. to stop harassment of innocent people on the street. But nobody’s being harassed through an advertisement.” When it comes to sexist advertising, everyone has an opinion and draws the line at some point. But the players don’t agree on what constitutes a sexually exploitive image and where to draw the line.
In 1981, NOW’s first year, Hollett pulled an ad campaign for Maxell, in which a woman wearing next to nothing was selling stereo items. The ad ran once, but after letters to the editor, Hollett apologized to the readership and withdrew the ad. Looking back, he says he would call the same shot today. Relevance has a lot to do with it. The images in the ad have to be relevant to the product that’s being sold. “If you’re selling a Pontiac Firebird, it’s not acceptable to have a woman lying on the hood of a car to sell it,” Hollett says. Women’s groups are not willing to make such distinctions about images they regard as obtrusive and which perpetuate sexually stereotypical and degrading attitudes towards women. Whether it’s a bikini-clad woman posing on the hood of a car to sell cars or a nude, pregnant woman covered in mud to sell a bar, it all contributes to the same unhealthy attitude that says it’s okay to treat women like sexual objects, says Harris. “And such attitudes lead to both physical and emotional violence against women. The ramifications are quite staggering.” A negative image is a negative image.
Standards of morality and taste govern the advertising decisions at many newspapers and magazines and some have written policies on classified and display advertising. At The Toronto Star, a comprehensive written ad policy taking into account the paper’s mass audience is intended to exclude offensive material. Jolley says the Star is a family paper and the ad content must reflect good taste and appeal to all members of a family.
If The Toronto Star contains any so-called sex ads, they are camouflaged in the Companions section of the classifieds, and are so tame that anyone can read them:
According to Hollett, anyone can read NOW classifieds too. “Mine’s the family newspaper, not the Star, because my family newspaper really talks of issues concerning families.” Hollett’s family presumably discusses this type of ad in an up-front, open manner:.
“My family’s not afraid of this information,” he says. “So, what family what archetypal, hermetically-sealed family living in a jar somewhere-is Jolley talking about? At NOW; we don’t run things because of theoretical people. We make our decisions about real people.”
Some women’s groups like MediaWatch, which consider the promotion of positive images of women in the Canadian media high on their agendas, don’t object to Hollett’s commitment to the sex trade. But they say his decision to run ads because of real people is a tad faulty. For a publication which claims to be non-sexist, it’s a contradiction to run display ads which pigeonhole all women into one category and degrade them, says Harris, who has yet to see a nude, mud-covered pregnant woman stalking any bar-even the Lizard Lounge.
Nothing’s clear-cut when dealing with the dilemma of sexually exploitive ads and the press’s ability to screen and regulate them. It’s hard to be prescriptive.
At Chatelaine, all ads are vetted by publisher Lee Simpson. “The buck stops here,” she says. “But frankly, some ads get run up the flagpole to see who salutes.” If Simpson doesn’t trust her own opinion on a controversial ad, she will run it by her colle2gues and make a decision based on their views. Simpson also relies heavily on readers’ comments. “Chatelaine readership is very involved in the publication. And the publication has changed along with the women who read it.” Women’s groups say that passing the buck to readers isn’t going to solve anything. They say media people who claim to be concerned about the way women are shown in ads should practice what they preach.
Some women’s groups even say censorship is the only way to force the press to act responsibly where images of women are concerned. “The journalism industry has clearly shown it’s not willing to be self-regulating because the profit motive is so compelling,” says RAP’s Kerr. “So in the best interests of society and the greater rights of the collective, I think we need to impose government regulations, as we would on any other industry that’s producing a harmful product.”
The publishing industry is appalled at the mere thought of censorship and government intervention threatening freedom of the press. People are less and less willing to see institutional solutions to problems because they have lost faith in them to effect change, says David Nitkin, president of EthicScan Canada, a group which has a data base on 1,500 Canadian corporations. He believes the answer lies not in censorship, but in the composition of the work force: “Many decisions at newspapers and magazines are still being made by middle-aged men.” And when women do try to speak out against ads which they find harmful and degrading, they are often silenced.
When NOW ran the ad of the nude, pregnant woman, Hollett says he consulted the more articulate feminists on staff. But Kerr says that consulting employees is useless, since they have a vested interest in pleasing the boss. “If the press is really concerned about serving the community, then it’s the press’s responsibility to give us voice, to invite the disadvantaged groups to participate in the decision making.” At MediaWatch, Harris echoes Kerr’s thoughts. Newspapers and magazines should either contact women’s groups before they run controversial ads or they should be more conscious of the images depicted in the ads they receive, says Harris. And for the press to decide what is and isn’t appropriate is not censorship.
Hollett says NOW ads couldn’t be more appropriate for the publication. But he admits it was nerve-racking the day the police stepped in. “It was very chilling. I was suddenly dropped into the maw of the police state. The state went from being this nice place that gives us OHIP to one that throws people in jail for what they believe in.” And Hollett will adamantly defend every ad he runs. He believes the front page coverage that The Toronto Star gave to the death of Andrea Atkinson was far more exploitive than NOW’s business/personal classifieds. “I just find it very interesting how Jolley can be so ‘moral’ about what goes onto the back pages and so ‘immoral’ about what goes on in the front,” he says. “The hearts and minds [of readers] are won on the front pages, not the back.”

“Two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” That was how Lord Durham perceived the relationship between Upper and Lower Canada in the late 1830s. According to Durham the only way to resolve the tensions between the two Canadas was to unite them. Once French Canadians developed political and economic ties to Upper Canada, they would see the advantages of the English way. After all, Quebec could not possibly survive as a distinct nation in the wake of English immigration and English progress, Lord Durham said.
History has proven that Lord Durham’s dream of assimilation was unrealistic. In fact, the ongoing constitutional crisis in Canada has intensified the long-standing differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada. If the Meech Lake debate exposed the gulf between English and French Canadians, media coverage of the debate further alienated them. As the debate gained momentum in the winter and spring of 1990, the coverage took on dangerous nuances. Images of intolerance littered our newspapers and polluted our television screens. Again and again, the media showed the spectacle of a handful of zealots in Brockville, Ontario, trampling the fleur-de-lis. Ontario mayors who declared their municipalities English-only were portrayed as anti-French and anti-Quebec. Dissenters, especially provincial premiers, who saw the Accord as flawed, hasty and force fed, were presented as obstructionist at best, traitorous at worst. People who did not think the Accord was good for Canada commanded little media space. Thus, the real flaws in the Accord were ignored in the panic to see it pass without changes so Quebec wouldn’t separate.
Both French and English media can be criticized for the dramatic play given to certain symbols that had little or nothing to do with the contents of the Accord. The Quebec media in particular turned the debate into an emotional battle between French and English.
What happened in Brockville actually occurred on September 6, 1989, long before Meech heated up. At the time, the image was reported around the world in newspapers such
as Le Monde and The Guardian. Brockville made the news on television programs such as Telejournal, NBG’ Nightly News, Montreal Ce Soir and The National. It was discussed on radio current affairs shows like As it Happens and on the Montreal francophone station CKAC. But the Quebec media kept the image of bigotry alive until the demise of the Accord. Le Point, the French equivalent of The journal, replayed the incident in March 1990, six months after it made the news. The image remained vivid throughout the debate. The journal reported that out of 1,000 Quebecers, 60 percent thought the flag trampling occurred in March or April 1990.
Brockville was referred to in emotional editorials calling the incident symbolic of
Canada’s dislike for Quebec, and in angry letters to the editor in Le Devoir, La Presse and Le Soleil. In a June 23,1990 editorial in LeSoleil, Raymond Giroux wrote: “Many Quebecers, perhaps a majority, are happy that Meech Lake has finally died. After flags were torn, Quebecers lost their honor and enthusiasm for the deal.”
The Brockville episode was repeated so many times on television news, radio call-in programs and in editorials that it looked as though an epidemic of anti-Quebec sentiment was forming in English Canada. Disapproval of the Accord appeared to be more widespread than just in Newfoundland, Manitoba and New Brunswick.
In November 1990, CBC’s Telejournal ran a two-part feature entitled “The Brockville Incident.” A handful of members of the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, who trampled the flag, said they didn’t realize how powerful the image had become to Quebecers. The irony was their message had not been intended for Quebec. It was a protest against then-Premier David Peterson’s push for official bilingualism in Ontario. By then though, the ~ image had become firmly fixed as an anti French symbol.
Lysiane Gagnon of the Montreal daily La Presse recognizes that Brockville was exaggerated in the Quebec media. “It was overplayed ~ because it was spectacular. In other provinces, on the other hand, the law on signs, law [Quebec’s French-only sign law], was really overplayed…so one can say that anything spectacular and controversial is overplayed-that’s partly the nature of journalism.”
Journalist Gilles Lesage of the Montreal daily Le Devoir says the flag stomping was emphasized in Quebec because of the timing. It took place when Quebecers doubted that English Canada would accept the deal. “It confirmed a distrust” of English Canada. Journalists like Lesage, therefore, began to doubt the merits of a deal that would not likely be accepted in English Canada.
In a June 7, 1990 letter to the editor of Le Devoir a reader wrote: “The media in Quebec, like in the rest of Canada and the world, sometimes encourage simplifications and sensationalism. It would be a shame if the incident that was repeated on television were to convince Quebecers that all anglophones scorn and detest them.”
Many anglophones were disturbed by the flag coverage. Hundreds of anglophone Canadians gathered in a downtown Regina park carrying Quebec flags to express their concern over the flag desecration. A June 9, 1990 article in Le Soleil reported that the Regina anglophones said they wanted to send a clear message to Quebecers that Brockville was an isolated case. “They were frustrated by the negative publicity surrounding the relationship between francophones and anglophones in Quebec,” it said.

