Although Karla Homolka was convicted of manslaughter in July 1993 for her role in the sex-slayings of two Ontario schoolgirls, our press has been forbidden to report the details of that role until her ex-husband, Paul Bernardo, faces charges of first-degree murder for the same deaths. (His trial is expected to begin in May.) For almost two years, the big media players have attacked the court’s ruling as an obstruction of a free press. They have argued in editorials, and before the Ontario Court of appeal.

When the appeal court refused to overturn the ban, the media continued to protest in print and on the air, making the Homolka publication ban a cause célèbre. Everyone knows about it. Everyone has an opinion. When I began work on this story, my take on the ban could only be described as ambivalent. Freedom of the press sounded like a good principle, but surely there were times when that principle should yield to higher interests. That changed. As I immersed myself in the research, I began to move towards a strong anti-ban position. I believed the media could have and should have done more. But by January, on my third draft, the weight of events and evidence led me to a different conclusion.

Have the media gone too far? Not far enough? Another look provides some interesting answers.

In justifying their attack on the ban, newspapers in particular like to argue that “the public has the right to know.” But a vocal segment of the public does not want to know. In a letter to The Toronto Star, Sean Martin asked: “Is there anything intrinsically wrong with honoring the ban until the Paul Bernardo case is over? Or are you so obsessed with the potential profit margin of this story that you can’t fathom the judge’s extremely simple logic in imposing it?” In a letter to The Globe and Mail, Glenn R. Brown suspected the press of using high principles to conceal base motives: “…we who have seen what the press is doing with the O.J. Simpson trial and what the press has already done with the Karla Homolka proceedings, do not seriously believe that these principles are foremost in the minds of the press. Greed and selling papers are primary; helping the public to monitor the justice system has little to do with it.”

To some degree, the media have encouraged this bitter skepticism by sending the public mixed messages. They claim to be protesting on behalf of pillar-of-democracy principles, yet operate independently of each other, plotting their own responses to the ban and looking after their own interests. “In very, very, very few circumstances do I get a call from anybody else or do I call anybody else on these things,” says Globe managing editor John Cruickshank, “simply because we’re all quite different institutions. We do view the issues quite differently.” For example, newspapers may agree to fight for the release of Homolka’s statement to the court, but differ on whether to fight for the release of victim impact statements, he says, “It seems to me that there are tremendous practical difficulties in that sort of thing in achieving that kind of consensus. I’m not prepared in a case of this complexity to give away the right of Globe and Mailto instruct its own counsel so that the interests of The Toronto Sun can be served, or the interests of [radio station] CFRB, or whoever else gets into it.”

Infighting between the Star and the Sun only helped to persuade the public that self interest, not selfless principles, was behind the media’s anti-ban campaign. In October 1994, the Star lashed out at the Sun for its irresponsibility in publishing information about recently discovered videotapes at the former home of Bernardo and Homolka — information that Star reporters claim to have had, but withheld in deference to the ban. Part of the Star’s article read: “[Bernardo] Lawyer John Rosen immediately blasted the story, saying in an interview that it might hurt Bernardo’s chances of getting a fair trial.” Between the lines, readers knew the Starwas ticked off that the Sun dared to run the scoop. Sun managing editor Mike Strobel calls the squabble “silly,” but he shrugs it off as routine behaviour among the media. “It was just one newspaper taking shots at another because the other newspaper beat it.” Alan Cairns, who has covered the Homolka story for the Sun, bluntly characterizes the level of cooperation among newspapers: “The other media would dearly love to see one of their competitors pinned to the dartboard.”

However routine the infighting, it looked ruthless to the public, confirming its belief that the press is bent on revealing every last detail of the sex-slayings, even if it means destroying Paul Bernardo’s right to a fair trial. Some lawyers, such as Bill Trudell, vice-president of the Criminal Lawyers Association, give grounds to that fear. “Let’s say John Smith was charged with something and it’s like a Paul Bernardo situation,” he explains. “There was a publication ban to preserve the rights of this person to have a fair trial. It also preserves the right of the Crown to prosecute it, right? So all of a sudden, if something was exploded now at about what went on in the back rooms or something was botched, it may prejudice not only John Smith’s right to a fair trial, it may mean that the Crown can’t prosecute and maybe somebody who’s guilty of something — or would be found guilty of something — goes free.”

The public may be surprised to learn that its concern is shared by some of the journalists who are covering this story. “We do not want to impact on any fair trial arguments for Paul Bernardo,” says reporter Alan Cairns. “If Paul Bernardo is acquitted, The TorontoSun doesn’t want to be singled out as the main reason why.” Star reporter Nick Pron has never hidden his contempt for the publication ban, but he says: “I have to admit, I go back and forth on the ban sometimes. I mean, I’m against it —but sometimes I can sort of see why they did it.” Their ambivalence reflects an honest struggle. The Homolka ban is a difficult issue. I know of at least two anti-ban journalists who have flipped their opinion and now support it. But whether they are for or against, I have been struck by the level of thoughtfulness that journalists have brought to the ban debate, a thoughtfulness that belies the salacious and greedy motives ascribed to them. Most believe, deeply, that the ban is a threat to our notion of democracy and prevents the public from receiving information it needs to know today, not after the trial. Jill Troyer, executive producer of Toronto’s CBC Evening News, says, “Our justice system is based on being open. People have to know what’s happening in the court system so that they can see whether justice has been done, so that they’re in the position to make judgments about our laws and about the way that they’re handled and about the way they’re followed through.” If the public can’t see that, Troyer continues, then you’re. into a situation “where justice has been conducted behind closed doors and in secrecy, and there’s no public accountability.”

Colleen McEdwards is an articulate and thoughtful reporter who covered the Homolka proceedings for the Evening News. “I’m not really that concerned about reporting all the gory details about what happened to those girls,” she says. “I don’t think the public needs to known that now.” However, she opposes the ban because it prevents her from conveying facts that she believes should be open to public scrutiny — immediately. “Without getting into specifics, there are aspects around the sentencing of Karla Homolka that the public ought to know that I can’t report.”

The Globe’s John Cruickshank is less guarded. “One of the real fundamental issues is the handling of [the Homolka case] — the deal-making, the conduct of the Crown, the effectiveness of the police. These are all issues that we should be able to pursue at the instant.”

Although Cruickshank says letters to the editor, like the angry one written by Glenn Brown, are representative of a big chunk of public opinion, she sees no contradiction between selling newspapers and fighting for principles. “I really don’t have any serious discussion with people who say ‘you just want to sell papers’ because my response is, ‘of course I want to sell papers. I can’t inform the public unless I sell papers.'” He adds: “I could very safely say that the paper’s revenues and profits are not going to be influenced in any way by the Homolka ban, but justice — as it operates in this country — will be.”

Freedom of the press is not as highly valued by the Canadian public as it is by the press. When the principle is threatened, as it has been during several recent publication bans, there are no demonstrations; passions stay cool. This complacency disturbs the Sun’s Cairns. “Where is the public?” he asks. “The public should be looking at this case very, very carefully. And from what I see, they may be reading and looking and listening, but they sure as hell aren’t doing anything.”

According to writer and columnist Robert Fulford, the Homolka publication ban is a spectacularly repressive measure. “It calls into question the whole relationship between the public and the justice system,” he says. “We have to know what they’re doing; it is very wrong when we do not. They have so delayed our full knowledge of this that it will become a matter of historical interest by the time we understand what the hell this case is all about. That’s wrong. That’s exactly what a criminal justice system in a democracy must not do.” He dismisses the idea that a publication ban is necessary to protect Bernardo’s right to a fair trial.”Jurors may go into a courtroom with ideas about who did it and who didn’t do it. But what happens in a courtroom during a murder trial is so intense, so powerful in its amassing of detail, in its development of argument — it is so powerful an experience that, I believe, it wipes out what you brought in.”

The highest court in Canada recently agreed. In December 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada released its long-awaited decision on The Boys of St. Vincent publication ban, which the CBC had appealed the previous year. The Boys of St. Vincentis a fictional mini-series concerning the abuse of children in a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland. Two days before CBC Television was to broadcast the first of two installments, four Christian Brothers, who were facing criminal charges of sexual and physical abuse of children, won a legal injunction that prevented the CBC from broadcasting the mini-series in Ontario and Montreal until their trials were completed. Their reason for seeking the publication ban: The mini-series would influence the jury and therefore infringe upon their right to a fair trial.

In its decision on the appeal, the Supreme Court ruled that the ban was “far too broad” and that it “affected the specific freedom of expression interests of the film director, the broadcaster, the public’s interest in viewing the film, and society’s interest in having the important issue of child abuse presented to the public.” In two of the far-reaching aspects of the ruling, the Supreme Court said that the right to freedom of expression was equal to the right to a fair trial, and that “jurors were capable of following instructions from trial judges and ignoring information” obtained elsewhere. Bert Bruser, a lawyer who represents The Toronto Star, is — as one might expect — upbeat about the ruling. “This case recognizes that publication bans can be granted, but … it recognizes that the right to freedom of expression is as important as the right to a fair trial. So the balance has changed. Presumably, there still may be publication bans, but fewer of them.”

Dagenais, as the decision is called, legitimizes the media’s opposition to publication bans by affirming that what is at stake are the important principles that the press has been fighting for all along. But in signalling that the media have not gone too far in their Homolka effort, does the Dagenais victory also suggest that they have not gone far enough?

From the beginning, some passionate critics of the ban have criticized the media for playing it safe, for lacking the necessary outrage and courage to make their case persuasive. It did not help that the press was essentially “laughed” out of court, as Alan Cairns puts it, when the CBC and three Toronto dailies attempted a year ago to overturn the ban. The failure of the appeal was proof to the anti-ban quarter that the media were going about their protest the wrong way. If they really cared about freedom of the press, then they needed to use other means of protest. They needed to take chances.

Instead, the media “wimped out,” according to John Miller, chair of the journalism school at Ryerson Polytechnic University. “I don’t want to be too strong here, but I would say that it’s a failure of strategy on the part of top editors that they haven’t gone far enough. I think there is a public justification for reporting more of this than has been reported.” Even Robert Fulford, though he “applauds” the media for appealing the ban in court, believes they have not fought the ban as aggressively as they should. “I’m sure they feel aggressive,” he says. “They spent money, they hired the best legal talent, they’ve gone as far as the court will let them go, but maybe they should have done something else. Maybe they should have run a story every day about the judge, the Crown attorney, the attorney general. Maybe they should have done something out of the ordinary, something that would almost go up to the edge of civil disobedience.”

The media will have nothing to do with civil disobedience — not even the edge of it — for they believe that responsible journalism means full observance of the law. Defiance and aggression (the press essentially equates the two terms) are viewed as anathema. Stories are carefully scrutinized by lawyers and editors to ensure they do not contain anything that might be construed as contempt. The original court order is unspecific about what information does and does not fall under the publication ban, but news managers have not tested the limits. It is something even their own journalists question. “We’re following the law right to the T,” says Nick Pron, “and, in fact, I think we’re erring on the side of caution. I think there are times we could have pushed a little bit.” The CBC’s Colleen McEdwards says, “I think we could have pushed the envelope and gotten a little more information out to the public. And perhaps we should have. We’ve been restrained. I think we’ve been responsible. Maybe we’ve been chicken, too.”

Certainly, the caution of the press looks odd compared with what is going on elsewhere. With banned information crisscrossing the continent via computers, fax machines, and — yes — even telephones, it looks as though everyone is distributing details of Homolka’s trial except the mainstream Canadian media. But as Joe Conforti, a lawyer who represents the Sun, says, “I think the media want to be very careful in showing that we are responsible and you can trust us.”

