Something just didn’t look right. Veronica Cusack, then chief of research for Toronto Life magazine, pored over a research document for the story she was checking. The writer had accused an organization of falsely claiming to be a registered charity. A strong declaration. Proof? A photocopy of a government form with a number on it. Since the organization was not a charity, no number should have been filled in, yet there it was in black ink. “But when I looked at the photocopy,” Cusack said, “the type of the number on that line was totally different than the type on the rest of the form. It looked very strange.” It bothered her enough to go down to the government office to have a look at the original document. The difference of the type was even more apparent on the original. When she asked a government official about the number, he said, “Oh that’s just the stamp that gives each form a number when it comes through the office.” The office stamp had randomly landed on this very important area.

When Cusack returned to the offices of Toronto Life she sat down with the editor and the writer to go over changes to the story. She told the writer about the mistaken number. “I was fully expecting her to say, ‘Oh my goodness, what a silly mistake.’ Instead, the writer said, ‘No, what I’m saying is that there is a number on that line, and they are not a charity. Let the reader take whatever they can from that.'” Cusack was stunned, since the writer was reputed to be a crackerjack investigative journalist. “She wanted to give the absolute fact, the fact that there is a number on that line. But the implication, what the reader would infer, was completely wrong.” Cusack held her ground and finally, under strong protest from the writer, the section was removed from the story.

Fact checking certainly doesn’t always expose such crucial mistakes. Indeed, since its inception 71 years ago at The New Yorker, fact checking has drawn both praise and ridicule: criticized as pedantic and picayune, exalted for preserving many a magazine’s reputation and for saving many a writer’s bacon.

Magazines have always distinguished themselves from the rest of the media as being more evaluative, more thoughtful. Even critics of fact checking can’t dispute that it helps ensure accuracy. Increasingly, though, many magazines across the continent seem less willing to dish out the dollars to make sure what they publish is right.

Undoubtedly, dollars are more scarce. The recession of the early ’90s tore through magazine editorial departments across the country, tossing out editors, writers and researchers. But the destruction wasn’t haphazard. Cuts often started at the bottom, where the fact checkers live.

Like all things Canadian, the shift away from fact checking-a historically undervalued institution-has been subtle. Newsmagazines have telescoped their production schedules in an attempt to be more current, which leaves less time to properly fact check the copy. And many general-interest magazines now rely on interns, generally unpaid or poorly paid, and the small and slowly depleting pool of experienced freelance researchers. It’s difficult to assess the exact extent of the damage, but damage there is. At most magazines the fact checking bill is rolled into the freelance or production budget along with copy editing, page production and research. And staff checkers often have more than one duty. But it is clear that fact checking is allotted less time than it was a decade ago and is becoming less an integral part of the everyday operation of the general-interest magazine-despite an increasingly litigious environment and a public justifiably suspicious of journalism.

Small wonder they’re suspicious. Last year several high-profile American journalists were exposed for bogus journalism: Patricia Smith of The Boston Globe for fabricating sources; two CNN producers for airing information without verifying its authenticity; and the now-infamous Steven Glass for his spectacular deception. The formerNew Republic starstaffer made up part or all of 27 stories before he was caught, sending other magazines he’d written for-George, Rolling Stone, Harper’s and Policy Review-scrambling to recheck or perhaps properly check his articles. Most recently a prize-winning British documentary on heroin smuggling aired on the CBS show 60 Minutes, was denounced as a complete fake.

Despite all this, many U.S. magazines are drastically cutting back on fact checking staff-and expecting reporters to verify their own stories. The 1997 July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review reported that Newsweek, Time and Fortune have virtually eliminated the practice, and Vogue as well as the Village Voice are “relaxing standards, relying more on ‘author checks,’ or leaving large amounts of copy unchecked.”

Cuts to fact checking staff at Canadian magazines haven’t been quite so drastic. Still, they are fraying the fabric of a critical element of magazine reporting. In 1989, Canadian Business was a monthly magazine with five full-time fact checkers. Now it publishes twice monthly-each issue is slightly smaller but that still means editorial copy has nearly doubled-and as of late February, employs three part-time checkers. Pat Ireland, who has been fact checking and copy editing since the mid-1960s, almost quit because of this shift.

In September 1997, when CB first doubled its production schedule, checkers were told to only verify titles, dates and company names. “They had this really stupid idea,” Ireland says. “The editors would supposedly go over what needed checking and they’d mark it for you. Well, they never did, and editors, in my experience, don’t have any idea of what should be checked. You check everything. You never know what you’re leaving out.” The new system, which resembled copy editing more than fact checking, didn’t work. Within weeks Ireland and the other researchers reverted to the old system of checking as many facts as they could, in descending order of importance, in the time they had.

But the time they have has been significantly reduced. Before CB went twice monthly in September 1997, Ireland would have three or four days to check a major story. Now she has one. Jasmine Miller, who left the managing editor job in March, said before she left, the days of checking every single fact, like whether or not the subject of a story owns a blue-and-white seersucker suit, are over: “We just don’t have time for that anymore.” In spite of this reduction, checkers are still held responsible for any errors that make it into the magazine.

Maclean Hunter Publishing Ltd., CB’s parent, tried implementing the same type of cursory check in 1992 atMaclean’s. Checkers were told to “light check” the most experienced writers, the assumption being that only inexperienced writers make mistakes. “They wanted to speed up the process with fewer people on the staff,” says Julie Cazzin, who’s been a staff researcher at Maclean’s for nine years. The experiment was scrapped: writers were spending too much time checking their own stories and the checkers like Cazzin didn’t feel confident with the process.

Still, things didn’t return to the status quo. Nine years ago Maclean’s employed eight full-time researchers. Now there are four plus the head of the department-who also does some checking-yet the book size hasn’t decreased. “When it comes to paying for [fact checking],” says Cazzin, “it’s one of the first things to go. I think we’re finding now that it’s not a good idea because once you start having a lot of mistakes it really does reflect on the publication.” Freelancers are brought in most Fridays during production time, but they are expected to check three or four stories of varying length before the magazine closes Friday night. Managing editor Geoffrey Stevens says checkers weren’t singled out-the magazine has fewer writers and editors now as well.

Chatelaine, too, has greatly reduced checking. In mid-October ’98 it introduced what chief copy editor Deborah Aldcorn calls “a more common-sense approach to fact checking.” Chatelaine‘s checking system used to be extremely rigid, she says. Every single fact of every story was checked off. To save time, not money, she insists, checkers are now instructed not to check things they already know. What does this mean? “It’s just things that anybody would consider they know personally, or they’re in the air. I know how to spell Vancouver, so I’m not going to check that. I’ve had people come up to me in the office and say, ‘Do you remember a certain television program? Was this person in it?’ And if I do, it’s confirmed. Historic facts, like I know Confederation occurred in 1867, I’m not going to go to a historical reference book so I can cite a page, but there was a time when people would have done that.” Brenda Spiering, a former checker now writing and editing, occasionally checks for Chatelaine. She says Aldcorn is going to have to be “really, really careful, because I don’t know how many times I thought I knew something absolutely and then I’ve been proved wrong.”