The extensive coverage of English-language resolutions in Ontario municipalities such as Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay also added fuel to the flames. “The hysteria was media generated,” says Richard Starr, program editor for CBC Radio’s Media File. The resolutions made English the language of business in 47 out of 839 municipalities in Ontario, while 33 other cities, including Toronto, reaffirmed bilingualism. That fact was rarely reported. Starr says the media made it appear communities were suddenly declaring themselves unilingual to spite Quebec, when in fact many resolutions were in the making months before the Meech Lake deadline.
Both French and English media referred to the resolutions as “symbolic decisions” and “evidence of bigotry.” In a Toronto Star article on February 3, 1990, reporter Darcy Henton drew a link between the Sault Ste. Marie resolution and Quebec’s perception of it. “The Council vote has sparked a national controversy, adding fuel to tensions already inflamed by the debate over the threatened Meech Lake constitutional accord and the role of Quebec within Canada.” And when Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Joseph Fratesi tried to defend his position as not anti-French, the Quebec media were skeptical. Lise Bissonnette, publisher of Le Devoir and former columnist for 1be Globe and Mail, wrote: “Soo Mayor Joseph Fratesi’s first attempt to camouflage the bigotry in the city’s move had to do with money.” Money was not the question. Although municipalities said they adopted unilingual resolutions because they could not afford to offer C/O French language services, in fact, the French “‘
Language Services Act requires provincial government agencies, not municipalities, to offer some French services in areas of Ontario where francophones make up 10 percent of the population. Several city councillors said they supported the unilingual resolutions to show their anger with Queen’s Park’s policy of transferring programs to municipalities without consulting them. “But it was a gratuitous, untimely slap at francophones – a run on the bank of tolerance when its reserves were already low,” Andrew Cohen wrote in his book A Deal Undone, the 5 Making and Breaking of the Meech Lake Accord. More and more, language became the catalyst for further divisions between English Canada and Quebec. In a Globe and Mail article on February 1, 1990, two senior Quebec cabinet ministers described the unilingual resolutions as “deplorable but not surprising in light of increasing language tensions.”
In a noted case of distortion, Toronto Star columnist Gary Lautens was misquoted in Le journal de Montreal. Lautens had written a column about Quebec on June 13, 1990, in which he described his personal observations about Meech and what he saw as the reality of Quebec. He said that Quebec is now a place where English on signs is banned and where the Queen is unwelcome. The problematic line was: “A Quebec where ‘federalist’ is a four-letter word.” Le journal de Montreal printed 10 paragraphs of Lautens’s article and added the word “fuck.” Lautens wrote to Pierre Peladeau, chairman of Le journal de Montreal, saying Peladeau owed his readers an explanation and Lautens himself an apology. “I only make this public to show how Quebecers are manipulated,” Lautens wrote in a column on August 27, 1990.
Le Soleil also referred to Lautens’s column in a June 14, 1990 column by Michel Vastel entitled “The Accord Awakens Old Demons in English Canada.” Vastel wrote that Lautens’s article was yet another example of English Canada’s disapproval of francophones. “The Toronto elite gladly say that incidents like Sault Ste. Marie are isolated. But one of the most highly regarded columnists in the largest daily in the country, Gary Lautens…didn’t hold back his punches yesterday.” Again, Vastel added the word “fuck” to Lautens’s column.
In Cohen’s A Deal Undone, he observed how symbols had become critical in the debate over Meech Lake. “The towns, villages and hamlets that spurned a bilingual regime that did not apply to them did not necessarily want to be mean-spirited. Similarly, the desecration of the Quebec flag by bigots in Brockville, Ontario, did not represent the feelings of most Canadians, but the footage of the event was played repeatedly in Quebec as if it did. The discussion was no longer rational. It had moved from the merits of the accord to the perception of its impact or the consequences of its demise.”
For Meech to become law it had to be ratified by the 10 provinces by June 23, 1990. Anxiety was high at the opening of the discussion in early June 1990 and the media began to refer to Meech as a “crisis.” In a Toronto Star article entitled “Pressure Mounting to Salvage Meech Lake,” Rosemary Speirs described the mood surrounding the opening of the conference. “Politicians and commentators across the country yesterday called for a settlement of the constitutional crisis that is fueling nationalist anger in Quebec.” Immediately, the focus in both the English and French media turned to Quebec. The message was: settle Meech and avoid alienating Quebec into separating from Canada.
In the francophone media, unconditional acceptance of Quebec’s demands quickly became the focus of debate. Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s five demands were regarded ‘” as a measuring stick of Canada’s willingness to get Quebec’s signature on the Constitution. To repudiate any of these demands was to reject Quebec. So evident was the francophone media’s eagerness to pass the Accord unchanged that even Premier Bourassa questioned their i3 objectivity.
In a June 13, 1990 article in Le Soleil, Bourassa criticized the media for not allowing him to negotiate a deal and for placing unrealistic demands on him. He was quoted as saying: “There are suggestions that I have given in. When you make compromises that don’t cost you anything, you are not giving in. Agreeing to examine the questions that concern Canadians is not an extravagant compromise.”
But if the media manipulated Bourassa, politicians also did their fair share of media manipulation. On June 7,1990, Premier David Peterson called a news conference exclusively for francophone reporters. Peterson was said to have pleaded with the francophone media to be easy on Bourassa. “Mr. Bourassa is very intelligent in debate but the reality is now that one must try to understand the problems of Newfoundland and Manitoba,” Peterson was quoted as saying in a Toronto Star article. “Bourassa is under enormous pressure here from the fiercely nationalist Quebec media, which grills him and his officials if there is any sign he is giving in on changes to the accord,” Toronto Star journalist Matt Maychak wrote.
As part of the push to see the Accord pass, pro-Meech politicians made opponents look like traitors. There was a tendency in the media prompted by politicians -to apply pressure to dissenting premiers. In a June 1, 1990 article in Le Soleil, Michel Vastel described an internal memo which circulated in then-Premier Peterson’s office. The memo suggested the government manipulate the media into singling out hold-out premiers. Clyde Wells, for instance, was to be portrayed as “a spoiled brat that is not to be trusted.”
The Globe and Mail ran an article on November 10, 1989, entitled “Wells’s Defiance on Accord Casts Him as Odd Man Out.” In a later article, Wells was described as “the angry man at the first ministers’ table.” He was portrayed as a defiant man with a bad attitude. On June 23, 1990, LeSoleil ran an editorial entitled “A Day of Deception.” It referred to “Clyde Wells’s obvious betrayal,” and Gary Filmon, Sharon Carstairs and Gary Doer were branded as Manitoban “Pontius Pilates.”
Bilingual journalists who covered the debate found fault with both English- and French-language coverage. Peter Stockland was in Ottawa during the week of June 3, covering the first ministers’ conference for the Toronto Sun. Stockland, a bilingual journalist, worked as the paper’s Quebec City reporter for two years. He said English and French journalists defined the debate in completely different terms.
“The francophone press has a tribal perspective-the idea that we’re doing this story by, about and for our people as opposed to doing a news story.” Stockland says at a scrum in Ottawa, a senior Quebec parliamentary correspondent with the national assembly asked, “‘Why are we continuing with this taponnage [screwing around]?’ I cannot imagine an English language reporter asking that kind of question. You might say, ‘What do you hope to achieve here?’ or ‘Isn’t this a little bit fruitless?'” Stockland also points out that the Quebec media placed the constitutional debate in a historical perspective, while the anglophone media tended to see the debate as evolving from the 1982 patriation of the Constitution. Clearly, if Quebecers were regarding the debate as a process that has lasted 230 years since Wolfe defeated Montcalm, the impact of its failure would be more shocking.
Rheal Seguin, a Quebec City national assembly reporter for The Globe and Mail, recalls being excluded from Peterson’s francophone scrum in Ottawa because he works for an
English paper. Seguir says the “exclusive’ francophone scrum was a good example of the different interpretation the two media gave to events in Ottawa. “The francophone media had Bourassa under a magnifying glass,” Seguir says. “There was pressure here in Quebec City coming from the PQ saying he’s giving in. He should just walk out of there because they didn’t want him to give in.” On the other hand, the anglophone media outside Quebec, when they go to Quebec to cover an event, often have very little understanding of the origins of the debate, Seguin says. “They take a very simplistic view oj what’s going on here.”
Bilingual journalist William Johnson, who
covered Meech for the Montreal Gazette, says, “] think both the English and the French press were beneath the ethical standards of journalism during the whole three-and-a-half years oj discussion of Meech, but the French press particularly.” Instead of pointing out all the legitimate reasons why someone could be against Meech, the francophone media simply saw criticisms as rejections of Quebec.
Michel Vastel agrees that there were instances of sensationalism in the francophone media, but the anglophone media were equally guilty oj distortion. In an article entitled “Quebec’s Reputation Takes a Blow in English Canada,” Vastel attacked the media in English Canada for misunderstanding Quebec nationalism. Every week, editorials and political cartoons in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen and the Calgary Herald distorted Quebec’s image. One cartoon in The Ottawa Citizen illustrated four interconnected gears of increasing size. The smallest gear was labelled “Dice Mulroney,” then “Meech Fiasco,” followed by “Quebec Hyper-nationalism,” and finally, the largest gear was labelled “Racism.” Vastel says this cartoon reflected an anti-Quebec bias, where nationalism was regarded as a precursor to racism.
“There is always a provincial or regional bias in the media,” Vastel says. “In Toronto, the media have an English-Canadian bias versus a French-Canadian bias, which is, in my opinion inevitable, as the media reflect public opinion.” Robert McKenzie, Quebec City bureau chief for The Toronto Star agrees. “There is nothing surprising or scandalous in that journalists reflect the society in which they live. There’s no such thing as objectivity. We get the media we deserve with their prejudices and their weaknesses.” Although they can’t be entirely objective, the important thing is that they be honest, McKenzie says.
The media’s prejudices and weaknesses were apparent in the days after Meech died. There was a feeling of bittersweet resolve in the Quebec media. In a June 25 editorial in Le Soleil, Raymond Giroux called the death of Meech “a monumental slap in the face” and added that “Quebecers, calm and serene, are capable of prospering on their own.” In the pages of Le Devoir, former Conservative cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard, who resigned from the Mulroney cabinet and later formed the Bloc Quebecois, expressed his determination. He told Quebecers that they must not be fooled into believing English Canada still wanted Quebec. The point is no one could have blocked the Accord without large support in English Canada, encouraged by anti-francophone sentiment, Bouchard wrote.
Toronto Star editor John Honderich doesn’t think that opposing Meech meant being antiQuebec. “That was hogwash. We had sound reasons for objecting to Meech.”
Lise Bissonnette says one of the first things she did as publisher of Le Devoir in mid-June 1990 was to offer Quebec readers a perspective from English Canada. Jeffrey Simpson, a Globe and Mail columnist, was hired as Le Devoir’s columnist. Bissonnette said she would encourage this kind of exchange because it exposes the reader to a variety of opinions.
If the goal of media coverage is to inform the public, the media failed. Canadians were confused by the coverage. A March 1990 Gallup poll showed that 60 percent of Canadians said they knew little or nothing about the contents of the Accord. The closed-door tactics employed by the federal government did not help, but the media could have focused more attentionon defining the terms of the agreement instead of speculating on the possible consequences of a failed deal.
Some Canadians knew at least enough to express their anger at the coverage in letters to the editor in both the French and English media. “This closed-door session on Meech is a black mark on our history. I do not feel that the Canadian press represented the people properly. Why were they not asking the right questions?” wrote Nancy Macera of Nepean, Ontario, in The Ottawa Citizen.
Other readers were outraged by the way the media shifted attention away from the politics of the Accord to the differences between French and English Canadians. “The political crisis was, and is, real and factual, but it was politically caused. The portrayal of antagonism on the rise within the Canadian people, I believe is inflated and to a serious extent fabricated by the hypercritical media,” wrote Jenny Lynch of Ottawa, also in the Citizen.
By the time Meech Lake approached its final hour, there was a sense that Canadians were a people more divided than ever. Quebec and English Canada have always maintained two versions of what it means to be Canadian. The media helped revive this polarized vision by pitting English against French Canadians. Clearly, those who objected to Meech Lake had legitimate grievances concerning Quebec’s status as a “distinct society,” the protection of women’s rights, the constitutional aspirations of native people and the northern territories. Meech Lake was more than an emotional argument between French and English. This was a time when the media might have used their critical sense to discern fact from fiction and symbols from reality. In fact, the rejection of Meech Lake in English Canada had little to do with anti-Quebec, anti-French bias. It was an understandable reaction to an undemocratic political process in which the media allowed themselves to participate.

