A: Toronto
B: Calgary
C: Baker Lake, NWT.

You’d be right only about the centre of Canadian insularity if you chose A. But we are trying to pinpoint the geographical centre-the exact heart of our nation. If you guessed Baker Lake, NWT, you win this round.

And if you already knew that Baker Lake is at the geographical centre of Canada, you belong to a very small minority of Canadians. It’s a truism up here in the Northwest Territories that southern Canadians know nothing about the North. People say this all the time, in tones of practised contempt.

Call it regionalism, call it whining, but Northerners can’t be blamed. The information most Canadians get from their southern-based news media is scarce and biased.

There’s irony in the scarcity factor, since no other region of the country has the same symbolic importance the North has. This sprawling chunk of geography is the Great Wilderness that lies at the heart of our national identity: True North, that’s us. Canadians have long cast themselves within this flattering Northern myth, based on accounts of rugged individuals out to conquer a frozen frontier with which we were pleased to identify – but preferred not to know firsthand.

In fact, when southern Canadians speak comfortably about “our North,” Northerners grit their teeth. Most of the folks who live down there in cities strung along the US border have only the vaguest notions about what “our North” really is. The persistent cliche that our part of Canada is a huge emptiness, where Nature’s gifts lie in cold storage, isn’t very popular up here. Yet media coverage in the south does very little to dispel such thinking.

~ How come? Well, I think it has something to j do with the fact that for those whose job it is to ~ inform the country, the North is a single, heroic beat. There’s a print media tradition of oneS handed reportage (doubtless rooted in the literature of earlier romantics) that has created ~ the journalistic “Northern expert,” a sort of itinerant foreign correspondent. No matter what’s going on, from local politics to natural disasters, the North specialist is tapped for coverage that too often turns out to be an exercise in interpretation-by an outsider, for outsiders.

Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton and Mordecai Richler were among those who pioneered this peculiar mischief. And far lesser lights have followed after them. Most have been mere excursionists in our frozen land.
Such stories are necessarily selective in focus; they may be laced with misinformation or worse. What’s perceived by outsiders quite naturally creates a southern-shaped North. In their cosy affection for “our North,” Canadians have accepted a great deal of nonsense. Few ever actually see the place for themselves, after all.

To get to the Northwest Territories, you have to travel a very long way, through land that’s all lakes, bush, muskeg and bony outcroppings of glacier-scraped rock. If you fly into the North, you’re impressed as hell by how much time it takes to get across all that nothingness to the tiny grid of lights that marks whatever outpost of civilization you’re in search of. Not many can afford trips like this.

So the specialist is sent on tour, and comes back with enough for a magazine article or a series on the op-ed page: “The Exotic North as I Actually Saw It, Firsthand.” Others stay a week or two, examining social issues in depth. Some are even based here for a while as stringers. The trouble is, damned few spend years hunkered down in the cold with the rest of us up here, listening to what people really have to say.

And of course, Northerners do have plenty to say. The issues: language rights, the economy, the environment, the future political organization of the North, have a familiar ring. But in a northern setting, they have particular urgency. We have one of the highest birthrates in all of Canada, and the fewest prospects for jobs. We have the most fragile environment in Canada, yet the greatest prospects for resource development. And the federal government, to this very day, continues to treat the North as a colonial entity, voiceless at federal-provincial conferences despite occupying fully a third of Canada’s land mass.

Most interesting of all, we have a population that’s mainly native Inuit, Dene and Metis. We have six official languages, besides English and French. If you didn’t know that, you’re still influenced by bias in coverage of the North that long gave the impression Inuit were the only native group to occupy this land. Inuit were a romanticized people, at one with the simplified Northern Image we held dear. The Dene of the western Arctic and Mackenzie Valley were virtually invisible, appearing only sketchily in accounts of the adventurous bush pilots and prospectors who brought modern enterprise north just over half a century ago.

These people, considerably diverse in language and cultural expression, yet very similar in the ways they wrest a living from the lakes, rivers and subarctic forest, have occupied the North for thousands of years. With the emergence of political will on the part of native groups across the country, northern Dene and Metis have, with Inuit, become faces in the media of southern Canada.

Today’s Northern native people are taking control of their own lands and government, working with their own votes and through powerful and articulate organizations at the community, regional, and territorial levels.

The creation of a new Northern Territory by Inuit grabbed inside newspaper space last December, as did the election of a feisty Inuvialuit woman to the job of NWT premier. These are giant moves on the path to decolonization of Northern peoples, yet they still appear to be marginal events to southern media.

To correct the imbalance of information, Northern media will have to come to the fore. The birth this January of Canada’s first aboriginal television network is a landmark in the battle to provide Northern news, perspectives, entertainment and opinion to Northerners. Thanks to satellite technology, programming can begin to flow regularly out of the North to the south, too.
The magazine I edit, now soldiering into its eighth year of publication, has long carried images and information about Northern life to readers in southern Canada. We plan to continue to do so. In the face of lingering romanticism, careless stereotyping and plain indifference in much of what still passes for journalism about the North today, what else can we do?

When I first meet Peter Armstrong, he’s sitting at his desk eating chocolate-chip cookies. “I’ve got about 10 extra pounds of chocolate on me,” he says, laughing. “Do you want one?” As a recovering alcoholic, Armstrong is all too familiar with how one addiction can replace another.

In fact, this idea is central to the philosophy of the magazine he launched last September; Pathways; The Guide to Health Through Balanced Living explores more than just people’s dependencies on drugs and alcohol. Its goals are to show how people can find balance or moderate a whole range of obsessions -alcohol, food, gambling, drugs or sex. Armstrong has won his battle with alcohol; but the question is, can he win a battle to produce a viable magazine in the midst of a recession?

His own story reads much like an article in the magazine: twenty-five years spent pouring booze down his throat, getting drunk every day, using all his energy to conceal his addiction. When he finally bottomed out, “there were a lot of people to help,” he says.
Now he wants to help others. “This magazine will be a life-and-death source of information for some people. We’re playing with people’s lives, their emotional lives, and their sanity,” he says.

But are good intentions enough to sustain the magazine? Armstrong’s personal struggles bear a strong resemblance to the underlying pain the magazine confronts. “It’s a service magazine of emotions,” says start-up editor Joann Webb. “Most emotions explored in magazine writing are about love and male/female relationships. There is very little done in this country about other types of emotions,” like pain, she says. But current editor Keitha McLean disagrees. “The magazine deals with joy,” its flip side, says McLean. ‘We’re not interested in the horror stories

They’re the starting point. It’s what the reader can learn from them.”

Their differing philosophies are reflected in the editorial content of the first two issues of the magazine. While the premier issue often confronted the painful struggle of living with an addiction, the second issue, produced by McLean, combined stories of recovery with articles on individuals successfully pursuing their own “paths,” and who have not necessarily undergone a personal struggle with addiction themselves.

Just over a year ago, Armstrong envisioned the magazine as a recovery digest focusing on alcohol and drug dependencies. He had become disillusioned with The Toronto Star, where he’d worked as an editor and writer since 1982. “I realized I didn’t give a shit about current events about keeping track, day in and day out, of world events, entertainment, and corporate world changes,” he says. He describes the Star as no longer the spiritual place his great grandfather created.

It was then that he picked up the phone, knowing only one person in the consumer magazine industry. “I sought out and accepted a lot of advice,” says Armstrong. A month later, he began organizing an editorial advisory board of health professionals working in the area of alcohol and drugs. A telephone survey done by Thompson Lightstone & Co. Ltd. made it clear that the magazine needed to broaden its base to include other types of dependencies. In a survey of 2,000 adult Canadians across the country, half recognized excessive behaviors as a problem in people’s lives. And one third said they’d subscribe to a magazine that dealt with prevention and recovery in these areas.

Thus Pathways was born. It was February, seven months before the first issue was to appear on the newsstands, when Joann Webb got a call. Webb was the first person to be involved with Pathways who had any real consumer magazine experience. And as editor of several national magazines, including Canadian Business, Harrowsmith and Vista, she was all too familiar with the riskiness of the business.

The launching of Pathways was anything but typical. Most magazines begin with a prototype, or a onetime issue that goes on the newsstands to gauge people’s response. But Armstrong just wanted to dive right in, without trying to build circulation first, says Webb. “Peter was so close to the project at a personal level that his hope was that this publication would break every rule about publishing that there is in the middle of a recession, that’s hoping for a miracle.”

Even the corporate structure for the magazine is unusual. Half a million dollars seed capital for the magazine’s launch was provided by Armstrong’s mother, Joyce Armstrong, a Hindmarsh, one of the shareholding families of Torstar. It has been put into a non-profit trust, called the Armstrong Trust for Recovery Enterprises, which wholly owns Recovery Publications, the company that publishes Pathways. Webb’s frustration over limited funds and “business priorities, generally,” were the major reasons for her leaving the magazine. And as it has turned out, Armstrong says he has “pretty well abandoned plans for investors for this year,” which could have resulted in a major boost in revenue.

But despite the effects the economic slump has had on the magazine industry in general, some magazine experts believe there’s still a market for Pathways. Doug Bennet, editor of Masthead, The Magazine about Magazines, is optimistic that the magazine fills an important niche. There is no other specialty publication in Canada on recovery, and only one in the United States that comes close to Pathways. If the venture is successful in making bulk sales to corporations, it may have a chance, says Bennet.

So assuming that Pathways does have a readership, will advertisers buy in? The second issue, published last month, had 17 pages of ads representing more than $30,000 in revenue. This was supplemented by 2,000 individual subscriptions, plus the sale of about 1,500 sponsored copies to hospitals and unions and to companies with employee assistance programs.

Advertisers are hesitant to buy. Wendy Muller of Magazine Network, the company that represented the first issue of Pathways to advertisers, says “I might have built it up in the trade first,” restricting its circulation to places like treatment centres and doctors’ offices, and then turning the magazine into a consumer product later.

Part of the marketing strategy was to have a five-month lag between publication of the first and second issues, then go to bimonthly frequency beginning February 1992, and increase publication to 10 issues a year by 1993.

But will it be around in 1993? Keitha McLean brings a lot of expertise to the magazine. She was the founding editor of Flare back in 1979, and has more than 20 years’ experience in the business. She also has a personal understanding of the magazine’s issues. “I’ve been in recovery for nearly 16 years,” she says, “from life, and alcohol primarily.”

But the question remains. Is the magazine, produced in such a short time, another kind of “instant gratification” for Armstrong? He himself admits that “giving birth” to a magazine brings with it an “entrepreneurial high. It’s just another buzz. I’ve had lots of buzzes in my life.”

When I last see Armstrong, it’s 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and he’s ensconced in discussion with another recovering alcoholic at the fluorescent lit Pita Stop on Toronto’s King Street East. Armstrong offers encouraging words to his friend, who is concerned because the company he works for is going under. In recovery language, this kind of a session is called a reality check.
For the moment, Armstrong is helping one person. But with the magazine, he wants to reach 50,000. And if it doesn’t work? “I could do anything I wanted. The idea of folding doesn’t devastate me.”

For now, it’s just one day at a time.

Windsor Star editor Carl Morgan and reporter Alan Abrams were two blocks
apart when they spotted each other that lunch hour in March 1989. Abrams,
walking a CBC radio picket line, knew he’d been caught in the act. It was an act
that would have potentially profound consequences for Canadian journalists.
“Oh shit. Here’s Carl, and he sees me,” he thought, as Morgan steadily approached.

Abrams stood his ground. Morgan’s eyes were on him, and they never left-not for a secondas the editor continued toward him. Soon he was directly across the street, and Abrams thought that he’d walk straight into traffic if he crossed, he was staring so hard. But Morgan didn’t cross. He kept walking and, one block down, turned a corner and disappeared from sight, on his way back to the Star.
Abrams and labor reporter Don Lajoie, who hadn’t seen Morgan until he’d passed, headed back to the office immediately.

Abrams sensed trouble, and his instincts were right. His lunch-hour picket has had enormous consequences. Nearly three years later, the Star and its unionized employees were still awaiting the decision of an arbitrator on the rights of papers to limit the outside activities of their staff.

The case has been at the forefront of the journa1istic ethics debate because it could decide for the first time in Canada whether the trend toward limiting the civil rights of reporters in the name of journalistic integrity will continue.

Abrams, who rarely wrote about labor issues, was surprised that March afternoon when then metro editor Kevin McIntosh told him that he had been in a conflict of interest and that the paper could no longer send him out to cover related stories. On his way out after the meeting with McIntosh, Abrams stopped by the desk of Julie Rowe, then-president. of the Windsor Newspaper Guild, told her what had happened, and asked her to look into it.

