Standing in ankle-deep snow, Peter Lynch, director of Project Grizzly, had a vision he wanted to portray. The documentary he was filming focused on Troy Hurtubise, a self-professed mountain man whose quest was to find a grizzly bear and grapple with it, wearing a handmade suit of armour. Rather than following Hurtubise around for weeks or months-an expensive endeavour his budget couldn’t cover-Lynch planned a 15 day film shoot in Banff, Alberta, that would tell of Hurtubise’s search and explore mythological aspects of Canadiana. Lynch wanted his film to be true to his subject’s mountain man image. So when Hurtubise emerged from his tent and lathered himself for a shave, Lynch had no qualms about agreeing to shoot what followed. Taking his hunting knife, Hurtubise dragged it along his face, continuing until he appeared clean-shaven. What Lynch had chosen not to film, however, was Hurtubise shaving himself with a Bic razor only moments before.

Lynch is one of many documentary filmmakers who emphasize drama in their documentaries more than factual truth. But commonplace as dramatic techniques may be, their use is debated within the documentary community. Filmmakers who approach documentaries from the cinematic tradition embrace dramatic technique as a valuable tool in storytelling. But filmmakers who approach documentaries as a purely journalistic vehicle object to the use of drama, saying that it clouds facts and confuses viewers. Still, it’s evident from newsmagazine and documentary shows that even journalistic documentaries are using dramatic techniques more and more. The problem arises, journalist filmmakers say, when the audience can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s fiction. It’s true that strictly journalistic documentaries make a point of letting viewers know when they are using dramatic techniques, like recreated scenes, while cinematic documentary filmmakers don’t think that’s necessary. In theory, a purely journalistic documentary aims to witness unfolding events. A cinematic documentary filmmaker, however, takes liberties, feeling free to recreate events or insert symbolic scenes without labelling them as such. To Lynch, factual accuracy is less important than telling a good story. Deceiving viewers about what instrument Hurtubise used for shaving, says Lynch, isn’t as important as the image the documentary is trying to portray. For him, Hurtubise being portrayed as a mountain man is every bit as legitimate-and lots more entertaining-as Hurtubise sitting down, explaining his intentions in front of the camera. “It is a documentary in the sense that it’s a real story about a real character,” is how Lynch defends his decision.

Fact and fiction have been jostling for position ever since John Grierson-the pioneer of the British and North American documentary form and one of the founders of the National Film Board of Canada-was credited with coining the term “documentary film”. He first used it in a 1926 essay to describe Robert Flaherty’s, Moana, a 1926 film about the daily life of Samoan islanders. Flaherty was one of the first filmmakers to push the boundary between reality and dramatization. In his first film, the 1922 Nanook of the North, Flaherty had Nanook, an Inuit, perform certain daily tasks over and over again while being filmed. Although the tasks Flaherty shot were all ones Nanook really did daily, Flaherty scripted the scenes so the filmmaker could capture enough footage to recreate the events as if they were unfolding. In this sense, Flaherty’s film technique of capturing reality-which Grierson described as the creative treatment of reality-was the first of its kind. Before Flaherty, events had long been filmed in a simple straightforward manner in newsreels-ever since the Lumi?re brothers of France invented the cin?matographie in March 1895. The newsreel provided a graphic, eyewitness account that print couldn’t match. It showed actual events in plain terms without bias or a point of view. Although the genre has become extinct, newsreels were popular in the late 1920s and 1930s and provided a foundation for other nonfiction forms, such as broadcast news reports and editorial documentaries.

Over time, the plain and prosaic evolved and nondramatic documentary film techniques began to develop. One of the more influential of these was cin?ma v?rit?, popular in the 1960s. Direct cinema also caught on around this time. Although both techniques depict reality as it actually happens, direct cinema (which has its roots in cin?ma v?rit?) takes things one step further, removing the filmmaker from the situation entirely. This means no narration and a third-person tone. News coverage on TV began to change. Lindalee Tracey, a documentary filmmaker who directed the 1997 film Invisible Nation about illegal immigrants in Canada which aired on TVOntario, surmises that journalism became involved in documentaries when The Journal, the CBC public affairs program that ran from 1982 until 1992, began to style its news stories in a documentary fashion, using techniques like cin?ma v?rit?. Viewers grew accustomed to a stylish presentation of stories, complete with factual accuracy.

Mary Ellen Armstrong, editor of RealScreen, a trade magazine for documentary filmmakers, also believes that viewers tend to think of documentaries and news in the same category. During the 1960s, factually accurate documentaries commissioned by the NFB were used in schools as part of the curriculum. Viewers naturally came to consider documentaries as “true”. Even today that expectation exists. In the 1993 documentary series, Constructing Reality, produced by the NFB, students and teachers are asked what they consider a documentary to be. Many answer that they consider a documentary to be, as one teacher puts it, a “nonfiction subject treated in a nondramatic way or for the purpose of informing.” When another teacher is asked if a documentary would affect her in a different way if she found out that it contained actors, she replied that yes, she would because the “people are actors and just playing a role and it isn’t reality so it doesn’t emit the same kind of feeling.” Barbara Mainguy, editor of POV (for point of view), a trade magazine for independent filmmakers, thinks the whole debate about the use of dramatic techniques in documentaries is so lively because people feel cheated and pissed off when they feel lied to.

Over the past five years, with the proliferation of cable specialty channels, documentaries have been growing in popularity. Discovery Channel, a science and nature station that relies mostly on documentaries to fill its schedule, was voted the most-watched specialty channel by television viewers in 1997. More broadcasters are willing to feature documentaries than ever before. In the past, CBC rarely showed documentaries. If it did commission one, it was usually produced in-house. Today, the Newsworld series Rough Cuts airs 22 to 26 one-hour documentaries by independent filmmakers each year. Even filmmakers are jumping in. “A few years ago, everybody had a feature film script in their back pocket.” says Gordon Henderson, a senior producer of CBC’s upcoming Canadian history series and an independent filmmaker. “Now everybody seems to have a documentary.” With interest in documentaries growing, filmmakers are eager to experiment with different techniques, such as dramatic scenes, to create engaging stories that entice viewers.

The controversy comes to a head when filmmakers and broadcasters-even the Senate-try to predict how sophisticated the viewer is in interpreting fictional elements in a generally nonfictional genre. Trina McQueen, president of Discovery Channel, believes that viewers-sophisticated or not-deserve mostly factual programming. She commissions and buys only documentaries that follow a certain code of ethics. She looks for mainstream documentaries that focus more on the journalistic and less on the cinematic. “You have to have the trust of the viewer, and once you break that bond you are very much in trouble. A film is truthful if what it says to the viewer is what actually happened in filmmaking.” Mark McInnis, the executive producer of documentaries at CTV, shows only factually correct documentaries and agrees that viewers must be aware of what sections in a documentary are dramatically recreated. However, Rudy Buttignol, creative head of documentaries for TVO, does show docs with dramatic elements.

It’s not surprising that Brendan Christie, an assistant editor and senior writer at RealScreen, thinks that broadcasters use a “cookie cutter” approach when commissioning. Most, he says, use the same format and cover the same range of topics. Christie believes viewers are more savvy than broadcasters give them credit for.

Even when they do grasp what’s accurate and what’s not, they don’t always like documentaries to combine the two. In 1992, the CBC commissioned the war series The Valour and the Horror, directed by Brian and Terence McKenna. It was very controversial for many reasons, among them whether its use of dramatic techniques was ethical. The complaint was that the dramatic segments involving actors quoting memoirs, reading letters of the dead, and reenacting battle scenes were factually misleading and poorly researched. In May 1993, Brian McKenna defended his use of dramatic techniques in front of the Senate subcommittee on veterans affairs, stating: “To bring the stories home, even more powerfully, we decided to take the letters and stories of the men and women who fought and bring them to life employing the skills of professional actors. The central reason for this technique was to communicate to the new generations of viewers that inside the old men with blue tams and clinking medals are the young men who went to war.” The Senate saw things differently. “Even when the words spoken by actors accurately reflect the historical record, bias and misinterpretation can easily be manipulated in dramatic scenes through facial expression or tone of voice…. While the blending of drama and documentary may be more entertaining for the average viewer, it blurs the lines between fact and fiction and ultimately misleads the audience.”

Still, some documentaries do contain dramatic recreations that clearly don’t mislead the viewer. Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line is a classic example of how dramatic recreations and facts can marry and still form a documentary that isn’t misinterpreted. The film explores the events surrounding the 1976 shooting death of a police officer. Throughout the film, the dramatic recreation of the officer getting shot is used over the over again, but what is real and what is reenacted is obvious. During reenactments the picture is distinctly grainier, with exaggerated close-ups of people and of objects. Morris also uses such cinematic techniques as slow motion and repetition; the police officer twirls around and falls again and again after getting shot.

Although Morris could have told the story using just interviews and archival documents such as court transcripts, he wanted to create a film that was not just credible but engaging. And to produce something engaging, cinematic documentary filmmakers feel they shouldn’t be constricted by precise renderings of reality. Lindalee Tracey’s major complaint with journalistic documentaries is that they try to be balanced rather than developing a point of view. Even Morris hates to be called a “documentary filmmaker” because of the images the term conjures up. In the April 1989 Washington Journalism Review, Morris said that “one of the things I loathe about many documentary films is that they come off as some bad species of journalism-that one doesn’t feel the filmmaker behind the film?. The idea that somehow you’re a slave to reality in making a nonfiction film-I don’t think that’s true at all. What you are is in an odd relationship to reality.”

Odd or not, Morris does manage to produce work that is entertaining and credible. What makes that possible is that “people’s words aren’t being manipulated,” says Barri Cohen, advising editor of POV magazine and a documentary filmmaker. “He uses different means, like a palate, to express that truth. The question isn’t whether it ceases to be a documentary. The question is whether it’s expanded as a documentary.”

Lindalee Tracey agrees. In her own films, she employs dramatic techniques to supplement the facts. InInvisible Nation she uses shots of people from different ethnic origins standing in different outdoor settings. She filmed one East Indian businessman, for instance, facing the camera in front of a downtown office tower. In another shot, an Asian man, his chest naked, holds a spade, also facing the camera. She wanted to show that a variety of people make up our country’s mosaic. Tracey sees documentaries as a form with artistic licence. Although they are based on facts, those facts can be arranged to affect the viewer. Using dramatic techniques is almost a necessity, she says, because the attention span of the average viewer is becoming shorter. “It’s not good enough just to be ‘worthy’ anymore, because frankly, people don’t know what worthy is”-viewers want to watch something that’s entertaining, but informative as well. Deceiving the viewer isn’t a concern for Tracey because she uses dramatic techniques judiciously in her works-only, she says, when her research supports them.

Still, scrupulous research doesn’t always justify the use of dramatic techniques. In 1998, the BBC revealed that the famed marine biologist and filmmaker, Jacques Cousteau, had staged some underwater scenes in his nature documentaries. In one, some former crew members later confessed, Cousteau taped footage of an octopus scrambling out of a tank and hopping overboard. What the viewer didn’t see was that Cousteau had poured bleach into the tank before he started filming.

Howard Bernstein, a former executive producer of news and current affairs at the CBC and a broadcasting instructor at Ryerson Polytechnic University, finds Cousteau’s deception indefensible. He believes that it’s entirely possible for a documentary to be interesting without containing any staged dramatic elements.

One good example is the CBC-commissioned documentary Warrendale, about an institution for emotionally disturbed children. Directed by Allan King in 1965, it was the most well-known documentary of its time for its use of cin?ma v?rit?. Famed for its gritty portrayal of the children, the film was made without directing the children or staff, without narration and without King’s telling the camera operator where to point the hand-held camera. Without a single planned scene, Warrendale made for riveting footage, documenting the emotional roller-coaster that the children went through and the staff’s efforts to control the children’s outbursts.

Another notable example of a compelling nondramatic documentary was 1989’s Roger & Me, about the General Motors plant closing and layoffs in Flint, Michigan. In the film, director Michael Moore plays GM as the villain that brought down Flint’s economy. Mostly, the documentary was famed for its attack on a large corporation. In many ways, both films easily lent themselves to the nondramatic format-the subject matter simply suited the treatment. In Warrendale, young children swore and screamed while the staff struggled to hold on them-reality was dramatic. In Roger & Me, watching this David try to corner Goliath with wit and daring made for great unrehearsed entertainment

While Roger & Me attracted moviegoers to theatres, Warrendale languished unseen for 30 years. Its content was so raw and disturbing that the CBC-despite having commissioned the film-refused to air it. Then TVO’s Rudy discovered in conversation with Allan King that Warrendale had never been shown. Buttignol decided to broadcast the documentary in January 1997 and it became one of the station’s greatest rating successes, drawing 200,000 viewers. People flooded TVO with phone calls, saying they had enjoyed the documentary and wondering what had happened to the children and staff of Warrendale.

While Buttignol is a fan of this type of documentary, he’s less keen about those that use dramatic techniques-precisely because they can mislead viewers. Still, he does enjoy some of them, like Project Grizzly. TVO’s commitment to provide diverse programming leaves him “begrudgingly open to a challenge.” But Buttignol’s ambivalence reflects the conflicted nature of the whole debate. Because there are so many grey areas to the use of dramatic techniques, most filmmakers, broadcasters, and writers say they can only assess whether such techniques are justifiable on a case-by-case basis. Buttignol has developed a theory to explain the conflict in using dramatic elements. “In fiction, the filmmaker asks the audience to suspend their disbelief. The audience consciously knows that they have to forget that the actors are play-acting. In documentary, we do the opposite. We ask the audience never to suspend their disbelief. When you have documentary and dramatic scenes together, subconsciously these two ideas, these two preconditions, clash in the viewer’s mind.”

As vehemently as cinematic documentary filmmakers may defend dramatic techniques, even they agree on where to draw the line. All draw it clearly between their work and outright fabrication. Just last December, a British documentary called The Connection, which aired on CBC’s The Passionate Eye series and CBS’s 60 Minutes, drew controversy for faking a story on the Colombian heroin smuggling operation. Almost everything in the documentary turned out to be false: actors had posed as actual drug runners, settings were staged. The film’s key interviews-supposedly with the drug cartel boss and a mule smuggling heroin into Britain-were completely bogus. The deception didn’t go unnoticed and wasn’t tolerated. Carlton Communications broadcasting, which produced The Connection, had promised to refund all overseas broadcasters that purchased the film. It also returned the eight national and international awards the film had won.

While it’s easy to agree on cases like The Connection, ambiguity remains. Chances are that debate-about whether and in what cases dramatic techniques are justifiable-will continue without ever being resolved. Lindalee Tracey, for one, welcomes it. It’s vital, she says, to continue discussing the issue: “The notion that people can use the power of the media to tell lies is frightening and so possible that we have to stay vigilant.”

Blissfully sleeping for about five hours in a tent pitched on snow as hard as concrete, Jerry Kobalenko isn’t disturbed by the 24 hours of daylight and -15?C air of the polar desert. The writer, drawn to Arctic exploration, has travelled all night and is halfway through a 500-kilometre trek, camping on Ellesmere Island, the most northern point of land in the world, engrossed in field research he will later incorporate into a book and an article for Outdoor Canada. What does wake him on this May morning in 1989 is an unfamiliar noise that he cannot describe but knows can only be one thing.

In long underwear, Kobalenko peeks out his tent. His sled, which he purposely parked 15 metres away in the hope that any passing critters would play with it instead of him, is gone. Kobalenko peers to the left. About 40 metres away, he spots his overturned sled and, scattered across the snow, all his provisions. Beside it is the culprit licking frozen cocoa dregs from his mug: a huge, hungry polar bear.

Alone, with no radio, Kobalenko thinks methodically. He pulls on wind pants, a parka, fluffy camp booties, and grabs a 12-gauge shotgun, flicks off the safety, and goes outside. Hearing Kobalenko, the polar bear looks up, leaves the sled in an instant, and jogs toward Kobalenko as if to say: “It’s my grub now and I’m not giving it up!” The bear closes in to about 15 metres when Kobalenko raises the shotgun and fires a one-ounce slug. He misses. The gun, which has no shoulder rest, recoils, slamming Kobalenko in the mouth. Still, the blast causes the bear to veer off. Kobalenko, bleeding, stumbles to retrieve what’s left of his equipment. The grey duffel bag containing his food, his means to survival, is missing, but the damage to his sled, a six-inch crack, is more of a love-tap.

Survival in the wild-la survivance-is a traditional theme in Canadian wildlife writing that dates back more than a century and continues to manifest itself in contemporary wildlife journalism, as it did in Kobalenko’s story. Established by pioneering narratives of men and women persevering in the harsh Canadian bush and tales of animals suffering from human encroachment, the genre still evokes notions of Canadian victimization, both animal and human.

But today’s wildlife writers face additional challenges to their survival. Even though Canada possesses one of the largest areas of uninhabited land in the world and wildlife is part of our national consciousness-a fingerprint of our identity-there are only a few venues that publish wildlife journalism in Canada and these cater to a fairly small readership. The limited resources of most magazines make it difficult to fund time-consuming excursions into the field, such as Kobalenko’s. The results are lower market profiles, diminished recognition, and a paltry payback. In addition to financial challenges, bringing wildlife stories to the public remains a monumental task. Working with nonhuman subjects and trying to attract readers who crave a link to their own lives forces wildlife journalists to employ unique narrative strategies and to play up an animal’s appeal. In this age of doom-and-gloom environmental reportage, writing about “pure” nature and the wonders of animals is even more difficult. Despite the hardy tradition and the importance of nature to Canadian identity, the genre is still in a delicate, unstable situation, perhaps more in its infancy than its grandeur. Survival, for Canadian wildlife journalism, remains an ultimate goal; the outcome is uncertain.

Canadian wildlife journalism is rooted in a strong literary practice that began more than 300 years ago. “It’s a very peculiar literary tradition,” says Rick Boychuk, editor of Canadian Geographic. In journals and letters home, explorers and settlers wrote about their fascination for and fear of nature. The Canadian attitude toward nature was split: it was both monstrous and beautiful. Human survival in the wild and death by nature were staple themes before the turn of the century. But as our exploitation of nature increased, writing about the threats and the harshness of the Canadian bush started to wane. Nature and its wild inhabitants were coming to be seen as victims.

