This is crap…it’s truly dreadful. This headline doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t want to read such a piece of shit.” Tony Sutton, the in-house design consultant for Thomson Newspapers Corp., is critiquing the prototype of a new Sunday edition of The Daily Mercury of Guelph, Ontario. He’s standing in his office on the 24th floor of Thomson headquarters in downtown Toronto, amidst chaotic piles of the many newspapers and magazines he’s redesigned for clients around the world: Drum magazine, Rapport, City Press, the Financial Times of Canada, and The Globe and Mail among them. A self-described “journalist who happens to design” and a newspaperman since the age of 16, Sutton looks the part: scraggly beard, unkempt hair and cut-rate clothes. At 46, he’s now applying his expertise to the redesign of Thomson’s 163 dailies across North America. The Mercury is the first Canadian paper to undergo his scrutiny, and he’s unsparingly critical of its staffs early efforts.

“The first thing I say to editors is ‘would you buy this?'” says Sutton, in his characteristically blunt fashion. “And the answer has got to be no. When I get things like this, after I have vomited, I produce new samples to show them there’s a better way of doing it.” I t’s no surprise to hear a veteran journalist trashing a Thomson newspaper. The real surprise is that the company is paying for the abuse. Thomson, whose small-town papers have historically been criticized for a skinflint mentality that puts returns before readers, now seems bent on revolutionary change. The old obsession with high profit margins and tight cost controls is giving way to a new corporate focus on giving readers “quality” and “relevant news.”

Leading the revolution is Thomson CEO Michael Johnston, who has engineered a huge shake-up in traditional corporate thinking since he took up his post in 1989. He has some lofty new goals for the newspaper chain that was scathingly criticized by the 1980-8 I Kent Commission for producing a “lack-lustre aggregation of cashboxes.” “Our newspapers will be written well, edited well, printed well,” he says, “and they will contain the news the community wants.” Look after all that, he reasons, and profits will take care of themselves.

It’s now mid-November and the Mercury’s redesign is already three weeks behind schedule.
And although Sutton usually recommends a four-page wraparound, publisher Stephen Rhodes has produced a full 24-page mock-up. Sutton is clearly displeased with the result.

Some page-one headlines are as big as their accompanying stories; others fade in a cluttered grey mass, undistinguishable from the stories they are meant to promote. The body text is so tight and small it’s difficult to read. A couple of “pull-boxes,” traditionally reserved to alert readers to important stories inside the paper, are in this case displaying a hockey score and winning lottery number. “Why do you want to advertise those at the top of the page?” says Sutton. “It’s secondary news.” As he flips to the inside pages, his exasperation intensifies. “This editorial opinion-where is the opinion? Why a national weather map? People don’t give a shit about the weather anywhere else but in Guelph. Often you want to hit people over the head with pieces of two-by-four and say ‘Think. Ask questions.'”

These days, executives at Thomson headquarters are asking questions about their firm’s whole way of operating. The launch of the Sunday Mercury and a concurrent make-over of the 138-year-old daily are part of a general Thomson renewal project aiming to improve the content and design of its chain of newspapers. After almost six decades of doing business on the cheap against little competition, Thomson Newspapers is now forced to spend serious money to fight a host of new threats.
The company is partly playing catch-up against competitive forces that affect the whole newspaper industry. The growth of network and cable TV broadcasts as a prime source of breaking news, for instance, means that Thomson has to redefine how it selects and covers its own news to target true reader needs more precisely. “If you’ve been putting out the same newspaper the same way for 10 years, you’re probably out of date,” says Hunter George, appointed last year as Thomson’s first-ever director of editorial development. “There is an increasing appetite for coverage that affects women, families and the workplace.

Newspapers should reflect that change. It’s nothing more than marketing-tailoring one consumer product, the newspaper, to changes in the marketplace. Society has changed. People want news that affects their daily lives and they’re not getting it.”
At the same time, Thomson is also grappling with competitive pressures unique to its own business situation. As a publisher of mainly small-town daily newspapers, it is acutely affected by a North American trend in which an increasing number of weeklies, giveaways and shoppers’ guides are eroding the traditional revenue base of its dailies. For several decades, Thomson faced little effective local competition, ran its papers parsimoniously and demanded relatively high profit margins of them-leaving little money to invest in editorial quality. The company now realizes it must relax those demands and free up funds to win back its competitive footing. Last year alone it invested $124 million (U.S.) in capital expenditures-compared with averages of less than $18 million annually in the early eighties.

The state of The Daily Mercury suggests Thomson’s typical problems. The paper’s circulation is only 18,500, nearly the same as it was in 1971, although the local population has grown 44 percent since then. Problems differ slightly from market to market, of course, but Thomson has similar goals across the board: to tailor each newspaper’s content and design to appeal to the demographic profile of its community more sharply, and to regain lost circulation and capture new readers from traditionally weak segments of the market, such as women and young adults. At the Mercury, publisher Stephen Rhodes projects that the redesign and accompanying content changes will attract the university crowd and new families in the area, to translate into a circulation increase of 7,000 in just 18 months.

Beyond hiring Sutton and Hunter George to work on newspaper content and design, Thomson chief Johnston has launched a range of other corporate improvements. A new satellite hook-up now links the bureaus of Thomson Newsservice (an in house wire service) with its newspapers; bureaus in Ottawa and Toronto have increased their staff, a new bureau was opened in the U.S. mid-west, and a correspondent has been added in Mexico City. Starting this spring, Thomson papers will carry a freestanding, colourful weekly entertainment tabloid, designed by Sutton, that aims to attract younger readers. And it has already introduced about 200 other new supplements, from Sunday editions to lifestyle and automotive sections, across the chain. To beef up staffing, Thomson created 53 7 new editorial positions last year and plans to add at least another 500 this year. Editors now receive an in-house corporate magazine dispensing professional tips; and all newsroom staff are being trained in writing, editing, design and photography so as to sustain the new quality levels.

Last November, the publishers and editors of every Thomson daily in North America were flown to Nashville, Tennessee for a week-long conference, hosted (and paid for) by head office at a cost of $750,000 (U.S.). No expense was spared in bringing the best minds in the newspaper business to preach the new Thomson motto: quality. The conference was an attempt to jumpstart Thomson newspapers into modern newspaper management. The underlying message to publishers and editors was clear: circulation has to increase-here’s how to make it happen in your community.

“At the conference, it became quite clear that Thomson’s thrust to improve quality was sincere. Every Thomson manager was given his or her marching orders to improve,” says Bryan Cantley, manager of editorial services at the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association. Eric Anderson, managing editor of the Thomson-owned Advocate of Newark, Ohio, saw the conference as a visible statement that the standards of the past are no longer acceptable. “It’s a considerable switch from the old Thomson attitude in which quality was up to individual publishers and editors,” he says. “If those standards were higher or lower, those papers reflected that, but not anymore.” The most remarkable aspect of the new Thomson push is the financial support that publishers and editors are receiving from head office to clean up their acts. In the old days, spending any money on something as frivolous as improving newspapers was unheard of. The chain’s founder, Roy Thomson, was a self-made success who bought his first newspaper, The Timmins Daily Press, in 1934, with a $200 deposit, and thus launched a publishing empire producing annual revenues of$725 million by the time of his death in 1976. Although he was fond of saying that good journalism sold more papers, he really ran his newspaper business on the principle expressed in another favourite saying: “Editorial is the stuff you separate the ads with.” His penny-pinching policies were legendary. To pare costs, reporters were cut off from receiving free copies of their own newspapers and pencils were tethered to telephones to keep employees from walking off with them. A frustrated publisher is claimed to have once said of Thomson’s miserly upper management: “God help us if they ever realize there are two sides to a piece of toilet paper.”

And those policies continued when son Kenneth took over the company following Roy’s death. By this time, Thomson had acquired 148 papers in North America and Britain, including the prestigious Times of London, which has subsequently been sold. (Today, Kenneth Thomson, the chairman of Thomson Corporation, is the eighth-richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.)

Ironically, it is precisely the corporate attitude established under Roy Thomson-that newspaper content is irrelevant, or at best, secondary to advertising-that has damaged the franchise and hurt circulation in recent years. Thomson head office has historically pushed for 25 to 30 percent profit margins, which are at least 10 percent higher than the average for North Ametican newspaper chains. With circulation stagnating as various new competitors came on the scene, publishers such as the Mercury’s Stephen Rhodes eventually were finding it harder and harder to produce those returns while also producing enough quality local news coverage to keep readers happy.

Thomson’s new response to the problem has been to accept lower profit margins from publishers (as low as 19 percent, according to one industry analyst’s estimate) and free up money for product improvements. In the short term, it means the ratio of news to ad pages has increased across the board at Thomson, even as the recession continues to decrease advertising sales. In the long term, it means that individual newspapers will have more flexibility to hire reporters, editors, or other staff to produce good papers. “Since Johnston took over, our newshole is 15 percent larger; I hired two new positions last year and one this year,” says Anderson of the Advocate, “all at a time when the advertising climate is not as exciting as some folks might like it to be.”

Despite such optimism, Thomson’s rebound won’t be easy. During its long corporate sleep, many competitors gained serious ground on it. One such company, Metroland, (owned by The Toronto Star’s parent Torstar Corp.), runs a string of weekly papers across Ontario in direct competition with several Thomson dailies. They pose a significant threat. Circulation at Thomson’s The Oshawa Times, for instance, has dropped 20 percent (to 20,000) since Metroland began publishing its tri-weekly Oshawa/Whitby This Week in 1970, which today has a circulation of 68,000. And since Metroland launched its weekly Peterborough This Week in 1989, circulation at Thomson’s Peterborough Examiner has dropped almost 10 percent. In the most dramatic upset, Thomson quit publishing the 135-year-old Brampton Times in 1989, largely because it couldn’t compete against Metroland’s Brampton Guardian, published three times a week, and the large papers in nearby Toronto.
“Metroland happens to be very good,” admits Johnston. “They are a well-marketed newspaper. But our circulation decline only reflects the general state of what’s happening in the newspaper business.” Johnston believes Thomson is reversing the trend, pointing to the fact that overall circulation of Thomson papers was up by almost two percent in 1991.

The most complex challenge faced by Thomson may be one faced by the whole newspaper industry: to reinvigorate its products to ensure their appeal to the readers of tomorrow. “Newspapers are in danger of being left behind,” says Cantley. “They appear to be losing their readers to television and to so many different forms of communication. Young readers are coming up who really haven’t been brought up on newspapers. They’ve been brought up on television and computers. It could result in a very difficult time for newspapers.”

The general answer is to select news that is more relevant to readers’ lives and to package it in a more exciting way. More and more newspapers are redefining their notions of daily news and using colour, graphics, sidebars and news summaries to retain readers’ attention. During last November’s conference in Tennessee, Thomson employees boned up on contemporary trends by studying the model of the 27 ,000-circulation Boca Raton News, in Florida. Owned by Knight-Ridder, it broke ground in 1989 with its innovative “25/43 Project,” designed to attract new readers within that age group with a “news-you-can-use” format of shorter, softer stories and lots of colour.

Of course, studying is one thing, but implementing radical change is quite another. “Getting newspapers to change is harder than turning around the Queen Mary,” says Cantley. “There are cultures in the newsroom; and journalists are very conservative people whose training is rooted in very old-fashioned ways of reporting with beats.”

At least one old-school thinker believes that Thomson’s experiment with trendy design won’t work unless it’s rooted solidly on a foundation of classic hard-news reporting. “You’re still going to end up with fluff newspapers,” says John McLeod, a Thomson employee for almost 10 years and former managing editor of the Brampton Time.~. “It’s fine to have a paper that’s more attractive to look at, but once people get past the looks, there has to be something to keep them there. Redesigns don’t work unless there’s some substance behind the redesign and that’s where Thomson has yet to prove itself-that it can put substance into its newspapers.”

McLeod should know. He literally wrote the book on the “Thomson Formula.” It’s an editorial mix of what McLeod calls “the cook of the week, the team of the day and lots of fluffy little features while ignoring the hard news in the community” all prescribed in a manual he put together to train editorial employees. In 1983, when McLeod decided to ignore his own manual to concentrate on publishing stories linking local politicians with big developers, he ran into trouble from his publisher and head office. Eventually, he was ordered by head office to reassign the reporter, who was getting the developer scoops, to soft features; he refused and was fired.

From his experience, McLeod is convinced that puff pieces don’t sell papers in competitive markets. Unless Thomson papers begin to emphasize hard news, he concludes, they’ll never gain ground on their competition.
Thomson’s Hunter George dismisses McLeod’s characterization of his papers as too fluffy. “You’d be hard-pressed to say that a community newspaper that goes into 80 to 85 percent of homes in the community, and that people pay money for, would fit that description,” he argues. And he defends the new era of news that’s truly relevant to readers’ day to day concerns. “If I want to know whether it’s better to use disposable or non-disposable diapers, I would say that’s information I’d like to have and I’d like my newspaper to give it to me. If somebody were to say that’s soft news, I’d say bull.”

A final element of Thomson’s corporate renewal is a massive decentralization of newspaper operations. Under Johnston’s rule, Thomson’s head office no longer dictates plans for development. Instead, changes originate with individual publishers. In theory, this gives publishers greater liberty to produce a paper that’s sensitive to community needs.

