October, 1990. The scene is Jackman’s office, from which he manages the eponymous charitable foundation his father, Harry R. Jackman, formed in 1964. These days, the Jackman Foundation offers grants to organizations whose agendas range from preserving Canadian culture to offering affordable day-care; in 1986 alone, it gave out almost $1.3 million. But sums like these are business as usual for the Jackman family, who share an empire that includes Canada’s third-largest trust company, two major insurers and a stake in a railway.
Tall and greying at 56, Jackman wears a perfectly folded four-point handkerchief in his breast pocket and a I gentle, constant smile. He offers me I coffee and eagerly outlines his latest I passion: the 1980 seed, come at last to fruition.
“I mean, for John Aird to be called a bagman was not only inaccurate, but pejorative. It seemed to me that this type of reportage on people in public life was the trend in Canadian media, and I didn’t like it. Speaking as a clinical psychologist, in my line of work you’re never supposed to say anything which would damage the patient’s selfesteem, and for somebody to damage a person just for the sake of being a wordsmith-well, it’s unnecessary.”
His solution?
“I know that if you want somebody to change, you need to use positive reinforcement-rewards instead of punishments. So I said: ‘How can we encourage Canadian journalists in a way that’ll make them feel good about themselves, so they don’t have to take potshots at other people, and also create examples for young journalists to emulate?’ “
Jackman quickly divided his rewards into three main categories: first, funding for research into “the ethics of journalism”; next, programs of professional development for experienced journalists, perhaps even going so far as to sponsor mid-career sabbaticals encouraging rest, relaxation and refurbishing skills; last, and most important, the prize.
“I learned there was nothing in this country that has the same kind of distinction and style the Pulitzer Prize does in the US, so I wanted to create an award which would be so prestigious, money and recognition-wise, that journalists receiving it would say, ‘I don’t have to feel bad about myself because of my profession, I’m not really an ink-stained wretch.’ And young journalists would say, ‘What did that person do to get that award, how can I emulate him-what judgment, sensitivity and responsibility did he bring to his writing?’ “
But who would sponsor the prize? Jackman sounded out the business community for fund-raisers, and those who answered are a measure of his clout: Bill Dimma (deputy chairman and director, Royal LePage Ltd.) and Senator Trevor Eyton (chief executive officer of Brascan Ltd.). Macleans magazine and Southam Inc. soon vied with The Molson Companies Ltd. and Brascan as contributors-among them, they raised some $50,000.
In 1987, the Niagara Institute for International Studies, a nonprofit think tank for Canadian executives, came to the Jackman Foundation for a research grant. Recommended by Dimma (a former institute chairman and still an honorary member of its board of directors), it soon joined the team, providing the practical base necessary to make Jackman’s grand designs flesh.
Rightly realizing that journalists might not take kindly to being told how to improve themselves by a group wholly composed of the business elite, Jackman also looked for credibility lending allies within the media “so everyone would be fairly represented, equal amounts of people in public office, businesspeople and journalists.”
A media advisory committee embodying this principle was formed to plot the details. Finally, as Jackman puts it, “we needed a figurehead.” Sought as interim chairperson in 1989, Knowlton Nash agreed to be the face of the organization. Its stated mission: to “enhance the quality of Canadian journalism.”
Five years after the Aird episode, Jackman’s seed had sprouted: the Canadian Journalism Foundation was born.

Jackman is undeniably genuine in his enthusiasm for the CJF-and understandably excited about the project in which he has invested so much time and effort. It’s easy to get caught up in his vision of journalistic excellence. This said, however, inevitable questions spring to mind. Will the CJF actually enhance Canadian journalism, or do it irreparable damage? And who is most qualified to enhance it-a coalition of vested interests, however wellmeaning, or journalists themselves?