For me to write that I think Brian Mulroney is an asshole,” says Joey Slinger, “is every bit as inconsequential as if my mother phones up and tells me she thinks Brian Mulroney is an asshole. My opinion is perhaps interesting to her and hers is to me, but it has no place in journalism.”
Slinger has been a columnist for The Toronto Star since 1979. He’s won a National Newspaper Award (1982), and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for humor for his book No Axe Too Small to Grind (1986). His work makes some people laugh out loud and others shake their heads in bewilderment.
What makes him the most peculiar columnist, and perhaps the best writer, in Canadian newspapers is that he so often hides his opinion behind a mask of nonsense. His only apparent ideology is to attack the stupid, the cruel and the self-important, but not every day and not always in the same way. He is, as one magazine editor described him, a “closet moralist.”
One often has to dig deep and reread his pieces to discover their meaning. Bag ladies don’t play baseball and grown men don’t build wives out of Lego, and Aurora, Ontario, does not have a famous Nude Festival, except in Slinger’s world. If you can’t see his point, well, that’s your problem.

“I tend to be of the Mark Twain point of view,” Slinger says. “I’ve no great interest in humor for its own sake. Humor as plain entertainment is fine for those who like it, but
think a columnist should have some thing to say. The kind of humor like is going after something.”
He writes about what makes him mad and is not above embarrassing his targets into submission, if the’ are mighty enough to take the heal One never knows from day to day
what devilry will pop up in Slinger’s column. Or how much sense Something we didn’t see or know before, revealed or simply viewer from off centre.
He makes it seem so easy it’s difficult to imagine him in any other job. Actually, he’s worked at three dailies in Toronto and the CBC. In the early seventies, he was alternately Globe and Mail bureau chief in Washington, Vancouver and a the Ontario Legislature. He was later a producer for CBC Radio, gossip columnist for the Toronto Sun and the editor of City magazine, a glossy Sunday supplement in the Star.
Author Martin O’Malley was writing for The Globe Magazine when Slinger arrived from Victoria in 1970 “(Joey] was very hippie-looking-hair down to his shoulders, granny glasses-small, witty, Woody Allenish. Pretty much the way he’s been ever since, except his hair is shorter.”
While at the Globe, Slinger orchestrated a plan to streak the newsroom. “It needed to be shaken up,” he says. The Globe welcomed good writers, but it also attracted a collection of “Marxist-Leninists and Trots, draft dodgers and twitchy people” whose pretensions he found unbearable. Perhaps they thought him equally strange, especially when he and his confederates posted notices throughout the building advertising the streak. It brought the paper to a halt. At the appointed hour, hundreds of people were straining to catch a look. Whatever they were expecting, they were disappointed. Slinger made the run all right, but a raincoat and rubber boots ran with him. The stunt was dubbed the “Yellow Streak” because Slinger apparently turned chicken. Not so, he says. “I don’t think I ever actually intended to do it” The point of the exercise must have been to see how many people he could attract. It’s an old carny trick. Promise the suckers something outrageous to get them into the tent and, having done so, shame them for the impulse that took them there. What did you think you were going to see?

“Don’t take off your shoes. The dog doesn’t, I don’t see why we should,” says the columnist as he shuts out the damp of a dull, drizzly morning. I stamp my feet on the mat as McGee, an amiable six-year-old golden retriever, sniffs my hand without slobbering and distractedly wanders out of sight.
Slinger used to jog. Now, he is a speed walker. His wife, freelance writer Nora McCabe, calls it “geeking,” which Slinger admits is an unfortunately apt term. It is his morning ritual, a discipline. It helps him keep his feet on the ground.

Michael Enright, the hose of As It Happens on CBC Radio, knows Slinger better than most people. They met at the Globe and then worked together at Ibis Country in the Morning in 1974. The two look very much alike and have often been mistaken for brothers. Enright is Slinger’s best friend and has been with him through “fits” of jogging, bicycling, hiking, weightlifting and t’ai chi, among other diversions.
“I think he feels that if he doesn’t discipline himself or run his life in a fairly orderly way, he’ll lose the ability to have a disorderly mind,” Enright says, “which is what you have to have. Balzac said, ‘You keep your life in perfect order so your mind can be chaos,’ and that’s what you write from. It gives him greater freedom in the work. I’ve known painters like that.”
Slinger guides me past the stairway to the second floor and through his long, narrow kitchen to a round pine table where he offers coffee. It is a room with a view.
The kitchen window is very nearly the height and width of the back wall-an extension of a former sun porch, the result of an inspired renovation. Although the yard is bordered by neighbors’ lots on three sides, it does not seem enclosed. Rather, it resembles a clearing in the woods. This morning, a swirling, feathered mass of white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows (“See the black-and-white head?”) and chimney sparrows, even a female purple finch, compete with me for his attention. He’s not being impolite. I’m here to observe him in his habitat.
When it comes to bird watching, “Joey’s a pro,” Enright told me. “It galvanizes his interests.”
I ask Slinger why he became a birder, but his answer is broken off when something catches his eye. “On the white table there,” he points, “is the fox sparrow. Now, if he comes up-there’s a central spot on his chest-you’ll see, while these other birds are brown, he’s almost red-rusty red, and a very gentle grey. He’s really beautiful. He’s an exciting creature to have show up.” Slinger, too, is an exciting creature, but not because of his plumage-today, a long-sleeved purple shirt and khaki trousers with red suspenders-but because of his call. Some say it’s the call of the loon and they may be right, if for the wrong reason. If you listen closely, it stays with you, with a warmth and with a chill.
When Slinger started his column at the Star, his editors expected him to return to the path of political gossip which he had trod with great success at the Sun. The reborn columnist had other ideas.
“Gossip is hard work. It’s drudgery.”
“It’s reporting.”
“Yes. It’s reporting. Absolutely.” There is a tone of mock horror in his voice. He resolved to go for walks around the city’s many neighborhoods and river valleys. Early mornings he’d explore Toronto and go home to paint word pictures of what he’d seen. Once he got over the thrill of writing about “yellow flowers and blue flowers,” he decided he needed a little remedial education or he would run out of material. His studies included a correspondence course in ornithology from Cornell University. “I got fairly serious for a time, but mainly it was to have something to write about.”