In reality, just how much liberty publishers actually have is questionable at times. For redesigns at the Mercury and the Advocate, head office reinforced rigid deadlines. While the Mercury’s progress was interrupted by a bitter strike, the Advocate did meet its deadline-even though its own staffers felt they hadn’t really completed their redesign work. “Improvements had to be accomplished,” says Johnston firmly. “It was not going to be on someone else’s time frame. We’ve said consistently that if somebody doesn’t want to operate within our philosophy, they’re going to have a difficult time staying employed, aren’t they?”
In his office at Thomson headquarters, Tony Sutton is putting the finishing touches on the last of three new prototypes he has designed for the Mercury. Moving the computer mouse, he brings up the prototypes on the 18-inch Mac screen, which takes up most of the room on his desk. When redesigning a newspaper, he comments, “you’re going in and saying to people ‘what you’ve done is wrong.’ You’re rejecting what somebody spent a huge amount of time doing. So you have to be sympathetic. You have to explain how to do the job properly. But the first thing you do is show them at least one page where you’ve done the job properly because you’re setting your credentials and showing an alternative which is usually better.”

It’s an understatement to call what Sutton has done “better.” Large bold headlines are splashed across the top of the page; the text is larger, cleaner and easier to read; the stories are shorter. The Daily Mercury is actually appealing.

While the redesigns don’t guarantee Thomson a victory in the newspaper wars of the nineties, they’re at least a symbol of a new fighting spirit. Sutton, who worked for the company 20 years ago in England, knows the battle will be long and hard. “Thomson is realizing they have to do something better,” he says. “The problem is you don’t change 50 years of thinking overnight.”

It was mid-May of 1991 and I was fresh off the plane from Vancouver, sitting in a Queen Street West restaurant eating Thai noodles with Globe and Mail editors John Cruickshank and Phil Jackman and explaining the cognitive indignities I had planned for their readers in the coming year. After nearly a year as the Globe’s Friday Fifth Columnist and semiofficial house communist, I was beginning to feel like an institution. And why not? I’d been largely uncensored, and better, I’d been having fun.

Judging from the hate mail, I’d managed to morally offend most of the Canadian right wing with columns suggesting that the stock market is run by irresponsible hooligans betting on the productivity of real participants in the economy. I’d called all those BMW owners who drive around with cellular phones stuck in their ears “dickheads.” I’d invoked the ire of the CanLit industry by suggesting that its most beloved writer (or location for intellectual strip mining) is merely a minor antiquarian miniaturist. I’d attacked the Nike corporation for counselling exercise-induced psychotics to “just do it” and for selling people running shoes filled with air, and I’d been, well, unkind to several other advertisers.

Only once had a column been canned. A reader wrote in to express his consternation that an obscenity like dickhead had been permitted to appear in the august pages of The Globe and Mail, and I responded with a column that used the term 21 times. A dickhead, I explained, is any person whose political character and private behaviour emulates that of Richard M. Nixon. I went on to give a list of eminent dickheads that included Brian Mulroney, Jacques Parizeau, George Bush, Barbara McDougall and people on both sides of the then-current Oka crisis. Noted non-dickheads included Pierre Trudeau, Rene Levesque, Clyde Wells and Elijah Harper. Cruickshank phoned to say, gee, no, that was going too far, and couldn’t I please concentrate a little more closely on media analysis?

I was having far too much fun to quit over a single word, so I said okay, I can live without that column, but really, John, wasn’t everything media? I was, in short, a columnist out of control, and here I was having lunch with my personal wardens proposing to spin out still further.

Somewhere in mid-lunch (and midflight) Cruickshank shot me. He seemed a little embarrassed about being the one to pull the trigger, but with power, as they say down at corporate headquarters, comes unpleasant responsibilities. He discharged his well, although not gleefully.

I didn’t fall off my chair when he did it. I didn’t splatter Thai noodles around, throw a tantrum and I didn’t grovel or threaten to commit suicide. But I’d never been fired before from anything, and I was stung. I managed to squeak out just one interesting question. “Was it,” I asked carefully, “because my columns weren’t as good as the others?” Cruickshank glanced at “Facts & Arguments” page editor Jackman before he answered, also carefully, that, no, that wasn’t the problem. They wanted me to go on to other things-a euphemism, it quickly turned out, for irregular articles on assigned topics. I said I wanted to think about it, and that he should call me in a couple of weeks when I got back to Vancouver. We both knew he was blowing smoke up my ass, that I wasn’t going to write like an Anglican Church deacon, and that he wasn’t going to call.

I did get a phone call a couple of weeks later, but it was from Frank magazine. By then, I’d stopped feeling stung, and was just plain pissed about being fired. Frank asked some questions and I gave some silly answers that the “journalist” on the other end of the line either mis-transcribed or creatively interpreted. One thing he asked me was who I thought was behind it, and I told him I didn’t know. “Thorsell?” he demanded. “I dunno,” I answered. “Maybe.” I went on to relate that I’d heard that an editorial think tank held two weeks before I was fired had decided to move the paper’s news section further to the right, and the arts coverage toward “popular” culture-fewer book and theatre reviews, and more video and gossip. Since I was on the left (in their minds, anyway) and an outsider without Toronto connections or close friends in editorial, I was, my source told me, the easiest to shoot. The item that eventually appeared said that Frank was sad I was gone, but then reported that I’d blamed it entirely on Thorsell, making it sound as if I was the victim of an editorial sweep that had the whole Globe and Mail turning into an agitprop sheet for the Hitler Youth. That, interestingly, was the first-and only-lesson in journalism I received during the whole year.

Am I still pissed off? Not really. I got a year of columns in, which is about six months more than I or anyone who knows me expected I’d last. Losing the column isn’t even a professional blow. I’m not really a journalist, you see, and my interest in daily events and matters of “fact” is marginal. What gets reported in the media as factual verity most often strikes me as a smoke screen to hide whatever it is the business community, the government and whoever else has access to the media are really trying to do to us-and to distract us from the long-term consequences of the horrible things we’re all guilty of doing to one another and to the planet just by living in consumer heaven. A couple of years ago, for instance, the federal government had the whole cultural community tied up in knots over a patently ludicrous censorship bill while cultural funding was quietly being frozen and the cultural elements of the Free Trade Agreement (which froze funding permanently) were negotiated. Now the Mulroneyites are dithering around with a self-inflicted constitutional crisis to hide the increasingly obvious fact that they’ve been consciously and systematically dismantling the country for the past seven years.

As a writer I’m interested in metaphors and in ideas, and at those points where “the facts” interface with metaphors and ideas. Writing the column forced me to develop a whole lot of skills I didn’t really have when I started and generally sharpened my weapons as an anecdotist. The first columns took three to five days each to write, but toward the end, it was down to four to six hours.

After a deadly earnest summer, The Globe and Mail has hired two competent left-of-centre columnists for its arts section, Rick Salutin and Stan Persky. Persky is capable of being at least as funny as I ever was, and Salutin is always interesting to read. Meanwhile, the column that replaced mine is stinking up the page.

As I said, nobody had more fun with that column than I did. It was so much fun, actually, that if someone offered me another gig on the same or similar terms, I’d probably take it. But I’m not holding my breath. …

Brian Fawcett is the author of 14 books. Unusual Circumstances/Interesting Times and Public Eye are his two most recent works. He’s recently moved to Toronto.

It’s seven o’clock on a frigid November morning, and Toronto Star feature writer Patricia Orwen is scurrying about her small Etobicoke home as though she were working against a deadline in the newsroom. She enters the kitchen with her two daughters in tow and begins to make coffee from a pan of water on the stove. Thick navy kohl encircles her small blue eyes like a raccoon’s mask. Her daughters-three-year-old Taryn and two-year-old Cay leigh-are still groggy. “She had to sleep in her clothes again,” Orwen says, motioning apologetically at Cayleigh’s stained sweatpants. At 7:30, everyone piles into the family’s Jeep Cherokee and heads for the daycare. Once inside, T aryn whimpers at the thought of being left and clutches her mother fiercely. Orwen tries to reassure her daughters, but as she leaves, Cayleigh begins to wail hysterically at the window, one pudgy arm extended in a last appeal to her mother. Orwen looks away with a frown, trying to shut out the cries. When she arrives at the newsroom shortly after eight, she will apply the rest of her makeup and, one hopes, notice the zipper that is undone at the back of her dress. The first shift of the day is already behind her, but a second one awaits.

Since January 1991, Orwen has shared her job with another Star feature writer, working five days in every two-week period. She is among dozens of newspaperwomen across the country who work reduced hours in an attempt to balance career and family. But despite changes in legislation and workplace policies to help working mothers cope with their responsibilities, most newspaperwomen with children still face enormous professional barriers.

“A friend said we live in a child-hating society that doesn’t want to slow its pace because of kids,” Orwen declares. “The truth is, women have only accomplished two things-the right to work away from home, and the right to take on all the responsibilities at home.”

A 1988 Labour Canada study found that by 1986, half of mothers with children under three were working, 66 percent full-time. In 1990, all Ontario companies were forced to recognize maternal and paternal rights. New legislation required companies to provide 17 weeks unpaid maternity leave (if the employee was at the same company for at least 13 weeks before the birthdate) , and 18 weeks unpaid parental leave, to be taken by either parent. Also that year, unemployment insurance rules that allowed employees to receive 60 percent of their maximum insurable earnings were changed to increase the claim period from 15 to 25 weeks of leave.

As a result of this legislation, many newspapers have given their employees extended parental benefits, but little else in the way of relief. Just the same, many women jump at this opportunity, knowing it may be the only one they’ll be offered. After all, management supplements-“top ups”-to U.I. earnings are rare, and on-site daycare is virtually unknown. And, creative arrangements, such as job sharing, part-time and flextime, if offered at aU, are at the discretion of supervisors.

The Toronto Star, for example, boasts about the one-year unpaid (and un-supplemented) maternity leave it offers. But this single concession doesn’t provide a lasting solution to career and family conflicts. What’s more, the job sharing opportunities at the Star are far from ideal. While this kind of arrangement is practised informally-writers Kathy English and Leslie Scrivener revolutionized the concept there three years ago-no formal policy is yet in place. Ditto almost everywhere else. Informal arrangements between reporters and editors are a poor substitute for protective policies and programs. As a result, employees who seek alternative arrangements at newspapers often find themselves up against a wall of conflict between family and career.
Orwen recalls one Tuesday when her new editor asked her, five minutes before the end of her shift, to write a story on euthanasia. The deadline was the end of the week, but Orwen accepted the assignment without complaint, even though Wednesday and Thursday were her days off. What would have been a routine job for a full-time reporter turned into a nightmare. “The trouble is, I have only part-time daycare for the children. The daycare is full and doesn’t have much flexibility in taking the children extra days,” Orwen says. “So in the case of the terminally ill story, that meant working from home on my days off, in this case interviewing a dying man from my kitchen phone, while at the same time writing a cheque for the plumber who had just finished stemming a flood from the ceiling above me, at the same time supervising Taryn and Cayleigh who were watching Sesame Street on the other side of the kitchen counter. Having children, especially two this young, and a career, combined with so little flexibility in child care, creates a difficult juggling act. And if it’s this difficult at times, even with the job sharing, what would it be like if I were trying to work fulltime? Practically impossible.”

The whole point of alternative job options is to give employees some control over their lives, and provide some sense of routine with their kids. Yet employers sometimes act as if they’re doing reporters a favour in allowing them to job share. Vivian Smith, national beats editor at The Globe and Mail, shares many of Orwen’s concerns. “In general, it’s tough for people to propose alternate arrangements, because they’re so sure they will be turned down,” she says. “I don’t think there’s been a sea change in attitudes toward working mothers or fathers. I think the company looks at job sharing as they look at anything else-cost benefit analysis.” Ironically, she says, informal job sharing arrangements are becoming easier to obtain, because the Globe is looking for ways to reduce costs.

The Globe is one of two large dailies (the other being the Winnipeg Free Press) that is owned by Thomson Newspaper Corporation, the largest newspaper conglomerate in Canada. No corporate benefits policy presides over the Globe or any of Thomson’s approximately 80 small weeklies and dailies across the country. Rather, each paper sets its own rules. The Globe, for example, offers the minimum leave and additional unpaid time off, up to a year. Like the Star, it provides no top-up on 0.1% earnings, and no formal job share program.

Vivian Smith, who has two children under six, returned to work full-time shortly after each was born. Although the support of her editors helped her overcome initial concern about her job, Smith admits she would have liked to consider reporting part-time, had that been available to her. Now, she works 10 hours a day, four days a week. Her husband, who also works at the paper, has regular hours and is able to care for their children in the evening. “I get to see them about an hour in the morning, and an hour at night,” Smith says. “It’s very stressful to work a 10-hourday.”

Managing editor John Cruickshank, a father of two young children, agrees the balance between career and family is difficult to maintain. In defending the Globe, he points out that family emergency days are offered and he insists that the atmosphere at the paper regarding working parents is, if not progressive, at least collegial. The recession, he argues, has made it impossible to expand formal employee programs. But except for expensive options such as on-site daycare, many work arrangements such as job sharing cost employers little and are worthy investments. “If you want to keep good employees,” Smith reasons, “it’s worth accommodating them temporarily, even if that means restructuring the organization to do so.”

Southam Newspaper Group, which owns 17 dailies and is the country’s second largest newspaper owner, realized this four years ago when it launched a task force to study the barriers to women’s advancement within Southam ranks. In April 1990, it released a report advising, among other things, that Southam papers form “supportive” policies on maternity, paternity and dependent sick leave. At the Southam-owned Ottawa Citizen, for example, job sharing and part-time work have become commonplace, and employees on maternity leave receive a supplement of up to 95 percent of their 0.1. earnings.