At Saturday Night, Geri Savits-Fine, a checker there for 17 years, remembers when everything changed. It was at a Christmas party shortly after Ken Whyte, now editor of the National Post, took over as editor in 1994. Under his predecessors, John Fraser and Robert Fulford, Saturday Night fact checkers were considered part of the editorial team. Although they weren’t technically staff they often worked in the offices and sat in on some editorial meetings. Savits-Fine was shocked when one of the senior editors approached her at the party and mentioned what a shame it was that the fact checking budget was going to be cut in half. “The other editors weren’t happy about it, but I guess the magazine was bleeding and they had to cut somewhere, so they cut us. They had the interns there anyway to do the smaller pieces. I always had the sense that Whyte didn’t value it.”

Considering Whyte’s background as a newspaperman, it’s not surprising that he was dubious about the fact-checking process. Stevie Cameron, author and former Globe and Mail columnist who is now the editor of Elm Street magazine, says she too was skeptical of fact checking at first, believing that writers should be responsible for verifying their own stories. But two and a half years at the magazine have changed her mind. She’s seen fact checking expose innocent mistakes, shoddy reporting and plagiarism.

Toronto Life has always considered fact checking vital to its credibility, but it too has changed its system. In the past few years it’s lost in-house staff to attrition, and chief of copy editing and research Cynthia Brouse decided not to replace them. Brouse calls on a roster of about 10 freelance checkers and gives the shorter pieces to two unpaid interns. She considers the new system a mixed blessing. It’s advantageous for two reasons. First, because space is at a premium in the magazine’s small Front Street offices, and freelancers work from home; and second, because most stories come in at the same time and this way she can easily assign six or seven pieces at once. But Brouse also acknowledges the new system’s disadvantages. “If someone were to start fact checking right out of the game without ever having worked at a magazine, there are just certain things that she doesn’t know about how a magazine works, and she’s not going to learn them sitting in her kitchen.” For fact checkers to be effectual there must be considerable communication with editors, which is difficult by phone, fax or e-mail.

For the checkers, working from home has another downside. The job has always been a way for young writers or aspiring editors to break into the magazine industry. Whereas once they had the opportunity to establish relationships with editors, who might spot their talents, now they have less chance of making those contacts. Working more closely with editors also helped checkers learn to verify not only the facts, but whether the facts support the sense of the story.

Depth of checking varies from magazine to magazine, but generally researchers try to verify every fact with an original source: by phoning the subjects of the stories, listening to tapes, reading through transcripts and consulting reference books. David Zimmer, editor of Cottage Life, says checkers at his magazine often cross-check the service pieces with two unrelated sources. “When you’re giving people advice on how best to do things and you get it wrong, you hear about it immediately. I can’t see how you can put out a decent magazine without fact checking. It’s the one thing that makes it different from a newspaper or TV. Magazines are one of the last bastions of journalism where you can get the straight dope, and really trust what you read.”

Newspapers, with their furious deadlines, offer a revealing glimpse of the volume of errors that can slip through when no one is double-checking facts. TorontoStar Ombud Don Sellar says theStar publishes 500 to 600 corrections every year and those are only the mistakes that are caught. Sellar says he can think of hundreds of examples where fact checking could have prevented serious errors: of the several dozen libel notices filed every year, for example, more often than not the complaint is about an inaccuracy. But newspapers simply don’t have time to verify every fact. Stories are sifted through several editors in a very short time before going to print. These editors are responsible for spotting inconsistencies or possible errors. Then they check back with the reporter to “verify” those points. Time allows only for a kind of cursory check that would never be considered sufficient by a properly trained magazine checker. When a mistake slips by the newspaper’s various editors, a speedy correction and apology often satisfies the injured party.

When these measures don’t pacify the injured, the value of fact checking-in hard dollars-is evident. On January 17, 1997, an Ontario Court general division judge ordered theStar to pay $25,000 to Niagara Falls lawyer Guy Ungaro for libel. Ungaro sued theStar, publisher John Honderich, managing editor Lou Clancy, former Sunday editor Ellie Tesher and reporter Judy Steed for over $2 million for ruining his professional reputation in a September 4, 1994, front-page article (“An Angry Dad Takes on a Strip Club”), which stated, “Ungaro’s dubious claim to fame is that he was one of the first lawyers in Ontario to be sued successfully for negligence, poor courtroom performance and inept defense of a client.”

It turned out that it was Ungaro’s associate-not Ungaro-who had been accused, but never found guilty, of poor courtroom performance. Five days after the story ran, theStar published a 39-word correction on page A2, which Mr. Justice John Cavarzan said repeated the libel. He reprimanded Steed for not speaking to Ungaro and for failing to check the public record, and chided theStar for not talking to Ungaro before publishing the inadequate correction. The Star reported on January 18, 1997, that Cavarzan dismissed the newspaper’s explanation that mistakes are inevitable “because the newsroom is as big as a football field.” Instead, the error suggested “the need for special procedures to guard against such mistakes.”

Cavarzan’s position notwithstanding, some see fact checking as an unnecessary expense. In their view, fact checking is too picky, too concerned with inconsequential details, too literal-minded. Writer and editor James Chatto remembers a story he wrote for enRoute magazine in which he described a ridiculously expensive bottle of German wine-costly only because of its hand-printed lithograph label-gathering dust in an LCBO store. The fact checker, who was meticulous to the extreme, informed him that the bottle couldn’t possibly be gathering dust since it was locked in a glass cabinet in the liquor store. The notion that “gathering dust” was an apt metaphor completely escaped her. “It seemed cruel to do anything but agree with her,” says Chatto. Still, the editor kept the phrase in.

How far is too far? When does the pursuit of accuracy simply become absurd? Eileen Whitfield, now an associate editor at Toronto Life, says a person could theoretically spend an entire lifetime checking one story. She once spent a full day calling the White House media office, the State Department and the Pentagon, trying to find out the name of President Reagan’s dog. In the end, the name wasn’t even included in the piece. Pat Ireland, who worked at Toronto Life with Dusty Mortimer-Maddox in the mid-’80s, was stunned to hear the New Yorker-trained fact checker spend three days on the phone-even calling Austria-trying to determine whether loden coats were actually brushed with a thistle.