Critics may like the idea of aggression, but think about it, says Star lawyer Bert Bruser. “If the media thumbs its nose at this law, what would be the consequences? The consequences might be that enormous fines would be imposed on the media, people might be sent to jail. I don’t think this would have been the kind of civil disobedience that would have caused the authorities to say, ‘Okay, I guess our attempt to impose the ban was so silly that we’re just going to give up and go away.’ No, I don’t think that would have happened at all.”

Anne Swardson, a Toronto-based foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, published banned information in November 1993 with an article entitled, “UNSPEAKABLE CRIMES: This Story Can’t Be Told In Canada. And So All Canada Is Talking About It.” Despite her brazen approach to the ban, she sympathizes with the position of Canadian newspapers. “I think the Canadian media were understandably constrained by an agreement they had made: ‘You go into the courtroom, you abide by my ban,”‘ she says. “Once you agree to that, you can’t violate your word. So, in a way, it was more than a ban; it was almost a contractual matter.”

Although they have protested the Homolka publication ban with the fury of caged squirrels, our press believes that the only way to defeat this ban, and any subsequent bans, is through legal action and strict obedience of the law. After working on this story for more than four months, I have come to agree — fully. What can aggression accomplish other than undermining the media’s pursuit of responsible journalism and alienating more members of the public? When a publication ban is imposed, it is the law — and the law, like freedom of the press, is fundamental to our society and must be obeyed until it changes, even if that change comes in a series of small steps over a period of time.

“One changes bad laws,” says the Globe’s John Cruickshank. “That’s the process. [The courts] have the right to make bad rulings, and we have the right to scream like hell about them. What we don’t have the right to do is take the law into our hands whenever we’re confronted by a bad law.”

Dagenaishas shown that the media have it right.

But his perseverance paid off. Today, the Montreal-based Nicholls is executive editor of The Nation, a lively biweekly newsmagazine focussing on aboriginal issues, with a staff of 12 and a circulation of 6,000. “Money’s a bit tight,” says Nicholls says, “but we’re ahead of all our business plans and have recently expanded into another office.”

For native people, Nicholl’ success is heartening; keeping any kind of magazine afloat is tough at the best of times, but in recent years, aboriginal publishing has suffered particularly severe setbacks. Most notable was the axing of the $3.45-million Native Communications Program from the 1990 federal budget, which meant that 11 native newspapers and two magazines lost all their funding. It proved a lethal blow for several respected publications, including Micmac News and The Saskatchewan Indian.

Yet despite funding cuts and a weakened economy, native publications are making a comeback. Along with The Nation, several other native magazines and newspapers have been launched in the last two years, including Aboriginal Voices of Toronto, Eastern Door based in Kahnawake, Que., Tawow in Ottawa, and Neechee Culture in Winnipeg. And, if it can overcome its early funding and logistical problems, Native Life, the most ambitious project of all – a glossy, national magazine aimed at mainstream Canadians – will reach newsstands this fall.

What accounts for this mini-boom in aboriginal publishing? For one thing, high-profile and controversial issues such as native land claims and self-government, along with what has become an exciting cultural renaissance of native artists, writers, and musicians, are fuelling a growing hunger for news from the aboriginal world. As well, with native journalism programs offered throughout the country, more young native people are gaining the skills needed to enter publishing, and are choosing to do so in and for their communities.

Most significant of all, from a monetary point of view, is the fact that advertisers, noting the trend, are willing to put their dollars into aboriginal publications, in return for exposure to an audience of young, educated natives and increasingly, non-natives who have an interest in aboriginal issues and healthy disposable incomes. And we’re not talking bait shops and fly-in-hunting lodges. Flip through the pages of today’s aboriginal publications and find ads sponsored by Ford, Amoco Petroleum, The Royal Bank, CIBC, large pharmacies, insurance companies, and hotels.

While editorial skill and a thriving circulation base are crucial to the health of a magazine, it is this shift in advertisers’ perceptions that is allowing the new aboriginal publications a shot at success in a difficult and competitive publishing climate. Neechee Culture – which started up in late 1993 and currently reaches 6,000 readers eager to learn more about aboriginal musicians, visual artists, and culture in general -depends primarily on advertising from businesses such as car dealerships and small airlines. Eastern Door, now in its third year of publication and up to 2,600 in circulation, relies on local enterprises for most of its income.

Indeed, publishing without the aid of government funds is a source of pride for many of the new publications. “We are officially an independent publication produced solely from funds generated from subscriptions and advertising…without any government funds,” boasted native actor Gary Farmer in the second issue of Aboriginal Voices, the 10,000-circulation entertainment quarterly, of which he is publisher. Like Farmer, Neechee Culture’s publisher, Richard Grouette, and Ken Deet, publisher and editor of Eastern Door, are confident that they can make a go of their enterprises even in the absence of funding, and are optimistic about future prospects, based on the enthusiastic response from both readers and advertisers.

In the wake of the funding cuts, “we’re not out to kick government officials in the ass,” says Grouett, who sees his magazine’s mandate as educational rather than political. Still, Grouette admits that government help could have strengthened his magazine’s market position by giving it the financial means to expand quickly to a larger circulation base. “We didn’t bother to apply for grants, but the money would have made things much easier,” he says.

It was a small grant from the Grand Council of Cress that made things easier for The Nation to get up and running. And although the Native Communications Program is a thing of the past, opportunities to receive federal government funding have not completely dried up for aboriginal publications. The creators of Tawow (the name is the Cree word for “welcome”) successfully sought assistance from the Aboriginal Business Development Program, a government agency that helps native entrepreneurs start businesses with loans, grants, and access to experienced business consultants. The magazine was launched a year ago and appears once a year in four languages. I runs to 180 pages per issue, with stories and tourist information on cultural events in the Cree, Inuit, West Coast and Plains Indian communities across Canada. It’s aimed at the international tourist market and distributed throughout England, France, and Germany, where native North American culture is extremely popular. With two-thirds of its revenue coming from government loans and grants (the remaining third from advertising), Tawow occupies a unique position within the current aboriginal publishing scene.

For the publishers of Native Life, who were turned down by the same program that backed Tawow, the free-market economics of launching a national magazine have proven frustrating. The decision not to fund Native Life has hindered the development of what many see to be the most ambitious and exciting publishing enterprise ever undertaken in Canada.

The idea for Native Life was conceived back in 1992, by Wanda Big Canoe, a well-known and respected Ojibway elder based in Jackson’s Point, Ont,. along with John Moir, the non-native publisher of two medically related trade publications. Together, they wanted to create a sophisticated, entertaining, native-culture magazine that would be read by both native and non-native Canadians, and that would have the same high-quality production values and general appeal as Saturday Night or Cottage Life.

Over the last three years, the two have spent $80,000 of their own money on a series of detailed business plans and an impressive mock-up of the proposed magazine designed by Jim Ireland, one of the country’s top magazine art directors. The proposed contents include everything from profiles of native performing artists to regular columns on traditional native cuisine and medicine, written by leading freelancers. There’s also a plan for a mail-order catalogue call Dream Catcher, which would appear as an eight-page insert in Native Life selling authentic arts and crafts. Aiming optimistically (some might say naively) for a circulation of 90,000 (with 10,000 of that in newsstand sales), Big Canoe and Moir plan to hire Ireland as art director, Richard Own, a former Maclean Hunter publisher as advertising manager, and Dennis Martel, a well-known communications consultant in the native community (he is non-native), as the magazine’s editor.

When their planning and goals failed to convince the Aboriginal Business Development Program that their enterprise was worth funding, the partners turned to the private sector for help. In January, the two confirmed that they had struck a deal with the owner of a gold-mining conglomerate (who wishes to remain anonymous). Moir calls him “a philanthropic type of guy,” and says “he’s not expecting millions. He’s providing a long-term loan at a very at a very reasonable rate.” Whether such an unusual arrangement will pan out in the long run is difficult to predict, but for now, Big Canoe and Moir are confident that after enduring several setbacks, they will finally launch Native Life in the fall.

Is the new vigour in native publishing destined to be a short-lived trend? Not if the economy continues to recover, allowing advertisers to further loosen their purse strings, and if the general public sustains its growing interest in native affairs at the rate it has over the last years. “There’s a resurgence of confidence within the people in and around the native community,” observes John Parsons, magazine development officer at the Ontario Ministry of Culture. Parsons has seen a lot of magazine come and go, and acknowledges that aboriginal publishing in particular is “a diverse market that is difficult to break into.” But he’s also watched several aboriginal publications successfully adapt to current rigorous economic conditions, and considers that cause for optimism. With luck and determination – more reliable in these tough times than government hand-outs – the likes of The Nation, Neechee Culture and Native Life will live long and healthy lives.

It is a sign of the endangered status of environmental issues in the Globe when its senior management chooses neither to recognize a catastrophe in the making nor anticipate its far-reaching consequences. “When it first happened,” recollects editorial board member Marcus Gee, “no one was sure how serious the oil spill was, especially in a remote place like that.” Editor-in-chief William Thorsell points out the story did get “bigger” as the days went on, and that anyway, “there is something more dramatic about a spill in Alaska than a pipeline spill in Siberia.” It took editors at the paper more than a week to decide that the leak, then estimated at 37 million litres (approximately the size of the Exxon spill), warranted front-page coverage. Five to six years ago, an environmental crisis of this kind would have made huge headlines, with months of follow-up commentary about the damage to the natural landscape, the loss of livelihoods and wildlife, the obligations of corporations and governments to protect the environment. But all environmental issues made news then because of an unprecedented awakening of public concern. People were making links between the quality of their air, water, and earth, and the health of their children, the security of their jobs, and the future of the human species. Social scientists heralded this new consciousness not as a fad, but a revelation. The public had finally recognized the dangers it had brought upon itself and was demanding change.

Though newspapers eagerly reported on this environmental awakening, they didn’t understand-or believe-its depth and implications. They covered environmental issues only as long as there was public fervor. When things quieted down, they misinterpreted the quiet as apathy and environmental coverage began to decline, both in quantity and quality.

Project Censored Canada is a joint venture of the Canadian Association of Journalists and Simon Fraser University that annually solicits and lists the most under-reported stories in the mainstream media. In 1993, says co-founder Bill Doskoch, one-third of its 111 nominations were for environment-related stories. Ironically, Doskoch, a reporter at The Regina Leader-Post, can no longer report on these stories himself because his editors terminated his environment beat last fall, wanting him to report on health instead (as if environment and health were separate issues).

Also in 1993, prompted in large part by the Vancouver Sun’s drastic decline in environmental coverage, Simon Fraser University organized a conference called “Take Back the News” that critically examined mainstream media’s treatment of environmental issues. In spring 1994, The Financial Post in Toronto dumped its biweekly environment/business column, written for four and a half years by Colin Isaacs, former executive director of Pollution Probe and currently a respected environmental consultant. Isaacs, whose column usually encouraged and described industry’s environmental initiatives, was told that the Post’s readers “weren’t interested in the environment anymore.” (Yet the paper continues to hand out its highly popular environmental achievement awards to business each year.)

To its credit, The Toronto Star hasn’t dropped its weekly environment page, but one gets the feeling it’s more a token gesture-environmental issues don’t get much space elsewhere in the paper. As the Star’s environment reporter, Brian McAndrew, admits, “An environment story is not something the people who put the newspaper together have on their minds. They tend to work with what they’re comfortable in, like politics.” Even the paper’s own media critic, Antonia Zerbisias, was prompted last July to write “The Greening of the Media Never Seems to Last Very Long,” where she suggests that what the “world needs is an environment disaster, one we in the Western world can relate to….It’s just that media need to be jolted back into covering the environment.” The apathy of the media in covering the environment is compounded by something even more disturbing at the Globe: antipathy toward environmental concerns. In editorials and columns, it persistently downplays the mounting evidence of human folly, dismissing the warnings of scientists and environmental groups as hysterical, irrational, and alarmist. Depletion of our ozone layer? Warming of our planet? Chemical loading in our bodies? In the world according to the Globe, such problems are either grossly exaggerated or under control. And that message is misleading.