In the late 19th century, two forefathers of the genre, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, began writing factual accounts of animals poisoned, caught in traps, snares, and cages. They developed a new and novel approach-telling the story from an individual creature’s point of view, creating sympathy for the animal and vilifying man. The stories in Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known went even further, relating the inner emotions of the suffering creature. Projecting human emotion onto animals may not be an objective representation, journalistically speaking, but the technique provided an entry into the animals’ psyche that provoked readers to take a stronger interest in the well-being of something other than themselves.

Canada’s first major conservationist, Grey Owl, of English decent but living as an Apache, continued this tradition, writing four books about his “beaver people” to save the creature from overtrapping in the 1930s. He gave the beavers names-McGinty, McGinnis, and Jelly Roll-and wrote about their emotions and social interaction in an attempt to give them value beyond their pelts.

Contemporary animal scribes-even while deciphering complex behaviour, population cycles, and ecosystems-still employ narrative strategies developed by Grey Owl, Seton, and Roberts. Journalists often zoom in on one creature, which offers the reader a closer, more personal link to the larger group and issues. Vancouver writer Daniel Wood introduces us to “Lola” the wolverine in his Equinox article “Glutton for Punishment,” and to “Bean” in the Beautiful B.C. piece “Cougars on the Rebound.” Alberta writer Sid Marty begins his Canadian Geographic grizzly bear story “Homeless on the Range” with the tale of “Four Toes.” The choice to use what are essentially biologists’ tag names-naming nonetheless-works to create a subject readers can relate to.

Although writing in the animal’s voice is rare today, practitioners do speak on behalf of their nonhuman subjects, creating sympathy for them by vilifying their opponents. In contemporary wildlife writing, human interference, diminished habitats, and overhunting are common antagonists that threaten the “animal hero.” Wayne Grady, one of Canada’s best nature writers and science editor of Equinox, provides a concerned voice for coyotes in his article “The Haunting Powers of God’s Dog.” And like his predecessors, Grady enforces the theme of animal victimization. He writes: “After World War I, we threw cyanide canisters into coyote dens, as if the dens were bunkers. We’ve run them down with snowmobiles until their hearts burst. We’ve sawed off their lower jaws and then let them go so that they would starve to death. We’ve wrapped them in burlap bags soaked in gasoline, set torches to them, and turned them loose in the desert. After World War II, we used new poisons.”

While concern for the environment has spurred much current work, wildlife writers-who, like Jerry Kobalenko, plead boredom with the typical issue-as-villain narrative structure-are also writing stories in which the “pure” natural world figures. “A few years ago, when the environment was the hot subject, everyone was doing environmental smoke stack stories,” says Kobalenko, “and the problem is virtually every environmental story is boring. It’s so hard to make all those political machinations and sorry details interesting. These stories were originally presented a little bit like CBC radio-it’s supposed to be good for you, so, like cod liver oil, you swallow it. But magazines and newspapers, being businesses, quickly realized that people weren’t reading these environmental stories very much so they’re not quite that popular anymore.” Alan Morantz, editor ofEquinox until late January, says it doesn’t depend on us “screwing up” animals’ lives. “It’s just accepting them, accepting their really wondrous natural history. As far as I’m concerned, that’s good enough. It doesn’t need any more storyline than that.”

But stories without conflict or antagonists are difficult to make interesting, as is featuring nonhuman subjects as central characters. Stripped of the usual tool of interviewing their subjects, wildlife writers have developed other techniques to get the story. Simply interviewing an expert biologist is not enough. Wildlife reporters are driven to get close to their subjects, observe them, and experience them, rather than rely on background material or what researchers say. Morantz says the best wildlife journalists write about what they see in the purest sense and tend to notice subtleties. He says mainstream journalists get the facts right but miss many of the small details that good wildlife writers catch.

This, along with traditional research, renders an authenticity that is characteristic of wildlife writing. But readers, as much as they may be fascinated by wildlife, still crave a human connection in these stories. Wayne Lynch, a Calgary-based science writer and photographer who specializes in animal behaviour, says the success of wildlife writing depends on building a sturdy bridge between animals and humans. “People love to read about themselves,” he says. “This is what people want, this is what makes animals more interesting. Boy, are we self-centred.”

Fulfilling this desire for a link between readers’ lives and an animal’s often comes in the form of first-person narration. Daniel Wood’s article “Cougars on the Rebound,” in the Winter 1996 issue of Beautiful B.C.magazine, is a prime example. Wood, who has worked in the media for nearly 25 years, spends much of his time in the bush trying to recreate his experiences in writing for armchair naturalists to enjoy. In this article, he describes creeping through a near-impenetrable forest on Vancouver Island in search of the province’s largest wildcat. By inserting himself into the story, he allows readers access to his emotions and senses, to the point where they can almost feel the blood drain from his body when confronted by a brawny puma: “I’m frozen-motionless-in the ankle deep snow, listening to the eerie ffft ffft ffft sound of footsteps. Wildlife biologist Apryl Hahn is standing beside me, the earphones of her radio receiver now collaring her neck, her eyes peering as intently as mine into the dense and dripping second-growth Douglas-fir forest just ahead. We see nothing. … I can hear the electronic bip bip bipping, crisp and insistent, issuing from Hahn’s earphones. … And then it happens. From behind a rotten, snow-covered cedar stump-astoundingly close-a cougar suddenly appears: orange-brown, massive, its tail swishing, its head turned in our direction, its eyes staring at the two wilderness intruders. The cat is less than 10 metres away. We freeze.”

Wood says he “earned his stripe” to appear in the article. He believes in buying his way into a story, not simply including himself as a way of making it more appealing to readers. “It’s best if the writer is in the bush, in the woods, on the water, where the wild animals are,” says Wood.

To lure readers, some practitioners also write in an elevated style, employing poetic and lyrical devices often not characteristic of journalism. Poet and writer Sid Marty, who has worked as a park warden in the Canadian Rockies for 13 years, is a master of this narrative strategy. In an article that appeared in the September/October 1995 issue of Canadian Geographic titled “The Lynx and the Hare,” Marty details his sub-Arctic adventure tracking down Noda-a mysterious male lynx who’s managed to outwit a high-tech radio tracking system designed by the Pentagon. The conclusion to the story is a remarkable example of the literary prowess of this wildlife writer: “Two dark beings towered up through a swirl of falling powder on the white surface of Wolverine Lake, horned and watchful. They turned suddenly into bison, bison a prairie boy had never imagined seeing among black spruce and tamarack. Just as suddenly, they set off at a gallop and vanished into the far shadows of the black spruce where, doubtless, Noda’s great luminous eyes watched, noted, and then blinked shut, willing the night to come on, come on, and make a warm white creature run once more.”

While wildlife journalists have continued to push the boundaries of their genre with such inventive narrative strategies, the public is still a reluctant consumer of wildlife journalism. Lynch says just because we’re surrounded by nature or interested in wildlife doesn’t mean we want to read about it. There remain only two big Canadian publications for such stories: Canadian Geographic and Equinox. Smaller magazines, such asNature Canada and Seasons, cater to a specialized market made up of Canadian Nature Federation and Federation of Ontario Naturalists members, respectively, with little newsstand presence.

With a small market, limited readership, and few outlets, wildlife writing is anything but a lucrative business. The smaller nature magazines pay writers in the range of $500 to $1,200 for a feature story, depending on the author and the length. Nature Canada, for instance, pays a meager 25 cents per word, while Canadian Geographic offers $1 per word. Many of the magazines that publish wildlife articles have limited funds to send writers into the field. Many writers think there aren’t enough magazines to support the amount of time, research, and money required to produce wildlife stories. Still, they take the poor returns because the job fuels their passions if not their pocketbooks.

Kobalenko, who finds much urban journalism dull, says he’s not interested in who’s repairing the sidewalk cracks in Brampton or some political scandal. “I and a lot of outdoor professionals live and breathe what we do, and it’s not a great living. People at The Toronto Star bring in a nice, fat paycheck, whereas here you’re not making a living, you’re supporting a lifestyle.”

The magazines, as well, have faced turbulent times. Outdoor Canada, bought by Camar Publications Ltd. last summer, is undergoing an editorial shift from a general outdoors publication to one that covers more “traditional” activities such as hunting and fishing-because apparently that’s what readers want. In 1996,Equinox was sold by Telemedia Communications Inc. to the smallish Malcolm Publishing Inc. in Montreal, which also houses Canadian Wildlife and would buy Harrowsmith Country Life a month later. Malcolm proceeded to replace the entire editorial staff, except for Morantz, who was appointed editor and the only full-time staff member. Malcolm has since tried to return Equinox to its “roots” by doing longer, more heavily researched wildlife stories. But with a fairly minuscule budget over the last couple of years, the magazine has been forced to find alternatives to expensive field stories that require travel.

In comparison, American outdoor and nature magazines, such as Outside, are flourishing. Outside‘s success is perhaps partially due to its consumption of nature perspective. Articles offer readers information on how to “use” nature, with stories about extreme outdoor adventures and wildlife excursions, revealing of the way Americans have traditionally viewed nature. Historically, American wildlife writing featured the hunter as protagonist as opposed to the animal. The stories were about challenging and ultimately conquering nature. Animal deaths were not projected as tragic but rather as successful. Although this hunter/hunted relationship is less obvious in contemporary writing, the split between humans and animals is still apparent. Writing about nature as an “otherness” to be conquered or consumed lends itself nicely to a “consumer” editorial format. Even the American magazine Wildlife Conservation has departments and stories that focus on what animals can give humans, such as “Star Attractions,” “At the Zoo,” “Where Things Are Hopping,” and information on other wildlife hot spots.

The uncertainty of the Canadian market for wildlife journalism makes for differing opinions on editorial direction and, sometimes, testy relations between writers and editors. Insufficient budgets for field research and low fees mean a lot of writers are punching out fast, easy stories. Lynch believes the quality of wildlife writing is failing as a result. “There are so many magazines with superficial stories and quick and dirty 1,100 words on all you ever wanted to know about the walrus.” Such stories, says Lynch, are mediocre at best because they lack personal observation and new insight, simply regurgitating already published research. Lynch believes it’s crucial for wildlife writers to “get out and get dirty,” as he puts it. “They sit in their little house in front of their computer and they say, ‘I think I’ll do a book on eagles,’ or ‘I think I’ll do a book on bears. I’ve never seen a bear, but I’ll read the literature and I’ll talk about it anyway.'”

Barbara Stevenson, editor of Nature Canada, agrees that financial constraints (like her $5,000 per issue writer budget) not only make it tough for writers to do original research, but also difficult for editors to attract quality writers with specialized knowledge. She believes some writers may depend too much on the personal and poetic song and dance, rendering articles saccharine. Victoria Foote, associate editor of Seasons, says nature magazines, including the Federation of Ontario Naturalists’, are straying too much into the entertainment zone. They are not as challenging as they should be, leaving difficult issues untackled because they want to present the feel-good version of things. Stevenson agrees but acknowledges that readers also need a lift from the constant dose of heavy issues.

The kind of animals magazines feature sparks discord as well. For magazines such as Canadian Geographic,Equinox, and Outdoor Canada, stories about the bigger, more ferocious animals seem to be the key to intriguing readers. But in smaller nature mags, with a committed member reader, lightweight critters such as birds, rodents, frogs, and insects make the cut. Daniel Wood says we are losing sight of the real web of nature, which includes small animals, plants, and microbes. Shrews, he says, have a lot less sex appeal than bears and therefore don’t get the play they deserve. Wood believes readers should be exposed to it all, not just the big, mean or cute and romantic parts, so he takes a more provocative stance in his work: “I’ve always made sure that there are animals eating other animals, and I write about their sex life, and I show pictures of their dung.”

But the ultimate decision over which animals are profiled and how they are presented in a magazine is the editor’s. Lynch says what readers are getting is often an urban editor’s version of the story, not the writer’s, who has likely just spent a lengthy amount of time in the field. “They edit extremely heavily,” says Lynch. “I deal with publishing houses all over the world, and I’m constantly astounded by editors from Paris, editors from Tokyo, editors from Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, trying to tell me how to portray a walrus, and they’ve never seen a walrus!”

Beyond the squabbles, the future of the genre may be looking up. In 1987, 1991, and 1996, government surveys showed that more than 80 per cent of the Canadian population participates in wildlife activities such as reading wildlife books and magazines or watching wildlife films. The Print Measurement Bureau survey, which measures total readers of magazines, indicates that Equinox and Canadian Geographic are gaining readers, with Equinox up from 525,000 in 1997 to 573,000 in 1998, and Canadian Geographic up from 798,000 to 818,000 in the same period.

And if this is any indication of consumer appeal, putting a critter on the cover (and a big one at that) usually results in good sales for magazines. Equinox, which tries to run at least one animal story every issue, has animal covers on half of its six yearly publications. The editor of Canadian Geographic, Rick Boychuk, says issues that display animals on the front do very well on newsstands. Animal stories are also appearing in general-interest magazines and online publications as the outdoors grow in popularity among urban dwellers. Ten years ago, the only animal you would have found in Toronto Life would have been served up between two slices of rye. But over the last five years, the city lifestyle magazine has published several stories on nature and wildlife-about urban raccoons, termites eating the city, and an exploration of the forests along the sides of the Don Valley Parkway. Even the story of Grey Owl is getting exposure-Hollywood style. The movie is scheduled to appear on the big screen in spring 1999 with Pierce Brosnan cast as the Canadian legend.

There is also hope that popularity for the genre will come from a younger generation. Seasons‘ Victoria Foote believes that while aging boomers are saying, “Don’t clutter our lives with another issue, we just want to know where we can go for a good hike,” younger people are more savvy when it comes to environment issues. “In high school, kids are much more educated about the environment than I ever was,” says Foote. “We didn’t talk about the environment at all. Now, a lot of kids are vegetarians for political reasons. It never would have occurred to me to do that.”

A new generation of readers who view nature as something more than a retreat for human use may liberate writers and editors to present a greater range of subjects without putting the story teller or techniques front and centre. As Morantz says, “We have to eat, we have to make love, and we have to know who we’re a part of and what we’re a part of. It seems so basic to me.” As Jerry Kobalenko’s experience suggests, there is wonder in that. Scared but determined, Kobalenko followed the polar bear’s tracks to a ravine about 75 metres away and recovered what was left of his food. Interestingly, the polar bear had not ripped open the duffel bag with bestial force, but had hooked one of its claws through a loop of fabric and opened the zipper daintily. The bear also passed up two kilograms of smelly kielbasa sausage in favour of chocolate and, with connoisseur know-how, ignored the Swiss and went for the Belgian.

The wondrous details made Kobalenko recall an episode he experienced as a three year old living in Montreal, when he developed his fascination with nature. Kobalenko was watching his mother scrub the balcony when he spotted a black caterpillar about to be squished beneath the mop. He shouted, “Mom, don’t!” and tenderly rescued the caterpillar from the dangly strands and let it crawl away in the garden below. Weeks later, Kobalenko and his mother were in the garden when suddenly a black butterfly appeared. She said, “Look! It’s the caterpillar come back to thank you.”

“I want to be in a position to average out 1.5 [million dollars],” says Don Meehan, a National Hockey League player agent, as he argues with Bill Watters, assistant to the president for the Toronto Maple Leafs, over a new contract for Tie Domi.

“Jesus Christ!” responds Watters. He pauses. “Well, that’s not a bad raise. That’s 250 percent!”

The negotiation continues until the narrator’s voice breaks in: “Tie Domi, a seven-year NHL veteran, is a fan favourite in Toronto. And scoring goals has little to do with it.” Then comes a sequence of shots accompanied by eerie, slow music. First, Domi lands three straight lefts in a slow-motion punch-up with Buffalo’s Rob Ray. Next, Domi chases down an opponent, landing a body check to muscle control of the puck. Then another slow-motion shot shows Domi, arms intertwined with an opponent and a linesman, giving an icy, murderous stare. Finally, a linesman breaks up the Domi/Ray fight. Back in Meehan’s office, the agent explains the fine points of the new contract to his client. “This is all U.S.?” asks an incredulous Domi. “Oh, my God.” After listening to Meehan outline each year of the contract, Domi bursts into a grin. “Let’s get it done!”

This scene is one of the best-and one of the most controversial-from The New Ice Age: A Year in the Life of the NHL. A six-part, $2.3-million documentary about the business of professional hockey, it aired on CBC from September 29 to October 3, 1998. What viewers didn’t know at the time, but would discover about a week later, courtesy of Toronto Star sports media columnist Chris Zelkovich, is that CBC Sports gave the NHL the right to make changes to the series. One of those changes just happened to be the Tie Domi contract negotiation scene. At the league’s insistence, CBC Sports forced Peter Raymont and Joseph Blasioli, who directed the series, to include shots of Domi skating, instead of just fighting. In addition, the filmmakers had to shoot an interview with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman the week before the show aired to replace a scene in which he reacted strongly to Brett Hull’s public pronouncement that the league “sucks.” The NHL felt the scene would embarrass Bettman and wanted it changed. And CBC Sports, hoping to satisfy a long-time meal ticket, readily agreed.

One of the most common criticisms of sports reporting is that it’s just public relations. While CBC Sports is certainly not the only offender, many Canadians expect it to live up to a higher standard because it is part of the public broadcaster. That’s why it’s surprising when CBC Sports’ hockey coverage routinely misses meaningful sports news stories. By giving the league editorial control over The New Ice Age, CBC Sports is ensuring, as the Hockey Night in Canada tag line goes, the tradition continues.

One of the only profitable divisions of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Sports made $1.9 million in 1995. And that’s despite losing money on amateur sports, such as the Canada Games, the private broadcasters rarely touch. Much of the profit comes from hockey. (Hence the bidding war for NHL broadcast rights among Canadian networks-newcomer CTV Sportsnet, for example, paid $60 million for a four-year deal, outbidding TSN.)

Although it sometimes produces specials, often of the documentary film variety, CBC Sports is primarily a broadcaster of sporting events. Hockey broadcasts have long included play-by-play, colour commentary, and interviews with sweaty, short-of-breath athletes. Increasingly, however, CBC is trying to offer more. But the amount of journalism, in the true sense of the word, remains minimal. This season, Hockey Night in Canadahas added a half-hour pregame show largely in response to competition from other networks. (Last season TSN’s Esso Saturday Night served as the pregame show for the hockey broadcast on CBC.) But the pregame show is not much of a improvement, serving mainly to set up the two or three games CBC is broadcasting that night. It does include a feature segment called “The Headliner,” that has offered, for example, interviews with Detroit Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman while he was recovering from surgery and former Vancouver Canuck sniper Pavel Bure after he was traded to the Florida Panthers. Such interviews, however, are by no means hard-hitting.