“First of all, and I want to reinforce this,” Bill Dimma tells me, “there are absolutely no ties between the business community and the objective of the CJE We are, and will be, totally independent of our funding sources. To paraphrase Lincoln, this is something of, by and for journalists.”
If Jackman is the CJF’s heart, and Nash its chosen face, then Dimma is its brain. President of The Toronto Star from 1976 to 1978, he started at A.E. LePage in 1979, founding Royal LePage in 1984. His stint as chairman of the Niagara Institute ended in 1986. At the moment, Dimma’s filling me in on the CJF’s founding meeting, held at the pastoral Niagara Institute itself (in Niagara-on-the-Lake) last October 20 and 21. Knowlton Nash was formally elected at last, along with 30 members of the foundation’s board of governors. Since his initial nomination, Nash has enlisted Lise Bissonette, publisher of Le DtVoit; as his co-chairperson. Together, they carryon Jackman’s equality principle: Nash, the grand old man of broadcast journalism, and Bissonette, a highly regarded female francop hone print journalist.
Interestingly enough, the journalists the CJF has so far recruited are commanders, not grunts. As administrators and spokespeople, they’re almost the CEOs of our industry. Aside from Knowlton Nash and Lise Bissonette, the list includes such mainstays as Neville Nankivell, publisher of The Financial Post; Robert Lewis, managing editor of Macleans; Hugh Winsor, national political editor at The Globe and Mail; and Elly Alboim, CBC’s Parliament Hill bureau chief.
After the elections, chair-people were assigned to each committee: Michael Adams of Environics Research Group, for research; Alboim for professional development; and Jackman himself for his baby, the prize. Perhaps because of his added duties as senator, Trevor Eyton is no longer helping out as a fund-raiser. After a relaxing night at the Shaw Festival, the board reconvened to discuss the budget.
Originally put at $100,000, the CJF’s overall projected costs may require as much as half a million dollars a year within the next three years. The prize will take up $400,000-eight awards, at $50,000 each. According to Dimma, the awards will be given on the basis of “lifetime achievement.” The board of governors has yet to decide how much will be needed for the research and professional development programs. And there’s also the expense of setting up a director’s office to monitor the various projects.
I would gladly have gone to the meeting myself, and saved Dimma the effort of describing it for me, but it was closed to the press.
“Don’t you find that a bit of a contradiction, given what you just said about the CJF being by, for and of journalists?” I ask.
“No. Not really. I mean, we put together a press release.”
When I quote Jackman’s line about behavior modification through reward to Dimma, he looks at me for a long moment. “Well, I suppose that’s a psychologist’s view,” he says, at last. “I mean, to see it through those eyes…”
Pause. “Did he really say that?”
“The only thing the CJF’ll enhance is the kind of navel-gazing that keeps you too occupied to see what’s really going on,” says media critic Rick Salutin, going over the Niagara Institute’s CJF press release. “This whole thing’s just another pressure group in fancy dress. Nixon called it the flack technique: question reporters’ motivation, and keep at it until they’re too nervous to do anything, let alone their jobs.”
Long-standing newspaper journalist Patrick O’Callaghan thinks almost equally little of the CJ~ though with more direct reason; he has been involved in its growth and can trace the path of his disenchantment like a map. The trail begins back in 1987, when O’Callaghan-then publisher of the Calgary Herald-was asked to contribute to the media advisory committee in planning the professional development program.
O’Callaghan’s doubts began when he first examined the foundation’s goals, which he found “ambitious but nebulous” (he dismisses the prize as “an Academy Award for journalists”), and crystallized when he met the other members. At the time, they includedaside from Alboim, Adams, Eyton, Jackman, Dimma, and Winsor-Peter Desbarats, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario; Niagara Institute director Bill Wilton; Southam Newspaper Group president Paddy Sherman; Arnold Edinborough, president and chief executive officer of The Council for Business and the Arts in Canada; and Deputy Minister Harry G. Rogers of the federal Department of Regional Industrial Expansion. In total, the journalistic contingent was outweighed exactly two to one.
O’Callaghan next volunteered to help reword the foundation’s proposed mission statement, which he found insultingly paternalistic. “I took out any suggestion of the CJF wanting to ‘help’ journalists do a better job-the I-am-only-here-to-help-you line, with its patronizing undertones.” None of his changes made it into the final draft.
O’Callaghan’s wariness turned to worry in July 1988, when the Niagara Institute produced a survey entitled “Canada’s Media.” It was the result, the institute said, of more than 70 videotaped interviews with what purported to be an equally representative cross-section of society-but trrned out to be two labor leaders, 22 media figures, 23 businesspeople, six spokespeople for charities and research groups, a lawyer, an academic and 17 politicians or bureaucrats, including almost every member of the media advisory committee itself. It was the survey’s findings, however, rather than its participants, that most troubled O’Callaghan. Those findings are summed up by Wilton, the director, in his introduction to the institute’s report. He begins with the claim that “both media executives and leaders in other sectors, who rely on the media (and often appear in their coverage), voice similar concerns about the media’s ability to…achieve balance and accuracy, and…maintain professionalism in their reporting.” The concerns expressed here, however, presuppose some increasingly bizarre opinions about the way the media operate.
For example: “Concern was expressed again and again about the blurring between fact and opinion and… the frequent presentation of opinion as fact,” Wilton’s summary states. It accuses the media of “us[ing] unnamed sources, sometimes fictional.”
O’Callaghan, reading this for the first time, found such charges ridiculous. “When they talked blithely of fictional quotes and falsifying sources, I got the feeling they’d been watching too many old black-and-white thirties movies about Hollywood’s version of tabloid journalism. Haven’t they ever heard of the law of defamation?”
Stuart Robertson, a leading libel lawyer at Toronto’s Paterson MacDougall, agrees. “Libel is the area where ethics meets the law,” explains Robertson, who often acts for the media in such cases. “If a story comes out in which sources claim someone committed a crime, that person can sue the reporter for defamation. And if the reporter lied about the sources, he or she will probably have to pay punitive damages above and beyond those granted in the original suit.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world to claim the media will go to any lengths to get a story-even make it up. But 99 out of 100 journalists go to incredible lengths to make sure what they put in their copy is both accurate and exact, because the bottom line is somebody always finds out.”
Wilton’s summary of the survey goes on to say that the media need to “attack success or find a villain.” Furthermore, reporters have an anti-business bias which makes them “attack…business at every opportunity.” They also have a “very shallow understanding” of business itself.
Margaret Wente, editor of The Globe and Mail’s “Report on Business” section, disputes this thinking. “That’s an old perception on the part of business,”
she tells me. “It goes back to the 1970s, when it might have been true most reporters had an anti-establishment streak. Back then, we were also a lot less sophisticated about the workings of business. But over the last 15 years, there’s been a steady trend to the increase in accurate business coverage-partly in response to a growing public appetite for, and interest in, economic news. It’s hard to make generalizations about journalists as a group.”
“Except,” I say, “that’s just what the Niagara Institute appears to be doing.”
Wente laughs. “Yes. There’s certainly always room for more education on economic and business issues in the journalism industry. But bias is in the eye of the beholder, and consequently very hard to prove.” Wente, who was then editor of the Globe’s Report on Business Magazine found that critics accused her publication of being both too pro business and too con. “So you can basically take your pick of positions, and still be assured of enough evidence to prove your case.”
Finally, according to the survey, the media always “assume that institutions are by nature inept or worse.” Wilton writes that “a number of interviewees believed that while the media take their social responsibility seriously by challenging the establishment, this was not balanced by promoting what is good in the establishment.”
This perceived animosity by the media toward authority has always been one of Jackman’s bugbears, even before the Aird incident. He cites a 1980 Environics poll, which showed “a disastrous fall in respect” for public figures. “That concerns me immensely. And I mentioned this to [CBC producer and host] Adrienne Clarkson recently, and she just said, ‘Well, look what people in public office are doing!’ I mean, that’s easy to say. But what people think they know is basically just what they’ve been fed. John Honderich [editor of The Toronto Star] says: ‘Listen, we don’t create the news, we just report it.’ But…”
(Adrienne Clarkson wouldn’t confirm Jackman’s comments. All she knew of the CJF, she said, was that Jackman was involved in it. Honderich, although listed as one of the current members of the CJF’s media advisory committee, told me he was disassociating himself from the foundation because he felt being involved would form a conflict of interest with his activities on the National Newspaper Awards’ advisory board.)
According to its version of the CJF’s evolution, the Jackman Foundation started planning to improve media ”as part of its interest in…promoting able [Canadian] leadership.” The Niagara Institute, by Dimma’s admission, has long had the same goal. But what does promoting able Canadian leadership have to do with enhancing the quality of Canadian journalism?
When the Niagara Institute first opened, it had two stated objectives: to “provide a forum where leaders from industry, government and labor could exchange views and increase their awareness of human and social values” and “to improve international understanding by bringing together people from both sides of the border.” Since then, the link with the United States has been progressively downplayed. By 1988, when Douglas Bowie took over as president, the institute was a schizophrenic amalgam of think tank and resort-an “off-the-record retreat” for executives. Bowie transformed it from disinterested mediator to hard-nosed business adviser-a sudden shift in image brought on more by growing financial problems than by ideology. Its 1990 membership list reflects this change, running a gamut of businesses from A.R.A. Consultants to Zurich Canada. The party line, however, Jackman needed a figurehead and Knowlton Nash fit the bill-the grand old man of broadcast journalism remains the same: “improving the quality of Canadian leadership.”
Rick Salutin sees this goal as just another excuse for involving the media in non-media interests. “The more we identify with exterior concerns, the less impartial we’ll be. By telling us to judge our own performance, they’re stopping us from performing our true function, which is judging their performance in the goals they publicly set for themselves.”
Jackman says he’s always supported the Niagara Institute on principle, “and recognized them as the only Canadian institution which has a quasi-therapeutic function, trying to bring together warring groups within society, so they can gain some kind of understanding and trust.”
Dimma takes the practical view over the clinical. “The Niagara Institute is elitist in the best sense of the word.”
Salutin snorts. “Which is?”
“I was uneasy when I went to be
interviewed for the survey,” O’Callaghan says. “But when I saw Wilton’s report on its ‘findings,’ I got downright concerned. What Jackman and his friends obviously wanted was media that would ‘render credibility to Canada’s major institutions’-in other words, if those institutions have fallen into disrepute then it wasn’t because of flaws and failings in those who run them, but because the cynical press dares to expose them.”
Soon after the Niagara Institute’s survey came out, O’Callaghan and the CJF -to-be parted company. Later, as a board member of the financially strapped Michener Awards, O’Callaghan was the most vehement objector when the CJF approached the board with an offer to become involved. The board did not accept.
“It’s simple,” O’Callaghan says. “We can’t allow the heavy hitters of business to ‘influence our product’ Bill Wilton’s words-any more than we can let government use us for propaganda purposes. We have to keep them all at bay, if we value our freedom.”
Salutin, not surprisingly, agrees. “If you don’t like the coverage you’re getting in the press,” he says, “then write a letter to the fucking editor.”