He tells of E.B. White, who wrote for The New Yorker. One day White surprised his friends and moved to Maine to a farm he’d bought on the edge of the ocean. There he stayed for the next 50 years with a few geese and a few sheep and a few pigs. “I believe he did that because what he wrote about was himself and his own experiences. I’ve
always believed that he bought the farm to give himself something to do that he could write about himself doing,” rather than staying cooped up in an office in New York.
“One of the things I do in writing about Toronto is go and see things that have been taken for granted and write about them as if they are, in fact, novelties and unique rather more wonderful than they actually are.”
Those columns are gentle and pastoral, and often reveal some portent drawn from swirling leaves or a patch of wild raspberries or a hole in the ground or a hidden, hanging swing or 1,000 similar things. In one column, he described himself as a “searcher after rhythms and patterns, trying to discern shapes in terrain where none exist except in the imagination.”
A morning in Serena Gundy Park produced these lines:
“If there is a prettier name for a park anywhere, I have yet to hear it. And if you know what’s good for you, you will go out there and bob up and down on the swooping suspension footbridge that carries you into the park across the Don River. If you are still in a foul humour after bobbing up and down, then throw yourself off the bridge and dash your brains out on the rocks below; you are beyond help, anyway
“At the end of a woody cove, a shallow ravine-more like a gully pitches down through the trees. It is filled with snow and well marked with tracks of toboggans, children’s sleighs, the wobbly downhill courses and herringbone up hills of cross-country skiers. But the tracks, while clear, are no longer sharp. They are softened, the way memories-at least pleasurable memories-are softened as we get farther from the original experience. And they last much longer than the unpleasurable memories that melt rapidly out of mind around them.”

Another thing that appealed to Slinger when he was offered the column was the chance to fool with comic forms, “which is great exercise, like practicing the piano.” Practicing is not something that very many newspaper people do very often and that pains him.
“It’s an odd business where most of the people in it are not very good at it because they don’t work at it.” There are good reporters and gifted writers, he says, but few of those care much about improving the quality of their work. “[Editors] don’t give a shit. Just read the Star and you’ll see they’re not terribly interested in it being well-written. It’s
the one thing I care about. That, as a task, engaged my interest and it still does.”
The wheels of his creation seldom show. Equally, it’s sometimes difficult to find the humor, to see the joke. Can he be serious? Definitely. Always. Never more so than when he’s being funny.
The fictitious Aurora Nude Festival, which many people took for fact, was born when Slinger decided the town’s Latin motto, SOL MEUS TESTIS, meant “Where the sun never shines.” A better translation might be “The sun is my witness,” but that would be quibbling. The mayor” not amused.
One of the columns for which won the National Newspaper Award demanded public floggings, legalized prostitution, death squads a martial law, so that visiting delegation of the International Monetary Fund might feel at home in Toronto. The premier of Ontario had extend drinking hours in deference to guests.
Wrote Slinger: “I’m positive some of the delegates were homes because none of us natives were invited at three a.m. by masked m and taken outside and summar machine-gunned or, failing that, least taken into the basement
police headquarters to have electrodes affixed to our genitals. Polite society isn’t polite society in a lot countries our visitors hailed from unless there are screams in the back ground.
“Me, I broke all my fingers. It w my way of saying ‘Welcome!'” On a gentler note, the beauty “Bag Lady Baseball” is that his description of these sad, lonely ladies whose instincts make them incapable of playing the game, presses 0 eyes closer to the truth than a conventional newspaper story might.
the end, the bewildered bag ladies are huddled for protection in del centre field, cowering under a blizzard of baseballs hit by Pete Rose. is a tall tale that touches both t] heart and the imagination.

John Edward Slinger, Jr. was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1943 and startc his career at Guelph’s Daily Mercury in 1965. He had dropped out of t third year at Queen’s University
Kingston just before Christmas 196 He says he picked journalism as career while on the train back
Guelph. “I had to have something tell my father about what I w going to do.”
He first applied for a reporting job at the Kitchener- Waterloo Record but was “laughed out of town” f, his inexperience. Then “somebody died” at the Mercury and a job opened up for the hometown boy. Two years later, he decided to try
school again. On the basis of his time at the Mercury, he was accepted into the second year of the journalism program at Carleton University. While at Carleton, he worked part-time for The Canadian Press in Ottawa. Canada’s centennial made for a lot of work in the summer of 1967, but Carleton wouldn’t take him back in the fall. “I told CP they were stuck with me and, in their gratitude, they sent me to Winnipeg. It was cruel and unusual punishment.” That winter was marked by long, frigid walks up Portage Avenue late at night when he couldn’t afford a taxi. Rescue came with an invitation to Vancouver Island to join the Victoria Times, now the Victoria Times-Colonist. At the Times, he quickly rose to city editor, a rank which he describes as a “misinterpretation of prodigiousness-this was the backwater of journalism.” In 1970, he made the big time when he was hired by The Globe and Mail.
Ask about his reporting days and he’ll tell you he was a terrible reporter. “I never knew what questions to ask.”
Not that this stopped him from doing his job. “I always figured that if you get 10 facts, I’ll only get two, but I’ll out write you,” says Slinger. “I’ve never been too good at getting facts, but I haven’t ever been too worried about not being able to do it. I’ll write something that’s enormously readable no matter what.” Rather than gathering information, “I’ve very much gone the writing route. It might be out of sheer laziness, but I like to think it’s because I’m such a sensitive person.”
The dream of many a reporter would be to wear Joey Slinger’s geeking shoes and walk the dog, not before work, not after work, but absolutely any time at all-within reason. There is always work to be done.
The down side, the hard part, is conceiving and competently executing four columns a week. It’s far from easy. The job is basically self-assigning. “It’s not physically demanding work,” he says, “but it’s not something that many would either care to do or would do very well.” “Do you have the best job in Canadian journalism?” “No, but it’s the only one I care to do. And I do it because I have no particular skills in any other area.” Martin O’Malley tells Slinger he should write books or a once a-month column in a magazine. Michael Enright says Slinger should try to write for American magazines and gain a wider, more profitable audience. But Slinger stays at the Star, “because they let me do whatever I want to do.” For that he receives the five-year union rate of just over $1,100 a week-actually a princely income for a Canadian writer-but Slinger has other ambitions and they don’t include journalism.

“If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t say, ‘What? And lose my vocation?'” He pauses, eyes wide, relishing the thought with his wild, toothy grin. “I’d be out of here in a flash.”
He’s written at least one novel, unpublished-“It’s out of circulation now”-and for two years has been writing TV scripts with Bill Cameron, co-host of The journal on CBC television. When I comment on the mediocrity of Canadian sitcoms, those produced by Canadians who stayed in Canada, Slinger replies, “It’s not hard to write awful stuff, as we’re discovering.”
What would be the market for a Slinger syndicated column in Canada? Actually, the column is already syndicated by the Star. “Here, I’ll show you the cheque for September.” The figure is an appalling $2.26.
Why so little money? So few papers?
“I think because it’s badly sold. I’m sure the syndication department thinks it’s because nobody gives a shit or [the column] is shit.” He smiles, innocently. “I’m sure they would have a different view than mine.”
The title of Slinger’s first collection of columns, No Axe Too Small to Grind, aptly describes the columnist’s raison d’etre: to make big issues out of small ones. At more than one major Canadian newspaper, where managing editors and former legislative bureau chiefs tap out derivative fluff styled on the Star’s Gary Lautens or popular American columnist Dave Barry, Slinger’s appearance could only make the locals look ridiculousand that’s not funny.
Although he exhorts his friend to try other things, Michael Enright notes that the pursuit of the big book or the big movie should not be the gauge of Slinger’s career. “I don’t think he’s limited by anything other than the energy he wants to devote A lot of great writers have been great in just writing columns and essays.”
For Joey Slinger, writing a newspaper column is just another job and he’s stuck with it. A tough life. He sets his own hours. Chooses his own stories. Comes and goes as he pleases. He’s seldom seen in the newsroom. He writes at home. He writes what he likes. Some days he writes about what makes him mad. Some days he just dreams and takes his readers with him. Fortunately for Slinger, and his readers, he’s uncommonly suited to the task.
It’s the columnist’s unique degree of freedom, he says, that allows the columnist to draw attention to things that an ordinary journalist, a reporter, might not be able to.
“I occasionally write about my dog, but I’m imagining it has some sort of more universal significance than the great fascination we share in my household with my dog. It’s an excuse to tell another story-an excuse to preach”.

The day my daughter started kindergarten we received a sheet of paper from her school that we were advised to keep for handy reference. The dread communication-which occasionally slips out from under the plastic french fry magnet on our fridge door-lists all the “PA days” for the year. To our horror, the very first one was the following morning. There were 15 in all, not including Christmas break, spring break or the usual statutory holidays. Education, it seems, at least in the Toronto public school system, is a sometime thing.

At first glance this may not have much to do with journalism, but in fairly short order my outrage as a parent and a taxpayer had a curious spillover into my own profession. What the hell was a “PA day” anyway? I talked to some other parents at the school and discovered most were as puzzled and annoyed as I. “It stands for ‘Professional Activity,'” one mom informed me. “The teachers’ contract gives them time off to upgrade their skills.” But no one seemed to know how PA days (or PD, for Professional Development, as they’re called at some schools) came to be..