Rowe met with Morgan and managing editor Jim Bruce later that afternoon. The managers reiterated the view that what Abrams and Lajoie had been doing constituted a conflict of interest, and that the fact that they did it on their lunch hour was not at issue. Julie Rowe did not agree. She said that Abrams and Lajoie, as well as a group of about six other Star employees (herself included) who had been at the CBC television station at the same time, were entitled, on their own time, to show support for their CUPE colleagues, who were striking to protest funding cutbacks that they feared would lead to the station being closed, and their jobs being lost.

Not surprisingly, the meeting did not produce a resolution to these two conflicting points of view, the implications of which are vast.
Should reporters be forced to steer clear of any form of activism or public involvement in their free time? Several recent cases in the United States point to a trend toward increased control over reporters’ outside activities. In a bid to avoid even perceived bias, newspapers are increasingly clamping down on all kinds of behavior by journalists-behavior that most citizens in a democratic society take for granted. Should reporters be allowed to take part in pro-choice or antiabortion rallies? What about peace marches, gay and lesbian parades, anti-violence or anti-racism rallies? Should they be allowed to canvass on behalf of political candidates? The Windsor Star case could set a new precedent for deciding whether journalists must give up their right to take part in such activities.

Right from the start, the lines were clearly drawn. In a memo dated March 16th, Julie Rowe stated the guild’s position for the record: “The guild believes its members have the right to do whatever they please… on their lunch or time away from work. To suggest that a reporter or editorial employee cannot do his or her job because they have shown support for members of another union is unreasonable. Our reporters feel their integrity is being questioned by your stance on this issue and feel they are professional enough to put personal biases aside in order to cover any assignment given them.”

In a March 21st memo signed by Carl Morgan, management replied: “What is at issue is recognition of the importance for active, working journalists to avoid becoming involved, as third-party participants, in events that we have collectively undertaken to report on as impartial, arm’s length observers. If we are to maintain the position of
disinterested observers, it is absolutely imperative that we do nothing to erode that role…that trust in the eyes of the public.”
The idea that newspapers have an obligation to provide fair and impartial news stories to their readers is not new. In fact, for most of the twentieth century it has been the accepted moral and ethical foundation of the profession. Few newspapers, however, have written policies specific enough to cover every threat to this impartiality. Lorne Slotnick, former labor reporter for The Globe and Mail and currently on staff at the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild, says that whether or not a written policy exists depends on the size and culture of each organization. Some papers, like The Toronto Star, have comprehensive policy manuals dealing with almost all possible conflicts of interest. But most, such as the Kitchener- Waterloo Record, if they have policies at all, deal only with the more black-and-white issue of financial conflicts of interest, like reporters accepting gifts or paying for information from sources.

Slotnick says that even if a paper does publish a written policy, that does not make it law in the guild’s view. So, as in the Windsor case, the problem is often one of interpretation.

Jim Bruce, managing editor of The Windsor Star, says that although the paper did not have a policy manual at the time the dispute began, the contract between the paper and its guild employees did address the issue of conflict of interest. The clause in question reads: “Employees shall be free to engage in any activities outside working hours unless such activities are demonstrably in conflict with their duties and responsibilities as employees of the Employer.” Bruce says it was up to union leadership to make sure its membership knew what the clause meant. The union contends that the clause, when negotiated, was intended to prevent Star editorial staff from freelancing for competing organizations, not participating in non-journalistic activities on their own time.
After the Alan Abrams incident, the Windsor guild and its members didn’t need much urging to show management how they felt about this issue. On the weekend between the posting of the Rowe and Morgan memos, more than 40 people attended a previously planned guild membership meeting at a downtown Windsor hotel. But normal business took a back seat to the events of the preceding week, and it was decided to stage another picket the following Wednesday to protest the Star’s response.
Approximately 40 members of the guild, which includes circulation as well as editorial and clerical support staff, split up into two groups and spent their lunch hour picketing

both the CBC radio and the CBC television stations. They carried signs that read “GUILD SUPPORTS CUPE” and “WINDSOR GUILD SUPPORTS CHANNEL 9.” Three Star reporters were filmed marching behind Julie Rowe as she was interviewed on the picket line: two general assignment reporters-Doug Williamson and Alan Abrams-and the paper’s then-environment reporter, Chris Vander Doelen.

When Star management saw members of their staff on television, on the picket line of another union, there was no question that something had to be done. “Management is often accused of being too vague about what their expectations or their policy might be,” says Jim Bruce, “but we felt that Carl’s memo had clearly enunciated our position on this issue. We made the decision, after seeing them on television, to issue letters of reprimand. We wanted to send a signal that this was a serious matter, that the position that was expressed in the letter was one that we were going to apply to members of the staff.”

Julie Rowe was not disciplined because management felt that as an editorial assistant she was not in a position of conflict or bias. The other three each received a formal letter of reprimand, stating that they were in violation of the collective agreement. From this time on, Williamson, Abrams and Vander Doelen would be known jokingly by their colleagues as “The CBC Three.”

“The CBC Three” may sound like a group of organized radicals, but really they are just three people who by the luck of the draw have been called upon to defend a principle. All three were long-term Star employees. Abrams had worked there, full-time or part-time, for nine years. He has since moved on to The Toledo Blade. Vander Doelen joined the paper in 1982 and plans to stay. Williamson, with the Star since 1976, has been promoted since the incident. (He is even described by Vander Doelen as a “white-haired boy” in management’s eyes.) All three describe their actions as part of a struggle over the right to control journalists’ social actions.
When the guild learned of the letters of reprimand, they immediately decided to challenge them. The ensuing notice of grievance, dated April 14, 1989, alleges that “The Windsor Star, through these letters, has violated several sections of the collective agreement. The Windsor Newspaper Guild views the letters of reprimand as harassment over a legitimate union activity in the employees’ own time and seeks removal of these letters from the employees’ personnel files.” The arbitration hearing took place at the (Compri) Convention Centre, just around the corner from The Windsor Star. In all there were 10 days of testimony between April 14, 1990 and June 17, 1991.

The arbitrator in the dispute was Richard McLaren, a law professor at the University of Western Ontario. His mandate was two-fold. First, he had to interpret the clause in the contract that the reporters allegedly violated-the one about employees avoiding activities that are “demonstrably in conflict with their duties and responsibilities as employees of the Employer.” McLaren’s other task, which he referred to as “secondary,” was to decide whether or not the Star had just cause in issuing the reprimands.
McLaren heard arguments from Stephen Krashinsky, the Toronto lawyer representing the guild, and Len Kavanaugh, the local attorney acting for the Star. In addition to questioning the people involved, each lawyer also called on an “expert witness” to give testimony about conflict of interest and how it should be defined. It was their testimony, more than anything, that attempted to express the larger issue that McLaren was to decide: the question of a newspaper’s integrity versus its employees’ civil rights. The Star’s witness, John Miller, would regulate the behavior of journalists through written policies to avoid even a hint of bias. The guild’s witness, Anthony Weste11, would trust journalists to lead full lives as citizens but still report in a fair and balanced manner, as professionals.

Miller, chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism, spent most of his career at The Toronto Star.

While holding his last position at the Star, as senior deputy managing editor, Miller rewrote the paper’s extensive policy manual, one of the few that attempts to address the issue at question in The Windsor Star case. Two clauses in the policy manual give an indication of his stand on this issue. The first reads: “Care should be exercised to avoid open endorsement of any political candidate or cause, since this might reflect on the newspaper and employee.” And the second says: “Staff members should not hold office in community organizations involved in activities about which they may write or make editorial judgments. This includes fund-raising or public relations work, and active participation in community organizations and pressure groups that take positions on public issues.”

The Windsor Star case is not the first to address this issue. The Toronto Star applied that second clause in a similar case in 1986-and won. In that case, a general assignment reporter named Susan Craig was challenging the paper’s attempt to prevent her from heading a labor organization called Organized Working Women, or giving her another job until her term as president expired. The paper’s concern was not one of real bias, but rather of the possible perception of bias. The arbitrator in the case ruled that the paper did have cause for concern, and was justified in not allowing her to cover labor stories.

Miller resisted defining conflict of interest at the Windsor arbitration hearing, because, he says, “every situation is different.” Instead, he based his testimony on the all-important issue of perception.

Miller doesn’t see this as a case of infringement of civil rights. And he finds the guild’s assertion that reporters should be allowed to do whatever they want on their own time “untenable.” “If you had to start keeping lists of ou tside invo1vements, you would lose the power to assign staff. And that’s not fair to management,” he says.

“If we believe that it’s a professional calling to be a journalist, then there are certain things that we cannot do, like showing support for one side in a contentious issue,” Miller says. “A newspaper’s currency is trust. Anything that undermines that trust should concern everyone, including the guild.”

Guild witness Westell, director of the School of Journalism at Carleton University, characterizes Miller’s view as old-fashioned and outdated. “This is a policy that many papers have followed for a long time, but I feel that !;; times have changed and that now there’s a great deal more attention being paid to individual rights,” he says. While he agrees with Miller that a precise definition is impossible and” probably not desirable, Westell feels it is unreasonable to say that reporters should be asked to surrender many of their civil rights, such as their right to take part in a public debate, or to become involved in public life, just because there is a chance that they might, at some stage, have to cover a related story.

He believes that the test should not be whether there might be a perceived conflict, but what in fact the reporters actually wrote. If they wrote stories which were fair and balanced, then that ought to be enough. In any case, he says, “There’s not much evidence that I’ve ever seen that the public cares about this one way or another.”

This central issue of trust and objectivity is at the heart of the disagreement between Miller and Westell. Says Westell, “I don’t really believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Most journalists are members of a trade union, and that’s known.”

Miller likens Westell’s argument that “objectivity doesn’t exist anyway” to “saying that everyone knows there’s a crime rate, so let’s do away with the police force. ‘Let’s give up.’ That’s in effect what he’s saying.” Only one thing was certain in the
Windsor Star case: neither side was giving up-or giving in. Despite the fact that the arbitration process cost both sides thousands of dollars in legal, arbitration, and witness fees, and wages for time spent at the hearing (the guild paid for its people), both sides were seeing this through to the end. And everyone involved says they’d do it over again.

Says Vander Doelen, “I was fuzzy on the issue before. But after sitting through the hearings, I’m now certain that we did the right thing. Because no one else is going to defend our craft but other journalists. I have to defend my craft because no one else will.” The mere thought that the paper was in the right, he says, makes him feel “the way anyone would if they had some of their freedom taken away against their will. It’s a horrible thing to lose freedom.”

The ultimate significance of this case does not lie in what happens to the people involved.

As Williamson points out, it’s really a moot point now; the CBC station has closed and the letters of reprimand were removed from the files last spring. What is important is what the arbitrator’s ruling in the Windsor Star case means to the freedom of journalists across Canada.

During the fall of 1990 a memo was sent by Montreal Gazette entertainment editor Brian Kappler to associate managing editor Michael Cooke regarding the book section. It read, in summary: Feature novels closer to public taste (Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum). Scrap the French best-seller list. Limit commissioned reviews to five a week. Shorten reviews. Use wire services for US and European reviews. Put more emphasis on color art for break pages, including photos of coffee-table books.

The memo reads like a sabotage of homegrown Canadian book reviewing, USA Today style. In reality, it represents one extreme of a spectrum of views held and implemented by Canadian newspapers regarding what books to review and how to review them.

Only one or two per cent of the roughly 54,000 books published annually in Canada ever get reviewed in Canadian newspapers. Papers have few book pages (the best have about three), usually published only once a week, and review only 7 to 14 books per week on average. Therefore, decisions about what to review become crucial, not only to book-page editors, but also to authors and publishers. The Gazette memo was never implemented in its entirety. It was intercepted on the computer system by a friend of then-book editor Mark Abley, who later quit, blaming his problems on middle management and overwork. “I was told I was elitist,” Abley says. “I wanted books of quality. I wanted the section to appeal to people who love books, like sports written for sports lovers. But they wanted no section of the paper inaccessible to most readers.”

Mel Morris, former managing editor of the Gazette, worries that Cooke and Kappler were trying to lower the target audience by featuring “shit books,” by writers such as Danielle Steele, which he says should be given only a one paragraph review in the book pages. And while the memo is shrugged off by some staff members as meddlesome, and pressures from middle management to change have abated, it does encapsulate the threat to book reviewing posed by editorial interference. Abley cites a list of reviews that were pulled by his seniors, including a feature on black protest poets in South Africa. This kind of censorship, which the public knows nothing of, hinders the critical purpose of book reviewing. Granted, the selection of books for review depends on taste, but on whose taste? The book editor’s taste or that of Danielle Steele fans?

A November 11, 1991 article in The Toronto Star claims that only 50 per cent of Canadians read one book or more per year, and the fact is that Canada has become a dumping ground for US and British books. Therefore, the scant Canadian reviews that are published are precious. But some treat them as almost too precious. At the other extreme of Canadian book reviewing are book editors who would rather boost Canadian books than relegate them to inferior status behind the latest US best-seller.

