IT’S NO NEWS THAT THE FIRST FEW years of the 1990s haven’t been good for the newspaper industry: papers are shrinking, massive layoffs are common, and real innovation is rare. That’s why the appointment last summer of Neil Reynolds as editor of New Brunswick’s sister papers the Saint John Telegraph Journal and the Evening Times Globe attracted such attention. Reynolds, of course, is the former editor of The Kingston Whig-Standard, whose 12 years at the paper are widely regarded as the Whig’s golden era.

What made the choice of Reynolds remarkable is the ownership of the two papers. Both, along with the other two English dailies in the province, are part of the Irving publishing empire, whose papers have long had a reputation for profound mediocrity.

The ambition to change that perception came from then general manager Valerie Millen, the woman who brought Reynolds to Saint John. Millen oversaw a complete revamping of the look and content of the papers. The Canadian Press wire service, upon which they once depended, was eliminated in order to hire more editorial staff and strengthen the papers’ bureaus in Fredericton and Moncton; as a result, the Times Globe has become a predominantly community-based paper, while the stronger bureaus have allowed the Journal to become the provincial paper it has always claimed to be.

Harvey Enchin, in an article in The on Globe and Mail last November, credited Millen with fashioning an “unlikely beacon of hope for the troubled Canadian newspaper industry,” and described the papers’ transformation as “nothing short of a miracle.” But some praise should be reserved for Reynolds also. He is generating an enthusiasm previously unknown among the staff of Irving papers, adopting an independent editorial stance in relation to the Irving family of companies, and generally putting out much better papers. Less well known is that he is also attempting to duplicate the success of one of his innovations at the Whig: a weekly magazine insert that carries original articles and artwork. The Whig-Standard Magazine, which won four National Magazine A wards during its 13 years, was known for its literate style and articles on everything from opera to Afghanistan. For the moment, Reynolds’ vision for his new magazine, The New Brunswick Reader, is slightly more modest. It’s designed to be, he says, “a celebration of New Brunswick.” But in a province long poorly served by newspapers and magazines, even that goal seems ambitious.

Monday rose to prominence outside B.C. for probably the first time one day this past January, when it unsuccessfully challenged the publication ban on the Homolka trial. But locally, the paper that Vancouver media critic Stan Persky calls a “hard-working, digging-for-the-story weekly mirror of Victoria” has a readership that its counterparts in other cities envy. Vancouver’s alternative weekly The Georgia Straight, for example, reaches 23 per cent of the greater Vancouver market and only nine per cent of downtown readers, and while Toronto’s NOW has a 30 per cent piece of the city-core market, in the Metro area the figure drops to four per cent. In contrast, Monday is read by 88,000 people each week-35 per cent of greater Victoria readers. That audience is older than those of most alternative weeklies: the average reader is 44, and the magazine is read by more than half of Victoria’s 35- to 45-year-olds. Altogether, Monday bears up well in one of the smallest markets with an alternative publication in North America. It is, some joke, the best daily in Victoria-a telling comment on the grey and greying Thomson-owned TimesColonist. Monday’s publisher, Andrew lynch, has some telling comments of his own. “We’re trying to craft stories into something different at Monday, not just pump out copy.”

That crafting happens at a squat, sky-blue building on Victoria’s Blanshard Street. As you walk into lynch’s office, there’s a framed copy of Monday’s 15th-anniversary cover featuring a shot of the bearded lynch leaning on two Monday boxes, a fist raised victoriously. His gesture seems even more apt now. last month lynch’s magazine won a round with its principal competitor, Island Publishers, when it ceased to produce the directly competing Victoria News. Still, Lynch is worried that Island Publishers is just regrouping, not retreating. “They made themselves look like Monday, but they weren’t Monday. They have not given up.” The Island Publishers chain, owned by David Black, took over some flagging community weeklies and recast them as the Victoria News and the Oak Bay News in 1988, and now has six other weeklies, collectively making up The News Group, delivered directly to Victotia-area homes. In recent years, the Victoria News had been aggressively targeting Monday’s advertisers and readers-in 1993 The News Group even painted Victoria News boxes the same canary yellow that Monday has used for years. And the News, while still giving lost cats as much playas local bands, had begun coveting the entertainment scene, traditionally Monday’s turf.

However, in early March, Black retreated from the Victoria market when he combined the Victoria News with Island Publishers’ existing regional insert. Black maintains that while his group is in a “growth period,” redesigning the Victoria News did not sell the paper as well as he had hoped: “We tried it and gave it our best shot, and we may do it again, but we can’t figure out how to do it well…yet.”

If Black’s company does come back into Monday’s market, it has a size advantage. “It’s an $8million company against an $80-million company,” Lynch says. But for now, according to Lynch, his ad revenues are up 30 per cent over last year’s. Black, meanwhile, disputes Lynch’s estimate of his company’s worth and says that Monday’s problem, like that of all alternative weeklies, is its editorial stance: “If your editorial mission in life is to prick the egos of mainstream corporations, you are always annoying advertisers and you can only grow so big.”

Big was part of what Monday’s founder was looking to escape when he arrived in the province in 1974. Gene Miller rolled into B.C. on a freight train from New York City at 27, having left his job as a high-school teacher behind. He was living in a converted chicken coop and picking up a bit of work acting when he had the idea for Monday. He envisioned a community paper with the social conscience of The Village Voice that told stories in the style of The New Yorker. Although he had no publishing experience, he convinced five investors to put up $5,000 each, and the first issue of Monday came out on a Monday morning in July of 1975.

Miller’s vision was of a paper that would reflect Victoria in a way the two local dailies then in existence did not. Neither took hard looks at prostitution or did critical pieces on MacMillan Bloedel’s logging practices. Miller dreamed this paper would champion the underdog, scrutinize big-business interests, and cover the arts community. Since those early days, the paper’s editorial focus has broadened from local to province-wide, but its signature stories are still ones like the piece on the relocation of a village of B.C. natives because of pulp-mill pollution and a series of articles untiringly defending Clayoquot Sound.

Bruce Grierson, Monday’s City Life editor, is proud that his paper refuses to soft sell Victoria as a pretty vacation spot for high tea at the Empress. “A lot of Victorians don’t like bad news.

So the other papers oblige with fluff pieces. There is a spirit of stubborn irreverence on this staff.” Even advertisers who disagree with Monday’s pro-environment, anti-fat-cat slant know that the weekly gets read. “I don’t want to save the world and all the trees in it, but some of their stories are good,” says Mark Herbert, president of the bike shop Pacific Cycle.

These days Miller, now a real-estate developer, isn’t as happy with the paper he founded. In 1985, after Monday lost a libel suit launched by Peter Pollen, then mayor of the city-and one of the original investors-Miller started to become disheartened with his creation. Three years later he sold his one-third interest in the venture, then valued at approximately $2 million, to his business partners: Andrew Lynch, a former ad salesman and the son of the award-winning journalist and television commentator Charles B. Lynch, and chairman George Heffelfinger.

“My concern with Monday is that it hasn’t grown up,” Miller says. “It’s a bunch of discontented shitheads, little snot-nosed fourth-year journalism students with bad attitudes tooting the same damn horn that I was 20 years ago.” But some insiders feel that Lynch, at 52 hardly snot-nosed, has changed Monday’s tune. They say his money-making focus may have even softened Monday’s alternative punch.

Monday was born from leftist ideals, but it is a business, Lynch points out. He’s proud of Monday’s growing classified section. Ads from escorts like Misty, who says she’s “hot, playful, and voluptuous,” are big money-makers. “I have no ethical problem with printing these ads. They are part of our society, and I refuse to censor society,” he says. On the other hand, he won’t risk upsetting bigger advertisers with an unusual front page. Recently, for example, he demanded that a cover photo of two almost nude lesbians be replaced by a less in-your-face shot. Lynch’s strategy is paying off. He speaks loudly of his $3 -million payroll and says, “Alternative press publishers wear three-piece suits now.” Lynch, who nonetheless still prefers the crumpled-sports-jacket, red-suspender look, was perhaps referring to publisher and competitor David Black, four years Lynch’s junior. Sipping tea from gold-rimmed china in his Beach Drive mansion, the tall, urbane Black looks like a man whose company’s overall ad revenues are up 25 per cent, as he claims they are. Black lives well, because like Lynch he knows the earning power of a weekly that’s not too alternative. His publishing experience dates back to the mid1970s, when he researched the weekly market for Torstar around the time it was launching community papers. “I began to appreciate the value and nature of the business so much that I wanted to get involved,” he says. In 1975 he moved west and took over the Williams Lake Tribune from his father. By 1988, when he bought several existing weeklies and revamped them as the Victoria News and Oak Bay News, he had already started to cover B.C. like a patchwork quilt with his papers. Now, Island Publishers owns 35 papers in Canada and 10 in the U.S.

Even though from the start the Victoria News ad sales reps pushed their paper as “just like Monday,” the real competition between Monday and Island Publishers dates back to the early nineties, when the News began to copy Monday’s coverage of the alternative entertainment scene. Then last year the Victoria News boxes were repainted from their old grey to a yellow almost identical to the shade Monday has always used, a choice Black guilelessly maintains was “pure coincidence,” the work of a hapless painter. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Monday was paying Island Publishers about $1 million yearly to print Monday’s 41,000 copies each week, along with Monday Publications’ two other titles-the weekly Real Estate Victoria and monthly Victoria Business Report.

“We were in competition on every front, so why should I wax his payroll?” asks Lynch. Late in 1993 he decided to spend about $1 million and buy his own press, which meant that Black’s press lost its biggest client. Island Publishers retaliated. “There was a hole in my business when Monday stopped printing with us,” says Black. “I warned Andrew.” First, Island Publishers cloned Monday’s real-estate directory, which Black estimates was bringing in more than $2 million a year until the fancy green Victoria Homes boxes started appearing last November. And though the Victoria News continued to define itself as mainstream, with its pictures of high-school soccer and its uncritical, boosterish coverage of local politics, it began to look more Mondayish than ever with its new full-cover photograph and jazzed-up banner. However, Lynch denies that Island Publishers hurt his company, despite flat ad revenues in 1991 and 1992. All Black’s aggressive door-to-door ad sales attracted more attention to Monday, he says.

Some advertisers stood staunchly behind Monday. “Monday appeals to people who read, and it’s part of the hip scene,” says Jim Munro, owner of Munro’s Books, who has advertised with the magazine since its inception. But other advertisers weren’t as loyal. “I put more money into the Victoria News once the quality was jerked up,” Joan Wellwood, advertising manager of the New Bastion Theatre, said in February.

But are Black and Monday’s founder Gene Miller right about Monday’s editorial content? Has the paper become its own biggest problem, full of what Miller calls “sneering condemnations of big business” Stan Persky doesn’t think so. “The mainstream media, with their hundreds of slots to fill, become a kind of stew. In Monday, the lead article always stands out.”

The lead story in Monday may look at steroid abuse among Victoria bodybuilders or present a doctor’s-eye view of Bosnia, complete with frank pictures. The book reviews are always quirky and the softer features-on llama farming, for example-are surprisingly literary. The graphics are a little tired, but Monday offers the best guide to nightlife in the city-from acid jazz to Robert Munsch readings. Even Monday’s office tells readers that this is a weekly with a difference. There is always a bowl of apples for couriers in the lobby, and one reporter even has a few apple peelings in his files from the desperate time when no paper was handy, so he took notes on the skin. Monday has changed with each editor, but never strayed into the mundane. Sid Tafler, 46, Monday’s editor since 1988 and a former political reporter at the Calgary Herald and later in Victoria, believes the magazine needs to be more daring, not more restrained: “We sometimes need to get farther to the edge, more gonzo,” he says. He laughs about the six potential libel suits sitting on his desk. He does not want Monday to get fusty, so he keeps the writers young, though he sits unabashedly middle-aged in his patterned socks. The average life expectancy of a Monday writer is under three years. Burnout is partly to blame- Tafler wants writers to “sweat it.” So is the lousy pay: most Monday reporters make less than $27,000 for their up to 60-hour week, while a counterpart at the unionized TimesColonist starts at $37,000. Writers on the Monday masthead do it for love. Bruce Grierson is rumoured to work all night, pyjamaclad, to get a phrase to turn just right. Besides, if Monday died, The News Group pays less than $20,000 to start.

And Victoria would be poorly served by the remaining papers. They lack the main ingredient of an interesting read: opinion. Still, even Monday’s gems-like John Hofsess’ ground-breaking pieces on assisted suicide and Grierson’s eloquent words on eating disorders-are getting rarer. And, historically, Monday has had few female voices, despite the recent addition of writer Lynda Cassels. Monday needs to preserve that opinionated edge and keep taking risks, no matter what advertisers think. That’s how Monday survived this long. Miller mortgaged his house, nurtured his vision, and readers read it. Monday was never a safe business venture. Its insolence kept it alive. And despite Miller’s reservations, he recognizes its importance. “Monday is still the strongest editorial voice in the city,” he says.

And that says something for the little weekly that survives in the city of 1,000 tea cosies.

I believe this was intended as a compliment, but I’m not sure what “personal journalism” is. I like to think personal journalism-that is, writing about oneself-is not just the opposite or the enemy of impersonal, straight reporting: for me, it’s a kind of Journalism- Plus, factual reporting that also draws on the experiences and inner life of the reporter, moi.

Do I have this right so far? A personal journalist is the kind of reporter who might interview a subject about his gun collection, take his leave, and then later, on the highway, decide to stop for a cup of coffee. The waitress might ask where he was from, and in answering he would wonder what it would be like to go home with her, but he wouldn’t. Instead he’d go back to his hotel and write a story about the gun collector, and he’d include his conversation with the waitress, what he thought about her, and how he felt about the encounter afterwards-although he might, ifhe were running out of space or had any taste, leave that last part out, and let the reader figure it out. That, to my mind, would be one kind of personal journalist. Why is that story more personal than any other brand of journalism? Because the reporter has a part in it. What’s wrong with that? The reporter was there, after all. Is the story less revealing or truthful or “objective” than a straightforward report of an interview about guns? Not at all: a straightforward news report often entails more artificial manipulation of events, material, and quotes than does a subjective I-was-interviewing-this gun -collector-and -feeling-depressed -so-I -checked -into-a -motel- and -w hat-do-you-think-l-saw-there? kind of story. Unadorned facts about a gun collection are subjective too; the story isn’t being written by a machine. Every journalist commits personal journalism at some level every time he or she writes a story.