Perhaps what justifies such seemingly inane pursuits is the importance of credibility. Get one small detail wrong and all the reporting is thrown into question. “I can’t tell you how many letters to the editor I’ve seen saying, ‘This story is bullshit from stem to stern, you couldn’t have fact checked it,'” says Brouse. “It may have been that their ceiling really wasn’t eight feet high or their niece’s eyes are not blue but green. They make it sound like the whole job of reporting was faulty when really there are just two fairly inconsequential facts wrong.”

Magazines, unlike daily newspapers, are a more permanent form of journalism. So when a mistake is made, it can’t be corrected the next day. An issue sits on coffee tables, on nightstands, in offices for sometimes more than a month, reinjuring the magazine’s reputation every time another person picks it up. ConsiderNewsweek‘s “zwieback” incident. In early May 1997, Newsweek recalled several hundred thousand copies of a special issue called “Your Child,” which had already been distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada, because one of its stories incorrectly advised that babies as young as five months can safely feed themselves zwieback biscuits and raw carrot chunks. This mistake occurred roughly six months after the magazine obliterated its fact checking department.

Despite its obvious importance, for severely cash-strapped publications like This Magazine, fact checking is out of the question. This’s former editor, Andrea Curtis, says with an editorial staff of two she had to rely on the integrity of the people who write for the magazine. “People who write for us are not doing it just to turn over a fast buck, they’re doing it because they’re committed to either what we are trying to achieve or the particular subject they are investigating. They may spend a couple of years on something.” This has never been sued, or even seriously threatened, even though it often publishes contentious stories. Mind you, suingThis for a cash settlement would hardly be worth pursuing-the magazine lives significantly below the poverty line.

In Quebec, tight budgets aren’t the reason that magazines don’t use checkers. Jean Par?, president of Maclean Hunter Quebec, publisher and former editor of Montreal-based L’actualit?, says fact checking, as English Canada defines it, doesn’t replace good professional journalism. “Fact checking is not done by a class of tape-listening slaves but done as a team effort by the editor, managing editor and the senior editors.” Like most Quebec magazines (except the French version of Reader’s Digest), which follow the European rather than the American tradition,L’actualit? does not call back sources or systematically check transcripts or tapes.

Par? is defensive when it comes to the subject, and with good reason. In April 1990, the magazine published a biting profile of Pierre P?ladeau, the now-deceased owner of Quebecor Inc. Allegations of anti-Semitism had haunted P?ladeau throughout his career. The author of the story, Jean Blouin, wrote “Est-il antisemite?” (Is he anti-Semitic?) and answered the question with what he claimed were P?ladeau’s own words: “Je suis anti-personne, je suis pro-Qu?b?cois…. J’ai un grand respect pour les juifs, mais ils prennent trop de place. Je veux qu’on aide d’abord nos gens qui en ont bien plus besoin.” (I’m anti-no one, I’m pro-Quebecois. I have a large amount of respect of the Jews, but they take up too much space. I want us to help first of all our people who need it.)

It turned out those weren’t exactly P?ladeau’s words: at least they weren’t the words on the tape-recording of the interview. Par? says Blouin first interviewed P?ladeau without a tape recorder and Par? made him do a second, taped interview. “Of course, P?ladeau had said these things or equivalent, he had repeated them in other publications, on radio, and all that has been recorded. But when the interview was done again, for some reason, probably because [P?ladeau] is prudent as a fox, they were not there and the journalist, who was not a staffer of L’actualit?, lied to me. You understand that we can’t listen to 40 or 45 tapes for each issue; we’re satisfied that it’s there. We discovered [later] that the wording on the tape was different. I wouldn’t say that Pierre P?ladeau didn’t say anything of the sort, but I would say it was different enough that we had to say we had not reported the tape correctly.”

L’actualit? contributing editor H?l?ne de Billy says the incident put a major dent in the magazine’s reputation. “Par? took [Blouin’s] word. Didn’t check it really. It has been a long time, but it has been a big thing forL’actualit?. P?ladeau said he was going to sue. He said he’d have Par?’s head.” After Par? apologized and vowed that Blouin would never again work as a journalist in Quebec, P?ladeau agreed not to sue for libel. Par? insists that the magazine wasn’t severely hurt by the incident. “It damaged my ego, but we’ve not lost circulation, we’ve not lost advertising, we’ve not lost a single word.” L’actualit? hasn’t changed its procedures because Par? maintains that it was an isolated incident.

A checker certainly would have caught the fudged quote. Basically, checking is reporting backwards, deconstructing stories to make certain the foundation is solid. “The fact checker can only make sure that the writer is using real bricks, but you cannot control what house they make out of those bricks,” says Toronto Life‘s Eileen Whitfield.

Sheilagh McEvenue didn’t like the house that John Goddard built. Farley Mowat was a fraud, selling fiction as fact, he said, and he had proof. Saturday Night editors Ken Whyte and Dianne de Gayardon de Fenoyl knew the 1996 piece was highly contentious and put McEvenue, one of their best freelance fact checkers, with almost 15 years’ experience, on the case. McEvenue immersed herself in piles of national archives, Mowat’s own books, interviews, notes and diaries and began to discover small inconsistencies. She came to believe Goddard had a fire in his belly to expose Mowat as a bullshit artist and was ignoring certain facts that weakened his argument. McEvenue told the editors she thought Goddard had an agenda and some of his statements didn’t hold up under scrutiny. The editors listened to her but wanted the story and they wanted it to be strong. “So if he can’t say this exactly, what can he say without being wrong?”

“His thesis was off,” says McEvenue. “In his enthusiasm for proving Mowat a liar he missed a few things that he ought not to have. As it turned out, those things were taken out: he said Mowat never once mentioned his wife in a particular book and he had in a couple of places. He was holding Mowat to a standard of journalistic accuracy, but Mowat never claimed to be a journalist. He said throughout the interviews he was a storyteller above all.”

Even the most experienced checkers today wouldn’t be likely to deconstruct a story quite so thoroughly. Most are freelancers who no longer even share the physical space of an editorial office. And they don’t run departments, save Cynthia Brouse at Toronto Life, which means they aren’t there to teach others, like interns, how to do the job properly. Libel lawyer Julian Porter says that bad fact checking can be worse than not checking at all. “Implied in it is a standard of perfection,” he says, but if the checker didn’t do a thorough job or missed a crucial point, it reflects very poorly on the magazine in court. Effectual checking not only demands meticulousness, it requires subtlety, nuance when asking tough questions. Editors and writers don’t want that hard-earned quote lost because a checker botched it.