Such negative feedback, from the very people he wants to help, bothers Jackman a little. But he says he understands it. “The primary thing we learned from the survey is that journalists’ fear that big business will try to somehow manage the media is equally matched by business’ fear that journalists will try to manage the news. Now, as a psychologist, I know it’s good for everybody to be a little bit suspicious; it’s normal. But if you become too suspicious, you become paranoid. And I think this degree of suspiciousness on either side no longer serves its original purpose. It has, in fact, reached paranoid proportions.”
This opinion, however, cuts both ways. “I had lunch with Jackman two years ago on the subject of cooperation between business and the media,” says John Miller, chair of Ryerson Poly technical Institute’s School of Journalism. “All I really knew about him was that he had money, and an interest in ethics. He started talking about how he felt journalism was preventing people from attaining political office, and ruining businessmen, and it was obvious he had this feeling about journalists-they were shabby and unethical, and out to get anybody in a position of power.
“At that meeting,” says Miller, “I told Jackman: ‘An ethics program at Ryerson would have to be totally without strings. There couldn’t be any attempts to govern what we could and couldn’t do.’ And after I said that, I never saw him again. On the other hand, when Jackman put the CJF together he did invite the participation of journalists like Pat O’Callaghan who have problems with its ideology. But they’re in the minority.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“I think because-well, it’s possible everything was open to discussion in

If Eric Jackman is the heart and Knowlton Nash the chosen face, then Bill Dimma is surely the brain

the beginning. But there’s this kind of Stockholm syndrome that happens when people are in the thick of it. Then you have to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute, where are these guys coming from?’ I’d like to think there’s still a healthy skepticism at work on the part of the journalists involved. It’s just that I haven’t seen it so far. They’re ethical, at base, but in a situation like this where a lot of cash is being flashed around, group dynamics tend to take over. And I’m not sure the brakes are in place to keep the CJF from going in a direction we’d all be uncomfortable with.”
Which brings us to the future.

The first award ceremony is tentatively-for the spring of 1992. But Jackman is taking a considerably longer view. “I look at my country as I would at a person’s personality, and say, ‘Is it healthy? Is it working as optimally as it could? If not, what can be done?’ I look at our media and say, ‘Do we have the best media we possibly could? Are we representing significant events and personalities as well as we might be?’ And I have to say I don’t think so. “
Lately, he’s been thinking about changing the CJF’s mission statement. “The CJF seeks to enhance Canadian journalism, and to make sure that we have the best journalism in the world,” he now wants it to read. “One of our surveys says we’re sixth in the world. But what are the criteria we’d have to fulfill in order to be number one? I’ve talked to students and teachers at every school of journalism and I think they could develop those criteria if enough research was done. You could do your doctoral thesis on it.”
I glance down at my coffee, which has gone cold.
“No, I mean it! And all of your friends would say, ‘Hey, I knew her in college, and even then I knew she would succeed because she always had the right sense of values!’ So put that in your article. ‘Jackman says, let’s go for it!’ I mean, why not? You can have the best of anything-why not the best of journalism? I mean, why have anything less?”
Why indeed.

“What do you think the future of the CJF will be?” I ask John Miller.
Miller shrugs. “All depends on what they undertake next. Probably they’ll concentrate on getting hold of an award, since that’s being touted as their showpiece. But it doesn’t really matter. They have the most important thing on their side-money. And money will always find a home.”.
Forewarned is forearmed.

For almost 40 years Allan Fotheringham has been one of Canada’s most prolific and popular journalists; such titles as Malice in Blunderland and Birds of a Feather have made him one of a handful of non-fiction writers whose books are guaranteed best-sellers. A master of ridicule with a gift for the memorable phrase, he’s also one of Canada’s most highly paid media icons. An article in the now defunct Vista magazine estimated his 1989 income from newspaper columns, Macleans pieces, speeches, appearances on Front Page Challenge and a book advance at just under half-a-million dollars. And yet, despite his mammoth reputation, despite his ubiquitousness, I kept hearing that his star was on the wane. After all, the Moira Farr affair was only the latest in a string of professional embarrassments for the man they call Dr. Foth.

Allan Fotheringham’s most recent problems started in 1986 when he lost a much publicized libel suit; in a 1984 Macleans column he’d stated that two Vancouver lawyers, both associates of Liberal leader John Turner, were “cementing their connections through the tennis club circuits and the wife-swapping brigades” Despite two printed apologies, the court awarded the lawyers $10,000 each in damages. And 1986 also saw the beginning of the plagiarism accusations. Fotheringham had penned a column in Macleans about RCAF war veteran John Magee, whose poem “High Flight” was quoted by then US president Ronald Reagan after the Challenger space shuttle exploded. Editors of the British magazine This England told Kevin Doyle that passages of Fotheringham’s column were lifted from an article the magazine had published in 1982. Fotheringham denied it, even though whole sentences from the This England piece appeared almost verbatim in his column.
Then, in 1987, Fotheringham got in a jam with Southam News, which had given Foth a plum posting in its Washington bureau two years earlier. The appointment ended, according to Fotheringham’s account in Birds of a Feather, after a tasteless comment he made at a Southam directors’ meeting in Ottawa during the Canada-US free trade negotiations. Fotheringham, the guest speaker, in advisably quipped that the Americans could not be serious about free trade because their chief negotiator, Peter Murphy, had an inoperable brain tumor. The American Ambassador to Canada, Thomas Niles, was among the guests and he was not amused. Several months afterward, Fotheringham writes, he was given his walking papers by Nicholas Hills, Southam’s Ottawa general manager at the time. But Paddy Sherman, then president of the Southam Newspaper Group, says Fotheringham’s departure was not a result of the Niles incident but of his disappointing output from Washington. Hills felt Southam was paying its star columnist too much for what itwas getting and he approached Fotheringham about the possibility of renegotiating his hefty contract. That, says Sherman, “spooked” Foth into signing a deal with Toronto Sun Publishing, owner of the tabloid papers and The Financial Post, where Fotheringham’s column now appears.
More recently, Fotheringham became a problem for Maclean Hunter when he lost a suit to British explorer Sir Ranulph Twisleton-WykehamFiennes last July. In a 1988 column, Foth described Sir Ranulph as a “professional bore” and “a close relative of Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau.” Sir Ranulph sued and was awarded more than $200,000 in damages and $150,000 in legal costs when a London court ruled that Fotheringham had libelled him with this statement: “no one has ever been able to demonstrate that any scientific or historical benefits have resulted [from Sir Ranulph’s expeditions].” The decision is under appeal and a ruling is expected shortly.
Staffers at Macleans have been tightlipped about the effect Fotheringham’s continuing troubles have had on his relationship with management, and Doyle and managing editor Bob Lewis have not made themselves available for comment. But one reliable source at the magazine, who requested anonymity, told me there i.1″ a rumor swirling around: the management board at Maclean Hunter is just about fed up with the black eyes Fotheringham has caused. Nor has Fotheringham’s book publisher, Key Porter, been immune to carelessness on the part of its star author. Nine months before he pinched Farr’s reporting, Fotheringham was again accused of plagiarism, this time by Maritime writer Silver Donald Cameron. In Birds of a Feather Fotheringham appropriates-often word for word-material from a submission made by Cameron to the 1970 Davey Special Senate Committee on Mass Media. Fotheringham’s explanation was that he didn’t know he was using Cameron’s stuff, that he’d been in Europe and had assigned a researcher to gather the information used in that section of the book. Key Porter backed him up but, once again, Fotheringham’s reputation took a hit.