So is personal journalism any less rigorous than impersonal reporting? Not if it’s done conscientiously; truth is, it’s harder, because there’s a whole additional realm of information to report. Does it make for a better (aesthetically complex, deeper, more human, more readable) story than the non-fat, pure-facts version? Most likely. Is there something wrong with a readable story? Only if you’re incapable of writing one-in which case you might be a bureaucrat at a national news organization with nothing to do but sit around and write handbooks about what is and is not journalism, personal and otherwise.

The problem is, I now find it near impossible to write anything that isn’t personal. As I grow older, the mendaciousness of most morality becomes apparent to me, and I find it difficult to hold an unwavering opinion with any conviction. The less certain the world appears, the more I am forced back to the only dependable place I know, which is where I am, what I see, how I feel. I notice flaws in great people, strength of character in criminals, and ambiguity in everything. It seems only fair and honest to admit it, which perforce entails describing myself a little. By writing myself into a story, I hope I also improve my subjects’ odds of being treated fairly: I ought to judge myself and them by the same standards. I’ve lost my taste for blaming the ills of the world on the System; my faith and my anger have taken up residence on a lower floor, in the realm of individuals. That suggests a certain reportorial mode.

At its best, reporting done from the centre of someone’s personal experience and passion has given us the greatest journalism of this and every other century. History doesn’t remember impersonal journalism. Tom Wolfe isn’t thought of as a personal journalist, but all his work is essentially concerned with his relationship to his own skepticism. Ryszard Kapuscinski never writes just about war: he tells us what it’s like to be Ryszard Kapuscinski in a war (down to how much vermouth he liked in his martinis in Belize), because by monitoring his own habits and desires he can cast the moral ambiguities of war in a truer and more vivid light. Whatever Norman Mailer writes about (and sometimes it’s hard to tell), it’s always about Mailer. He is inseparable from what he sees, and refuses to lie about the fact. Nora Ephron, no one’s patsy, established her long career with an essay about her breasts. “Before I say anything about my breasts,” it began, “I have to say a few words about androgyny.” Personal journalism can take you into the moment and therefore into your true mind, both fine places for a writer to be. Then there’s Joan Didion, the most “personal” journalist of them all, wondering aloud why she’s obsessed by dams and malls and why she suffers from migraines. “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” she campily begins an essay called “In the Islands,” and then goes on to explain that she is in a hotel in Hawaii, waiting for a tidal wave and contemplating a divorce. To a writer who couldn’t pull off Didion’s subsequent feats of reporting about Hawaii or her insights into what the islands mean to her, that opener might seem self-indulgent. But it is the perfect lead to an essay about how we try to find Paradise in places it can’t exist.

Don’t misunderstand me: there is much, much, much, much more hideously bad personal journalism than there is brilliant stuff. It’s hard to do, and when it fails the stench of burning flesh is overwhelming. I once wrote a column for Chatelaine (my first mistake) in the form of a diary of my life that to this day makes me actually yelp and cringe when I think of it. Or did you see that column in the Globe last summer, by that Vancouverite who complained…without irony…without even a dab of humour!…that society discriminated against him because he had a small penis? Hilariously stupid on every conceivable level. Even if the heartbreak of penile dwarfism was a story (and I have my doubts; on the other hand, I don’t know much about it)-even so, the first principle of personal writing is, Thou Shalt Never Write Directly on the Nose About Anything.

That’s part of the challenge and compulsion of personal writing: addressing the unmentionables without making too much of an idiot of oneself. Personal journalism isn’t a matter of confessing-the trick is to be candid, and to be candid about being candid, which can make for a graceful caginess. While researching my book I met a bunch of philandering golfers who objectified women to an encyclopedic degree. They had more names for female body parts than a mother does for a newborn. One was “blow-job hair.” (That would be hair short enough to allow a woman’s face to be seen by her male partner while…oh, never mind. Buy the book, and turn to page 33.) I find typing those words slightly embarrassing, but when my editor read an early version of their adventures he sent back a request for stories about my own experience of oral sex. In a novel, maybe. But in a work of nonfiction? I told him he was crazy. He told me to try anyway.

So for two weeks I tried to write about oral sex. It was like writing about cement. The subject is inelegant at best, and my experience with it barely deserves a letter to Dear Abby, never mind eight pages in a book. Thousands of words later, I realized I had the wrong angle. The way for me to write about oral sex was to write about not being able to write about oral sex.

To be honest even to that slight degree is liberating for me. Personal reporting always is when I can suddenly see over the old stone wall of my own reportorial repression. And if the glance has been a graceful one too, so much the better. Just as telling the aforementioned story of the gun owner would be liberating, with its convenient twin symbols of his guns and the beddable waitress, men collecting what men collect. At least it would be more liberating to write (and read) thamts impersonal counterpart: an anecdotal lead about the historic Winchester over his desk, five freeze-dried paras, three quotes, the required disturbing/reassuring statistics about violent crimes. Are we snoring yet?

Which raises one last question: why do the print and broadcast media alike still resist the personal-except as an occasional dose of kinkiness on the op-ed page or in the feeble-minded “commentaries” of an Eccentric Correspondent like that buffoon Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes? Why do so many reporters live to grunt out impersonal journalism-that endless rack of two-button suits, that statistic blear that gives even the most gripping stories the siege of Sarajevo, the abortion argument, the AIDS crisis, national elections-all the kick of a double-A battery? Most impersonal reporting is chloroform in print, Snoozeworld. Why do it, then? Does the innate grubbiness of our so-called profession make us reporters yearn to belong to something established-hence all the high-collared rules of reporting, and our reluctance to undo them? Why else did a journalist friend at a prestigious Canadian news organization cluck that he was “shocked” that I had “written such a personal book”? What does it say, on the other hand, that my American friends (none of them reporters) thought the book could have been “racier”?

My guess is that non personal journalism is a blood relative of political correctness. It’s a form of emotional propriety that serves no one except (this will come as no surprise) the owners of the media. After all, it doesn’t take much to sustain a newspaper, a radio show, or a TV news hour: you do the same thing again and again, and eventually people fall into the habit of consuming it. Why rock that familiar, profitable boat? Why develop highly individual writers who might then ask for a little highly individual compensation? Personal journalism will always be suspect because it reintroduces a rogue X factor, the wild card: the writer, and a mind that won’t take Lie Down as a command.

Of course, no one needs to make an entire career out of personal reporting. I simply recommend it as a diversion. And if you want to play it safe and never offend anyone, I’d avoid personal reporting completely. Don’t give us your self, the bright hot spots of your heart and mind, because they’ll make everyone nervous. Stick with the status quo and the impersonal, with “real” reporting; give us the facts, our daily bread, in a reliable, comfortable format, guaranteed to hold only reliable, comfortable ideas. Do that long enough, they might even make you a manager.

I suppose that the guild, ever mindful of the mandate of all self-serving organizations-keeping itself in business believes that publishers and newspaper managers are gleefully reorganizing resources and firing staff. Indeed, the tone of such comments suggests that newspaper management goes about its daily task with a joyous song on its collective lips. But like hierarchical and power-based management, the day of the union is past. One would assume, given that the membership of the guild includes some of the country’s most prestigious and accomplished reporters, that one of them would have notified the union that it either gets on the side of inclusive and vision-oriented management or it dies along with the notion of lifetime sinecure.

Those “profit-blinded” publishers, for the most part, are doing nothing more nefarious than trying to save a business. It shouldn’t be necessary to give unions a lesson in Economics 101: Make a profit or be shut down; show the shareholders in your company that their money is in good hands and their trust is not misplaced or close the doors. It is that simple. Newspapers, magazines, and the electronic media are not run as some social service. We ask ordinary Canadians, with their pension funds and cold cash, to trust us with their investment. They have a right to ask for a return on that investment. Or do unions still hold the attitude that they’d sooner kill the business than make allowances? Like thousands of other employees of Southam, I have trusted the senior management of the company to look after my stake in the company. It is money that I have personally invested and that other managers-much more senior and much more saddled with responsibility-are charged with protecting.

It is necessary to know that I work as a manager at a non-guild newspaper in a province that, to put it charitably, is not exactly union heaven. It is also necessary to know that personally I am opposed to unions, while acknowledging their historic contribution to the labour movement and to the better quality of working life in general. But I believe they are an anachronism for most businesses, an anachronism that perpetuates the myth that all management is, by its very nature, out to screw the worker. Why is it, I wonder, that union-supporters never see unions as themselves out to screw business, forcing unreasonable demands at the threat of a strike? Furthermore, Unions should be anathema for journalists. They tarnish us and our reputation. They make us beholden ~ to a point of view, to one side of any discussion. If we want or need an organization to speak for the workers in our newsrooms, then let us organize ourselves the way that doctors and lawyers do-professionals police themselves. Professionals establish their own standards and practise codified ethical behaviour. We do not do the same work as truckers and mailers, we do not, except to the extent that we stand or fall together as a business, share concerns of the circulation department or business services. Under no circumstances should we belong to the same union as these departments.

Traditional adversarial thinking, the sort that unions thrive on, has no place in the newsroom of tomorrow. There is only room for cooperation, for consultation, and for a common commitment to do more with less. Because so many unions have, at least on the surface, refused to change, they have become blockers. Obstacles to get around. At the very least, like plastic silverware, military intelligence, or tight slacks, “journalists’ union” is an oxymoron.

More than anything else, now that we have moved into the realm of snooping into the past lives of people we write about, we must be above reproach. If not clean, then at least truthful with the audience. If not above reproach, then honest in association. At least set the tare weight, so that our readers and listeners and viewers know the influences on our life, rather than merely the influences on our subjects’ lives. Why should our own union membership be considered sacrosanct? Should we expect to be assumed unbiased when we carry the card of a labour movement that has a political agenda all its own? Oh, I am supposed to believe in your fairness because you tell me you can be objective. This when we ask other people to prove their objectivity? Who, exactly, do we believe we are?

If there was a need to solidify my antiunion beliefs, such an opportunity was presented to all who attended the Centre for Investigative Journalism convention in Vancouver in the spring of 1986. Glenn Babb, at that time the South African ambassador to Canada, was a member of a panel on press censorship and apartheid; the discussion was about free speech in South Africa. The B.C. Federation of Labour urged unionized journalists to boycott the convention, and in response some Vancouver members picketed the CIJ meeting. They would muzzle Babb because his country and its government and policies were repugnant to them. None saw the irony in their attempts to silence a panel on press censorship.

I find no dichotomy in respecting the individual-friends who are guild members, many of whom have no choice about union membership-while having contempt for the union. No organization that would condone a press demonstration against freedom of speech is worth the powder to blow it to hell.

Within days, the 37-year-old Canadian reporter with the charming manners and serious good looks had been dubbed the Scud Stud-the man who made the distant war seem just that much more exciting and romantic. Admirers in San Francisco formed an Arthur Kent Fan Club and its membership was soon in the thousands. One of Kent’s biggest fans was NBC itself the network quickly offered him a contract as a correspondent for Dateline NBC, its new current-affairs magazine show.

Dateline is most famous, or infamous, for rigging the explosion in the gas tank of a General Motors truck in November 1992. But because of his time at Dateline, Kent himself has developed considerable notoriety. Almost from when he started there in the summer of 1991, he fought with the show’s producers over story ideas. The fight culminated in his staging a one-man picket outside of NBC headquarters in New York on August 17, 1992. Four days later, NBC fired him. In response, Kent launched a $25-million lawsuit for breach of contract, fraud, and defamation-a case that was finally settled out of court on March 16 for an undisclosed amount of money.

While Kent waited for the opportunity to prove that NBC management was made up of “white-collar sellouts,” the onetime media superstar was back in Canada. Since last fall he’s been the host of Man Alive, the earnest CBC documentary show that never provokes lawsuits or angry pickets. On the show he’~ calm, confident, and compassionate-the antithesis of the rugged foreign correspondent. In fact, while the lawyers talked, the only time Kent seemed to project the passion and verve that characterized his earlier career was when he was talking about NBC, the Great Evil. In Kent’s view, NBC’s management was “corrupt and incompetent,” it was “limp, tepid, cringing, and defensive.” This was Arthur Kent’s jihad: “I was in a position where I and my work were assaulted and compromised by executives who were placing goals and objectives which I considered unhealthy above the principles of our craft. So I spoke out about it.”

The day of the settlement, however, Kent’s rhetoric was positively diplomatic. He repeatedly referred to NBC as one of “the world’s greatest news organizations,” and said, “I believe that injustice has been rectified.” Had he won his war but lost the moral high ground?

“HE WAS ONE OF THE BEST,” RECALLS GEORGE FRA]KOR, A broadcast instructor at Carleton who taught Kent in 1973. Even then, Kent had a very strong personal vision, and he would get impatient with those who didn’t share it. “When he’s got an idea that he thinks is a damn good idea, he sees no reason why people should get in his way,” Frajkor says. But for Frajkor, Kent’s obvious talent outweighed this flaw and after only two days in the classroom with Kent, Frajkor phoned Max Keeping, the news director of Ottawa CTV affiliate CJOH, and urged him to hire Kent..

Keeping, who took on Kent on apart-time basis that year, recalls that he was “a determined and feisty” reporter with a “natural visual sense.” He helped Kent with his final-year thesis, a documentary about western alienation, by arranging for him to use staff from CTV stations in both Calgary and Edmonton. Soon after Kent graduated, Keeping hired him full time as a reporter. Kent, he says admiringly, has “got the right genes.”

And it is true Arthur comes from a family that has a high profile in the journalism field. Kent’s late father, Parker, was an associate editor of the Calgary Herald for many years. (Arthur worked for a summer at the Herald during university.) Older brother Peter first rose to prominence with his freelance TV reports from Vietnam in 1966. He later went on to the CBC, and was a foreign correspondent for NBC before returning to Canada to anchor Global’s 11 p.m. news, The World Tonight. Norma Kent, also Arthur’s elder, has worked on Marketplace, and is currently a respected anchor at CBC Newsworld. Their sister, Susan Kent-Davison, while not working in journalism directly, is a writer and editor. Another sister, Adele Kent, is a federal judge in Alberta. Given his connections, it’s not surprising that Arthur says the decision to enter journalism was “obvious.”