Skillful researchers don’t read back quotes verbatim unless specifically asked. Nine times out of 10, sources will try to change a quote even if it doesn’t reflect badly on them. But if sources insist, there isn’t much of a choice. People will plead, cry, cajole and scream if they suspect they’re being portrayed negatively in stories. McEvenue laughs when she remembers the end of one less-than-polite conversation: “What kind of filthy rag is Saturday Night magazine? You are going to have the biggest fucking lawsuit on your hands.”

Lawsuit threats are common at magazines that publish contentious stories, but if the facts are entirely in order they have a solid defence. Since Canadian libel law is still much stricter than it is in the U.S., even idle threats are disconcerting.

It seems astonishing that in such a hot legal climate, so many magazines are devaluing fact checking. Still, not all the news is bad. Just as some of the more established magazines are cutting back on it, or at least pushing it onto the sidelines, some of the newer magazines are embracing it. Elm Street, published eight times a year, has three full-time assistant editors whose main job is checking, and Shiftrecently hired ex-Elm Street checker Neil Morton to establish a formal system in its offices. Even Toronto Life is reassesing its situation: this month it will be hiring a full-time checker. Some Quebec magazine journalists, too, are beginning to question the dearth of fact checking in their tradition. Le 30 magazine, for Quebec journalists, recently ran an article on the subject by freelance journalist Marc Cassivi. Last year the new magazine Brill’s Content emerged south of the border. Its niche? Pointing out mistakes that other news agencies and journalists have made while taking every precaution not to make blunders of its own.

You’d think that in the face of an incredulous public and a litigation-obsessed society, more mags would be moving in that direction. After all, magazines have always billed themselves as an authoritative voice. These days it’s obvious we need one-just to cut through the daily assault of massive information and misinformation: infomercials, instant and unedited internet news and advertising supplements masquerading as editorial content. If magazines do manage to hang on to rigorous fact checking, despite the time and expense involved, they’ll have a fighting chance of providing that voice. Readers, who show an almost filial loyalty to their favourite mags, deserve no less.

Some of the street children of Cusco, Peru, are no more than five or six years old. They congregate in the town?s main square begging, hawking postcards, or visit a shelter where they can get a meal or occupy themselves making art work. In their games the children seem as happy as any, but underneath the playful veneer smoulders a quiet despair, apparent if you get to know them even slightly. A six-year old girl sheds a tear when asked about her father. A seven-year old boy tells of his arrest and imprisonment by the police. A five-year old boy already has a history of glue sniffing.

These images form the heart of the film Growing Up in the South, by Luc Cote and Robbie Hart, two Montrealers with an intensely personal approach to documentary filmmaking. To coincide with the film?s broadcast premier on Radio Quebec, Cote and Hart held an exhibition they organised of the children?s art work in a Montreal gallery, raising $20,000 for the Cusco shelter. Filmmaking for Cote and Hart is an act of intimacy and affection directed at the people they focus on, but that affection extends beyond their films into an ongoing involvement in the lives of their subjects.

In the more than thirty films they have made since 1986, Cote and Hart have sought out hope in the lives of people on the margins and explored solutions to mundane but vital problems. In contrast to the more predictable documentary that focuses on the macropolitics, wars and disasters Cote and Hart’s films are devoted to the micro-where individuals, ordinary and extraordinary, struggle to understand and change their worlds. Even more unusual, in an industry full of part-time filmmakers who often juggle other jobs to finance their films, Cote and Hart?s company Adobe Productions occupies the partners full-time. Their films have been broadcast on the CBC, Radio Canada, TVOntario, Tele-Quebec, PBS in the United States and in more than thirty other countries. And Adobe has won more than thirty awards at such prestigious film festivals as the Columbus International Film and Video Festival, Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and the Japan Prize International Education Contest.

One of the risks in making the kinds of films that Cote and Hart make is of being seen as simplistic and naive in the face of life?s cruel realities. With their six-part >I>Rainmakers series, broadcast in 1997, the accusation has some merit. The series examined the lives of a global melange of young people each working for a cause against formidable circumstances. But in one Rainmakers episode, for instance, how effectively can the drug-dealer-turned-poet alleviate violence in Harlem? Or, in another episode, can one low-caste Hindu woman really make a difference and improve the lot of all women in India? And do such films matter?

Rena Mcleod, a young aboriginal woman in Manitoba who was featured in another Rainmakers episode, says that her experience with Adobe has helped both her and her cause. Mcleod, who works with troubled native youth in Winnipeg, says, “it?s important when people tell positive stories.” And it is particularly important that those stories appear on TV, says Mcleod, because young people are very much influenced by what they see there. While there is an optimism in Cote and Hart?s films, it is rooted in the belief that individuals can make a difference. The name of their series speaks to that belief: a rainmaker in North American aboriginal lore, is a conjurer with extraordinary abilities to move and shape events.

Adobe?s documentaries originate in a spacious but Spartan former flat in a grey-stone turn-of-the-century walkup on Avenue du Parc in the Mile End, Montreal?s most ethnically diverse neighbourhood. Cote and Hart relish the area?s mix of Jewish delis, Vietnamese and Greek restaurants and French pastry cafes, and both live within walking distance of their office.

One or the other of the partners greets the visitor to the office, there is no secretary or receptionist. Two of the former bedrooms are now editing suites. The walls of Adobe?s “boardroom,” formerly the dining area, are decorated with film award plaques. In the front office, shelves hold toys handmade by Peruvian street work story here ers, a soccer ball and an adobe mud block from Honduras, all items that have appeared in Adobe films.

Cote, now 45, and Hart, 39, first became acquainted with each other in October 1985. Hart was completing a master?s degree in international affairs at Columbia University in New York City and looking about for a career. Becoming a filmmaker appealed to him. Although he had never made a film, Hart considered himself, “very knowledgeable about film theoretically and as a journalist.” Already Hart had in mind a film project to shoot in Honduras, which had developed from his experiences living in Central America in the early 1980s. Hart?s roommate suggested that he speak to a friend?Cote?who then had his own production company in New York and had worked at the National Film Board in the 1970s. Hart telephoned and they spoke for two hours about filmmaking and Hart?s project idea. Cote was impressed by Hart?s enthusiasm and they arranged to meet at Cote?s office the next day. “Of course he never came,” laughs Cote, who imagined Hart as someone with big ideas but little initiative. (Hart had been too busy with his thesis.) Three months later, in early January 1986, Cote flew to Montreal with Hart?s roommate. Hart happened to be at the airport and the roommate introduced them. “You?re the one who?s going to Honduras,” Cote said to Hart. “I?ve got news for you, I want to go too.” A few days later, back in New York, they made plans to go to Honduras that year to tackle their first joint film project. Funding for the trip came from a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) grant.