“They are encouraging readers in a fool’s paradise,” says scientist Digby McLaren, who is a fellow and past-president of the Royal Society of Canada, considered by many to be the most eminent body of scientists in the country. McLaren, a geologist and regular Globe reader, describes the newspaper’s environment policy as “very poor, destructive, and dangerous journalism” that detracts from its credibility, and be adds that many of his scientific peers agree. “The Globe has a long way to go to understand what is really going on environmentally.”

The Globe’s denial of environmental realities began around 1988 when it kicked Michael Keating off the environment beat. Over his nine years there, Keating helped to pioneer environmental journalism in Canada, his files and source list becoming so extensive, he could swing from forestry to population to acid rain to toxic chemicals at a moment’s notice. For his thoughtful, groundbreaking coverage, he received an average of two international and national environmental awards a year.

Officially, editors told Keating they wanted a fresh voice on the beat. Unofficially, it seems they thought he had crossed the line from objective coverage of environmental issues to advocacy journalism. Keating firmly disagrees with the suggestion that he crossed any line, or was dismissed for this reason. “It was just a case of not enough other voices putting out other viewpoints at that time. “But he does concede that there might have been other ulterior motives for his dismissal. “People have said [my removal] was a ploy to diminish the coverage of environment and therefore please some right-wing business interests.”

Until the late ’80s, Keating says the Globe’s editorial policy “tended to be much more supportive of dealing with environmental problems-not in a radical way, but in a way which said, ‘These are serious problems. We have to treat them seriously.’ The attitude changed, he speculates, for two reasons. First, the Globe was trying to compete with The Financial Post, which had just gone daily. “The paper was being attacked on its most profitable front, which was the business section … by another business paper that editors perceived to be further to the right,” he says. So the Globe’s editorial business policy followed suit. Around the same time, Keating continues, there was a change in editorial management. “A number of editors were replaced and the whole policy of the paper shifted more to the right:” he says.

But by this time, Keating was gone. Choosing to quit the paper rather than move to another beat, he became a successful writer and consultant, advising a number of government, business, and environmental organizations at the national and international level. In addition, he is founder and co-director of a short, yearly course at the University of Western Ontario called Environmental Issues for Journalists-the only one of its kind in Canada.

Since his departure, reporters have been moving in and out of the beat like hotel guests. By early 1994, three reporters at the Globe’s Queen’s Park bureau – James Rusk, Martin Mittelstaedt and Craig McInnes (now at the Victoria bureau) – had all done short stints on the environment beat. As the current environment stand-in, Dan Westell, says, “It’s a joke around here that the next thing for the environment reporter is to become the Queen’s Park reporter.”

None of these reporters was pushed off the beat. But it’s no longer a hip place to be. It’s not a place for more Keatings. In fact, Westell says he is basically just biding his time until something better comes along. “The environment job was an escape for me,” he openly confesses. “It was a chance to get out of Report on Business because I wasn’t getting along with the editor.” If it became possible, Westell says he would like to go back to business reporting. The foot soldiers at the Globe take their cue from the top-and they’ve quietly suggested to me more than once that the guy at the top is anti-environment. Editor-in-chief William Thorsell would say he is anti- “misguided environmentalism.” He describes his policy on the environment as “one of some skepticism We’re always looking for proof for claims that are out there.” And as long as there is no absolute proof, so the Globe argument goes, there is no need whatsoever to upset the current economic order of things.

Given this, it’s not surprising that shortly after his appointment in 1989, Thorsell fully supported the firing of science columnist and environmental guru David Suzuki, who argued passionately and repeatedly that society must shift from the overuse of natural resources to wise use. (Thorsell says they wanted more “diversity” in Suzuki’s column.) But his skepticism extends even to businesses that are taking initiatives to protect the environment. As he cautions me, “It can be part of some corporate relations game, with companies saying they are turning green.” Naturally, there are a lot of pretenders, but for many businesses, the greening approach is no “game.” A recent article in the Globe’s own Report on Business Magazine describes how the growing Canadian environmental industry is cashing in on a multi-billion dollar market and creating tens of thousands of jobs. Perhaps he didn’t read it.

One major reason Thorsell gives for getting off, and staying off, the “environmental bandwagon” is that readers aren’t as interested in environment issues anymore. And he argues that this has been clearly demonstrated in public opinion polls. But Michael Adams, president of Environics Research Group (one of the biggest pollsters in Canada), says the fact that the environment is no longer the number one preoccupation of Canadians “disguises” the real issue. “Concern for the environment has gone from apocalyptic anxiety to secular religion,” Adams maintains. “It’s not top of the mind, but it has become a part of our value system.”

In conjunction with Environics, consultant Doug Miller conducts and publishes The Environmental Monitor report, a national survey done four times a year. He says that in the seven years he’s been putting it together, there has been no real change in the level of interest in the environment-just an “enduring concern.” (Indeed, the Star’s Zerbisias had an “amazing response” to her piece deploring the lack of environmental coverage, with readers applauding her insight.) What has changed is society’s acceptance of job creation at any cost to the environment. “If you say to a person, ‘Well, you’re worried about the economy, so why don’t we just simply stop treating the environment so seriously and allow people to pollute and make money to provide jobs,’ they’ll say, ‘No, that’s not acceptable.'” says Miller. “People won’t accept trade-offs willingly and easily in terms of environmental losses or economic gain.”

But rather than move with the times, the Globe stubbornly stays in the camp of denial. “The policy on the editorial page is that quite often they think the environment stuff is foolish,” says Dan Westell. “Some of them perceive sometimes that it’s a cost without benefit … that sometimes the science alleging the problem is wrong.”

Sometimes it is wrong. But rarely, if ever, do the Globe’s editorials admit that the science is right and the problem is real. Is this side of the “truth” any less a form of propaganda than the so-called hysteria of environmentalists?

June 1, 1992: “Will Environmentalism Come Down to Earth?” described how the “first challenge in responding to environmentalism is the separation of myth from fact.” Fair enough, but later we see the Globe’s real stripes: “The more conviction and momentum the environmental movement sustains, the more skepticism is necessary to avoid wasteful mistakes.”

November 21, 1992: “The Robust Earth” announced that “a growing body of evidence suggests that we may have been underestimating the resilience of our natural environment.” As an example of nature rebounding from “apparently catastrophic environmental events,” it cited a U.N.-commissioned study that found oil spills and oil-well fires induced by the Gulf War caused “much less damage to aquatic life in the Gulf than originally feared.” And what was the editorial’s own modest proposal? That “we take a more careful took at supposed threats to the ‘fragile’ planet before we rush expensively to its aid.”

March 2, 1993: “Crowded Planet” played down the effects, and reality, of overpopulation: “After peaking in the period 1965-1970, world population has slowed. The planet as a whole has not reached its limits of endurance….has no energy shortage, no commodities shortage, no food shortage. The Earth is not about to collapse from overpopulation.”

Although long disturbed by the Globe’s environment perspective, it was the November 28, 1994 editorial that really agitated Digby McLaren. “Environmental Phobias” began by criticizing a local environmental assessment, but turned into a global rant. Though acknowledging that there are “grounds for [the] fear” that the “environment is being destroyed by careless human action,” it complained that “critical judgment on environmental issues is too easily suspended in the emotional reaction to stories about chemicals, nuclear waste and other horrid-sounding words. Facts and proportion seem to lose their efficacy when set against the term ‘environmental threat;’ the wicked witch of the latter 20th century for which we seem to have an almost psychological attraction.”

With breathtaking confidence, the Globe went on to inform readers that while the appearance of an ozone hole “may have posed significant threats to human health,” these “have been addressed by changes in chemical use.” Now that is news. (In August 1993, the Globe’s front page trumpeted that the ozone hole was on its way to recovery. Interestingly, it based the news on a study co-conducted by scientists working for the chemical giant E.I. DuPont de Nemours Co.)

Thorsell seems vague about the Globe’s rationale for damning or legitimizing environmental concerns. Though reiterating to me that “huge amounts of money are wasted on studying threats that aren’t threats,” he admits he’s unsure of just what the “real” environmental problems are. The main point, he explains to me, is that “the environment shouldn’t be a religion. It’s an issue.”

But what many informed people, like Digby McLaren, understand is that the environment is the issue on which all others rest. As McLaren warned in a letter responding to the above editorial, “your refusal to accept facts about the present state of the planet, which are available to everyone, is puzzling and dangerous. The environment is not something separate from our daily lives and external to our economic system. It embraces the whole of our physical, chemical and biological surroundings that constitute the complex life-support system of the planet, of which we are part….There are no substitutes for air, water, soils, forests or all living things.”

A couple of years ago, McLaren joined the Union of Concerned Scientists and, along with more than 1,600 of his peers from 70 countries, signed a public declaration of warning to humanity that human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Given that scientists tend to be an ultra-cautious breed, it was an extraordinary statement, one that some human beings are choosing to ignore. McLaren explains that there are two schools of thought about where we are in nature. One school says we are inside the environment and messing it up. The other says we’re above nature, where our modern technology and economics allow us to think that if we run out of one resource, there will always be another. This is the Globe’s philosophy, says McLaren, and it’s wrong. It wouldn’t be so bad if this ideology were balanced by other perspectives in the paper, but apart from occasional stories on endangered species or recycling efforts (or angry letters to the editor), it infiltrates almost every section. It has reached the point where even columnist Michael Valpy, one of the only voices expressing environmental concern at the Globe, has resigned himself to his paper’s philosophy. “I just assume the Globe editorial policy isn’t pro-environment.”

Editorial board member Marcus Gee was given nearly two full pages in the Focus section in April 1994 to rebut an Atlantic Monthly article maintaining that we are in the midst of global decay and on the brink of chaos. In “Apocalypse Deferred,” Gee made the astonishing claim that “by almost every measure, life on Earth is getting better.” (This February, see-no-evil Gee reviewed a book forecasting troubles in the future, and announced there is no need for pessimism because the prospects for humanity have never been “brighter.”) Gee says he wrote “Apocalypse Deferred” because he found the Atlantic’s thesis to be “wrong-headed.” He contends he does care about the environment, and is merely trying to take the necessary steps to protect it properly.

Trouble is, the Globe advocates taking no steps until the problem is a scientific “certainty.” Only six months before Gee’s rebuttal piece, it ran an adaptation from a book called Ethical Choices and Global Climate Warming, but apparently didn’t heed its most crucial point: “We must arm ourselves with the scientific ‘facts’ about the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and climate, but it may be even more important that we gain a better appreciation of the realities of scientific complexity and un-certainty,” wrote author Lydia Dotto. “In all likelihood, we will be forced to make significant economic, political and social decisions about climate change without a foundation of absolute scientific certainty to fall back on.”

Digby McLaren points out that scientists identify potential problems long before they can tell the real effects. “‘Scientific certainty’ is an expression that shouldn’t be used,” he says, adding that anybody, including scientists, who insists on certainty is irresponsible. “How sure do you need to be about something?” he asks angrily. “If there’s a one percent chance of something happening, we should be bloody prepared! Would a person get on a plane if there was a one percent chance it would crash?”