Kent’s next job after CJOH was with CBC- TV in Toronto, where he started as a local reporter in 1976; he transferred to Edmonton in 1977 to work as a national reporter. But as he told Globe and Mail television critic Liam Lacey last year, “There were too many good people ahead of me.” By 1979, he was in Afghanistan doing independent reporting and documentary making. He was one of the first western reporters to spend time with the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet invasion. It was his war, in the same way that Vietnam was his brother’s. Kent also maintained his profile by freelancing for the CBC, BBC, and others. He continued to freelance out of Europe and Asia during the eighties and at one point, according to Keeping, he was able to stay in London, despite the immigration laws, by calling himself CJOH’s “European correspondent.” Then, in 1989, after he covered a variety of events for NBC, including the slaughter in Tiananmen Square and the attempts at liberalization in the former Soviet Union, the network offered him a full-time correspondent job. Despite Peter’s warning that “NBC were jerks,” he took it. He worked on major stories like the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; it made sense, then, that Kent would be part of the crew the network sent to cover the Gulf War. The problem was that soon he would become a star player rather than just a member of the team. “Everything changed when he waved that gas mask in the Gulf War,” says Antonia Zerbisias, media writer for The Toronto Star. “The Americans recognize a potential money-maker, and they saw one in Arthur.”

He may have been a money-maker, but he soon developed a reputation with management as a troublemaker. By the following spring, he was frankly telling an audience at the Canadian Association of Journalists’ annual meeting in Edmonton about his reservations regarding NBC in general and Dateline in particular. The speech he gave reflected his increasing worries about the decline in television journalism and foreshadowed the fullblown editorial dispute that would soon be his undoing. “What we’re seeing is a cheap and easy alternative,” Kent said. “I would like to offer more hope. But it’s going to be a battle. You’re up against great corporate and political interests that are very much concerned with breaking down [newsgathering], and continuing the old politics of fear and hatred for short-term expediency.”

It was more a diatribe than a keynote address. When he finished-“with that weighty thought, I could stop talking”- there were a couple of moments of flummoxed silence. Writer Undalee Tracey, a former girlfriend, was in the audience. “His speech was like a personal rant against his employers and the U.S. media establishment,” she says. “It was more angry than informed.”

What made Kent angry about Dateline was its entertainment as-news quality and lack of balance. He says his stories were watered down and even spiked in some cases. As an example, he cites the time he was doing an item on economic rebuilding in Eastern Europe; he saw it as a serious piece, while his producers wanted to focus on the economics of prostitution and the sex trade. Not long after his speech in Edmonton, he asked to be reassigned to nightly news in Rome, an option he says his contract contained.

Instead, he was put in the European general-assignment pool in Rome. In August, he rushed a letter to NBC in New York, protesting that the network was in breach of contract and indicating he would refuse war-zone coverage until the contract situation was resolved. Only days later, he was assigned to Zagreb. The noncompliant Kent flew back to New York and, on August 17, picketed NBC headquarters at the Rockefeller Plaza, handing out leaflets to co-workers denouncing the actions of the network. NBC executives, who had earlier refused to talk to him, simply decided to fire him.

“It was a setup,” Kent told Reuters the day after his firing. “They’re trying to trap me.” Last November, he elaborated on this theory in almost robotic me-versus-the-big-interests terms: “The harsh management regime there really militated against people speaking up and resisting. And when I resisted there was a kind of retaliation people had never seen before-fraud and defamation were kind of unusual to see in the TV wars.”

Both sides claimed a contract dispute, but Kent also said the network had been preventing him from doing tough foreign news pieces. In addition, he accused NBC of placing him in a position where his refusal to go to Zagreb would seem like cowardice on his part. NBC responded by saying he was an egomaniac and difficult to deal with.

Comments made by NBC employees at the time of Kent’s firing suggest some of them shared the network’s view. A September 1992 People magazine article about Kent’s fight includes quotes from anonymous colleagues to the effect that Kent was “out of control” and “not a team player.” One said, “Frankly, before he became the Scud Stud, he was serious and intense, but not difficult like this.” Today, one of Kent’s former NBC colleagues says Kent didn’t deliver on his own stories and disputed his assignments. He also contends Kent was a loner, and that he crawled over a lot of his co-workers at NBC to get ahead of them. During the Gulf War, he says, Kent made certain he would be the one NBC reporter on the rooftop when the Scuds came down. Kent angrily declines to comment on these remarks.

After his firing, Kent’s biggest project was filming A View of Bosnia, a documentary he shot in the spring of 1993. “It’s all about how human beings respond to seemingly unbearable pressure,” he says. The 16-minute film, which won best short documentary and best cinematography at the 1993 Houston Film Festival, goes behind Serb and Muslim lines to detail the horrifying effects of the war on both soldiers and civilians. But the film also allowed him to prove he was still a good journalist. “I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I was srill very much capable of doing that kind of special reporting and doing it well.”

Then in July 1993, Man Alive executive producer Louise Lore called Kent to see whether he would consider becoming the show’s new host. She was, she says, looking for certain qualities that set the show apart from other documentary shows. “The Man Alive host has to have a certain amount of moral integrity. He has to represent a certain kind of character. He should be passionate, have integrity and moral authority. It seems to me it’s obvious that the host must appear to speak from certain commitment to those values.” Kent, she says, was ideal-although she had already talked to at least one other prospective host before Kent.

Of course, Kent has nothing but good things to say about Man Alive. “This is a bit like reaching an oasis,” he says. “I’ve been very fortunate to be at one of the best documentary shows on television anywhere. It’s really terrific for me. I came from a program that represents the diametric opposite of Man Alive.”

In Peter Kent’s view, Man Alive’s appeal for Arthur was that it was relatively undemanding: “Arthur’s main preoccupation is resolving the lawsuit with NBC,” he said in late fall. “Man Alive is good for him. Toronto is halfway between London and New York. It gives him time to do other things.” Those included battling NBC and spending rime with his girlfriend of four years, Deborah Rayner, a television producer. She visits Kent frequently, accompanying him to New York and even doing some production work at Man Alive. Kent also sees her in London, part of a frequent-flier lifestyle that he has gotten used to-he has residences in London and Toronto.

Working in Toronto may have suited Kent professionally and personally while he waited for his case to be resolved, but Antonia Zerbisias believes Kent is squandering his skills on Man Alive. “He can phone his performance in,” is how she describes his role on the show. However, she guesses that he likes having a Canadian home base. But does he even have the option of working in the U.S.? Bob McKeown, a former fifth estate reporter now with CBS in New York, thinks Kent does. “There’s a short institutional memory at these networks. It’s a seller’s market down here for experienced journalists.” The press release detailing the settlement suggested that NBC itself might be suffering from amnesia. In the release, Andrew Lack, president of NBC News since April 1993, said Kent is “an accomplished international news correspondent,” and “always welcome to return.”

Newsday described the press conference at which the settlement was announced as “lovey-dovey.” A reporter who covered it says he got the clear impression that Kent would soon be rejoining NBC, possibly with a newsmagazine program currently scheduled to be launched in the fall. And in the March 1 7 Lo.1 Angeles Times, Kent himself seemed to confirm this: he was quoted as saying he wanted to return to NBC and continue hosting Man Alive. But the same day, Kent’s sister Norma said it was too early to speculate on Arthur’s future. “Don’t believe what the papers say. The last thing Arthur knows is where he’s going to work.”

Wherever he choses to work, Lindalee Tracey thinks fame may have isolated Kent. “It was like he was suddenly famous and didn’t know what to do,” she says of his Gulf War notoriety. “I get the feeling this guy is all by himself.” Other friends and colleagues of Kent’s say that his character really hasn’t changed that much and that he’s always been a bit of a crusader or, at the very least, opinionated. Len Grant, now a CBC documentary reporter in Calgary who met Kent in Edmonton in the seventies when they worked together, is a close friend of Kent’s. He thinks Arthur has a substantial ego, but, he says, “You have to have a healthy regard for yourself to do what Arthur’s done. Wander alone into war zones? I mean, come on!” Louise Lore’s theory is that the Scud Stud image is a protective measure: “Arthur’s public persona is someone who is an international journalist-a kind of romantic war-correspondent hunk. He’s been under enormous pressure and I think that is the way he deals with things.” Broadcaster Ann Medina says of Kent’s tactics during the NBC dispute, “Anyone who stands outside of NBC with a placard, well, you can say they don’t believe in subtlety.” She also believes Kent became the story, and when that situation arises, many journalists feel uncomfortable. “Journalists hate to make themselves the story. The question is whether your journalistic integrity is still intact.”

But Kent rejects this concern. “It’s time for more people to speak out,” he says.” As for me, I don’t see any reason to be quiet about it.” And Peter Kent defends his brother. “He’s never taken journalistic shortcuts, as NBC has and continues to do,” he says. “If that makes him a flake, so be it. What’s wrong with fighting back?” The problem is Kent can come off as arrogant, smug, dismissive, even a little condescending. And while “flake” may not be completely accurate, he certainly was focussed on NBC. Almost any question became a chance for him to launch into another diatribe. Ask him about his fan club-still going strong with around 4,000 members-and listen to him lash out against NBC. “They watch the news and want to express their views on how the news is being brought to them. I don’t think [NBC president] Bob Wright has a fan club anywhere. I don’t think there are many Americans who applaud the use of naked power and destructive, defamatory, libellous publicity against individuals.” Ask him about his relatively modest CBC salary compared to the estimated $250,000 (U.S.) he was making at NBC, and he responds: “That question for me is overshadowed by the excellence and skill of the people around me.”

The day after he and NBC settled, after four months of meetings between Kent and Lack, Kent seemed to have rethought his attitude towards the network. More than once he called NBC “the company I love” and said he was “deeply moved by the expression of willingness by Lack and the new management to set the record srraight.” It was a performance that one reporter who covered the news conference labeled “a joke.” Zerbisias believes the whole event was designed to “boost Kent’s profile” in preparation for his return to the network. “Why else would they go through this song and dance? I can only suspect they’re grooming him as a star.”

Peter Kent, however, says that his brother will never take a staff job at NBC again, although it’s likely he’ll freelance there. He also says that NBC offered to settle with Arthur more than a year ago but that Kent held out for a public apology. And he got it. The release was positively fulsome: “Arthur Kent is and always has been a talented and courageous journalist who is highly regarded within the NBC News Organization.”

Some of Kent’s colleagues aren’t quite so admiring. One CBC producer who he, worked with Kent calls him a “pompous asshole” who tries to tell others how to do their job. But as Liam Lacey points out, “A lot of investigative reporters, not necessarily Arthur Kent, are complete pricks. They’re successful because they don’t see the world like everyone else. They’re good at what they do because they’re not team players.” His sister Norma says he’s always been independent. “He’s a little pit bull. That’s something I admire in him.”

And Kent is good. If he’s a flake, then he’s a flake who won’t compromise the craft he clearly loves. If you were watching Man Alive, you’d see work like this: a segment on the fallout from the Giant Mine disaster in Yellowknife in which a dead miner’s best friend talks, over a glass of beer, about the betrayals of the whole affair, how it took innocent victims and destroyed the best friendship he ever had. “It’s very hard to understand friendships like that unless you’ve had one,” he says. Out of the corner of the screen comes Kent’s hand, clutching his glass of beer. “Cheers,” he says and they clink glasses. It’s a very effective moment.

It’s also uncompromising television. Kent feels that journalists should be more aware of serving their consciences and protecting their profession. “I see compromise every time I turn on the TV set, and it makes me sick to my stomach to see our discipline being defiled.” His consistently critical and passionate comments on his craft sometimes makes him sound more like a disciple of Noam Chomsky than a conventional journalist.

Now that he’s won the suit, unlike conventional journalists, he has the money to bankroll a variety of career options. As Antonia Zerbisias put it before the settlement: “You can make a lot of documentaries with $10 million.” Perhaps Kent could use that kind of money to finance a small dream of his: to make his own movie. “I would, at some point in the near future, like to do a motion picture that is based upon, and helps explain-through the dramatic process-the issues and events that I’ve seen and witnessed, about the abuses of power by governments and corporations in regard to freedom of expression. In other words, about how ordinary people can overcome censorship.” It wouldn’t be his first movie: in 1981 he produced a $4-million teen sex-and-violence feature called The Class of 1984 that for a time was a popular high-school video rental.

For now, Kent is on a one-year contract at Man Alive, and in mid-March, Lousie Lore said he had “indicated his intention to stay on.” Meanwhile, his mission continues to be informing people of the unholy trends he is witnessing and how Arthur Kent would correct them. “It’s time for the big rich companies to say, hey, let’s devote 10 per cent of our broadcasting reserves to public interest broadcasting.”

In another interview, he reflects on how NBC epitomizes the state of contemporary TV journalism: “In a larger sense, it’s issues of accuracy and fairness and journalistic integrity. It really comes down to truth versus bullshit.”

Perhaps that should be truth and bullshit.

But there was still hope. Broadcaster Hilary Brown was about to interview Patrick Watson, chairman-designate of the CBC’s board of directors, on the local news. Saxberg felt heartened. Surely Patrick Watson, the legendary broadcaster and journalist who had been part of so many CBC triumphs, would have something forceful to say.

Instead, to Saxberg’s amazement, Watson defended the closing of the local stations and the creation, in their place, of regional programming. “This thing you call regional broadcasting,” bristled Watson, “is going to be a service that [will soon] exist and probably should have existed.”

At that moment, says Saxberg, “I was alarmed. I thought, Oh my god-he has swallowed the line, lock, stock, and barrel.” He could not believe he was hearing Watson-the crusader, the activist, the icon of journalistic integrity-selling the cutbacks to local service. And as he listened, a dark feeling he would come to know well stole over him. “This was not the Patrick Watson I had heard and read so much about,” he says. “It was a telltale sign.”