The basis for Hart?s idea was Central American squatter settlements and their political organisation. Seeing Windows, Cote and Hart?s first film, focused on two farming co-operatives working to prevent the people of their communities from fleeing to the squatter settlements that had sprouted up around the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. Seeing Windows examined how the two co-operatives built houses using the adobe mud block, a whitewashed mixture of sun-dried mud, straw, sand and water, creating sturdy clean homes. (An apt symbol of attainable self-help, the name Adobe was perfect for their fledgling production company.) With improved housing and increased farming efficiency, co-operative families are less likely to migrate to the dismal squatter settlements.

Seeing Windows is not a great film narratively or aesthetically, but it is a competent first effort and it delivers its message?that local affordable solutions can be implemented and can effect real change. The film was produced in conjunction with the 1987 United Nations International Year of the Homeless. Earnest and serious, as expected from novices, the film lacks the passionate edge of their more recent work. Cote and Hart?s struggle with learning to work as a team is reflected in Seeing Windows pedestrian nature. “I wanted to make my first film and I wasn?t thinking much beyond that,” says Hart. Moreover, they shot the film without any commitments from broadcasters. It was very much a gamble.

During that first trip the values and objectives of the two partners coalesced into a philosophy that 13 years later still guides their approach to filmmaking. For Hart, those values had developed while he worked as a part-time stringer for Radio Canada International, CBC?s shortwave service, in Central America in the early 1980s. “I was doing stories about Contras, revolutionaries and Sandanistas, the American military,” says Hart. “It was your typical stuff. No one talked about the lives of ordinary people. It?s very difficult to tell a story that has a good news ending. I was determined to tell that type of story.” For Cote, too, those stories were important. “We love people, to be with them, to experience what they experience and to be able to tell simple stories. That?s part of who we are.”

“They were young when starting,” says Jacques Bensimon head of TFO (TVOntario?s French-language affiliate) and a documentary filmmaker himself. “But, what was striking was their almost missionary approach to their work and their respect for the subjects they were treating.” Once back from Honduras, Cote and Hart had no idea if any television networks would be interested in their films. They failed to interest CBC in Seeing Windows although it eventually aired on Radio Quebec, TVOntario and several foreign broadcasters.

Hart and Cote persevered, encouraged by this success, and in 1987 were commissioned by CIDA to produceDu Coeur au Ventre. The film, a mundane, chronological account of 18 Quebecois who volunteered to visit and work with local farmers in Nicaragua for a month, celebrated CIDA?s twentieth anniversary. Then, in 1988 Adobe produced, for Tele Quebec?s “Nord Sud” program, Au Marche des Manchettes, a short film contrasting the professional lives of three foreign journalist in Nicaragua with Hollywood?s version of journalists portrayed in feature films like Salvador and Under Fire. Au Marche des Manchettes tries to dispel the myths surrounding war correspondents. For anyone with an interest in the news and how it is gathered, the film offers insights into the lives of journalists. It shows, for instance, how some “on-location” journalists from the American Networks covered the war from their hotels, getting their news from Washington.

In a Peruvian village in the Amazon basin Yage Prztyk, a Polish-Canadian farmer from Quebec?s Eastern Townships, talks to a group of farmers, descendants of the Incas. Yage is helping the farmers? co-operative market its organically grown coffee in Canada. Several times a year Yage, “the flying farmer,” travels to Peru and treks into the jungle to meet his business partners. To reach the Ashaninka Indians, a primitive and remote tribe who grow some of the co-operative?s coffee, Yage and his local associate, Luis, set out on a two-day cross-country hike. The camera follows the two men hiking up steep hillsides and across a river on a primitive footbridge. This area of Peru is infested with the cocaine mafia and the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas. “The native communities still survive on simple hunting and farming methods and maintain their traditional ways,” says narrator Roy Bonisteel. “Most are tucked away in the Amazon jungle and reached only by small aircraft. Others are virtually inaccessible.” Yage and Luis approach the Ashaninka village and the Indians chant a greeting. Dressed in long coarse cloth tunics, painted faces and bows and arrows, the Ashaninka appear threatening. Later, sitting under a thatched gazebo, Yage and Luis talk business with the Ashaninka.

Off camera, Cote and Hart, had some difficulty with the Ashaninka. “They were not expecting us,” says Hart. “I had to negotiate with the tribal chief, for permission to film them.” Sitting in a hut with two interpreters, Hart and the chief finally agreed on terms; a case of canned tuna would be sent to Ashaninka. “Transactions like that are normal in the more remote corners of the world,” says Cote. “Filming the Touareg in Niger meant constantly having on hand a supply of tea and sugar.” A quirky film, mostly because of the incongruous Yage?a chain-smoker promoting organic farming to Amazonian Indians?The Flying Farmer is intriguing, despite having to fit into the constraints of a 30-minute format. The Flying Farmer?s prime-time broadcast on CBC?s “Man Alive” in 1989 was a big break for Cote and Hart. It was the largest audience of an Adobe film to date. The film fits neatly into Cote and Hart?s philosophy and goals. Self-sufficiency based on local resources and the spirit of solidarity between Canada and the Third World engrossed them. Cote and Hart felt that the strong central character of Yage with his humanist message would appeal to the “Man Alive” audience.

Also in 1989, Adobe produced Villa El Salvador – A Desert Dream, the story of a squatter settlement of 300,000 people on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Astonishingly, Villa El Salvador has the highest literacy rate in Peru and one of the most effective municipal structures in South America. Adobe?s film demonstrated the importance of grassroots organisation?people working in unison toward common goals. Two other 1989 films,The Cusco Kids and Growing Up In the South, examined the day-to-day lives of eight Peruvian street children. The 1993 film When the Circus Came to Town looked at two groups of street kids, in Rio de Janeiro and in Montreal, working with artists from Cirque du Soleil. “We knew when we started that this was an Adobe film,” says Cote. “But that it was a new way to do it through the circus.” The parallels between street kids in Rio and Montreal are striking and the idea of the circus as educational tool intriguing. With this film, Cote and Hart aimed to reach youth audiences in Canada and abroad, wanting to dispel any romantic illusions of street life. All of the kids in the film, both in Rio and Montreal, are on the street because of abusive or broken homes. Some openly yearn for a normal family life.

To date, Cote and Hart?s most ambitious projects, in terms of scope and logistics, have been two series: the eight-part Turning 16 which examined the values and concerns of 16-year-olds around the world and aired in 1994, and the six-part Rainmakers. Both series were largely well received by reviewers and the public, winning film festival awards. One Turning 16 episode set in Thailand won the prestigious Japan Prize. Cote and Hart are currently working on seven new Rainmakers episodes to be broadcast in late 1999 on CBC and TFO.