“I think the Citizen’s been very progressive in its attitude,” says sports editor Lynn McAuley, who has worked there for 10 years. Like Smith, McAuley has two children under six, and a husband who works at the same paper and shares in the parenting. Although she has chosen to work full-time, five days a week, McAuley says the Citizen no longer limits working mothers or fathers to this kind of schedule. “There was a time when I was told flat out that if I wanted to have kids, I couldn’t come back part-time,” she says~ explaining that, to a large degree, the Southam report changed the corporate culture. “The recommendations were quickly put in place and embraced,” McAuley recalls. “It became a business reality and a sound one, and it suited a lot of the people who worked here. No one had to have an arm twisted.”

In its report, the Southam task force also recommended that its papers establish or support a child-care centre on or near their offices, where possible. So far, however, the Calgary Herald and The Edmonton Journal are the only newspapers in the country to provide onsite daycare. The Calgary centre, built in 1987, is overseen by a parents’ committee and is used by both male and female employees. For Jack Spearman, an editor in the sports department at the Herald, and cochair of the committee, the centre is a blessing. “If you’re having a bad day, you can just go down and have a cuddle,” he explains. “There’s nothing like a kid to keep your perspective.” Like many other working fathers, Spearman faces the same challenges as his female colleagues in coping with career and family conflicts. But he is, at least, able to bring his three-year-old son to work with him every day. Luckily, his wife is assistant city editor and can pick up their son when the centre closes at 6 p.m. “It’s a question of convenience. I mean, he’s two floors down,” Spearman says. “It’s a real asset here and I think the people who use it value it very highly. It keeps up morale. I know we’ve had a lot less turnover, and it’s a recruiting feature.”

Catherine Ford, associate editor at the Herald, says a general change in attitude toward working parents forced daycare to become a priority. “If you’re going to spend a lot of money to hire professionals,” she explained, “then you’re going to have to address other things in their life. It’s unconscionable to make them choose between their families and their work. We recognize that we’re not their only commitment.”

Orwen says a daycare at or near the Star offices would have eliminated her grueling quest for nannies: One was allergic to the family cat, another became pregnant, and a third brought home boyfriends with criminal records. She says her daycare centre is first-rate, but at 4:30 p.m., 90 minutes before the centre closes, she is rushing to catch the GO Train. Her jaunt to the centre will take at least two hours. From the Mimico station to the daycare is a 40minute walk, and the centre charges for every minute past six o’clock.

Orwen arrives disheveled and weary, but tries to appear energetic as her daughters smother her with kisses. Within minutes, she is complimenting Cayleigh on a drawing and responding to Taryn’s questions. Her eight-hour stretch of interviewing, researching and writing is now long past, though perhaps not forgotten. Orwen bundles up her children and heads out the door, braced for the half-hour walk home and her final shift of the day.

As this decade began, the trend watchers in the media predicted that it would bring a return to traditional moral values: the unscrupulous eighties would give way to the ethical nineties. Though I hate to give them credit-why does every 10-year period have to be tied up in a fashionable package and labeled like a designer fragrance – there are already signs that the soothsayers were right. From the political correctness scare to the peep shows into politicians’ lives, the North American media have lately been very busy highlighting ethical questions. The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial raised similar issues-both in themselves and in the way they were covered. In America, where the media no longer hesitate to take shots at each other, the battle lines are being drawn across the country. In Canada, however, we’re still rather reserved about bashing our own kind. As Marlene Fine discovered in “Dubious Distinction” on page 52, many of our newspapers believe in the glass-house effect; they aren’t about to cast the first stone. Her story explores the controversy surrounding an exhaustive profile of Marc Lepine, which won two of the nation’s highest press awards. When it was discovered that the authors, two Ottawa Citizen reporters, had lifted three unattributed passages from other newspapers, some journalists called for the awards to be repealed. Others shrugged the whole thing off as common practice. Either way, the debate was largely a private one; what was published at all was cloaked in the neutrality of news stories.

In keeping with the nineties trend, most of the other stories in this issue of the Review also deal with ethics. However, we’re not neatly as concerned with being au courant as we are with keeping a close eye on what the industry is up to. Journalists have a role in society that’s too important to be performed without scrutiny. Yet, for the most part, the media aren’t obliged to answer to anybody for their actions. The federal broadcast regulator is notoriously weak-willed and newspaper press councils have no real punitive power. As for magazines, only the consciences of their editors-and a few enlightened publishers-keep them on the ethical up-and-up. As I found out for “Horning In” on page 32, no organization exists to police periodicals, especially those that get too cozy with advertisers.

Though our cover story is mainly concerned with the way good writers are fettered at Maclean’s, it too has an ethical side: the staff of the magazine is deeply troubled about the sexist way that women are depicted in its pages. And in that most sexist of newspaper enclaves, the sports departments, a bunch of the guys have decided that Globe and Mail columnist Marty York is completely off-base. As Anthony Seow reports on page 26, they question his reporting on the grounds that it’s-what else?-unethical.

What you see in these pages is only a sampling of the moral quandries we heard about this year. In preparing the issue, we were flooded with neatly 50 story ideas and reports on what’s wrong with the journalism industry. But at least it’s a start. When we begin to uncover-and debate publicly-what ails the industry, we can begin to cure it. Journalist, heal thyself.
So that’s our mandate: to be the watchdog, the self-scrutinizing element that’s largely missing in the Canadian media. And that’s what we’ve done since the first issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism rolled off the presses in 1984. Even before ethics became trendy.

A few hundred years ago, during a night of drunken carousing, young gentlemen would argue, like men everywhere, about women and money. But instead of simply punching an opponent in the nose, a gentleman would thwack him across the face with his glove, crying: “You cad, sir! ” The cad would stagger to his feet and slur: “Pistols or swords?” As the sun rose, the two of I them would make their way to a park or deserted field and duel until one was killed or wounded.

Duelling struck other people as dumb, especially, I suspect, women who were stuck with a dead lover or assassin. As Ottawa lawyer Warren Kinsella pointed out in The Globe and Mail last January 30, “16th-century jurists, intent upon protecting the feelings of British aristocrats, developed the law of defamation and slander primarily to prevent the use of duels to settle matters of personal honour.”

Personal honour? What on earth does that mean in Canada in 1992? Nobody knows. Ontario’s libel law does not define “reputation.” Nor does it define “defamation.” In libel suits, judgments are made on an ad hoc basis by individual judges or, rarely, by a jury. Therefore, when writers are creating a story, a column, a novel or a song, we have no way of knowing in advance whether or not our words may be deemed “libelous” by at least one of our readers. Since most writers don’t know anything about the libel law, and I don’t want to-it’s scary as hell we are flying blind, and some of us wing it right into a libel suit.

It happened to me in 1990. I wrote a column for The Canadian Forum, a small, critical journal about politics and the arts, in which I questioned the appropriateness of the personal corporate affiliations of the chairman of the Canada Council, Allan Gotlieb. Since the council is a public body, I felt my column would provoke a useful public examination of an organization with immense power over artists’ lives, including mine. Instead, it provoked a libel suit from Gotlieb against myself and The Ottawa Citizen which had reprinted the column.

Silence. That was the first and most traumatic consequence of the suit. I was told by the Citizen’s lawyers, and thank God for them-I was a free-lance, second rights columnist and they could have washed their hands of me-that anything I said, even to a friend, could potentially be used against me in court as evidence of malice. Any further discussion of Gotlieb and the Canada Council, by me or anyone else, could lead to aggravated damages.

Malice, or malicious intent, is the black heart of the libel law. Truth is no defence. I am constantly puzzled and amazed by writers such as Philip Mathias of The Financial Post who defend the current libel law because “publisher and author are terrified into making sure everything published is factual and fair.” The idea that the media should allow themselves to be terrified is peculiar enough, but in a libel action, the accuracy of any statement is largely irrelevant. There is a case currently before the courts in which the facts in the story are not in dispute; what is being prosecuted, for more than $1 million in damages, is the alleged malicious intent of the story.

How can anyone know what a writer intends? Often writers don’t know-we cast our words upon the waters-but we do know from experience that all of our readers draw dramatically different inferences and conclusions from what they read, and many of those inferences come as a complete surprise to us. For an individual to interpret accurate analysis as a slight or an insult, a question of “personal honour,” is to negate the democratic process. The tight of the public to know must take precedence over the privilege of an individual to stifle criticism or avenge his wounded ego.

Writers are responsible for the inferences people draw from our stories because we have to prove our own innocence. Only in libel actions is the defendant guilty until proven innocent. The law assumes a “reputation” has been damaged, and the writer meant to do so. Take that, you cad! Thwack, thwack! Compared to a libel suit in Ontario, a duel is quick, easy and cheap. The guys who fought duels were also fond of burning witches, or strapping women to a dunking stool and immersing them in a lake for several minutes at a stretch. Anyone who survived had to be diabolical, only the innocent drowned.

The dunking stool is now called “examination for discovery,” and it permits a plaintiff’s lawyers to grill a writer not only about the published story, but about his previous drafts, notes and sources, his earlier published and unpublished work, his career, his associates and his motives. Writers and publishers strenuously resist divulging this irrelevant and potentially self-incriminating information, especially if a source has been guaranteed anonymity, and the process of discovery, and eventually trial, can consume months and even years of legal maneuvering. The lawyers’ computerized billing meters are running at up to $300 an hour it doesn’t take long to hit $100,000, and bankruptcy. There is no legal aid for libel suits.

But there is libel insurance. Sure, for the corporations that can afford it, and if the insurance is heavily used, the premiums become exorbitant. For individual writers, insurance is prohibitively expensive, yet book publishers’ contracts insist that the writer indemnify them against a libel suit: the writer takes full responsibility.

“I thought I was going to lose my house,” says one established writer whose publisher initially refused to defend her. She felt she could not afford to hire a lawyer and began to research the law herself when a friend intervened and the publisher relented. Self-employed writers are not wealthy people, and our assets are invested in our homes, our RRSPs and our savings-all this can be wiped out in a few months by being forced to defend a libel suit. The amount of damages claimed, whether $1 million or $100 million, is essentially inconsequential since the actual awards are relatively small.

Fortunately, publishers and broadcasters customarily choose to defend their writers. But they are often tempted to settle out of court with an apology or a cash payment, even when none is legally justified, and, in the interests of survival, let their writers take the rap. As the result of a libel suit, or even the threat of a libel suit, books are pulped, or, in some cases, killed before they are written. Libel suits are not, as commonly believed, the result of carelessness or “lazy journalism.” Controversial stories or columns, including my own, are read and corrected by editors and lawyers, yet the writers and publishers are still sued.
Some of my best friends are lawyers, but I don’t want them writing my stuff. Being “lawyered” is now a universal and pernicious part of the publishing scene, and in the words of one business editor, stories are commonly “eviscerated” of all meaningful content before they are published. Most lawyers will change an exciting phrase into a deadly cliche, they will wring every possible nuance and ambiguity out of a sentence in the interests of caution. For the writer, there is no longer any joy in the exercise. The creativity, the spark and freedom are gone, and we might as well be lawyers. It would be better to be in jail.
There is a common belief that the libel law acts as a deterrent, and if it is liberalized the media will be full of false and malicious gossip about you and me. However, the cost of a libel suit is so great that ordinary people cannot afford to sue; the libel law is a deterrent only in the case of the rich, particularly large corporations, including public corporations that can effectively suppress discussion about their operations. There is no time limit during which a suit must proceed to trial; many statements of claim simply sit there for years, sometimes until the plaintiff dies.

Until last year, a libel suit was treated as a nasty little secret, a taboo subject like AIDS or herpes. My friends were afraid to phone. “Are you all right?” one nervously asked me after news of my libel suit hit the press. I felt as if I had cancer. Even worse, I became doubtful about my most trusted colleagues. Do I dare talk to this person? Will she betray me? Libel suits breed a poisonous miasma of fear, suspicion and secrecy, and silence deprives writers of our one great weapon, words. Being forced not to write, not to speak, is a lesson in totalitarianism that leaves an indelible impression.

Fortunately, I was not alone. It seemed that almost everybody was being sued, including an editor I had worked with years before. One day she phoned; we got together for dinner, and from that encounter grew a small, informal network of book, magazine and newspaper writers, called Writers to Reform the Libel Law. From January to April 1991, we met frequently, in deliciously clandestine circumstances, to draft a brief, “A Dangerous Silence,” which we presented to the government of Ontario on May l. We were simply plugging into a process of reevaluation that had been initiated by the previous Liberal government because there is a growing consensus that the libel law contravenes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and would be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada on a test case.

Libel is now a political issue. Libel suits are rarely reported-writing about a libel action can implicate a reporter in a suit but so much is being written about the iniquities of the law that the public is becoming aware of the “white space,” the books and stories they are not reading because the law prevents them from being published.

Much of the credit for breaking the silence belongs to the Writers’ Union of Canada, PEN Canada and the Periodical Writers’ Association of Canada., who organized a demonstration in December 1990 and launched a protest campaign that has gained support from the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild and the Writers’ Guild of Canada. These protests have focused attention on freedom of speech, and have raised public awareness about how little of it we actually possess; even “fair comment,” the most popular defence in a libel suit, is not a guarantee of success.