The kind of stories that “The Headliner” could and should cover are likely the ones that profoundly affect the game. Stories like the Alan Eagleson or Graham James/Sheldon Kennedy sagas, or even the current increase in the number of head injuries, all of which have received sparse coverage from CBC Sports.

It wasn’t until Eagleson’s conviction in January 1998 that CBC Sports, through Hockey Night in Canada, aired a short piece on Eagleson’s legal woes, even though the story had been building for almost a decade. In 1989, about 100 NHL players hired labour lawyer and former head of the National Football League player’s association Ed Garvey to investigate Alan Eagleson, who at the time was the head of the National Hockey League’s Players’ Association and a prominent agent. The players were following the lead of agents Ron Salcer and Rich Winter, who were suspicious of Eagleson’s methods. In 1990, Winter filed a complaint with the Law Society of Upper Canada accusing Eagleson of unethical conduct. In December 1996 the RCMP charged Eagleson with eight counts of fraud. Though most Canadian media failed to investigate or even follow the story, Hockey Night in Canada had one of the best platforms in Canada to let fans know what was happening. Indeed, Bruce Dowbiggin, one of the only Canadian reporters investigating the Eagleson story, worked for CBC Radio Sports and could have easily provided reports for HNIC. But it was Russ Conway, a reporter for a small-town paper in Massachusetts, who broke the story.

The Graham James/Sheldon Kennedy case was another missed opportunity. In September 1996, Kennedy, then a member of the Boston Bruins, went public with the story of how his former junior hockey coach had sexually abused him. In January 1997, James was jailed for sexually assaulting Kennedy some 300 times over 10 years. Nearly two weeks after the conviction, and after Kennedy had done numerous other television interviews, Hockey Night in Canada aired a 17-minute interview with the abused hockey player. Toronto Sunsports columnist Rob Langley claimed Ron MacLean looked more uncomfortable than Kennedy.

“To work a story like Graham James is to do investigative journalism, which few sports reporters are capable of doing, with notable exceptions,” says Mark Douglas Lowes, whose book Inside the Sports Pages, an analysis of the sports press in Canada, will be published this spring. “And quite frankly, I don’t think a lot of hockey writers have the skills to do investigative reporting of the kind that would lead to breaking a story such as Eagleson or James. They’re trained to report, not to investigate.”

Even simply reporting unpleasant news has proven difficult for CBC Sports. It has all but ignored the concussions issue, even though the 1997-98 season was marred by some 60 head injuries. After sitting out the entire season with a concussion, Nick Kypreos retired in the off-season. Pat Lafontaine did likewise, after suffering the sixth concussion of his career-a career that had already included sitting on the sidelines for a season due to postconcussion syndrome. And youthful stars such as Rob Niedermayer, Eric Lindros, and Paul Kariya missed significant chunks of the season recovering from head injuries. Kariya not only missed 28 games, but also the Olympics and NHL playoffs. Meanwhile Lindros’s brother Brett retired two years earlier from recurring concussions.

CBC Sports appears happy to report who’s out, but it rarely goes beyond the numbers. This year, for instance, the number of groin injuries has increased. Some experts believe poor ice conditions may be a contributing factor, but CBC Sports has made little or no mention of the connection. It does, after all, have a 47-year relationship with the NHL to maintain.

Given CBC Sports’ dismal journalistic track record, The New Ice Age offered it an opportunity to be taken more seriously. The promos for the series called the film an unprecedented investigation that “would uncover stories and secrets previously reserved for insiders only.” And given the outstanding access Raymont and Blasioli had, the series certainly lived up to its billing. Chris Zelkovich called The New Ice Age “possibly the best hockey documentary ever.”

In episode one, New York Islanders general manager Mike Milbury paces the arena floor at the 1997 entry draft, trying to trade a first-round draft pick. He scurries to and fro, bartering with competing GMs, throwing players’ names out like a car salesman tossing extras into a deal for a new car, all in what turns out to be an unsuccessful bid to trade a player. The series also contains numerous scenes from closed-door meetings where general managers and governors of NHL teams discussed proposed rule changes and other sensitive issues.

That Blasioli and Raymont, who directed the series and produced it for CBC Sports, are both award-winning, documentary filmmakers, certainly lent some credibility to The New Ice Age. Coincidentally, they’ve also both produced films about questionable media ethics. Blasioli’s most famous work is the critically acclaimed Blast ’em, a 1992 documentary about the paparazzi. Raymont is perhaps best known for his 1988 documentary,The World Is Watching, about ABC News’ misrepresentation of the civil war in Nicaragua, which aims to illustrate how the media spin reality. Raymont also worked with CBC on a 1993 documentary Chasing the Dream, about the experiences and challenges of bush-league baseball. On that occasion, he had no problem with CBC Sports. But there’s a huge difference between a six-hour, prime-time series made with the cooperation of CBC Sports’ major source of revenue, and a one-and-a-half-hour film about minor league baseball. “I think the stakes were much higher for the CBC on this project,” says Raymont. “The CBC will argue that you’ve got to be able to give an organization like the NHL editorial input and that they never had final control, that they had input. I think they had more control than they should have had.”

The CBC’s journalistic policy sides with Raymont. It prevents subjects from being shown, let alone having a say on, the final product. The policy states, “Participants in programs will not be granted the right to veto any portion of a program.” The network recommends CBC Sports adhere to the guidelines, but it doesn’t insist, even when the department covers news, as is the case with The New Ice Age.

Alan Clark and Nancy Lee, head and deputy head of CBC Sports respectively, refused to respond to numerous attempts to contact them about the series. However, according to Zelkovich’s column, Clark claims only two significant cuts were made to the series: foul language and one scene described only as “sensitive.” Clark said he was comfortable labelling the series a documentary even though the subject, the NHL, got to review the final cut. And Clark believes there was no way the filmmakers would have received the access they had without striking a deal with the NHL.

But many filmmakers make documentaries without such deals. It’s as simple as asking the crew to turn cameras off when contentious issues arise. In fact, during shooting of The New Ice Age, general managers and league officials often requested cameras be shut off.

Not surprisingly, the NHL was happy with The New Ice Age. The league received $2.3 million worth of free publicity from a reliable journalistic outlet like the CBC and had the right to edit the film. Glenn Adamo, the NHL’s vice president of broadcasting, doesn’t acknowledge any breach of journalistic ethics occurred. In fact, he believes the show isn’t journalism.

“This, in my mind, is not a documentary. This is simply an entertainment show called The New Ice Age: A Year in the Life of the NHL,” says Adamo, a former television sports producer for NBC. He characterizes the series as a coproduction between CBC Sports and the NHL, citing the filmmakers’ use of footage shot by NHL Productions and the league’s involvement in the film. And he had subsequent conversations with CBC Sports to dictate the changes to be made to the film. “A lot of this came from within our PR department,” says Adamo. “We reviewed the rough cuts of the episodes. If there were things that were going to embarrass or hurt people that they got through this access then that wouldn’t be fair.”

CBC Sports has always been more than fair with the NHL, and it seemed intent on keeping its cozy relationship with the league during the making of The New Ice Age. But it didn’t have to go that far. In 1990, CBC produced Home Game, a documentary by Ken Dryden and Peter Pearson that was free of interference from the NHL. Pearson says most of the access granted in the Home Game series was largely a result of Dryden’s personal relationship with many of the key figures involved, like Serge Savard, then general manager of the Montreal Canadiens, and Edmonton Oilers GM Glen Sather, both former teammates of Dryden’s. The NHL, however, still wanted the right of final cut. “Well, we had a big negotiation with the NHL in terms of whether they were going to let us shoot that one Canadiens-Oilers game because they were all upset about violence in the NHL and that kind of shit,” says Pearson. “It was one of those big-dick-on-the-desk issues, you know. They tried it out, but, I mean, people try out stuff all the time. Essentially, Savard and Sather both said, ‘Come on, fuck off.”’

Home Game, however, was not a CBC Sports production. And that made all the difference. “Because we were in public affairs, the CBC was not going to let some NHL executive have final cut on information programming,” says Pearson. “They weren’t going to allow that precedent.”

Unlike CBC Sports, the public affairs department has to abide by the journalistic policy. And public affairs also doesn’t rely heavily on the commercial success of the NHL, as CBC Sports does.

“You walk a fine line to criticize your business partners,” says John Shannon, executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada. CBC buys the broadcast rights to the NHL and considers itself partners with the NHL. As a result, CBC has a vested interest in the game. The show has segments that sometimes emulate journalism-interviews, for example-where the objective is to convey information to the viewer. However, Shannon believes that it’s not HNIC‘s job to do journalism. But if there is something wrong with the game, doesn’t HNIChave any responsibility to cover it? “We would separate ourselves,” says Shannon, “and try to, as well as we can, try to cover the story with a great deal of fairness.” The late, lackluster coverage of the games’ significant issues, like the Eagleson saga, suggest HNIC isn’t greatly concerned with its viewers’ knowledge of the games beyond the score. But Shannon doesn’t see it that way, especially when it comes to Eagleson. “Tell me what that had to do with Hockey Night in Canada and the National Hockey League as a day-to-day issue?” questions Shannon. He suggests the Eagleson affair has no connection to HNIC, saying issues the show might be responsible for covering must have a connection to the game at hand. “I mean, the Kennedy situation had terrible ramifications on the whole game of hockey,” says Shannon. “But how does that reflect on a Montreal-Toronto hockey game that we’re covering?”

Shannon explains why HNIC shouldn’t and couldn’t do journalism. “I think our news department at CBC….” Shannon stops. He tries again. “Our job is to cover hockey, and to cover games, and to cover the current National Hockey League, that’s our first job. I think the Eagleson thing is a very topical issue, but we don’t have the resources to do that. I mean, tell me who would cover it? We, we, don’t have those resources. So, and I’m not sure, and this is not a negative at all reflecting back on us, I’m not sure we have the background to do it.”

HNIC does do journalism, however. Shannon mentions a piece the show did in November 1998, saying, “I think we did a great job covering the bankruptcy trial of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Totally unbiased. Gary Bettman literally said, ‘I hope you don’t make too much of this’ And we didn’t make too much of it.”

If that sounds contradictory, it is at least consistent. Most sports broadcasters and press are devoted more to reporting game scores and highlights than reporting significant events or issues. “The sports pages-and this holds for radio and TV-function as a promotional vehicle for the major-league sports industry,” says author Mark Douglas Lowes. “There is a very strong reciprocal relationship between the sports press and big-time sports leagues.” He explains that sports teams and events need the daily coverage of their activities to build and maintain fan interest. And the press and broadcasters are happy to oblige, especially considering the audience for their skin-deep coverage of male-dominated professional sports is the coveted 18-to-49 male demographic. “Because of the symbiotic relationship between the two industries-pro sports and news-the kind of coverage you get is invariably promotional in nature,” says Lowes. “Sports editors and reporters do not see themselves as having a social responsibility to do critical reporting, to really dig around in the muck.”

That’s certainly the experience of Bruce Dowbiggin, the former CBC Radio and local TV sports reporter in Toronto. “They don’t want to deal with this. Most of TV sports is run by beer salesmen and car salesmen. Keep preaching the romance of the game and all that other horseshit and ignore the real problems when they come up,” says Dowbiggin, who is now a sports columnist for the Calgary Herald. When he was one of the only Canadians investigating Alan Eagleson, CBC Sports showed no interest in any of his work. The National, part of CBC News and Current Affairs, however, took full advantage and aired his stories. “CBC Sports, ah, that’s a different case,” he says. “They have had no interest in this story whatsoever. The sports department at CBC is an entirely different entity in terms of its ethics and the way it does things.”

To illustrate this point, Dowbiggin mentions an occasion when CBC Sports paid a high-profile Olympic athlete to participate in a documentary. He also believes the relationship between individuals in the TV sports department and the sports they broadcast is too friendly. “They’re always schmoozing and golfing,” he says. “The idea of having to turn on one of their own is too difficult for them.” That’s one reason he’s not surprised by what happened with The New Ice Age. “When it comes from TV sports?” he asks. “No, not in the least.”

There is an ironic scene in The New Ice Age that illustrates the cozy relationship between reporters and the National Hockey League. As the camera zooms in on reporters in the press box of New York’s Madison Square Garden, the narrator says, “Hockey writers around the league can understand the NHL’s need to sell itself. But it’s not their job to buy in.” On the ice, the Rangers face their former captain, Mark Messier, in his first visit to the Garden since signing as a free agent with the Vancouver Canucks. The fans’ excitement is palpable as Messier accepts a breakaway pass, fakes a shot, then snaps the puck past New York goalie Mike Richter. The fans give Messier a rousing ovation for his clinching goal, even though the home team, their team, lost.

Over pictures of reporters flipping notebook pages, jotting notes and typing on laptop computers, New York Post sports columnist Larry Brooks comments on the battle between the league selling its image and reporters buying that image. Brooks mentions how New York Rangers GM Neil Smith has portrayed the loss of Messier as a story of greed. But Brooks says the writers aren’t buying that.

The next image is a group of reporters conferring on the story of the game. One of them believes Messier left for financial reasons. “They forget that he walked out of here for more money,” says Toronto Star hockey columnist Damien Cox of the fans. The narrator’s voice comes in over shots of the huddled reporters. “Journalists are paid to report what they hear, see, and sometimes conclude,” states the narrator matter-of-factly. “They are not paid to handle public relations.”

One afternoon in Italy, part way through yet another day crammed with too many winery visits, my fellow wine writers and I went on strike. We had tanker loads of wine coursing through our veins, stomachs that bulged from five-hour-long meals and eyes that drooped from lack of sleep. We had warned our hosts that this day we would not see more than five wineries. They had promised to cut back. At winery number seven we refused to get off the bus. Undaunted, the producers cheerfully boarded with dozens of bottles. Our brief insurrection ended when they started popping corks. It was far too hot and stuffy to taste in the vehicle. We descended to our punishment of yet another tasting room and bottling line.

My occupation requires me to be gorged with too much of a good thing from time to time. It also sometimes involves being surrounded by tipsy men with lascivious intentions. I take it all with good humour. The quote I chose some decades ago to accompany my high school graduation picture?”Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive,”?still conveys my core philosophy. It’s that predilection that steered me from my beginnings as a speechwriter on the political staff of Marc Lalonde to a more amusing subject.

There are two camps of wine writers, in my opinion. One group includes the likes of Robert Parker and others who do comprehensive guides to every single winery in a region or country. These thorough, hardy critics, who have perfected the art of tasting, spitting, and ranking, often got their training first as lawyers, scientists, or doctors. Their ability to concentrate on a single subject is amazing. When they are my travelling companions, I’m either nodding off, flipping through winery brochures, or preferably flirting with an empathetic male, while they’re two hours into a serious discussion with the viticulturist about pruning techniques.

Obviously I’m in the second camp. I’m a writer who happens to have a passion for wine and food. However, on the 10th day of a tour sampling 100 or more wines each day, my mind and mouth go fuzzy. And there are only so many bottling lines I can admire before my enthusiasm starts to fray. Wine writing may well be much ado about meeting winemakers, seeing how they make their wine, and tasting it. Living well includes cultural, physical, and romantic pursuits. Luckily for me, most people involved in wine are equally connoisseurs of life.

Wine is worth getting to know for the company it keeps. The characters in the biz are what make this beat so enjoyable for me. Take the aforementioned Italy. No country appreciates women more. Or wine. I remember one trip to Piedmont, in particular, which took place early in my career. Several journalists and restaurateurs had been invited to see Italy’s first vino nouvello being made near the town of Gattinara. Travelling with us was a young Jeanne Beker, in TV but prior to her gig as the grande fashionista. She did, however, dress rather more stylishly than we scribes. The Italians drooled. The more confident sent roses to her hotel room. But the best reaction came from the oldest winemaker we visited.

He was dressed in shabby pants, held together at the fly with safety pins, his disheveled appearance belying his millionaire status. The innocence of his face and the sweetness of his smile also disguised his virile thoughts. As Jeanne tromped around the wine cellar with her camera crew, pausing here and there with the barrels as backdrops for her videotaped words, he muttered away in Italian. Toronto restaurateur Franco Prevedello whispered the translation in my ears. “In that corner is where he took his first woman. Over there is where he made love to several villagers,” and so forth. The place was redolent with memories of his romantic trysts. Then he paused to gaze admiringly at Jeanne’s wide, broad, open lips and sighed, “What a mouth! The things I could put in it.”

When in France?. The French men have their own inimitable style. To them a mistress is a desirable family extension. Lack of interest on the part of a Canadian is merely coy encouragement. My wildest encounter with this came after I was inducted into La Commanderie du Bontemps M?doc et Graves in ’92. Purple robes, pomp, and speeches, followed by the guzzling of much Bordeaux are all part of the initiation rites to this brotherhood. One of the inductors, Christian, took a liking to me. While I managed to evade his overtures in Toronto, he persisted with frequent transatlantic calls asking when I would next come to France. Finally, he enticed me with an invite to attend the F?te de la Fleur, one of the world’s most prestigious wine events, which that year was hosted at the gorgeous Cos-d’Estournel. As the party’s location was within eyesight of Christian’s Ch?teau Ladouys, I was invited to stay there with several other journalists. I extracted a promise of no hanky-panky. True to his word, I was shown my own lockable room. The guest rooms were across a courtyard from the main ch?teau where Christian and his wife presumably slumbered. Leaving nothing to chance, however, I carefully turned the key in the lock before retiring. My head had barely hit the pillow when the door opened. “Master key,” explained Christian as he advanced. At that moment, the storm that had been brewing outside let loose. Lightening struck just outside my window, knocking a chunk of wall down and turning the room into a blaze of light. The meteorological message from above was wasted on my ardent swain.

Some of the best Frenchmen, however, are more bark than bite. Bernard Repolt, affectionately nicknamed the Bad Boy of Beaune, claims to have named vineyard plots after women he has known. Agents who have visited his cellars confirm that hundreds of women’s names are on the racks holding the wine. Bernard says his conquests were easy. Using reverse psychology, he spoke of religion and his mother, and told the ladies they must not kiss him because it would be too tempting. Time and matrimony have mellowed him. The extent of his misbehaviour with me was to call for more “juice” as he dumped my glass several times into a nearby flower pot upon finding the Jaffelin Bourgogne du Chapitre it contained was not up to snuff. From rue Paradis in Beaune, he later sends me a handwritten fax: “Sweetheart it was great having you for dinner. I’m still dreaming of you.” He then suggests I come to visit as he has lined up a couple of highly qualified potential boyfriends.