Regardless of their success, Cote and Hart claim not to follow any specific cinematic movement. “From the beginning we tried to have a different look from the NFB films with their talking heads,” says Cote. But is there a unique look and feel to Adobe films? “I can?t remember a moment or sequence in their films that made me sit back and say this is a totally new way of looking at things,” says Mike Boone, television reviewer with The Gazette in Montreal. Boone is careful not to criticize too strongly. “I don?t think they?re innovators, but, at the same time I don?t think they?re making films like anything else I have ever seen. I don?t think they have a lot of style.”

Henry Mietkiewicz, television critic at The Toronto Star, says that in the Rainmakers series and When the Circus Came to Town, Cote and Hart leave several unanswered questions regarding the characters? lives and the issues surrounding them. “Filmmakers tend to get carried away by the fact that they are working in a visual medium,” says Mietkiewicz, “and not enough time is spent satisfying basic journalistic requirements.” Cote and Hart respond by pointing out that they are not engaging in journalism. “We let the characters narrate the story,” explains Hart. “We don?t go for a lot of talking heads. The only characters speaking on camera are the protagonists, the rest is live action.” Half-hour time slots (imposed by TV requirements) do not allow for much room to flesh out an individual?s character and passions, and still present a sketch of the issues. And in films dealing with obscure individuals it is essential to draw in viewers, especially the targeted stimulus-craving youth audience. “We thought a half-hour time slot with its faster pace is more dynamic and easier to reach them,” explains Cote. “We made a choice to do a certain type of film. Some of the more traditional investigative school tend to be more critical.”

Critically successful or not, Adobe?s films, like all documentaries, are the result of a complex and intricate process. After researching an idea, filmmakers must sell it to the television networks. Once a network (or networks) is committed to broadcast, the filmmaker receives a licence or contract, and, more importantly partial fund- ing. Andre Champagne, creative head of youth programming at TFO and a co- production partner on the second set of Rainmakers episodes, says that Cote and Hart are, “tough negotiators. Even though they?re dealing with emotional subjects, they?re shrewd businessmen.” Obtaining that initial financial commitment?between ten and 15 per cent of the film?s budget?triggers access to other sources of funding such as CIDA, Telefilm Canada and the Cable Production Fund. Finally, provincial and federal tax credits top up a film?s finances. “It?s an incredible challenge to go through all these different phases,” says Hart. The whole process can take months, even years. One Turning 16 episode took two years from idea to broadcast. “Robbie and Luc have a good reputation so they?re able to put together these arrangements successfully,” says Jerry Mackintosh, senior producer at CBC?s Newsworld. The Turning 16 series, for instance, was broadcast in thirty countries.

In between projects, money generated from previous films carries Cote and Hart through. They have deliberately remained a small business, “a cottage industry,” as Hart calls it. Cote adds, “we don?t want to be a big company. We want to do our own films.” To minimize costs, they hire technicians on a project-by-project basis. On location they keep the film crew to the bare essentials, one or the other of the two partners as director, plus a cameraman and soundman.

When they first started out, Cote and Hart co-directed but six years ago that changed. “We have a different vision of things on a creative level,” says Cote. “Our approaches to filmmaking are not exactly the same, and when we co-directed there were always concessions to the other.” Nevertheless, each of their films is joint effort?Hart undertakes most of the writing, while Cote?s forte is in the editing suite. Their different roles do not stop there, the partners have distinctly different views about the importance of journalism in documentary films. For Cote, the expression of opinions is intrinsic to the process of filmmaking. “I?m a filmmaker with a point of view,” says Cote, “not necessarily with a rigorous journalistic approach. I have a feeling, I have a story that I want to tell.” Hart agrees but is careful to add that the journalistic approach does play a part in their films. “There?s a big part of me that is a journalist,” says Hart, “that?s looking, listening and asking questions. The end product may not be a pure journalistic story but there are a lot of journalistic skills involved.”

In a Rio de Janeiro courtyard a group of boys, mostly teenagers, shout and roughhouse. The boys, street kids, barefoot and stripped to the waist, look lean and muscular with close cropped hair. Three long-haired men, circus instructors, struggle to control the boys and teach them some circus skills. Sixteen-year old Cosme pauses long enough to speak to the camera. “I?ve been living in the street since I was six years old. My mother also lived with me in the street. My father drank and I helped my mother. Sometimes I returned home, but I found living in the street better. I managed all alone. I thought that I didn?t need anyone?s help and I could do whatever I wanted.” Another boy, eyes in a stoned glaze, shouts at one of the men. “I?m a mafioso. I smoke marijuana, take coke and sniff glue. I don?t want to know about school, just drugs.” Alain Veilleux is with the Cirque de Soleil. “I know that anything can happen. It could be unsettling. But I can feel the energy even in the little space like this. Since we started working it?s been going well.” The courtyard is in chaos, the instructors plead for order. “It?s impossible to work!” shouts instructor Geraldo Miranda. “If it continues like this we?ll cancel everything. There are some who won?t come back. It?s finished for today.

The idea for When the Circus Came to Town, did not originate with Cote and Hart. But helping street kids, the goal of Cirque de Soleil?s humanitarian program, Cirque du Monde, appealed to them. It was difficult film to make. Gaining the kids? confidence took considerable effort. Yet some of the kids? lives did change for the better after the experience. “Jardel (one of the Rio kids) is now a professional performer,” says Cote. Others remain on the street. “A year after the filming I went back,” says Cote, “and found Cosme as messed up as ever. I?ll be surprised if he lives to be 25.” Filming in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Luc and his crew had to constantly watch out for muggings and thefts. The kids were wild? physically rough with each other and, at times, with the film crew.

Despite filming conditions that are often difficult, Adobe?s films are known for their high technical calibre, says TFO?s Andre Champagne. That competence partly depends on developing an intimacy with the subject?the only way to get the camera and microphone in close to the subject. “They have gifts to do this work,” says Rena Mcleod, subject of one of the Rainmakers episodes, speaking of Hart and his crew. “I could trust them and I could open myself. They?re respectful of other people and that?s what has earned them respect from everyone else.” It takes a patient director and crew to gain the subject?s trust. It also requires a lot of preparation and ground work. Cote and Hart do not simply fly into a location and start filming?there may be months of preliminary contacts with the subjects. And when something major is happening in the subject?s life, a demonstration or a conference, for instance, they plan to go on location. In a Bangkok AIDS shelter, a dozen women sit at a table. Jongsada Suwanchondee is a Rainmaker, a former heroin addict who is now HIV positive, and a advocate for people HIV positive and AIDS infected. She asks, “How do you feel about living here at the emergency shelter?” One woman tells how her family won?t allow her to take meals with them. Her eyes moisten. She starts to cry and dabs her face with a handkerchief. In a low calm voice Suwanchondee councils, “Our families wouldn?t be sacred of us if they knew more about AIDS.” The camera cuts to another woman, face contorted by anguish as she sweeps tears away, a toddler in her lap. The child is oblivious to her mother?s sobs. Suwanchondee walks around to the weeping woman and asks, “Do you want to talk? If you want to cry, it?s OK.” Suwanchondee embraces the sobbing woman. “She wants to go home,” someone says, “but she?s afraid that her parents won?t accept her.” Quick cuts reveal most of the women weeping.