Allan Gotlieb withdrew his suit against me in December 1990, and he and the Citizen later went their separate ways. Other writers are not so fortunate. Many live with the nightmare of a libel suit for years, a dark cloud of anxiety and a burden of litigation that interferes with their ability to work and insidiously undermines their confidence. One investigative reporter I know faces from 15 to 30 outstanding libel actions at any given time, many of them brought by politicians. He wastes a lot of time in court, and a lot more in his lawyer’s office.

The government is drafting a new law of defamation. We may see it by June, we may never see it at all. However, writers have won a seat at the discussion table, and the Minister of Culture and Communications has been given some responsibility in addition to the Attorney-General. I hope the new law will no longer permit the media to be terrorized, or the courts to be used, in the gloating words of one plaintiffs lawyer, as “an instrument of revenge.”..

Marty York sits alone at the front of the plane. There are 35 players, coaches and other writers on board, but they shy away from him. While York displays no anger, his helpless expression reflects hurt and frustration. He looks like a misfit kid being picked on at recess only the bullies in this case are the highly paid members of the Toronto Blue Jays. On the field they are heroes who make hitting and throwing an art form. Here they just throw garbage. First, a few peanuts fly toward York’s head from five rows back. Then a barrage of more peanuts, rolled-up socks, odd bits of airplane food. Seeking an ally, York turns to one of the other writers. “What’s going on?” he asks. He doesn’t know why they are doing this to him. He can’t understand what he’s done to deserve it.

Some five years after the incident, York is still wondering. His airborne humiliation is typical of the hostility he encounters almost everywhere he goes. A Globe and Mail columnist who’s built a reputation for harsh, critical reporting, York is despised not only by most of the sports personalities he covers but by most of his colleagues in the press box as well. In the cozy little world of sports heroes and scribes, he is an outcast-and he honestly doesn’t know why.

I wanted to find out. Reading his copy didn’t explain it. In print, he’s fearlessly tough, especially on the pampered Blue Jays. If, as his accusers say, his copy sucks, it doesn’t suck up to anything or anybody. He’s no PR man for the franchise, but an for fans, though many are sick of his relentless faultfinding. Though his judgment ( be questioned and his predictions wrong, he covers sports like a legislative reporter covers government, as a watchdog. He doesn’t run with t pack, rather he breaks big stories by chasing and that colleagues are afraid to touch. Yet he’s at t top of every sports department’s hate list-including the Globe’s Why?

I had my own reasons for asking. As a writer fascinated by pro sports since childhood wanted to discover the real workings of a profession I hoped soon to enter. I had imagined a happy little fraternity, but soon discovered a fractioned gang consumed by competition, jealousy or hate. They were playing a bitter game and Marty York seemed to be their pawn. Was he being vilified simply for reporting big-time athletes the way he sees them, rather than the way they want to b seen? If a guy like him, 18 years on the job, damned for applying normal journalistic standards to coveting his beat, what chance is there for a novice like me to do serious work?

I figured there had to be deeper reasons for York’s outcast status. What did you have to do to be the target of crank calls and endless mocking remarks? To have colleagues on your own paper demanding that you be fired? To have a 225 pound baseball player threaten to use you for batting practice?

I had heard some rumours, but was unprepared for the level of anger and contempt I tapped into as I canvassed sportswriters across the country. Few of them, especially the writers on his own paper, would speak for attribution. But once granted anonymity, they had all kinds of stories, interesting and hilarious, varying in credibility. I’m a little shamefaced to admit that I began to enjoy swapping some of them.

“Did you hear about the time when Marty was afraid to go down to the dressing room so he paid some flunky a hundred bucks to run quotes for him at the 1989 Grey Cup?”

No kidding?

“What about the time the reporter went into the clubhouse and one of the athletes mistook him for Marty, grabbed him and was threatening to beat the shit out of him? And here was this poor guy with his hand in front of his face pleading, ‘I’m not Marty York, I’m not Marty York.'”

A lot of York bashing went like that, juicy items from the gossip circuit. But just as much of it was deadly serious, especially when it came from York’s colleagues at the Globe. “I don’t think we should be running his stuff because it’s not good enough,” said one writer. “Never mind everything else, it’s not good enough to run in The Globe and Mail.” The contempt in that comment was shocking enough, but it was the “everything else” he alluded to that interested me more. What, besides sweeping value judgments, was behind the slagging of Marty York?

To get some answers I called a bunch of guys in the sports department at The Toronto Star, where dislike for York is no secret. What I got instead was a hostile brush-off. Rick Matsumoto refused to go on record, Mark Zwolinski wanted nothing to do with the subject, Jim Proudfoot suggested I talk to York’s pastor and grade-school teacher if I wanted to do a profile, and Dave Perkins told me to take my business elsewhere.

Though intimidated by their surliness, I kept up the calls and slowly, among those who would talk, the rap against York began to emerge. He was accused of sensationalism, one-sided reporting, and-most gravely-plagiarism. Not incidentally, there was also much talk of his salary, $80,000 to $100,000 a year, which makes him one of the highest paid newspaper writers in the country.

To many in the business, then, York’s columns are an expensive waste of space in the already diminished sports pages of The Globe and Mail. “Sports journalism has always been thought of as second-rate,” says one Globe writer. “What we need is someone out there doing great reporting, not someone who seems to be cutting all the comers. It’s bad for business, no doubt about it.”

Not as far as York’s supporters are concerned-and he does have them. “Marty is a terrific reporter,” says Earl McRae, the gutsy and outspoken columnist for the Ottawa Sun. “He’s often maligned for the wrong reasons. A lot of it is simple jealousy.” And, he adds, York also suffers because he works outside the pack, asking the tough questions while others cheerlead for the home team.

But whether you talk to those who defend Marty York or those who denounce him, the fact remains that he is the centre of a hellish controversy. And as I prepared for my first interview with him I was expecting to meet with the journalistic version of the devil himself.

The character before me looks nothing like his column photo, nor anything like the monster I had let my careless imagination create. Hidden behind his wire rimmed glasses, he is smaller, less intimidating, with a quick laugh that adds to his boyish appeal.

In conversation, he comes across as soft-spoken and insecure, and distinctly troubled by the animosity he attracts. “Maybe there are flaws in my character that I don’t know about that have bred this contempt towards me,” he says. “I try to get along with everyone. I really like them [his Globe colleagues]. I just don’t know if they like me. Maybe it’s some personality flaw or maybe they resent my style, my salary .”

York’s main work base is an office in his home, in an affluent neighbourhood in Thornhill, Ontario, miles from the scorn and pressures of the Globe newsroom in downtown Toronto. He works at a large, uncluttered desk that leaves little space for other furniture. On the desk are two telephones sitting side by side, his lifeline to his sources. There are signs of York’ s insecurity in several aspects of our meeting. He insists on keeping his own tape recording of our talk, explaining, unconvincingly, that it’s purely for backup. On the wall behind his desk is a badly creased letter Scotch-taped to the wall. It’s a letter of praise that Joe Falls, sports editor of The Detroit News, wrote to Globe management: “I know of no sportswriter in the U.S. or Canada who is displaying more energy, enterprise and enthusiasm than Marty York” As I glance at the letter, York walks up behind me smiling, almost urging me to use parts of it. “Please Anthony, feel free to use anything you want.”

As I spend more time with York I find myself involved in a continuous mind game with him-a game that could be called Guess My Weaknesses. It begins with York asking me who else I’ve talked to, what did they say and was it for attribution? “Did you find anyone at all who had something good to say about me ?” he asks, then, after a quick chuckle, adds, “No, seriously, Anthony, I do have friends in the business.”

When I try to ignore his questions he even begins asking whether I’ve talked to reporters with certain initials that he lists. Then, more bluntly: “Did you talk to Dave Perkins, Pat Hickey?” I admit talking to Hickey, associate sports editor and columnist for The Gazette in Montreal. York snaps back: “None of the stuff Hickey told you ” was true.

The game is over. Ironically, Hickey is one of the people who speaks kindly of York. In fact, according to Hickey and several other sportswriters, York has natural reporting talent. But his insecurities sometimes lead him to betray it. “Marty worries too much about what other people are saying about him,” says one Globe writer. “He gets upset if he hears someone is saying something unkind about him and, to avoid this, he tries to get stories that other people don’t have. If it means getting those stories by means that are sometimes unethical, i.e. borrowing them off someone else, then he does that. It all stems back to his basic insecurities.

In the past three years York has been accused of plagiarizing from three publications, most recently The Gazette in Montreal. On February 27, 1991, Gazette writer Michael Farber wrote the following about an outfielder newly acquired by the Montreal Expos:
Ivan Calderon sauntered into the Expos’ clubhouse yesterday decked out in two 10pound gold chains around his neck, a diamond bracelet that spelled I-V -A-N on his right wrist, a Rolex watch on his left wrist and a No. 22 diamond earring on his left ear.

Calderon wears your mortgage.

“The chains were $7,000 each,” said Calderon, removing one and handing it to a man who hadn’t lifted anything that heavy since letting his Nautilus club membership expire. “The bracelet was $2,000. The watch was $6,000.”
And the earring? “The guy gave it to me for free.”

A week later, this description of Calderon appeared in York’s column: He wears two 10-pound gold chains around his neck, a diamond bracelet that spells IVAN on one wrist, a Rolex watch on his other wrist and a diamond earring in his left ear. The chains are worth $7,000 (U.S.) each. The watch goes for $6,000. The bracelet, $2,000. The earring, $1 ,000.

Someone cracked that Calderon wears your mortgage.

I am driving with York in his car in downtown Toronto when I ask if he can explain the similarities between these two columns. Gone is the joking and laughing that flowed so naturally in the hours before. York is in a drastically different mood, late for an appointment, nervously scratching his leg and clenching the steering wheel tightly as he searches for his destination and for an answer to my question. He is lost. “I’ve already explained that to the people that need those explanations, and they were satisfied,” he says. “They understand there was no plagiarism at all, and I don’t think it does me any good to talk about it any further.”

Globe management questioned York c the issue in Aptil 1991. “Some duplicate of copy was presented to me and I took it to the managing editor, and after a discussion with Marty it was resolved to our satisfaction,” says Globe sports editor David Langford. Was plagiarism committed? Langford will only say: “There were some issues that we had to discuss with Marty and we deal with it in a private manner and that’s the way it will stay.”

Globe sources say York was given warning. But many believe he should had been fired. “It’s a worse incident than I’ve seen people fired for in the past. Judging r the responses of people at the Globe, tt decision reached by management was sin ply not valid,” says one Globe writer. “I t’ s a embarrassment to the paper and an embarrassment to them.”

The charges of plagiarism against Yor were actually researched and brought t Globe management by other reporters at th paper. “If they want to embarrass me, IE them go ahead,” says York. “I don’t thin they’ve done anything to spoil my goo name.”
This issue aside, York has allegedly done some other things himself to spoil his good name. He’s often accused by athletes of misquoting them. The Blue Jays’ dressing room is now foreign territory; many player there refuse to talk to him. “You wonder why it is that on every occasion Marty breaks a story that involves a player’s quote that they always say they have been misquoted,” says one Globe writer. “I can’ remember the last time anybody, after the shit hit the fan, came to me and said the~ were misquoted.”

York dismisses the charge of misquoting, redirecting the heat at the players “They’ll say something and then they’ll realize ohhh God what did I say, and sometimes they’ll get a lot of heat for it. So the easiest thing for them to do is just deny it.”
York was embroiled in a controversy after a column appeared last August in which he insinuated that there were racist divisions among players on the Montreal Expos. He quoted second baseman Delino DeShields, one of the two black starters on the Expos, as saying, “Yeah, it’s just me and Marquis these days, that’s all.”

It was a big story, at least in what it implied. “Marty took that to mean that the clubhouse was clique ridden and racially split,” says Jeff Blair, a baseball writer for The Gazette. “The Expos have had a lot of problems in the past three years, but the one thing they have not had is racial problems.” Blair says that, in his comment to York, DeShields was really only suggesting that centre fielder Marquis Grissom was the last player left in an old gang of friends who had since left the team.

As I spoke more to York about this kind of issue, I did come to see him not simply as an insecure man despised for unethical conduct, but also as something of a maverick fighting the system. “Telling somebody something they don’t know is my number one objective,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s positive or negative as long as it’s newsworthy, interesting and entertaining.”

It’s a simple and obvious credo, but one not followed by many sportswriters these days. Most newspaper sports reporting goes no further than asking a player “How’s the knee!” and serving up the answer along with last night’s scores and a cliche or two for colour. “It’s PR bullshit,” says McRae. “It’s disco journalism, it’s glib and it’s cozy.” Whatever else you can say about Marty York, you can’t say he’s ever found his own cozy place in sports journalism. And that’s to his credit. Since joining the Globe in 1974, he’s always fought to go his own way. His first Globe job was covering high school sports under the guidance of former managing editor Clark Davey and the late sports editor Jim Vipond. Though only 16 when he started, York broke several big stories. The biggest initiated an investigation into the illegal recruitment of basketball players by a downtown high school.
While studying political science and history at York University, he continued to work part-time for the Globe, dividing his time between sports and news. When he graduated, in 1978, York joined the paper full-time in sports. He soon found himself on the receiving end of a lot of criticism from other staffers.