Ken McGoogan, book editor of the Calgary Herald, has been doing just this for 11 years. McGoogan is not only geographically, but also ideologically, isolated in southern Alberta because he believes writers, including Canadian writers, should be boosted in reviews. “I prefer to err on the side of generosity toward writers. I have a great deal of empathy as a writer and it extends to Canadian and other writers as well,” says McGoogan. He says it is appropriate to pay special attention to Canadian books and regional (Albertan) books, but stresses that he doesn’t force his views on reviewers of the books he chooses; in fact, he sometimes disagrees with them. Controversy over his views has heated up since the publication of his book, Canada’s Undeclared War: Fighting Words From the Literary Trenches, detailing his ‘booster’ philosophy of revlewmg.

Toronto Star book columnist Philip Marchand, a relatively hard-hitting reviewer, says mischievously that he has a great deal of sympathy for an author he rakes over the coals. But he stresses that reviewers have a duty to be firm in their views: “If you really think a work is flawed or failed, then you owe it to your readers to say so clearly at the risk of offending an author or publisher.” Most book editors concede that there is a place for some boosterism in the Canadian context, because only big-name Canadian authors get reviewed in the US or Britain. But boosterism should be restricted to paying attention to Canadian books, not pampering them.

The Globe and Mail is relatively middle-of-the-road compared to the Gazette and the Herald, neither boosting Canadian volumes nor stooping to feature mass-market books, but its book section has been criticized for deliberately setting up provocative reviews-for example, having academic historians review popular histories. Professor Duncan McDowall negatively reviewed Peter C. New~ man’s Merchant Princes, the last volume of his trilogy about The Hudson’s Bay Company. In the Oct. 12, 1991 review, McDowall criticized S Newman for “seldom resorting to the nitty-gritty of history-the primary documents.”

Newman has three words to say about book reviewing: “It’s all politics.” He maintains that having academics review popular histories leads to “a crossing-over of different disciplines and different audiences.” In his stinging rebuttal to the Globe’s review, he called McDowall’s criticism a “defensive diatribe disguised as a book review” and the man himself, “a crusty academic.”
Still, no book editor wants to commit the sin of having a boring book section. The book pages are written for the public, not for the authors. And because reviewers with extensive knowledge in some disciplines are rare, most editors say it’s okay to use academics as long as they understand the purpose of the book and judge fairly whether the author succeeds in his or her intention.

But the Globe has also been criticized for assigning books for review to an author’s ideological opponent. Last October, its editors printed a review by David Olive of Mel Hurtig’s anti-free trade book, The Betrayal of Canada. Olive is the editor of Report On Business Magazine and a known supporter of free trade. He panned the book, put off because Hurtig paints supporters of free trade as “traitors” to their country, “antiCanadians” and “pimps.” Olive took the book’s main attack all too personally. He concluded his review with: “Now if only his strident followers can break their habit of labelling those who sometimes disagree with them as ‘traitors’ to their country, it is likely that Hurtig’s message will receive a charitable hearing.”

Hurtig angrily wrote the Globe that assigning reviewers who perspectives guarantee a book will be trashed is hardly fair to atuthors, publishers or readers, “and it certainly doesn’t help your reputation for objectivity.” June Callwood opposes such provocative reviewing, saying there’s a spirit of mischief in it. “An extreme illustration would be giving a pro-choice book to a right-to-lifer to review.” The charge that the Globe sets up provocative reviews doesn’t sit welpwith arts and book editor Katherine Ashenburg. “People always read the entrails of the Globe as if a lot more Machiavellian, bizarre planning were going on,” she says. Yet bizarre is an apt word for the twin reviews commissioned by the Globe of Robertson Davies’ Murther and Walking Spirits. Ashenburg denies that the Globe ran the dual reviews because it knew it would get a negative review from Canadian novelist and critic Janice Kulyk Keefer. Yet she says she knew that Kulyk Keefer had written negative reviews of Davies in the past and that the American reviewer Michael Dirda would gush because “Americans love Davies.” Philip Marchand says this practice arouses suspicion. “Why do you need it?” he says. “Was the first one not good enough? Robertson Davies doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves, he is a wellestablished and well-read author.”

The Canadian book industry and newspaper reviewing have greatly improved in the past 30 years. But in these hard economic times reviewing is suffering. When newspapers import American culture and bias cheaply via wire services, or deliberately set up provocative reviews, or feature American mass-market books, or insult authors and their readers by handling Canadian books gently, the Canadian book industry, book reviewing and the public are not well-served.

Saturday Night, the magazine that hasn’t made a penny for more than 40 years, has always been a hard sell. And now that the venerable but perennially money-losing magazine is operating on a controlled-circulation basis, few media forecasters are predicting an easier economic future. At the magazine’s glitzy launch party last October at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, David Olive, editor of Report On Business Magazine, foresaw a rocky ride. “The bigger the launch, the bigger the fall,” he said, recalling the demise of Vista, Domino, Quest and City Woman.

Under the intense scrutiny of the country’s magazine industry, consulting publisher Jeffrey Shearer has been charged with the burdensome task of turning Saturday Night, which is one of Canada’s most expensive magazines to produce and is estimated to still be losing money, into a profitable success. Shearer rode the controlled-circulation concept to heady heights with Quest and City Woman, as executive vicepresident of Comac Communications Ltd., until Quest got into trouble in the early eighties. He ought to know that controlled circulation is a hard sell.

But Shearer believes Saturday Night will not only break even, but will also see profits within the next two to five years. “We’re doing tracking studies by phone and personal interviews with readers after every issue. We’re getting an excellent response. Our targetted audience is clearly interested in this broader range of editorial material. They may not have read it before, but they’re reading it now,” he says.

Restructured from a subscriber base of 127,000 to a controlled-circulation newspaper supplement of 400,000, gracing homes with incomes of $40,000 a year or more, the new Saturday Night is delivered with selected issues of the Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. Still available on the newsstand and delivered by mail to paying subscribers outside the targetted controlled-circulation areas, the relaunched magazine is a controlled/subscriber hybrid.

Patrick Walshe, vicepresident of the advertising firm Harrison, Young, Pesonen and Newell Inc., says, “It’s a quasi-controlled magazine. A magazine that will succeed is one that is really well-focused and well-niched, and I don’t see Saturday Night delivering on these scores. The key issue is not the receivership of 400,000 magazines, but the amount of time spent by its readers and how they value it.”

Janet Landreth, media group head of the McKim Media Group, explains, “Advertisers in the first few issues weren’t taking a big risk because of the huge discounting that went on.” The rejuvenated Saturday Night will have to continue discounting rates until it can assure advertisers it is not only being received but read. Nevertheless, advertising sales manager Jennifer Bedford says ad sales are strong. “In the first three issues alone, we’ve generated more advertising business than we did all of last year.”

The flashy premier issue resembled a cross between Vanity Fair and Harper’s, instead of the blend of stodginess and cultural nationalism that characterized its former incarnation. There was more lavish display of type, artwork, photography and graphics. But despite the new look, clearly aimed at a younger audience, there wasn’t much new in the new Saturday Night. Ironically, the cover, an arresting photo of Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, left the impression that the magazine was outdated. Timmins might have been hot, say four years ago, but at the time of the release of the magazine, she wasn’t on tour, nor had she produced a new record.

After reviewing the first issue, Doug Bennet, editor of Masthead magazine, didn’t think the restructuring was satisfying both new and old readers. “It’s unfocused right now. The new graphics are amazing, but it’s not known who they’re trying to appeal to,” he said. “As a result of this ambivalence, advertisers will probably wait for six months to a year before buying.”

But despite such negative predictions, there are at least a few who don’t expect the new Saturday Night to fall from the sky just yet. Hugh Dow, president of Initiative Media, agrees there is some obvious fallout from the previous readership, but he believes the magazine will ultimately attract a broader audience. “It has a sizable circulation and good editorial content.”

Joann Webb, who has been the editor of a number of publications, sees the magazine as a breath of fresh air. “I am personally excited that Saturday Night has the guts to move forward in the midst of the bleakest environment I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if they will succeed, but I sure as hell hope they do.”

It is going to be a hard night for Jack Layton. Pre-election polls have forecast defeat of Toronto’s NDP mayoralty candidate at the hands of his Tory opponent, and at 7 p.m. on election day, time is ticking away. And here is Layton, sweating in his overcoat and red scarf, rushing from door to door in the Ryerson student residence, trying to garner some lastminute votes. Though well-spoken and personable, he cannot mask the aura of panic that accompanies him. And as if this weren’t trying enough, this personal campaigning, this compilation of months of work into final-hour sell lines for college voters, a reporter has emerged out of nowhere to chronicle the act. Not just any reporter, either, but gritty Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno-not exactly a die-hard fan of the New Democratic Party. But Layton greets her amicably, and they exchange witticisms as she follows his rushed passage up and down cement stairwells and along hallways.

DiManno, too, has been anxious all evening, dreading the notion of a political story, unsure about the slant she will take. She has even developed a tension headache on the way over in the cab. But leaning back against a wall, observing Layton, she is in her element. She scrawls constantly in her notebook, managing to maintain an air of grace. Layton is making her job easy. As he promises better student housing, Metropasses for university students and better lighting in the residence, DiManno visibly relaxes.
To her amusement, Layton, in his hurry, is knocking on doors and entering rooms before he is invited in. “I’m much better now,” DiManno says, laughing. “I can see the column taking shape. He didn’t even wait for them to answer the door! Does he look manic?!”

“They left you off the voters’ list. That’s how much they think of you,” Layton informs student after student, while DiManno stands to the side, eyes slightly squinted in thought, smiling. If Layton had time to think about DiManno’s presence there that evening, he might have been worried.

Knock-knock, Who’s there? began DiManno’s column the following day.

Jack.

Jack who?

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack who could not win over the electorate.

But oh, how he tried. Until the very last moment he tried. What followed was a sympathetic account of the final hour of Layton’s campaign. Humorous at times, but certainly not cruel.

“It’s so easy to ridicule people,” says DiManno. “But you don’t make fun of losers. It was funny, but it wasn’t ridiculous. Here was a man heading for defeat, and he was going to fight till the last minute. These are admirable qualities.”

Who could have foreseen this forgiving slant on a piece by the writer whose coverage of the funeral of a murdered child aroused public fury for its alleged ruthlessness? And it was only last May that DiManno condemned “a trendy, all-purpose NDP ideology” for being ”as much at fault…as any Tory national agenda or broken Liberal promises.” Not to mention the charges of self-righteousness directed at NDP cabinet minister Marilyn Churley in at least two other columns.

But if DiManno is anything, she is unpredictable, a rare quality for a newspaper reporter in this age of pack journalism and creeping orthodoxy. “Rosie doesn’t toe the political party line,” says friend and fellow Star writer Craig MacInnis. “She doesn’t wear party colors on her sleeve. She’s a situational person. She sizes up a situation on its own merit.” Says city editor Joe Hall, “I find it difficult to pigeonhole her. One of her most appealing qualities is that she’s not predictable.”

Without aligning herself with any faction, DiManno seems to speak for…the people. She writes with a snappy, witty rhetoric which often appears to take on the voice of her subject: the prostitute, the TTC striker, the mother of a murdered child. “Her politics are emotionally situated,” says MacInnis. “She writes from the perspective of someone who feels a certain empathy for the little guy.”
The response she elicits from her readers is emotional too. “She infuriates large numbers of readers,” says Hall. “She outrages them.” He estimates that DiManno gets more phone calls from readers than any other staff member on city side. It’s easy to believe. At her desk this Tuesday afternoon, DiManno’s phone is ringing constantly. Her latest column was about the shooting of Jonathan Howell, a black man, by Detective Carl Sokolowski, and criticism of the police provokes the most virulent of public responses. DiManno listens patiently to the opinions of each caller, responding firmly but respectfully unless the reader gets rude. And some of them do. After one such call impugning the purity of her motives, DiManno sits back in her chair, looking more sad than angry. “This job is disheartening at times,” she says. “You really get to feel the pulse of the city.”

The idea of having a city columnist had been in the air for years at the Star before DiManno was selected for the job in September 1989. “I’d always said the Star should have one,” says DiManno. “I was always interested in the prospect of me doing it, but I just thought that somebody should do it. It was an element that we were missing in the newspaper.”

Hall was looking for a column that would provide a younger person’s perspective as well as a sense of the city. Born and raised in Toronto, at 33 DiManno seemed like a prime candidate. It was an impressive position to hold at such an age, and DiManno knows how fortunate she was. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I think I got the best job in this city.” It didn’t exactly fall into her lap.
Born to Italian immigrant parents, DiManno was raised around Christie Pits in Toronto’s west end. The only girl among five boys, she experienced the restricted childhood typical of kids of traditional Italian parents. At 12 she was forced to attend Central Commerce, a secretarial school in which she had no interest. To her horror, she excelled there. But she left halfway through the year when her family moved to North York. “I don’t know what would have happened if my family hadn’t moved,” says DiManno, who doubts she would have become a secretary. “I might have led a life of crime.”