Propositions also happen at home base. When I joined Julio Iglesias and entourage at Prego restaurant as he tangoed through Toronto one November, I learned just how much he loves red wine and steak. He produced a 1985 Haut Brion and his fave, the magnificent 1982 Lynch Bages, from his briefcase. Seems he always travels with a stellar cellar in his plane. But the young beauties at the table didn’t get to taste the silky, lush, and lengthy Pauillac. Julio bought them wine from Prego’s list, sharing his treasures only with me and another writer. Nor did they get their hand placed on his upper inner thigh, as I did, or the bite on the back. He did say he liked meat with his reds. Opera’s playing in the background. One hand is wrapped around a luscious wine. Beside me sits a passionate man. In front, a dish wafting mouthwatering scents. In the other hand I hold a pen. Jotting it all down and loving it.

November 26, four days before the 1998 Quebec election: A smug Jacques Parizeau, arms folded across his ample girth, looks out from the front page of the Ottawa Citizen under the headline “Parizeau: Take the ‘Booty’ and Run.” Under the photo caption is the first half of the story titled “Separatists Poised for Landslide.” It’s the kind of article you’d expect to find during an election campaign-lots of numbers, who’s up, who’s down, plus a prediction.

But there is something unexpected here, too, right under the empty chair to Parizeau’s left: a small, understated sidebar box, split in two. One half is labelled “Today’s Poll” and and the other half declares “Yesterday’s Polls.” The latter features polls from such papers as the Montreal Gazette, Le Soleil and theNational Post. Newspapers rarely group poll results. But Harvey Schachter, the former editor of The Kingston Whig-Standard, would like to see them make the poll box a habit. The public, he argues convincingly, would be better served.

Schachter has been a journalist for longer than I’ve been alive. He has taken a specialized course in polling at Williams College in Massachusetts, and has run workshops for the editorial staffers at The Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail on how to understand polls. He’s all for the box approach. “Poll coverage can be extreme during elections, and you can cover polls without them being on page one every day.” A chart or a box lets readers compare. Readers can examine the latest polls to spot trends or to discover if any of the numbers are out of line. The results are put in context for the reader. He believes it’s the only way rogue polls can be spotted.

Regular boxes would be useful for reporters and editors as well. “Unfortunately, most reporters don’t know what a newsworthy poll is,” says Schachter. “You have to look for changes, but you won’t know until the next poll is done if the results were from a rogue poll or if they were accurate. There’s pressure to use a poll because the media get two dramatic stories: the rocket and the decline.”

Pollsters all vie for the dead-on accurate poll, the one in which final election numbers match the prediction. In a competitive industry, the coveted bragging rights go to the firm whose poll numbers mirror reality. In polling, though, a number really represents a range of numbers. As Schachter says: “The best polls wouldn’t necessarily be the closest to the actual result because there’s the margin of error. It’s a delusionary concept that a poll is a single number.”

The polls the Citizen included in its “Yesterday’s Polls” box had a variety of predicted outcomes. SOM polled for the Montreal Gazette and Le Soleil, COMPAS for the National Post and Angus Reid for (among others) CBC Newsworld and Radio-Canada. In the end, COMPAS’s results were a duplicate of the election results, with the Parti Qu?becois taking 45 percent of the vote, the Liberals 44 percent and the Action D?mocratique 11 percent. However, given the sample size of approximately 1,000 people, a common number for pollsters, then the margin of error was, plus or minus, about three percent. So, 44 percent could be a number between 47 and 41. And 45 could be between 48 and 42.

By contrast, Angus Reid had the Liberals at 41 percent of the decided vote and the PQ at 46 percent. Though the numbers weren’t dead on, Angus Reid wasn’t exactly kilometres off target. Once the margin of error was put into play, the Liberal support ranged from a high of 44 percent to a low of 38 percent, while the PQ’s numbers ranged from 49 percent to 43 percent. The actual outcome of the election fell within those ranges, and so the Angus Reid poll was accurate too. It just wasn’t remarkable. Bringing up the rear was SOM, which had the PQ at 43 percent and the Liberals at an unusually low 30 percent. Even with the margin of error, the numbers were off.

The folks at COMPAS credit their “leaner” question with giving them such “precise” results. Having a good leaner question is like having the killer app: everyone wants it. Leaner questions help pollsters distribute the undecided voters. This gives them a clearer indication of where the support for the various parties lies. In a posting to the Canadian Association of Journalists e-mail list, Conrad Winn, COMPAS president, explained part of his method. “Asked of voters claiming to be undecided, COMPAS’ more coercive ‘leaner’ question reduces dramatically the number of respondents claiming to be undecided. As you may know, in Quebec, avowedly partisan voters are disproportionately P?quiste, while ostensible ‘leaners’ are Liberals.”

The question is “a way of reducing the number of undecideds in a poll by giving them fewer options. I’m sorry. I can’t go into any more detail than that.” Winn said. It’s his belief that a “bias of fear in our culture,” is one of the things that causes voters to give the dreaded “undecided” response. People may be afraid they don’t know enough about a candidate or a party platform, so they hide their perceived ignorance by telling the interviewer they have no opinion. If a survey is crafted to significantly reduce the opportunity for playing the undecided card, more respondents have to make a choice. So what was Winn’s knockout leaner question? “I can?t tell you exactly what I did, for proprietary reasons,” he politely but firmly replied.

In 1991, the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing highlighted a need for information comparison: “When two or more pollsters are seeking essentially the same information, yet produce different results, doubts naturally arise about their methodology.” The commission recommended that papers put in more methodological information to better serve the readers. From what I’ve seen, the dailies have done this. There’s more information on sample sizes, dates of surveys and margins of error. A chart box would round out their efforts to provide more detailed information. “Polls should be on the editorial page in a box,” says Schachter. “You can cover polls without going to five leaders and have one say it’s great and have four say it’s wrong.”

Inside the boardroom at Xtra: Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Biweekly, Eleanor Brown takes refuge far from the raucous production-night chatter to proof a story. “How do you spell palette?” she asks without looking up. She has the focus of a Tibetan monk at prayer. Nothing short of Mike Harris declaring himself to be queer, I am convinced, would make her lose her place on paragraph two.

I have often wondered if Brown, Xtra’s managing editor and news editor, ever leaves the office and her altar: a gravity-defying paper mountain. As one of Xtra‘s 50 or so freelancers, I’m accustomed to her odd-hour e-mails. She joined the biweekly as a part-time writer six-and-a-half years ago. Today, her knowledge of lesbian and gay issues has made her an influential figure in our community. In an earlier interview, Brown sailed through details of half-a-dozen watershed moments in recent homo history so quickly that I was left flailing in her wake. On this night, proofing done, pencil down, and back amid the rabble-rousers in the newsroom, I ask her about the issue’s top stories in this issue.

Brown shows me two of the coverlines for the December 3, 1998, edition: “The Gay Divorcée: Brian Orser’s Palimony Fight Marks a New Low For Gay Rights,” and “Oath of Allegiance: AIDS Action Now Members Must Believe In HIV.” The Orser article is an opinion piece, and argues that Craig Leask turned the lawsuit against the renowned skater into a “circus” and does not advance gay and lesbian rights. The second headline refers to a conflict between AIDS Action Now, an education and advocacy organization, and Health Education AIDS Liaison, a group that insists the disease is not caused by HIV. Both stories are classic Xtra.

The tabloid’s guiding principles are rooted in the mission statement of the Pink Triangle Press, which publishes the paper: “We, the members and workers? are lesbians, gay men and people of good will. We carry on the work first undertaken by The Body Politic [Xtra‘s predecessor]. The outcome that we seek is this: gay and lesbian people daring together to set love free.” This statement was revised in May 1998 from an earlier, clearer version: “The Press engages gay men, lesbians and others in struggle for their sexual liberation by providing them with mass media in which to express their sexuality, share information, debate ideas and advocate actions.” The mandate empowers Xtrato do what many in the gay community feel that mainstream newspapers do not do: adequately represent our culture. “Why don’t the dailies do this?” many have asked. “Why can’t they delve into gay issues with the same zeal as Xtra?”

Until recently, I have posed similar questions. Now I wonder if we’re asking too much of the dailies. Their job, after all, is not to advocate for one group, but to give their best judgment on what’s important on any given day to a diverse readership. Often, this coverage doesn’t include gay and lesbian issues. Fifteen to 30 years ago, it hardly ever focused on queer concerns. Now, coverage is better, more enlightened, and sensitive. But how much better is it? In order to find out, I decided to survey gay and lesbian coverage in Canada’s mainstream newspapers. I also wanted to survey two of my colleagues at Xtra, Brown and features editor Rachel Giese, to get their views of how coverage has evolved.(Giese left Extra to join counterSpin in late March.)

On the weekend of June 27 to 29, 1969, a group of drag queens and bull dykes resisted a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a small gay bar on Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The modern gay and lesbian rights movement had begun. The Globe and Mail failed to mention it. Twelve years later, Canadians experienced our own smaller-scale version of the Stonewall Riots after the Toronto bathhouse raids sparked huge protests from the gay community. This time, the dailies took notice. On February 5, 1981, about 200 heavily armed Toronto police descended on four downtown bathhouses, arresting more than 300 men and charging most for attending a bawdy house. Nineteen others were charged with keeping a bawdy house. The Toronto Sun effectively outed those 19 by printing their names and addresses. The February 8, 1981, front page asked: “Gay Raids Sparked By Boys-For-Hire Ring?” A headline kicker to a story on page two read: “Gay Link to Mob Suspected.” In fact, a connection to organized crime was never substantiated and no charges of prostitution were ever laid in relation to the raids. Coverage of gay stories in the early eighties was either sensational, like the bathhouse story, or sparse in the early days of AIDS. At this time, the dailies even shied away from using the word “gay.” In his March 11, 1995, column, Toronto Star ombudsman Don Sellar quotes the paper’s 1983 style book: “The ’83 guide declared, with evident unease, ‘gay and gays are not yet permitted terms for homosexuals; it is true that homosexuals do refer to themselves as gay, and there is a distinguishable gay community, so the word is in common use; but it’s still not quite acceptable to the majority of people who think gay, with its connotation of carefree joy, has been usurped; so don’t, at least not yet, use the word in copy outside of quotes or-and this, admittedly, poses problems-in headlines either….”

By 1990, the Star officially dared to name “the love that dare not speak its name” as gay. In fact, Sellar says the Star used the term “gay” before the style guide changed. In his column, Sellar outlined some complaints that the paper received from readers in 1995 about how it handled gay issues. In a story about Olympic diver Greg Louganis, the Star was criticized for saying he “confesses” to having AIDS. Another complaint concerned the use of the term “homosexual pedophile.” The Star has come a long way since these earlier semantic struggles. “Long ago, and I’m talking a couple of decades ago, there was a story about a support group for gay and lesbian teenagers,” says deputy managing editor Fred Kuntz. “The story never ran. A senior editor at the time held it out of the paper because of a concern that it would encourage a gay and lesbian lifestyle among children. I think our readers have grown up,” Kuntz adds. “I think there is more knowledge and understanding now of gay and lesbianism as a normal and acceptable loving lifestyle.”

Xtra‘s Rachel Giese agrees that the Star is liberal, but has a surprising criticism: “It does not always do a good service to the gay community because it presents the gay community at its most cleaned up.” Not that Giese, who writes for the Star every second Monday, is opposed to a feature about, for example, why so many gay men live in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood. “Any time you mention the words gay and lesbian in the mainstream paper, it’s good,” she says, because it means “the consciousness that this is a valid community to discuss is out there.”

Eleanor Brown shares this view. The papers, she says, now have no problem portraying what she calls the wholesome homosexual who is “married and holds hands with her girlfriend when she walks down the street.” In a June 18 Xtra column, “Gimme More Drag Queens,” Brown wrote: “I remember when we used to complain all the time that the mainstream media ignored the business suits and femmes and obsessed on Pride Day’s weirdos. You know, endless photos and camera shots of the drag queens, the topless leather dykes, and the naked putzes walking around getting sunburns on their penises. Embarrassing us. But then came the sea change. A Canadian Press journalist told me that she was purposefully ignoring drag queens for her Pride Day reportage. She wanted gay people to be understood and tolerated, she said. And for that, she wanted to find nice, normal homosexuals. That conversion, which occurred some six years ago, marked the beginning of a lovely little game. It’s called Make The Homosexuals Respectable.”

Brown’s column went on to explain that after Bill 167, Ontario’s same-sex spousal rights legislation, was defeated in 1994, “heterosexual reporters were truly horrified at the bilious vomit suddenly spewed at gay men and lesbians.” For example, on June 6, 1994, a Star reporter covered a prayer vigil held in Toronto protesting Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Ambrozic’s stance against Bill 167: “Standing on the steps of St. Michael’s Choir School, one woman told a gay man to keep the issue away from her son, calling homosexuals ‘sick.'” When Bill 167 was defeated on June 9, Christie Blatchford, then a columnist at The Toronto Sun, took issue with the way gay protesters were treated at the Ontario Legislature. On June 10, she wrote: “It all came down, in the end, to dozens of the Queen’s Park security guards donning rubber gloves and breaking open a duffle bag full of billy clubs. So protected (Against what? AIDS? Women holding hands? Men wearing T-shirts with pink triangles?), they linked arms and moved on the gays and lesbians who had been sitting quietly all afternoon, in the public galleries?. The security officers-a mix of Ontario Provincial Police and the Ontario Government Protective Service-let the gays and lesbians blow off a little steam and then chased them down a flight of stairs from the second floor to the main floor of the Legislative building, out of the foyer and into the lovely evening light?. [S]ome of them had been hit by billy clubs, a couple had been dragged away, some had been pushed down the stairs….” Homophobia spurred reporters to write “a series of incredibly gay-positive stories,” Brown said. But, she added, “There is a deep problem with this news coverage. It’s not real. What really happened is that liberal journalists started coddling us, ignoring reality in order to present a willfully distorted view of gay life. Just like that Canadian Press reporter. They want to present wholesome homosexuals. As a favour, I guess. To help us out. By ignoring the freaks and the perverts, and concentrating on the smiling lesbian moms and happy families.”

Brown is known for her contentious opinions. Consider her take on the Maple Leaf Gardens’ abuse case, which was everywhere in the news when Martin Kruze hurled himself from Toronto’s Bloor Street viaduct on October 30, 1997, three days after Gardens’ employee Gordon Stuckless was sentenced to two years less a day for sexually abusing Kruze and others. (The sentence was later increased to five years at the Ontario Court of Appeal.) “We cannot discuss Martin Cruze rationally,” Brown says. She is critical of the Toronto dailies for focusing solely on child abuse. She cites the Star‘s coverage of a special Gardens’ symposium: “They came by the hundreds to heal,” wrote the Star reporter on September 28, the day after the event began. “Some found solace in tears, others in a quiet sense of joyous relief after stripping away the secrecy of their lives as victims of sexual abuse.” That kind of analysis, Brown says, is too simplistic. “I don’t mean to sound like a heartless bitch,” Brown says. “It is a truly awful thing that he killed himself. But,” she takes a breath and charges on, “these kids went back. Why did they go back? Don’t tell me they were all abused. I can’t believe that every single one of those kids was a victim. Perhaps some of them were. But a lot of those kids obviously enjoyed themselves. They loved it. There’s nothing wrong with being 14 and liking sex.” [The age of consent, Brown points out, is 14.] “This kind of coverage in the mainstream is actually encouraging people to believe that they were victimized when they may not have been. That’s an horrific flash point for me,” she says. “It pisses me off.”

Though I disagree with Brown’s analysis, I support her right to challenge and ask difficult questions that make some, including myself, uncomfortable. But to criticize the dailies for not examining questions of sexual consent when it comes to boys barely into their teens makes me think of a meeting I had with Sarah Murdoch, associate editor of The Globe and Mail, in which she talked about a daily paper’s responsibility to a wider audience and its different standards for deciding how to treat stories.

In March 1998, Murdoch sat on a panel sponsored by the Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association that examined mainstream coverage of the gay community. It was here that Murdoch talked about gay journalists as pamphleteers: “I was saying that I don’t trust the gay community’s coverage of itself because it’s so often totally uncritical and I don’t feel I’m getting an objective piece of journalism.” However, she understands why gay reporters may be loath to be too critical of their communities-it would take guts. “If I were in that position, I wouldn’t want to hurt my friends. I wouldn’t want to hurt my family.” Then she asks me if I would hesitate to cover something negative in the gay community. “No,” I say, bristling. But I wonder if my answer is completely truthful.

The fact that I decided to write about my disagreement with Brown on the Kruze case is a good example. I spent five years working at a rape crisis centre, where I listened to countless horror stories from those who lived through childhood sexual abuse. I cannot see sex between adults and young teens as anything but wrong. And yet, it makes me cringe to differ publicly with Brown. It makes me feel guilty, although I’m not the only gay person to feel this way on this issue. The “intergenerational” sex argument drives many community members crazy. I would still much rather not mention it, not cast any unfavourable light on a fellow gay journalist. But here is a clear example of pamphleteering, which is precisely Murdoch’s point when she says what goes into the Globe is based on “the usual criteria of the news; whether it’s interesting and important, something in some way in the public interest to publish.”

There is a place, I think, in a gay publication for a little pamphleteering now and then. But if the dailies flinch from gay cheerleading-as they should -how do they deal with gay issues? I wanted to know how they handled news stories; how queers were portrayed in entertainment, in opinion pieces, and in sports coverage. I also wanted to find out how they dealt with gay sex. My content analysis involved The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax),The Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe, the Star, The Toronto Sun, the Winnipeg Free Press , theCalgary Herald and The Edmonton Journal. It was, regrettably, not an exercise in precise science. While some electronic databases were comprehensive, others were not, necessitating a manual search. In cases where no electronic data were available, it was also necessary to do a hands-on scan of each issue. In the end, the search resulted in what I hope will be considered a fair representation of queer content from April 1, 1998, to September 30, 1998. In addition, to get a sense of how gay advocates felt about current coverage, I asked Brown and Giese for their view of how well the dailies are doing in the areas mentioned above.
Arts & Entertainment

The dailies generally embrace queer themes in their coverage of arts and entertainment, and, for the most part, do a good job, says Giese. In the Ottawa Citizen, for example, 94 of 328 stories that mention the words gay, lesbian, or homosexual appeared in the entertainment section. The Citizen is typical of dailies in this study. From the Calgary Herald‘s ongoing obsession with actor Anne Heche (“Anne Heche Finally Finds Happiness,” August 16; “Heche Plans to Spend Rest of Summer Being Housewife,” August 19; “Vince, Anne Team Again for Psycho Remake,” August 14) to the Globe‘s coverage of the Inside Out lesbian and gay film festival (“Gay Filmmaking Comes of Age,” May 21), to the Star‘s story on fetish clubs (“Fetish Chic,” August 30), arts coverage puts famous gay faces front and centre, publicizes gay events, and delves into a deeper analysis of gay culture.