Print and television personality Larry Zolf has traded barbs with Fotheringham over drinks at Toronto’s Hop and Grape tavern and, often, in print as well. I spotted Zolf strolling the halls of CBC’s the fifth estate offices while I was talking to Stevie Cameron, Silver Donald Cameron’s sister-in-law. “There will never be a Fotheringham school of journalism,” he said, popping his head into the room. “Foth certainly would fail [Ryerson journalism instructor Robert Fulford’s ethics course.”
A week later, I attended Fulford’s ethics class. As Zolf predicted, Fulford was baffled by the F arr episode-not so much by what Fotheringham did as by the manner in which he did it. At least, he told the class, Fotheringham used to be a lot more clever about his thievery. For instance, he said, with This England Fotheringham chose an extremely obscure target, thus cutting down his chances of being caught. But with Toronto Life he was, in effect, shoplifting in broad daylight.
“I don’t think it’s all that serious,” Fotheringham said during our telephone interview. “Plagiarism has become such a trendy topic these days, but all journalism is based on basically what someone else has written or reported.”
Is this what Fotheringham has become-the highest paid rewrite man in Canada’s history? Frank magazine regular Geoff Heinricks, who recently co-wrote a profile of Fotheringham for The Globe and Mail’s West magazine, says one of the reasons Fotheringham is writing secondhand news on a more regular basis is because he is no longer an insider in Canadian political circles-mostly by choice, partly by exclusion. This would explain Fotheringham’s tendency to quote other writers, or himself, as he so often does. Heinricks also says that behind Fotheringham’s pose of imperturbability lies an unhappy, word-weary writer.
“He’s having some dark days,” Heinricks said from his Toronto home. “He seems quite tired of this whole country. I think he’s in a rut. He’s been doing what he does for so long that he doesn’t seem to put much thought or feeling into what he writes anymore.”
In the short time I spoke to Fotheringham I was struck by how unapologetic he was. Yet I realized afterwards that anything like remorse would be too out of character, too unbecoming a man of his stature. He’s a cinch for the Canadian News Hall of Fame and Hall of Famers have an image to uphold, a glorious past to live up to. I also suspect they’d be the last to realize their batting eye is not as sharp as it once was, that their fastball has lost its zip. Plagiarism, meanwhile, is the journalistic equivalent of a spitball-an illegal pitch that can artificially extend the career a year or two.
Fotheringham’s last Macleans column of 1990 did, however, offer some hope. In a column written a few months before the Farr controversy, Fotheringham stated that Canada is “a country that has too much geography and too little population.” At the end of the year, Fotheringham recycled the aphorism, but this time he amended it. It read: “This country, as Mackenzie King told us, has too much geography and not enough population.” Robert Fulford would be proud.

For nine months, the group worked on soliciting contributions, choosing by consensus and splitting the duties. (Smith got the final say on what was published, since he was working on the journal full-time.) An “anonymous angel” provided $5,000 so there was no overhead. Smith, Lowry and Stockl, who was the art director, did most of the production work, which took almost four months. Stockl says working on that first issue “was quite an experience” because the ins and outs of magazine production were so new and different to all of them. Lowry says he had fun.
In late June 1987, more than two years after Smith conceived the idea, The Journal of Wild Culture made its debut. Three thousand copies were printed and sold for $3.95 each. They were gobbled up. High on that initial success, Smith and company printed 7,000 copies of the second issue, which proved to be far too many. Following issues had print runs of about 3,500 each; with only 800 subscribers and unpredictable newsstand sales, it was a more sensible number.
Stockl, listed on the masthead as “Design Chef Emeritus,” says he modelled The Journal of Wild Culture after Harpers and Arts and Architecture, an innovative arts magazine of the fifties and sixties. “The trick was to create certain effects with what was available to us. Trying to cheat our way through it without it looking like that,” he says.
The trick worked. All of The Journal of Wild Culture’s covers, for example, have been eye-catchers, especially the Barbara Klunder tapestry of brightly colored fish and other marine life that appears on the fall 1989 double issue.
As for content, Sarah Sheard’s short story, “What Goes Around” (the tale of a woman who learns the meaning of life and death when she begins to compost) exemplifies The Journal of Wild Culture’s values. The story found its way into the fall 1989 issue after Sheard gave a reading at a Cafe of Wild Culture event. Smith liked it because it talked about ecological issues “in a warm, artful way.” But beyond that it “would be counterproductive” to pinpoint the journal’s raison d’etre. “It isn’t about one thing. It’s about many different things.”
Eclectic, ephemeral-and elitist? Some have thought so. But Jocelyn Laurence, editor of Canadian Art and an early admirer and contributor to the journal, puts it: “It can seem like it’s put together by an in-group and directed toward another in-group.” For his part, Smith says that The Journal of Wild Culture is not a “lofty concept for the privileged and intelligent. It’s just that we are working on something here that will attract certain types of people who have the same sense of the world as we do.”
In fact, Smith considers the magazine and The Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture part of “many movements -the bioregional movement, the men’s movement, the feminist movement, the handicapped movement and many more,” as long as they are interested in “changing the paradigm from the old kind of patriarchal, commerce-dominated world to one that is citizen-based, more respectful of the ecology of the earth.”
However laudable the journal’s political intentions, it has been accused of displaying a certain naivete. On the back cover of the double issue (Fall 1989) there’s a color ad for Molson Canadian, featuring a golden corn field swaying in the wind. Printed across the deep blue sky is a quote from John Molson, circa 1925: “We are all members of a larger community which depends on everyone playing a part”
The ad appeared when Molson workers were engaged in a bitter labor dispute and asking the public to boycott Molson products. In his printed reply to one reader’s complaint, Smith put the gaffe down to “a young, green advertising policy,” and belatedly expressed “solidarity with the workers at Molson.” He’s aware of the moral dilemma, but says in defence of the decision, “We were supposed to get a drinking and driving ad, which we felt fit in our perspective, but at the last minute we got that one. We needed the money so we went with it.”
A young, green editorial policy also poses problems; even though The Journal of Wild Culture calls itself a quarterly, it has yet to come out four times a year. Some in the magazine business, like Toronto Life’s Lynn Cunningham, think it shouldn’t call itself something it patently isn’t. Smith says they always try to publish four times annually and on time, but they can never find the money. At one launch party for a new issue, Smith had promised to hand out copies to the guests. But it hadn’t been completed on schedule and all he could do was wave a sample cover around.
Most colleagues say Smith is utterly charming-and utterly disorganized. Judy MacDonald, This Magazine’s managing editor, worked at the journal for four months in 1988. Smith was part of the reason she left. “Working with Whitney was very difficult. He had so many great ideas, but he couldn’t stop and think things through,” she says. This led to confusion and extra editorial duties; as managing editor of the magazine, MacDonald didn’t think that she should have been spending her time coordinating auctions for The Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture. Still, MacDonald admires Smith. “It’s not that what he does is wrong. It’s just that he has a very different approach,” she says.
Bernie Stockl, who left after he found that his paying work “had less hassles than the magazine,” says that “the things that make him a joy to work with also make him a pain.” Marni Jackson, who also admires Smith for his creative energy, thinks that he does too many things to devote enough effort to the magazine and that it really “needs someone to edit full time.” Chris Lowry says Smith “has good instincts about writ ers and artists…he’s an idea: person, he needs a team.”
And yet, these people also say that the only reason The Journal of Wild Culture lasted this long is that Smith is so committed to it. “My will was such I was not prepared to let it go under, which it could have a long time ago,” Smith says. He also credits the determination of others who have worked on the journal. Normally a talkative guy, Smith dries up quickly when asked about money. All he will say is that he makes his living as the artistic director of The Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture, earning between $25,000 and $30,000 last year. He is also cagey about the magazine’s finances, though he grudgingly gives me some dollar amounts. He estimates that it has cost between $15,000 and $20,000 to put out each issue. He includes overhead costs like office rent in those figures. The journal has received all $39,000 The Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture has made in its four annual auctions. (Items auctioned have included dinner by star chef Michael Stadtlander and signed editions of Margaret Atwood novels.) Whatever grant money the journal has picked up hasn’t gone far. It has received grants of $24,500 from the Ontario Arts Council, and $5,000 each from The Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council. But it had to decline this year’s OAC grant of $3,600 because of the decision to suspend publication. Where the rest of the money has come from to fund the magazine, Smith won’t say. Subscriptions and ad revenue are fairly insignificant. He says The Journal of Wild Culture’s deficit is running between 15 and 20 percent of the budget.
When I point out to Smith the journal’s chronic lateness, its poor financial state and the criticism of his editing style, he shrugs. He is suffering from the flu and looks as grey as the November day outside.
“I’ve never said I’m trying to make it in the magazine business. I am someone with an idea and I’m doing the best I can. I’m not a career publisher,” he says wearily. He doesn’t want to be judged by the same standards as Toronto Life, for example, because he says, “they’re not my standards.”
For now, Smith, the creative ideas man, is philosophical about The Journal of Wild Culture’s fate. Even if, ultimately, it does fold, the concept of wild culture won’t die ifhe can help it. “Because magazines don’t last forever doesn’t mean they are failures. They’re love projects. They’re like fireworks. They go and then they stop.”