So it was with some relief and gratitude that I glanced at a front-page feature story in The Toronto Star on October 28. It was headed: “PD Days Debate: Teachers Love Them, Parents Hate Them.” Finally, someone was going to tell me why the local school’s doors were closed on alternate Tuesdays. Isn’t that what journalism is for?

Eighty column inches later-complete with turn, big play on the inside page with photos and cutlines-and I knew…what? That most teachers feel PA days are a good thing; that most parents feel terribly inconvenienced by them. The yeas and nays all got to express their feelings on the subject, so no one could accuse the reporter of not being “objective.”

But here’s what I didn’t know after wading through all that carefully balanced type: Whose idea was the PA day? How long have teachers had them? What do the teachers do on PA days? Do they have to account for themselves to a principal or a school board, or does it work on an honor system? Is this a nationwide phenomenon? Do schools in Saskatchewan close with the same frequency as those in Ontario? Or is it a provincial policy? If so, does Timmins have the same number of PA days as Toronto? Is this a Canadian peculiarity, or do Japanese, American or British kids miss school as frequently? Are teachers not encouraged to upgrade their skills during their long summer holidays? What is it exactly that cannot be accomplished in classroom time? Are PA days part of the teachers’ overall collective agreement or do the number of days vary from school to school? Are principals generally in favor of them? Are the number of days negotiable from year to year or contract to contract? Can PA days be revoked? Are parents protesting them to school boards?

“What does the story say?” asked my husband, hoping to glean the information secondhand as I read through. “It says that some people feel that PA days are a good thing,” I muttered, “and some people feel they’re a bad thing.” “Oh,” he said, “so there’s no story.”

There was no story there, and I’m beginning to worry that there are fewer and fewer stories anywhere. When we turn to our newspapers for information these days-or radios and televisions, for that matter-we no longer get news. We get feelings.

I don’t mean to pick on the hapless reporter who wrote the Star story (or non-story) on PA days. He’s just one of thousands of trained journalists working in the new climate in which emotions are favored over information. I’d like to think journalists are trained to ask questions. There used to be five of them: Who? What? Where? Why? and How? But these days, there seems to be only ope: “How does it feel?”

Feelings are very nice and all, but they don’t provide context. And without context, we can’t hope to understand issues. And more important, we can’t arrive at solutions. PA days may be a trivial example in the greater scheme of the universe, but unfortunately the same methodology of reporting is applied to politics, the environment, foreign affairs, social problems, medical issues and so on.

The effect of this kind of reporting is that it leaves us all feeling (there’s that dreaded word) that the world is going to hell in a hand basket; everyone’s terribly upset about it and there’s not a whole lot that anyone of us can do. Primarily because no one ever tells us how things came to this sorry pass in the first place. The journalism of feelings, therefore, is the journalism of futility.

Generally, I blame television for this, as I do for so many other things. When print was the main source of information, a reporter’s job was to recreate an event or experience with words. Which meant that he (or less often she) had to have some understanding of what was going on to be able to convey it. But pictures are capable of telling the entire story. So what is left for a reporter to do? Simply to get the reaction.

Specifically, I blame Howard Cosell. He got his start covering boxing matches in the 1970s and, with his incredible polysyllabic verbiage and one-two enunciation, quickly became a sensation. What set him apart was that when the poor, battered loser climbed out of the ring after a bout, Cosell didn’t ask, as would most informed commentators, “Why didn’t you see that left hook coming? What happened to your footwork? What could you have done against those short jabs? Do you blame your trainer for bad strategy?”

Nah. Cosell went right for the gut. “Kid, your nose is broken, your face is a mass of bruises, your career is in a shambles and you’ve just kissed your hopes of a title bout goodbye. Tell me, kid, HOW DOES IT FEEL?”

Well Howard, everyone in the business is trying to be like you these days, whether they realize it or not.

And it  feels lousy.

Two male students boosted Montreal Gazette photographer Allen McInnis to the cafeteria window at the University of Montreal’s l’Ecole polytechnique and held him steady on the narrow sill. Police officers had drawn all the cafeteria’s drapes, but at this window a 15-centimetre gap in the curtains remained. The gap was all McInnis needed to photograph the horror inside. Less than one minute later a police officer inside spotted McInnis and furiously chased him away-too late to prevent him from capturing the tragic scene on film. Beyond the curtains was a murdered woman-one of 14 who were killed December 6, 1989, by deranged gunman Marc Lepine, who then killed himself. McInnis threw his roll of film down to Gazette reporter Mary Lamey. “Stuff this down your pants and if the cops come for me, you don’t know me. Get it back to the office!”

On that film was a photograph many people will never forget. It emerged from The Gazette’s darkroom close to 10 p.m.-hours past the paper’s photo deadline-but the editors knew immediately it was the picture they would use. It showed one of Lepine’s victims, her lifeless body slumped backward in her chair, while a plainclothes police officer in the background pulled down holiday decorations which had suddenly become hideously inappropriate. The Gazette ran the picture-which later won McInnis numerous awards-front page, in color, the next morning.

The 75 newspapers that receive Canadian Press wire photos then had to decide whether to publish the powerful picture too. Although newspaper editors frequently make such decisions about tragic photographs, the choice is still difficult. Whether the picture depicts the Montreal massacre, a nude Vietnamese child running from a napalm attack or a little girl severely burned by her flaming nightgown, decisions are not made lightly. Most papers don’t have a hard-and-fast policy because every picture tells a different story. Although many readers may assume a newspaper prints every shocking photo it receives, it does not. Most editors are surprisingly sensitive to the horror they occasionally bring their readers and require sound reasons for publishing a picture that is potentially offensive.

Pictures shock where words cannot. Facts and figures can be forgotten, but images are difficult to erase from the mind. Pictures act like a chisel on the brain, etching images 13 into long-term memory. Remember some of the pictures of the Vietnam War? Remember that nude and screaming little girl running down the road, desperately trying to escape a napalm attack? Can anybody forget?

Publishing photos like the ones that emerged from Vietnam or the Montreal massacre can have a positive effect. They may move people to make changes in society, to make a better world. The Calgary Herald published McInnis’s Montreal massacre picture on its front page. Murray Ball, acting managing editor at the time of the massacre, told the Herald’s ombudsman that “already in the aftermath of this horror public debate has begun on a number of issues-gun control, the impact of violent films, mental health checkpoints. Publication stimulates these discussions and may bring some good out of such awful evil.”

It wouldn’t be the first time publication of a tragic photo effected some change. Former Toronto Star graphics editor Peter Robertson remembers when the Star helped to make children’s nightwear nonflammable. A rash of fires in the early seventies burned several children. The Star published a photo of a four-year-old girl whose flaming nightgown burned more than one third of her body. Subsequently, the issue of setting minimum flammability standards regulations was raised in the federal legislature; months later the standards were set. “Nobody is suggesting The Toronto Star got the regulations changed,” says Robertson, “but the truth is that we sure gave it a good push.”

Not all newspaper editors rationalized the decision to publish McInnis’s photo by hoping some good could result. Surprisingly, the Toronto Sun, a tabloid often called sensational, did not run the photo. Managing editor Mike Strobel thought the murdered woman was twisted into a grotesque position and publishing the photo would go beyond the bounds of good taste. Instead, the Sun ran a picture of one of the stretchers leaving the university. Because the Sun is a tabloid and runs a SUNshine girl on page three, many readers assume it will run the goriest, most tasteless pictures of Toronto’s four dailies, but Strobel says, “Our use of pictures is very similar to newspapers across the country, including some of the most conservative.”

Many lurid photos never see the light of day, but CP rarely holds any photos back; it leaves the decision making up to its member newspapers. However, Mel Sufrin, executive secretary of the Ontario Press Council and the former head of photo service at CP, does remember a few pictures that fell into the “Too Grisly to Release” category. Photographs of an airplane crash at Pearson International Airport showing bloody pieces of bodies strewn over the airfield were deemed too gory and unpublishable.

Clearly, many newspaper editors found McInnis’s picture to be publishable. In fact, the picture won the Canadian Press News Picture of the Year Award and took top honors in the spot news category of the National Newspaper Awards. Although no records are kept, Harold

Herschell, photo editor at CP, estimates at least half of their members used the photo, including The Toronto Stat; The London Free Press, the Calgary Herald and The Ottawa Citizen. In the United States, The Detroit News, The Milwaukee journal and The Sacramento Bee were among those that published it.

Many readers, on the other hand, were outraged. They called the picture sensational, tasteless, insensitive and intrusive. The Gazette’s ombudsman received almost 400 telephone calls and 100 letters from disapproving readers. Many were worried that the woman would be recognized. “Can you animals imagine how her parents must have felt when they saw that picture?” one caller asked. Gazette editor Norman Webster didn’t think the woman could be recognized and says the paper had calls from at least four sets of distraught parents, angry and upset and claiming that it was their daughter in the picture. Webster stands by the decision to publish and says he would publish even if the victim was his own daughter. “The crime was not printing that picture, the crime was the terrible thing that happened.” He apologizes for any extra distress the picture might have caused the victim’s family, but he reasons that the picture was necessary to tell the story with absolute clarity-the woman was caught right where she was and gunned down. “There’s real pathos in that picture. It’s not just graphic and brutal and shocking; it really does tug at the heart-it did mine anyway,” he says.