Giese thinks this is due in part to the progressive nature of arts reporting, and in part to certain levels of cultural acceptance of homosexuality. “There are probably more openly gay and lesbian people in the arts than, say, in sports or in business. So I think that arts and entertainment writers are going to simply come across more gay people and deal with a lot more gay themes or gay-positive work, so they are going to have to take it up in a way that other sections may not.”

It is not uncommon for the dailies to explore sexual themes in gay arts coverage. The Gazette ran “Comics are Here, They’re Queer and They’re Funny, Too,” on July 20: “You can’t laugh at the confusing, gender-bending stuff of gay life in urban centres without lifting the veil on some of what makes gays gay-and that’s sex.” The Edmonton Journal didn’t shy away from naughty sexual camp in a May 30 article about British comic Julian Clarey, quoting from his show: “You remember Rumpole of the Bailey? Well, I’m more rump than pole.” On April 4 and 5, the Citizen even explored transgendered issues in a two-part feature on former Prairie Oyster drummer Bohdan Hluszko, who has since become Michelle Josef. “Naturally, people are going to be drawn toward anything that is a bit scandalous or provocative,” Giese says. “I think that gay and lesbian lives are still unknown enough for them to be of interest and of curiosity,” though she concedes this is less true in Toronto where “there’s a sort of ‘Yawn, oh well, who cares-another lesbian has come out’ attitude. But in smaller centres, it is still a big deal,” she adds. In places where there are few who are openly gay, “it makes people who are celebrities or public figures that much more essential.”

Giese says that a decline in Canadian gay activism and an increase in gay involvement in the arts also explains the high visibility of gays in entertainment reporting. “So if you are just going to cover what’s around you, there’s not a lot of gay activism,” she explains. “But with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, with other gay plays, with Ellen, and a flood of gay films, and with Will & Grace on television, there has just been more happening in the arts dealing with gay issues.”
Breaking News

There’s a good reason for the dailies’ ability in recent years to adequately cover gay news stories, says Eleanor Brown: it is no longer acceptable in most circles to openly despise queers. She believes that certain critical events have educated journalists and the general public to abhor blatant hatred of gays. When Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old Wyoming student, was crucified-literally-for being gay, journalists tackled the viler forms of homophobia through editorials and local stories on gay bashing. When big news stories concerning gay rights break, the dailies don’t hesitate to give them solid coverage.

The top gay news story during my survey was the Delwin Vriend case. On April 2, 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that sexual orientation must be read into existing Alberta legislation as prohibited grounds for discrimination.Vriend was dismissed from his job at a Christian college in Alberta just for being gay. It was a landmark decision in the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the press jumped on it as a legitimate, often front-page, story. “I thought the coverage was fine,” Brown says, “there was lots of it.”

For example, on April 3, The Edmonton Journal ran this A1 story: “Gay Rights Upheld; Alberta Won’t Challenge the Supreme Court Ruling; Delwin Vriend Wins Discrimination Fight.” On the same day, TheHalifax Chronicle-Herald ran the story: “Vriend Claims Victory In Gay Rights Clash” beneath a picture of the smiling Vriend. The April 3 front page of the Globe showed the same picture with the headline: “Court Protects Gays.” The Globe story served up a straightforward account of the Supreme Court decision, including the responses of Alberta premier Ralph Klein. Four other stories ran on page four, including a background article along with a picture of Vriend kissing his partner, Andrew Gagnon, at a rally in Edmonton. Brown refers once again to the aftermath of the fracas over Ontario’s Bill 167. “All of a sudden a bunch of liberals discovered that wow-there is actual, real hatred out there,” she says.
Gay Pride Day

Editors and advocates differ on how each of the Toronto dailies covered last year’s Gay Pride Parade, which focused on mayor Mel Lastman. On June 29, the Globe ran a picture of Lastman waving to the crowds from a fire truck and this story: “Tanned men wearing leather G-strings whooped. Topless women holding hands waved. Drag queens in stilettos blew kisses. All at Mayor Mel Lastman, the millionaire senior from the suburbs who was the unlikely star of yesterday’s Gay Pride Parade….” The Globe also ran the usual shots of drag queens-this time it was the B-Girlz lounge act squeegying cars. For its part, the Star also showed Lastman on his fire truck, inset against an aerial shot of the parade. “Mayor Mel Lastman may have seen more bare breasts and bottoms than he wanted to in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade,” the article began, “but he promises to be back next year.” The Sun put Lastman on the front page with an inset photo of leather boys sprawled across a convertible. The headline read: “Lastman Shrugs Off Anti-Gay Threats.” On page two, there was more Mel-mania: “Nobody was a bigger hit in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade yesterday than Mayor Mel Lastman, Nooobody!”

The focus on Lastman “was just crazy!” Rachel Giese says. “I think they went for the most simple and the most obvious and, ultimately, I don’t think they represented the gay community that well at all. Those were the two issues, that Mel Lastman was there and gay people have lots of money to spend.” There were many news hooks the dailies could have used, Giese thinks, like the Vriend decision. “I was really happy with howXtra covered Pride Day because we did a lot about the corporatization of Pride Day,” she says. The paper ran the feature: “Does Taking Sponsorship Bucks Mean We’ve Sold Out? Taming the Corporate Beast” in the June 18 edition. In the Pride follow-up edition on July 2, Xtra ran a news story about Molson and Labatt’s high profile at Pride: “You know Pride is big when even the breweries agree to come to terms with each other.” Eleanor Brown agrees that the dailies missed the mark in focusing solely on Lastman in their coverage. “I confess we wrote a couple of stories about ‘is the mayor going to march or not,’ but that was more to make fun of the mayor,” she jokes. “I don’t think gays and lesbians cared that the mayor marched.” Murdoch’s pamphleteering accusation rings in my ears. Wasn’t Lastman’s participation, after all, the news? It’s fine to cover other aspects of pride in a gay paper, but in a daily, shouldn’t the focus be on what is different and of interest to a predominantly straight readership? Deputy managing editor Fred Kuntz is pleased with how the Star covered pride day this year. He likens Mel Lastman’s involvement to a metaphor for the parade’s reception in the city over the years. “It was like his conversion on the road to Damascus,” Kuntz says. At first, Mel was hesitant, then he reluctantly agreed to march. By the end, he was an exuberant participant. Mike Strobel, managing editor at The Toronto Sun, echoes Kuntz. “That was the news,” he says.
Opinion

When it comes to columns, letters to the editor, and op-ed pieces, dailies don’t hesitate to print perspectives generated by right-wing and religious bigotry.

Raymond Brassard, managing editor of The Gazette, says his paper is liberal in its editorial position on human rights issues. The Gazette does, however, occasionally publish Lorne Gunter’s Edmonton Journalcolumn. It’s far from liberal. In his June 4 column, for instance, Gunter defended a Social Credit Party flyer that equated the Vriend decision with giving pedophiles the right to work with children: “The American Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists wants the perversion [pedophilia] renamed ‘intergenerational sex,’ and has urged its members to teach that it is part of a ‘continuum of sexual development.’ Homosexuality has ‘normed’ in precisely the same way.” Alexander Norris, a reporter at The Gazette concedes that, “since Hollinger’s taken over, we have loaded up with a bunch of right-wing yahoos.”

The Ottawa Citizen also prints anti-gay opinion pieces. In his July 9 column “Lies, Myths and Extremist Gays,” John McKellar, a gay man and a member of Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, writes: “History tells us that, although homosexuality always has and always will exist, no civilization has survived which has fully embraced and legally sanctioned it as a normal and healthy alternative to heterosexuality.” His column, which ran the week leading up to gay and lesbian pride day in Ottawa, set off an avalanche of angry letters condemning his views and the Citizen for providing him with a forum. Don Butler, executive editor at the Citizen, was not involved in the decision to run the column, but supports his paper’s right to print it. Butler also thinks that McKellar’s sexuality gave the piece some validity. “It’s like the old expression that only someone who is Jewish can tell a Jewish joke,” Butler says. “I think if the same article had been written by a heterosexual person, it could have easily been dismissed as antigay sentiment.”

The Edmonton Journal is another daily that doesn’t shrink from printing homophobic views, as this April 16 letter to the editor from Randy Thorsteinson, leader of the Alberta Social Credit Party, demonstrates: “The court decision in the Vriend case is a fundamental attack on the moral fabric of our society, and will certainly lead to a radical shift in our rights.” Thorsteinson goes on to lament the “erosion of parental rights. This decision will remove a parent’s right to choose who works with their children. Parents will not be allowed to refuse a homosexual hockey coach or scout leader.”

Sarah Murdoch makes a strong argument for the value of running this sort of right-wing, antigay opinion in the Globe. “What interested me about Vriend was the day after the decision, the letters editor came in and said, ‘God! Some of these letters are really hateful,” Murdoch says. On April 7, the Globe ran a letter from Edmonton that argued: “it is quite possible that within Alberta there remains a plateau above the cesspool of bathhouse culture.” Murdoch defends the Globe‘s decision to run these letters. “We printed a lot of them because we want to reflect what all facets of society are thinking,” Murdoch adds, “It’s very important to be the mirror of society. We can’t sanitize the news.”

One change that daily editors can make without “sanitizing the news,” says Giese, is to question their collective tendency to balance positive gay stories with the opinions of fundamentalist Christians. “Unless the issue is, do gay people have the right to exist?” she says, “to balance out a gay person’s opinion on spousal rights with somebody who thinks gay people should rot in hell is ridiculous.” As far as Giese is concerned, “having someone from Focus on the Family or the Coalition of Concerned Canadians is just ludicrous because they take the argument off in this crazy direction and hold it hostage. We end up having to defend our very being as opposed to having an interesting discussion.” She adds that editors and writers don’t seek the extreme viewpoint to balance out nongay stories. For example, she says, they “never figure they have to go and talk to a communist when they do an article about the banks.”

Some editors, when asked about the value of quoting extreme right-wing sources in the name of balance, agreed that it wasn’t the best course of action. Jane Purves, managing editor of The Chronicle-Herald , ignores some of the more vitriolic missives that come into her newsroom. “We don’t want letters that encourage people to hate other people,” Purves says. “That could be about women, it could be about blacks, it could be about natives, or it could be about gays.” Purves goes on to say that “there are very few people in this newsroom who would think that a story would be balanced by putting in what they consider to be an offensive point of view.”
Sports

If there is one section in the dailies where gays are nonexistent, it is in the sports pages. This is not a complaint unique to the gay community. Women’s sports, the Special Olympics, and community sporting events are also given little play in the dailies.

In August, 15,000 lesbian and gay athletes converged on Amsterdam to take part in the Gay Games, so named because the International Olympic Committee refused to lend its then-prestigious title to a bunch of weight-lifting fags and butch goalkeepers. This year’s event drew some 200,000 spectators for a rowdy week of competitive sport. Despite the fact that Canadian athletes did well, sports editors virtually ignored the games. “Isn’t that appalling?” asks Eleanor Brown. While some dailies did give the games passing mention, the stories rarely appeared in the sports sections. Peggy Curran, city columnist at The Gazette, for example, chose the media blackout of the Gay Games as the subject of her August 26 column. Curran reported that a local gay athlete had no luck convincing the sports desks to cover the event. The column prompted her managing editor, Raymond Brassard, to make some inquiries: “Following that column I sat down with the sports editor because it just jumped out at me, and I asked, ‘How come?’ I don’t think you’ll find that we are going to be ignoring it anymore.”

Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg also wrote about the games in her September 5 column. She was on vacation in Amsterdam during the festivities. The Star did not cover the games in the sports pages. Deputy managing editor Fred Kuntz points out that there is also little coverage of other community sporting events. Most editors, like Kuntz, think it’s just a matter of space constraints and happenstance that the games weren’t picked up. Nicholas Hirst, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, thinks it would have been a good idea to give the story some play, though his paper ignored it. He says that most sports fans are only interested in the big-league team sports. Conversely, readers want some local sports and stories about, as Hirst puts it, how well little Johnny did. The Edmonton Journal ran a short wire service story on the games on August 2 in the news section, but nothing appeared in sports. The Calgary Herald didn’t mention the games anywhere. TheCitizen ran two stories-neither in the sports section. An August 1 story concerned a transgendered athlete accusing games organizers of discrimination, and another on August 6 reported the dismissal of the games’ director for mismanagement.

Perhaps the dailies didn’t cover the games because nobody pitched the story to the editors. Jane Purves is certainly not opposed to covering the games at The Chronicle-Herald, though that paper also ignored them. Anything not involving a ball and a bunch of overpaid athletes is tough to get by the sports desk. Purves sounds tired when she explains, “It takes three years to get a story on canoeing in the paper. I’m not kidding.”

Few editors deny the validity of the games as a legitimate sports story. Sarah Murdoch is an exception. She isn’t convinced the Gay Games belong in the sports pages of the Globe: “Speaking for myself, and not the newspaper, I don’t find the Gay Games a very interesting idea.” She can, however, see a place for them in the paper, but not in the sports section. “Why you would have gay Olympics, based on sexual preference, this completely stymies me.”
Sex

The Pussy Palace opened its doors in a downtown Toronto club on September 14. Nearly 400 women turned up, many of whom waited for an hour to get into this first lesbian bathhouse. None of the Toronto dailies picked up the story. “It’s not like we hid it,” Eleanor Brown says. “We put it on the cover!” Fred Kuntz at theStar didn’t know about the bathhouse, though he was intrigued and said if he had such a story, he would read it. Kuntz says the paper didn’t intentionally ignore the bathhouse. With so many stories in Toronto, Kuntz says the Star can’t be a paper of record. “That’s not an excuse,” Kuntz adds. “That’s an apology, in a way. That’s me saying I wish we could do more.” Victor Dwyer, travel editor at the Globe and a member of the Toronto chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association Canada, sees no reason why the Globeshouldn’t have run something on the lesbian bathhouse. He thinks such a story could provide an opportunity to examine broader issues about women and anonymous sex. Dwyer is known for easily incorporating gay themes into his section of the paper. He ran playwright Brad Fraser’s essay “My Own Private Calgary” and published a neat little number on Cuban drag queens by Augusta Dwyer. (“My cousin, not me in drag,” he jokes.) But his openness to considering stories that touch on queer sexuality is exceptional. Sarah Murdoch is not certain how explicit the paper should be about gay or straight sexuality. “The pendulum swings back and forth,” she says. “Five years ago we were using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than we are today, so it’s not just to do with being gay.” Eleanor Brown says the dailies intentionally shy away from gay sex. The Toronto Sun, for example, she says, is hardly coy about straight sex. On September 24, the paper ran this enticing headline on page 22: “Spice Up Your Sex Life, T.O. Told.” The article encourages people-presumably, straight people-to do it in public places: “A little sexual spontaneity can spice up our bland city and your sex life, according to sex therapist Dr. Sue McGarvie. She said try making whoopee at an outdoor event, or even do it in your car. And don’t worry about becoming the next Hugh Grant-it’s legal if you’re not in an area easily accessible to the public.”

It is hard to imagine the Sun being so blasé about gay men taking part in a little late- night public “whoopee” in the parks. Gay male public sex has always been frowned upon by the paper. Brown is optimistic that one day the dailies may cover stories like the Pussy Palace with the same sort of playfulness as the spice up your sex life article. “Eventually, it will dawn on them,” she says. “They will be able to talk about our sex. I hope. That is the next frontier.”

Two people arrived at their new jobs at Saturday Night magazine last September. Both wore a tie and a dress shirt tucked into chinos. Both looked like recent university graduates although both were a few credits short of a BA. Twenty-nine-year-old Duff Wallis walked to Saturday Night‘s downtown Toronto office carrying an attaché case. He sat behind a fabric divider with the other intern. The other person rode his bicycle to the office with a Wired magazine bag tugging at his shoulder and, after locking his bike to a signpost, rode the elevator to the fourth floor to take his seat behind a dark wood desk next to a large window. He’s Paul Tough, now 31, and Saturday Night‘s new editor.

When John Fraser was hired as Saturday Night editor, Conrad Black treated him to a new Volvo. Tough bought himself a new $379 Norco bicycle after taking the job and he bikes to the office. His new office is spartan. Old Harper’s issues sit on the crowded bookshelf. Behind the desk is the lean, fresh-faced young editor turning a tiny leather day book between his fingers. His curly hair is cut as often by a barber as by his girlfriend of six years, Deirdre Dolan, former television and film columnist at The New York Observer who now covers the same beat at the National Post Tough’s ears and nose look slightly too big for his face. It’s as if he’s still growing.

Tough, who turned 31 not long after that first day at work, wasn’t the obvious choice for the editorship ofSaturday Night magazine. Past editors Robert Fulford, John Fraser, and Ken Whyte all began as Canadian newspaper reporters and wrote for Saturday Night long before editing the magazine. Tough’s been out of Canada for 10 years and has never worked in Canadian journalism. Since age 20 he has lived in New York, where he spent eight years editing at Harper’s magazine and contributed to This American Life, a radio show broadcast on Public Radio International.

While Canada was dealing with Meech Lake, the Charlottetown Accord, the 1995 Quebec referendum, the tainted blood scandal, the emergence of the Reform Party, and other major issues, Tough was helping shapeHarper’s commentary on U.S. issues such the Gulf War and the status of the Republican Party. He has never managed a staff before or worked on a magazine as important to a country as Saturday Night is to Canada.Saturday Night attracts about 700,000 Canadian readers each issue compared to Harper’s 426,000 readers in all of North America (41,500 of them in Canada). While neither magazine is profitable, Harper’s is maintained by a nonprofit foundation and doesn’t face the same expectations of eventually turning a profit asSaturday Night, which is owned by Conrad Black. Now this unlikely, unknown editor has the responsibility to run one of Canada’s oldest and most-read magazines. Yet Tough’s youth and eclectic approach to journalism may suit a reformatted Saturday Night as it greets the 21st century. He’s won high praise from some impressive people. “I think he’s going to be terrific,” says Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham. “He has a very innate sense of what is fresh and his ideas tend to be ahead of the curve. He may be talking about something that Time magazine won’t be talking about for another year.”