Allen Abel is a correspondent with CBCs The Journal. He has never met Wendy Mesley.

It came as no surprise, then, that when Valpy took aptitude tests in school they all said he’d likely be a farmer or maybe a psychologist. The psychologist emerges, perhaps, in the social reformer-the Michael Valpy who wants to uncover the human side of every story, who always wants to put faces on statistics.
It’s this quality of caring deeply about people that makes his writing stand apart from others at the Globe these days, now that Thomas Walkom and June Callwood are gone. He’s the last of the left-leaning columnists at the paper and for a time most journalists predicted he wouldn’t last long. Valpy has a habit of going out on limbs, and until recently media watchers were sure that the Globe’s publisher, Roy Megarry, was following with a saw.
But at this writing, the saw seems to have been shelved. Valpy, for the moment, seems secure. Now, after an early morning story meeting at city hall with the Globe’s city bureau, Valpy takes his crusade to preserve the rural landscape on the road. He climbs into a car littered with children’s green crayon drawings, parking tickets and orangestained Popsicle sticks, to drive for three hours through the crisp October air to Owen Sound, the Grey County seat. He’s to speak there to a group of agriculture students about the need to control rural development.
I’m along for the ride. When I asked Valpy if I could spend the day with him at city hall, he said it would be too boring. But would I like to come up to the farm? Of course. On the way he talks about his past problems at the Globe, his time as the paper’s correspondent in Africa, his family and, of course, the status of farmland in Grey County. Once outside the city, he begins to expand on that precarious period at the Globe. “It all seems so long ago and a little irrelevant now,” Valpy reflects as he moves the car north, with a thousand immediate things on his mind: the speaking engagement is at noon; three-year-old son Francis has to be picked up from day-care by six; a column still has to be filed; and I’m trying to pick his brain about an unsettling time in the not too distant past. As he drives he smokes a Rothmans Special Mild and talks of the shakedown that occurred in the private school that was The Globe and Mail. The Globe had gotten new headmasters and the boys were about to be whipped into shape or suspended.
For Valpy it began when he used his column to express a feeling of alienation and to protest the dismissal of Norman Webster as editor in chief on Boxing Day 1988. Valpy wrote that he was shocked because the staff took the sudden dismissal quietly instead of rebelling. “The thing that just infuriated me about the Webster thing was that we were going to lie to our readers about why he was fired. I just found that totally unacceptable.” The lie was a page-three news piece which ran January 6, 1989, saying that Webster was “stepping down to take a sabbatical.” William Thorsell, Webster’s replacement, went on to fire Geoffrey Stevens as managing editor within the month. Many others left, or were asked to, and some thought the pattern was all too clear; those leaving often held political and social views that were incompatible with the conservatism of Megarry and Thorsell.
“Webster and Stevens and I had all grown up at the Globe,” Valpy says. “We’d been around for 20 years and we all saw ourselves as the organic, emotional and intellectual inheritors of what the Globe was-the red Tory, caring conscience and voice of the country.” In hindsight there is some evidence that Valpy regarded Megarry and Thorsell as outsiders who didn’t understand the Globe’s mission. The old boys versus the upstarts. “Ideological differences between people like myself and Thorsell exist and there is no question that others who felt differences like this happen to be people who are left-leaning,” Valpy observes.
When Megarry read Valpy’s column complaining about the treatment of Webster, he went to Shirley Sharzer, then deputy managing editor, and told her Valpy was not to write any more columns about the affair. Sharzer never mentioned the edict to Valpy; he was unaware of it until a Saturday Night article told the tale almost a year later in December 1989. The news saddened him. In all his years at The Globe and Mail he had never been told what to write or what not to write.
Shortly after Thorsell took over, he and Valpy met for dinner. Thorsell told Valpy his column was not high on the Globe’s priority list. “We don’t know if we’re going to keep the column,” he said and for the next eight months he kept Valpy guessing. The column had originally been introduced as a way to integrate Valpy back into the paper after his stint in Africa. He had suffered a mild heart attack in May of 1987 while in London, as he was about to return to Zimbabwe. The Toronto column was to be a kind of convalescence before he was sent out again. In his now famous state-of-the-paper memo of August 29, 1988, Megarry had written: “We will eliminate the Michael Valpy column. We only introduced this column to assist in Michael’s recovery. It seems he has fully recovered and is ready for another assignment.”
Despite the uncertainty, Valpy hung in and it finally paid off. By spring of 1990 he sensed a swing in both Megarry’s and Thorsell’s attitudes. “Megarry admits he’s turned 180 degrees in his thinking about the column,” Valpy says. “I don’t think he liked the column because I don’t think he likes picking up the paper and seeing us constantly talking about the problems of our society. He doesn’t like us dumping on the federal Tories as persistently as we do either.”
Thorsell has come around too. “I like Michael a lot,” he told me, “and have every intention of keeping him at the paper as long as he wants to stay. I think his is a good column and it gives real strength to the paper.”
That strength became evident with the Patti Starr/ Ontario Liberals scandal. As the Starr case got bigger and Valpy’s coverage became more important, management’s uneasiness about him came to an end. “I think it was at the point at which Gordon Ashworth [executive director of the premier’s office] resigned and we realized we had the Liberal government on the run for the first time. Patti Starr will never know what impact she had on my career. She confirmed my role at the Globe.”
Before the Starr scandal, Valpy had been looking for another job, just to be safe-not an easy task when you’re being talked about so much. Frank magazine, The Thronto Sun and other media gossip mongers were exaggerating the thinness of the tightrope he had been walking for almost a year. Few seemed to want to put a safety net under his career. He tried The Toronto Star, but management said they didn’t want another columnist from outside. “That mayor may not have been the case; maybe they were just being polite and didn’t want me.”
Valpy couldn’t leave Toronto because he has custody of his son, so his options were limited to the city. He was set for a job at CBC radio and interviewed for a teaching position at Ryerson’s School of Journalism. Ryerson wanted him but at the last minute Valpy changed his mind. “I realized [during the Starr affair] that teaching couldn’t be as much fun as reporting every day.”
Finally, the waters began to calm, and it was about time. The media gossip had been driving him crazy. His rebuttal to it all came in an April 21, 1989, letter to the editor of the Richard Doyle, the Sun. Valpy wrote: “Your columnist Barbara Amiel writes that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Your columnist Christie Blatchford writes that I bore my editors. Your columnist Allan Fotheringham writes that I’m on my bosses’ hit list and am about to be shipped to Winnipeg. You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?” To which the editor replied: “Is this a job application?”
During this troubled time at the Globe, Valpy moved into his present city hall office in the press gallery overlooking Nathan Phillips Square. “I decided the best thing to do was to lower my profile.” He hid out there, sort of an exile on his own recognizance, after all the rumors and bad blood. “Tom Walkom’s departure worried and alarmed me and continues to sadden me just enormously,” Valpy says. Walkom was writing a Queen’s Park column some thought was the best column in the paper, but was not getting along with Bill Thorsell and left the Globe in March 1989 to work at the Star. “Tom and I have been close friends for a long time. When my marriage broke up I moved in with him. I had, and still have, enormous difficulty understanding why he was made to feel uncomfortable, not welcome. I really felt bereft of pals when he left.” In the purging of that spring of 1989, 42 people were fired or left. According to Valpy, Fotheringham insists he saved Val py’s job by creating such controversy over his strained relations at the Globe. Frank, too, had a hand in keeping his name alive and well in the media gossip mills. “Obviously, though, Frank no longer sees the need to defend me because their last mention of me said I looked and sounded like Winnie-the-Pooh.” In fact, Valpy more closely resembles the bouncing, trouble-making Tigger.
Valpy began stirring things up early on. In his book Hurly Burly: A Time at The Globe and Mail, Richard Doyle, the paper’s long-standing editor, describes him as a student at the University of British Columbia: “Michael Valpy, a skinny, tousle-haired Vancouverite, majored in causes in his university days. He did his post-graduate work in equality and other outrageous assumptions” Valpy left UBC after two years of working on a general arts degree and briefly considered entering the Anglican priesthood. He comes from a long line of Valpys with names like Charles, Andrew and Francis-all very Anglican names, he says-and at least one was a priest. In the end, it was not holy orders but newspapering that lured Valpy and he went to work for The Vancouver Sun as a reporter in 1961. Later he was night city editor at the short-lived Vancouver Times.
In 1965 he returned to Toronto-where he was born and had lived until his parents moved to BC after World War Two work for the Globe. He stayed for 10 years, first as a reporter and feature writer, later as a member of the editorial board, before taking a year off to join the Company of Young Canadians-a “domestic peace corps.” The CYC further stimulated his social conscience and had an enormous intellectual influence on him. He became more committed than ever to solving the problems facing Canadians at the time.