SINCE 1990, THE CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION HAS drastically redefined its mission, face, and future. The changes have come at a considerable cost. Some management decisions have provoked outrage, and have revealed many internal quarrels. A major party in these conflicts has been the CBC board of directors, headed by chairman Patrick Watson. Insiders point to three incidents in particular: the Black Wednesday cuts of 1990, The Valour and the Horror dispute of late 1992, and the “repositioning” controversy of 1992-93. In each case many CBC staffers felt pitted against an autocratic management bent on ruining the traditional vision of public broadcasting. Like Saxberg, they thought Watson would be an ally. Now many have decided they were wrong.

What happened to Patrick Watson, the onetime hero who is now so bitterly criticized? Did he sellout for a cushy job at the top? Or have the disillusioned failed to realize what he was up against? Watson is most revered for his work on the landmark current affairs television program This Hour Has Seven Days. The feisty show, famous for challenging public figures, only ran for two seasons, 1964 to 1966, before being quashed by management. Yet its provocative style and penchant for piquing authority were so innovative, so courageous, and so compelling that to this day many journalists preface their remarks about Watson with an awe-filled “I remember watching him on This Hour”

A reporter, producer, and documentary-maker since 1956, Watson has been involved with numerous films and television productions. They include the political program The Watson Report, the historical series Witness to Yesterday, and the business show Venture. Just before his appointment as CBC chairman, Watson had been on the media circuit promoting his acclaimed television documentary The Struggle for Democracy, in which he studied the development of democracy in society.

Veteran CBC journalist Knowlton Nash says Watson “had a burning desire to be CBC president for 30 years.” Watson denies this ambition, claiming he balked when he was first approached to be chairman. “I felt very negative about it,” he says. “I really wanted to just take a block of time off and reassess where I was going to go as a producer, writer, and host.” But colleagues persuaded him to reconsider. Their winning argument, he recalls, was that as a broadcaster on the inside he could bring a valuable perspective to the decisions being made and, Watson says, “at least temper the blows that are bound to fall.” He came to believe that if he rejected the government’s unprecedented offer, it might never again consider a broadcaster for a senior job. “I began to think it could be quite exciting. Maybe there’s a chance to move some things.”

So on September 27,1989, when it was announced that Watson had been given the newly created position of chairman of the CBC board, staffers were encouraged. Watson would be their champion where the new president clearly would not. For that job, the Mulroney government chose Gerard Veilleux, the former Treasury Board mandarin, who was exactly the kind of bureaucrat jaded staffers distrusted.

“At first I thought it was a great team: management teamed with broadcasting and journalistic background,” says Trina McQueen, former head of CBC news and current affairs. Her staff agreed. A director was elated to have “someone from the inside who can reflect what the CBC is all about.” An anchor pointed out that staff “refer to him as Patrick-he seems more one of us.” A producer believed Watson “would carry the torch, reflect our opinions.” The overall feeling, says Nash, was “heaven had at last arrived on earth.” Watson’s resume and profile put him front and centre, and it was hard to turn the spotlight off.

Watson now speaks of the fanfare with a hint of resentment. “Something I should have anticipated and didn’t, at the beginning, was a lot of those people who urged me to go and take the job were dealing, at that point, not so much with their pal and colleague, but with a star in whom they were investing a lot of magic. And they assumed, as people tend to assume about celebrities and about people who have been publicly successful, that you have some kind of capacity to reverse a lot of gravity.”

THE DOWNWARD FORCES WATSON WAS EXPECTED TO TAKE ON first manifested themselves in the cuts to local programming. Originally, Watson had thought cuts would not necessarily mean amputating services; he believed the CBC’s future could be protected by being creative. His words and presence had certainly been soothing. “We’ll have the money to do it,” he had said optimistically in an interview the day he and Veilleux were appointed. “There are a lot of untapped resources in this corporation, and there are a lot of untapped resources in the country. It’s going to take a lot of goodwill on the part of people in the corporation and the country-and us-but we believe it’s there.”

But when the Black Wednesday cuts were announced-the closure of stations in Windsor, Calgary, and Saskatoon, the scaling-down of eight others, and the loss of 1,100 positions-howls of protest erupted from those who saw the local stations, with their ability to cater to the unique needs of each region, as the backbone of the network. Watson’s heroic sheen began to tarnish. The man who had once said that he “could not imagine a future in which the CBC does what Parliament has asked it to do without its local operations,” was now touring the country, trying to convince Canadians that, yes, losing stations hurt, but it was a better cost-saving measure than trying to nip a little bit from every department.

“A lot of our people have been saying, ‘We shouldn’t try to do everything badly; we should try to do the things we do well really well, and forget the other stuff.’ I believe that,” Watson said during a particularly heated exchange with then Midday cohost Ralph Benmergui in February 1991. Shifting agitatedly in his seat as his tone rose, Watson said the local stations had been too narrowly focussed, and didn’t reach out to the rest of the country. Given the need to trim the budget, Watson explained, the

CBC had to refocus its philosophy as “a national network rooted in the regions.”
Since the cuts, the pain of losing the stations has been absorbed, but employees still speak with rancour about Watson. “My complaint at that time,” says a producer in his cluttered Toronto office, “was that these jerks who did the firings developed this theology about it. It was all bullshit, and somebody like Patrick Watson would know it’s bullshit. But no, Patrick went across the country saying, ‘This is the new CBC.’ He was handmaiden to the high priests, so either he acquiesced or else he’s really stupid.”

Watson now admits his early hopefulness was naive. “I had thought-and indeed my colleague Gerard Veilleux thought-that it might be possible to swallow the Wilson budget of 1989 without service cuts. This was based on my knowledge of the corporation as a person who had been in and out of it over the years and seen a lot of redundancy and fat. But it wasn’t based on a rigorous analysis, and when the rigorous analysis all came together, we found out we were wrong-we couldn’t do it without the terrible slashing that took place, and that was very hard.”

A few still defend Watson’s decision. Among them is Knowlton Nash. “Patrick had a choice: he could have denounced the government, but he decided there was more value in explaining the budget cuts. Denouncing the government would just turn into a pissing match.” Watson, explains Nash, “was not brought up in the local mind-set; his mind-set is more the national service than the regional.”

THE NEXT MAJOR UPROAR WAS THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE V ALour and the Horror, the three-part documentary about Canada’s involvement in World War II the CBC aired in January 1992.

Some veterans believed the show contained inaccuracies and were insulted by its portrayal of Canadian soldiers. They lobbied the CR TC and the government, demanding changes and a disclaimer on the planned video version. The CBC initially supported the filmmakers, but by summer, it had assigned ombudsman William Morgan to investigate the grievances. A Senate subcommittee looked into them as well.

On November 10, 1992-the eve of Remembrance Day-the CBC issued Morgan’s report. The ombudsman concluded that the dramatizations of actual events were not properly identified, and might confuse viewers. While he did not believe the filmmakers had deliberately tried to distort history, he found their film was “flawed” and did not adhere to the CBC’s policies and standards. His report was issued simultaneously with an apology from Veilleux and the board. It said that although Valour had merit as a film, it would not be shown again unless appropriate changes, such as clearly identifying dramatizations, were made. In response, the film’s producers spoke up-loudly. “We had been advised to take our medicine and shut up, and we would work again,” says Valour director Brian McKenna, who co-wrote it with his brother Terence. “But when we saw the report, we said there was no bloody way we were going to take this medicine.”

As the debate raged, broadcasters lined up behind the filmmakers, but Watson wasn’t among them. The parallels to This Hour’s battle with management were impossible to ignore. Watson knew firsthand the struggle of the independent producer against management-surely he would make some fiery public statement or gesture. Some staff expected he would resign. But as time passed and no statement came, morale plummeted and resentment grew. Staffers began joking that “this never would have happened if Patrick Watson were still alive.” “What would have been encouraging for people would have been for Watson to say, ‘I will not let this happen, I will not stay,'” says media critic Rick Salutin. “By leaving, you do accomplish something because you give people heart; you show them that somebody was willing to take a stand.”

Watson says that he did fight, but before the ombudsman’s report came out. He attended the Senate hearings with the McKennas and argued that the government had no business interfering with CBC programming. But the hardest struggle came just before the report was issued. The McKennas had heard that a press release condemning Valour was being prepared, and they passed the news along to Watson. Watson immediately tracked down

Veilleux and persuaded him not to issue the statement. Veilleux put the decision in the hands of the board. The meeting that followed in St. John’s, Newfoundland, was, Brian McKenna says, ”as fierce as any Atlantic storm. A ferocious debate ensued with Patrick in the minority.”

The board, says Watson, was a formidable opponent on this occasion. “I was dealing with a number of people who would cheerfully have murdered the McKennas, and I said to those board members, ‘We have a contractual relationship with them, and we are responsible for our side of that contract. Now what are we going to do about it?’ There were people who would cheerfully have said the McKennas will never work for CBC again.”

Perhaps in remembrance of the eight years he was denied work at the CBC after This Hour, Watson successfully argued against blacklisting the McKennas. “What I tried to do was make sure that the decisions that were made at the senior management level were consistent with the best humane and creative traditions of the CBC, and I think I made some headway there. I won’t say the solution I came up with was perfect, but I think it was the best solution under the circumstances. I know if I hadn’t been there, it would have been a very different position.”

During that conflict, Watson confesses, he did consider resigning. “It was that close,” he says, leaning forward with his thumb and forefinger a few millimetres apart. “It was that close on November 9,1992, when I was saying to myself, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be the chairman tomorrow.’ I mean, I have no trouble with the notion of resigning if it’s going to be useful, but you should never waste your resignation. You don’t get to consensus without having a tremendous amount of very tough and vigorous arguments. Had we not gotten to that consensus, I was perfectly prepared to walk out of the office and say, ‘Thank you very much.'”

Watson says his critics did not appreciate the struggle he felt between his instinct to side with the filmmakers and his duty as chairman. After the report was released, he publicly defended the board, saying it was not “cutting our producing partners adrift,” and insisting the board had not caved in to political pressure. Brian McKenna is “grateful” for Watson’s support. “Watson stopped the train. At first it was our clear impression that he couldn’t decide which side to choose, but when he did choose, there was no doubt he sided with us,” he says.

Watson notes the McKennas were not always so kind. “They have not been very nifty about this, in what they have said publicly about me,” he says, a faint rebuke in his voice. “It made a lot of people behave in a very unseemly fashion. The Senate behaved badly, I don’t think we handled it very brilliantly on our side, the program was full of problems, the CBC management’s acceptance of it. “It sure was a learning experience.” When he speaks of Valour, Watson’s tone slows and intensifies. “I have to tell you that I have seldom lived through such an extended period of violent, rancorous screaming matches among colleagues who are usually quite nice to each other, and at every level. And I don’t think the ripples from that one will die down for a long time.

Once again, the hero had fallen short of the expectations. “This is a man who understands irony,” says Brian McKenna. “I guess we expected more. At the time we were disappointed with Patrick, as were many looking in from the outside.”

GIVEN WATSON’S DEMONSTRATED COMMITMENT TO BOARD consensus, few were surprised when he supported the CBC’s “repositioning” plan in 1992. The initiative, aimed at changing the CBC’s planning, organization, and relationship with the public, was to help the network assert a place in the impending 500channel universe. Changes included developing accountability structures, planning a French version of Newsworld, and streamlining management.

The most dramatic and visible impact was on the English television network. In November, The National, the 22-minute evening newscast, was moved to Newsworld, the current-affairs program, The Journal, was axed, and both were replaced by a fullhour program at 9 p.m. called Prime Time News. On one end of the central newscast were two hours of “family” programming; two hours of adult-oriented fare followed it in late night. The changes were touted by management as breakthroughs that would win audiences. Instead, in the weeks following the frantic November 2 launch of Prime Time, viewers stampeded to the 11 p.m. competition at CTV. Few, if any, staffers believed what Canadians needed or wanted was a 9 p.m. newscast, particularly one that was thrown together with only a few months’ notice. Morale slid even further.

“Well, it’s not what some wanted,” Watson says. “There’s great division within the news unit itself, which is unfortunate, and certainly that’s under review now.” However, he says he and the board supported the changes despite staffers’ misgivings. “There was very strong consensus at the board level,” he says, “that the proposal to divide the evening up was a pretty nifty idea. High risk, but it didn’t contain as much prediction of high risk as was contained in the proposal to move The National from 11 p.m. to 10 p.m. in 1980, when everybody was predicting disaster, total disaster. My instinct is 9 o’clock is an appropriate time to have a news program; that’s in line with my concern that our service be different from everybody else’s service. I was very pleased to find that we were bringing in a lot more viewers from outside the Toronto area, younger viewers, more women.”
But to insiders who resent the shake-up, Watson’s views are evidence of how distanced he has become from hands-on broadcasting. “We’ve lost our primacy as the leading news network in Canada,” laments a producer, shaking his head. “We’re having a hard time getting that back.”

SOME CBCERS SAY THEY WILL NEVER forgive Patrick Watson for what he did-and didn’t do-as chairman. They feel he could have done more to boost morale, defend the budget, and protect journalists. “You can influence the public with outside acts,” says one director. “If the public gets on your side you can influence the board. No board wants to go against the public.” An anchor suggests that Watson’s presence was lacking. “He’s the voice that roars-or was. What is that now? A squeak.” But as time goes by, others have grown philosophical. “I’m not angry with him,” says Alison Smith, anchor of The National. “My feeling is more disappointment than anger. But there’s a time to be angry, a time to deny, a time to accept, and now that people are starting to accept, some of the anger is dissipating.”

Those who prefer to believe Watson-described even by his critics as a gentle, good-humoured, generous man-was not co-opted by the board, see him as a victim of circumstance. They sympathize with his political position-he was a Tory appointee on a Tory-appointed board. In fact, he originally thought he could handle the government’s obvious dislike of the CBC, and hoped to be able to use the clout that came with being the only broadcaster appointed to such a high-powered position. During his early interviews, he emphasized that “we have a personal commitment, spoken precisely, person-to-person to us by the prime minister and by the minister of communications to support us by revitalizing the CBC.”