Now Tough is wrestling with what Saturday Night should be talking about and how to express that in the overhauled magazine, which first hit newsstands at the end of February. “I hope when you read it, it will feel like it’s telling a unified and yet varied story about Canada-to try to say, This is what Canada feels like this month at this moment. I don’t think that’s what the magazine’s trying to do right now,” he said, explaining his hopes for the new Saturday Night shortly after becoming editor. “There are all these interesting conflicts and dilemmas in Canada-from language debates to trying to figure out a way natives and everyone else are going to interact. There are all these flash points and intersections of different cultures. At those intersections there are interesting stories.”

Tough’s Saturday Night has been completely rethought and redesigned, from the cover logo to the back page. As the February 5 deadline for the first new issue approached, Tough refused to talk to me about the relaunch, saying he was too busy. Instead, his close friend Joel Lovell ( who helped recreate Saturday Nightwhile on two months’ leave from editing Harper’s Readings section) relates the motives behind the changes. “I hope people will think this is a magazine that’s simultaneous ly serious, intellectual but also irreverent and funny, but not in an adolescent way,” says Lovell. “I think people who look to magazines like The New Yorkeror Harper’s will realize there’s a magazine here in their own country that achieves the same level of quality.”

Canadian Letters is the centrepiece of the new Saturday Night. It’s a series of personal stories from ordinary Canadians across the country. “If there’s an individual section that’s attached to Paul’s larger vision of the magazine, this might be it,” Lovell says. “It will be people telling personal stories from all over Canada. Sometimes those stories will be very specific responses to things in the news; others are going to be more like memoirs. It might be a guy in a punk band in Edmonton writing about what it means to be working as the manager of the Pizza Hut but also playing in this band in a place where there’s essentially no punk music scene. It might be someone writing from Peggy’s Cove or the town right next to it saying, This is what it feels like right now living in the wake of the Swissair crash. Hopefully, a lot of correspondents will write in a serial fashion so readers will get used to literally receiving letters from these people in different parts of the country.”

Tough brought Lovell to Saturday Night for only a couple months but he has quickly made permanent additions to the staff. He hired Paul Wilson (who used to be an editor at The Idler) away from CBC Radio, where he was a producer on This Morning, to edit Canadian Letters and feature stories. He plucked Adam Sternbergh away from Toronto Life to edit Saturday Night‘s front-of-the-book with Gillian Burnett, who started at the magazine as Whyte’s assistant. Tough has also scouted for new writers in Vancouver, Alberta, Ottawa, and Montreal. In Winnipeg he found Miriam Toews, assigning her first piece for Saturday Night about growing up in a Mennonite community in southeastern Manitoba.

Tough’s a specialist at finding unknown, idiosyncratic writers and coaxing them into contributing. These include a guy who calls himself “Dishwasher Pete” and travels from state to state in the U.S., washing dishing in restaurants and recording his experiences in a ‘zine called Dishwasher. But Tough found in his writings a commentary on work and money in America. Although Tough didn’t think Pete’s work fit with Harper’s, he maintained their relationship and the dishwasher eventually read stories on air for This American Life.

Since returning to Canada, Tough has also been reconnecting with some of Saturday Night‘s best writers from the past. Several contributors left Saturday Night when Conrad Black bought it. Fraser was burdened with being Black’s first editor and many writers stopped writing for the magazine when Fulford resigned. Whyte was viewed as a neo-con ideologue and an extension of Black’s editorial reach. For Tough, being unknown is an asset. “He’s helped by the fact that he comes as a relative outsider and therefore hasn’t got a lot of baggage,” says Ron Graham, who hasn’t written for Saturday Night since Black bought it in 1987 but is talking to Tough about writing again. “He doesn’t come with a lot of people either loving or hating him. He’s not seen as a particular ideologue or part of any particular group. There are a lot of people who weren’t courted by Ken Whyte and they’re now being courted by Paul Tough.”

While courting writers, Tough must also woo a new audience at the same time appeasing the loyal readers of Canada’s first consumer magazine. Saturday Night began as a 12-page Toronto weekly in 1887 but didn’t become a national treasure until the 1930s and forties under Bernard (B.K.) Sandwell (who shares the honour of longest-running editor with Robert Fulford, who ran Saturday Night for 19 years until 1987, when it was 100 years old and Canada’s premier general-interest monthly). That’s when Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. bought Saturday Night and Fulford quit, believing his editorial autonomy would be jeopardized under the new ownership.

Fulford’s replacement, John Fraser, made the magazine more exciting and radically altered the financial structure. He infused the magazine with his mischievous nature, publishing pieces like James Bacque’s controversial article accusing Dwight Eisenhower of deliberately starving German prisoners of war. In 1989, Fraser and publisher Jeff Shearer may have saved the magazine by making the bold move to distributeSaturday Night free in select markets through Southam newspapers in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver and through The Globe and Mail in Toronto, nearly tripling circulation. However, the magazine was still losing money.

When Fraser left in 1994, pundits suspected new editor Ken Whyte would drag the magazine further to the right. While it didn’t happen to the degree people expected, his magazine did favour articles that attacked feminism, welfare, and other left-wing causes. He also continued Fraser’s mischievousness, bringing a mean edge to it by calling Farley Mowat a liar and picking on young child labour activist Craig Kielburger. But his style won readers and the magazine was also inching toward profitability. “It’s as close to profitable as it’s been in all of the time that Conrad’s owned it,” Whyte says of the ledger books when he left the magazine and Tough took over. “I really think we were one year away from breaking even.”

Paul Tough was born in Toronto in 1967. His mother, Anne, a schoolteacher, and his father Allen, an education professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, raised him in a modest semidetached home on a tree-lined street just off of Bloor Street West in the Annex. He began school younger than most when his parents enrolled him at the Institute of Child Studies (a progressive school run by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), two months before his third birthday. They separated when he was 8 years old and he continued to live with his mother.

After he finished Grade 6 at ICS, he was accepted into the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), a downtown semiprivate school, and he started reading magazines. “I had a subscription to Mad, I read the science-fiction stories in Omni, and I’d briefly been obsessed with The Toronto Star’s Sunday magazine, The City, but I’d never before thought about magazines as something you could really interact with, as something more than just a disposable read,” he said in a speech to the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors last fall. Then a friend introduced him to Harper’s magazine, which had just been saved from the brink of extinction after editor Lewis Lapham’s famous 1984 overhaul. “I was hooked. I bought every issue, kept them on my shelf, and consulted them. I got to know the magazine’s writers, its sense of humour, its point of view. I think it was in those pages that I got my first glimpse into what a magazine editor was. I got a sense of the idea that collecting information and rearranging it could be a creative act.”

So enlightened, Tough continued studying at UTS. When he was 13, he got a job cohosting Anybody Home?, a Saturday morning current affairs program for kids on CBC Radio. He acted in a production of On Golden Pond at the Red Barn in Whitby one summer, banking the money he would later use to help pay for university and survive during an unpaid Harper’s internship.

Then, at age 17, he went to New York’s Columbia University with a modest scholarship, the money he’d saved working and a small amount willed to him by a relative, but dropped out after one semester studying general arts. “It was really expensive and I was paying for most of it myself so that made me question how worthwhile an education it was for me.” Despite hesitations about school, Tough applied to McGill University before taking off on a bicycle trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He returned to Toronto to work as a bike courier for the summer before beginning at McGill, studying religion and English. After a year and a half in Montreal, Tough felt he had to get back to New York and a Harper’s internship helped make it happen. “It seemed to give me all the things that I wanted from a university education,” says Tough, “a view of the world, information, and intellectual stimulation.”

Tough was assigned to work with Michael Pollan, then executive editor in charge of the Readings section of the magazine, the front-of-the-book section devoted to found bits culled from just about anywhere. “If you look at the Readings section from that period, it was really good and he deserves a large part of the credit for that,” Pollan says “He had a wonderful eye for finding these things in obscure places. He made a habit of reading all sorts of ‘zines and paid attention to computer networks before anybody was much paying attention to that.”

When the five-month internship was over there wasn’t a job for Tough at Harper’s. But after working eight months as an assistant editor at Savvy Woman, a now-defunct New York?based woman’s business magazine, he was back despite being the person with the worst credentials on paper. “He didn’t go to Harvard, he didn’t get a degree in English literature, he didn’t know half the people in the publishing industry,” says Jack Hitt, former Harper’s senior editor, now a freelance writer and one of Tough’s closest friends. “He violated both the overt and covert canon of intern networking but he was definitely a guy known for his work.”

Arguably, Tough’s greatest contribution to Harper’s was to bring obscure new writers into the magazine. These new writers often came from ‘zines he found scouring counterculture book stores in New York’s East Village where he lived in a tiny bachelor apartment. But Tough wasn’t mired in the ghetto of the eccentric and obscure. He also turned up Readings from traditional sources. “He would work hard on finding Washington documents,” says Pollan. “From an amazingly early time he had an excellent news judgment. He had a real sense of what was a story-what was the fresh wrinkle in the conversation. Those are journalistic skills that ordinarily take a very long time to acquire.”

On Pollan’s recommendation, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham promoted Tough to Readings editor. Tough also moderated many of Harper’s more memorable Forums, an occasional section bringing disparate experts to discuss a topical issue. He and Hitt brought together computer specialists and techno-geeks to a computer bulletin board to discuss the dangers hackers posed to the world. That Forum spawned an article on hackers Tough cowrote with Hitt for Esquire in 1990 which won them the U.S. $10,000 national reporting prize at the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, one of three prizes given yearly by the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation in the U.S. to deserving journalists under 35. The 1995 movie Hackers was partially based on that article and Tough and Hitt served as “hacker consultants” for the production. Another Forum, “The New Auteurs,” brought together movie marketers to discover how Hollywood spins a terrible film into a box office hit.

Much of Harper’s Canadian content came to the magazine through Tough. He commissioned Guy Lawson, former host of TVO’s Imprint and now a writer who lives in Tough’s old East Village apartment, to write “No Canada?” about Montreal and the Quebec referendum for the April 1996 issue. Then Tough assigned him to follow Flin Flon, Manitoba’s junior team for a story. “Hockey Nights,” in the January 1998 issue. The article revealed Canadian hockey’s emphasis on size and hitting over skating, passing, and shooting skills long before Canadian sports journalists were decrying the demise of hockey in Canada following our recent Olympic and World Cup debacles.

Harper’s suited Tough well, and Tough suited Harper’s. “He got very much ensconced at Harper’s-very much protected by the other editors, who adored him,” says Patricia Pearson, who interned at Harper’s when Tough was assistant editor and is now a freelance writer for Saturday Night and other publications.

At 25, Tough was a senior editor at Harper’s, but even that job didn’t fully exploit his talent. In 1995, Tough began as a contributor to This American Life, a Peabody award-winning show broadcast on 300 U.S. stations. “When I met him I was shocked at how young he was,” the show’s Chicago-based creator, Ira Glass, recalls. “On the telephone I thought he was probably a good 10 years older than me, and then he turns out to be 10 years younger.” For the first year Tough contributed ideas to the program, did some reporting, and cohosted shows while still at Harper’s. At the same time he was putting out an occasional ‘zine of unintentionally funny bits photocopied from the Times.

But Tough, now an editor of a writer’s magazine, has done little writing of his own. What he has written, including pieces for the Shouts & Murmurs back page of The New Yorker, the back page of GQ, and the op-ed page of the Times, are darkly humourous smart-bombs cowritten with friend and former Harper’s intern Stephen Sherrill and aimed to explode journalism clichés. In an August 1997 Shouts & Murmurs piece called “Khmer Roué”, Tough and Sherrill mock the ubiquitous come-back celebrity profile with a facetious report on Pol Pot living out his retirement in California. They have the genocidal dictator going from a poolside breakfast of Belgian waffles to a workout with his personal trainer. As he steps off a Lifecycle, Pol Pot says: “Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a big fan of radical primitivist agrarian reform. But one morning I woke up and it hit me: I’d been so busy thinking about the masses that I hadn’t been taking very good care of Pol Pot.”

Just one year before Conrad Black came calling, Tough was ready to give up on magazines. After nine years at Harper’s, he left in 1997 and devoted more energy to the radio show, but he didn’t work full time. “I think I was burned out a little bit on magazines as a concept,” he says now. “The process of editing and writing had become kind of cramped. There was a clichéd style for a lot of magazines and it was hard to get beyond that and hard to really get the essence of the story across. I just felt uninspired by magazines.”

Meanwhile, the Whyte era at Saturday Night was fading as he planned the launch of Conrad Black’s National Post. Saturday Night publisher Maureen Cavan, honorary publisher Allan Gotlieb, Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel Black began searching for a new editor in May 1998. They drew up a list of about 19 candidates (including several Canadian journalists working in the U.S. such as New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam, a Times editor, and former Newsweek writer Rick Marin) but none was interested enough to sit down for an interview. Then Ken Whyte suggested Paul Tough after hearing good things about him from Marin and Leanne Shapton-whom Whyte hired away from Harper’s to design the Post’s Avenue spread.

After meeting with Whyte and Gotlieb in Toronto, Tough was asked to meet Conrad and Barbara at Hollinger’s New York office. “We talked about Canadian journalism. I think I was talking more than they did,” Tough recalls. “I talked about how the radio show found stories in places where a lot of other journalists hadn’t thought there were stories. I thought that same thing could be true with Saturday Night.” He realized he wasn’t quite so weary of magazines after all when he was offered the editorship of Saturday Night in mid-August. “The magazines I had worked for felt static and limiting but I felt there were things a magazine could do that no magazine was doing. A magazine like Saturday Night, with such a wide focus where you can consider so many different things, was a great opportunity. On the other side, I was happy with what I was doing. I had been living in New York for 10 years and that felt like home. I had friends there and I knew this would be an incredible amount of work,” he said. “It seemed like an opportunity I would never get again and it was just too good to turn down.”

Some people are surprised Tough got the opportunity at all. Although he’s accomplished more than most 31-year-old editors, he hasn’t yet amassed the wisdom that comes from years of writing and editing for several publications. Harper’s gloomy outlook and narrow focus on political and social decline may not translate well at a mainstream publication here in Canada, a country he’s just come back to.

His return to Canada surprised many of his New York friends and colleagues who expect he’ll be back in New York before too long. Although Tough closely followed happenings in his home country while in New York, reading about Canada in the Times is not the same as living here. “I’m glad he has roots in Canada but I think it’s ironic that we’re hiring somebody who has largely American work experience to edit Canada’s oldest magazine,” says former Saturday Night publisher Jeff Shearer, who is now the Star’s vice president of marketing. “I don’t think it’s flattering to editors in Canada that they went south of the border.”

Flattering or not, Paul Tough has the potential to be a great editor. His age can help him bring younger readers to the magazine. Tough has never lost touch with his homeland. Like a son who can’t understand and appreciate his parents until he’s moved out, Tough has had time away to contemplate Canada, something he’s done with a This American Life show called “Who’s Canadian?” about Canadian influences and personalities in American culture.

Now, as a Canadian magazine editor, Paul Tough must constantly examine Canadian culture. Just 15 days after becoming the editor of Saturday Night, Tough hinted at his plans for the magazine in an address to the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors, where he impressed some magazine veterans there, like Toronto Lifecopy chief Cynthia Brouse, who was once Fulford’s assistant at Saturday Night. “What struck me most was that he had very strong views on what a magazine is and should be and seemed to want to get away from the superficiality that afflicts magazines,” she said. “That, and the fact that he looked as if he was 12 years old.”

We were in the car on our way to cover a story when the photographer looked over at me and grinned. “So, how do you like working at The Ladies Home Journal?“

I didn’t get it at first. Then my eyes widened and I must have seemed a bit flustered because he looked at me disparagingly and refocused on the road. The Ladies Home Journal. In Red monton. It was a nickname I hadn’t yet heard in my short time at The Edmonton Journal. I was a summer intern. This was the first job I had ever loved or valued and I was stunned by his snide reference to the liberal tendencies of the paper. He was right. The Journal loved human-interest stories and made a point of putting a feature on almost every front page. That summer the bleeding-heart topics I had written about included various ethnic festivals, the opening of a women’s health clinic in a low-income area, and the impact of the housing shortage on a single mom. How odd, I mused, that this paper thrived in my home province of Alberta.

I was raised in Calgary and learned to read with the Calgary Herald. As a preschooler, I would scan the inky pages to pick out words I could recognize. Later, as a political science student at the University of Calgary, I would digest the news daily, gritting my teeth when I reached the columns and read the same conservative, pro-Reform opinions my father and his oil field cronies had always so forcibly touted. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t just the columns that were catering to the typical Calgary mind-set.

Not only are the Herald and the Journal both native to Alberta, they are both owned by Southam Inc. Yet the more I thought about it, the less curious it seemed that the papers are so different. Calgary is the antithesis of Edmonton.

A line could be drawn through the middle of the province of Alberta, each half being a unique entity. Historically, the two cities developed quite differently. Southern Alberta was settled by Anglo-Saxon cowboys on big ranches with British money backing them up. The central Albertans were mostly Eastern Europeans with small homesteads. From then on, it seems the cities have grown further and further apart.

These days, Calgary is booming; 2,400 people move to the Stampede city every month and the vacancy rate is the lowest in the country. Oil tycoons, business executives and technology buffs crowd the roads in their $50,000 4x4s. Edmonton’s population and economy are more stagnant, but the city is still a lively mix of politicians, university intellectuals, and blue-collar workers, with world-class music and cultural festivals that draw thousands of tourists every year.

The main Alberta dailies are popular because each is a mirror image of the city that inspires its existence. They differ not in spite of their common owner, but because of him. Conrad Black wants to make money, and in order to do that he must sell papers. Advertisers won’t invest in a publication that isn’t read, and people won’t read a paper they don’t like. Albertans vote with their 50 cents every weekday morning – these papers dominate their respective markets, crushing the competition. The Journal has a circulation of 143,691 from Monday to Thursday and Saturday (The Edmonton Sun 74,173 Monday to Saturday) and the Herald 116,441 on weekdays (The Calgary Sun 69,089 Monday to Saturday).