For a period in the sixties he covered the hippie drug scene in Toronto’s Yorkville district for The Globe and Mail and saw how the police can treat people in discriminatory ways: those who had money and property were shown respect; those who didn’t-the kids of the Yorkville subculture weren’t. He witnessed a severe public health problem in which some doctors didn’t want to treat the hippies. Close friend and lawyer Clayton Ruby met Valpy during this time. He says Valpy has always had a deep understanding of what goes on under the surface of society. “Whether it’s Yorkville or South Africa, he is a man who hates prejudice and wants to find out what makes people do what they do.”
Valpy returned to Vancouver after the CYC to rejoin the Sun, first on its editorial board, then in Ottawa to write a political column for three years. In 1981, the Globe invited him back to write its national affairs column after Geoffrey Stevens was appointed national editor. Valpy says there must be a Trivial Pursuit question about who wrote the prestigious editorial-page column between Geoffrey Stevens and Jeffrey Simpson. From May 1, 1981, to November 30, 1983, (he remembers the dates vividly) he did. “I was intimidated by the Globe’s audience. It terrified me.” He was afraid to go to the Sparks Street Mall for fear of running into critics. “It was probably the only prolonged unhappy period of my journalistic career.”
He recalls a lunch with Joe Clark during this time: “He was going on about what was wrong with all the Ottawa columnists, and he dismembered every columnist in turn. I said he’d left one out and he said, ‘Oh yes, you. I can’t believe the Globe gives you that space to write the things you do.'” Valpy admits that he wrote about everything but Ottawa, even about his cats. And he’s still passionate about pets. He brought home two from Africa: a dog named Chuma and a cat left behind by neighbors. “It took four weeks but I lured him into the house.” He named him Cat and when the animal died last summer it was the first time Francis had witnessed death. Valpy buried Cat between two Norwegian spruce trees on the farm and explained to Francis that Cat’s immortal soul had undoubtedly gone back to Zimbabwe. Francis now equates Zimbabwe with heaven. “I heard him explain to a friend the other day that when you die you first go to God and then you go to Zimbabwe.”
Francis is the sixth Francis in the last eight generations. Valpy refuses to talk about Francis’ mother, Jo Anne Ambridge, who is no longer in his life. Nor does he talk about his marriage (1970-74) to Amanda Ferguson, chief librarian at the Globe. Their daughter Leslie is 18. He adores his two children. “I’m terribly in love with my son and my daughter is quite wonderful. I’d rather spend time with her than with a lot of my friends.”
Valpy’s only other immediate family (his parents are dead) is his older brother David whom he describes as a “millionaire businessman living in Vancouver.” Valpy says their family was “strongly Tory monarchist British imperialist-quite right wing.”
It was with this eclectic background-a mixture of Tory conservatism and street radicalism-that Valpy left to be the Globe’s Africa correspondent in 1984. He was there for four years-a period of re-education and physical stress. Because there was no time for a full advance briefing, he arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe, virtually uninformed about the situation or the history of southern Africa. Marq de Villiers, a native of South Africa and editor of Toronto Life, thought Valpy’s early coverage was weak. “I remember reading his dispatches consistently and thinking he was missing the point. He had a set of preconceptions that took a long time for him to clear away about how politics should work in places that weren’t Canadian.”
Valpy admits to his early mistakes in Africa. His opinions and philosophy changed as he accumulated experience with the South African system. De Villiers says Valpy understood the black side of the equation before he understood the white side. “Once he did get that perspective, I thought he did some very good work.” Valpy lived in a little house in a mixed race area of Harare with no swimming pool, unlike other correspondents who were living in large houses with staffs of servants. His reasons were practical-he had the only telex line. Even the Canadian high commission staff used his telex. “Actually it was a quasi-diplomatic post,” he says. Diplomats often stayed with him and he took them along on his tours.
Valpy sees himself doing Citystate for another two years at least; he will be SO then. “Writing a column is really a tripartite process in that the column has to be in tune with the readers, editors and with me, and you can’t ignore any of those focal points. The first thing I do when I pick up the paper is read the front page and then turn to the letters page to see if anyone’s written in about the column. It’s that intense desire to stay popular,” he says-the same desire that’s making him nervous now about the speech to the agriculture students.
It’s noon when we arrive at the Owen Sound Holiday Inn and there are many pickups in the parking lot. Valpy’s light blue Toyota Tercel looks slightly out of place, especially with its “I love Soweto” bumper sticker.
Inside the Holiday Inn the decor is standard issue. The mauve-pink hallway seems out of place here in the heartland. A buffet table greets Valpy and he grabs a drab looking sandwich-white bread, butter, slices of supermarket salami. He asks to be given a few moments to read over his notes, have a smoke, go to the bathroom. “I don’t like speaking in public,” he had told me earlier. “I’d rather talk to strange groups like the Prayer Book Society, which I often do. The Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful book, you know.”
After Valpy’s smoke break, we descend to a dingy basement conference room called the St. Vincent. At the head table Valpy is flanked by three other speakers: an artist, a farmer, and former township reeve Bill Murdoch, now an MPP. A representative of the environment ministry acts as moderator. Valpy is asked to speak first. He stays seated, ignoring the lectem, and talks quickly, his face reddening. He runs his fingers through his untamed hair as he reads from his notes, and what he has to say he says passionately. A clipping of his column from the Friday before about Grey is being circulated surreptitiously among the 25 people gathered.
Grey County leads the province in the number of land severances granted each year. These are small sales of farmland and require municipal approval. Where they occur, houses spring up along the roads: many are Mediterranean inspired, adorned with plaster owls, eagles and lions; they look alien among the silos and Massey Fergusons. When Valpy first confronted Bill Murdoch about the high rate of severances, Murdoch graciously told him to sell his farm and move if he didn’t like it. Bad move.
In Grey, the attitude toward Valpy is a combination of apprehension and admiration. People know who he is and read his column probably more than anyone else outside Toronto, and Valpy takes pride in this. “You have the feeling that if Toronto takes notice there is a kind of delicious tingling to the fact that the problems of Grey County are being fought out in The Globe and Mail,” he says. Although he’s been a member of the community for 20 years, Valpy is still considered somewhat of an outsider, and some clearly resented him as an intruder. Garbage has been dumped on his property and he takes the precaution of not keeping a mailbox with his name on it out by the road, as is the rural custom: “Although you could just ask the woman at the post office and she could tell you where I live.”
This trip to Owen Sound on a work day demonstrates Valpy’s commitment to the things he cares about. A liberal who wants to do what is right and good, whether it’s fighting development on Ontario’s rural landscape or championing the 105,000 Torontonians who depend on food banks, he is the self-appointed defender of the underdog. In the case of Grey County, though, the underdogs are very close to home. Is his crusade self-serving? Does Valpy have to justify using his Citystate column to write about Grey County? He pauses and smirks, “No, I don’t think so, increasingly now that Megarry lives on a farm himself. It doesn’t bother me one bit because it’s a major issue and I’ve never had such prolonged mail on a single issue.” The problem of destroying our rural landscape is country-wide, he points out. “It’s a Globe and Mail issue because it’s our upscale professional readers who own rural properties and it’s an issue that calls in planning and environmental protection and urban-suburban development. If my property values were threatened I suppose it would be a problem, but it’s working in the opposite way. I bought the farm for $20,000 and the last time I had it appraised it was over $300,000.”
When the meeting at the Holiday Inn is finished, Valpy feels he may have wasted his time. The audience seemed unresponsive. But as we head toward the farm his spirits pick up. He hates Toronto’s noise and congestion and would like to get out. During the week he lives in the Dundas-Dovercourt area in the second storey of a house, but he has a keen desire to live on the farm full-time. “The dream was, when I came back from Africa I was going to quit the Globe and do magazine pieces and books. It never came off though.”
It’s now three o’clock and we’re at the farmhouse checking to make sure the water pipes haven’t frozen. He’s eager to show me through the house-decor casual rustic. A hand pump that doesn’t work but clearly has nostalgic value adorns the kitchen. Upstairs an old upright Underwood sir-” on a desk facing northwest toward the view. Valpy’s commitment to the farm is clear. He has spent $3,000 just to keep the old barn in good repair. He rents his hundred acres to a neighboring farmer who uses the land for pasture and to grow some gram.
By now it’s getting late. Valpy still has to pick up Francis from day-care and decides there isn’t time for a column today. He calls his editor and explains the predicament. Next day’s paper says, “Michael Valpy is on assignment.”
On the trip back to Toronto, we pass a farm with an orange tractor sitting in the front yard. Valpy swerves a little staring at it. “Gee, I’m dying to buy a tractor,” he says. You can almost see a flashback to the toy farm set. “Just to push some dirt around or something. I’m not sure what else’