Now he admits he was trying to keep the Tories from evading their public promise of support. With politicians, he says, “you have to take the best-case scenarios, run with them, and see if you can make them come true by repeating them, and part of what you’re doing there is reminding a government what it has said and hoping that will help it live up to its promises. That didn’t work.”

In fact, he continues, “One of the things that was characteristic of the Mulroney government was an almost pathological concern about media in general, which spelled out for the CBC a fury-I was going to say resentment, but it was much more than that-that the CBC, which we’re paying for, is always saying these nasty things about us.”

That Tory fury hindered Watson in a number of ways. Trina McQueen points out that under the circumstances anyone would have had a hard time with the board. “Mulroney didn’t confirm Watson’s position for a year. That was no coincidence; that was a very deliberate political delay. The government was very concerned about Watson’s influence at the CBC. First he was punished by not being approved; then there was the board appointment of [vocal right-wing CBC critic] John Crispo.” McQueen, like others, came to see Watson’s appointment as a public-relations ploy to make it appear the Conservatives supported the CBC.

Fortunately for the corporation, not all the Tory appointees w~re hostile to the CBC. Watson says some of them were sincerely interested in developing and protecting the network. He feels the board members worked well together, and says the conflicts led to constructive discussion. As a result, Watson is satisfied with having been part of what McQueen calls “one of the most activist boards in CBC history, involved in every major decision and too involved in programming decisions.”

Some suggest Watson’s problem was that staffers expected high-profile activity from the high-profile chairman. “We’ll never know how much he’s done,” says Pamela Wallin, co-anchor of Prime Time. “One sometimes fights battles more effectively behind the scenes and we don’t know about it; we’ll never know how much worse it could have been. I can’t believe he would do less. He’s given his life to public broadcasting.”

“If he hadn’t been there, then nobody would have been there to effectively reflect the concerns of producers,” says Knowlton Nash, who adds that Watson “could have done more-you can always do more,” but that his choice was to work from within. “He chose not to confront the government,” concludes Nash. “He made that choice based on the belief that he could gain more with compromise than with confrontation.”

Nash now wonders if the creative Watson was suited for such a restricted managerial and political post. “People make assumptions that he’s going to be as lustrous in this job as he was a broadcaster, because his career as a broadcaster was so valuable. But it’s a totally different type of job, it requires an art of politicking that Patrick just couldn’t do.”

Ultimately, assessments of Watson’s tenure are defined by the myths he was expected to live up to. Few deny they had expected a miracle. “We thought if anyone could keep the wolves at bay, it would be Patrick,” reflects Brian McKenna. “He had this reputation as a broadcaster, as a fighter, as understanding how bureaucracies worked.”

“Like a lot of people, I expected he would become a real advocate for the things that we as journalists believe in at the CBC,” says Alison Smith. “A lot of us were disappointed, but we had very high expectations. When you assume a role like chairman you buy into a certain amount of compromise,” she adds. “It’s obvious a lot of us were naive.” Such presumptions still frustrate Watson. He tried to warn people he would just be a manager. On his appointment, Watson said, “For both of us [himself and Veilleux], it involves a very radical change in what we do with our lives. It means for me, effectively, the end of being a broadcaster.”

Even after four years of criticism, he is not completely inured to the bitterness. It’s clear the harsh judgments have taken a toll. “The expectations that were loaded on my appointment were romantic and exaggerated. When it became clear that we were living in the real world, and that I was a real person and not a magical person, there was a lot of recrimination that came back from people who were saying effectively, ‘Why didn’t you wave your magic wand?’ And that was a bit tough emotionally. I mean, I think I’m a very robust person and I knew that we were into a period of a lot of very tough, practical decision-making, and there wasn’t magic to be wrought, but to get the continuous kind of recrimination that came back-from people I thought ought to know better-was rough. And continues to be rough.”

Watson defends himself by saying he was doing his job. “The real issue is, what does the CBC chairman do? Is he there to increase the division in an institution, wrestle with every tough thing, or to try and make it work out?” he asks. “I think if he’s there to increase the divisions, then his only honourable solution is to step outside, take a side. If he’s going to stay in, I think he has to act on behalf of the corporation, publicly and privately, and try to bring about a resolution that works. That’s what happens when you agree to become part of a political unit. Had I been a private individual, undoubtedly I would have behaved differently.”

ON THE DAY AFTER THE SEARCH FOR A NEW CBC PRESIDENT ended, Watson is in his sunlit home office, wearing blue jeans and a sweater and leaning back in his chair. He has aged visibly during his tenure as chairman, but now he appears relaxed, perhaps even relieved that his term is ending soon. This Halloween he will close the door of the chairman’s office for the last time. When he considers his future options-writing, producing, learning Italian-he smiles, his eyes light up in anticipation. But the thought of the CBC’s future makes him frown. He takes heart that “it’s still there now,” but is unsure of where the corporation will be in five years.

Asked what he will tell new CBC president Tony Manera about the job, Watson grins mischievously, “I think I’ll tell him that in private.” Questioned about his own replacement, he pauses. “When the time comes for me to make my recommendations,” he says thoughtfully, “I don’t know if I’ll suggest a broadcaster.” He falls silent again, perhaps considering how to spare someone like himself the burden of great expectations.

In the weeks following the story’s appearance in a two-part series, more than 300 readers cancelled subscriptions, irate callers tied up newsroom phone lines, and angry letter writers denounced the series as “sickening.” Labonte himself received more than 50 threatening and abusive phone calls. Of course, he also heard from readers who commended him for his courage, and from co-workers who told him, “Well, we didn’t know you were gay but you’re still okay with us.”

And then there was the reaction of the Citizen city editor whom Labonte had considered a mentor since Labonte had joined the paper’s staff eight years earlier. The morning after his article ran, the editor approached him m the newsroom. “I hate fags and I didn’t know you were a fag,” he growled. “But if you’re a fag, you’re a fucking good fag.”

Today, it’s still rare for gay journalists to come out like Labonte did. As CBC Evening News senior reporter Jeffrey Kofman, who has been out since the mideighties, says: “There are a lot more people in the closet than out. I work with them. Many of them are known among their colleagues but don’t go a step farther.” Nonetheless, gays and lesbians have become more visible in major newsrooms, especially in the 1990s.It’s an open secret that the editor of one of the bigger papers in the country is homosexual, and across Canada an increasing number of “queer” journalists are out on the job. They talk freely to straight colleagues about their partners and, when asked what they did during the weekend, they no longer hesitate about being truthful.

But by being openly gay, are they affecting their job prospects? And what does their increasing visibility mean to the way stories about the homosexual community are reported? The answers are important because the composition of the country’s newsrooms influences what news we read and hear and see. But the answers are also important to me on a more personal level, because even though newsroom attitudes have changed a great deal since Richard Labonte wrote his historic article in the Citizen, as a young gay journalist, I wonder how my sexual orientation will affect my own career.

BEFORE THE 1980s NEWSROOMS WERE generally macho bastions where fag jokes were as common as typewriters. To be openly gay often meant being unemployed. “The Citizen was not an oasis of tolerance and understanding. There were crusty old farts there for whom having women in the newsroom was a problem, let alone queers,” Labonte recalls. “I know there were other gay people at the Citizen during this time period but I was the only one who was open.”

Labonte’s experience was similar to that of Murray McMillan, now a 45-year-old features and news editor who joined the “conservative” newsroom of The Vancouver Sun in 1967. The idea of being “out” was not yet part of the social consciousness-the Stonewall riots were still two years away. In fact, it wasn’t until the midseventies, when he worked under an “open and supportive” editor, that McMillan started coming out to colleagues. He remembers how the atmosphere gradually improved as senior editors made it clear to staff that homophobic comments would no longer be acceptable. He also thinks that as the number of women in the newsroom rose, the climate became increasingly tolerant. “Women stopped putting up with sexist nonsense from the guys and we certainly benefited from the change,” he was quoted as saying in a CAJ Bulletin article last year.

More recently, we’ve undergone what the American gay magazine The Advocate rather inelegantly calls “the lavender enlightenment.” The growing militancy of the gay and lesbian movement, partly as a result of the AIDS epidemic, has been one contributing factor. So has the rising acceptance of diversity in all its forms. Today, at least among the more liberal, sexual orientation is not an issue. This accepting attitude seems to be the norm in major newsrooms: I tried to locate working journalists with contemporary horror stoties about workplace harassment -or worse-but failed to turn any up. Some reported heating derogatory jokes or remarks, but they also said they were confident enough to confront the colleagues who made the comments.

By contrast, in a U.S. survey conducted in 1990, many of the 205 homosexual reporters interviewed said they worked in a homophobic environment left unchallenged by managers. Leroy Aarons, then executive editor of The Tribune in Oakland, conducted the study for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. When Aarons presented his findings at an ASNE meeting, he also revealed that he was gay. A well-established journalist like Aarons coming out to his colleagues with no apparent negative consequences sent a message to journalists across the country that they didn’t have to check an essential part of their identities at the door of their newsrooms anymore. Several months after Aarons’ presentation, a handful of gay and lesbian reporters met in his San Francisco living room to discuss forming a support organization. The resulting National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association currently has 16 chapters and 850 members, up from 500 in 1992, and Aarons, now retired, is the association’s president. The NLGJA’s recent activities have included organizing diversity workshops to promote tolerance and lobbying for such workplace rights as insurance benefits for partners. It has also held two conferences, the second of which was in New York City last September.

During the weekend-long event, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., a heterosexual who has been largely credited for making his newsroom environment more comfortable for his homosexual staff, hosted a reception for the 560 NLGJA members in attendance. The same weekend featured a panel discussion involving NBC’s Tom Brokaw, CBS’s Dan Rather, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, and Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, who all said they would welcome gays and lesbians to their newsrooms. Even more notable was the day-long job fair, which attracted 15 major American news organizations, including the Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and ABC News.

While in Canada a similar job fair is probably years off, the NLGJA’s success has prompted the creation of a similar network. Vancouver Sun news reporter Kevin Griffin attended the association’s first conference in San Francisco. Upon returning home, he and about half a dozen journalists, including McMillan, met in Griffin’s living room. The result was the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Canadian Association of Journalists, which now has 80 members, two-thirds of whom are male, roughly reflecting the gender makeup of the industry. The caucus has not hosted a conference of its own, but at last year’s CAJ conference, a four-member panel, including Deb Price of The Detroit News, whose column on gays and lesbians is syndicated nationally, discussed such issues as what a gay and lesbian news story is, when it’s significant to identify someone as a homosexual, and whether journalists who are out have a responsibility to ensure coverage of gays and lesbians is fair and accurate.

One of Griffin’s hopes for the caucus is that it will help other journalists avoid the isolation he felt when he began at the Sun. He describes how he took the “safest route” and portrayed himself as being asexual, not insinuating he was either straight or gay, when he started at the paper in 1987. But, as he wrote in the CAJ Bulletin last year, “After a while, I found this intolerable. I could no longer justify writing about injustices against other people while perpetuating one against myself.” Shortly after he started at the paper, following a few bottles of wine during a dinner party with several close colleagues, Griffin told them he was gay. “The announcement caused hardly a ripple,” he says. The grapevine kicked in from there. Now Griffin refers to his desk in the Sun’s newsroom as “a gay space” where he encourages other homosexual reporters and editors in the newsroom to gather.

There certainly weren’t any gay spaces in the Global newsroom when Jeffrey Kofman started as a Queen’s Park reporter in the early eighties. Consequently, he was pretty much in the closet. “I was young and working my way up. And I was less confident about myself and less confident about my career.” Then in 1985, he attended an AIDS fundraising dinner. He remembers being concerned that some provincial politicians who were there would see him and conclude he was gay. He was uncomfortable, and at the same time worried. “You set yourself up to be vulnerable if you let people think there’s a reason to be vulnerable. It took a moment like that for me to realize I didn’t want to live that way.” Over the next two or three years, as he gained more confidence, he began being completely honest about his personal life when colleagues asked. “I wasn’t prepared to be someone I’m not,” he says. Like Kofman, Toronto Star reporter Bruce DeMara initially kept his sexual orientation a secret on the job. He was on a summer internship program at the paper and was afraid he wouldn’t get a position at the end of the summer if his bosses knew he was gay. After being hired full time, he told one colleague, who passed on the news to others. The response to DeMara’s revelation was anti-climactic: he didn’t lose his job, and the couple of reporters who had previously made homophobic remarks stopped.

For Janet Money, the decision to come out was not unlike Richard Labonte’s experience. In 1989, when she was working at The Daily Sentinel-Review in Woodstock, she and the lifestyles editor attended a speech given by the mother of one of Money’s lesbian friends. As a result, the editor decided to write an article about what it’s like being homosexual in Woodstock, but the one lesbian who was willing to be interviewed wanted anonymity. “I was feeling really awkward because there was no reason to hide,” Money recalls. She came out to the editor and agreed to be quoted in the piece. “It seemed important that at least one lesbian be named in the story. Otherwise it would convey the message that it was too scary to be a lesbian in Woodstock and I didn’t feel it was.” The day the article appeared, a staff photographer congratulated her and the composing room foreman said, “That was a really brave thing you did.”

And coming out not just to one’s colleagues but to the public is still a brave thing to do today. Kofman admits that five years ago he probably wouldn’t have agreed to be interviewed for an article like this one. And a journalist in his mid-20s who writes for a national TV news and current affairs program didn’t want to be identified even though he is open to colleagues and has previously worked with the gay press. He doesn’t believe it serves to have “Joe and Mary Public” know he is gay. “That’s not the best way to operate until you get to the point in your career when you’ve proven yourself.” He makes the point that it’s difficult being out to only a few in Canada because the business is so small and the circles of decision-makers are so interconnected. “When you out yourself in Canada you’re outed across the board. If you are a journalist in New York and you come out, people in the south probably won’t know it. In Canada, everybody will know.”

A 44-year-old entertainment writer at one of the Sun chain of papers also didn’t want to be identified, even though he is open with colleagues. “Being gay is a component of my personality. It’s not the overriding aspect of who I am,” he says. “Maybe if I had come out when I was 20 it would have been.” While he acknowledged and accepted his homosexuality 14 years ago, for a long time afterward he was in a state of constant fear. “I spent a lot of years living the U.S. military position on homosexuality: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ You never know when the door is going to slam.”