Behind the camera Cote, the soundwoman and the cameraman were in tears. Suwanchondee embraced each member of the camera crew in turn. “For two weeks we were surrounded by all these people,” Cote recalls. “They were all young, very sick, others not sick but HIV positive. We shared everything with them, we ate with them. When this happened on the last day of filming it was very intense. All of us cried like babies.” It took two weeks of patience to capture the scene on film. Nothing as emotional had occurred until then. Cote used Suwanchondee to put a human face on the HIV problem in the developing world and at the same time show that those who are afflicted have the hope of living in dignity.

It seems fitting that an important part of Cote and Hart?s philosophy is to become part of the lives of the people whose stories they tell. They still keep in touch with many of them, including Suwanchondee, and have organized several events around the films, raising funds for the various causes that the protagonists champion. In a Turning 16 episode, Cote and Hart filmed 16-year-old Rosie giving birth to her son J.R. Now, every year on his birthday J.R. receives a present from the two partners. In Harlem, Cote and Hart organized a screening of the Rainmakers episode featuring Victor Cherry, a former drug dealer turned poet and “peace maker.” Early in 1998 Cote and Hart put Cherry in touch with Rena Mcleod. She invited Cherry to spend two weeks in Winnipeg to hold seminars on poetry and non-violence for her group of native youth. “It was wonderful,” says Mcleod. “Victor had a positive influence on my group and on others.” And with Cote and Hart?s help, Suwanchondee got in touch with a young woman featured in a Turning 16 episode who is fighting for the rights of child labourers in Thailand. Now the two women help each other with their respective causes.

These days Cote and Hart are so busy working on the second set of Rainmakers episodes that they have had to turn down an invitation to film a Cirque du Soleil tour of China, something they would have liked to do. If anything, the second set of Rainmakers is more ambitious than the first. Cote and Hart have deliberately sought out controversial issues in contrasting locations and cultures. Gay and lesbians tights in Zimbabwe are hardly considered newsworthy by the mainstream media, but Cote and Hart are documenting the story of a lesbian whose life is under constant threat in that country. Similarly the rights of the disabled in Mozambique gain little media coverage. In Mozambique, Hart will profile a young man, deaf and blind from childhood, fighting for the rights of the disabled whose numbers grow daily in a land littered with millions of unexploded land mines. Not all of the Rainmakers are from the Third World. One of the new episodes will focus on a young man working with the homeless in Tokyo. In Turkey for another episode, Cote was detained for several hours and questioned by police while doing preliminary research on a woman fighting for human rights.

Work on the new Rainmakers episodes will occupy Cote and Hart until September 1999. In the meantime they are looking for new project ideas. “Right now we are in that creative space where we?re looking to plant the seeds for something new,” says Hart. Like their other projects, their next film will probably be the stuff of television?competent, workmanlike and uncon- troversial, perhaps leaving the discerning adult viewer less than satisfied. And, like their other films, it will most likely draw audiences already sympathetic to the subject matter. But, Cote and Hart aim much of their film work at teenagers and young adults. These are impressionable audiences whose views, opinions and perceptions are in constant flux. If they succeed in opening the eyes of even a few, maybe they will have achieved their goal?sow the seeds of change and understanding. Naive? Optimistic? Perhaps, but with their personal approach to filmmaking, Cote and Hart, like their subjects striving to make the world better, have themselves become Rainmakers.

Alan King had been the staff editorial cartoonist at the Ottawa Citizen for 15 years when Neil Reynolds came in as editor in 1996. He fought with Reynolds frequently about the content of his work, and about the changes that Reynolds was making to the newspaper-particularly the changes to the editorial board. Unlike editorial cartoonists at most Canadian dailies, King, whose work has been self-described as low taste, had to get approval from both Reynolds and the paper?s publisher, Russell Mills, before his cartoons were allowed to run. After King depicted Don Cherry in a way that Reynolds referred to as nasty, Reynolds killed the cartoon late in the day, and King did not provide the paper with a cartoon for the first time since he?d worked there. The next morning he was demoted to staff illustrator at the Citizen, a paper which rarely used illustrations. He quit the paper three days later and is now working freelance as a digital artist. (When Reynolds was asked about this, he said that he would not discuss internal matters.)

King sent a letter privately to three or four cartoonists, warning other would-be Citizen cartoonists about working under Reynolds, a heads-up somebody posted on a webpage of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists.”Reynolds has given the cartoonists reporting to him a very difficult time,” King wrote.”Attempts at rational debate are regarded as mutinous insolence and deviations from the ideological line of the editorial board as evidence of mental deficiency.”

Reynolds started wooing Charles Jaff? before King left the Citizen. Jaff?, who was working primarily as an illustrator and whose only experience with editorial cartooning was at The Varsity, a University of Toronto student newspaper, accepted the job gradually, expressing doubts about the viability of editorial cartoons. Nevertheless, he decided to take the job and was hired on contract. During his first few months, only about half of the cartoons he drew were about political topics, since he had heard that they could get him into trouble. Instead, he created work that he referred to as “loopy.” This tactic proved to be at odds with Reynolds’s vision of editorial cartooning. Having received letters from puzzled readers regarding Jaff?’s work, Reynolds said that Jaff?’s cartoons were too obscure, explaining that”readers have to get the cartoons on at least one level.” After about a year on the job, and soon after Jaff? had drawn a cartoon depicting Santa Claus interrogating children on his lap as a comment on Christmas consumerism, Jaff? was politely asked to leave. Just recently, Cameron Cardow, who signs his work “Cam” and lives in Calgary, was hired as the Citizen’s newest editorial cartoonist, the paper’s third in two years.

The Citizen is an extreme example of the editorial cartoonist’s precarious position at Canadian newspapers. Cartoonists are the jesters who provide the humour that breaks up the dense text on the editorial and op-ed pages. But beneath the humour there often lies sharp, satirical commentary. The tradition of graphic arts as a form of social protest in Canada has been strong-consider politicians such as Sir Wilfrid Laurier, R.B. Bennett, Joe Clark, John Diefenbaker, Brian Mulroney or Jean Chr?tien, all of whom have been targets of cartoonists’ wrath.