The problem is that sometimes such images don’t just tug at the heart. They are capable of ripping it out with the ferocity of a mechanical claw. Witold Widajewicz, a medical student at the University of Montreal, told The Toronto Star as the anniversary of the massacre approached that he hopes McInnis’s photo will never again be shown. His wife was the woman in the photo. “This picture kills me. It takes two days out of my life every time I see it. I get so depressed I can’t function.”

The Ontario Press Council, which handles complaints about newspapers, didn’t hear any complaints about McInnis’s photo. Sufrin says this might have changed had the tragedy been closer to home.

Proximity is an important consideration when deciding if a picture is appropriate. The issues of privacy and respect for the dead take on greater importance the closer the event is to home. Most editors particularly agonize over a picture of a local tragedy because their readers are personally involved.

The Edmonton journal, even more distanced from Montreal’s tragedy than Ontario, had no complaints about McInnis’s photo on page three. Instead, the journal’s front page picture of an injured woman on a stretcher drew all the flak. “Several readers said that you could see the woman’s breast, that her nipple was exposed, and they were offended by that,” says ombudsman John Brown. He wonders if the complaints would have been the same had the two photo pages been reversed.

But as -far away as it was, editors at The Sacramento Bee in California published McInnis’s photo on the back page of a news section because they thought it was too graphic for the front. Yet, readers still objected. In a memo to the ombudsman, managing editor Peter Bhatia says the photo would have been looked at differently if the massacre was closer to home. “Was it news? Definitely. Would we have run it if it happened in Sacramento? Probably not.” But regardless of distance, ombudsman Art Nauman disapproves of the editors’ decision to run the photo. “There ought to be room in this craft of news reporting for the application of good taste. We still could have understood the enormity of the event without the picture.”

Not necessarily so, many journalists insist. The enormity of the Montreal massacre required the story to be reported and illustrated as powerfully as possible, regardless of distance. The massacre shocked a nation. “How could this happen in Canada?” many people asked. Marc Lepine became Canada’s Charles Manson. Many papers published shots of stretchers leaving l’Ecole polytechnique. Dramatic, says Robertson, but routine. “The object was to try to convey that something so horrible has happened and seeing somebody on a stretcher doesn’t cut it.” One photo Robertson cannot ever forget showed a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales. In October 1966, a slag heap of almost two million tonnes buried a schoolhouse filled with almost all the town’s children, virtually wiping out a generation. “Very little of the school could be seen. It was just a pile of coal dust.” That image drove home the enormity of the tragedy.

The Gazette trusts senior editors to exercise good judgment and to avoid sensational and purely exploitive photographs. Ombudsman Robert Walker acknowledges that they sometimes err and doesn’t let the mistakes go by unnoticed. “When we are wrong, I give you my word, I jump on it as hard as I can.”

Mistakes happen because there are no steadfast policies on how to handle tragic photos. The consensus in newsrooms is that every photograph must be judged on its own merit, but some guidelines are followed. Dead bodies or pictures containing a lot of blood rarely appear on a newspaper’s front page, or even inside, unless the story is of great news value. Gazette associate managing editor Alan Allnutt says The Gazette’s readers are often protected from the horrors of the world. “There’s a certain banality to splashing a dead dismembered body in Beirut on page one.” Yet, many newspapers published photos of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife after their executions to prove they were really dead. Suicides are also not illustrated or even reported in newspapers unless they involve a very public individual or the suicide itself had large public impact. If a man commits suicide by setting himself on fire in the middle of Yonge Street, the Sun would probably run that picture, says Strobel, but not one of the suicide of a private individual in his home.

Like photos of suicides, editors avoid publishing photos of grieving people at funerals. This is considered a gross invasion of privacy unless, again, the funeral involves a public individual. One of the most famous funeral pictures is of John F. Kennedy, Jr., saluting his father’s coffin. Sometimes newspapers publish a picture even though it invades an individual’s privacy because of the power of the picture. In March 1989, the Toronto Sun ran a picture of a police officer carrying a young boy to safety after an early morning house fire in Metro Toronto. The boy’s 17-year-old cousin stood in the background crying and clad in only his underwear. This photo ran front page and calls poured in all day. Readers charged that the paper unnecessarily humiliated the teenager.

“This guy is going through hell. Why would you put his picture on the front page?” one caller demanded. In a column the next day, Strobel explained that while there was some element of humiliation for the youth, it was outweighed by the importance of the picture. “We ran the picture because it was a superb news photograph. A superb news photograph tells a story better than anything else. It gives you the emotion and reality that no words can give

Fires don’t happen the way they do in soap operas, with elegant curls pf flame and artistic puffs of smoke. Fleeing victims don’t have time to get composed, to look nice. Real fires are horrifying.”

Former Saturday Night editor Robert Fulford, currently the Maclean Hunter chair in communications ethics at Ryerson, says the Sun overstepped its bounds by unnecessarily humiliating the. youth. And running the photo on the front page, where anybody walking by a newsstand would see him in his underwear, made the shot a hundred times more devastating.

A newspaper’s front page is its showcase-the first thing the public sees-and it tells what the editors think are the most important stories and the most powerful pictures of the day. Although the Montreal massacre was reported and illustrated on the front page of the Star, its editors put McInnis’s photo on page three because they deemed it too strong an image for the front.

In cities like Toronto with more than one daily newspaper, competition also plays a big part in determining the front-page photo. The Globe and Mail’s managing editor, Timothy Pritchard, says he isn’t happy when the photo desk chooses a photo he knows is going to be on the front page of the Star and the Sun the next morning. But conversely, editors at the Sun see competition differently. “We always have to think, ‘If we don’t use this picture and the other newspapers do, we’re going to look pretty silly,'” says photo editor Hugh Wesley. He wanted the Sun to publish McInnis’s picture because he didn’t think it was gruesome. “It was basically a body with no life as opposed to a mangled, mutilated body.” Not that Wesley has anything against , showing mutilation. He says tragic photos can teach readers a lesson. In his days as a photographer, Wesley took a picture of a dog run over by a streetcar. “If it made two or three people realize you can’t let a dog run loose downtown without jeopardizing its life, then the picture served its purpose.”

It is arguable whether tragic pictures actually have the desired educational or preventive effects. Printing a gory picture and then saying somebody might learn something from it is too simple an argument-any picture could be justified by that statement.

Showing a mutilated dog on the streetcar tracks to teach people to keep their dogs on leashes just doesn’t have the same significance as showing a napalmed village in an attempt to end a war.

Most newspaper editors have legitimate reasons behind decisions to publish. They try to balance the media’s job of reporting the news with the sensitivity of the paper’s readers.

“The depth of feeling that a photograph can elicit from your public can be terrifying,” says Robertson. “The still picture allows you to spend time looking and thinking. Television doesn’t do that. I think that’s probably why TV gets away with as much as it does.”

There are some things we never forget because of pictures. Maybe all the outrage aimed at newspapers for publishing tragic pictures is because we want to forget. Forget crime. Forget destruction. Forget war. But to do that we would have to forget reality. Reality may be harsh, but it can’t be ignored, and it is important that we remember not to shoot the messenger for showing it to us.

It was mesmerizing. As bombs rained on Baghdad, we were glued to our radios and televisions. We heard the air raid sirens and felt the tension of reporters as they resisted the Iraqi authorities’ requests to go to bomb shelters. We flinched at the jolts of the antiaircraft missiles and listened in as the Cable News Network crew hid under beds in their hotel room and passed the microphone back and forth to describe what was happening.

It was the first night of the Gulf War, and this was no pool report. This eyewitness account, crackling over the phone lines, riveted us to the television set. As CNN reporter Bernard Shaw wailed that he wished he wasn’t there, we felt like reaching into the television set and pulling him home. And military officials probably felt like that too, when Shaw began lamenting the next day about Iraqi people being killed.

This was war reporting at its most electrifying, completely different from the passive Allied military briefings which resulted from the creation of the official news media “pool.” The pool was invented by the United States Department of Defence so a small group of reporters and photographers, picked by lottery, could accompany the military in action and share their stories with media across the country. But generals with maps, charts, dots indicating strategic sites and before and after pictures-not even pictures but cartoon-like drawings could never match for immediacy, the gut-wrenching accounts of John Holliman, Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett in the AI-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad.

Most journalists could endorse this kind of on-the-spot reporting anytime, but especially during wartime. Reporters cannot hope to cover a war with any credibility when they’re restricted to air bases, their stories under censorship. At this writing, pool pictures from the Gulf show little more than airplanes taking off from runways in Saudi Arabia for the umpteenth time.

Canadian reporters are even more tongue-tied than U.S. journalists. Because non-American press had to wait for their turn in the pools Conly one space in each pool sortie to the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border is allotted to international journalists- 75 percent of press are American), Canadians had to rely on the American-censored pool press. Clearly reporters of all nationalities were being absorbed into the guided tour of the American military news pools.

The road that ended in these polite question-and-answer sessions between journalists and military officials began after the Vietnam War, during which reporters could travel anywhere without military escort. Many generals are still convinced that it was the bloody pictures on TV that turned the American people against the war.

When the U.S. invaded Grenada in 1983, the military pushed for a total news blackout. News organizations were furious. To pacify the media, the Department of Defence created the official news media pool.