One concern common to both closeted and out gay and lesbian reporters is being labelled a homosexual reporter rather than a reporter who just happens to be homosexual. They worry about being typecast or, worse, being seen as an activist. Kofman remembers that fear: “I figured that label would follow me and people wouldn’t look at my work without dismissing it or pigeonholing it.” But for Daniel Gelfant, senior editor of documentaries for Prime Time News, labelling isn’t the issue. He believes that if you’re a journalist who is known to be homosexual, the label is there automatically. “My question is what do you do with the label? In my case being gay is a special part of my identity, it’s a part of the way I see the world, therefore my work is going to reflect that sensibility.”

Susan G. Cole, a senior editor at NOW, an alternative Toronto weekly, thinks “every journalist should have an adjective in front of them. Nobody just happens to be anything.” She believes that insisting we’re not homosexual journalists is the biggest insult. “It means we have nothing to say.”

One notable difference between gay and lesbian journalists is that there are relatively few women who are out of the closet. When Money joined The London Free Press in June 1991, she came out again in an article because she wanted to meet other lesbian journalists. It didn’t work. “I am the only out lesbian mainstream journalist in my city,” she says regretfully. “There are hardly any of us, so it’s nice to create moral support.” It’s just as lonely out west. Mary Lasovich, a former staffer at The Kingston Whig-Standard who now freelances out of Victoria, says until she became a member of the CAJ’s gay and lesbian caucus she didn’t know of any other reporters who were lesbians. When Lasovich realized she was a lesbian in 1989 she did some research, trying to find an out lesbian journalist to use as a role model. She didn’t succeed. For the situation to change, she says, “There will need to be more women out in the newsroom, out to readers, to show that it’s not as dangerous, not as career-threatening.”

There’s no one explanation for why lesbians are less visible. It took Lasovich almost three years to come out to others after separating from her husband because she didn’t want to jeopardize getting custody of her three children. She suspects there are other lesbian journalists who have the same fears. Irshad Manji, a freelance journalist who writes a regular column on equality for The Ottawa Citizen, believes another reason has to do with numbers: there are still not as many women as there are men in the newsroom. “Therefore, there are naturally fewer lesbians in journalism.” Manji adds that there is still sexual and verbal harassment of women in newsrooms “so to draw attention to yourself by coming out is not the safest thing to do.”

The isolation felt by lesbians, however, is lessening. During the CAJ-sponsored Women in the Media conference in 1992, Money announced the formation of a lesbian caucus. Only about six women, some of whom were not out in their newsrooms, attended. At last year’s conference, twice as many women came to the caucus and almost everybody there was out in the workplace, Money says.

Those journalists who have made the often-difficult decision to come out to their colleagues believe the newsroom benefits from their decision. They say that they’re in a position to pitch stories about the gay and lesbian communities that might otherwise be overlooked, and to serve as resource people for colleagues when they are writing about gay and lesbian issues. Just as important, says Bruce DeMara, they can monitor copy to ensure stereotypes are not perpetuated so “the bogeyman idea of leather-wearing men who have 1,000 sex partners goes out the window.” Daniel Gelfant thinks there’s an educating job to be done as well, so other reporters can write about gays and lesbian issues with some depth of understanding. Before taking part in a panel session called “Straight Mythology: Gay and lesbian Reality-Who Draws the line in the Media?” during the 1993 CAJ conference, he conducted a brief “unscientific” survey among his colleagues to gauge their opinions on and knowledge of homos sexuality. “I realized there isn’t much communication across the line about what the gay and lesbian world is, who we are,” he says of the responses. One of the eight questions was, “If you were at a bar sitting next to a pregnant woman who told you she was a lesbian, what questions would you ask her?” To Gelfant’s bemusement, most said they would ask the same questions they would a straight woman. Some said they certainly wouldn’t ask the woman how she had become pregnant. “There’s no point in seeing us the same because we are different,” he says.

Freelance journalist Gerald Hannon also points out that gay and lesbian journalists might have a different take on stories than heterosexual reporters. We have been conditioned, he says, to view issues and events from an “outsider” perspective: we grew up in a heterosexual society that didn’t have our interests at heart-we learned about straight culture without ever fully being a part of it. And Daniel Gelfant makes another point: “We can be better journalists because we’re more used to being observers. As children we have had to judge the danger all the time. So when you’re so attuned to looking at danger then you’re also a keen observer of other things.”

Of course, the question arises as to whether homosexual reporters can cover gay and lesbian issues objectively. Janet Money dismissed this concern in a column she did for the Free Press last June: “Well, first of all there’s no such thing as objective journalism. What is often called objective journalism is the news as seen through the eyes of privilege. The eyes are usually those of white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class men.” She went on to relate the story of a reporter who, while covering a school-board conflict over gay and lesbian curriculum content, was asked by her editor to interview people who thought homosexuality was a sickness. “When we do stories about racism, we don’t go to the Ku Klux Klan in order to present a ‘balanced’ view of people of colour,” Money wrote tartly.

Susan Cole is equally suspicious of the passion for objectivity: “I don’t believe journalists are little ciphers through whom information and facts flow, but rather they’re human beings who filter information and interpret the facts.” And Bruce DeMara, who calls himself the “unofficial” gay and lesbian beat reporter at the Star, says that when he’s writing about homosexual issues, “I can pour on a bit more compassion because I’ve been there.” But the New York chapter of the NLGJA probably has the snappiest response to the objectivity dilemma: “Can heterosexuals cover straight issues objectively?”

Newsroom managers like John Cruickshank, managing editor of The Globe and Mail, and Phil Bingley, assistant managing editor of The Toronto Star, maintain that when they’re hiring, an applicant’s sexual orientation is not an issue or a concern. As Bingley says, there are dangers in not being objective doing any story, whether it’s a lawyer writing about legal issues or visible minority journalists writing about issues in their own communities. On the other hand, a homosexual reporter might have more insight into a story on the homosexual communities than would a straight reporter.

And what about the quantity and quality of coverage of the gay and lesbian communities? Have these improved as more journalists come out? Certainly there’s been a marked increase in the number of stories on gay and lesbian issues. According to the Canadian Index, in 1980 the Globe, for example, published 21 stories about homosexuals and homosexuality, whereas in 1993 there were 69. But while there are more stories, are they better? Gays and lesbians aren’t so sure. Often the media either cover the sensational aspects of gay and lesbian culture-drag queens during Gay Pride Day, say-or they go the other way by trying to make the homosexuals look like heterosexuals. “You don’t ever get the richness of the texture of our culture,” says Cole. However, this coverage is better than nothing, she concedes. One reason for the greater amount of space has to do with newspaper economics: faced with a dwindling readership, papers have become more inclusive, recognizing that gays and lesbians make up a fairly large part of the population. As Phil Bingley says, “It would be short-sighted to ignore.” Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. made a similar point at last year’s NLGJA conference: “If newspapers are to survive, they can no longer be exclusionary bastions of a single view of the world. We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight, male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job.”

SHORTLY AFTER HE TOLD HIS OWN STORY in the Citizen, Richard Labonte left the country and the newspaper business altogether. Since 1982 he has been living in San Francisco, where he runs a chain of gay bookstores. He doesn’t know if his coming out more than a decade ago would have hurt his journalism career, but he has no regrets. “Overall, I think it did me good, it did the paper good, it did the people in Ottawa good.” As for the coverage today, he says: “We are a component of news and for a long time gay stuff was covered insensitively by straight people. Not that they were being deliberately malicious, but it helps to know facts. The more facts you know the better the story is. That’s another reason why I like the idea of people being open. Now, hardly a day goes by that some lesbian or gay element of news doesn’t get into one of the papers. It’s almost commonplace.”

During his seven years in Canada, Coren has written for The Canadian Catholic Review, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Frank, Books in Canada, Quill & Quire, Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Toronto Life, numerous smaller publications, and a host of British newspapers. In addition, he’s a contributing interviewer on TVOntario’s Imprint and a once-a-week commentator on Toronto radio station CJRT. Coren’s reputation is that of a sharp witted satirist-a brackish, bow-tie-sporting man who regularly
assails Canadian political and journalistic heavyweights. But on this day in October, Coren has been demure, reserved-cheru\ic even. Until, that is, I mention that a colleague has called him a “literary prostitute.”

Coren emits a short, hollow laugh and leans forward on the couch. His drooping eyes open wide as he suddenly sits up and then leans over his clenched hands. He begins to look like one of the hanging gargoyles. “Who was that?”

I stand tough. “I can’t say, but he said you’ll write anything for anybody.” As a sneer creeps across his bulbous face, I ready myself for vintage Coren toxicity.

OTHERS HAVE CERTAINLY EXPERIENCED IT. Coren has a take-no-prisoners style, and a list of his victims would read like the wall of a war memorial: For those skewered in the line of duty-Pierre Berton. June Callwood. Peter Gzowski. Michele Landsberg. Svend Robinson. The entire Metropolitan Toronto police force Consider these examples:

FROM AESTHETE, A COMPILATION OF HIS diaries from Frank magazine: I do not think she can hear me over the cacophony of mastication and slurping in which she invariably indulges. She tells me that her doctor recently demanded she lose 180 pounds of ugly fat. In response, she continues, she has left Stephen Lewis. I am worried. We cannot afford to lose such an intelligent and versatile wordsmith as Michele Landsberg. That being the case, I am raising money to send the dear lady to a fat farm. If you care as much as I do about Canadian letters, please send a donation, however small, to…

FROM HIS “MEN” COLUMN, THE GLOBE and Mail, October 20,1993: Some young women are asking close female friends to be with them for the birth of the baby. Will we then have mothers-in-law and highschool chums present at the conception” You’re doing wonderfully dear, be brave now. Almost finished. Soon it’ll all be over and then you can have a nice cup of coffee and a sandwich”

FROM A COLUMN ON RELIGIOUS BOOKstores, The Idler, November/December 1991: The Evangelicals may be intolerant, small-minded, and repellent, but at least they hold a consistent set of beliefs

FROM AESTHETE: LOVABLE OLD GRUMPY headed radio star Peter Gzowski is not, as he claims, the illegitimate child of a poverty stricken immigrant Pete’s father was Manny Gzowski of Gzowski’s Vaginal Vibrators fame, and made a fortune selling his electrical pleasure-giving devices to bored housewives

FROM HIS PIECE ON CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOP Aloysius Ambrozic, Toronto Life, June 1993: This is one of those moments where Ambrozic indicates a form of weakness, even impotence. The truth is that he is a man who cares more about his church than anything else. He tries extremely hard but he cannot, in the long run, achieve its ends

FROM A BOOK REVIEW, THE TORONTO STAR, June 27,1993: Can one seriously imagine a detective priest? Regrettably, it is easier to conjure up the image of a priest being questioned by secular detectives over abuse charges

FROM AESTHETE: As I RELAX IN MY LAVENDER scented bath, I hear a little ditty on the radio: “A dog, a woman, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em, the better they be.”

I cannot believe my ears. I am so offended by this humour I find it difficult to contain myself. Don’t people realize the horror of the abuse problem today? I am genuinely angry. After pausing a moment to regain my composure, I pen a spirited missive to the Humane Society, informing them of the name of the person who delivered the rhyme, and advising-nay, commanding-them to take swift and decisive action

FROM A BOOK REVIEW, THE STAR, SEPTEMBER 18, 1993: Three cheers for Ken Dryden. Just as I worried that there would be insufficient entries for this year’s Most Pretentious and Pointless Book of the Year Award, along come the flaccid writings of a man…once paid a lot of money to stop a lump of rubber from entering a hockey net and is thus qualified to pass judgment on the known and unknown world

AS I WAIT FOR COREN’S REACTION TO being called a literary prostitute, I wonder if he can take as good as he gives. The answer is no. He’s quite thin-skinned, although he’ll often try to veil his anger with a witty response.

“Literary prostitute,” he says. “Prostitutes will sell their services without a thought to who the person is, simply for money. They open their legs to anyone, if that person has cash. I would never do that-I’ve turned down work on numerous occasions. I only write what I think is quality.

“I really would stress this point. The Canadian Catholic Review pays me virtually nothing! I do it because-. That is a very annoying comment. I would like to know who said that,” he says, whispering under his breath, grimacing, “because I’d like to bash their teeth in.

“Look, I’ve reached a point in my career where people approach me to work for them, and I just have to say no. Either I don’t have the time or I don’t respect what they do. The prostitute thing, what it is in this country, is if you’re prolific, you’re envied. Look at my work! If you think there’s a drop in quality, then I’ll stop doing as much.” He gestures to a small oak bookshelf stacked with his titles. “It’s just not true, a literary prostitute,” he whines in a high voice, pretending to weep. “The person who said that thing, oh, how banal. What an original comment.”

What is opinionated “quality” to Coren is name-calling drivel to others-particularly with regard to his work in Frank. Written in a Swiftian vein, Coren’s diaries follow the style developed by Auberon Waugh in the British satirical magazine, Private Eye. Coren’s alter ego, who savagely sends up the latest newsmakers, is that of a British upper-class intellectual stranded in the incomprehensible backwaters of Canada. (In reality, Coren’s a graduate of Wanstead County High School, who earned his Honours B.A. in politics at the decidedly unpatrician Nottingham University. His father is a cab driver and his mother’s family descended from Welsh coal miners.) The Aesthete character, Coren maintains, has some virtue behind his vitriol. “What I do is attack something like a double standard on AIDS. Sure, we must find a cure for AIDS, we must put enormous amounts of money into it…” he pauses. “Look, people are dying all over. When it was blacks in Africa dying of AIDS, no one gave a toss. Nobody gave a toss. Suddenly, it’s middleclass men in California and everyone goes crazy about it. It’s a double standard. I’m trying to provoke people into rethinking comfortable points of view.”

But former Saturday Night editor Robert Fulford calls Coren’s diaries heavy-laden with unfunny material. “Watching him construct all those fictions makes me tired. It’s like one guy telling jokes, one after another, but each one gets worse.”