But the Globe underplays potential risks, an attitude at the top that “creeps into reporting,” as one source at the paper told me. Even its science writer, Stephen Strauss, from whom you might expect a greater sense of urgency, spouts the skeptical party line. McLaren recalls a poor (and lengthy) Strauss article three years ago called “Understanding Ozone.” In it, Strauss tried to clear the air of ozone-depleting fears, reassuring us that “the sky is not falling. Not yet, anyway.” The last line of the article was a quote from a NASA scientist, who gave this dead-end suggestion: “You don’t want to make big steps until you know everything-and you probably will never know everything.”

As one reader wrote in, Strauss sounded “like an apologist for our current, damaging lifestyles. We do not need Mr. Strauss’s reassurances, or his rationalizations. We need to be quicker to heed the warnings of environmental scientists as the evidence of our destruction of nature mounts.”

In trying to explain to me how the article was misunderstood, Strauss only reiterates the need to go slow. As he rightly argues in many of his columns, nature is complicated (a reality he believes environmentalists sometimes overlook). “In terms of environments,” he cautions me, “we should operate conservatively in general because you don’t understand what’s going to happen.”

But it’s precisely because of that uncertainty that scientists weigh the statistical possibilities, or probabilities, of harm. McLaren, who criticized Strauss’s article by letter, says the ozone problem is “extremely” serious. “All the predictions made over the last few years of what it will be like the next year have been inaccurate,” he says. “It’s worse than [scientists] said it was going to be. And there are all sorts of signs. Dozens of organizations are measuring it and showing it is being increasingly depleted. These are accurate measurements.” McLaren adds, “More facts are known about the severity of environment issues, in general, than [scientists] use. We have enough now to act.”

Fittingly, it was a paleontologist who last summer lambasted Globe business columnist Terence Corcoran for his dinosaur-like rants against environmental concerns. “Periodically, Mr. Corcoran strays from the discussion of the business of business into the interface between business and science,” wrote M.J. Risk, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. “He usually gets it wrong….There is a great difference between being uninformed and being willfully ignorant.”

Like everybody at the Globe, Corcoran says he is not “anti-environment.” He just believes that a more market-oriented, individualistic society that has greater reliance on property rights can do a better job of looking after the environment than government regulators. “I do think the cleaner the environment, the better,” he says. “It’s just how you get that cleaner environment that I disagree with.”

But the raging accusations that pour from his podium on page two of the business section makes one wonder how much Corcoran cares about helping the environment. Among his pet hates is Ontario’s blue box program (ditto Thorsell), which he hits on with tiresome frequency. In one column, Corcoran said the “monster” waste recycling program is a “great economic sham,” and added, “there is nothing-repeat, nothing-commendable about blue-box recycling, either in its origins or operations.” The next day, he outlined ways to get rid of it. He’s described Earth Day as “an annual festival during which much of the world celebrates bad science and worse economics.” He’s criticized environment groups for tying up decision-making, preventing economic development, and forcing the private sector and governments to incur billions of dollars in wasteful spending: “These groups routinely misrepresent facts and fabricate information; they abuse the media process and mislead their members and the public.”

This past December, he chastised the environment ministers of British Columbia and Ontario, as well as “chemophobes at Greenpeace and other environmental organizations,” for their costly decision to push the pulp and paper industry to remove chlorine from its manufacturing processes. In the “real world of science,” he said, a “growing body of new research” shows that chlorine is not the cause of environmental problems. Really? It was only this past fall on CBC’s Witness program that a symposium of international scientists expressed extreme concern over reproductive mutations they were tracing to chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen. Chemicals such as organochlorines. Mark Winfield, director of research for the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, wonders why Corcoran didn’t cite the “new research” on which he based his column, speculating that it had to have come from the chlorine industry. “There is no question chlorine is dangerous,” Winfield says. “The esteemed International Joint Commission [which administers the Great Lakes water quality agreement] says there should be zero discharge of persistent toxic chemicals, and [its] most recent reports have focused on chlorine-based chemicals.”

Corcoran’s editor, Margaret Wente, says she won’t ask him to tone down his columns. “His job is to incite,” she insists. “His job is to challenge conventional wisdom.” But it is only the Globe that looks unwise when it lets Corcoran loose on matters he knows nothing about. After an unusually balmy weekend in February, he wrote, “If this is the greenhouse effect, then maybe we should make it a permanent feature of the environment.” Corcoran went on to assert that global warming was a “hypothesis of dubious scientific uncertainty.” But according to Henry Hengeveld, science advisor on climate change for Environment Canada, it is the Globe’s judgment that is dubious. (On the same day as Corcoran’s column, the paper ran an editorial titled “What Not to Do about Global Warming.” You can guess the rest.) Hengeveld says, “There’s a global consensus that global warming is occurring. We’re confident that there is a problem….The CO2 emissions level is 27 percent above the pre-industrial level. And it’s continuing to increase.” Without question, he says, precautionary measures must be taken.

Perhaps they could start by muzzling Corcoran. “Corcoran is way out in left field,” says Hengeveld. “I’m surprised that the Globe would publish anything like that.” Corcoran’s colleagues aren’t. James Rusk believes that, like all columnists, he is given “enormous latitude” and makes errors that reporters can’t get away with. People at the Globe like Corcoran sometimes believe in “right things” they cannot prove, adds Dan Westell, and on occasion, they allow “a belief to overtake the facts.” The question, in the end, is whether the Globe’s beliefs reflect those of its most important readers-the business audience. Michael Keating finds it ironic that this conservative business newspaper has not “approached the environment in a conservative way, which is to say, ‘Let’s conserve the environment adequately so it will guarantee jobs.” The Globe’s attitude, which perpetuates the myth that economic interests are threatened by environmental protection, is simply blinkered. As Keating points out, “Many businesses are now developing major environmental plans and saying, ‘We understand that if we continue to pollute and be seen as raping and pillaging the environment, we’re going to have trouble doing business. We’re going to lose market share. So we have to start changing our environment practices to be more sustainable, more environmentally friendly.

The lack of an informed debate in major papers with the enormous reach of those like the Globe is a major disservice to the business community, says Colin Isaacs, who helps to develop environment programs for the Canadian private sector. “It’s very detrimental to public understanding of the issues, and ultimately, to Canadian competitiveness because other countries are moving aggressively on the environment,” he says. “Japan has a 50-year plan for energy efficiency, the Europeans are moving in reduction in use of chemicals, on water conservation. All of those things save them money. Therefore, their products will become cheaper. They’ll become more competitive. If Canada is still wasting resources and not keeping up with world requirements for state-of-the-art environment performance, our industries won’t be competitive. So I think the fact those stories are no longer getting written [as they were when Keating was on staff] actually damages our economy and costs us jobs.”

It was stories like the ones Keating used to write in the Globe that first showed Jon Grant how business people could reconcile environmental and economic concerns. Former chairman of the Quaker Oats Company of Canada and current chair of the Ontario Round Table on the Environment and Economy, Grant is very concerned about the “overall publishing philosophy” the Globe has taken on the environment. “There has been a major turn to the right,” he says, “and environment concerns and issues are much less important.” In fact, Grant thinks the Globe is not keeping up with what is actually happening in business. He points out that most leading companies have developed “sophisticated” ways of dealing with the environment, using resources more efficiently. “They’ve made the link between environmental stewardship arid profitability.”

Why can’t our national newspaper? Is it fair or constructive to focus only on what it considers to be “wrong-headed” environmentalism? Wouldn’t it be more forward-thinking to encourage action of some kind instead of denying the gravity of the problems? “We tend to be guilty,” editorial board member Marcus Gee concedes. “Probably we should do more about environmental threats. I think we could do more.”

It would be the first step out of a fool’s paradise.

A fantasy script, obviously. Wallin wouldn’t be caught dead comparing “her” magazine with its predecesor on air. But comparisons are inevitable. In retrospect, The Journal, the golden current affairs program glittering with foreign documentaries and high-profile interviews, that for a decade followed The National five nights a week, does seem like the successful and beautiful big sister, heaped with money and praise. And Prime Time Magazine (PTM) does seem like the not-so-pretty sister – painfully earnest, prone to criticism, and with little of the cash lavished on her sibling by Mother Corp.

The Journal was babied from the start. Much hype surrounded its birth in early 1982. From there on, it was blessed with an annual allowance of, estimates range, from $10-$14 million. The show attracted many bright and talented journalism stars, some say the best in the field, producing top documentaries that would eventually be shown in more than 20 countries.

But in 1992, both The National and The Journal were abruptly ousted in a round of budget cuts (The National has since moved onto CBC Newsworld). In their place came Prime Time News, formatted on the successfu BBC model of mixing documentaries and news throughout the hour. There’d be no clearly defined slots for either news or documentaries. As part of the repositioning shift in the entire CBC television schedule, the show moved back to 9 p.m. in hopes of attracting a younger, larger audience, and added co-host Pamela Wallin for long-time solo anchor Peter Mansbridge.

After two years of fumbling, spotlighted by brutal media and public criticism, the show returned to 10 p.m. last September, and to a format clearly reminiscent of its predecessor. Wallin was pushed across the studio to her own desk to host, and obviously separate, the back half of the show, PTM.

But the content was not like its predecessor’s and the critics, if anything, were more disparaging of PTM’s interviews and documentaries. “The banishment of Pamela Wallin to the magazine serves only to reinforce the impression that the interview/documentary segment of Prime Time News is a pale shadow of The Journal,” wrote Mike Boone, in the September Montreal Gazette.

Something is missing from Prime Time documentaries. Gone are The Journal’s panoramic, sometimes offbeat analyses. “The Journal is more than a good beyond-the-headlines interview show in the Nightine mode, thanks to its documentary unit, known for the excellence of its foreign reportage,” wrote Martin Knelman in a 1985 Channels magazine article. “The Journal is at its best when it takes dramatic risks, often with long documentaries on subjects that are not topical, such as Vichy, France and questionable cancer treatments.”

Gone too are such in-depth ventures as sending The Journal’s Eric Rankin to Amman at the beginning of the Gulf War to examine Saddam Hussein’s rising popularity. Viewers rode with a cabby who passionately spoke of his love for Hussein, and listened as a young man explained in his broken English why he hated Israel and America: “Can you tell me if anyone comes and occupied your house or your country – do you like him?” the young man threw back at the camera. “And you know well that someday he will toss you out from your country or he has already tossed you out. Do you like him? And do you like anyone [who] helps him?” Pause. “I don’t think so.”

On PTM, most often you’ll see Wallin lead off with a double-ender interview (two people staring into cameras, conducting the actual interview through phone lines). Or “The Canadian Debate,” consisting of a roundtable discussion or a packed townhall – a handsome showcase for her but not doucmentary fare. The rest of PTM may consist of one or two brief mini-docs (TV slang for “documentary”) or a a report – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which. Full-edition documentaries, devoted to a single, pithy, and often thought-provoking subject, have all but disappeared.

Telling a good story and taking the viewer within is the key to good documentaries. A superior doc is clear, insightful, and visually rich. Ideally, it is also full of passion, with a strong feel and texture, and it attempts to make an emotional connection with the viewer – be it sadness, delight, or anger.

But the story should be told through visuals and sound, rather than simply piecing talking heads together with a voice-over – which happens too often on PTM.

“The documentary traditionally is done without an on-screen interpreter,” says Peter Flemington, director of programming at Vision TV, who has been in the business for more than three decades. As well, “documentaries tend to be a little more deliberative.” What Prime Time Magazine makes, says Fleminton, are not documentaries. Instead, he and fellow documentarians think that the CBC is doing straight current affairs – elongated news clips.