Paul Palango, sports editor at the Globe from 1983 to ’86, recalls his initial feelings: “When I first took over, Marty York was an annoyance to me. I went in there and said, ‘Geez I’m really going to bust this guy’s chops.’ I didn’t think he was accurate. I thought he was sensationalist. I thought he made things up.” Palango was suspicious about York’s monthly phone bills. “I phoned some of the numbers to see who they were and I met some of the most famous people in North America. I thought this guy actually does what he says he does. He’s talking to so many people in a day it’s mind-boggling.” Palango’s early skepticism was transformed into respect and admiration. “Marty has the best list of contacts probably not only in sports, but one of the best in journalism. He can find out anything at any time, I’m convinced.”

York’s tenacious reporting skills shone during his coverage of the Canadian Football League, from 1979 to ’84, when he broke many stories that left the competition scrambling. “Marty was disliked by his counterparts on the Star and Sun because he kicked their asses time and time again,” Earl McRae recalls. “They would bend over backwards to discredit York’s stories to save their own asses.”

York also made enemies in the CFL. After several stories lashing the 0-10 Toronto Argonauts, coach Willie Wood confronted York in a dark, empty equipment room, locking the door behind them. The only sound was the low thumping of York’s heart. He could see Wood’s fists raised in the air, poised to strike. Then Wood stopped and said, “You thought I was going to hit you, didn’t you!” York replied: “I almost wish you had’ve because it would’ve made a great story .”

In 1984, Palango asked York to move from football to baseball coverage, which he did reluctantly. Because of his reputation for tough reporting on football, the pro baseball players treated him as the enemy. And he found it tough to crack the cliquish circles of writers and players. “It was a bit of an ego depressor,” he admits.

Today, almost a decade later, York is still adjusting. Though he’s a columnist, and not a beat reporter, he’s criticized a lot for rarely showing up in the locker room after the big game. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t need to-the beat reporters can be counted on to supply all the predictable things the players have to say. Still, there’s more than a hint of bitterness in his defence of his distanced approach. “I don’t have to go down to the clubhouse or batting cage,” he says. “There are columnists in this world who never use a quote, ever.”

According to many baseball writers, York put his philosophy to the test when he covered the 1990 Wotld Series in Oakland. Games three and four, the final two of the series, were held on Friday and Saturday. During the third game, York got up from his chair in the auxiliary press box, which seat ed about 20 other Canadian journalists, and never came back. He told me he watched the rest of the game from the stands and then went off to Reno.

My next question to him was simple, “Why did you go down to the stands!” “Because I was leaving,” he blurted out
angrily. “I wanted to beat the crowd.” I pondered his answer for a moment. It didn’t make sense. If you wanted to beat the crowd, why move from a press box filled with 20 people to a stadium filled with neatly 50,000!

“You can’t try to convince everybody that you were sitting in the stands at a World Series game; it’s just not done,” says one writer. He adds that even if York had watched from the stands, he surely would have popped in and out of the press box while writing and filing his story. Neither of York’s Saturday and Monday columns contained any description of the atmosphere in the stands or comments from the fans.

Many writers think York’s stories have declined in quality. Some charge that he often makes predictions based on unsubstantiated tips, often generated by player agents who have their own agenda to forward. In the past three years York has raised the possibility that some of the biggest names in baseball would land in Toronto. How’s this for a: partial all-star lineup: Willie McGee, Willie Wilson, Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan.

But Palango defends York’s long-term record. “Sometimes he’s so far ahead of the story, the story doesn’t come true for a year, but it will eventually come true.” As does York himself: “I will never go to print with anything unless I am absolutely sure there’s some grain of truth to what I’m writing.”

But how much of a story can be based on a grain of truth? Last November, for instance, he wrote a column speculating that football star Raghib “Rocket” Ismail would be leaving the Toronto Argonauts to join the L.A. Raiders. The story was based entirely on the views of a U.S. football writer, whom York had interviewed. He also talked to an Argos official and Ismail’s publicist (both of whom denied the rumour), b1.lt neglected to speak to Ismail himself or anyone from the L.A. team.
When I asked York his rationale for this approach, he jumped all over me: “Anthony, give me a break, I tried to talk to the Rocket but he wasn’t around, so I talked to his PR person. Come on, man, grow up. What are you trying to get at, that I didn’t call anyone from the Raiders? It wasn’t my job to call anyone from the Raiders because the Raiders weren’t going to say anything for the record one way or another.”

In fairness to York, many critics blame his flimsier stories on the pe6ple who should demand better work: his editors. “His stories tend to be dishonest because he doesn’t tell the whole story,” says Hickey, who worked at the Globe before joining the Gazette. “There hasn’t been anybody strong in the sports department to question people and say, ‘Look, where did you get this, is there more to this story?'” Globe sports editor Langford admits to past failings: “I used to just let him go and occasionally he has gone too far in terms of what he writes and what he writes about. Maybe that is a problem with me specifically, I don’t know. But in the past six to eight months I think I have kept a bit more of a leash on Marty.”

At the same time, Langford emphasizes that York’s most aggressive columns do fill a void. “People say that Marty is too negative and not balanced in his writing. If everybody else did a balanced look at the Toronto Blue Jays, then I would say, fine, Marty should be balanced as well. But he is this island against a continent of boosterism.”

As York contemplates his future at the Globe, he is increasingly aware that whatever his skills or failings, lots of people wouldn’t be sorry to see him leave. A turning point in his relations with Globe co leagues was his signing of a new contra. with the paper in 1989. He’d had some interest from The Toronto Star, though the Star’s editor, John Honderich, says the] was never a formal offer. The Globe, however, kept York on with a lush deal th~ named him associate sports editor, pa] him a salary of up to $1 00 ,000 per year an includes a satellite dish. Sports agent G Scott, a friend of York’ s, represented him i the bargaining, but York insists that was casual arrangement for which Scott wa paid nothing.

Nosey Globe staffers apparently went to great lengths to discover the terms c York’s new deal. “I had people go into m mailbox and open up my pay slip to se what I was getting,” he says. “Rumour spread and ever since, I’ve detected a complete change in attitude towards me.” Col leagues have also stolen his mail, he says and made harassing calls to him at home. Sitting in his office in Thornhill, isolated from the threats and cutting criticism that have chased him here, York occasion ally drops his guard to reveal a vulnerable and hurt man. And as he sits in his chair aimlessly staring into the doodle he has nervously scribbled on a notepad, searching for a solution to his problems, I momentarily forget about the various things he has beer accused of. Instead I see a lonely newspaper reporter who is being unfairly pushed out of a business that he truly loves.
“I never would have believed it would have gotten this bad,” York says at last. “I can take it when it is the people you’re competing against, but these are some people within my own organization. It’s a shame that guys I’ve never knocked publicly, and never would, feel they can make moves to better themselves by knocking me. It hurts.”

After almost two decades with the Globe, York, still just 35, is considering leaving. “For the first time I’ve really been thinking seriously that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. It would make a lot of people happy if I quit. A lot of journalists would like to see me go down. It comes to a point where you’ve got to realize that money and the profession you love aren’t everything.” And so Marty York sits alone in his office, waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if the next call will be a tip on a big story or the threat that will finally push him out of the business.

In February, 1991, the CBC’s Toronto station, CBLT, aired a clever, facetious television commercial for its six o’clock newscast. In it, Barbie and Ken style dolls sat at an anchor desk, their plastic hair perfectly coiffed, grins stuck permanently in place. Staring vacantly into space, they engaged in some idle chatter:

HE: Over to you, Tammy
SHE: Thanks, Bob. Say, you’re looking especially fine tonight.
HE: Hey, that’s my job.
SHE: Well, good looks make for good news, I always say.

The message? That CBC’s agenda is one of serious news, and serious news only, that it shuns the preoccupation with physical appearance typically associated with television broadcasting. As Trina McQueen, CBC’s vice president of news and current affairs, says, appearance simply is not an important issue at the CBC. “If you lined up your average bunch of women who are walking down Yorkville Avenue-which is the street I happen to be looking at right now-and you lined up your average group of women who present the news, I don’t think you’d see a lot of difference, with one exception-and that is their age. You don’t see very many women over 50 or so on television.” McQueen says this is partly because “the largest group of women who trained a~ journalists are not of that age yet,” but she also blames society’s “natural prejudice’ against older women.

McQueen is perhaps being a bit disingenuous when she notes that the majority of female journalists are still under 50. As she well knows from her own experience she’s 48-the reason there are few women over 50 is that until the 1970s women were actively discouraged from aspiring to on air positions, at the CBC or anywhere else. Today, while a growing number of women anchor news shows or report a full range of events, not just soft items, they are likely to be conventionally attractive-and as McQueen herself suggests, “attractive” still means “young” for women in TV .

In recent years there have been some well-publicized examples of U.S. news executives succumbing to the younger woman syndrome. In 1989, for example, NBC made the ill-fated decision to replace 38-year-old Jane Pauley with 31-year-old Deborah Norville as cohost of the Today show, despite Pauley’s 13 years with the program. The underlying buzz was that Pauley was dropped for a younger woman who could attract a larger audience. Ironically, Norville failed to boost ratings, and when she went on pregnancy leave 13 months later, she simply never retumed.

However, the attention given to the Pauley/Norville brouhaha was minimal compared to the outrage that surrounded the 1981 Christine Craft case. Craft, then 36, was fired from her anchor job at KMBC, in Kansas City, because, her male superiors told her, she was “too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men.”

While there haven’t been any Canadian incidents as high-profile as the Pauley or Craft affairs, the CTV rumour mill had it that the decision in 1987 not to renew Helen Hutchinson’s contract as cohost of W5 was due to the network’s desire to replace her with Genevieve Westcott, some 20 years her junior. (Hutchinson, who was on the show for 10 years, reached an out-of-court settlement with her former employers and declines to discuss the incident.) Whether the whispers were true or not, it’s clear that many producers and news directors still put youth and beauty high on the list of requirements when they’re shopping for female news staff assuming they’re hiring women at all.

In 1990, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released a study entitled “The Portrayal of Gender in Canadian Broadcasting 1984-1988.” The study showed that of 21 English-language TV stations monitored in 1988, men made up 61 percent of news announcers and 72 percent of reporters. But the figures for age groups were even more revealing. In the under -36 group, women made up 76 percent of news staff. In the 36 to 50 group, they dropped to 24 percent. And in the 51 to 65 group, they plummeted to eight percent. Clearly, as women grow older, they fade from view in TV newsrooms.

The CRTC study reinforced a more extensive 1984 survey conducted by Media Watch, the Vancouver-based feminist group that monitors the portrayal of women in the media. The survey, which examined sex-role stereotyping, involved a complicated methodology in which two groups of observers watched 75 and 85 TV news programs respectively. When the observers were asked to rate anchors and reporters according to appearance, the first group found 72 percent of the women to be “attractive or very attractive,” while just 25 percent of the men fell into those categories. Though, in the second group, the numbers dropped to 11′,.59 percent for women and rose to 32 percent for men, the difference was still substantial.

What these studies reflect is the bias against women in news that dates back to the beginning of television in Canada. While regular newscasts started in 1952 on CBC and 1961 on CTV, it wasn’t until 18 years later that J an Tennant became the first woman to anchor the evening news for CBC. Hazel Desbarats, who was a production coordinator for the CBC and Toronto’s CFTO throughout the sixties, says of her early days, “I don’t think there were any news programs with women anchors that I remember at all.”

In Desbarats’s experience, women didn’t aspire to on-air news positions “because they didn’t consider it an option that they could choose, in the same way that there were fewer female doctors, fewer women doing a lot of things.” She also recalls the prevailing attitude that women weren’t suited to the medium: “There was the belief that women on-air in the news business had less credibility. They didn’t have the stature or weight of the male voice or the male presence.”

Those few women who did manage to land on-air jobs were often relegated to weather girl roles, or, at best, limited to delivering social pieces or fluff stories. McQueen, who became the first female reporter for CBC national news in 1966, says, “Were women stereotyped in those days about the kinds of assignments they got? Yes. No question.” While covering the 1967 Progressive Conservative leadership convention, McQueen had to deliver a detailed description of Olive Diefenbaker’s outfit. She admits that her fashion commentary was “certainly an example of stereotyping,” but points out that at the time it was a “plum” assignment, one she was fortunate to get. “It didn’t matter whether you were good looking or not when I started,” she says. “You weren’t wanted, period.”

McQueen sums up the prevailing attitudes toward women in the following two decades: In the seventies, “we went through a thing where people wanted women, but they hired women who decorated the set. Every newscast had to have a guy and a girl-that was the Ken and Barbie period. By the eighties, a woman had almost become required as an anchor hosting a show, and more serious journalists were being hired.” But as McQueen herself admits, even today the majority of women in TV news are relatively young, even at the CBC.

However, the same is not true of their male colleagues. A convention that remains firmly entrenched is that of the young, heavily made-up female placed next to the older male authority figure. Barbara Frum, interviewed shortly before her sudden death on March 26, said there’s still “a kind of bow to the doctor/nurse, principal/teacher” relationship. CFTO’s World BeatNews is a prime example: Kate Wheeler, the 30-year-old female anchor, is paired with avuncular 55-year-old Tom Gibney. The long-held double standard about aging men and women is as applicable here as it is to other facets of society-men get more distinguished; women simply get old.