While Healthsharing was certainly hard hit by the sudden loss of its government funding, it isn’t yet conquered. For several months last year, the magazine’s cheeky answering machine message was, “Since none of us have been named to the Senate, we’re still here fighting the Tory budget cuts.” But the fighting was taking time away from the main work of producing the magazine. And although they are short staffed, the editors didn’t apply for a new Employment and Immigration grant-Gottlieb and Elliott simply didn’t have enough time to train new staff.
Still, their sagging spirits were rallied by readers’ response to the crisis. The Spring 1990 issue was already printed but it hadn’t been distributed yet when Healthsharing received the bad news. Collective members sat at their wooden table and in every issue inserted a bright pink flyer that announced, “We will not be silenced!” The drive raised $13,000 in donations and brought in dozens of two-year subscriptions. Readers wrote and phoned daily to offer their support. One in Arizona requested one copy of every back issue; in January, another signed her GST rebate cheque for $65 over to the collective. “I was going to mail this back to the government,” she wrote, “but they would probably use it for the military build-up in the Gulf. It’s yours.” The staff at Atlantis, a Halifax-based women’s studies journal which has its own financial problems, offered to pay for its Healthsharing subscription instead of taking advantage of the free exchange the two magazines had agreed on. Healthsharing also managed to secure small grants for specific projects. The menopause issue was financed partly by $2,500 from Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital; the Summer 1991 theme issue on immigrant and refugee women’s health will be funded in part by $9,800 from the Ontario Women’s Directorate. But piecemeal funding means less money over shorter periods of time. It also has the potential to skew the editorial direction of magazines that have to rely on this form of income.
The federal government and critics of the feminist press argue that the magazines should become more self-sufficient and find a broader base of financial support. In fact, according to the Secretary of State’s Westerberg, the Women’s Program is moving away from annual core funding to short-term project funding; this, he says, is to “discourage financial dependence.”
That rationale enrages Gottlieb. Healthsharing and similar magazines, she argues, are self-sufficient. “If you look at what our budget is, you see that the amount of money we spend on our production, typesetting, printing and distribution equals what we actually take in from subscriptions, sales and donations. What the magazine’s revenue doesn’t pay for, however, is staff and administration costs. That, in fact, is the story of magazines in Canada.”
In addition, Women’s Program funding guidelines state that projects cannot advocate one lifestyle over another, hence issues about homosexuality or choice in abortion, for example, are considered too controversial. Philinda Masters recalls that Resources for F eminisI Research could not receive Women’s Program funding for an issue on lesbian sexuality. Policies like this inhibit groups from publishing pieces which explore important, often complex topics; in effect, they enable the government to control a magazine’s content.
Ironically, the solution to Healthsharing’s life-threatening problem came in the guise of another federal department: Health and Welfare. In late January, the magazine learned that it would be the beneficiary of a $344,000 grant originally intended for the creation of a women’s regional health network. By the time the two groups that had applied for the funding got word that the money was available, they were no longer able to undertake the project. They instead proposed that the funds be turned over to Healthsharing on the condition that, until 1993, it devoted two or three issues a year to regional reports on women’s health. To carry out the plan, Healthsharing will have to hire six regional editors to oversee the assignment and writing of material on their areas, so the infusion of cash will still leave the magazine with less money than it had before the Women’s Program funding was so abruptly cut off. But there’s another development: the establishment of a fundraising committee which includes Connie Clement, one of the members of the founding collective. Clement is confident that the group can raise enough to cover the $30,000 annual shortfall.
So Gottlieb and Elliott are again devoting their efforts to getting the next issue ready on time instead of worrying about whether there will be a next issue. They have always been optimistic, though. Even before the Health and Welfare grant threw them a fiscal lifeline, the collective was planning issues as far ahead as 1993.
When they needed inspiration all they had to do was think of the ramifications of the magazine’s demise. As Elliott said last fall: “What would readers be left with? Chatelaine?”