So it was on to William Lyon Mackenzie Secondary School, and the trial of adolescence under the thumb of “phenomenally strict” parents. “Curfews? What curfews?” asks DiManno. “I couldn’t go out at all. No curfew. Home after school. You weren’t allowed to go to a dance or anything like thatever .” Her marks began to slip when she started cutting classes. She would go down to Yorkville and panhandle, pretending she was a hippie, or go to a movie, or go to a mall. It was the only freedom she had in those days.

North York was also the place where DiManno discovered sports. She’d played a lot of softball as a kid, but she’d never been a good athlete, never had much interest. Then one morning she woke up a sports nut. Her primary fixation was hockey, and she read everything she could about it. “If I read a newspaper at all, it was just the sports pages,” says DiManno. Except for a “book” she put together while in Grade 9, DiManno did not do much writing in those days. “God knows what it was about,” she says. “It was a stupid book, about sex and drugs and being 14. I used to hand it out in class. There were always people reading chapters of it.”
Still, she had the notion back then that she was going to be a writer, and the Ryerson School of Journalism seemed like a good place to start. The restrictions set by her family had always been a problem, and with the prospect of a career in sight, they loomed larger than ever. “I didn’t know how I could be a journalist and get along with my family at the same time. Even in my ignorance I realized that journalism involved travelling; it involved long hours.”

Bu t DiManno thrived at Ryerson, becoming editor of The Ryersonian, the journalism school paper, in her final year. She describes her paper as the worst one in history. “I just picked my friends, people who were good partiers, and I don’t know how we put that paper out. 1’d bring from .home these great big bottles of homemade wine. We’d sit in the back…and we’d just drink all this wine, and then we’d go outside and smoke some dope. Then we’d come in and try to put the paper together .”

She began working part-time for the Star when she was 17 years old, and the summer after third year she was hired full-time as a sportswriter. She doesn’t remember when the epiphany occurred at Ryerson, when she decided that she wanted to write sports. But Christie Blatchford was already doing it at The Globe and Mail, and DiManno thought that even being a female sportswriter might be a more realistic goal than setting out to write fiction.

She had “the time of her life” covering the ’76 Olympics in Montreal for the Star. Her stories were getting good play, and she describes that period as a delayed adolescence. Because she worked in sports, she worked a split shift. She’d work in the morning, have the afternoon off, then return to work at night. Most people went home during the d~y but DiManno, who was still living with her parents, would go drinking. Sometimes her assignments were late. “This was the first time that I was going home at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. That never happened before. So perhaps I was behaving like a
lot of other people when they’re 15I thought that those good times were never going to end.”

When DiManno finally moved out she was 23 years old, and the action did cause a rift. She now lives by herself in a downtown apartment. Relations with her parents were eventually restored, though the relationship has always been limited by the language barrier; DiManno speaks Italian but not very well. “I don’t think that they know to this day what it is that I do for a living,” she says. “It must be a terrible puzzle to them.” And any freedom she has taken for herself was reluctantly yielded. “If I phone them and say ‘I’m going out of town tomorrow,’ then there’s always that sigh, ‘Oh there you go again. Why do you always have to do this?'”
When her quarterly probationary period at the Star came up for the third or fourth time, then-sports editor Jim Proudfoot fired her. “It would probably be correct to say that I was having too good a time,” says DiManno. “I didn’t take it all that seriously, they tell me.” Thus began a low period in her life which didn’t lift until six months later when she started freelancing for magazines. She got a story in the first issue of City Magazine, a now defunct Toronto Star publication then under the editorship of Hartley Steward. Freelancing kept her alive for three years until she decided to go back to newspapers.

This time she tried The Globe and Mail. “I walked over to the Globe, got an interview and was hired. I remember later coming out and sitting on a curb outside the Globe and thinking ‘My God, what have I done?'” She worked as a general assignment reporter at the Globe for four months before she decided to quit. “If there was ever a person who was un Globe, it was me,” says DiManno. “It took itself much too seriously.” She walked into managing editor Ted Moser’s office ready to quit, but before she could get the words out of her mouth he said, “You’re gone.” She had gotten in trouble for hitchhiking home from an out-of-town assignment the previous week, and he didn’t like the way she dressed. “You didn’t wear little halter tops to the Globe,” says DiManno.

After a year of freelancing, Star city editor Mary Deanne Shears offered her a job as a summer replacement. “I jumped at the opportunity,” DiManno recalls. “I always felt that I had the Star tattooed on my ass. I always felt that I wasn’t where I should have been. I mean, I felt like a Star person all those years when I wasn’t a Star person.” Shears gave her a stern welcoming lecture about responsibility, but by the end of the summer DiManno was hired on as a general assignment reporter. She worked as a GA reporter for five years, in entertainment for less than two, and then for one and a half years as part of the features team. Last September was the second anniversary of her column.

The role of a city columnist is a precarious one, says Blatchford, city columnist for The Toronto Sun. You’ve got to be newsy, but not too newsy, to avoid taking stories away from reporters. You’ve got to be topical, and at the same time give readers something they won’t get from a news story or from television. What you have to do is provide the kind of detail that newspaper and television reporters can’t supply.

“I like columns that rely heavily on detail,” says DiManno. “I think I have an eye for detail. Sometimes you write columns that are really just mood pieces. They’re not really saying anything. They’re just word pictures.”

This knack for verbal impressionism, nearly poetic at times, is typical DiManno. Hall compares her work to Jimmy Breslin’s, and DiManno too is a fan of Breslin’s writing. “I’m not a great hockey fan,” says Hall, “But I remember quite well a piece she wrote a year ago about the Leafs. It was just a look at the Leafs all geared up for a new season…but with the words she used you could just about see the blades cutting through the ice.”

Blatchford describes the relationship between herself and DiManno as “curious.” DiManno keeps her on her toes, she says, especially when they’re covering the same story. In one case last summer, both columnists were writing about Kay~a Klaudusz, a missing child who was later found murdered. “I can’t tell you the times I’d see her in front of [the family’s] apartment building and start to worry,” says Blatchford. “Then she’d disappear and I’d think ‘Fuck, she got inside,’ and it would turn out she went for a coffee.”

But DiManno is a harsh judge of her own work, and says there are many columns she regrets having written. She warns of the traps columnists can fall prey to: like falling in love with the sound of your own voice. “Sometimes I just want to say: ‘Shut up, Rosie! Shut up!’… There are days I don’t go into work because I’m so ashamed of what I’ve written.”

Ironically, the columns she regrets are rarely the ones that caused public furor. Perhaps the best-known of these controversial pieces was on Andrea Atkinson’s funeral. Six-yearold Andrea had disappeared days earlier from her mother’s east end apartment, and her body was later found in the storage room of her building. DiManno went beyond the death of the child, exploring the intentions and suspicions of the funeral goers, many of whom had appeared with small children and shopping bags.

There are times when you can almost touch the face of madness. And it was there in the tawdry spectacle of a service for the dead, turned into a circus for the living. In the almost giddy grief of a childless mother. In the murmur and hissing of strangers. In the hostility of a crowd engorged with rage.

Some of that rage was directed at Ruth Windebank, Andrea’s mother, and DiM anno’s piece made that clear. It was her description of Windebank’s behavior which provoked an outcry from readers who felt the grieving mother had been unjustly served by DiManno’s prose.

In the chapel, Andreas casket was laid out in front of pale pink curtains, laden and surrounded with flowers. On the lid, a burst of pink carnations with a card that read: To our little girl. From Ruth and Doug. Not mother, not mom, but Ruth. That’s Ruth Windebank, mother, and Doug Heinbuch, the boyfriend she met on Labor Day.

Hall doesn’t regret having run the piece, though he wishes he could have prevented the error which caused DiManno’s photo byline to be dropped from the column, making it look like a news story. But even without this confusion, people would have complained, says Hall. DiManno was trying to convey that the funeral had become a spectacle of sorts, with a turnout that seemed more like audience than mourners. But her efforts were largely misinterpreted, because in our society funerals are like death itself. They are surrounded by taboo.

DiManno admits that she did not like Ruth Windebank. She was angered by the fact that Windebank had let Andrea out of her sight for at least three hours the morning she disappeared. And on the day she was told that Andrea’s body had been found, DiManno overheard Windebank complaining about her stereo.

DiManno concedes that nobody can judge somebody else’s grief, and Windebank’s reaction could easily have been an expression of shock. But that doesn’t excuse the behavior of Windebank before her daughter was found, she says. The reason she was there that first day was because Windebank, dissatisfied with the way the investigation was going, had phoned the Star and the Sun, asking to give her side of the story. “Christie Blatchford…was there from the Sun and we went inside [Windebank’s apartment],” recalls DiManno. “And for over an hour Ruth Windebank talked about herself. Ruth Windebank told jokes. She was more concerned about the image that was being presented in the press about her than she was about her daughter’s disappearance, and that was my honest-to-gut feeling about what was happening that day.”

DiManno never heard from Windebank after the column came out.

In contrast, her column on the World Cup soccer sparring in July 1990 elicited an active response from its subject, the Italian community. After Argentina knocked Italy out of the World Cup in Naples, thousands of Argentinian and Italian soccer fans battled it out with eggs and bottles on St. Clair Avenue West.

Arriverderci Italia.

And shame, shame, shame, wrote DiManno in her column the following day. She continued to reprimand the Italian community for being sore losers, “despite all the practice we’ve had at it.” The Italians were so outraged by the column that a reaction was broadcast on Italian TV. Letters of complaint poured into Corriere Canadese, Toronto’s Italian newspaper, which went as far as to publish an article in response to DiManno’s. “It raised a lot of fur,” says Silia Coiro, then English news editor at the paper, of DiManno’s piece.

Surprised by the reaction, DiManno does not regret the column. “I didn’t anticipate that they would react so virulently,” she says. “What were they so angry about? Were they angry because I said they behaved like a bunch of assholes on St. Clair Avenue West? They did.” She says while some members of the Italian community are proud of her for having made it in “the big Anglo-Saxon culture,” others think they own a piece of her and consider her a traitor when she is critical of them.

The Italians aren’t the only ones to lay claim to DiManno’s loyalties. She has also been attacked by feminists who say that she writes articles demeaning to women. They write in to say that she’s sexist, and if not sexist, simply stupid. “Had DiManno been racebashing instead of feminist-bashing, would her column have been printed?” asked one Star reader after the appearance of a column criticizing a LEAF (women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) breakfast.

She has always considered herself a feminist, and is shocked by the suggestion that she is not. “The word ‘feminist’ has been co-opted by certain factions,” she says, “and their definition seems to be the only working definition that’s allowed any more. My feminism is as good as anyone else’s, goddammit!”

In one instance, DiManno co-wrote an article on pornography with MacInnis in which she defended it from a civil rights perspective and because she finds it funny and entertaining. She attributes the critical response to the piece to an increasing trend among journalists to adhere to the laws of political correctness. As an example of this DiManno cites the issue of a national day care program which, despite the fact that it has opponents, is covered largely from the perspective that it should exist. ‘We don’t approach it as a news story any more,” she says. The feminists have become the status quo these days, says DiManno, and the role of the media has never been to uphold the status quo. “You’re supposed to have questions. You’re not just supposed to say ‘four legs good, two legs bad.'”

Hence her problem with Marilyn Churley, an NDP cabinet minister and the focus of several of her less flattering pieces. In a column last March, DiManno called Churley “the mother of all big sisters.” The column was inspired by Bob Rae’s decision to put Churley in the position of Peter Kormos, former minister of consumer and commercial relations. “The fey Ms. Churley: charming, earnest, and always righter than the rest,” wrote DiManno. “The standard-bearer, during her truncated tenure at Toronto City Council, for a certain dogmatic strain of feminism that long ago parted company with the most basic tenets of diplomatic principle.”

The reference here is to Churley’s efforts to ban sexist ads from City of Toronto property, and beauty pageants from Nathan Phillips Square. DiManno sees her as a member of a group of people cavorting under the title of politically correct, dictating to everybody else the right way to live. “These are all people of the same age-group. They’re a little older than I am,” she says, “but they went through the sixties. And they had free sex. And they went out and did all the drugs they wanted to do. And they went out and had the adventure of their lives. They broke all the taboos. They went against their parents. And now they’re 20 years older and they’ve had their little piece of fun and they want to go back and have the same Victorian prudish society they rebelled against in the first place. Now they want it for different reasons, though.”

DiManno has little tolerance for people or institutions she perceives to be taking themselves too seriously. Certainly she can ‘t be accused of taking herself too seriously. She has no noble objectives as a columnist, and does not see herself as being under any particular obligation. “I don’t have a role,” says DiManno. “I just want to tell good stories.” Maybe, she suggests, she is having a late adolescence. “I want to be perverse and outrageous.”

She sees herself as a city-side reporter given the freedom to write in her own style. Her desk sits amidst the hustle and bustle of the newsroom, not in the tower with other columnists and editorial writers.