Journal president and publisher Linda Hughes doesn’t agree that her newspaper is a knee-jerk reflection of the city. The community is reflected only in the broadest sense, she maintains. “We don’t run by consensus. We don’t take a poll and say, ‘this is what Edmontonians think therefore this is what the editorial page will say.'” News is just news, she says, although stories are chosen for their interest and relevance to Edmontonians. Opinions and editorials are composed by individuals with diverse points of view.

Some say that when Hollinger Inc. took over Southam, and thus the Journal, Hughes, the incumbent publisher, was instrumental in keeping the paper liberal. But she says no arguments were necessary. “I don’t think it was something The Edmonton Journal had to worry about,” she says. “Our circulation and our financial results spoke for themselves.” Hughes started in the Journal newsroom in 1976 and worked her way up, reaching the apex in 1992. Her Calgary counterpart, Ken King, has only been the Herald president and publisher for about three years. Southam solicited him away after an eight-year stint at the rival Calgary Sun.His newspaper career has always been on the business side, in advertising and management, but under the leadership of each publisher the papers have seen good financial results.

“Our circulation is up, our readership has achieved all-time record level, and our business base of advertising is much higher than it has ever been before,” King says, maintaining that part of the success comes from format changes seen since his arrival. Headlines are bigger. The city section was separated from the life section to cover about 40 percent more local news. The business section was expanded to accommodate Calgary’s growing financial community. More attention is now paid to sports. “The market seems to have accepted [the changes] wholeheartedly,” he says.

King doesn’t think his paper is ideologically different from the Journal, just as Hughes believes her paper and the Herald are similar. He says the editorial board leans neither right nor left: “I think we take a centrist view of the world.” If the Journal covers more provincial politics, he says it’s because more Edmontonians are directly employed by the government; Calgarians are also provided with a good diet of politics. “We are critical, constructively, hopefully, of the government and I suspect The Edmonton Journal is, too. I don’t think we’re any less or any more critical.” And there is a significant representation of social issues, he says, from investigative work on native reserves to the plight of the homeless.

That’s the publishers’ line. A content analysis of the papers leads me to a different conclusion. Because the papers are so rooted in cities with such distinctive personalities, they necessarily take on those personalities in their coverage. Their readers make the news. Their readers are quoted in the stories. The papers, therefore, have different takes on political and social issues that affect the whole province.

Susan Ruttan is the chief editorial writer at the Journal. The position was a professional challenge for the former Herald columnist, who spent 15 years at the Calgary paper. The Journal covers politics more aggressively than the Herald, she argues, because it is in the capital. But political polarities are also a factor, she adds. They have to be because the cities vote differently. “The MLAs here are generally Liberal. When you cover politics in Calgary, it’s hard to find an opposition member to quote, even, because there are so few of them. And all the local Calgary MLAs, with some exceptions, are Conservative. I think [coverage] does get skewed.”

Edmonton, home to the legislature, houses most of the provincial lobby groups and social service organizations; groups of people more likely to vote for more liberal parties. Deficit slashing takes a backseat to health care and education. Edmontonians don’t hate the Klein government, but they are more likely to be suspicious and critical of it.

Calgary is the birthplace of the Reform party and a bastion of conservatism. Ralph Klein’s Tories can do little wrong in Calgary, and the Herald doesn’t go very far to criticize them. Klein and King are known to be golfing and fishing buddies. In Calgary, the deficit has to be kept under control, taxes must be low and the government should stay out of the way of big business.

There are no federal Liberals from Calgary (the last one was Pat Mahoney, who won a seat in 1968), and only one Liberal MLA, Gary Dickson, is from a Calgary riding. Dickson says the Journal is more pointed and aggressive in its analysis of the government than the Herald. “I’m often in the same story in The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald,” he says. “But the Journal features an opposition comment or criticism and that’s the lead. The same story runs in the Herald and I’m in the last paragraph.”

His observations concur with the results of a 1997 study done after the provincial election in 1997. Shannon Sampert was a journalist for 20 years before going back to school at the University of Calgary, and she was intrigued with how the two Alberta papers presented distinctive accounts of the same news. In June 1997 she publicly revealed a paper that compared election coverage in the Herald and the Journal for the Parkland Institute, a public policy research group. Analyzing all electoral headlines, she found the Herald consistently favouring the Klein regime and minimizing potential scandal, while the Journal was often critical, especially when it came to social issues.

Klein called the election the same day the budget was revealed, trumpeting a huge surplus. The Heraldcriticized Liberal and New Democrat spending plans (“Liberal Promises Come with Price Tag Attached”) and congratulated Klein on his timing, while the Journal was wary (“Too Busy Gloating About Surplus to Consider Outcasts: But Some Canadians Are Noticing the Alberta Disadvantage”).

Health care was the most contentious issue: nurses were threatening to strike, northern doctors stopped working for three days, and doctors had their medicare spending cap lifted. The Journal was sympathetic. Columnist Linda Goyette wrote: “[Nurses] see their employers, the appointed regional health authorities keeping a polite silence about Alberta’s health care troubles so as not to offend Tory masters in the sensitive days before the vote.” The Herald endorsed Klein’s view that nurses shouldn’t be allowed to strike and argued that Albertans wouldn’t support illegal job action.

The differences were duly noted. Four days before the election, Klein scathingly remarked, “For their election coverage this year, I want to thank The Edmonton Journal from the heart of my bottom.”

The pattern of coverage continued the next year when lacklustre Liberal leader Grant Mitchell stepped down and four candidates rose to vie for the vacant position. The winner, Nancy MacBeth, had one less successful high-profile race behind her. The former Conservative MP from Edmonton had faced Calgary’s Ralph Klein for that party’s leadership in 1992, but her supporters in Edmonton weren’t enough to overcome Klein’s stronghold in Calgary and the rural areas. So, she was new not only to Liberal leadership in 1998, she was new to the party and didn’t have a seat in the legislature.

In the two weeks leading up to the April 18 election, the Journal published almost twice as many election stories as the Herald. The race, to the extent it was covered, read like a Shakespearean drama in the Heraldwith headlines denouncing “Lady MacBeth” as a vindictive turncoat against “King Ralph.” The premier, one column joked, was “a damn tough spot [MacBeth] can’t easily get out.” In Edmonton, MacBeth was a viewed as a worthy opponent to Klein. The paper gave her platform good coverage; she was heavily quoted in articles such as one that connected a dwindling number of Alberta doctors to underfunded health care.

Emphasis on social issues is typical of the Journal, while the Herald usually reports with the pragmatic, business-minded perspective of its readers. Calgarians are a friendly sort of people who take great pride and comfort in their perpetual willingness to lend a hand-on an individual level. The government shouldn’t decide, with our money, who is going to receive help and in what manner that help will come. It’s too bad that health care costs so much. But if we’ve gotta cut we’ve gotta cut. You can’t spend more than you make, after all, and something had to be done about that deficit.

Edmontonians, too, are generous-but in a more universal way. So many people are out of work, and health care has eroded to such an appalling extent. Single mothers, the unemployed, the disabled, and the seniors should all have enough food to eat and a warm roof over their heads through the bitter northern winters. We should all have the same access to the same quality of health care. Ruttan says that when it comes to health care and other social issues, the Journal has led the charge in the province and in so doing, represented the community. She has researched the Grey Nuns Hospital closure in Edmonton. “When it was demoted to a community health clinic [it has since been reinstated to hospital status], they had two rallies in Edmonton of 15,000 people. You couldn’t get 1,500 people to a rally on health care in Calgary. The papers reflect that.”

Former Edmontonian Gayle Gilchrist James, now an associate professor in the faculty of social work at the University of Calgary, became vehemently frustrated with the Herald and cancelled her subscription about two years after moving south. She thinks Calgarians would be shocked if they knew the extent of the poverty in their city. “Economic development is so terrific I don’t think people realize that economic development alone, in many cases, does not create jobs,” she lamented. “The lack of social-issue coverage in the Herald, to me, is a major factor in Calgary’s being uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed. This is the Texas North approach: Pull your damn self up by the bootstraps.”

The Health Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 37), introduced with little ado into the Alberta legislature last spring, provides a perfect example of how social issue coverage varies from one city to the other. The bill would give the health minister power to authorize-or reject-private hospitals in Alberta. For-profit hospitals. Lobby groups and opposition parties caught on to the ramifications of the new legislation and were ruthless, drumming up so much horror from the public that Klein has twice had to delay passing the bill.

Major coverage didn’t begin until April 9 in Edmonton, but before long, Bill 37 was being thoroughly dissected, analysed, defended, and castigated. News stories gave brief explanations of the government’s position but emphasis was on groups that lambasted the bill for its dire implications for the health system. While theHerald remained silent, the Journal reported on extravagant sums health companies had been donating to the Conservatives. Columns warned that the government was trying to shove the legislation through before the public had a chance to debate it, and Liberal health critic Gary Dickson was quoted saying, “Any time you see the word, ‘for profit’ you know that profit is the goal, not patient care. And if one private hospital is allowed, they’ll all be in the door.”

On April 21, the Herald finally gave the issue some coverage, with minor reservations about the bill but none of the Journal‘s vigour. A news story appeared and a column questioned the government’s intent, reasoning that since the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons had the power to regulate private clinics, the health minister didn’t need to assume the same function.

The Journal headline on the same day read: “Scrap Bill 37, Lobby Groups Demand; For-profit Hospitals Feared; Pressure Building.” The article quoted the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour as saying, “This is the same government that has privatized everything from liquour stores to birth certificates.”

The following morning, both the Herald and the Journal had editorials about the bill. The Calgary paper wrote that the province should defend the bill more forcefully under a headline that screamed “Bill 37 Hysteria: Private Health Care Is Controlled, Not Created.” The opinion was that “opposition Liberals and New Democrats have begun to obsess on the recently introduced legislation ? and are needlessly exploiting Albertans’ fears with dire predictions of the looming end of medicare.” The story continued, saying Albertans had to find a way to get quality health care while keeping a balanced budget.

The Journal editorial did not go so far as to criticize the bill itself. The bill itself wasn’t the problem; it would indeed give the government the power to safeguard against private hospitals, and if it passed, we would have the chance to see the true Tory agenda; given their record, it’s unlikely public health care would benefit. More importantly, the Journal opined, if the bill didn’t pass, the debate might focus on “the true threat-the underfunding that convinced private operators there was a cash-on-the-operating-table market here in the first place.”

Despite their usual standard of divergent views, the papers don’t always disagree. The people don’t always disagree. Some conflicts divide Albertans uniformly across the province and the newspapers respond accordingly. Take, for example, the recent controversy over video lottery terminals.

VLTs are part of the reason Albertans don’t pay any provincial sales tax. They’re billed as a form of entertainment, so those who choose to play the machines can assuage their consciences with the knowledge that their money is not wasted; a significant portion of VLT revenue goes to charity. Bars make a killing by keeping the terminals: 15 percent of each machine’s revenue. Almost half a billion loonies are fed into 6,000 gambling machines in bars across the province each year.

The chances of winning big are pretty slim but the temptation, for many, is great. Opposition groups listed astonishing statistics about problem gamblers in Alberta and claimed that VLTs were the most addictive form of the vice. Bankruptcies and suicides were blamed on the lure of the electronic cherries.

The debate had been smoldering for at least a year, but the heat intensified in the summer of 1998. Opponents had asked for a province-wide vote to banish the machines; Klein consented only to votes in individual communities where at least 10 percent of the electorate had signed a petition. Calgary and Edmonton, along with several other towns, managed to get the question on the municipal election ballot last October 19. Both cities narrowly voted to keep the machines.

Coverage of the issue in Calgary and Edmonton was almost identical. In the two weeks prior to the civic election, up to four or five VLT stories appeared almost every day in each paper. Heartbreaking tales of homes that had been shattered over VLT addictions. No-nonsense pleas for freedom of choice from those in favour of keeping the machines. Colourful accounts of the team efforts on both sides. When the dust had settled and votes had been counted, both papers agreed the debate wasn’t over; the province would have to do something about the whole gambling problem.

By the end of my summer, I was no longer blown away by the differences between the Herald and theJournal. Of course they are different, how could they be otherwise? A political border might tie Calgary and Edmonton into one province, but culturally, they are each in their own universe. In order for the papers to succeed, they have to become in and of the cities they represent. When the cities agree, so do the papers; when the cities disagree, the papers follow suit. I am not convinced by the publishers’ arguments. News is notjust news. Someone decides what will be in the lead, what quotes will be used, whose voice will be heard, and how the headline will focus on a certain part of the story to draw readers in.

Neither am I surprised that one dominant personality has ultimate control over two such divergent papers. It still disturbs me to think that one man owns 60 percent of the nation’s newspapers. Opinions are often influenced by newspaper stories and commentaries, and Conrad Black does have the power to control what goes into his publications. I’ve come to realize, however, that Conrad Black is not out to manipulate my mind with his self-described libertarian philosophies. He is a businessman, first and foremost, and if he starts telling publishers, editors, and journalists how to write the news in their communities, he will be a miserable financial failure. The Alberta example proves that he does not insist his papers be Black in their politics, as long as they are black where it counts-on the bottom line.

It’s the early 1920s and Lotta Dempsey is nervously walking into the MacDonald Hotel in Edmonton to meet the subject of her interview, Miss Charlotte Whitton. It’s the first time Dempsey has been entrusted with covering an official visitor on national business. Mr. MacPherson, the city editor of The Edmonton Journal, had only assigned the story to her because one male reporter was held up at city hall and another had called in sick. Not only had Dempsey never interviewed someone so important, she hadn’t been sure why Whitton was important?it turned out that she was the new director of the Canadian Welfare Council, appointed by prime minister Arthur Meighen himself. Whitton was on a national tour, crusading for professional standards in health care for child immigrants.

The two women meet in the lobby. Whitton is in her late 20s, not many years older than Dempsey, and is crisp in her tailored suit and white shirtwaist. On Whitton’s suggestion, they go up to the mezzanine for tea. Dempsey doesn’t know where to begin. Sensing her discomfort, Whitton carefully puts down her tea cup and looks at Dempsey with warm, womanly understanding. “You haven’t been doing this type of assignment long, have you?”

“No,” stuttered Dempsey. “The man who was supposed to be here. . . .”

“We can do as well as any man,” says Whitton firmly. “Now get out your book and pencil. Write carefully and I’ll tell you what you are supposed to ask me, then I’ll tell you the answers.” Patiently, Whitton interviewed herself.

For Dempsey, the Whitton story was a crash course in the art of reporting. Years later she would recall, “I studied it, took it apart, reassembled it and began to see how these things work.”

Generally, how things worked for women at the time is encapsulated in a piece that appeared in The Toronto Star in 1924. Entitled “Says Women Mistaken in Asking Equality,” it said in part: “To do the things men do, just for the sake of showing we can do them?how foolish. . . women’s sphere is the home. Perhaps she can do things in the outside world, superlatively well. But the home is still her kingdom. Let her do the work that calls her, by all means, provided it does not make her neglect her linen cupboard, her kitchen and her looks.”

If the home was supposed to be a woman’s kingdom, the newsroom was ruled by men. The roaring twenties may have been a time of flappers and new freedoms, but within newspapers women were barely tolerated. “Having women around would restrict our language,” was a common explanation for their exclusion. Alberta, Lotta’s home province, had just 50 women journalists in 1920 (a decade and a half earlier there had been only 16 in all of Canada).

Elizabeth Dingman, former women’s editor of the Toronto Telegram, remembers the unwelcoming atmosphere in the newsroom even in the 1940s. “Women journalists were too sexually free. That’s what everyone thought. I heard stories about a lot of women that weren’t very nice. They weren’t true either. But lots of people thought that women shouldn’t be journalists, it wasn’t a ‘ladylike’ profession.”

That was Dempsey’s father’s attitude. While Lotta longed to be a reporter, he insisted she pursue a “respectable” career. So after graduating high school, she dutifully went on to get her first-class teaching certificate. Hired by a one-room schoolhouse in Four Corners, Alberta, she lasted eight weeks. Her marriage to a young English accountant named Sid Richardson, in May 1923, about the time her teaching career was ending, wasn’t much more successful: the couple separated after six months. Years later, Dempsey would recall, “I was too spoiled, too immature for serious dedication to a marriage. A newspaper was deadly competition for my affections. When I could not learn to attend to both husband and job, the job would win.”

The job had come about in September 1923, when she managed to talk her way into a $17.50-a-week position at the paper. There, the 18-year-old Dempsey was taken under the wing of Edna Kells, editor of the women’s page and the only other woman reporter at the Journal. Kells and Dempsey were boxed off in the back corner of the building; the few other women who worked for the newspaper were secretaries or clerks. Women reporters were almost always relegated to the women’s pages because, the prevailing thinking went, they simply didn’t have the capacity to cover hard news. A typical women’s page was a pastiche of recipes for dishes like scalloped cabbage and egg croquettes, plus hints on things like window shopping and dyeing clothes (“For successful dyeing we must know a good deal about color, because a colored garment can be dyed only certain colors related to the color it already has”). The “newsy” section would cover events like charity dinners or meetings of organizations like Big Sisters, while the social columns listed everything from which prominent socialites had entertained friends at tea to announcements like, “Mrs. Arthur Miles is opening her summer place in Coburg the end of June.” Poetry, short stories, and quotations from “wise men” were also regulars.

At first, despite the blatant discrimination, Dempsey was just glad to be a reporter. But after four years at theJournal, her need for more excitement and adventure pushed her to the Edmonton Bulletin. It was a morning paper with a younger, more energetic bunch of newshounds, and her salary was $40 per week?a sum practically unheard of, especially for a woman. She covered stories in Vancouver and Winnipeg, touring Indian reserves and Mennonite settlements, interviewing trappers, traders, and university professors. But Dempsey still wanted more. In 1929, she approached her publisher, Charlie Campbell, for a leave of absence so she could attend a six-week journalism course at Columbia University. “I have no use for journalism courses,” snapped Campbell, “They’re a lot of nonsense.” Crushed, Dempsey was turning to go when he added, “But I’ll pay your salary and expenses for a six-week ‘course’ with some of the editors and reporters I know on a few American newspapers with real guts.”