The result could be called the “Mike Duffy factor”-that is to say, what’s acceptable for men in terms of on-air looks isn’t okay for women. As many in the industry point out, Duffy, CTV’s roly-poly, balding political correspondent, would likely find himself in another profession if he were a woman. “Mike Duffy would never get a job in television as Michelle Duffy,” says Wendy Trueman, a producer for CBC’s business show, Venture. “I’m sorry, but no way. I mean, imagine Rita MacNeil reading the news. Never in a million years. As credible as she might be, it would never happen.” Peter Trueman (no relation), who was a highly respected anchor at Global from 1973 to 1988, says that in his experience women “had to be prettier than their male counterparts. I mean, I anchored for fifteen years and I’ve got a face that could stop a clock.”

If women newscasters have to be attractive to be hired, it may be partly because women are still largely excluded from the upper echelons in television management. In 1990, Toronto Women in Film and Television, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the status and portrayal of women in the visual media, revealed that women make up only 14 percent of upper management in public TV and a dismaying one percent in the private sector. McQueen herself is the first to admit that she is an exception. “I don’t think very many women have moved into news management. Name three,” she challenges.
To combat this problem, another nonprofit group, Canadian Women in Radio and Television, was founded late last year. Its goals include creating a job bank to offer broadcasters a pool of qualified women, including those suitable for management and boards of directors. As cochair Nancy Smith says, “The major thing we have to do is change attitudes so that when people are even thinking about filling a management position they consider women. A lot of those positions are filled through male networking and a lot of times men don’t think of women for those jobs.”

But is sexism alone the only issue? Not in the view of one former CTV executive. Discrimination based on appearance happens not because “there are a bunch of fat old men with cigars and pinkie rings sitting in the back room,” he says. “If it’s true, it’s because people in private television have to be more conscious and are more responsive to public taste. If you’re running a business, you have to make a profit.” Of course, the more viewers a news show attracts, the higher a station’s ad revenue. It is not difficult to see how hiring anchors and reporters with traditional market appeal becomes a priority, though many executives deny that appearance is a determining factor. Peter Trueman, however, doesn’t believe them. “I think when people say they don’t hire Barbie dolls anymore, that’s crap,” he says. “I mean, all you’ve got to do is look who’s on the air. I see them allover. I see Kens, too.”

According to the ex-CTV executive, the problem is more prevalent at the local level. “CTV, the network, simply couldn’t hire a bimbo or the male equivalent and put that person on the air to read the news in Lloyd Robertson’s chair. It just wouldn’t work. You have to distinguish between the network and its affiliates-CFTO is not CTV. It seems to me there are a lot of Kens and Barbies on CFTO.” And Jim McElgunn, who covers the broadcasting beat for Marketing, the weekly trade magazine that serves the ad industry, observes, “With the local stations, their supper-hour news shows are often one of the biggest sources of profit. It’s the number-one thing that gives the station an identity with viewers-they feel close to it, they recognize it. And the person on that newscast is very important. The choice of that anchor is really crucial.”

Marketplace forces aside, feminists have been telling us for years that women themselves help to perpetuate the tyranny of the physical ideal. Women, more so than men, are quite willing to conform to what others deem aesthetically desirable. “Women aim to please,” Wendy Trueman says. “We want to be liked, we want to be pleasant. And that’s why women, I think, put the little extra effort it takes into looking good, into the kind of presentation that works on air.” In Trueman’s experience at Venture, men who’ve worked on the show were much more resistant to “attempts to mold them physically, in appearance.” Or as Barbara Frum put it, “If this is a conspiracy by men to keep women in their place, then men have got an awful lot of willing collaborators in women.”

Viewers, both men and women, have also been guilty of fostering the North American beauty myth, When newswomen like McQueen, Tennant and Frum first appeared on TV, viewers were taken aback, and often complained. Frum, who started out on television coanchoring for CBL T in the late sixties, recalled that period: “The phone calls were so intrusive, so critical, that it was hard to believe that the audience was interested so little in content and so much in what you projected as a person.” Viewers would complain that skirt lengths were too short (what was the reporter trying to suggest, anyway?), and nitpick about everything from hairstyles to makeup in a manner Frum called “extremely vicious.”

Those complaints were still around and still vicious-when executive producer Mark Starowicz launched The Journal in 1982. He had made an unprecedented move by hiring Frum and Mary Lou Finlay to host the show. To his disappointment, he was suddenly faced with” a strange surge of mail about appearance” from viewers who wrote to say they hated Barbara’s hair I or thought Mary Lou’s dress was hideous.

But while the complainers seemed fixated on looks, it’s probable that undetlying I their remarks was a resentment that two women were fronting a news program.

But if what television marketers say is I true, viewers today are not nearly as concerned with appearance as they once were. I In 1988, for example, the CBC asked focus

groups about what they saw as important in I on-air news staff. Roy Thomas, communications manager for CBC Ontario, says,
“When we talked to people in the focus groups, it became apparent to us that the actual physical appearance of hosts or anchors was very lowly rated in terms of a reason to watch a particular news program. We gave them a whole list of things and said, ‘Rank these.’ Physical appearance of anchors was about number 14 out of about 20. People wanted quality, professional presentation. They looked for a sense of confidence and authority, but not tied to ..I age, not tied to beauty.”

The well-known Virginia television doctor Jacques DeSuze-“Dr. Seuss” in the industry-says that many producers stick to a conventional but outdated approach to faces on the news. According to DeSuze, who has 40 clients in the U.S. and more than half a dozen in Canada, including Citytv: “What some news directors and others have done is go with some sort of norm of acceptable appearance they have in their heads.”

This theory is borne out by Don Fitzpatrick, president of Don Fitzpatrick and Associates, of San Francisco. Fitzpatrick’s firm acts as a media matchmaker for television newscasts across North America, maintaining a video library of 12,000 newscasters and reporters. “There are still certain individuals who are firmly entrenched in 1955,”Fitzpatricksays, “and as long as you’ve got some of those people still making decisions, they’re going to take that cute, little perky person who was a cheerleader three or four years ago, who is now a ‘journalist,’ and try to make her a television star someplace.” These days Fitzpatrick is approached as often for female staff as for male, and in his view, the women are the superior choices: “They’re better journalists, they’re more telegenic, they’re better storytellers, they’re better reporters, they’re just better.”

Interestingly, DeSuze thinks that most viewers have never been preoccupied by appearance. “Age has never been, in the thirty years that we’ve been studying the question, an issue in and of itself in the way viewers judge the performance of an anchorperson or a reporter,” he says. “They never reject somebody, male or female, because their hairline recedes, or because their hair gets white, or because they get a little chunky.”

If DeSuze is right, many TV execs are sorely out of sync with their viewers, particularly as those viewers get older. The single biggest news-watching group is the aging baby boomers, many of whom are now reaching their late 40s. Clearly, something’s got to change. As Wendy Trueman puts it, “Older men have always been accepted, but I think there’s going to bean added acceptance of older female faces because there’s a lot of older audience out there.” Outside North America, older women are already widely accepted in on-air role Peter Trueman, recently returned from trip to Europe, found that in France, fc example, it is not unusual to see a woman reporter, without makeup, in her 50s c 60s, delivering the news. Could this ever happen here? Well, Helen Hutchinson still approached on the street or in the way by former viewers who tell her the miss her wisdom and experience an resent some “whippersnapper trying to tell me what’s what.” And Jane Pauley’s depature from the Today show caused considerable protest from people who were not a all interested in tuning in to a fresher face over morning toast and coffee.

So far, though, there are few female counterparts to men like the CBC’s Knowlton Nash, who at 64 shows no signs of let .ting up. But Adrienne Clarkson, who is 53 and a handful of other Canadian women are approaching that kind of longevity They can be seen as proof that sexism ageism and double standards aren’t as pervasive as they once were. Just the same Peter Trueman points out that both anchors of the major national newscasts are still men-Peter Mansbridge at CBC and Lloyd Robertson at CTV. “When one 0 those two is replaced by a woman, I’ll say OK, we’re getting there,” says Trueman “And until that happens, I don’t think Wt can talk about equality.”

No, we aren’t talking about equality yet but there is some hope. Seasoned journalist June Callwood, currently the host of Vision TV’s National Treasures, told Broadcast Week magazine last fall: “I’m 67 years old, I don’t wear makeup, and I’ve never had a face-lift, God knows. So here’s an old woman’s face and it’s getting accepted, which is good for all of us.” There’s also the case of Dodi Robb, who spent 40 years behind the cameras in the television industry. Two years ago, Robb, 72, was offered her first regular on-air job, fronting a program about film called Curious Eye, also at Vision TV. “I couldn’t believe it when they asked me to do it. Well, I just about fainted. I said, ‘C’mon, you can do better than that. I’m an old lady.'” Robb points out that she would never have been offered this opportunity when she started in television. “As they say, we’ve come a long way, baby.”
Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll even see Rita MacNeil doing the news. Stay tuned.

Until shortly before showtime on October 8, 1991, producers of CBC’s the 5th Estate believed they lived in a society that, above all else, upheld the freedom of the press. They were wrong.

At 5 p.m., an Ontario provincial court judge granted an injunction preventing the 5th estate from broadcasting that night’s program, “Evil’s Fortune,” a documentary investigating the whereabouts of millions of dollars allegedly stashed away by deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. It didn’t matter that the story was major news worldwide or that it involved more than 200 interviews in at least a dozen countries on three continents. It didn’t matter that the 5 th estate would have to fill the hole with a year-old rerun. Most of all, it didn’t matter that the press had been robbed of its right to inform the public. Mr. Justice Abraham Mandel ordered that the program would not be seen until a decision could be reached on the claim of “breach of contract” that had surfaced that day from one of the documentary’s subjects.

Robert Lindquist, a forensic accountant who’d been involved in the search for the dictator’s fortune, charged that the 5th estate had reneged on a verbal off-the-record deal. The claim had been prompted and cosigned by the firm for which Lindquist had worked at the time of the search, Peat Marwick Thorne. After reading a TV -listings review of “Evil’s Fortune” on October 7, a senior official of the company apparently became alarmed that its former employee had revealed certain client confidences. Peat Marwick demanded to preview the program, as (suddenly) did Lindquist. When the CBC refused, they sought-and found-recourse in the courts.

Injunctions restrain. By definition, they prohibit, prevent, stop or delay a person from a specified act. Applied to the media, that act can be words, ideas or pictures. When an injunction is placed on a newspaper or magazine story, or a television program, it is working as the first stage in a legal action (though not all legal actions involve injunctions). So, in the case of the 5th estate, the 22-day “interlocutory,” or temporary, injunction that Judge Mandal placed on “Evil’s Fortune” was the first step in a breach of contract suit against CBC. Lindquist and Peat Marwick argued that if. the show aired before a proper trial could be held to settle the suit, the supposed off-the-record information would be public knowledge and, therefore, damaging to themselves and potentially to their clients.

CBC never dreamed that the justice system would accept that argument. First of all, says Susan Teskey, producer of the 5th estate, their claim that she had given Lindquist veto rights over the interview was preposterous. “They never asked to see the interview, but if they had, I would have refused. That’s absolutely nonnegotiable.” Second, even if the judge couldn’t immediately decide whether a contract had been breached, surely the press’s constitutional right to freedom of expression would carry more legal weight than an individual’s.

It didn’t. When the injunction was granted, Teskey and her team were shocked and angry. “It’s like someone holding their hand over your mouth saying, ‘we’re not letting anyone hear that,'” she explains, frustrated and angry that this should happen in a so-called democracy. “An injunction is really censorship. I think in a society that believes in freedom of the press and freedom of speech, it has virtually no role except in the .”
most extreme circumstances.

Injunctions against the press don’t happen every day, but they happen frequently enough to create a climate that 5th estate host Linden MacIntyre describes as “a constant drumbeat of preemptive criticism.” The fact that they can be used at all, by anyone who wishes to thwart the public’s right to know, has frightening .implications. But equally disturbing is the mechanism by which injunctions are sought, fought and then granted because it too makes a mockery of the democratic process. In Canada, a judge’s decision to allow an injunction is usually based on the testimony in affidavits presented at a hearing by the lawyers representing the plaintiff and defendant. No witnesses appear on behalf of either party to support or challenge allegations or to be cross examined. How much less persuasive is a lawyer arguing on paper? How can a judge clarify conflicts between claims and defence? What safeguards exist against undue influence or outright lies?

Going from bad to worse, injunctions may be granted ex parte-literally, without the other party’s knowledge or presence. In other words, a judge makes a decision not just based on mere pieces of paper, but also on only one side of the story. Fortunately, according to Toronto media lawyer Brian Rogers, “such injunctions are very rare, permitted only in unusual circumstances, where the defendant simply can’t be notified and the matter is highly urgent.”

Although the 5th estate was represented at the injunction hearing on Tuesday, October 8, CBC lawyer Peter Southey says the order might as well have been ex parte for all the time they were given to prepare their case. They didn’t even see the claims in the affidavits prepared by Lindquist and Peat Marwick until they arrived at the hearing. In effect, Southey says, “we wrote our affidavits blind.”

Would freedom of the press have been upheld if the CBC had had the chance to make a better case? Possibly, but it would have been a tough sell. As the law sees it, breach of contract or confidence, or misuse of confidential information all amount to a breach of legal obligation-or alleged obligation. And those relationships, says Rogers’s partner, Burt Bruser, “are something the law seeks to preserve and encourage. You make a promise, you keep it.” Certainly, the courts won’t condone obtaining information in ways that are unlawful. So if someone comes claiming a confidentiality has been breached, explains Bruser, “a judge is going to look at that obligation and weigh it in the balance.”