In theory, it sounded promising. In practice, it was a fiasco. When the first military pool accompanied troops during the American invasion of Panama in December 1989, the operation resembled a farce. Herded like sheep, the 19 journalists quickly became frustrated as they tried to cover an invasion which the military tried to hide. Instead of viewing combat as promised, the pool was taken to see selected aftereffects of the battles. When they did discover a fresh news story, it was by accident. Jonathan Wolman, Associated Press Washington bureau chief, likened the frustrated journalist to a sports reporter “missing the game but getting great access to the locker room afterward.”

Today, pool members must pass a physical fitness test. Journalists are accompanied by military escorts whenever they travel into the U.S. combat zone. The best reporters don’t necessarily make every pool. Copy is submitted in the field to “public affairs officers” for “security review.” Lt. Comdr. Gregg Hartung, in charge of pools for the Pentagon, claims that “unlike the British, we don’t have censorship in our country.” Nevertheless, Canadian TV reports were flagged “cleared by U.S. military censors.”
For the military, there are obvious advantages to controlling journalists. A crucial element in any military campaign is secrecy, resulting in a constant tug-of-war between pool reporters and commanders for information-How much? How soon? How accurate? And how complete? Many journalists, like radio reporter Rick MacInnes Rae, who is stationed independently in the Gulf for CBC, say they “avoid pools like the plague.” The one advantage of the pool to a news organization is financial. Canada’s first military pool-a radio reporter from CBC, a print reporter from Canadian Press and two television people from TVA, the Quebec CTV affiliate-filed stories for one month from the warship HMCS Protecteur. The costs were far below those of an individual reporter. Buying into the pool cost $40,000 for an initial 30-day period, compared to a daily $5,000 to $10,000 cost for an individual reporter. But MacInnesRae says that he probably would have refused a bunk on the Protecteur. There’s a compromise, a catch-22 with a military pool. “Even if you find the biggest story since Watergate,” he says, “you can’t normally tell it.”

No reporter or photographer wants to expose anything to endanger the lives of their allies, but Vince Carlin, managing editor of CBC Radio’s national news, says that some of the censorship in a pool is silly. “In a war, like it or not, there are certain things which we cannot responsibly report on,” says Carlin. “However, the military tends to widen that out into virtually anything which might embarrass them.”

The result can be a bland report of the obvious. Rejean Grenier, who filed 48 pool stories in English and French last summer from the radio rooms of the Canadian warships, says that even the most competitive journalists can lose their aggressiveness in a pool. “There was no competition,” he says. “When the heat came, we all did heat stories. We were all saying the same things anyway.” During the first awful weeks of the Gulf War, the news from the Allied forces came as a homogenized package. Military censors changed such words as “giddy” to “proud” and reports were held back in the field, only to turn up in military jargon in some general’s briefing in Washington the next day. Steve Hannah, managing editor of the Milwaukee journal calls the military pool “a pact with the devil.” We need a better way to cover technological warfare, no matter how swift or terrifying, or we will be forced to take the homogenized pablum spooned out to us from the military’s public relations blender.

When Toronto Life executive editor Lynn Cunningham gets her Esquire, Saturday Night, Canadian Business and Masthead magazines on the same day, it’s Masthead she reads first. “The information is so vital to me in what I do on a day-to-day basis,” says Cunningham. “While other publications are optional reads, Masthead is a must read.” In its fourth year, Masthead magazine writes about the people in the magazine industry, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what battles they face. It’s information most industry members agree they can’t do without. “It’s hard to believe that we carried on without Masthead for so many years,” says Catherine Keachie, executive director of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association. “The CMPA thinks the world of it.” Reactions like this are smoothing Masthead’s bumpy ride over the industry’s hard times. Partly because of its acceptance, Masthead has shown a steady progress in advertising revenue. For the first time, it broke even last year. It also increased its ad pages 22 percent over 1989. That’s helped the magazine grow to a consistent 32 pages from its initial 20 pages, with one issue reaching 48 last year. And editor Doug Bennet believes it hasn’t tapped the full market yet.

“It’s becoming more and more an authority in its field and if people look at it as such, advertising success will follow,” says Martin Hochstein, president of The Auditor, a Canadian ad tracking service.

Masthead publisher Sandy Donald is confident enough to test this when he sells advertising for the magazine. In the early days, he told prospective advertisers “to pick 10 people that count in the magazine industry and phone them up and ask them if they read Masthead.” One publisher of a large firm tried it. The result: a perfect score.

But like so many publications with’ less than 50 percent of their circulation as paid, Masthead must deal with a large hike in postal rates. An issue now costs 26.25 cents to mail, an increase of 50 percent. With a circulation of 4,700-0f which only approximately 150 sellon newsstands -Masthead will be spending almost $4,000 more in postage alone.

Partly because of industry acceptance, however, Donald might have an easier battle to fight than most publishers-he’s considering the switch to paid circulation from controlled. Paul Doyle, publisher of Canadian Aviation, summarizes why Donald might make the move: “If you’re delivering a good enough product to the reader, they’ll pay for it. I’d pay for Masthead magazine because it’s a good publication and it’s a publication I have to read.” Cunningham agrees. “I would be happy to fork over whatever cost. I’d be amazed if the primary readers were reluctant to pay for it.”

Another hurdle for Masthead could be the Goods and Services Tax. As a flow through tax, the GST isn’t foreseen as a financial problem. But costs could accumulate when accounting staff sorts through the administrative paperwork the tax requires. It could also cause cash-flow problems if the government is slow in reimbursing tax credits.

Despite these obstacles, recent Masthead issues have added sections for the farm and church press in an effort to cover all areas of the industry. To create a more national content, Masthead also has a loose network of stringers in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Halifax. Some magazine representatives believe Masthead’s coverage is concentrated on the big printing houses. “A lot of things they write about tend to have some connection to Maclean Hunter,” says James Warrillow, president of Canadian Publishing at Maclean Hunter. “Then again, we are a large part of the magazine industry.”

But indisputable is Masthead’s thorough coverage of government policies like the GST, postal costs and free trade. “We have become an information source for the industry,” says Bennet. Some publishers even ask Bennet what their new postal rates will be.

Ironically, Masthead almost didn’t get born. Donald wanted a new magazine to complement his seven-year old Graphic Monthly, aimed at the Canadian graphic arts industry. The choice was between a publication that served the magazine industry or the desktop publishing field. Donald opted for the former, partly because Bennet, who was familiar with the industry, was already working for him.

Modeled on the American Folio magazine, its first issue appeared in October 1987. But Bennet emphasizes that Masthead sets itself up as a newsmagazine.

Bennet remembers the industry’s first reaction as, “What the hell is this?” He says that was partly because its founders deliberately started small and didn’t make a large announcement. Others believed it lacked a large enough marketplace. “I didn’t believe there would be enough subscription and advertising revenue to continue publishing,” says Michael de Pencier, president of Key Publishers Co. But despite the early pessimism from some members, Bennet received compliments from many.
Even de Pencier changed his first view. “It continues to be very useful for those of us in the magazine business to have a journal that covers the industry in-depth because nobody else does.”

Bennet is grateful for the positive reaction, but doesn’t stop there. “Our philosophy is not so much to just report on the industry,” he says, “but to be a part of it.”