She would rather write about breaking news than pontificate about a subject. “I don’t like using I,” says DiManno. “It’s embarrassing. Where do I get off using 20 inches of the Star to tell you what I think?”

Despite herself, her column seems to have taken on a life of its own, says DiManno. It’s become more personal than she ever intended, and now she considers that perhaps there is really no way to keep her personality out of it. And she doesn’t know how long she should continue to write the column either, before the time will come to pass the space on to someone else. “I’m always waiting for the tap on the shoulder saying ‘Hey kid, it’s been fun, but you gotta run!'”

Blatchford agrees that DiManno’s opinions usually manage to sneak through somehow. “Even though she doesn’t say ‘I think,’ it’s pretty plain 90 per cent of the time what she thinks.” DiManno insists there are few issues she gets really passionate about, that steam her up enough to bring out the opinionated Rosie. One of them is the conflict between the police and the black community.
“You talk about being affected by a story,” says DiManno. “That one I wanted to go home and rip out my hairI think there are a lot of really good police officers in the city who care. But the fact that we should even be discussing that it’s right to shoot people over a theft kills me. How can it be? How can it be?”

And taking a stand on the police issue is not an expression of her feeling of responsibility as a columnist, she says. Rather, it’s the least she can do in the face of the racist sub text of the incidents. She’s had readers and even some police officers suggest that given her stance on the issue, she must be ‘sleeping black.’ “If you’re not outraged by that, then you can check out,” says DiManno. “Then you’re not alive.”

While some may see inconsistencies between her stands on racism and feminism, DiManno can’t equate the two. “If you’re talking about the opportunities that women are given or not given in their lives, that’s a far cry from young black males being shot in Toronto,” she says.

But then there is nothing neat or packageable about Rosle DiManno’s assorted stands. There is no way to infer one from the next. Every issue is considered individually on its own merit, and there are no hard-and-fast rules that apply’ to any of them. If this capriciousness makes her somehow more credible than other, party-oriented columnists, the effect has occurred incidentally. She never set out to create a persona for herself in print. It just happened naturally.

“Be a maverick,” says DiManno, who ought to know. “Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no cant. There are too many people walking around thinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.”

Right off, an ugly problem stood between me and my assignment to write a piece on CBC Newsworld, “the all-news channel for Canadians.”

I would have to watch it.

Try it sometime. While you yawn your way through another Capital Report or Ontario Update you get a small dose of what it must be like to be a convict stuck in solitary confinement. With the “luxury” of just one small window, you gaze expectantly upon an interminable greyness that occasionally darkens or lightens in intensity as you await release or, as in my case, a publication deadline.

CBC Snoozeworld. What else to call it? It’s narcolepsy with silly haircuts.

As a confirmed zapper, I play more than 40 cable-delivered channels like a hopped-up roulette addict before I settle on a show that will sustain my interest. But I zap past Newsworld faster than by any other channel. Except perhaps the home shopping network As inevitably as home shoppers tune in to find wall-to-wall cubic zirconia, Newsworld viewers are rarely without a steady, slow-march parade of talking heads.

But don’t take my word for it. Before I started watching and forming my own prejudiced views, I wanted the cross-Canadian perspective. So I called a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and even an Indian chief-all bona fide Canadians-to see what kind of impact Newsworld has made since its debut in July 1989. First I asked if they watched.

“Umm, yes and no,” equivocated Victor Boryski, a 39-year-old butcher and co-owner of The g; Butcher Block in Saskatoon. “I’ve heard of it.”

After a little prompting, Boryski confessed he didn’t tune in to Newsworld much, but that he watched CNN-a lot. “They (Newsworld) should do more on-the-spot type video,” he continued. “People love that stuff.”

Francis Reynolds kneads dough at Larkin’s Bake Shop in Halifax, but she didn’t seem to have much need for Newsworld. “Hmmm…Newsworld? Tell me about it.”

I explained its all-Canadian, all news worthiness to Larkin. “I wasn’t even aware we got that here in Halifax,” she said.
Wendy Grant, chief of the Musqueam Band in Vancouver, had actually seen Newsworld. “Yes, I do watch. But I don’t deliberately tune it in. I’ll just watch it for a few minutes if the subject interests me,” she said.

Okay, so Anita Hayes, the 38-year-old proprietor of Candle & Flame Creations Ltd. in Calgary doesn’t actually ‘make’ the candles she sells. So call the press council.

“Newsworld?” Hayes queried, when asked about the channel. I might as well have asked her about genetic engineering or how to hot-wire the Space Shuttle.

“1 don’t watch it very much at all,” she confessed. “Sorry.” I assured her that it was quite all right. It was perfectly understandable.
Realizing this wasn’t enough to milk into a complete column, I resigned myself to a few days on the couch watching Newsworld. Here are some of my notebook excerpts from a recent Monday morning: Canada Live with Anne Petrie. She does phone interview with brother of hostage Thomas Cicippio. No pictures. Just Anne on the phone.

Business News with Petrie and Ira Katzin, a Toronto financial analyst, via phone. No pictures again. Get up and look out window. Do a few stretches.

Southam correspondent Stephen Bindeman talks to Petrie about the John Munro c~se from Ottawa. Pure talking head stuff.

Syllables melt into a blah-like drone. Go to the kitchen and get Diet Sprite. Practise golf swing in living room. You get the picture.

And man, is it borrrrring.

Even the news, with Sheldon (Mr. Excitement) Turcott, seems somewhat anaemic. While the CBC National has some undeniable flair, albeit steeped in a central Canadian bias, Newsworld news appears bland and cheap.

On one newscast, Turcott intro’d eight times. Four had no correspondents attached to them. Three had no accompanying pictures Gust Turcott reading). And one, the most interesting visually, was a satellite borrowed story about Michael Jackson from CBS news.
Even when Newsworld is good (like an eccentric, it produces intermittently quaint entertainment), it sputters.

On the morning hostages, Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland were released, Newsworld was first (before CNN, before any network) to break programming and go live to Damascus.

But the Waite-Sutherland press conference was delayed. Newsworld returned to regular programming (the rivetting Tomorrow Today with a compelling rep’ on “innovation in containerized freight”) and, when t news celebrities showed up, it went back. But this tir CNN had beat them there.

Good things do happen on Newsworld, though. Honest. Antiques Road show, a totally weird collector’s digest from Britain, is one of my favorite T shows. On the Arts, an entertainment review show, is lively. So is Ideas c Camera, a TV version of the CBI radio show Ideas. Midday, too, which airs on the CBC as well as Newsworld is watchable in a soft, chirpy, trendy urban sort of way.
But even Midday, slick and glib a it appears, isn’t immune to thc Snoozeworldian karma.

Recently we witnessed a pretty decent “theme” Midday that focussed on Canada’s hungry. After an interview with a Newfoundland welfare mother and a factoid on food banks, the show cut to a commercial. It was for Lite Delite-a diet frozen microwave dinner for yuppies.

Barbara-jo McIntosh couldn’t understand what had happened. A week earlier, when Eve Johnson of The Vancouver Sun had called her, they’d gotten along fine. Quite well, in fact. Johnson had asked her about the chef, the menu and the history of her central Vancouver restaurant, Barbara-jo’s Elegant Home Cooking. She hadn’t sounded unimpressed. Certainly not enough to warrant something as mean as this. Johnson had seemed to enjoy the two meals she had eaten at Barbara-jo’s the week before-one with her husband, the other with her sister. And she had chatted with the chef for quite a while the second time.

But there it was in black and white, almost leaping off the page as McIntosh read on, incredulous, feeling as if she had been reeled in like a Pacific salmon. And, on that cold January morning in 1991, she knew that thousands of other people allover Vancouver were reading it too.

Johnson wrote about how McIntosh “got her start in the food business” carving roast beef in Eaton’s Marine Room when she was in high school, and said the fact that McIntosh was from South Vancouver was probably not “enough heritage to infuse a southern restaurant.” (“I told her those things in confidence, off the cuff, during a casual conversation,” says McIntosh. “I felt really violated when she ended up using them against me.”)

Anything nice Johnson had to say about the fledgling restaurant and its owner was drenched in a sea of sarcasm: “Barbara-jo’s has made the most of an unpromising little slice of a room smack dab against [a] bus stop. The white linen napkins are folded in one of those fancy shapes waiters learn on slow afternoons.”

“People called me that day and said’ Are you sleeping with her husband?'” McIntosh says. Over a year has passed since the review was printed, but the memory is as painfully acute as if it had happened yesterday. “Maybe she didn’t like me. Maybe we had a mutual acquaintance that didn’t like me. But there was obviously something deeper there.” This is simply not true, says Johnson. She found the restaurant pretentious and insists she had two disappointing meals there. She says McIntosh recognized her, made a big fuss, and dragged out the chef who proceeded to drone on about his food for what seemed like hours.

McIntosh doesn’t remember it that way at all. “The review wasn’t properly critical-it almost seemed vindictive,” she says. (“The review was a little tongue-in-cheek,” responds Johnson. “1 was only poking fun.”) “I don’t know what her education and background are, but she completely misuses her power,” says McIntosh. (Johnson has a master’s degree in Chinese history, but no education in either food or journalism. “But I was always good at Home Ec.,” she says.)

McIntosh is not the first person to suffer the caustic barbs of a disappointed critic. And Johnson is only one of hundreds in this country who earn their living by spouting off about how other people do their jobs. Critics tell us which restaurant will soon have lineups around the block, which film is the latest Oscar contender, which album is sure to go platinum. But exactly who are the people behind the bylines, and how did they get there? What is their responsibility to their readers? Is anything fair game in a review? And how much power do they actually have?

Few newspaper readers in this country would be surprised to find out that most Canadian critics have no formal education in their critical discipline. Nor have they been schooled in the fine art of criticism; after all, there is no “College For Aspiring Critics,” no summer camp to which one can send opinionated prepubescent youngsters who irritate their classmates by ranting on for weeks about the school play. In reality, most critics learn the ropes during their first g few months on the job. Many of them start as reporters and “fall into criticism,” filling the slot left open by a colleague who moved on.

“I never wanted to work for a newspaper, much less be a critic, says John Coulbourn, theatre critic at The Toronto Sun. Coulbourn was working in public relations for the Calgary Stampede in 1983 when The Calgary Sun called “from out of the blue” and offered him the position of entertainment editor. Even though he had no training in drama and only a few college courses in journalism, he “decided to give it a shot” and says now it was “the most exciting and stupid thing” he’s ever done. “I knew absolutely nothing, and here I was with a staff of six writers, trying to edit their copy,” he says. “But I must have done all right, because The Toronto Sun hired me as a theatre critic a few years later.”

When John Griffin was in university he played in a rock band, so he “thought it would be fun” when he joined the Gazette in 1980 as rock critic. “In the seventies I had about 30 or 40 jobs, none of them to do with writing,” he says. “The critic thing just fell into my lap. But the first few months were a nightmare. I had to learn absolutely everything.” He left the rock scene three and a half years ago to become the Gazette’s film critic-a job which he says “is a blast.”

A trained critic is about as common as a Sunshine girl in a winter parka. Most of the people who are telling us how to spend our entertainment dollars become “experts” after they get hired, not before. Herein lies the ethical problem: a critic is supposed to be an authority, almost omniscient, able to separate kitsch from creative genius. How can someone with no more training than the average reader possibly live up to these expectations? Shouldn’t an education be absolutely, unequivocally necessary?
Not according to the critics. Most say on-the-job training can be just as valuable as long as the person is genuinely interested in the subject at hand. “The passion has got to be there,” says John Haslett-Cuff, two time National Newspaper Award winner for his television criticism in The Globe and Mail. “You have to be committed to whatever it is you’re reviewing. You have to read a lot and you have to talk to people. If the passion isn’t there, no amount of education can help you.”

Some, like food critic Cynthia Wine of The Toronto Star, think a formal education is more a hindrance than a help. She says people who have no education have no pre-conceived notions before they go to a restaurant, concert or film. They don’t take things for granted, don’t expect too much. They’re more on their readers’ level.

And being educated doesn’t necessarily mean being well-educated. “There are good and bad schools,” says Globe and Mail food critic Joanne Kates, who studied at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris. “And there are smart and stupid people. Jay Scott [also of the Globe] doesn’t have a film degree, but I would hate to think that someone who went to a lousy film school and wasn’t very bright would get a job over him.”
(Scott, arguably the most respected film critic in the country, does have some education in film; while taking a freshman film course at the University of New Mexico in the late sixties, his professor asked him to take over as lecturer. “But I don’t have any credentials,” he said. “You know more than I do,” his professor replied. Barely 20, he taught the course and took it at the same time. “Needless to say I got an A,” he says. “I didn’t think I needed any more education after that.”)