Where the media stand more of a chance, says Rogers, is in situations where the socalled contract or breach is less clear. Then, “showing that there’s a real public interest in publishing the information becomes a very important defence. In that kind of murky situation, I’d argue strenuously that the court keep its hands off.”

But ultimately the decision rests on the inclinations of the presiding judge. And as far as Judge Mandel was concerned, says the 5th estate’s MacIntyre, the argument was never about freedom of speech. “The issue was just a television program.”
At the end of the 22-day period, the next presiding judge, Madame Justice Karen Weiler, lifted the injunction, finding there was no confidential information in “Evil’s Fortune” that could cause damage if made public. The CBC aired the program unaltered in November. Interestingly, neither Lindquist nor Peat Marwick has bothered to pursue the action.
Meanwhile, the CBC has paid in loss of faith, time and newsworthiness. When the program finally ran, one of the key interviewees in the documentary, General Victor Staneculescu, was no longer the prominent figure in the Romanian government that he had been a month earlier. No doubt a further delay would have rendered other important interviews irrelevant.

Can the media protect themselves against injunctions ? Partly, by understanding what constitutes legitimate grounds for getting them. Breach of a legal obligation is one reason, and that type of injunction is relatively easy to get. Libel is another, and that type is much harder to get. “What most media people don’t understand is that there’s a distinction between the two,” says Burt Bruser. “If it’s simply a libel injunction, the law is very reluctant to interfere with freedom of the press. It doesn’t regard itself as having, at that stage, to discourage the publishing of information on the grounds that it simply might be libelous.” What the judge needs to know is whether there is a defendant who is willing to defend his or her action, and if so, stresses Bruser, “there won’t be a libel Injunction.” If the information is defamatory, that should be determined after it’s been made public.

However, as history shows, the system can be abused and judges have made mistakes. A case in point is the libel injunction that was sought and granted against The Toronto Star in 1985. In an entertainment column for the Saturday edition, Douglas Marshall criticized Garth Drabinsky’s company, Cineplex Odeon Corporation, for its new policy of running commercials before the feature film. As a moviegoer, Marshall expressed annoyance at having to pay for advertisements he had no desire to see. His column, his opinion. Only Garth Drabinsky didn’t see it quite so simply. Not that he should have seen it when he did, before publication. But somehow someone messed up, and Drabinsky got hold of one of the 800,000 copies the Star preprints for its massive Saturday edition.

The notice announcing intention to sue for libel arrived late Friday afternoon. Neither Marshall nor the Star responded, considering it absurd to be sued for something that hadn’t yet been published. But what the notice didn’t tell them was that at that very moment Drabinsky’s lawyer was presenting his case to a judge (who had little experience with libel injunctions), claiming irreparable harm to Cineplex if the column went public. Since the Star was not there to say it would defend its action (and the responsibility of informing the defendant lies with the plaintiffs lawyer), that judge granted an ex parte libel injunction. Less than an hour later, the Star was ordered to pull the column.

The order caused pandemonium at the Star. How was it supposed to comply when, as Marshall puts it, “the preprints were all over hell’s half acre? It’s impossible without killing the whole paper.” But the Star’s lawyers knew that the injunction had been granted on shaky grounds, that the judge should have known better than to grant the injunction, especially when the Star was just a phone call away. At 11:04 p.m., they got it overturned by a second judge who was dumbfounded by the plaintiffs failure to notify the Star. “Quite apart from the principle issue that the defamatory material is defensible and the publisher is willing to defend it,” says Rogers, “there are factual things that can be important [at a libel injunction hearing]. And only if the publisher’s there, can they be dealt with.” The facts, in this case, would have revealed the practical and financial nightmare of pulling a column out of a newspaper section printed and primed for distribution province-wide.

Nightmare is an apt way to describe the whole experience, but Bruser thinks it is extremely unlikely to occur again. He reiterates that when it comes to libel injunctions and the media, the law is on their side. “I do not worry about injunctions based on libel,” he says. “I worry about injunctions based on breach of confidence and misuse of confidential information. I don’t think that message has gotten through to the media.”

Okay, so maybe we’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. But how do you anticipate breach of confidence injunctions when you’re in the business of getting information however you can? “I don think the media can let the affect what they do,” says Bruser. “Once they get the informtion, then they should won about how they’re going to use it.” In other words, he an Rogers suggest, you could protect yourself by treating condential information as a levy to get less litigious on-the record material from other sources. Or if you plan to use potentially sensitive stuff don’t trumpet your editorial secrets around town.

But is it fair that writer editors and producers should work under that kind of shadow? The truth is that injunctions are a form of price restraint-they stop the media from doing their job. To date there are no media groups lobbying to change that injustice by challenging the ways in which injunctions are granted and the reasons why. Must w wait for the next voice to be silenced before we do?

In June 1987, CBC reporter Claude Gervais and a cameraman rushed into a post office in Pointe-Claire, Quebec to film angry strikers as they trashed the interior. The item that later appeared on the news did not show the faces of the strikers a stipulation of the union leader who let Gervais in-but some of the unused tape did. Sooner or later, Gervais knew, the cops would come calling. “At first I thought if they came that afternoon I would hide the tapes. I’d use what I needed then hide the tapes, or say to them, ‘I don’t remember where they are.’ But one of my bosses said I couldn’t do that.”

Instead, when the police arrived with a search warrant the day after the story aired, CBC management instructed Gervais to place the tapes in a sealed envelope and hand them over. The envelope remained in a safe at police headquarters for the next four-and-a-half years while the validity of the warrant was challenged in court.

Last November, the CBC was finally forced to surrender Gervais’s tapes to the Montreal Urban Community Police. After a series of lower court decisions and appeals, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the police had the right to search the CBC’s Montreal newsroom, seize the tapes and use them in their criminal investigation.

At the same time, the Supreme Court also ruled in favour of the police in a similar case involving CBC television reporter Rosaire L’Italien of New Brunswick. The Moncton RCMP wanted the tapes from an item produced by L’Italien in September 1988, after demonstrators protesting the land policies of a remote pulp-and-paper company threw Molotov cocktails and set fire to a guardhouse on the company’s property. Like Gervais, L’Italien had to surrender the tapes.
All in all, it wasn’t a great day for journalistic freedom in Canada.

In its six to one decision, the Supreme Court tried to give the news media some protection against unreasonable search and seizure by the police. However, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its guarantee of “freedom of the press and other media of communications” seems to have been at the bottom of the pile of documents the court consulted. Instead, it came up with a set of guidelines for justices of the peace and lower court judges to consider when asked to issue search warrants for newsrooms. One of the guidelines says that a balance must be struck between the interests of the state in fighting crime and the right of the media to gather and disseminate news. But how they’re supposed to walk that fine line is left to the JPs and judges. The other guidelines include determining that the warrant application is sufficiently documented, that the police have exhausted any other sources and that some or all of the information has been broadcast.

Both Gervais and L’Italien are skeptical about the protection the new guidelines actually give journalists. Although the court stated in both decisions that the media are entitled to special consideration because of “the importance of their role in a democratic society,” the fact remains that the police still ultimately have the means to seize journalists’ tapes, photographs and notes. “Those guidelines are very dangerous,” says L’Italien. “I can see a judge deciding in favour of the police 90 percent of the time because they are from the same system.”

It’s a fear shared by many journalists, and it has serious ramifications. The possibility of police interference may inhibit reporters from telling the whole story, leading them to compromise their own standards and shortchange the public. “If a policeman gets in the way every time we do a special story and uses journalists as some sort of tool, then there’s no way for us to do our work,” says Gervais. “There’d be no confidence between journalists and the people we interview. Why should people give me an interview when it’s just going to the police station afterwards ?”

Indeed, the court’s ruling did not recognize the principle of confidentiality- crucial for journalists-between Gervais and the striking workers. It also appears to be less sensitive to television reporters than to those in print. Though videotape is the equivalent of a notebook, often containing material never intended to fall into a police officer’s lap, it is considered more accessible to the police, especially if part of it has been broadcast.

“We would be impeded not only because of the actual execution of the search, but also the fear or apprehension that it was about to happen,” says Michael Hughes, the CBC lawyer in the L’Italien case. “And if the reporter had to go back to the same location because the story is ongoing, the fear of retaliation would have an inhibiting effect on the coverage. You’re inevitably going to hold back.”

Cristin Schmitz, a reporter with Lawyer’s Weekly, is among those concerned that television reporters can no longer grant confidentiality to sources who appear in unedited tape. “Certainly the fact that a majority of the court upheld the seizure of the CBC videotapes suggests that it will be relatively easy for the police to seize videotapes of public events which have been at least partially televised,” she argues. “It will make it harder for TV reporters to protect the unbroadcast portions of their tapes and protect their sources.” Schmitz sees another serious problem with the decision. Though the constitutional right of the media tobe secure against unreasonable search and seizure is recognized, “what bothers me is that the onus here seems to be on the media to prove that it was an unreasonable search,” she says. “The court didn’t analyze under freedom of the press, it analyzed under the search and seizure provisions of the Charter.”

In both the New Brunswick and Quebec cases, the court ruled that the seizure was not unreasonable, but necessary to aid in the police investigations. The police in both instances contended that they needed the tapes because they had exhausted all their resources even though in Pointe-Claire, the warrant was issued only one day after the post office demonstrations, and in New Brunswick, RCMP identification officers were present during at least part of the demonstration.

Short of destroying tapes, documents, photos and notes, the bottom line is that a reporter can eventually be forced to turn information over to the police. And if the police don’t find what they’re looking for in the newsroom, they can search other places, such as the reporter’s home. Another option is to subpoena reporters, forcing them to reveal tapes or notes. If the reporters refuse any of these attempts, they can be thrown in jail for contempt of court.

Both Gervais and L’Italien remain angry about a ruling they feel betrayed their rights as independent reporters. More than anything else, the pair feel squeamish about how easily their work could be scooped up and used for the purposes of criminal investigations. It means that reporters, especially those in the broadcast media, may find themselves straddling, uncomfortably and unwillingly, the roles of journalist and criminal investigator.

“I’m a reporter. My job is to inform the public,” says L’Italien. “If I were working for the police, I’d ask for a paycheque and I’d change my job. I can’t be a reporter and work for the police at the same time.”

Gervais says his experience has given him less faith in the legal process. “I can’t fight the Supreme Court,” he reflects, “but I would have expected that if they were going in this direction then they could have given me more protection.”

Clearly, the state has the upper hand and that makes a lot of journalists, both broadcast and print, more than a little uneasy.
“If the cops had exhausted every other means and it was a serious matter,” says journalist turned-novelist Carsten Stroud, who has worked alongside various police forces during his writing career, “then I think the best thing would be to go to the journalist and say, ‘Have you got any information you can help us with?’ Now the journalist would have to decide yes or no. But at that point, if the journalist refuses, I’m uncomfortable about enshrining this principle in law that the cops can kick in the door and take it.”

Stunned silence filled the meeting room. The 11 governors on the board of the National Newspaper Awards were in a daze. Three of them-Bill Peterson, executive editor of The Star Phoenix in Saskatoon; John Honderich, editor of The Toronto Star; and John Paton, general manager of the Ottawa Sun-had just resigned. They were protesting the majority vote in favour of accepting, without comment, the decision of the judges to uphold the 1990 award for enterprise reporting to Greg Weston and Jack Aubry of The Ottawa Citizen. For a moment, it seemed that not just an award but the fate of the NNA program itself hung in the balance.

The feature article splitting the board was a two-part profile of Marc Lepine, the killer of 14 women at the Ecole Poly technique in Montreal. The Canadian Association of Journalists had already given the 12,000-word piece the CAJ award for best investigative reporting. But the possibility of plagiarism by Weston and Aubry was raised by reporters at The Gazette in Montreal. The complaints forced the boards of both organizations to ask the original judges to reconsider their decisions. In June 1991 theCAJ judges upheld the award and in September the NNA judges followed suit.

The protest resignations at the NNA board meeting later in September showed that not everyone was happy with the judges’ review. But, after three hours of rancorous discussion, the resignations were withdrawn and the governors reached a compromise. By a vote of six to five, they accepted the decision of the judges that the entry was original. However, their final press release went on to name the five governors who disagreed with the majority. Peterson, the chair of the board, says he decided to live with the compromise because everyone would know “there had been a pretty good brawl over this.”
Yet the fallout from the controversy over the Lepine profile still hangs over the Canadian newspaper industry. Few journalists believe that the issues raised during the stormy debate in the summer of 1991 have been settled by the confirmation of the awards to Weston and Aubry. On the contrary, concepts such as plagiarism and ethical journalistic practice, which formerly had seemed straightforward, suddenly became complex and difficult to define. At the same time, the hidden issue of the fundamental relationship of trust between the writer and the reader gradually came into focus.

The Weston/Aubry profile ran in the Citizen, a Southam paper, on February 7 and 8, 1990, two months after the massacre. The Gazette, also a Southam paper, ran a much shorter version on February 11. Its reporters had already written over 100 stories on the massacre, a collection of which earned the Gazette a 1989 runner-up NNA for spot-news coverage. But it was only when theCitizen’s profile won an award, over one year after it first ran, that Gazette reporters Alexander Norris and Elizabeth Thompson raised the question of plagiarism.

A third Gazette reporter, Rod Macdonell, was authorized by the paper to investigate the complaints. His intensive analysis of the Lepine profile focuses on three contentious areas that he and the others claim reveal improprieties, and that the NNA and CA] boards asked their judges to consider in their reviews.