JOHN FRASER WALKS IN SHORT, staccato steps, shuffling his feet as he moves around the offices of Saturday Night magazine, Canada’s most venerable periodical. In many ways, Fraser’s small steps symbolize the change in the magazine since he took over as editor from Robert Fulford in 1987-slight 3 movements away from the liberal leaning magazine his predecessor 6; had created. Fraser has tried to make the magazine more accessible, less g stuffy and ponderous. As a result, he 5 has seen newsstand sales nearly double and, until recently, advertising revenue increase. But Fraser could not cure Saturday Night’s woeful economic problems. The magazine has not made money in more than 40 years. He’s still grappling with this legacy, and the little he has done has not changed it.
But come September, the magazine will undergo further, perhaps more drastic, change. Saturday Night is going mainstream in a big way. A deal was finalized in February between the magazine and The Southam Newspaper Group, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, calling for Saturday Night to be distributed between the pages of five Southam newspapers-the Montrea Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, thc Calgary Herald, The Edmonton journal and The Vancouver Sun – l1 times a year. The magazine will go only to newspaper subscribers. It will not be sold with newsstand newspaper box copies. (Nor will it be sold by itself on the newsstands in those five cities, due to Audit Bureau of Circulation regulations.) This will increase the magazine’s circulation five times, to 650,000 from 130,000. This “piggyback” arrangement, writes Fraser in the January-February issue of Saturday Night, will get “the magazine to many readers who have simply never heard of us.”
Yet, it is not only those readers Fraser must win. In his battle to turn around the financial fortunes of Saturday Night, he must also placate the most discriminating groups: regular readers and advertisers. Fraser’s task, an arduous one for even the most seasoned of magazine editors (which Fraser is not), is to produce a magazine that will be readily acceptable to the new audience, while at the same time honoring its historical identity and holding its readers, among the most loyal in Canada. “If you think that’s going to be easy,” says Fraser with a chuckle, “you’re crazy.”
In an effort to satisfy all, Fraser is restructuring the magazine. His plan is to make Saturday Night graphically more exciting and approachable. The major change will be “frontloading” the magazine-putting essays and shorter pieces pertaining to Canadian society on subjects such as politics, sports and culture at the front, while the longer, investigative pieces, which Saturday Night is known for, will go toward the back. The book will start with impact and end with thoughtfulness. It’s the inverted pyramid applied to a magazine’s structure. There will also be turn pages to increase the new graphic display at the front.
Fraser, who speaks willingly and enthusiastically about the new deal, does not see Saturday Night selling out its loyal audience. They will still have essays, Charlotte Gray in Ottawa and offbeat pieces on sports and other aspects of Canadian society, he says. “It will still be a major magazine doing investigative stuff and broad political analysis. It won’t be a newsmagazine.”
Yet, selling the idea to the traditional Saturday Night reader may prove more difficult than Fraser anticipates. For one thing, Saturday Night’s larger circulation will mean a broader audience. To reflect this, many speculate the magazine’s content will have to become much broader also. After all, says Gordon rape, former publisher of Today magazine, a newspaper supplement that died in the early eighties, “they may have the most loyal readers in Canada, but there aren’t many of them.” Soon, there will be 500,000 more. “The management of the magazine has to ask itself whether it wants to continue to put out a publication that meets the desires of its loyal readers, or whether it would like to talk to a larger audience. In doing so, it may be required to make some changes.” Much remains uncertain, however, until Fraser reveals his product in September.
Fraser doesn’t think he’ll need to change the magazine very much because the papers he has chosen have similar demographic readerships to that of Saturday Night. That was essential to the deal. It’s one reason why The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine, which Fraser helped to launch in 1985, has been so successful. RoB Magazine is a natural extension of the paper, a perfect fit. Fraser thinks he’s found another perfect match.
However, skepticism about the deal abounds, generated most notably by the Toronto media. This is natural-Saturday Night’s largest subscription base is in Toronto, a base that Fraser hopes to keep around 100,000. In August, Globe editor-in-chief William Thorsell wrote a scathing column criticizing the plan. Robert Fulford, while saying that he hopes it works, also has trepidations. “Selling it to advertisers will be really hard.” Advertisers, after all, have a history of disliking Saturday Night, a history that Fulford knows all too well. It plagued him for the 19 years he was editor. He also says the comparison with the Globe’s RoB Magazine is misleading. “The RoB Magazine is not a supplement as much as it is part of the personality of the Globe.”
But Fraser remains optimistic. He hopes that his restructuring will attract a very sluggish advertising market. “We would not be where we are with the distribution plan if we had not had a more than adequate response from the advertising community.”
But not everybody is as confident as Fraser. Says Ann Boden of McKim Advertising: “From an advertising perspective, we don’t see it as a great move.” Advertisers have never been too keen, even on Fraser’s Saturday Night. A new Saturday Night, reaching a much wider audience, may not change that, either. “To turn something like that around is like turning around the Queen Mary,” adds Boden, “so it’s difficult to do.”
The magazine has set its ad rate at $20,500 for a full-page color ad, to compete with the other high profile and high circulation magazines in Canada which charge between $18,000 and $24,000. But it’s not the hyped rate cards that everyone is balking at.
“You can’t take a narrowly niched magazine that’s been dying for years and suddenly blow it out to a larger circulation,” says Patrick Walshe, vice-president of account management at Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell Inc.-who buy ad space for advertisers-and an employee at Saturday Night during the Fulford days. He sees a Saturday Night that will be less serious. He believes advertisers will wait a year or so to see how it’s doing before buying space. “I’m hard put to understand why Southam is talking about the distribution deal in the first place,” says Walshe.
The deal, says Russ Mills, president of the newspaper group at Southam, “means $600 to $700 thousand a year for Southam.” The distribution is not a joint effort. Saturday Night is paying to be put in the newspapers; the onus is on it to make it work. Southam must give one year’s notice if it no longer wishes to carry the magazine. Saturday Night can pullout anytime it wants. And Fraser will pullout, he says, if the ad director can only “sell about five pages of ads.”
But Fraser doesn’t foresee that happening. He believes, rather enthusiastically, that it’s going to succeed. But he does have a backup plan if it doesn’t. He will downscale the magazine, creating a book that is smaller and geared to a small segment of the population. It will drop dramatically in circulation to keep the losses to a minimum. Fraser is committed to keeping the magazine alive, promising not to be its last editor or to hand over a piece of trash to his successor. “Saturday Night has a certain image and a lot of people care about it very deeply,” he says candidly. “But nobody cares about it more than me. I’m the guy who has to ensure its survival and preserve my own self-respect.”
Reality-the magazine’s sorry economic state-has thrust this move on him. “I’m prepared to sacrifice some of the old mystique in the struggle to find a new mystique. It’s a great challenge and I’ve got my honor involved in it.”
For now, Fraser will continue with his short, quick pace around the office. But as the time for the unveiling of the new Saturday Night approaches, a hitch may develop in his confident stride. And if he is to continue to imitate his magazine’s evolution through his walk, he may have to look into a larger office to accommodate his leaps and bounds.

There is an impression on the street that the only places in which female journalists don’t get the same treatment as men in the business are in the locker rooms of some of the major sports franchises.
But women in television news generally agree that the sexual equality officially on display for viewers of the average newscast misrepresents the actual working reality. There are many more women on the air now than there were 20 years ago, but they say that youth and beauty will still be in the job specs for female anchors and reporters long after some of their older, plainer male counterparts have been put out to pasture.
My own experience as an anchor and what I have observed in TV newsrooms confirm that suspicion. For example, there isn’t much doubt that a major reason Jan Tennant was allowed to get away from Ontario’s Global Television was management’s mistaken notion that she was getting too old.
Tennant, easily the most professional anchor I ever worked with, and one of the nicest people, will continue to be beautiful (and would have graced any TV newscast on this continent) until she’s a very, very old lady.
She could have been the Katharine Hepburn of TV news in this country, and like Hepburn, is still capable of drawing very large daily news audiences. Instead, she is freelancing in Vancouver, and happy to be out of it.
If Canadian society and the TV news industry were completely free of sexism, there would be no reason for women who want to be on air in a TV newscast to worry more about their looks than their male counterparts.
As things are, they do have to worry, and those whose looks are borderline have to submit to exhaustive cosmetic efforts to erase the ravages of time or to compensate for any shortfall in natural advantages. Men are spared this unflattering reconstruction.
My daughter, Anne Jenkins, Ottawa news producer for Global Television, says that there is pay equity now for women in TV news not just because male managers have seen the error of their ways, but because TV newswomen know the labor code, and are unionized.
Jan Tennant knew the labor code incidentally, particularly in regard to statutory holidays, and she was vocal about it. That may have been another reason why Global didn’t go out of its way to hang on to her.
“But there is still a degree of discrimination,” Jenkins says, “not by the younger males, but by those of the old school. In their case, there is still some winning over to be done.” I know the feeling. Things have been changing too rapidly for most of us, and I for one had no idea that I’d been a chauvinist swine all my life until I was into my forties. I’m sure some of the women who worked with me could have told me years earlier, but women didn’t do that in those days. Jenkins says there is still discrimination against women in the TV news workforce because they are mothers. Children, when they are sick for example, must sometimes take precedence over a mother’s employment, and that can cause friction with male bosses.
But the things that really get her down are those demeaning pats on the bum, sexist remarks disguised as humor, and even, when tempers rise, dirty cracks about the time of the month.
“Maybe they think if they make jokes about sexism that that isn’t sexist,” she says. “There is a lot of that actually.” The woman’s role in TV news, she feels, is now much closer to the man’s role, particularly if you are speaking of producers and reporters. There has never been a “women’s page” in TV news, of course, although there have been clearly labelled “women’s issues.” But women are no longer assigned exclusively to that kind of story, and the assignment breakdown in most newsrooms is much fairer than it used to be.
The receptionists in TV newsrooms still tend to be women, however, and so do the script assistants. The people in charge of the production end of TV newscasts the directors are men for the most part, and so are camera operators and tape editors. Oddly enough, women may be doing rather better in senior news management than they are in some intermediate roles.
Trina McQueen, for example, a former colleague with whom I walked a picket line in the early 1970s, is now the director of news and current affairs for the CBC network. She told Canadian Press recently that she has encountered “great reluctance” and “open opposition” from some male employees during her time there, and sometimes still runs into traces of it.
But in the same story she is quoted as saying that the atmosphere has changed radically since the day in 1968 when she started work as the only woman in the CBC’s Toronto newsroom.
“There were things you just shut up about,” said McQueen, recalling conditions on the old fifth floor of the Jarvis Street TV building. “You knew they had absolutely no hope of getting on the show because they weren’t in the consciousness of people who were running the show.”
She’s right, I know, because a couple of years later one of those people was me, and although I had liberal views about human rights, I was as insensitive to women’s issues as most of my sixties contemporaries.
What I don’t understand is how sexism has survived in TV news. We are, after all, the fountainhead in this so called information age, not just the clearinghouse for shifting manners and mores, but a primary force for change. One of the most significant developments I’ve come across, a good omen for the future, is the number of times lately in TV news marriages that the woman’s career has been given first consideration.
I can think of at least three recent cases offhand, but the one I know best is the one closest to me. Anne and Phil Jenkins were both working for the CBC in Toronto until a couple of years ago when Anne was offered the Ottawa job with Global.
They decided together it was too good to turn down, and Anne accepted before they knew what Phil was going to do. As it turned out, Phil, then a producer at The journal, got a job with Newsworld in Ottawa, and has now moved to CBOT.
It is this kind of erosion of the traditional views about male and female roles, and the disappearance of a sexual pecking order, that will in the end do more to ensure real equality than the lip service paid to it by some of the reluctant older men who still run TV newsrooms.