There is a small faction, however, that believes critics have to be schooled to properly critique something. “Writing about jazz, I earn more than most musicians in this city,” says Paul Wells, jazz critic at the Montreal Gazette and an accomplished piano and trumpet player. “How could I sleep at night if I didn’t know as much about the medium as those who are making it and starving?” Ray Conlogue, former lead theatre critic at The Globe and Mail, who has a master’s degree in drama, goes so far as to say: “Any critic who doesn’t have a formal education will be an embarrassment to their newspaper for their first three years, until they know what they’re talking about. And newspapers continue to appoint people who have no idea what they’re doing.”

It’s somewhat disturbing that these people are scrutinizing chefs, actors, dancers and musicians who have spent years in training and countless hours practising their craft. Paul Wells is acutely aware of this irony. The first time he ever went to the ballet, he was reviewing it for The London Free Press during a summer student internship in 1988. “They were counting on the fact that I could fake it,” says Wells. “I felt like a complete idiot.”

The debate over what makes critics qualified stems from how they view their job and their responsibility to their readers. According to William Zinsser, journalist, author and Yale professor, there are two distinct camps: those who are critics and those who are reviewers. In his book, On Writing Well, Zinsser explains that the reviewer’s job “is more to report than to make an aesthetic judgement.” People like Griffin, Coulbourn and Ann Garber, food critic at the Vancouver Province, subscribe to this point of view. They try to describe the play, film or restaurant the way they would to a friend. Their job is not to write formal dissertations, says Coulbourn, but to tell people how to spend their money. “Most people don’t care about how the food is technically prepared,” adds Garber. “They just want to go somewhere where the food tastes good and where they feel comfortable.”

Criticism, on the other hand, is “a serious intellectual act,” writes Zinsser. “A critic sees himself as a scholar, and what interests him is the play of ideas in his field.” People like Conlogue and Wells view their role in this larger, perhaps loftier, context. They try to rate the experience in terms of its significance within the medium. According to Wells, “If you don’t argue for some position about the function of the artist in question within society, then it’s reduced to ‘I like this and I don’t like that.’ You become nothing more than a consumer advocate.” Conlogue agrees, dismissing the idea of reviewing from the viewpoint of the masses as “complete and utter bullshit. It’s people making excuses for not mastering their field, an excuse for mediocrity. If you don’t know more about the theatre than the people going to it, why should they read you? They should write the review and you should be reading it.”
Obviously then, the goals and aspirations of critics and reviewers are dramatically different. “But what is common to [both] forms,” writes Zinsser, “is that they consist of personal opinion.” His advice to critics and reviewers alike: “What is crucial for you as the writer is to express your opinion firmly take your stand with conviction.”

Zinsser’s credo has been adopted by many critics, much to the chagrin of restaurateurs, actors and musicians who have fallen short of perfection. Lack of a firm opinion is definitely not the problem-some opinions are so firm, so downright steely at times, that the mere mention of the critic’s name can elicit a string of profanity that would make even the crustiest city editor do a double take.
“It’s not inherently a very likable profession,” says Liam Lacey, theatre critic at the Globe. And he knows what he’s talking about. Lacey has been stopped on the street by recipients of bad reviews and asked why he wanted to hurt them so badly. And Ray Conlogue has had drinks poured on him by bitter directors on more than one occasion. (“Standing next to Ray at openings was very dangerous,” says David Mirvish, owner of Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, “because he’s a very tall man, and you’d invariably get splashed with whatever was being thrown on him.”) “Everyone, including me,” Lacey admits, “reads critics to be annoyed.”
And none are more annoyed than those who stand to be lauded or lynched by the chosen few. People who feel they have been unfairly judged say critics are mercilessly vicious, blatantly biased and unjustly unrealistic in their demands.

When it comes to no-holds-barred criticism, Joanne Kates sits happily, unapologetically, on the top of the heap. In her almost two decades at the Globe, Kates’s acerbic style has won her a reputation as the Iron Lady of Criticism, as well as more than a few adversaries in Toronto’s culinary circles. Michael Kalmar is one of them. The 34-year-old restaurateur was dumbfounded when, on a rainy day last October, he opened the Globe and discovered the hatchet job Kates had done on The Old Mill, his west-end restaurant. “If I wanted to hire someone to destroy the place I couldn’t have done it better,” Kalmar says.

There is no doubt that Kates had her claws out that day. She started off by calling The Old Mill a “sick restaurant…an old dog that closes its eyes and plays dead at the thought of new tricks.” Next, she referred to the century-old building as “the hulking Tudor pile on the Humber.” After lambasting the food and the service, she closed the review by lobbing a few insults at the restaurant’s clientele.

The review prompted a letter to the editor from the mayor of Etobicoke (which the Globe didn’t publish) and The Old Mill’s suspension of more than $150,OOO-worth of advertising in the paper. And some nasty words. Kalmar says the review stemmed from a grudge match between Kates and The Old Mill’s former owner. She says she doesn’t even remember who the former owner was. He says The Globe and Mail was upset and apologetic about Kates’s review. She says they gave her nothing but support. He says she went way beyond the boundaries of good taste. She says everything is open to criticism in a restaurant review, from the food to the people who eat there.

Cynthia Wine agrees with Kates. She hates “wimpy critics” and thinks newspapers should encourage critics to be fearless and harder-hitting. “Anything is fair game in a review,” she says, “because restaurants are more than just food. They’re a whole experience, from the ambience to the waiters to the clientele. A critic’s job is to pass judgment on everything. That’s what we’re paid for.” Her response to hostile restaurateurs who have suffered her barbs: “To hell with them. If the restaurant is open and charging big bucks, my review may be hurtful and damaging to them, but it’s more damaging for the public to be shat upon night after night.”
And earnest effort alone is not enough to impress most critics. “I understand that my criticisms can feel destructive sometimes, when people have been toiling for weeks on a show,” says Liam Lacey. “But I can’t just applaud hard work. Otherwise I’d be reviewing anthills.”

Other people who have been spurned by critics complain of bias. “It is generally recognized within the restaurant community that there is quite a bit of favoritism by critics,” says Peter Oliver, owner of three successful restaurants in downtown Toronto.
But perceived biases can be negative as well, and it’s not only restaurateurs who are complaining. Richard Monette, one of Canada’s most revered stage directors, calls Ray Conlogue’s dislike of his work “maniacal.” “Very often a critic will make a personal decision about an artist and his work. They’re bound to hate everything you do,” Monette says. Conlogue admits he does have a continued problem with Monette’s work, but says it doesn’t stem from a bias, but rather from a legitimate criticism of Monette’s style. “Monette breaks a lot of rules as to how things like Shakespeare are meant to be performed,” Conlogue says. “Other critics love his work. We just have a genuine and profound artistic disagreement. I still like Richard very much as a person, though.”

Another bone of contention lies in the fact that what critics want and what the public wants aren’t necessarily the same things. According to theatre producer David Mirvish, sometimes a show will be adored by the public but the critics will hate it, because it doesn’t fit into their description of “good theatre.” (A case in point is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, which are among the most popular in the world, but are very often panned by the critics.) And the bottom line is that restaurants, theatres and jazz clubs are businesses first and entertainment venues second.

This is cause for continual frustration, says Peter Oliver. “When the critic tells us to do something our customers won’t like, and which will invariably lower our profits, what choice do we have? We’re in business to please the public, not the critics. When critics pan you because you’re playing squash and they want you to play tennis, that’s unfair.”

But what can someone do about an unfair review? “There’s no point in a rebuttal,” says Richard Monette, “because it is, after all, only someone’s opinion, and the critic has the last word.” Usually those who have taken slaps in the face from critics just try to turn the other cheek. “I usually don’t pay too much attention to them, but there’s nothing worse than getting a bad review from a critic you respect,” says Monette. As an afterthought, he adds with a sly chuckle, “Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.”

In the end, all this talk about critics is pointless if their words are falling on deaf ears. Do people really listen to them? Not many, according to Robert Fulford, former editor of Saturday Night and longtime critic of film, art and books. “Most critics have far less power than is generally imagined,” he says.

It is widely acknowledged, however, that although critics may not hold all the cards, food critics are dealt the most powerful hand, especially in larger cities like Toronto and Montreal. And many believe that Kates holds more trump cards than all the other food critics combined. “She closes restaurants, she opens restaurants, she has all the power,” says colleague Jay Scott. Restaurateurs say they “know for a fact” that she has put restaurants out of business. But Kates disagrees. “I have no evidence of restaurants living or dying by my pen,” she says. “They might like to believe they do. I’m much more convenient to blame than the market.”

While food critics modestly play down the power of their swords, critics of other disciplines freely admit that their pens aren’t all that mighty. In Canada, where theatre is less a private than a public venture (aside from shows like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, which are virtually critic-proof anyway), its critics don’t have much clout. Most shows are booked for three- or six-week runs, “so if nobody shows up, they bring in the ushers,” says Liam Lacey.

If theatre critics have little power, film critics have even less. Even the illustrious J~y Scott admits that his only power lies in the promotion of a foreign or unknown film. With a rave review the film will have a strong opening and its run may be extended. But in terms of Hollywood films, critics’ effects are almost nonexistent.

“Things like Terminator 2 I have absolutely no power over,” says Scott. “But do I care? Not in the least.”
The same impotence is true of rock, television and jazz critics. Diehard fans will repeatedly shell out $50 to see the aging Rolling Stones, despite the warnings or recommendations of a critic. “My good reviews may convince some people to go listen to a jazz musician, but my bad ones won’t stop people from going who were planning to go anyway,” says Paul Wells.

Whether or not the public remembers what the critics say, one thing is certain: the actors, restaurateurs and musicians feel the effects of a review long after the newspaper has been bundled up and thrown into the blue box.

Just ask Robert Fulford. In 1975, he wrote an unflattering review of Shivers, one of David Cronenberg’s early films, for Saturday Night. Over the next few years, Cronenberg continually mentioned Fulford’s review in other interviews, talking about how much it had hurt him. More than 10 years after the piece appeared in Saturday Night, Fulford got a call from a reporter at The Washington Post, who was doing a profile of Cronenberg to coincide with the release of The Fly. The reporter had never heard of Fulford or Saturday Night, but Cronenberg had mentioned Fulford’s review.

“He kept my review alive!” says Fulford. “Everyone else, including me, had long forgotten about it. Cronenberg had become hugely successful, and wherever he went the critics wrote adoring pieces about him. But he never forgot mine. It hurt him that badly,” he says. “It’s frightening how much a critic’s words can affect some people. I guess that’s something critics should remember. I don’t mean that they should temper what they say, but they should never belittle the impact they can have on people’s lives.”
“It’s an imperfect business,” says Paul Wells. “Critics can help and they can do a lot of damage. They can build false gods who get attention out of proportion to their significance, and they can leave geniuses by the wayside until their editor assigns them to write a glowing obit.”

The last time I was in church was when I was 14 in Singapore. On those Sunday mornings at St. Andrew’s Cathedral I always felt a sense of moral inadequacy as, from the pulpit, Father Thomas feverishly condemned the dishonesty and debauchery he was all around him.

The same feeling came back to me after an 11-year absence the night I was on the phone with Stevie Cameron, author and Globe and Mail columnist. I imagined Cameron stepping out of her photo on the back of Ottawa Inside Out and mounting the same white pulpit to extol the virtues of her religion-journalism. I was asking Cameron about the fairness of the news coverage of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and about the role of journalists in a democratic society.

“I don’t think we are nearly tough enough, nearly searching enough on politicians,” she said. “I don’t think the press on Mulroney has been nearly hostile enough. It is more than a simple question of morality or that we journalists are simply exposing tales of dishonesty. We are looking at politicians who are crooked and spending taxpayers’ money on themselves. The situation is quite cut-and dried.” Cameron’s conviction and earnest argument notwithstanding, I doubted that this issue was really this “cut-and-dried.”
Stevie Cameron was one of 20 journalists I interviewed over a month. I had set out to determine whether Brian Mulroney was being shortchanged by the media, to see if journalists were taking on the role of moral judge and jury and, in doing so, were overstepping the bounds of fairness. My simple look at Mulroney-bashing became an ethical dilemma, a pondering of the role journalists should play in society.

I was ill-prepared for the quest. New to Canada, I had spent the last two decades of my life confined to a tiny island, only 42 km east to west and, at its broadest, 23 km north to south, with a population of only 2.6 million. I left Singapore three years ago to come to Toronto to pursue a degree in journalism. When I arrived I thought journalism would be easy. To me the job requirement was about meeting people, gathering information, analyzing it, writing it well, and getting a byline.

I was jolted into astonishment and downright shock when I read some of the coverage on Mulroney in the Canadian press. I saw headlines like “Publisher picks Mulroney as worst PM” (Globe and Mail), and “Lying Brian image does not bother PM”
(Halifax Chronicle-Herald). Other reports that astonished me included stories that dwelled on what seemed to me were the personal and private aspects of the Prime Minister’s life. There were speculative reports about his drinking, his marital problems, and even his intellect. The Sawatsky affair last September was another example that shocked me. The sensational headlines allover the country showed me pack journalism in action. “Mulroney portrayed as treacherous in book” read one Toronto Star headline. “Book on PM has startling, damaging revelations” read another. The Chronicle-Herald’s front page chipped in with “Book charges PM was mean drunk; flunked Dal exams.”