The first was a section where Isabelle Lahaie, a friend of Lepine’s sister, is directly quoted. Her initial exclusive interview appeared in Ie journal de montreal under Michel Benoit’s byline. In the Weston/Aubry profile, she is quoted in English saying exactly what she said in French in the journal without attribution to the original source. Weston and Aubry admit they never interviewed Lahaie but Aubry says he spoke to Benoit to confirm that his story was not altered in editing. Weston says they didn’t feel attribution was required once the accuracy was established. But Benoit told the Ryerson Review of Journalism that he never spoke to Weston or Aubry .

The second area of doubt was a section dealing with Erik Cossette, Lepine’s roommate, which Weston and Aubry later readily admitted was taken from an exclusive interview given by Cossette to Alexander Norris. Again there was no attribution. Aubry says that when he asked for an interview, Cossette refused to answer any questions but “more or less” gave Aubry “carte blanche” to use the Norris interview. Weston says that the interview acquired the status of a press release because Cossette called it “his statement.”

The last item questioned was a quote by Jean Belanger, Lepine’s childhood friend. It ran in the Gazette on December 9, 1989 under the shared byline of Rod Macdonell, Elizabeth Thompson, Andrew McIntosh and William Marsden as follows: “‘He kept his plans very close to himself,’ he added. ‘If he would have a problem, he would never ask for help. If something hurt him inside, he would keep it to himself. ‘” In the W eston/Aubry piece Belanger is quoted as saying: “‘He kept everything very close to himself, even with me,’ Belanger says, shaking his head. ‘If he had a problem, he would never ask for help.'”

In this case, Weston did interview Belanger. Weston gave Belanger a clipping of the Gazette story to confirm its accuracy and in the hope that he would add more details. He later described, for the Review, what happened when Belanger read the interview: “He’s been talking about the subject [Lepine] and going around and around and when he gets back to it he’s sitting there shaking his head and saying ‘yea.'” So Weston added the descriptive gesture to the quote, reinforcing the reader’s mistaken impression that Belanger had said these words originally to Weston rather than to the Gazette.

The Gazette reporters’ objections to the awards, backed by Macdonell’s research, raised unsettling questions for the boards of the CA] and NNA. Nothing like this had ever happened before and neither had rules to cover such a contingency. However, in their instructions to the judges, both boards avoided mentioning “plagiarism,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as the action or practice of taking and using ”as one’s own the thoughts, writings or inventions of another.”

The CA], a national association of active journalists and editors, asked its judges only to uphold or revoke the award in light of a formal complaint lodged by Elizabeth Thompson. The only CAJ judge who provided a written decision was Richard Cleroux, an Ottawa-based free-lance journalist. In his four-page response he accused Weston and Aubry of a lack of journalistic courtesy for not giving credit to the original sources of some of their material. But he ruled out a verdict of plagiarism in favour of “replication,” a vague misdemeanour rather than an outright crime. Furthermore, he excused Weston and Aubry by pointing out that the lifted quotes were a very small part of an otherwise “brilliant” work.

CAJ judge Peter C. Newman’s response was a terse fax saying that he voted to let the award stand. There was no plagiarism, he told the Review, because what Weston and Aubry did is normal journalistic practice for using quotes. Quotes are constantly being taken from his books without attribution, he said, and he has no objection.

At the other extreme, CAJ judge Peter Desbarats, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario, told the Review there was no doubt that Weston and Aubry were guilty of plagiarism. Desbarats is supported in his view by Errol Aspevig, professor of philosophy and a non-journalist instructing in media ethics at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Aspevig says that while spoken words may belong to the interviewees, once writers put them on paper between quotation marks and that is published as original material, those direct quotes are the property of the writers: they are, literally, their writings.

Nevertheless, Desbarats also argued that the plagiarized material was such a small percentage of the whole story that it would have been a disproportionate penalty to take the award away, especially since it was already tarnished. Still, if the accusation of plagiarism had been made during the judging process and ifhe had investigated the charges then, he says, he would not have given them the award in the first place.

The CA] board had already committed itself to upholding the judges’ final decision without knowing what the decision was-a strong statement in support of the integrity of the independent jury system. Just the same, when the judges’ ruling was made known, board chair Charles Bury, among other board members, was content with it. “They [Weston and Aubry] were accused of stealing,” says Bury, editor of The Record in Sherbrooke, “but what it came down to was the judges determined that they had actually borrowed.” It made their story “imperfect,” he says, but not “total garbage.”

Matters were more difficult for the NNA, an industry association whose sole purpose is to give awards and uphold standards of excellence. Confronted with a complaint from the Gazette’s Alexander Norris, the board specifically instructed the judges to decide if the story was an original work as required by the contest rules.

The NNA judges’ five-page unanimous decision upheld the award because they felt the story was original. But they slapped Weston and Aubry on the wrists for “bad form” because they failed to attribute information and direct quotes from the exclusive interviews with Cossette and Lahaie. The use of direct quotes without attribution wasn’t plagiarism-it was merely “the use of material under false pretenses.” In support of this ruling, and contrary to Aspevig’s views, they argued that direct quotes, properly attributed to the speakers, are not considered plagiarized. The speakers are the owners of the words, not the journalists who report them.

Unlike the CAJ, the NNA board voted on whether to accept the result of the review with full knowledge of what that result was. Not surprisingly, the board ended up deeply divided. Governor John Miller, chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism, says: “We disagreed on what we feel our obligations are and the power we wield as a board.” He winces when he says he felt compelled to accept the judges’ decision because “the rules don’t provide for us [the governors] to deny a prize on the basis of shoddy journalism. The judges’ decision is final.” But even on this point the governors were split. Stuart Robertson, a media lawyer on the board, says there would have been no legal or constitutional problem if they had decided to set aside the judges’ decision and begin the process again.

Even if Weston and Aubry were not guilty of plagiarism but were guilty of discourtesy, bad form and using quotes under false pretenses, both boards were uncertain if any punishment was called for. Norris, on the other hand, was certain that both rulings depicted Canadian journalism as a “bush-league affair with low standards.” Fighting to control his bitterness, Norris told the Review, “Some people say I was making a mountain out of a molehill…that a small amount of plagiarism is all right. Don’t make a fuss about it.”

But even after the judges’ criticisms, Weston, who quit the Citizen in April 1991 to finish a book, is unrepentant. “What was done here [in the Lepine story] goes on in every newspaper every day of the week.” His operating philosophy is to do what serves the reader best. And that, he says, is to verify the accuracy of previously published information before he uses it. When he can’t do that, he attributes. But attribution instead of verification is “cheap journalism,” according to Weston. The average reader doesn’t care who first reported something, only that it is correct.

The Citizen’s national editor, Graham Parley, claims there was no plagiarism in the Lepine profile and no need for attribution. Parley; who was the supervising editor on the piece, argues that all the questionable parts stood on their own. They had either been verified or, in the case of the exclusive Cossette interview by Norris had appeared once before in the Citizen under Norris’s byline vi:; the Southam News service. It was now in the Citizen’s data base and therefore the Citizen’s to use as it wished. Not the least bit humbled by the judges’ criticisms, Parley says, “In future if in doubt we’re going to attribute just because of the enormous fuss that happened this time.”

Veterans like Desbarats agree that journalistic shoplifting has been very common in the industry. One of Desbarats’s first jobs at the Gazette and the old Montreal Star was to rewrite stories from other papers to make them look original, often without adding any new information. There was no thought given to attribution. “That was quite common and I expect a lot of that stuff is still quite common,” he says.

Globe and Mail columnist Stevie Cameron calls this lack of attribution “the magpie approach to journalism.” The fact is that newspapers hate to give each other credit, she says. At the same time, Norris claims there is an invisible old boys’ network in the industry which made both the CAJ and NNA go to incredible lengths to avoid stating the obvious even after they all acknowledged that Weston and Aubry copied material from his story without attribution. He angrily denounces this reluctance as “cronyism.” Journalists love to condemn irregularities in other areas of society, he notes with frustration, “so why the hell can’t we point it out when it happens in our own backyard?”

Perhaps the answer to Norris’s question is that journalists are reluctant to challenge the status quo-an implicit code that permits the lifting of information without attribution. Miller is aware of this practice but he is unwilling to accept it as inevitable. “I think it’s like some cancer that you have to expose,” he says. “You have to root it out.”

But rooting it out is difficult when there are unwritten industry rules that say newspapers shouldn’t knock each other. If papers throw stones, the reasoning goes, they put their own glass houses at risk. But when Weston and Aubry won their CAJ award and Macdonell “smelled a rat,” his subsequent investigation of the three problematic sections in the profile was actually sanctioned by the Gazette’s management group made up of senior editors. He was given the time and expenses he needed to do a thorough job.

And Macdonell was thorough. He documented his evidence, including a face-to-face interview with Weston and Aubry, in a memo to Raymond Brassard, the Gazette’s city editor. Brassard then sent copies of the memo to his senior colleagues and, after a series of discussions, they decided to pursue the matter no further. Brassard told the Review: “We felt as a management group that there just wasn’t quite enough hard evidence that these people had gone out and plagiarized.” However, he agrees that there were some “questionable journalistic practices” involved in the Citizen’s story. “The problem obviously is the old ‘he who casts the first stone’ theory. How many reporters have not gone into the files and pulled out background material and used it?”

In the following months, Gazette management did not publicly back Norris and the others in their complaints. Gazette editor Norman Webster says his organization was vulnerable to accusations of sour grapes because the Ottawa paper had won the awards for a Montreal story, so management had to be careful about what it said. He also cites his conflict of interest as a member of the NNA board of governors, although he resigned in June before the September vote on the matter. But even after his resignation he didn’t support his reporters. Webster says he wanted to appear impartial. “I didn’t think I had to mount a white horse and charge.”

Meanwhile at the Citizen, Graham Parley had no such inhibitions. He wrote impassioned letters to the CAJ and The Globe and Mail defending his reporters’ integrity and, ultimately, his own. Parley appears to be especially enraged by the proprietary claims of a Southam sister newspaper to material that he considers to be public domain. He says disdainfully that Gazette reporters “almost became hysterically obsessive and puritan to the point of nausea with their complaints and shrieks of plagiarism.”

But if information can so easily be classified as “public domain,” it will only reinforce the industry tendency not to attribute, even when it is a small, fairly insignificant section of a story. Desbarats explains the Weston/Aubry motivation not to give credit as “partly that old tradition of borrowing without attribution and the other part was perhaps a little bit of that competitive feeling. It doesn’t look quite as good if you admit that the information came from somebody else. It raises the question-‘Well, why didn’t you get the information yourself?'”

In the last of Macdonell’s three problem areas-the Belanger interview in which Weston described him as “shaking his head” Weston did in fact try to get the information for himself. Unlike the Lahaie and Cossette sections taken from published stories, he did interview Belanger personally. But the addition of the “shaking his head” stage direction particularly bothered Honderich and Miller as well as Aspevig. While no one goes so far as to call it fabrication, Aspevig says that, in the context of the previously published quotation, it suggests a “setious, intentional misrepresentation” and breach of the implied trust between writers and readers. Readers trust that what they read is the product of the writer’s own efforts unless told otherwise, he says. When that tacit understanding is broken, a fundamental condition of journalistic credibility is breached and readers are justified in being suspicious of the accuracy of the entire story.

The controversy surrounding the awards has shone a spotlight on several ethical problems-plagiarism and good journalistic practice; the relationship between the writer and the reader; and the effect the tradition of not knocking other newspapers has on all these issues. The question of how or even if the industry, professional organizations and individual journalists will deal with these matters remains to be answered. For Alexander Norris, there were few options. He quit the CA] in disgust after it upheld the award to Weston and Aubry. In his letter of resignation he says the CA] “no longer has the moral authority to speak on issues of journalistic ethics.” Jock Ferguson, an award-winning investigative reporter and a founding member of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, the precursor of the CA], says the organization has no focus and doesn’t know what it stands for. He is also no longer a member and, like Norris, he says the award should have been revoked.

A less dramatic response to the affair comes from Eliza Thompson, a CA] board member and an original complaint She has decided to stay on at the CA] to work with other b members on a code of ethics. A national association like the I with over 1,000 members might be a good source for a journalistic code, but Bury says pointedly, “We are not responsible for ethics of journalists.” A model code of ethics would never beci a policy of the organization, according to Bury, because then too many individual codes to come up with one that could as everyone.

Other industry bodies are trying to combat the issue, however The Ottawa Citizen now has its own policy book that including lengthy definition of plagiarism. Patley says it was underway be the awards controversy. “I think the better papers leave no dc with their reporters on what their ethical standards are,” he say Although the NNA isn’t codifying its ethics, it has decided we should be responsible for them. To avoid the inner turmoil of year’s controversy, the governors have amended NNA rules so t in the future they alone will decide disputes which reflect on NNA standards.

Still, the industry as a whole gives no sign that the issues rai by the profile haven’t been buried prematurely. After all, the N~ and CA] upheld their awards so why discuss it further? Maybe, was plagiarism, maybe it wasn’t. Daily newspapering doesn’t all much time for reflection. There are deadlines to meet. Meanwhile the most difficult ethical question raised by the Lepine profile the ongoing breaches of trust between journalists and their readers-remains unexamined. At least until the next time, who something more than a few withdrawn protest resignations may needed to root out the cancer within.