Judy Rebick, former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, despises what she calls Coren’s Neanderthal scribblings. “I think his diaries are adolescent and anti-feminist. They’re stupid. Making fun of people’s size and looks? It’s vile.” Globe media critic Rick Salutin says he has hardly read Coren’s diary in over a year: “I thought he used to be quite good when he started. He used to poke fun at the right-wing establishment and shed light on its silliness. But when he was off, it was like he was whacking people on the head with a club.” Frank editor Michael Bate says Coren’s diaries are largely criticized by “humourless” people who don’t grasp the subtleties of satire. Although, he adds, that’s not to say Coren’s satire has always been on the mark: “When he plays the overdog and he bangs away at people he thinks aren’t important, it doesn’t work as often.”

To become a Coren victim you must have some notoriety: power, fame, or wealth is a good start. Coren half-seriously calls his political leanings “libertarian.” “I don’t want the church or state to tell me how I should or should not make love,” he says, which leaves him plenty of ideological headroom in which to skewer people. Coren says he doesn’t pick his victims indiscriminately-it’s all part of what he calls his “malice towards all” philosophy. If you’ve offended his sensibilities and you’re newsworthy, you’re a potential target.

“There’s this critical hatred of elitism in Canada,” he says, “which is very ironic because it’s a very elitist country. There are certain families-no, dynasties-who run the country but try to act like they’re part of the working class. You know, leaving the g’s off the end of their words-that sort of trash. These people are actually very powerful, but have to pretend they’re not.” Coren says it’s those self-absorbed, influential people who deserve to be taken down a notch-or five.

That he does, although even his wife, Bernadette, a philosophy teacher at Humber College, acknowledges he often crosses the line. “Oh yeah. He goes way over the top,” she says, “but that’s the shock element, the sharpened needle. He has to keep sharpening it, otherwise he gets dull.” She believes her husband’s writings force people to think, to “turn up their mental soil every once in a while.” But Coren dug a deep hole with her when, in one diary entry, he depicted Mother Teresa getting looped in a bar. Bernadette, a practising Roman Catholic, took offence. “Sometimes he’s so lurid I’m surprised-I say to myself, ‘Who is this man I’m sleeping with?'”

When pressed, Coren admits that not everyone is a potential target; he does take care to avoid offending a select few. Writer and broadcaster Daniel Richler, for instance, is a Coren buddy whose name never sees print in the diaries. Another no-show is media mogul Conrad Black. How come? After much hemming and hawing, Coren sheepishly gives in.

“I don’t mock people I admire,” he says. “It’s open season on someone like Conrad Black. I have a great deal of admiration for Black because he has bought newspapers and improved them. Look at the improvement in The Telegraph, The Jerusalem Post, and in Saturday Night. There’s no need for me to do it. I’m redressing a balance.”

Coren’s inconsistency troubles many. One journalist, who refuses be named for fear of starting a public feud, says: “If you’ve got someone taking on everyone, he’s an iconoclast. But Coren only attacks some people, so he’s just a bully.” (For his part, the “bully” doesn’t understand why people prefer to remain anonymous when criticizing him. He says he has only once taken out his anger in print. “Revenge,” he says, “is a dish best served cold.”)

One of the people he vociferously attacks is Michele Landsberg, the Star’s columnist on women’s issues. The staunch feminist is a Coren favourite, along with her husband, Stephen Lewis, and their son, Avi Lewis, a local TV journalist.

A smug and unrepentant Coren defends his work with vigour. “She exists, therefore she has to be attacked,” he says. “Look, if people come out and say, ‘I’m terribly powerful, I’m rich, so fuck you,’ then okay. But don’t lie about it. And I think Landsberg does. Her columns are strident and dull and unimportant. And I attack her size, because you don’t put on that much weight for no reason.”

It’s at this point that I politely remind him that he put on over 100 pounds when he came to Canada. His response is brief, terse: “I was a passionate rugby player and in the gym every day in Britain. I came over here and ate the same amount, and in what seemed like two weeks I had put on 100 pounds.” He pauses, glaring at me. “But I lost it very quickly. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Now I attack Michele because”

IT WOULD PROBABLY COME AS A SHOCK TO Landsberg and others that in private Michael Coren is quite personable. Likable even.

A man with three children (Daniel, 5; Lucy, 3; Oliver, six months), a wife, a mortgage, and a growing freelance business, Coren is reluctant to bring the private aspect of his life out into the open, except to his close friends. I ask him if I can speak to Bernadette, and at first he is very reluctant to talk about her, much less let me speak to her. As for a foray into his home-out of the question.

Daniel Richler isn’t surprised. “At heart he’s a softie. He likes family and friends above all else. He draws quite a line between his public, satirical life and his private one.” Another friend of Coren’s, while not enamoured of his writing, echoes Richler. “He’s terribly sweet at home. He’s a total teddy bear-he has got a real emotional side.”

Coren keeps strict office hours-weekdays from 6:30 a.m. until mid-afternoonin order to have a full working day and still have time to play with his children. Bernadette says there’s no doubt about who he is when he’s home with the family. “There’s no British standoffishness here,” she says. “The children use Mike as a trampoline.”

This clear demarcation between work and family is created specifically to avoid controversy over his private life-the same controversy he creates for others as a result of his Frank diaries. “What I am, in many ways, is a very private person,” says Coren, “so when 1 get home the door is locked, and I’m there to be with my children and my wife. There’s nothing better for me.”

Paul Stuewe, Books in Canada editor and also a friend of Coren’s, says Coren’s closed personal nature only furthers his acerbic reputation. “If they only read his writing that’s in the public forum, they’re likely to get a different opinion than if they knew him personally.”

COREN BEGAN HIS JOURNALISTIC CAREER in London, England, writing copy for British publications such as The New Statesman, Time Out, and City limits, and scripts for BBC-Radio, all of which led to a 1983 nomination for Young Journalist of the Year. A year later, the 23-year-old Coren met John Pilger, a popular British television personality. The chance encounter led to a new job: researcher and scriptwriter for a British TV documentary entitled The Outsiders, which profiled 10 influential Brits outside the traditional power structure. While the shows were a moderate success, Coren says his 1985 book version, a question-and-answer transcript, is “not a book I’m particularly proud of. I wanted to write 10 profiles.”

Even in the early years of his career, Coren was no stranger to controversy. In 1983, he was asked to write Theatre Royal, a book celebrating the centennial of the Stratford East theatre. But when Coren criticized a well-liked artistic director “he just didn’t know how to run a theatre”-Stratford East refused to sell the book. The furor and the resulting press coverage made Coren a critical success and attracted the attention of Bloomsbury, a British publishing company. The now marketable Coren signed on to write a biography of British novelist and critic G.K. Chesterton.

Bernadette says her husband’s first biography was a labour of love-literally. The two first met in Toronto at a Chesterton conference held in 1986 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the author’s death. An avid fan, Bernadette was at the conference with her father when a young man walked up to the podium. “At first I thought he was going to pour water for the next speaker, then I realized, he is the next speaker.”

The next six months became a whirlwind of plane trips for the couple. Coren in London, Bernadette in Toronto. Coren conned, begged, and finagled editors into sending him over to Canada to do interviews, stories, anything. At one point he agreed to fly to Chicago to interview Wayne Gretzky, although now he is the first to admit he didn’t-and still doesn’t-understand the game. “I knew nothing. I ended up asking him questions like, ‘How do you balance on those metal blades?’ and ‘Isn’t it cold out on the ice?’ Gretzky knew what was going on, but he was very gracious.”

Coren crossed the ocean to live in Oshawa, just east of-and cheaper than Toronto. It was a decision he immediately regretted. He says he was “utterly and completely in love” with his fiancee but incredibly lonely away from his English society. “I realized that the language similarities were irrelevant. I was far more at home in Germany or Holland or France than I was here. I was a fish out of water.” His voice trails off. “I just had no idea”

In 1988 he started writing book reviews for the Star and Maclean’s, while beginning a three-year research period for his next biography, a study ofH.G. Wells. In The Invisible Man, published early last year, Coren calls Wells an anti-Semite, a misogynist, and a fraud-harsh words rarely associated with the author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Although he swears that he didn’t loose Wells solely to create controversy-“The man called Jews ‘parasitic people.’ Should I have ignored that?”-his accusations set off shock waves in the literary world. Douglas Pepper of Random House, which published both Invisible Man and Aesthete, says that in many ways the Wells biography is more controversial than Coren’s Frank musings. “He was the first to seriously address Wells’ shortcomings. Other Wells biographers chose to ignore them.”

Coren agrees. “In Britain, they’re more interested in Wells,” he crows, “so when my book came out, I was page one in every book section of every newspaper.” (He later concedes that his prominence may have been due to the book’s February publication date, a notoriously slow month for books.) Coren even provoked a feud in print with staunch Wells supporter and former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot, who accused Coren of being “pious” and “curmudgeonly.” Characteristically, Coren calls Foot a “doddering old man who on his best days is semiliterate.”

Looking around his office, I notice Coren has copies of Aesthete stacked beside copies of the Wells biography. I ask him if writing in such diverse styles makes him feel schizophrenic. He says no, but adds that many of his readers and critics can’t seem to accept that he can be good at writing in a variety of forms: “Some people in Canada just don’t understand. They ask, ‘How can you be a biographer and write the Frank diaries?'” He draws an analogy with a quote from O.K. Chesterton. “He says something like, ‘There’s no contradiction between funny and serious; it’s like comparing black and triangular.’

“Sometimes I’m funny,” he pauses and smiles, “and sometimes I’m not. But sometimes I’m just trying to take the piss out of people.”

The phone rings, perhaps the fourth or fifth time in the last hour. “Yes, thank you. You’ll have it for Tuesday. Bye.” Coren’s grin is so large, I’m having trouble seeing his ears. “That was The New Republic. They rang up and said, ‘We’ve seen your work. Are you willing to do a 1,500-word piece about the Canadian election?’ Would I do it? I’d sell my mother to the Libyans to get the chance to do it.

“Now that’s me being a literary prostitute,” he quips, then asks me if I’d do it. “Of course you would. But now when it comes out, someone will pick it up and say, ‘Oh my god, he’s in here too! He’s a literary prostitute!’ I mean, they’ll say literary prostitute, but what they really mean is, ‘That bastard! I want to do what he does.'”

COREN HAS FOUND HIS NICHE PLAYING THE role of the contrarian – a right-wing firebrand ready to launch politically incorrect missives on demand-and more and more publications are buying into his act. Stuewe, of Books in Canada, says he chose Coren to write a publishing column because he’s willing to take an unpopular view. “He’s one of those Socratic gadflies people like to read even though they make you angry. He makes people think harder why they hold the opinions they do, and there aren’t many journalists in Canada who can do that.” Another editor attributes Coren’s success to three things: his ability to turn quick copy, his non-mainstream ideas, and his ability to provide intelligent discourse.

Last year, Coren’s impudence touched several nerves following the introduction of his “Men” column in the Globe and his profile of Catholic Archbishop Ambrozic in Toronto Life.

Ex-NAC president Rebick, for instance, hates the biweekly Globe columns. “The first few months were anti-feministic pap. Now it’s just uninteresting pap.” Rebick, it’s true, is still angry, even bitter, that she was passed over for a Globe column at the same time that Coren got his. Rebick wrote a personal letter to William Thorsell, editor of the Globe, calling Coren “the most vicious anti-feminist in the country.” Coren, of course, wears Rebick’s criticism like a medal pinned to his lapel. “What a wonderful thing to be known as.” Coren says the issues he chooses to address in the Globe are serious matters. Again he draws an analogy with O.K. Chesterton, who wrote his own column for many years. “He could take what was in my pocket, or a piece of cheese, and write a beautiful column about it. I always think of my column as a pebble. You throw it into the pond and the tipples are your column.”

Coren, however, likes to create waves, not tipples: one of his first columns responded, in the expected Coren manner, to a survey reporting that, at one point in their lives, 50 per cent of Canadian women had been victims of attempted or fulfilled rape. “I prefer the explanation that there are statistics, damn statistics, and lies. If it is really true…and if, like me, you know many women who have not been thus treated, to balance out the average there must…be entire cities whose populations are composed entirely of raped females.”

The piece Coren did for Toronto Life not only shook up the Catholic establishment, it shook up the author. The article revolved around an interview with Toronto’s most powerful religious leader, Archbishop Aloysius Ambrozic, who used words (“frigging” and “bitch”) and expressed opinions (he called the late dictator Francisco Franco “a conservative Roman Catholic and not a bad fellow”) not expected from a man of the cloth. What perhaps facilitated this revealing look at Ambrozic was Coren’s status as a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, an honourary title bestowed on him for his religious writings, conferred by Ambrozic himself in an October 1992 ceremony. When a local paper printed reactions to the Toronto Life story a few days later, the church circled its wagons around Coren and began shooting.

“He’s an archbishop and he was vulgar,” Coren declares. “I submitted questions in advance and the interview took place, and obviously what they expected me to do was lie. And obviously what thousands of Roman Catholics expected me to do was lie. I still get hate mail about the article.”

Bernadette says Coren struggled with his decision to publish the piece-a dilemma between religion and journalistic integrity-and when it did get published, he was floored by the negative reaction. “They said you’ve been a Roman Catholic for only seven years [he was raised in a “secular Jewish household” and took instruction shortly before he met Bernadette]. I mean, that’s quite low. Michael has this idealistic view of life and every time something happens to change it, he’s shocked.”
Richler suggests that Coren’s reaction was no different from the reaction his Frank victims have. “What did he expect? He loves scandal but hates it when it comes his way,” Richler says. “He kicked sand in the faithfuls’ eyes-you have to expect a response.”

Coren now says, with an almost incredulous look on his face, that he doesn’t consider himself a Roman Catholic anymore, although he still prays. “The reaction to the piece was what finished it for me; the reaction from people in authority in the church who refused to look at what Ambrozic said, but wanted to attack me and kill the messenger. My wife is Catholic and the children will be raised Catholic, but that’s it. It’s just not there for me.”

ON ARRIVING IN CANADA, MICHAEL Coren deliberately set out to make a name for himself. He succeeded brilliantly. Now when editors want to shock their readers with unconventional opinions, they’re likely to call on Coren. Ten years ago, Barbara Amiel or Allan Fotheringham would have got the call.