True documentaries offer a different spin on issues – more depth and a greater sense of reality by taking you to the subject – vastly different than what a studio interview offers. “In a studio, you see the same deep thinkers,” says Tom Alderman, a reporter from The Journal who is now with PTM. “Good talking heads, but you’ve seen them before. It’s not like getting out into another world, like docs do for you.”

Like Studio 2 did on its premiere show this year. The new TVO current affairs program (created by one of The Journal’s architects, Peter Herrndorf) featured a segment on a lesbian dinner party “filmed vertiginously by a single handheld camera,” wrote Tony Atherton of The Ottawa Citizen. “The kind of classic TV experiment we used to get on The Journal before the imagination of CBC’s current affairs producers was subjugated by Prime Time News’ deadly earnestness.”

The “deadly earnestness” that irritates critics apparently doesn’t drive off many viewers. In the first four months of PTM’s 10 p.m. reincarnation, the average-minute audience was recorded at 806,000 viewers – not dramatically less than the 850,000 viewers in the same four months of The Journal’s final season, which in turn was down from 932,000 in its second-last season. (Overall, these numbers might suggest a growing disenchantment with the news hour.)

In any case, the current regime – largely the same group of documentary makers who produced The Journal – seems more preoccupied with lack of cash than lack of viewers. Executive producer Tony Burman says the magazine is working with approximately 400 percent less money as a result of the 1990 slash-and-burn budget cuts handed down by Tory government. And the 1995 budget has taken another large dip into CBC funding, perhaps affecting the flagship show once again. In its final season, The Journal worked with $120,000 per week, with $90-95,000 going toward documentaries. PTM, with a budget of $70,000 per week, spends approximately $50,000 on documentaries. And since the show tries to shoot documentaries for around $20,000 each (obviously that varies with subject, location, and complication), viewers are seeing considerably fewer of them.

Documentaries live or die on cash,” says William Cobban, a Prime Time documentary producer. “With news, no one has to say, ‘Shoould we send a reporter to Moscow and buy a satellite feed for him?’ It’s already there. So that money is already spent.” But a documentary sitting on a piece of paper starts from zero, he says. “No money has been spent, and there’s been absolutely no commitment made to it.”

Current funds certainly don’t permit plane-hopping across the globe for a story anymore. Right after the first edition of The Journal on January 11, 1982, host Barbara Frum bragged to the audience that The Journal’s documentary cameras were already on four continents – Peter Kent in Uganda, Leslie MacKinnon in Toronto, Hugh Winsor in Ottawa, Susan Resler in Washington, Ann MacMillan in London, Linden MacIntyre in the high Arctic, Ann Medina in Israel.

An intense amount of work went into putting those event-oriented Journal docs together during the two years the show was being designed before airing. Ideas started with a mini-research team called the “insight unit,” says then-Journal reporter Peter Kent – ideas for full-takeout, full-edition, topical shows on themes such as medicare, taxation, and Canadian security intelligence. “Big picture docs,” says Kent says. Post-mortem meetings critically picked apart each previous night’s docs. “They were the most brutal, bloody, curel, soul-destroting meetings and we had people leave intears from some,” Kent recalls.

Nevertheless, he and others remember those as stimulating times, especially under executive producer Mark Starowicz, whose vision and style left an indelible stamp on The Journal. “The documentary unit was seen, of course, as the elite and the privileged,” says Suanne Kelman, a former producer with The Journal who is now teaching broadcast journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University. “Yes, these were high-prestige jobs. And at the beginning, there was a lot of money, which then translated into a lot of freedom to do what you want.”

Those freewheeling days are gone, perhaps forever. “We have to make choices now,” says Prime Time’s Burman. “We can’t do everything. We just don’t have the luxury of going after stories we feel are too chancy. In other words, we have got to be clear as to what our objectives are. There’s far more of a domestic focus to our documentary making now.”

Now, viewers are more likely to see Joe Schlesinger in British Columbia trying to sort out Canadian multiculturalism, part of a continuing inquiry the show launched in September to “explore how much common ground there is amid the conflicting visions which Canadians have of this country,” as outlined in a PTM mandate memo. Or an examination of the Quebec controversy about young Muslim women wearing their traditional dress to school.

Documentaries are not only more domestic, but more often angled to issues of the moment, such as Terence McKenna’s “Voices of Quebec” doc that aired four days before the 1994 Quebec election. “The magazine…will emphasize more quick-response documentary and tape/talk treatment of what’s behind unfolding stories and topical issues,” reads PTM’s mandate memo. “There has certainly been a sense that we should tie the magazine to more current events,” says William Cobban. “So there are less features, that’s fair to say.”

Tying docs to current events can come across as topical – or as warmed-over news. But Daniel Gelfant, senior producer of Prime Time’s documentary unit (and described as one of The Journal’s star producers), makes no apology for the new approach. “We still have a lot of range,” he says. “Perhaps not quite the eclecticism of The Journal, but we still do psychics. We still do statistics. We still do basketball.” He says if anything, the budget cuts have helped Prime Time focus more tightly on the story.

With Prime Time’s financial constraints came “integration,” a controversial mixing of resources, bringing together the crews of news and current affairs – divisions that in the past had a line of masking tape laid between them. Now, reporters cross the line either way and do a documentary or a news report if they so choose, or if so assigned. Whether this produces better, worse or simply different documentaries is arguable.

Both The National and The Journal were so well stocked with staff (The Journal at one point has 10 units, four people per unit) that sometimes crews from each show arrived at the same event. “There was a kind of separate but equal rivalry that developed between the two halves of the program,” says one former Journal producer, now with PTM, who asked to be unnamed. “Now that it’s integrated, a bit of the edge has kind of been taken off things….I think that kind of competition was a net plus, at least for the audience.

The melding of crews raises another question: can a news reporter do a documentary- and, by implication, a good documentary-as in The Journal days when everyone was a specialist?

“Quite often, news people have a difficult time trying to do a long piece,” says Tom Alderman. “They’re just not used to it. Producers who have worked with news reporters on documentaries have to almost take them like they’re in kindergarten and explain to them what to do. And even then they don’t get it.”

But the wall between news and current affairs isn’t insurmountable for a reporter. Prime Time’s senior correspondent, Brian Stewart, is one who has scaled it often. “It’s not the easiest thing in the world,” says Stewart, who started with The National and later moved to The Journal. “Almost all news reporters underestimate how difficult it is. We tend to think of a documentary as just a longer form of a news story. it took me well over a year to learn how to make a decent documentary. It’s a very different beast than a news story.”

Perhaps more crucial to making quality documentaries in times of budget austerity is a clear vision, point of view, or “mind set.” Although great efforts must be made to integrate resources and planning, says Stewart, “there still has to be a separate mindset [for PT News and PT Magazine]. It’s very important that the separate task of each, the separate mandate, is understood and respected. The worst thing Prime Time Magazine could do is to think of itself as just junior son of the news department.”

Stewart adds that creative ingenuity can compensate for lack of money. Writing, editing, and craftsmanship have to be that much better. And if live footage is lacking in a story, graphics can be used instead to bridge the gaps, “getting you into places you can’t get into.” In Stewart’s recent documentary, “Autopsy of a Genocid,” about the slaughters in Rwanda, he not only used a graphic illustrative map, but a series of graphically composed “file folders,” one for each organization that failed to stop what was about to happen in Rwanda at the time.

This might be a grumpy old former CBC employee,” says Peter Kent, “but I think PTM is overproduced. “Slick graphics may give the impression of too slick a show, therefore forsaking the grittiness of live fottage.

Prime Time’s efficiency measures have also brought new production techniques. In the past, a documentary crew worked as a unit. Reporter, producer, cameraman, and soundman all had editorial say on what went into the piece. Now doc makers can pick up a clip from crews across the country instead of flying out to shoot it themselves. Obviously an effective money-saving technique, but does it sacrifice quality? Yes, says Anne Medina, one of The Journal’s reporters and now chair of The Academy, which produces both the Genie and the Gemini Awards. She thinks it is crucial that only one crew be used thorughout the making of an entire doucmentary.

“Continuity,” she says of The Journal’s doc units. “They knew the story. Their focus of attention would be a little different than if they were just popped in for a day. They were part of the story.”

Does any of this prove that PTM is “a pale shadow” of its predecessor or simply that it is different? Neither, according to producer William Cobban. It’s a work in progress. “The documentaries are getting longer and better, and much more like The Journal’s,” says Cobban. “In fact, people have said, ‘Let’s bring back those Journal documentaries.'”

Brian Stewart explains that “The Journal sort of set a standard for news/current affairs documentaries in the ’80s and early ’90s. That will continue to be the standard for many years to come.”

But does PTM live up to that standard? Does it even live up to its stated mission? In 1982, The Journal’s Starowicz said in a Maclean’s article, “Any program concept is ultimately reduced to a terrible simplicity. As It Happens was ‘reach them.’ Sunday Morning was ‘you are there.’ Elements of both ideas are in The Journal.”

If such is the case, Prime Time’s concept seems to be “explain it to them.” “The mission of CBC Prime Time News is to help Canadians understand the issues and events that matter to them most,” reads the first line of Prime Time’s mission statement. “Our method is to reveal, to explain and to provoke.” The trouble is, it explains more often than it provokes.

The tendency to present all sides and tread softly can be traced in part to CBC’s historic sensitivity to pressure groups, says Peter Kent. Even The Journal suffered to some extent from its fear of offending the nation, but the current climate of political correctness has further compromised the voice of PTM documentaries. “[The CBC] tends to water down points of view,” says Kent, “eliminate them entirely or add too many points of view so that a piece becomes mushy.”

Mother Corp. can be faulted to some degree for crimping the style of the “Not-so-pretty sister,” but Kent doesn’t buy the argument that docs “live or die on cash” and that PTM doesn’t have enough of it. “You know, the CBC is a very wasteful organization,” he says. “There’s always been what could be described as small ‘w’ waste. They’re a lot leaner than in the high Journal days but a lot fatter than any comparable news organization. Compared to BBC, PBS, RAI, they’re in the lap of luxury in terms of not having to face real cost accountability.”

What about public accountability?

“The point is, for the money they’ve got,” says media critic Rick Salutin, “they should be producing a hell of a lot better than they are.”

It’s 8:32 now. Mair sits and fills the chair in front of the microphone. He drags the Diet Coke to him, does a sound test, and fiddles with a few coloured buttons. He opens his binder and sorts through it. The only sounds are the station’s news, the occasional snap of the binder’s rings, and the rustle of papers. Eventually, a voice calls out of the cool emptiness, telling Mair he has only seconds to go. He pulls the microphone to his mouth and rests his fingertips on a square red button. His middle finger jerks and the button glows. From the dull hush, a booming voice cuts the studio and rushes over B.C.’s airwaves. “And a very pleasant Monday, the 12th of December, around the province of British Columbia on the Western Information Network, I’m Rafe Mair…”

I didn’t know a hell of a lot about Rafe Mair when I leapt into this story. In fact, all I had was a photograph and a newspaper advertisement about his show. Because I’d lived in Vancouver before I came to school in Toronto four years ago, I considered myself an expert on the goings-on in B.C. But somehow, I had missed Mair, the ex-Social Credit cabinet minister who’d turned to the media to smash his views into public consciousness. My new eastern home, coupled with a shortage of funds for long-distance calls, forced me to find out more about the so-called “voice of B.C.” from Toronto’s journalists.

Few of them had a good word to say. Most think he is a bloated, raving bigot who wants to rip B.C. from Canada’s borders and bomb Quebec – a West Coast crazy, more full of himself than sound ideas.

Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham heads the anti-Mair pack. In the May 16, 1994 issue, Fotheringham began by referring to the “ego of the open-mouth heroes” (his derogatory term for “open-line” radio). He went on to claim that Mair “is now clearly out of his skull, his latest screamer his theory that British Columbia could and should separate.” The shots kept rattling.

Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail columnist, is also critical of Mair’s open-line persona. Having lived in Vancouver and known Mair since his days in the SoCred cabinet, Valpy came to realize Mair was no fool and has even grown to like him. But he does not respect Mair’s opinions of the nation or his on-air personality, calling him “a right-wing mindless bully feeding on some of the worst political emotions of British Columbians.”

Like Valpy, Toronto Star columnist and broadcaster Dalton Camp thinks Mair is a “western xenophobe” cashing in on the exploitation of B.C.’s sensitivities and biases. There is no doubt that Mair’s a right-winger, Camp says. “He’s an honorary chancellor of the Fraser Institute.”

I easily bought into these eastern opinions of Mair because of the eminence of central Canada’s media, and before long, the flat features of Mair’s photograph swelled into an image of a puffed-up, rednecked windbag. I started phoning around Vancouver to get more information about the man. Although some sources offered me a different perspective, I wasn’t really listening. I remained stubbornly skeptical of a rotter named Rafe Mair.

It wasn’t until I returned to B.C. and met the man, not the beast, that I realized I’d been suckered by the eastern media. I saw that along with all the shouting and showbiz, there is a serious thinker who may not reflect all of B.C., but certainly has its respect.

In the Unicorn, a near-empty, dark restaurant neighbouring CKNW, Mair admits between mouthfuls of a BLT “without the L” that he gets on a hobby horse from time to time and knows it can be a problem. But it can also get results. Mair’s tenacious and vocal opposition to the Charlottetown and Meech Lake accords, for example, is widely credited with influencing the province’s strong “no” votes in both referendums (and gained him the legendary nickname “Dr. No”).

“I think there’s a very difficult line between keeping on a matter of great public importance and flogging it to death,” he says. “I don’t know where to draw that line.”

Sincerity is not what you’d expect from an ex-lawyer and ex-politician, which is perhaps why Mair didn’t stick to either career. In 1973, while a lawyer at his private law practice in Kamloops, Mair became alderman of the city, and from there it was a quick step into the Social Credit party. Between 1975 and 1981, Mair was appointed to the ministerial portfolios of consumer services, consumer and corporate affairs, environment, health, and constitutional affairs. But by early 1981, he’d grown tired of compromising his principles and opinions in the name of party discipline. At about the same time, Jack Webster, then an infamous open-line talk show host on CKNW (with whom Mair, as minister of health, shared several verbal blood baths on air), suggested he might make a good broadcaster. Through Webster, Mair was introduced to Jim Pattison, who then owned CJOR, in Vancouver, and that’s when his broadcast career set out on its sluggish journey.

He hosted a show on CJOR, until his contract ran out in 1984. It wasn’t renewed because of Mair’s paltry ratings (which he blames on his inexperience and competition from the more popular CKNW.) After a few months of unemployment, he was offered a talk show on CKNW from midnight to 2 a.m. Since then, he’s slowly moved into the prime spot in talk radio, and his audience is building. Just over a year ago, about 97,500 listeners tuned in to Rafe Mair in the morning; now, it’s about 150,000.

Typically, during the two-and-a-half hours of the show, Mair belts out his editorial (the hottest time of the program) and goes on to do a number of interviews on public affairs. The day I was there, he brought up provincial politics, computers, and communicable diseases (after Bloc Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard’s shocking affliction). After his editorial and between interviews, Mair opens the phone lines to all people, questions, topics, and views. No calls are screened. He listens and interrupts, berates some and coaxes others. He even cuts some off. That’s how it goes, five days a week, from 8:35 to 11 a.m. That’s open-line showbiz with Rafe Mair.

I should say that open-line talk shows are a bit of a tradition in B.C. Some of the biggest names in the biz were Webster and Pat Burns (former CJOR talk-show host), who have since stepped back from their microphones. Both were well-known for being blowhards who lobbed lacerating insults to callers and guests with twinkles in their eyes. But these men were very influential, respected and could, some say, sway public opinion with surprising ease. Mair is now a member of this league that lays it on the line. Denny Boyd, a Vancouver Sun< columnist, says he is “the best talk show host B.C.’s ever had.”

It seems out east, though, that this aspect of B.C.’s culture is vehemently pooh-poohed. “There are a number of theories why the isolated province that pulls the mountains over its head is so obsessed with open-mouth radio,” wrote Fotheringham in his May 1994 Mair-bashing column. “Mair is given credit for killing the Charlottetown Accord and electing the Reform crackers in British Columbia, just as Jack Webster before him supposedly could turn elections. Obscure ex-politicians become more famous than the premier once they get their gums into a microphone on a daily basis, a strange phenomenon not equalled in any other city … In other jurisdictions, small boys aspire to become lawyers or industrialists or rock stars. In Vancouver? Open-mouth radio host. Little old ladies hail them on the street and pit bulls turn and flee at their approach.”

Thousands of kilometres away, it’s easy to dismiss the force of an open-liner, but the people of B.C. don’t. One of Vancouver’s media critics, author and professor Stan Persky, says that although Mair is excessive, “he does have an influence …. He’s fairly bombastic and emotionally overcharged and plays into a lot of latent attitudes.” According to Persky, Mair picks up on issues that are already in the public mind and brings them to the surface so that even if most listeners already believe what he says, he serves as an enormous reinforcement.

Neil Graham, managing editor at the Vancouver Province, believes Mair represents western views vigorously. “Sometimes Rafe does a better job of raising issues than the local press. He’s got a strong point of view and he’s not afraid to put it forward …. Rafe belongs to the sledgehammer school of journalism – and as an editor of a tabloid – I like it.”

Mair does hit hard on a diversity of issues, from libel chill to aboriginal land claims to the pathetic performance of political leaders, and some of his thoughts aren’t what you’d expect when peering through the eastern media’s magnified stereotype of a rabid rightwinger. For example, Mair’s latest successful campaign was against the Alcan Kemano Completion Project, a hot environmental issue, in B.C. In the ’50s, Alcan Smelters and Chemicals Ltd. dammed the Nechako River and created a hydroelectric generating station at Kemano to power an aluminum smelter in Kitimat. In the late ’70s, the company wanted to expand the Kemano plant, planning to sell power to B.C. Hydro until the market afforded it the opportunity to build another smelter. However, environmental concerns voiced by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept the project on hold until 1987 when a settlement was reached between Alcan and the federal and provincial governments. Construction began but was halted again in late 1993, pending a provincial environmental review.

Originally, Mair was all for the project, being a free marketer by philosophy; he believed all of what he calls Alcan’s “propaganda.” However, since mid-1993, with further study of scientific reports (some arriving by brown envelope), he realized “that this was an environmental disaster of unmitigated proportions.” He loaded his guns and started shelling the project. In the May 1994 issue of Equity, Vancouver’s business advocacy magazine, he wrote, “This project will substantially lower the Fraser River at Hell’s Gate and, given a predictable combination of drought and large salmon runs, will eradicate the Adams River sockeye run and much of the pink run as well. Alcan, with an arrogance I thought went out of fashion when Marie Antoinette’s head went in the basket, refuses to even discuss this unhappy probability.”

This January, the B.C. government killed the project, and a lot of British Columbians are convinced that Mair is the reason why. The Vancouver Sun’s Keith Baldrey wrote that, although the project was stopped this year, “it began to die almost two years ago. That’s when CKNW broadcaster Rafe Mair started a personal campaign against a project he felt was environmentally unacceptable, scientifically unsupportable and politically corrupt.” Baldrey suggests that Mair’s relentless and regular coverage, unmatched by all other media, “eventually resulted in a convenient and extraordinary position for the New Democratic Party government – it was able to kill a massive industrial development because of environmental concerns, and it was able to do so without being accused of being anti-business.” One of Baldrey’s cabinet sources said, “If Mair hadn’t kept a fire lit under this thing for the past year or so, our decision might have been considerably different.” Even The Globe and Mail admitted to Mair’s influence in the province this January when it printed a story on the strength of populism in B.C. In it, Norman Ruff, a University of Victoria political scientist, said, “Rafe Mair is part of the established elite structure of the province. He doesn’t present himself that way to his listeners. But being a popular radio host in this province, he is powerful. And by being at the front of populist campaigns, he is an elite.”

Because of Mair’s forceful opposition to the Kemano Completion Project, both he and CKNW are facing a defamation and libel suit, launched in January by ex-federal Conservative fisheries minister Tom Siddon. (Siddon believes they have made false, malicious statements about his involvement in the 1987 settlement with Alcan.) Naturally, Mair refuses to apologize.

There is little that will stop Mair from saying what he thinks – on air or in print. As the “Voice from B.C.” in his weekly column for the Toronto-based Financial Post, Mair sends loud messages to the newspaper’s national audience. (Bucking the eastern media trend, editor Diane Francis thinks Mair’s work is “good.”) In the paper, Mair has warned, for example, that B.C. may separate unless eastern Canada, particularly Ottawa, starts listening to the province and dealing with its complaints. “The national government is, to a large measure, seen as a money-sucking nuisance most of the time and when British Columbians, also running a deficit, see a portion of their taxes go, for example, to reward Quebec women who have children, the already restless natives get even more antsy.” In person, he is blunter about the discontent in his province. “There is a very serious feeling in B.C. now,” he says, crossing his arms, “that not only have we got some grievances, but if we had to we could go it alone.”

Mair’s politics are provocative, but not as easily fingered as some like to think. His ex-wife, Patti Mair, who is producer of the Rafe Mair Show and met Mair when she was a SoCred cabinet secretary, says, “Rafe is issue-oriented, not ideologically oriented, which explains why, when he was a SoCred cabinet minister, he wasn’t always enamored by all of what the SoCreds were doing.” Because of his provocative thinking and political savoir faire, Mair has been given a monthly forum in Equity, where he often writes about “an imbalance in the Canadian political system,” says managing editor Peter Waal. “Mair feels the west is deliberately not paid attention to in eastern media and politics. He’s got a fair number of people from all walks of life and all political ideologies reading his column. He has a pretty good sense of the pulse of the community.”

But not the whole province. Mair has critics on his own stomping ground too, one of them being Shane McCune, a Vancouver Province columnist who occasionally and publicly trades insults with Mair, calling him the “CKNW open-mouth blowhard RALPH Mair” in return for being merrily misnomered by Mair as “Shane of the [Vancouver] Sun.” As much as McCune admits to Mair’s popularity, he says he’s not representative of the entire province. “Rafe speaks to and for a considerable chunk of the white, male, conservative segment of the population.”

I just can’t swallow this. When Mair was at the wheel of his Cadillac El Dorado, driving the two of us from the station downtown to his house in North Vancouver, he was telling me how great the city had become since the massive waves of immigration. just after he growled “asshole” to the guy ahead of us for making an illegal turn, and speeding dangerously close and fast past him, Mair said he loves and appreciates the variety and colour the many cultures add to life on the West Coast.

This is not the attitude of your typical old white boy, nor is it what you find in some of the columns that Mair writes for The Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s alternative magazine. For example, he’s informed people wishing for more traditional (white European) sources of immigration that many candidates from Europe will not be white, and those that are WASPs will bring talents and grievances with them like all other immigrants. “He represents a populist point of view,” says managing editor Charles Campbell, “and he’s representative of people in B.C. on emotional issues.”