Dempsey’s itinerary included the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Portland Oregonian, San Francisco News and theL.A. Herald Examiner. Then, managing to squeeze another two weeks from Campbell, she went to Hollywood, the first of many visits there. She got on the train to come home, full of anticipation and keen to use all her new skills. But before she crossed the border, the world had changed: the date was October 24, and the stock market had just crashed.

In Edmonton, many of Dempsey’s colleagues ended up out of work; she was lucky?while her salary was cut back to $28, she still had a job, although now it included making up pages, writing heads, and bashing out a shopping column that brought in extra advertising money. In the wake of the crash Lotta was forced to move above a tailor shop with her mother and father. Dempsey’s father had run a fruit store, the Bon Ton, which catered to the carriage trade; he had mortgaged the family home in an attempt to save the store, and lost them both. Dempsey’s parents cleaned the shop below in lieu of rent. No bathroom in the apartment meant using the one downstairs and frequenting the Y for showers. All three lived on Lotta’s salary until her father got a job selling vacuums and her mother started selling baked goods to the local drugstore.

One day after the Depression finally eased, Campbell called Dempsey into his office. On his desk were five crisp $100 bills, a reward for working diligently through the harder times. She announced, “If you give me those, Mr. Campbell, I’ll be off to Toronto as soon as I can get a [train] pass.”

So, in 1935, at the age of 30, already with 12 years experience under her skirt, Dempsey arrived in Toronto with a plan and some connections. Tommy Wheeler, editor of the Star Weekly, had already bought some of her pieces. Byrne Hope Sanders, editor of Chatelaine, had visited Edmonton three months earlier and told Dempsey there might be a position available at the magazine. She also had a place to stay with two girlfriends who had moved to Toronto from the Calgary Herald and were renting a flat overlooking Queen’s Park. Wheeler hired her on a freelance basis, but three weeks later Sanders offered her the assistant editor position at Chatelaine. Dempsey would hold this post on and off until 1950.

Chatelaine was a place where Dempsey excelled. She wrote over 300 articles while she was there, under her own byline and three pseudonyms. “Carolyn Damon” wrote fashion, “Annabel Lee,” beauty and?significantly?the more authoritative “John Alexander” was the name she used for features. “It was great fun, at long last, to choose names I liked,” Dempsey would recall?the willowy 5 foot 9 reporter was plagued her entire life by cracks like, “Here comes a lotta Dempsey.”

Dempsey’s writing style meshed well with the magazine. Poetry was a great love, and her writing had a hint of verse. One of Dempsey’s many features, “New Eyes for Christmas,” published in December 1936, about a blind boy who gets his sight back, captures the warmth Dempsey wove into her writing. “Somehow, I think Billwill see Santa Claus this year. Life couldn’t let him down when he is so full of the joyousness of all he looks at. And he is so sure. You see, being blind the first nine years of his life has given him pretty vivid powers of imagination. He’s just emerging from a dream world as swiftly beautiful as only a world unseen could be.”

A beauty article bylined “Annabel Lee” hints at another of Dempsey’s enthusiasms. “You know what eyebrows can do to a face. You’ve seen Garbo’s, and wondered; Dietrich’s, and marveled,” was how she started the piece on the dos and don’ts of eyebrow plucking. Dempsey had in fact seen Marlene Dietrich’s eyebrows up close during her Hollywood visit in 1929. She would return repeatedly, staying for up to two months on assignment. The hardest interview she ever had was with Humphrey Bogart: “The day I was to see him he had just begun to get acquainted with a new leading lady, a tall, mocking model who had come from New York. He was so besotted with the charm of that angular, witty young woman, he simply couldn’t speak with any intelligibility to anyone else. Her name was Lauren Bacall.”

After only a few months at Chatelaine , Dempsey met Richard Fisher, a local architect, and they were married in December 1936. Two and a half years later, they had a son, Donald (Richard already had two boys from his first marriage, Alson and John). Dempsey took two years off after Donald was born, but kept writing her beauty column at home.

Alson remembers his parents had a very active social life. “They threw parties every couple of months and had reams of invitations to others.” The Royal York and the King Edward Hotel were favourite dancing venues and watering-holes for Lotta and Dick. Unfortunately, Dempsey’s career and social habits didn’t leave much time for family. “Lotta was a very distant person and I don’t think that motherhood suited her particularly,” says Alson. “She was certainly not the wicked stepmother. She quit work and tried to do the job, but she wasn’t up for it, and the minute she had the chance to go back to work she took it. If there was anyone who was said to have printers’ ink in her veins, it was her.”

The fact is Dempsey was no chatelaine herself, being neither domestic nor maternal. In the late fourties, she and Dick hired a gay houseman named Stanley who did everything from cooking the meals to buying Dempsey’s underwear. “He became a member of our family until his death 22 years later. He supplied us with flowers, sustenance, and a deep affection,” recalled Dempsey. However, Donald and Alson don’t remember Stanley fondly; in fact, neither will say anything about him.

During the fourties Dempsey couldn’t sit still. She did public relations work for the War Time Prices Board and was a CBC newsroom editor from 1940-44, then returned to Chatelaine as women’s editor. Being out of newspapers during the war years meant Dempsey was spared the experience of other women journalists when peace came. Elizabeth Dingman recalls a night out in Montreal, soon after the war ended, when she was working as hotel and rails reporter for the Gazette . “I was sitting at a banquette with two or three friends at the Samovar one night and sitting at the next one was a tall and handsome man in an air force uniform. I got the impression that he thought he was pretty important. We got into conversation and I said I was a reporter with the Gazette . He said to me, ‘Come Monday, you won’t be in that job anymore.'” Dingman turned away, thinking the man was “nuts” but on Monday she found him sitting in the city editor’s chair. “When the war ended, it was the idea to get women out of the newsroom and into the back. I refused,” she recalls.

After several more moves, including two short stints at the Globe ,Dempsey took the editor’s job at Chatelainein September 1952. But she missed writing and she was too soft to be effective as editor. She did, however, make a great discovery during her seven months in charge. Doris Anderson recounts how Dempsey rescued her from the advertising department: “I was a kid right out of university and no one gave me the time of day. Lotta knew I was from the West and gave me a chance as soon as she could see I was interested. I was ambitious and impressed her. I was on the editorial staff pretty quickly. Within six years I was editor.”

In February 1953 Dempsey settled at the Globe and stayed there until 1958. Her column in the women’s section was pure Dempsey: personable, poetic and funny: “Babette, a peppermint-pink poodle, was being walked up and down the lobby of the Chateau Frontenac. . . the color will last two months, fading gradually from Schiaparelli to a wild-rose tint. . . it’s a new U.S. fad, and the arrival of Babette on Quebec City’s high hill is a token of the opening of the tourist season in New France.”

Dempsey’s columnist status helped her avoid the widespread discrimination against women that was still the norm. At the National Press Club in Washington, for example, women were not even allowed in the building until 1955 (and were not allowed membership until 1971). After years of pressure, the men thought of a solution. Women reporters could cover speeches from the balcony in the ballroom, although they couldn’t sit down because the space was too narrow, and while the men sat comfortably below eating lunch, the women got nothing. “I remember being in that damned balcony crowded up against Pulitzer Prize winners like Miriam Ottenberg and Marguerite Higgins. You entered and left through a back door, and you’d be glowered at as you went through the club quarters. It was discrimination at its rawest,” Bonnie Angelo, chief of the Newsdaybureau during the balcony days, has said of that time.

In 1958 the 53-year-old newspaperwoman moved to the Star as a columnist. There she won her own important battle for women reporters. One Sunday afternoon in the early sixties she was working late at the old Star building on King Street when managing editor Charles Templeton brought in his two small children. Templeton asked if Dempsey would take his daughter to the loo. Eager to make a point, she quickly obliged. At all the papers Dempsey had worked, there had been no women’s washrooms on the editorial floor. Women reporters had to trek up or down to the advertising, circulation, or business offices, where other women worked in low-paying service jobs. The Star was no different. So with the boss’s daughter following close behind, Dempsey took an extended route down to the business level. On their trip back, Dempsey whispered, “Tell Daddy what a distance girls have to go wee wee in these nice, big, shiny offices.” Facilities were promptly installed.

It was at the Star where Dempsey met Marilyn Dunlop, who would become like a sister. “I became the medical reporter for the Star and there was a long passage way at the end of the newsroom which was known as ‘peacock alley’ and the special writers sat in it,” Dunlop recalls. “So Lotie and I started sitting together. She would have been the brightest writer in the peacock’s tail. The most vivid writer. She had a magnificent generosity of spirit that came through in her writing.”

Dunlop still remembers the first time she read Dempsey’s work. It was in 1949, the year the passenger ship the Noronic burned in the harbor. “Lotie had gone to the morgue and had done a story on a man who was looking for his wife. She saw this man holding the hand of his wife and wrote in her column, ‘With this ring I thee wed.’ It was so sensitive and so moving that I became a fan right then and there.”

When the two became friends she discovered Dempsey’s “delightful sense of humour and hearty laugh.” Wherever she went people took notice of Dempsey. She wore big hats, carried big purses and always smoked cigarettes with a long holder. She had large pockets sewn into her clothes so she would have a notebook and pencil accessible at all times. When she was frustrated and couldn’t find something, she would empty the contents of her purse right onto her desk.

Dunlop also recalls how Dempsey had a predilection for klutziness. On one occasion when the two went to a local seafood restaurant for lunch, Dempsey walked into the foyer and set her purse on the lobster tank in order to take her coat off. The maitre d’ gasped as he watched her handbag sink to the bottom. Without missing a beat, Dempsey politely asked the man to retrieve her soggy purse.

This kind of mishap was classic Dempsey. She loved telling the story of how, while covering the royal tour in 1952, she and her fellow reporters cruised the Ottawa River, mingling with Princess Elizabeth and her prince, Philip. As the ship approached the shore, Dempsey was eager to get off and file her story first. She leapt from the bow onto what she thought was solid ground. Unfortunately, the Eddy Match Company had spewed wood shavings into the river, creating the illusion of land. Dempsey hit the water with a momentous splash and sank into the icy murk. That evening the news carried a report about an unidentified journalist had fallen into the Ottawa River. Dick was listening to the radio with one of his sons and with a sigh said, “That will be your mother.”

Or there was the time she set an American Airlines plane on fire with a cigarette and her raincoat. Or the time she locked herself out of her room, naked, in a posh Chicago hotel. Or when she tried to curtsy and fell into Prince Philip. “My gift from whatever spirits hover over new babies was an invisible banana peel, with a lifetime guarantee. I come. . .I see. . . I fall flat on my face in so many different ways and places there’s often not a dry eye in the house,” was how Dempsey described her slapstick side.

She had been at the Star three years when Dick died of a heart attack in 1962, an indirect result of his heavy drinking. “They drank, they smoked, they danced, they died of alcoholism?you know, they had a really rippin’ good time,” says Dingman of this generation. Dempsey later blamed Alson for his father’s death and didn’t speak to him for about four years. “I considered the blame, or a portion of it, to be with her for keeping him on the bloody party circuit,” he says today. “It was more convenient to blame me than herself. The things that make you the maddest are your own mistakes.”

Dempsey partied and drank, too, but always managed to stay focused on her career. When problems would arise at home, she would rush down to the newsroom. “I don’t think Lotie felt complete or like herself if she wasn’t writing,” says Dunlop. It was her sanctuary, a place where she could go when things were tense.

The sixties newsroom was seldom a sanctuary for women, but that didn’t seem to affect Dempsey. Most women tried to ignore the injustices and were thankful they had jobs at all. Dempsey was thankful she had a venue for her writing. As Herbert Whittaker, former theatre critic at the Globe , remembers, “For a whole generation of Canadians, Lotta was a daily friend through her newspaper columns. Invading a man’s world of print, she was, for me, the crusader who opened up a woman’s point of view to countless readers at an important time in their development. And she did it with an exuberance, enthusiasm, and frankness not then fostered by the papers of her day.”

That exuberance stayed with Dempsey till the end. Following her retirement from the Star in 1981?the same year she married Arthur Ham, former chairman of anatomy at the University of Toronto?Dempsey continued to freelance for theStar and for the weekly paper in the community north of the city where the couple moved. Ham developed Alzheimer’s disease and required professional care; Dempsey was diagnosed with liver cancer in the summer of 1988 and lived her last days in a nursing home in Markham. But Anderson remembers Dempsey still had the same verve she always had. “Even in the nursing home, she never moaned about her problems. They didn’t change her. She would turn the conversation around and ask me questions about my life.”

Dunlop thinks Dempsey ran faster than she could go sometimes, “It never occurred to her that women couldn’t do what men can do in the world. It’s hard for women who have done what they wanted to do and had a career and everything to sometimes realize that. I don’t think she ever felt like she was being put down or put aside. She never reached a place where she couldn’t climb any higher because she was where she wanted to be.”

The Proposal

In the fall of 1998, several well-known Toronto wine writers were asked to be consultants to Magnotta Winery Inc. The Toronto Star‘s Tony Aspler, The Globe and Mail‘s David Lawrason, The Toronto Sun‘s Gordon Stimmell, Toronto Life‘s Margaret Swaine, eye magazine’s Konrad Ejbich, and Andrew Sharp, who freelances for the Winnipeg Free Press and The Telegram in St. John’s, were approached by Magnotta’s advertising agency, Samotie Advertising Inc. We thought, Why don?t we get some direction from people who really know what it should taste like??? says managing partner and creative director Bil Samotie. ?Why don?t we just talk to some of the wine writers and tell them, Here are some wines, taste them at your leisure and tell us what you think about them. If the wine tastes like garbage, I want you to tell me that. Samotie called up the critics himself. This was the offer: Magnotta would send the writer a few bottles of wine, acquire the subsequent tasting notes, and pay $1,000 for his or her time. Magnotta would then study the notes and perhaps use them to improve its product. In addition, Samotie said he told the writers that Magnotta would like to make use of any favourable comments in its advertising. The Christmas wine season was imminent and Magnotta?s owners wanted to make a splash with a collection of wines they were selling at their outlets. However, some of the writers say the mention of running their comments in an ad was not part of the initial proposal. But Samotie says he has the signed paperwork to prove it.

The Responses

Andrew Sharp: Yes

I have a policy about buying my tasting notes: if you buy, you must print them verbatim. If you can make your comments please people, that?s fine. It’s like a movie. You always see Siskel and Ebert giving this movie two thumbs up. You never see them give two thumbs down. And it’s the same way with wine. I might review and taste 50 products, and out of those 50 products, they might like three or four of my comments. If they want to reprint that around the world and tell everybody this is what Andrew Sharp?s tasting notes were, they can do that.?

Konrad Ejbich: No

The winery said they would like to send me six bottles of wine to review. I said Fine, sure. And they said, Well, we’d like you to write up your tasting notes and submit them back to us and we?ll pay you a thousand bucks. Excuse me? Excuse me? I said, Well, what?s the catch here? Well, if you like any of the wines, we would like to use your tasting notes along with your photo in an advertisement. I said, Well, let me get this straight: you?re going to send me six bottles of wine. If I like one of them, you will use those remarks in a column, in an ad, with my picture.? The guy says Yup. So I said, Why dont I give you six good remarks, and you give me $6,000? He said, No, no, no, it doesn?t work that way! and I said, No, I?m not interested. If somebody calls me up and says, I?ll give you a thousand bucks for a good comment, obviously I’m going to give you a good comment if it’s worth a thousand bucks. Even though they did say, in fairness, If you don?t like any of them, fine. We?ll pay you the thousand bucks.? But the bottom line is, there?s no winery that makes all bad wine. I?m bound to like something, but if you want to use my comments in an ad, wait till I review them, you know, quote me from my column. My comments are tainted because I?m looking for good things to say about the wine because I know they?re paying me. My feeling was, I?ll take the thousand bucks, but you print all my comments as they are, good or bad, without changing a word, all six. And they said, No, no, no! We won?t do that.

Tony Aspler: Yes

I reviewed the wines for the benefit of the winemaker. I tasted the wines and I wrote my notes, and they said that if I said anything worthwhile about their wines, could they quote me. And this is what I believed about the wines and if I had written it in the newspaper, they would have been able to take the quote as well. I was very critical about the wines, how- ever. There was one wine I liked so they used that. I donated the money to the Cool Climate Oenological and Viticultural Institute at Brock University. David Lawrason: No

I said, No, I?m not going to do that. I’d be happy to taste your wine for free, but I?m not going to take money for it.

Margaret Swaine: Yes

What I will do is provide tasting notes on it, and I?ve done it for a number of agents and often those notes aren’t very complimentary, so nothing that I?ve assessed has appeared in any advertisement or any publication because most of the time I?m pretty brutal, so that?s the end of that story.

Gordon Stimmell: Yes

Magnotta said, Your reviews would be used in-shop, at the winery, for educational purposes, to determine whether or not they were going to market wines. So they were professional tasting notes. But they then proceeded to splash them in big ads in all the major media. There was quite a shock because I was consulting for them. I wasn?t supposed to be part of any ad campaign. So it was really disappointing. I accepted the offer, but then I donated the money to charity. The point is that they basically paid me to taste some wines and I tasted them and I rated them exactly as I?d rated any other wine. Some of them I trashed because they were lousy wines, some of them I said were good. Whether they paid me or not has nothing to do with it. The first I found out was actually when somebody said, Hey, Gord, did you see yourself in the Star?

The Result

On December 21, 1998, Macleans ran a four-page advertisement that exclusively promoted Magnottas Chilean wine collection, premium collection, and gran riservas. Under the headline, ?What the Critics Say About the Magnotta Premium Collection? were thumbnail headshots of Andrew Sharp, Tony Aspler, and Gordon Stimmell next to their respective reviews. Each of these wines demonstrates a high degree of sophistication with great attention to detail and wine making art, read Sharp’s notes. Aspler called the collection Beautifully packaged with stunning art labels. The GRs are wines that any producer around the world would be proud of. Stimmell?s comments simply said, Magnotta?s premium series continues to surprise and impress.

Magnotta also ran a series of advertisements in The Toronto Star, one of which appeared on Wednesday, November 25, 1998. It bragged about the exciting return of a popular vintage icewine to store shelves just in time for the season of gift giving. ?Our recent Icewine celebration was overwhelming. We sold out our entire stock. Many missed out. And we’re still getting phone calls. Below was a headshot of Tony Aspler. He called the wine elegant and balanced. Magnotta?s best Icewine to date. Andrew Sharp?s notes also appeared in the ad. He described the icewines as Rich, luscious, and creamy flavours… exceptional.