Every thing about the clamor for a new particle accelerator by physicists at the University of British Columbia appealed to the reporter in Eve Savory. The accelerator would produce subatomic particles – kaons, which have important medical and industrial uses-in unprecedented quantities. The kaon factory story, Savory tried to explain to her supervisors at the CBC, would be about a fundamental mystery of the universe, a report from the frontier of matter and energy. What’s more, the story had a political dimension since eastern scientists claim that the project will never justify its $1.2 billion startup costs, while in the west, scientists passionately demand an end to the Ontario/Quebec bias of federal funding agencies.
But to Savory, the story was worthwhile simply because it was about scientists. Unlike many reporters who loathe the job of trying to elicit anecdotes and personal insights from scientists, Savory likes the challenge. “I know there are evil scientists and power-seeking scientists and money-seeking scientists out there,” she says. “But, though it may sound really naive, I think there are also some real idealists who are looking for truth and for something that will help the world, and I always want to tell their story. And it frustrates me that I don’t do it better than I do because of my own limitations and the limitations of television.”
Savory is, in fact, one of the few broadcast journalists even taking up the challenge. An eleven-year veteran of The National, she is one of only a handful of network news reporters dedicated full-time to a science beat. She is also very good at what she does. A three-time winner of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association’s Science Journalism Award, Savory was nominated again last year for her three-minute feature on the effects of global warming in the Arctic permafrost. But her piece was edged out for first prize by another of her stories, this one filed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California on the Voyageur space probe’s fly-past of the planet Neptune. Yet in spite of the combination-a story with/national significance and an award-winning journalist aching to tell it-the kaon item sat on the back burner at The National for almost two years. Savory would bring it up in sessions with her assignment editor four or five times a year, packaged along with a list of other possible stories in British Columbia to help justify the travel costs. But time after time, it was passed over. “They would say, ‘That’s intriguing but we can’t get you out there. There’s no money and there’s no news peg.’ With all the other news-Beijing, Panama, Eastern Europe, Meech Lake, the Liberal leadership, Okawe just never had the room or the money to do it.”

As long as science stories are regarded as difficult and complicated-hard for reporters to cover and yielding little in the way of pictures-they can never compete with traditional political and economic news for the limited resources and valuable airtime of the TV networks.
Yet in 1973, 43 percent of respondents to a national survey said the media do a poor job of covering science. And it seems little has changed since then. A study released by the University of Calgary in 1989 showed that 40 percent still feel that way. This, in spite of headlines telling of space probes, medical breakthroughs, AIDS, climate change, ecological breakdown and a host of other complex scientific issues. Stories about medicine and health, energy and the environment touch everyone’s lives now more than ever before. The public is truly dependent on scientific information. And it is to the media-to television in particular-that they turn to for this information. But news organizations rarely understand the science behind the stories and, to make matters worse, seldom go to the scientists who might set the record straight.
Environmental stories are handled particularly poorly. Ongoing problems such as deforestation or global warming require thorough analysis, making them more likely to show up in longer feature pieces than in the news itself. Then there are more dramatic stories, such as industrial accidents or oil spills. These offer the drama of confrontation-usually between big business on one side and environmental or native groups on the other-which opens such stories to sensational reporting. But the science is all too easily lost in the sensationalism. In 1989, the National Media Archive, an agency of Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, studied the coverage that environmental stories receive on Canadian television. The finding was that scientists were rarely sought out for interviews in comparison with other sources. For example, government spokesmen and environmental activists were each given 25 percent of the airtime in CBC’s stories, while scientists got just 10 percent. The privately owned CTV network was even worse, giving more than 60 percent to government sources, 10 percent to environmental groups, and only five percent to scientists. Moreover, according to the NMA report, even when scientists were cited, their opinions were systematically discounted.
In an opinion piece last fall in The Globe and Mail, John Chuck man, a senior economist at Imperial Oil, accuses the media of oversimplifying. He says that disasters such as oil spills are often covered in a “Chicken Little” manner, alarming audiences instead of informing them. “The complexity of environmental issues-in which scientific and economic factors are intertwined-goes largely unreported. All too often, stories are sensationalized and the remedies suggested are simplistic.”
“People are interested in science,” says Jeffrey Crelinsten, co-founder of The Impact group, a Toronto science communication consulting firm and president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. “But the editors and producers-the gatekeepers who tell the journalists whether their programs can go on the air-those people have a view that people aren’t interested in science. But they’re wrong.
“A democracy works by providing people with information, and the media is an information pipeline. And if it’s structured in such a way that important information can’t get through, then it’s failing.”
Part of the reason good science stories often don’t make it from the lab to the evening news is the communication gap between scientists and journalists. While reporters often give short shrift to the views of the scientific community, many scientists, for their part, dismiss the concerns of journalists and the needs of the media as irrelevant. They avoid interviews or restrict their comments to chapter and verse of proven data. Though that attitude is understandable in the scientific community, it frustrates the reporter’s need to find the human drama behind the story.
One reason scientists are hesitant to talk to the media is because they fear the reaction of their colleagues. “Scientists who popularize, in general, are often thought less of by their colleagues,”
says Patterson Hume, a retired computer science professor who hosted several prime time science shows on the CBC in the late fifties and sixties. “You’re suspect, in some ways, if you are seeming to bring science down to everyday terms.”