Though Mair slightly broadens The Georgia Straight’sleft-of-centre audience, it’s not to the gross degree that eastern media imply. “Rafe is often called a right-wing columnist,” says Campbell. “I’ve heard that more times than I can count. My perception, after reading a lot of Rafe’s work, does not give that picture. Because of his association with the SoCred party, and his anti-NDP views, people nail him as a right-winger. He’s not so easily typecast as people would wish.”

I was beginning to get the point. At the Pan Pacific Health Club & Spa, I watched Mair and the hotel’s general manager, John Williams, play about 45 minutes of squash – and for every second, Mair was at his “open-mouth” extreme. “VOTE NO! OCT 26 REFERENDUM,” screamed his T-shirt (worn, no doubt, for my benefit). Incidentally, for a man of significant mileage, he was no slouch. He was running, reaching, leaping, and sometimes missing the ball. His raging profanities came almost as often as the squash ball smacked the walls. He blurted a range of curses, all of which I tallied. “Fuck” came out the winner, hands down, at about 12. He got very frustrated with himself few times, called himself an “asshole” and smashed his racket to the floor. But when he returned a tricky shot for a point, he smiled and seemed to offer himself silent congratulations. Finally, Mair won (as he usually does, says Williams).

So when this same showboating, highfalutin, ball-busting man also claims he is shy, it does seem out of character. But en route to North Vancouver, – while we’re driving through the causeway to the Lion’s Gate Bridge, with the mighty trees passing close on either side, Mair tells me he’s a bit of a loner. He’s never gotten used to being approached in public and is still not sure how to deal with it. Even as a child, he was “quite comfortable with his own company.” He still is. “Around the home,” Mair says, “I keep very much to myself.”

At home, there is no audience, just the restful silence of the large homey rooms and the comfort of the many things he loves. Halfway through the interview, Clancy, Mair’s chocolate Lab, bursts into barks from a room close by. He trots over and looks at me with floppy bewilderment. Mair smiles and says, “Clancy, it’s probably just Wendy. Sounds like Wendy. Better go find her!” Wendy, whom Mair wedded last July, comes in the front door and up the stairs. She’s a tall, good-looking, 51-year-old woman, who has retired from nursing. “Hi love,” Mair says as she kisses him. I am graciously introduced and we have a short conversation. Then Wendy disappears into the immaculate expanse of the kitchen, returning with a camera to take pictures of Mair and me. It is, well…bizarre, and at the same time neighbourly. It is a calmer side of Mair that most don’t see, one that loses the mask of the open-line entertainer – and he knows he wears it.

“I am sometimes a provocateur,” says Mair, nodding. “I sort of take a Socratic approach, and a very loud one sometimes, in order to bring out the best of other people and other sides of an argument. That mealy-mouthed arguing that some people would like to hear is not very entertaining and, I don’t think, very illuminating …. One thing you can never forget is that there’s a very serious side to what I do, but I’m also in show business.”

Being so dedicated to his audience may help the public cause, but sometimes Mair’s personal life pays. “One of my flaws that troubles me the most is that in many ways I’m a thoughtless person,” Mair says. “I’m very quick to forget anniversaries, birthdays, that sort of thing. I often forget about the sensitivities of other people. Not as a broadcaster, though. That’s probably when I do think about people most because I’m publicly accountable. But I forget a lot of little things that are important to people close to me.”

There are some things that aren’t little and will never be forgotten. It turns out that Mair’s life has been spun off track by its fair share of black ice. He’s been divorced twice (and blames himself for his first failed marriage). He’s also suffered financial problems that should have seen him bankrupt and peddling on the street because of a bout of full-scale spending. After Mair resigned from politics, he was like a “kid out of school.” He and then-wife Patti bought cars and furniture and got involved in bad investments. “I was a bloody fool,” be says, but is quite proud that he didn’t knuckle under when he was financially whipped. Instead, he paid back the several hundreds of thousands of dollars he owed to his creditors. (The experience hasn’t lessened Mair’s fondness for the green stuff. After a few verbal pirouettes, I pinned his annual income at above $200,000 from salary, freelance, and commercial endorsements.)

But, beyond any doubt, the worst moment of Mair’s life was when his 17-year- old daughter, Shawn, was killed in a drinking and driving accident in 1976. Shawn was the drinking driver. Mair still feels the loss and holds himself responsible in some way. He says a lot of people would get behind the wheel after having a few cocktails in those days. He regrets being so casual about it. “I think when I was in my thirties and forties I could have set the kind of example for my daughter – that she wouldn’t have had anything to drink and driven an automobile and gotten herself killed. If I have anything that nags me – I guess it’s that. Everyone’s responsible for their own actions, and if Shawn were alive today, I’m sure she’d tell me that she was responsible for her own actions, but I think to myself from time to time that I could have done a better job.”

He lowers his head to hide the tears brimming in his eyes, peels off his glasses and tries to rub away the grief. A very deep sadness smothers the dining room like a dense fog. His voice is quiet and broken. “I’m sorry – it kind of sears a little bit.”

Late in the day, Mair takes me to the room in which he does most of his thinking. Usually it’s a disaster, with papers strewn all over, but today, for my sake, Wendy has cleaned it up. It’s here that Mair gets many of his ideas for editorials and columns, a process that he says is instinctive and non-stop. “I have a very strong gut feeling about things that are wrong or don’t seem to be the way they should be, or when I’m getting bullshit, which is most of the time.” Against one wall is a desk with a computer. On the opposite wall is another desk covered with spools of coloured threads and a tall canister of peacock and pheasant feathers where Mair ties his own flies to attach to his considerable collection of fly-fishing rods. Around the room are shelves filled with plenty of books, whose titles confirm that Mair is a dedicated anglophile and history buff (earlier he made a point of showing me his limited-edition china figurine of Winston Churchill). There are old black-and-white photographs on the walls, most of Mair the politician, and a framed collection of caricatures.

At the mention of the eastern media’s negative sketch of him, Mair’s face becomes as animated as the cartoons on the and the air shudders with his criticisms. He believes that central Canadians don’t like to hear that all is not well with the country when they aren’t the ones doing the talking. “It’s people who are used to being the be-all and end-all of power in Canada seeing a threat from British Columbia to their place as the linchpin of confederation of Canada.” His eyes leave me and search the room. Then he slugs a little of his fifth Diet Coke that day (Mair’s a diabetic), looks back with a rugged frown and says with impassioned fury, “If you’re looking for bigotry, strongheadedness, stubbornness, a refusal to look beyond provincial borders, if you’re looking for narrow-mindedness, you’ll find that more in the Ontario attitude! I would grab these people who are criticizing me, by the lapels, shake them and ask, ‘Who is unwilling to bend, who is unwilling to make changes that might take away a little bit of their power?!'” At each question, he shakes his outstretched arms as though he has got handfuls of somebody’s jacket.

He is particularly incensed by the attitude embodied in what he calls “the Toronto Globe and Mail.” “The Globe has got this notion that they are on a mandate or some sort of crusade to be the heart and soul of Canada, and they’re not. They’re a fucking Toronto newspaper! There’s a lot of things in it I read because I know it’s well reported, but if that’s Canada’s best newspaper God help us!”

He says, “Canada’s national newspaper” to himself and snorts. “When they stop saying ‘out in Vancouver,’ then I’ll know that perhaps they’re becoming a national newspaper.”

What happens, Mair says, when you have the opinion makers and mandates controlled by a very small group of people (such as Thomson Newspapers Corporation and Southam Inc.) is censorship of the nation’s news. Consequently, he believes the media in general is out of step with feelings of the Canadian public (as demonstrated by the media’s “yes” stand on the Charlottetown Accord) and the needs of the country. “The institutions of Canada [specifically government] have never been adequately examined by the media, and aren’t to this day, when it should be as plain as the nose on your face that that’s the reason we’ve got a hell of a lot of the problems we have!” He slants the coaster he’s been toying with on the table and throws his hands up in the air.

Neither censored nor complacent, Mair is better at connecting with, and reflecting, the public’s frustrations. He says, “I certainly think my own ability to interpret events has been enhanced by having met payrolls, having been in the real world, having known what it was like not to have paycheques come in and living by my wits, having seen how government works, not just from the legislature but behind closed doors, and seen how the justice system works.” If he were to find someone to replace him at the mike, he would look for a 35-year-old lawyer, preferably female, who’s been in a small practice and done some politics. By their trade, he says, lawyers have to deal with “a broad base of human happenings.” It is the fuel that gives Mair his fire.

A sinking sun behind a thick quilt of clouds made the room gray quickly. It was getting late, so I started packing my writer’s tools. Mair got up, said he’d meet me downstairs and disappeared somewhere in the house. After I snapped the last latch on my bag, I stood stunned for a minute, overwhelmed by a feeling of utter ignorance. For about three months, I had a genuine dislike of Mair because of my willingness to believe what people, so far from this coast, had told me. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything Mair says, but I realized I’d personified everything he told me he hated about the east and the country. I’d made quick, uninformed judgments. I wasn’t paying attention. But I’ve finally tuned in. Now I can respectfully say this audience is listening.

On its cover, a colour police mug shot of ex-football hero O.J Simpson was darkened using a technology called digital imaging. The art director and managing editor would have preferred to run a piece of art, but they didn’t have time to commission a painting. The O.J. story broke on a Friday, Time got the mug shot on Saturday, and its deadline was Sunday. “So they went to one of their guys who does Photoshop work,” explains senior editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt. “When [the digital manipulation] came in, they didn’t like how dark it was and actually tried to lighten it. When it came back lightened, they said, ‘Well, that’s better than what we saw before.”‘

But it wasn’t good enough. The artistic treatment of the photo brought on charges of racism and called into question the use of digital imaging by the media. Dorothy Butler Gilliam, president of the U.S. National Association of Black Journalists, stated a week later in Maclean’s magazine, “The cover appeared to be a conscious effort to make Simpson look evil and macabre, to sway the opinion of the reader to becoming fixated on his guilt.” Elmer-DeWitt says hundreds of negative messages were posted on the computer network America Online, after a Time staffer raised the question, “What did you think of [the cover]?”

James Colton, director of photography at Newsweek , thought the decision to manipulate the O.J. mug shot was a bad one. That same week, Newsweek had run the identical mug shot on its cover. The difference was, it hadn’t been manipulated. “Since they were side by side on the newsstands, it caused a lot more second glances,” he says. “People began asking, ‘This is the same picture, how could that be?”‘

A picture was once considered a snapshot of time. Viewers believed what they were seeing was an accurate representation of an event that occurred at a certain moment in history. Though often skeptical of the truth in print, the public had no reason to question photographs. The fact is, newspapers and magazines have always changed pictures. Events can be staged and photographs retouched or cropped so that they bear little resemblance to the original. Even the choice of lens, lighting or angle at which the photographer stands can alter the final result.

But with digital imaging, pictures can be shaded, rotated or melded with synthetic images, colours can be added or subtracted, and people moved or removed, all with a relatively inexpensive desktop publishing system. Most important, the mariipulation of images is undetectable to all but the highly trained eye, and it takes a fraction of the time and effort that traditional darkroom techniques require. The capacity to manipulate mav have always existed, but never with such range, speed, accessibility and ease.

Manipulation can be done so well, says Adrian Oosterman, a photographer at Electronic Photo Studio (EPS) in Toronto, “I could take a picture of you, change the colour of your eyes, the shape of your face, and only someone who knew you would know it was a manipulation.” So the issue becomes one of believability. When is it acceptable to digitally manipulate an image and when does it constitute an abuse of readers’ trust? Ross Mutton, the director of instructional media services at Carleton University in Ottawa, says it is the responsibility of journalists not only to accurately report the comments and ideas of those people being interviewed, but to ensure “that images are not altered digitally, resulting in a meaning or impression that is not based on reality.”