A colleague calls Coren a “master of self-promotion.” He is, and he’s able to make a living because of it. But in Canada, someone who has Coren’s range and cutting panache is attacked more than applauded. “I don’t think he would be as successful as he is now if he had stayed in Britain,” says one local literary editor. “Canadians are suckers for a good English accent.”

Myrna Kostash, chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, says she’s just not interested in the way Coren sees the world. “I thought he was a type who disappeared the Englishman of dubious origin who came over and impressed the masses with his English accent,” she says. “I really find him like a premature stuffed shirt.”

Another acquaintance of Coren’s says while she appreciates his need to maintain a bombastic air, it’s precisely that air that irritates her no end. “I think it’s a pose,” she says. “I don’t think he actually believes there are feminist lesbians with studs coming after him. It’s an act that becomes very tiring.”

If so, she’s about to get even more tired: Coren has just begun a second column for the Globe, this one on the arts and literary scene; beginning this summer is a column for Saturday Night (the new editor will decide the subject area); in October, Coren’s young-adult biography of religious and children’s author C.S. Lewis will be released. Scheduled for sometime in 1995 is his next major biography, what Coren calls a “more orthodox look” at the life and times of Sherlockian author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

BACK IN HIS OFFICE, AN UNREPENTANT Corent takes all the criticism in stride. “People have called me an anti-Semite,” he says, as he repeatedly flops the unglued heel of his Brooks running shoe back and forth on his carpet. “I thought it was quite rich since my father’s family was massacred in the Holocaust. But I quite like that. I like people to think about me that aren’t true. I like to beguile.”

The study was conducted by Ryerson’s journalism chair, John Miller. He looked at front-page stories in nine Canadian newspapers for six randomly chosen days in 1993 (five in the case of The Whitehorse Star, because it only publishes Monday to Friday). Every byline was identified as male or female and each story was placed in one of 14 news categories, as was done in a similar American survey in 1992. What Miller found was that two-thirds of the stories that made page one were written by men-a number that roughly corresponds to the proportion of male editorial staffers, which is currently about 65 per cent nationally. However, there was considerable variation from paper to paper, and often the women were relegated to softer pieces. More than half of 5 the 212 front-page stories were about 0 crime, economics, and government.

Three times out of four, these top newstories were written by men. Women wrote mostly on less “important” topics, such as leisure activities, accidents, and social issues. Not a single story about agriculture and transportation, or science and technology was written by a woman, and of the eight health and medicine stories, only one was written by a woman. (Interestingly, women wrote five of the 14 stories on war and the military.)

The smallest-circulation paper in the study, The Whitehorse Star, which sells roughly 3,000 papers daily, had a front page that was 93 per cent written by women. Of course, three of the paper’s four reporters are women and managing editor Jackie Pierce owns 25 per cent of the paper as well. At Le Devoir, one of only eight dailies in Canada with a female publisher, fully half of all front-page stories by staff were the work of women.

The Windsor Star’s record was by far the worst: zero per cent, despite editor Jim Bruce’s guess that “we probably didn’t show that badly.” The other papers’ results ranged from a high of 3 7 per cent (The Montreal Gazette) to a low of 19 per cent (The Globe and Mail), with the remaining numbers as follows: the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 31 per cent; The Toronto Star, 26 per cent; the Calgary Herald, 25 per cent; The Vancouver Sun, 20 per cent.

Windsor Newspaper Guild president Gail Robertson was understandably appalled by the Star’s record: “Zero per cent over six days is a frightening look at where we’re headed,” she says. And the Globe’s foreign editor, Ann Rauhala, reacted to her own paper’s poor showing by saying, “If the story is told by 81 per cent white men then the picture is distorted.” However, Globe managing editor John Cruickshank dismisses Miller’s study as meaningless. “I’ve never thought of the front page in gender terms,” he says, “only as stories.” Besides, he adds, Globe writers are encouraged to get their stories on other prominent pages like Middle Kingdom or page one of Report on Business. “Other papers give their best people front because they don’t have anything else,” Cruickshank says. But Colin MacKenzie, the Globe’s deputy managing editor, contradicts Cruickshank: “Everyone cares if you get on the front. It means what you did that day was one of the top six stories.” He’s not the only one to disagree with his boss. Social trends reporter Alanna Mitchell says, “The raison d’etre of writing for a paper is to get on the front page.”

Jim Bruce points out that one reason women are badly represented on The Windsor Star’s front page is because there are too few in the newsroom overall: they make up only 27 per cent of the staff. A number of the other papers surveyed have a disproportionately low number of female staff as well: at Le Devoir, 27 per cent of the editorial staff are women (which makes its front-page results all the more notable), and the Gazette and the Chronicle-Herald have 29 and 32 per cent respectively. The number of female reporters in the country has been 35 per cent at least since the recession started, with its resulting hiring freezes and “restructuring.” Union leaders say job cuts hurt women more than men because women, being more recent hires, are usually the first to go in layoffs. “As I look around the newsroom, I see a sea of white male faces,” says The Windsor Star’s Gail Robertson. “And they’re not going to replenish all the women who left-who were hired during the good times because they can’t hire right now.” But are budgetary constraints just an excuse to divert attention from the glass ceiling that has long limited women’s prospects in the newsroom?

Margaret Philp, the Globe’s social policy reporter, points out that beat assignment and story placement are key to women getting stories on front. “Many of the influential or high-profile positions are held by men and that’s why they’re on the front page,” she says. “Rather than blatant sexism going on, it’s a case of who’s got what job.” Philp and others also point to the preponderance of men in management, a factor they say can lead to male managers assigning men to the big stories that are sure to get a front-page spot. MacKenzie is frank about the power structure: “Managers in newsrooms tend to be male, and they make decisions of who goes where.” Rauhala agrees: “Jobs seen as high status are still going disproportionately to men.”

This reality is particularly evident at The Windsor Star, where the big beats labour, environment, and police-are all held by men. The newest and highest profile, the casino beat, was recently given to a man. Moreover, all assignment editors at the Star are male and only one woman is in management. Her position? Assistant managing editor on the night desk.

Anne Jarvis, the Star’s education reporter, finds the situation dispiriting. “I have felt at various times throughout the three years I’ve been here that I don’t know how far my career can go here simply because I am a woman,” she says, “and I’m not the first to feel that.” Media Watch president Shari Graydon, a Vancouver communications consultant, believes the newsroom environment “is still quite hostile towards women.” George Pollard, a sociology professor at Carleton University who has been researching media employment trends in Canada for 14 years, agrees. He notes that for decades women have outnumbered men three-to-one at J-schools, but this hasn’t translated into similar numbers at newspapers. According to his research, “between 40 and 60 per cent of women never have any intention of going into daily news.” He blames “the rough-and-tumble, male dominated newsroom environment.” For the women who are at newspapers, the fact remains they may still be relegated to lower-profile beats. As a result, their stories are less likely to get the same major playas their male colleagues’. Philp cites the example of the Globe’s Patliament Hill bureau. “We’re the self-dubbed ‘National Newspaper’ and we have only one female [Susan Delacourt] out of nine writing from Ottawa.” Philp thinks there’s one other reason for women’s stories getting less front-page space: “The newspaper business is one of self-promotion, shameless self-promotion, and to make a sweeping generalization, men are better at that.”

The bold experiment that the article described was the cluster system, a radically different approach to the way stories are developed, reported, and presented. In the conventional newsroom one assignment editor directs 40 or so reporters. By contrast, under the cluster system, editorial employees belong to one of a half-dozen or so small groups, each of which generates stories under broad themes: “work/wealth,” for example, or “applause.” The theory is that working collaboratively leads to better story ideas and better stories. In the case of the Free Press, there were other goals too: according to Mcleod, these were a happier, more flexible staff and a “more responsive, attractive, and useful paper.”

Mcleod hoped this “responsiveness” would stop the paper’s circulation slide that had accelerated in the late 1980s.

Now, almost two years later, it’s apparent that Mcleod’s revolution has collapsed into chaos. Not only is circulation still soft-daily sales declined from an average of 113,000 to 111,000 between 1992 and 1993-but the Free Press newsroom is arguably the most miserable one in the country. last year, some reporters had taped a kind of mantra across the top of their computer monitors. It said, “Set me free in ’93.” Why have clusters been such a disaster at the Free Press when similar systems have been both popular and successful at other papers in Canada and the U.S.? The answer lies partly in the tumultuous recent history of the Free Press. But the heart of the answer is Philip Mcleod himself.

Some reporters say the collegial spirit of the Free Press died with Walter Blackburn, the last real newspaperman in the dynasty that had run the paper since 1853. An owner in the old-style paternalistic tradition, he rarely fired anyone. After his death in 1983, his paper passed to his daughter, Martha. From the start, she seemed to be more interested in circulating the family art collection paintings in the Blackburn building were rearranged every three months than in circulation figures, but her husband, Peter White, was happy to run the paper. When her marriage to White disintegrated in 1986, however, she had Blackburn Group executives ask him to leave. Associate publisher Jim Armitage took control of the paper. less than a year later he fired editor Bill Morley, who had been at the Free Press since 1959 and in the top editorial job for three years. Chip Martin, a reporter at the Free Press for 20 years, describes the shock wave as “seismic.”

Armitage hired the deputy managing editor of The Toronto Star, Philip Mcleod, to replace Morley. Mcleod was welcomed like a new stepparent: with hurt, jealousy, and mistrust. “He didn’t know anything about London; he didn’t know anything about a monopoly newspaper,” Martin says. Mcleod, who admits he isn’t gregarious, didn’t help

matters. He often communicated with his staff by memos. “I’m not interested in this, but you made me read it to the end,” reads a typical one-and that one was supposed to be positive. Or he would simply post his critiques in the newsroom.

Immediately upon his arrival, McLeod began planning a redesign to, as he said at the time, “put us on the cutting edge of new-wave journalism.” The result-a USA Today-style look with eight-inch stories, fact boxes, and lots of charts that was phased in starting in late 1988-was about as popular with the editorial staff as McLeod himself. Management employee relations continued to deteriorate. In early 1989 the paper unionized and the next year the staff went out on the first strike in half a century. Meanwhile, the redesign hadn’t fixed the Free Press’ circulation problems: the paper continued to lose readers. McLeod turned his attention from layout to the newsroom itself. As he explained to the Globe in mid-1992, “Unless we make a new and better connection with our readers, this paper…is going to go down the toilet.” In his view, the way to make that better connection was through changing the way his staff gathered and presented the news. But by the time clusters were fully launched in January 1993, the staff was mutinous. Under the circumstances, it would have been astonishing if the reorganization had been anything other than a failure.

Yet The Ottawa Citizen had smoothly moved to a system similar to the Free Press’ in 1987. Randall Denley, then the city editor, broke the city section up into a set of “pods,” each with its own assignment editor. The move had one practical goal: to respond to the reporters’ complaint that they weren’t getting enough feedback from their assignment editor, a harried individual responsible for assigning about 35 reporters. The pods are still in place and, as one reporter says, “I would be surprised if anyone would argue that the old system worked better than this.” The Vancouver Sun’s shift to newsroom teams in 1990 was equally successful, although the system has since been dismantled because staff cuts made it both an unaffordable luxury and some what unnecessary. As at the Citizen, the goals were purely practical: better feedback for reporters and better stories in the paper. To sell his fractious newsroom on the idea, city editor Gary Mason struck a committee to review team-style management. Mason made sure there was a representative from every faction in the newsroom on that committee, so when its members unanimously recommended the Sun try teams for a year, his selling job was done. Unfortunately, Philip McLeod is no salesman. The man who vowed to mould his newsroom into a superlative communication machine is himself a lousy communicator. This is the editor, after all, who says his door is always open, yet he once asked a reporter’s supervisor to tell the reporter to stop dropping in. McLeod says his goal this year is to head out into the newsroom. One section editor responds sadly, “That’s been Phil’s goal for seven years.” Whatever McLeod’s problems of talking to his staff, the message that clusters don’t work has been forcefully communicated to at least one other paper in the country. In January 1993, when The Hamilton Spectator management proposed studying the system as one of a number of possible solutions to its own circulation crisis, there was so much resistance that management immediately took clusters off the list. Deputy managing editor Gerry Nott says categorically, “We are 10,000 miles away from the cluster system.” The word about the disaster at the Free Press has even reached the west coast. Gary Mason says, “I’ve heard more about complaining at the Free Press than I have about complaining at any paper in Canada right now. It seems to be the newsroom that’s in the most turmoil.” It would be unfair to say that the entire Free Press newsroom hates the system. Richard Hoffman, who has been at the Free Press for four years and leads the community cluster, likes the collaborative aspect of the system and believes it has handed more power down to reporters. And people who fill the editorial/forum pages give credit to the cluster approach for allowing them “to try wacky stuff.” Hoffman says, “If people set aside their rage, sometimes the cluster system allows you to create the best stuff possible.”

But Hoffman also faults management for interfering with the system by continuing to hand down orders as if the old newsroom were still there. The senior managers at the paper were known collectively as the “G- 7 ,” or as one staffer called them, the “G- 7 Fortress.” Recently someone in the fortress decreed that after 22 years as drama critic, Doug Bale would instead sit by a phone each night and take amateur sports scores. He tried to find out who had made the decision, and why: “I was told it was a decision of the editorship.” The message seems to be that dissidents like Bale are supposed to leave. “The buyout packages came six months after clusters, so it’s not as if there was no way out,” says Mary Nesbitt, the associate editor, matter-of-factly.

Given McLeod’s unshaken commitment to clusters, it seems that quitting will continue to be the only way out for unhappy staff. Even McLeod acknowledges the reorganization is failing. “In some cases clusters are not working at all. They appear to be largely dysfunctional.” No matter. He also says, “I’ve got a stubborn streak-some goddamn determination to make the thing work, regardless of whether or not it should. That may be my fatal flaw.”

Dave Dauphinee, a member of the planning committee that conceived the cluster system, maintains the system does not exist today. “Clusters exist on the pieces of paper that were collected during the two years the committee existed. They don’t exist in fact. I guess you could equate the theory of clusters with the theory of communism: It seemed like a good idea at the time