All of these reports left me feeling that Canadian journalists were homing in on the slightest scent of immorality emitted by any high-level politician. It seemed to me that the press was setting the standards for the nation’s morality.

In Singapore, the only ethical issues I ever read about in the local newspapers were crime reports on people being sentenced to death for drug trafficking. Political coverage was simply the reporting of governmental issues, debates on bills, new political agendas for the nation, foreign relations, and visits by foreign envoys. Politicians’ lives are never held up to scrutiny. Personal attacks in political campaigning are non-existent. In Singapore, spit is a four-letter word and doing so in public will cost you a $720 fine; littering on the streets is a $110 fine; chewing gum or eating on the subway is an offense. So for me to come from a country like that to Canada, where individual rights reign, but where journalists are so judgmental, raised questions that I could not answer.
Do journalists have the right to pry into every aspect of the Prime Minister’s life, his character, his family and his past? Should we cast moral judgments on events as we see them, knowing the capacity we have to influence readers? I didn’t know the answers to these questions. That night on the phone with Cameron was just the beginning of a long search for answers My quest began with Stevie Cameron because of her series of “Gucci” stories in The Globe and Mail in 1987. The series was about the use of $308,000 of Progressive Conservative party funds by Mulroney, as a “private loan,” to renovate his official residences at 24 Sussex Drive and Harrington Lake. The stories also included an estimate on the 50 pairs of Gucci loafers Mulroney had and the exact size of his Sussex Drive closet-capable of holding 84 pairs of shoes and 30 suits. For Cameron, though, the stories were not merely about some pricey loafers.

“It was more a story of people not paying bills, cheating and lying and getting the party to pay,” she said. “It’s a story of deceit, dishonesty and extravagance.” Cameron took a lot of flak from the staff in the PMO for the stories, but I sensed she would do it allover again if she had the chance. I didn’t understand what drives journalists like Cameron to go mana a mana with the most powerful politician in Canada. Cameron said Canadians are just sick of seeing Mulroney’s friends becoming multi-millionaires with either federal contracts or jobs as lobbyists in Ottawa. She mentioned the numerous scandals that have rocked the Mulroney government since it came to power. As an outsider, I did not understand the connection between government scandals and news stories about Mulroney’s personal life. Did it mean that if you have corrupt friends, you are corrupt too? I was disturbed.

Most journalists I spoke to regarding Cameron’s “Gucci” stories thought her coverage was justified. Carol Goar, The Toronto Star’s national affairs columnist for the last seven years, is a good example. Though known in Ottawa press circles as being too fair and compassionate, Goar nevertheless reminded me of a rule in journalism: reporters aren’t here to be cheerleaders for politicians. She tried explaining the need to report on the private lives of politicians. “We need to know what goes into making up the man’s character,” she said. “And if an individual journalist thinks that his having 50 pairs of Gucci loafers tells voters something they need to know about what makes this man tick, I think it is legitimate. There are some things in the way a man or woman conducts his or her private life which give you an insight into the kind of national leader the person is.” Goar insisted that journalists are not setting moral standards or judging politicians: ‘We [the press] are just the mirrors in which these politicians are reflected.”

Goar’s explanation was not enough for me. I think the press does not simply reflect people and events. It is capable of influence and it can make any politician out to be a saint or a villain. Pierre Trudeau is a good example. When he came to power in 1968, he charmed the media. Later the press turned on him. At this point I was still unsure whether Mulroney was being beaten because he was down or was down because he was being beaten.

As I ventured deeper into the issue, the phone lines led me to Nova Scotia and into the home of George Bain. He has seen it all, including the changes in journalism and journalists in covering politics throughout the years. Bain now writes a column called “Media Watch” for Maclean’s.

He acknowledges that the present government and its leader have taken more licks than any other government in his time. He attributes this to the fact that the press has developed a more antagonistic attitude toward government. Bain explained to me his belief that Canadian journalists’ “commitment to anti-government fundamentalism” has reached its peak with the Mulroney regime, but that it will be a long way back to moderation.
Bain was leading me toward a more conservative view of reporting on the private lives of politicians. “I think politicians are entitled to their privacy on anything that does not bear directly on their handling of their office,” he said. “We as journalists can’t say ‘This person shouldn’t be prime minister because he’s vain’ or ‘because he’s going bald,’ These things have no bearing on the person’s capacity to perform in the office.”

After what must have been a two-hour conversation, I sensed little optimism in Bain’s parting shot: “I hope that the press would develop a greater sense of responsibility towards the readers, that certain information be presented in a more comprehensible manner. This means more work should be done instead of trying to titillate them with crap.”

Bill Fox, Mulroney’s press secretary and director of communications from 1984 to 1987, echoed the same sentiments. Fox, a friend of the PM, said the coverage has not been fair. He has no problem with journalists reporting the private aspects of a politician’s life as long as the reports are accurate. He was upset by the “Gucci” stories because they were based only on an estimate of what the Sussex Drive closet size can hold-and not on any other source. And to him that is “just plain shoddy journalism.”

After speaking to Bain and Fox, I was torn between the conflicting schools of thought that had surfaced in my quest. Here I had a situation where a group of intelligent men and women, all colleagues, could not agree on questions that arise every time they sit down to write. Of course I had no answers myself. I decided I needed to find out more about Mulroney, the man in the middle of my dilemma. So I plowed further on the phone to New Brunswick, to the Ill-hectare lakeside farm of Dalton Camp, former mover-and-shaker in the Tory Party.

We talked about Mulroney and his flaws: his need to be friends with reporters, and his “hyper-sensitivity” to the news media. According to Camp, Mulroney felt betrayed by the press as he moved into the adversarial position of prime minister. He was no longer “one of the boys.”

Camp didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the “Gucci” stories since they did no harm; Mulroney won the next election anyway. Camp agrees that the public has a right to know what goes into the making of a public figure. But as to setting the standards of politicians’ morality, Camp says it is the public’s tolerance level-not the media-that becomes society’s moral gatekeeper.

Dalton Camp was the last interview in my quest. Through him, I’d learned much about Mulroney. I’d come to realize that since 1984, when he first led his party to victory, the media has played a large part in shaping our perception of him. At first, he was portrayed as a golden boy. Now, nothing he can do or say seems to please the press or the nation.

The launching of John Sawatsky’s biography last September did not help. Coverage by the press centred on controversial chapters about Mulroney’s past to the exclusion of everything else in the book. My conservative background and lack of exposure to this open journalism had not prepared me for the way the press covered the book. I spoke to Sawatsky when the furor had died down. He agreed that most of the press’s selective accounts had been unfair to Mulroney. I did not become a big fan of Mulroney’s after reading the book, but neither did I decide that he was unsuitable for office.

I realized that I had to look at the role and ethical codes of journalists in the context of a different political culture. What would be deemed taboo in Singapore-like reporting on the prime minister’s past drinking -may be justifiable here. I feel that journalists in Singapore are not capable of doing a good job because of the social and political constraints placed on them. When I see my home paper, The Straits Times, it now reads like something from Xinhua News Agency-an official communique.

If a story concerns the ability of national leaders to make decisions, it should not matter if it is being reported in Canada, Singapore or any where else in the world; the public has the right to know. It is also the journalist’s ethical duty to inform the public. But as to the invasion of privacy and dwelling on past behavior, be it drinking, womanizing or substance abuse, if the politician has overcome the problem, there is no need to dwell on peephole journalism just to titillate readers. There is a grey area where the press has to balance its responsibilities to the public and to the bottom line. Media outlets are, after all, businesses seeking profits.

On the question of character judgment, I think journalists in a way do become “moral cops.” If a journalist, based on his own moral code of ethics, believes that a politician b erred, he can pass that judgment his readers. Journalists can also exagerate the importance of situation through pack journalism or by cove ing a subject for days or weeks c end. Journalists can whitewash indicretions too, if they want to. I guess it all depends on how popular the politician is. Take John F. Kennedy In the early 1960s every reporter in Washington knew about his affairs but did not write about them.

As for Mulroney, it’s safe to say that he will never achieve the popularity of a J.F.K. I see Mulroney in a slump caused by bad policies, troubled economic times, national disunity, and widely-perceived character flaws like vanity, overriding ambition, smarmy persona, and pettiness. Not to mention a hostile press. It seems it is codified somewhere that one does not write good things about an unpopular leader. When someone’s down we love to add misery to his life.

Journalists like to use the excuse that we only reflect public sentiments and that we are merely being objective and fair. That is not true and we know it. If the public receives a constant feed of derogatory material about a certain individual or government from the press, when the press is seen as reliable, the public will form the impression that the individual is a scoundrel or that the government is corrupt. But when we hold ourselves up as moral judges, who will judge us?

At the end of my quest I found there were no answers, just grey areas which I still ponder. I am sure “gotcha journalism,” by increasing scrutiny on politicians, has helped to raise their ethical standards-or at the very least to make them aware that they’re being watched. But this kind of journalism may also have given us free licence to pollute the public with unproven rumors and hearsay.

My quest showed me that the responsibility to report fairly lies with every journalist. As politicians must be accountable to their voters, so must we be to our readers.

Once upon a time, there was a great grey lady of the financial press. Prim, pedigreed, if a trifle sheltered and old-maidish, she was a respectable broadsheet, born of leisurely and writerly ways, contemplative and conservative in her nature. Every week (more or less at the same time, depending on the whims of Canada Post), her collected thoughts on investing reached the doorsteps of her readers. Her name was The Financial Post, and her servants were loyal for life. ‘@’ But life for The FinancialPost changed irrevocably in 1987 when her father, Maclean Hunter Publishing, arranged a marriage of convenience between the paper and a most unlikely suitor: the brash, ballsy, somewhat boorish, big-bucks tabloid, The Toronto Sun. The union was not a happy one. But by wedding the financial depth of one with the hands-on experience of the other, they gave painful birth to The Financial Post daily-and caused the death of the old Post tradition. ‘@’ It was a slow death, with many casualties. Post people-those who remain, that is-don’t want to talk too much about it. But four and a half years ago, on the day it was announced that the Post had been sold to the Sun, one longtime senior manager confided his fear to another, and in doing so, prophesied the future: This isn’t a merger,” he said. “It’s a take over” The weekly Financial Post was founded in 1907 by John Bayne Maclean to guide investors safely through an unscrupulous market. It exposed nefarious investment schemes like stocks in peat bogs, and oil wells in the Peace River. Through diligent, if sometimes ponderous reporting, it won its reputation as a financial bible. It grew successful enough to become the foundation of the Maclean Hunter publishing empire.

Staff were a loyal cornerstone of that foundation. “Maclean Hunter was a solid company to work for,” recalls Bea Riddell, who did 20 years as a reporter, then editor at the Post, “sometimes stodgy, but a benign, good company.” In those good old stodgy days, Riddell’s byline had to run as “B.W. Riddell” because women then didn’t write about business. (When her gender was eventually revealed to Post readers, 10 cancelled their subscriptions.) What made the Post special through those years was its editorial depth as a weekly, she says. “We were trying to run away from the pack, not with it. We looked for added value on everything we gave. We were trying to give analysis.”

In 1977, another Post lifer, with a mere 17 years under his belt, assumed the title of editor. Much as Neville Nankivell revered the tradition of an insightful weekly, he had long dreamed that the Post should make the progression to a daily. He explains: “You can’t just be a business paper for the elite.”

In the late seventies, coincidentally at the same time as the Post redesigned its format and began to print on the more modern Toronto Sun presses, Nankivell proposed some strategies for a daily Post to Maclean Hunter. “Nothing much happened,” he says. And he got the same reaction when he tried again in 1984.

Meanwhile, on the edge of the city’s financial centre, the risk-taking Toronto Sun was becoming a power in its own right. Planted firmly in the ashes of The Toronto Telegram, the Sun was decidedly working-class, with scantily-clad women posing on a color Page Three, right-wing editorials, pages and pages of sports and opinionated columnists, and miniscule business coverage. In other words, a success. In April 1981, Maclean Hunter bought a 50 per cent controlling interest.

Nobody in their wildest imaginings figured that the investment would lead to the odd coupling of the Post and the Sun six years later. Hartley Steward, a diehard Sun boy, who from 1980 to 1984 published and fine-tuned the corporation’s newest progeny, The Calgary Sun, neatly sums up the Sun view of the Post in the eighties. “When all the things were piled up on my desk to read…I almost never got to The Financial Post weekly. It never had a sense of urgency for me,” he says, then adds with incredulity: “I couldn’t believe the circulation it had. A weekly business paper delivered by mail!” Urgency wasn’t high on the list of Post employees either, according to Steward. “We used to print the weekly,” he says. “Sometimes they would miss their deadline by five or six hours. That used to cost them.”