But the media cannot always predict what impression readers will form. Time thought it was creating an impression of reality – the tragedy of an American hero – but it was interpreted as a slur. Managing editor Jim Gaines had to admit in the following issue of Time (see sidebar, page 56) that “…altering news pictures is a risky practice, since only documentary authority makes photography of any value in the practice of journalism.”

There are a number of photographic and media organizations in the U.S. that could have advised Gaines of this. The New York-based American Society of Media Photographers maintains that any photograph used in a news context cannot be altered in any way. The National Press Photographers Association says, “As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy; therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public.” And the Associated Press (AP) has a firm code of ethics that states, “The content of a photograph will never be changed or manipulated in any way.”

Canada lags behind its American counterparts in officially recognizing the dangers of digital manipulation. While the Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators in Communications (CAPIC) is considering regulations on the use of the technology, nothing has been officially hammered out. But CAPIC national president Brian Greer recognizes that, on occasion, the ethics of digital manipulation have fallen prey to enthusiasm for its possibilities, a situation he compares to advances in scientific technology. “We’re probably going to have a pretty good idea of how to make somebody with four arms who’s four-foot-three before we spend a lot of time thinking about whether we should or not,” he says. “And that’s kind of what’s happened with visual technology. It’s become ‘boy, look what we can do’ [as opposed to ‘should we?’].”

So far, nothing remotely close to the O.J. manipulation has occurred in the Canadian media – and if they’re to be believed, it won’t. Maclean’s photo editor Peter Bregg says that, to some degree, the industry polices itself. “I know if I did something, if I covered an event and it looked very different in the magazine from what the other photographers saw, they’d be on the phone and they’d be writing editorials.”

But a photographer isn’t always in the company of witnesses, which is why editors must be on the alert for digital abuse. Tim Clark, special projects editor of pictures at The Canadian Press (CP), says, “The only manipulation we allow here is the removal of hairs that might be on a negative, a scratch, a piece of dust or imperfections on a negative surface. We don’t allow people to manipulate any part of the image, to move anything or remove anything from the image.”

Despite the fact CP receives 400 to 500 photos a day, Clark is not the least bit concerned that a digitally manipulated one might slip through the cracks. Every photo is thoroughly examined, and if someone sees something questionable, it gets stopped immediately. From there, it can be looked at pixel by pixel – which are the basic elements (or dots) that compose a digitally stored image. By zooming in closer and closer, experts can see if images have been broken up by the movement or elimination of parts of the photograph.

Clark says in the last year, he can’t recall a single picture that was stopped because it had been manipulated. “Unless it’s a picture that’s been worked on for days, nobody has time to modify a news picture,” he explains. “I think any news service in the world that’s competitive has not got the time, nor the manpower, nor the inclination to manipulate a picture.”

But it happens. Several years ago, Clark says CP was fooled when it unknowingly released a manipulated picture over the wire. A newspaper in Philadelphia had photographed a Nobel Prize winner sitting at his desk, with a can of Diet Coke in front of him. Before publishing the photo, the newspaper removed the pop can, Clark says, “because the art director thought it cluttered the picture.”

AP picked up the picture electronically and transmitted it around the world. And it got past the strict and watchful eye of CP. The manipulation didn’t hurt the scientist’s reputation, but it changed reality. Nobody noticed.

As long as somebody with the scruples of Clark is in charge, such deception is unlikely to reoccur. For him, the ethical line is simple: “You owe a responsibility to the person looking at the picture to show them the reality of the situation. Your primary task [as a news photo service] is to send out a picture that is easy for a newspaper to reproduce and easy for the viewer to understand.”

When he finds himself going too far in retouching a photo, he knows it’s time to back off and say,I can’t do this.” He’ll ditch the picture or run it unaltered.

But as we’ve witnessed with a large, supposedly responsible news organization like Time, adhering to that philosophy isn’t always so easy. Especially for media managers who see digital manipulation as a creative tool, one with which they can editorialize. Once we go into the realm of commentary and the definition of consent, the ethical issues begin to blur. As well, the rights of both the manipulator and the manipulated raise some interesting legal questions.

Alan Shanoff, a Toronto media lawyer whose clients include The Toronto Sunand The Financial Post, says if a publication manipulates a photo without the subject’s consent, and the subject sues for defamation, the publication will need to prove that the manipulated photograph is an expression of opinion. “If so,” Shanoff asks, “was it based upon something of public interest or concern, was it made in good faith that it was without malice, and are there some underlying facts that could support it?”

In the case of the O.J. cover, Toronto arts and media lawyer Aaron Milrad says, “You can get away with [this] in the U.S. because he’s a public figure, unless it’s done deliberately with malice.” But in Canada, he adds, if you take someone and show them looking sinister, it may be a libel – even if they are a public figure.

In a much less dramatic way, Saturday Night magazine created a visual commentary when it manipulated photographs at the expense of three subjects in its March 1992 issue. To illustrate an article on the political speech writers for Brian Mulroney, Audrey McLaughlin and Jean Chrétien, the magazine photographed each writer, then without their knowledge, digitally placed puppets of the respective politicians on their laps. The writers were portrayed as ventriloquists and their bosses as simply mouthpieces.

It caused a minor stir at the time because at least one of the speech writers objected to the manipulation. “I spent 45 minutes with your photographer,” Walter Kinsella wrote in the June issue. “At no time did he tell me that he intended to alter the resulting photograph to include a very unflattering caricature of my boss, Jean Chr?tien, squatting on my knee. You may call that artistic licence. I call it unethical photojournalism.”

But art director Carmen Dunjko thinks it was an example of fair comment. “In this situation, the joke is in fact on the bosses, the people they are working for,” she says. “Politically, one would want to object to that’ ” But from a personal point of view, she thinks “no one was left without a laugh.”

In a legal context, the photographs are an expression of opinion, so long as the speech writers don’t look foolish. However, no one asked the subjects for their opinion or their permission, and Doug Bennet, editor of the industry magazine Masthead, has a problem with that. “I think if you are arranging a photo shoot with someone and you know you’re going to use this photo in some way where it’s going to be digitally manipulated, and the subject doesn’t know it, that would cross the line for me.” In the case of Saturday Night, he thinks “the subjects were misled.”

Neither Bennet nor Dunjko thinks that readers were misled because the final image was so obviously a piece of art. The public is much more visually literate than it has ever been, says Dunjko. As a result, she thinks there is no reason to fear the technology – readers should be able to spot an altered photo.

This is certainly true of gross manipulations such as the October 1994 cover of The Financial Post Magazine. U.S. Senator Max Baucus is pictured standing in a wheat field, an American flag draped over one shoulder, a gun in the opposite hand, and a head swelled out of proportion. In this case, the digital manipulation is no different than illustrative caricature, and cannot be mistaken as anything else. Art director David Woodside says, “I would not do this without making sure you could understand [a photo] was obviously manipulated or a joke.”

The joke is over when the manipulation is too subtle to be recognized as artistic fabrication. Although darkened and shadowy, the O.J. image still looked like O.J. The average reader had to turn to the table of contents to discover – by the editors’ admission – it was the work of photo maripulation.

It wasn’t the first time the magazine had used (or misused) the technology. Senior editor Elmer-DeWitt says Time’s policy is always to inform readers of any photographic manipulation. That’s also the policy at The Toronto Sun. It manipulates photos for “lifestyle, illustrative stuff,” says director of photography Hugh Wesley. “But when we do, we always mark on it ‘photographic manipulation,’ or ‘photo art’ or ‘photo assemblage.’We make sure people know we’ve done it.” But by the time readers see the photo credit, an impression has been made. Does it really matter that for a few moments; they think former Toronto mayor June Rowlands and ex-police chief Bill McCormack are embracing on the cover of eye weekly? Or that Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan appear to be skating close together on the front page of New York Newsday? Yes, if with each instance of”harmless” deception, readers’ trust erodes a little more.

CP’s Clark does not have a lot of respect for the art directors who create such scenes, calling them “the chief protagonists” of manipulation. “The art director is the guy who really doesn’t have a lot to do with photos,” he says, “but when it comes time to designing that Sunday page or special lifestyle section – when he has four, five, six days to work on it – he or she will most likely want to do some kind of manipulation. I like good newspaper design, but people who want to do that sort of thing to achieve better design are cheating the reader.”

Still, acknowledging the manipulation is better than concealing it, which is why CAPIC’s digital technology committee is “looking at the possibility that photographs should be identified as manipulated images,” says Brian Greer. “Part of the reason for that would be so photography can retain a sense of reality or truth.” If the committee can reach agreement, he adds, its policy decisions would probably be recommended to the Canadian government. “Our first step, of course, would be to encourage its use in the media.”

In the U.S., where potential abuse of digital manipulation by the media is taken very seriously, identification is of utmost importance. At New York University, the Committee for New Standards for Photographic Reproduction in the Media has drawn up a proposal that an icon be placed outside the bottom perimeter of any image published in the media “where significant manipulations have occurred ‘ ” The symbol, a square with a circle inside and a diagonal slash across it, would stand for “not a lens,” alerting readers that they are not seeing exactly what is in front of the camera. The proposal states, “The use of the icon would be required when any alteration of the photograph occurs that goes beyond accepted conventional darkroom techniques.”

But part of the problem Canada’s CAPIC has in making guidelines “is that you can’t make them on things that are so flexible, so diverse,” says Toronto chapter member Adrian Oosterman. “In a way, it’s like telling a painter he can only use three colours, and not mix any of them.” He sees no reason why photos should be labeled as being manipulated “unless we’re talking about a news item. In that case, I think you have to stay away front any kind of skewing of the picture because that’s an integrity issue.”

Only once has the Sun altered a news photo, says Hugh Wesley – and he considered it a mistake. In a shot of a float in the local Santa Claus parade last November, a hydro pole in the background looked as if it was going through someone’s mouth. So a photo editor took the pole out. It was harmless manipulation, but on learning of it, Wesley expressed his “distress.” Everybody, he says, including the editor who did it, realized they would never do it again.

But Frank O’Connor, president of the Eastern Canadian News Photographers Association, likens the use of digital manipulation to a schoolyard fight. “The first one is devastating, but they get easier to get involved in after that,” he says. “If we allow it to happen and don’t challenge it, then yes, it can be a real problem.”

O’Connor thinks education should be the primary focus. “We’re very visually sophisticated now and along with that sophistication comes a dark side,” he explains. “I think it has to start early on at colleges and universities – and have it instilled in people coming into the work force – that manipulation won’t be tolerated.”

Perhaps because the Sun’s Wesley is confident ofhis own ethical standards and that of his staff, he maintains that fears of digital abuse by the media have been blown way out of proportion. “There’s a hot debate in the States about this and they’re all worried about it,” he says. “It’s one of their pet things and they harp and harp. But really, I think it’s a dead duck issue now.”

One of the “harping” Americans thinks this sort of attitude is naive. Newsweek’s James Colton provides a hypothetical example of a manipulation that might upset Canadians. He suggests that Wayne Gretzky placed in a compromising position in a photograph and slapped on the front page of a newspaper would likely cause a major outcry. “Forgive me for picking out a hockey subject,” Colton says, “but if you get something that is of interest to a particular audience that causes some eyebrows to be raised, yes, I think it will in fact hit home as much as [the Time cover] did here in the States ‘ “

The question is whether a newsmagazine in Canada would take the liberties that Time did, and alter the content and integrity of a news photograph. “I can’t say yes or no,” says Maclean’s Peter Bregg. “It hasn’t happened. We haven’t needed to.” When “need” drives a publication to use digital manipulation, then we have cause for concern.