Maybe so, but there were benefits to the Post’s gentler approach to publishing. “It had the reputation of being a good place to work,” says Tracy LeMay, who came to the Post from The Globe and Mail in 1984 to bolster its personal finance coverage, and is one of the few from those days who still remain. “Newspapers some’: times can be very brutal, fast-paced, but the Post wasn’t like that. It was a civil place, civil because it could afford to be.”

Dunnery Best left the Post over a hiring decision in 1987, just before the news of the Sun takeover, but he too recalls his seven years of reporting as mostly golden. “The Post was a writer’s paper and we had a number of name journalists,” says Best, now managing editor of The Financial Times of Canada. “In 1985-86, our circulation was over 200,000 and we were making money. It was a profitable book. It had no identity crisis, and could compete with the dailies.”

Such was the Post on the eve of the Sun buyout-relatively content, successful, harmonious, and in no way prepared for the power plays to come. While Neville Nankivell may have long dreamed of a daily Financial Post, it took the CEO of The Toronto Sun Corporation, Doug Creighton, and the head of Hollinger Inc., Conrad Black, to start those presses. “Creighton and Black had been talking about the need [for a Canadian financial daily], and said ‘Why don’t we talk to Maclean Hunter,'” recalls Nankivell. He got a call in August 1987, from the same bosses who had turned him down three years earlier, saying “Can you revive the plan and put it together in two weeks?” With a few trusted staff members, Nankivell went immediately into secret Saturday meetings to begin fulfilling his dream. In what ex-Poster Dunnery Best describes as “selling from one pocket into another,” Maclean Hunter facilitated the finances for a daily Post while diluting the risk to itself. It sold 100 per cent of the Post to the Toronto Sun Corp. in exchange for an increase of Sun stock, to 62 per cent from 50 per cent. The Sun then sold 25 per cent of the Post to The Financial Times of London, and 15 per cent to Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. At the time, a good deal for everyone.

In October 1987, at Maclean Hunter headquarters in Toronto’s College Park building, The Financial Post staff were shepherded from their desks and offices on the sixth floor to a large empty room on the fourth.

There were no chairs for the audience and no fanfare. Just a few people sitting behind a long table, and a podium. One by one, they went up to the podium-among them, Creighton for the Sun, Ron Osborne, president, for Maclean Hunter, Nankivell for the Post-and broke the news to the staff. “I t was short and sweet,” says Ron Mitchell, who on that day was with the Toronto Sun Corp. and with no editorial experience is now publisher and CEO of The Financial Post. “There were no questions.”

Maybe that’s because most listeners were stunned-less about the implications of going daily than being bought by the people famous for Page Three. “It was a shock,” says Bea Riddell. “The big surprise was the relationship with the Sun.”

When the news went public, the Sunshine Girl jokes began. Riddell was not the only staffer to be teased about the Post having a little T & A alongside its stock quotations. What wasn’t so funny was whether a Sun run Post could pull off a miracle and launch a paper in four months.

The amount of work ahead to create a daily tabloid, while maintaining the weekly edition, demanded more bodies. The first to arrive were the Sun’s number-crunchers, Mitchell and Tom MacMillan. They spent time at the Post learning about the environment, talking to the staff about what they could expect from switching to another corporate system (payroll, benefits, etc.) and as Mitchell puts it, “getting to know what we’d bought.”

It didn’t take long for them to size up the situation. In order to get a daily out, the Sun clearly had to move in. At the time, Hartley Steward was stationed in Europe on Sun business. Creighton asked him to be the point man on the daily launch. Steward hasn’t forgotten his first impressions of the Post’s original weekly staff, nor the impression he made on them: “I was ‘the guy from the Sun,’ and it was difficult for them to realize that a tabloid guy was their boss.”

Steward hired an outsider, Steve Petherbridge, to create and head the news desk. As ex-managing editor of The Toronto Star, Petherbridge had what everybody else on staff lackedexperience in getting out a daily. “It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that you couldn’t put out a daily in the same way as you could a weekly,” he says. “They had very antiquated systems and notions about how to move copy for a deadline.” He began to motivate them by iron fist, often using it to pullout his hair, but his gruffness rubbed many of the Post people the wrong way. As Eric Reguly, who is now running the daily’s New York bureau, says, “Steve wasn’t the best-loved man.”

The culture clash created all kinds of friction. Almost immediately, two camps began to develop in the newsroom; on one side were the new employees hired by the Sun management, and on the other the old staff accustomed to Post ways.

“It wasn’t only the clash between the daily and the weekly,” notes Petherbridge, “it was the clash between the old virginal Financial Post and the nasty rough Sun, which’ people found hard to take. I mean the old Posters, as they came to be known, really had trouble getting used to the notion that they were owned by a tabloid newspaper that had semi-naked women on Page Three. And Sun people thought that Posters were effete old snobs who weren’t used to hard work. I mean, there’s some truth to both attitudes.”
The differences were on every level-ideological and practical. “The Sun didn’t understand our concern with accuracy and providing something more than the news,” says Bea Riddell. “They didn’t understand our need to have experts.” And some of the differences were irreconcilable. “A lot of people left,” says Tracy LeMay, “who might not have wanted to work for a daily or because of the culture clash. The first couple of weeks I’m surprised we survived.”

The only person who downplays the problems with this “merger” of corporate styles is Neville Nankivell, then editor-in-chief and publisher of the Post operation: “I suppose some noses were out of joint. There were certainly some personality clashes. But some of the best weekly people turned out to be the best daily people.”

More power to them, because the place was in chaos. LeMay says understatedly, “I don’t think people were having a whole lot of fun-in at eight in the morning, out at eight at night, and hardly having any time to eat.” It didn’t help that while the Post was busy reinventing itself into a hard-nosed, ahead-of-time news business tabloid, the stock markets crashed. Ron Mitchell says ruefully, “Timing in life is everything, and we picked the wrong time.”

Not only was it the wrong time, but there was so little time to think before the February 1988 target date, says then-editor John Godfrey, that he was picking new staff almost on the basis of “the color of their eyes.” To save money, the Post hired cheap-many of the recruits were young and inexperienced, some right out of journalism school. Besides adding to the already divided feeling of the newsroom, this contributed to the confusion of new faces. Nametags were worn, mistakes were made. Such was the pandemonium, that Bea Riddell approached a man wearing a nametag and asked him if he’d finished his story. He replied, “Listen lady, I’m just here to install the phones.”

Hartley Steward had bigger problems to fix. Worried about the pace of production, he devised the idea of doing dummy runs of the paper. Every day for two weeks before the launch, stories were written, edited and laid out as if they were being published for circulation. Steward stood in the centre of the composing room with a stopwatch, and at deadline yelled, “Time!” at which point whatever was available was printed. In the first dummy run about half the paper was empty, or stories were missing leads, photos or cutlines. But with each successive run, the paper got closer to being filled.

The night before launch day, February 2, 1988, The Financial Post’s timing again proved unlucky. A major snowstorm effectively stalled delivery of the all-time thickest, 96-page Financial Post daily. Sun CEO Creighton wasn’t delivered a copy of his launch issue at all.

Those who did lay eyes on the historic launch paper saw a product closer to the Sun’s style than the Post’s. It was short and snappy, could be read on a crowded subway, and gave news analysis over to a pack of right-wing, pro-business columnists such as Diane Francis, Barbara Amiel, and Peter Worthington. American and international coverage was strong. Obviously vying with its major competitor, the Report on Business section of The Globe and Mail, it carried a higher story count.

The body count was higher too. In the Post’s struggle to be noticeably different, it became famed for its “revolving door.” Hard to say whether the turnover was simply because of the suddenness of change or because of poor management, or maybe an unsettling combination of the two. When Hartley Steward was called away by the Sun to start up another paper in Ottawa, he left an operation staggering to fill its own pages and prepared to eat its young in order to do so.

“The newsroom had never been geared to producing copy to strict deadlines,” says Petherbridge in defence of their survival tactics. “It didn’t even have an assignment desk as such there were incredible bottlenecks. There was no order of system to it. I think after a couple of months it became apparent to the Sun people who were involved in the long run that it couldn’t go on like that, that some drastic changes were needed. So we had this quick reshuffle.”

The “reshuffle” catapulted Petherbridge from news editor into the newly created position of executive editor, over the head of editor John Godfrey, as well as the heads of the existing Post managing and deputy managing editors. All retained their titles, but lost their clout. Effective control of the newsroom was taken from Godfrey, whom the Post had hired in 1987 although he had no working newspaper experience.

Ostensibly the changes were made to streamline the daily process. A memo to the “grunts” circulated downwards from on high, read, “This is the end of lunch as we know it.” Petherbridge admits that serious differences in attitude wouldn’t be resolved by one memo on too-long lunches. “A lot of these problems were not solved until some people left and new ones came” And more and more of those new ones came from the Sun.

It’s January 4, 1992, and The Financial Post has just marked another major launch. The weekend broadsheet, the last hold-out from old Post days, has become a tabloid.

It bursts with characteristic Sun energy and noise, boasting four-color cover, splashes, and a pumped-up schizophrenic “Spectrum” section that includes cooking, all kinds of commentary (from Preston Manning to Allan Fotheringham), a feature on William Burroughs, and a business travelers’ guide to London, England.

The old Post staff has traveled almost as far as the paper. Neville Nankivell is now carrying the specially created title of “editor-at-large” in London, heading the Post’s bureau and keeping an eye on its European division. N ankivell says he chose to divest himself of the power and titles he had accumulated over 30 years “because I wanted to do the writingYou can’t just hang on forever.
Things change, roles do change.”

Indeed they do, and none more significantly than when, in 1991, Sun transplant Ron Mitchell was quietly appointed publisher of the daily paper that Nankivell had dreamed so long of and fought so hard for.

John Godfrey, editor-at-large for his last seven months at the Post, was delighted to move on to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He chose to jump instead of getting the push. Dedicated 30-year-plus Post editors Carlyle Dunbar and John Soganich were fired without warning January 30. Soganich received a retirement package, but 61-year-old Dunbar did not. “At this age, it’s rather unlikely that I will find another full-time job,” he says.

Eric Reguly still heads the bureau in New York City, but as one who’s weathered all of five years from pre-Sun to daily, feels like a relic from the Ice Age. “Very few of us old weekly people survived.” Even those hand-picked by the Sun proved expendable, such as Steve Petherbridge, who was fired last year for not vetting a story critical of a major Post advertiser with senior management. Replaced with a transplant from The Edmonton Sun, Petherbridge thinks the decision “signals that the Post is prepared to be a lot more accommodating to its business constituency, maybe to soften stories that might offend major businesses who potentially might be advertisers.”

If so, you might excuse it as the kind of desperate measure a desperate company might take to outlast the current brutal recession. But all along, the Post under the Sun has paid an uncommonly high human cost.

More visible, however, at least to the Sun’s shareholders and media buyers, are the stunning financial costs the daily has incurred, a steady hemorrhage of dollars that continues to debilitate the Post. This past December, the Toronto Star reported Financial Post losses to date at $55 million and counting, not including the original $45 million investment to go daily. Ron Mitchell calls the Star’s figures “pure speculation,” but neither confirms nor denies their accuracy. Rumor puts the losses higher.

Media buyers are closely watching to see whether the Sun/Post marriage can be saved. “This is clearly a make-or-break year for them,” says Patrick Walshe, vice president of Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell Inc. “This is the year they need to start to show some black ink.”

Readers have mixed views about the four-year-old daily, now that it has come so far from the business views and voice of the Post of yesteryear. “Competition has inspired The Financial Post and The Globe and Mail,” says Chuck Winograd, chairman of the brokerage house Richardson Greenshields, who reads both: “The dark side is that perhaps it has forced people to do more sensationalization.” A source well-established in the Toronto business community, says the Post is doing too much “rumor mongering” in its rush to scoop the competition. Nor, reports the source, is Bay Street impressed with the recent appointment of Sun columnist and business journalist Diane Francis as editor.

If said to her face, these comments wouldn’t faze Francis. She’s Sun material through and through-brash, ballsy, and shooting for big bucks.

The Financial Post has never known a healthy economy in its daily form, nor are papers expected to show profits for their first five years. But you have to wonder how much longer the Toronto Sun Corporation will continue to suffer the bitter pill it swallowed for its ambitions to tabloidize the Post. It is too late to go back to the old ways. But, of course, there was never any intention of preserving those ways. Whatever the daily’s future, it deliberately left in its wake another newspaper’s tradition, values and philosophy.

Francis makes no apology about the rising of the Sun and the setting of the old Financial Post. “It was a sort of stodgy place before. Now we have drink-ups and people don’t take themselves so seriously.” Then, as if we didn’t quite get the picture, she says, “The takeover is complete.”