The first wave of political cartooning began 150 years ago when cartoonists such as J.W. Bengough, creator of Grip, found his muse drawing the follies of former Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, among others. Over the past half century, artists such as Andy Donato, Duncan Macpherson, Robert Lapalme, Terry Mosher (best known as Aislin, his daughter’s name) and Len Norris have contributed to the legacy. Cartoonists like these and others continually provoke reactions from the politicians whom they disparage, as well as the public on whose behalf they comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

So what happens if the jester falls out of favour with the king? The role of the king is played by the publishers and editors at Canada’s daily papers, who have the power to hire and fire cartoonists and demand changes to their work. Neil Reynolds believes there is a lack of innovation in Canadian editorial cartooning, that the range of visual metaphors has been restricted to single gags-for example, to variations on strange bedfellows or someone slipping on a banana peel. But it seems as though Reynolds’s biggest problem with cartoonists is that they do not hold a position on issues. The fourth wave of cartoonists claim that their job is not to pick one group and target them, but to point out the stupidity and malfeasance everywhere, regardless of their personal views or those of the paper for which they work. Reynolds has identified this as the problem with Canadian political cartoonists: they lack a philosophy. The late Duncan Macpherson, one of Canada’s premier editorial cartoonists, who was credited with establishing the separation of the cartoonist’s position from that of a paper’s editorial board, would be livid.

The heyday of political cartooning may be over. From the 1950s to the ’70s, cartoonists held much more influence over public opinion than they do today. Former Prime Minister Joe Clark was once quoted as saying that Canada’s political cartoonists cost him votes in the 1980 election. It was a boom time, when every respectable paper had a staff cartoonist. But these days many of the dailies are still recovering from the recession of the early 1990s, when circulation fell. Today, many newspapers still fight for readers, cautious of controversy and fiscally conservative. Cartoonists, by their very nature, are seen as dangerous by many editors and publishers, and when there is cost-saving to be done, staff cartoonists, whose salaries can range as high as $100,000, are among the first casualties. Furthermore, there would seem to be cheap alternatives: local freelancers or syndicated cartoonists. As a result, the staff cartoonist is becoming increasingly rare. Adrienne Lamb, while a graduate student in journalism at the University of Western Ontario, wrote her master’s thesis on Canadian editorial cartooning. She found that only 30 percent of newspapers across the country have full-time cartoonists. The largest, such as the The Gazette in Montreal and The Globe and Mail, employ staff cartoonists, but many mid-sized dailies, including The Kingston Whig-Standard, the ReginaLeader Post and The London Free Press, now rely on freelancers or syndicated cartoonists, as do the majority of smaller papers.

At as little as $10 to $25 per cartoon, syndicated cartoons are a cost-efficient alternative to having a full-time artist on staff. The pay rates are set by the newspapers based on their circulation levels and by the cartoonists themselves. However, the economics of syndication are behind one of the most frequently cited criticisms of this practice. At such low fees, cartoonists can only make money by having their work appear in as many newspapers as possible.

Conscious of trying to please many different editors in different regions of the country, critics say, syndicated cartoonists seek a common denominator?usually a national issue?that most readers will relate to. And some, in their approach, are inclined to be careful rather than bold. As a result, a growing proportion of cartoons has become less biting and diverse in subject matter and rarely address important local issues. Even newspapers that employ freelance or staff cartoonists?for example, The London Free Press and the Ottawa Citizen?keep a slush pile of syndicated cartoons on hand to choose from in case of emergencies. The editors who go through this pile remark that they can predict what the prevailing subject matter will be.

The top cartoonists are worried about the state of their art and see the trend toward syndication as the biggest threat. Brian Gable is one of two staff cartoonists for The Globe and Mail and a past president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists. He is among a growing number of cartoonists who fear that cartoons are in danger of becoming”McToons”-flat, generic, easily runnable anywhere with no regional reference. The Globe‘s other cartoonist, Tony Jenkins, uses phrases such as “satire lite” or “off-the-rack” to describe this type of work.”As newspapers become more corporate rather than family-owned voices,” says Gable,”there’s a blanding out in all journalism, not just cartoons. As long as people keep buying the newspaper, why run a cartoon that’s going to cause a demonstration in front of your building? That’s affecting not just the satire, but the look of the cartoons. They’re all looking the same. They lack that individual voice.” This sameness is reflected in many ways, including the style. Charles Jaff? refers to this style as “bendy ink drawings.” The cartoonists who copy the look of American editorial cartoonist Jeff McNelly, the creator of the comic Shoe and a several-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work, are said to draw this way. Finding a distinctive style sets the artist’s work apart. Aislin draws physically accurate caricatures of his subjects-eyes are often drawn so as to appear almost liquid-and he uses cross-hatching to create texture. He tackles many subjects by creating comical scenes, such as Jean Chr?tien in a bodysuit and ballet slippers; other times he’ll draw symbols with labels as political statements. For example, a recent cartoon that he drew when the euro was introduced featured world currency symbols labelled with the name of the currency and the area of origin. The last one he called OD, for overdraft, and the country of origin he identified as”most folks.”

Duncan Macpherson was well known for his ruthless style. Terry Mosher refers to him as the”king of the third wave.” One of Macpherson’s most celebrated cartoons featured Diefenbaker as Marie Antoinette saying”Let them eat cake,” after Diefenbaker cancelled the Avro Arrow project and its 14,000 jobs. Pierre Berton has said this cartoon was”the beginning, I think, of the country’s disillusionment with the Diefenbaker government…scarcely anybody had taken a crack at Diefenbaker until then.” The next generation of cartoonists need to be encouraged to develop distinctive voices and feel free to experiment in order to reach the maturity and depth of Canada’s greatest cartoonists. Terry Mosher is one of four editorial cartoonists recognized in the Canadian News Hall of Fame. His work is savage and biting; he has no sacred cows. In fact, he’s often getting into trouble for his opinions, and a few times for his portrayal of ethnic and religious groups. He has worked at The Gazette for all of his 27-year career, although he had a brief concurrent stint atThe Toronto Star.

Like a number of well-known staff cartoonists, Mosher is nationally syndicated. When newspaper editors are using syndicated cartoonists, they can choose which cartoons they run. Although publishers have the final say, staff cartoonists have the opportunity to vigorously defend the integrity of their work. While Mosher believes that cartoonists have more freedom than anyone on a newspaper, he adds that there is room for concern, because of the conservative trend among editors.”Some editors prefer to have a cartoonist who illustrates the editorial policy of their newspaper,” says Mosher. He believes that this is more prevalent in the U.S., but cartoonists are eager to please. An article in the January/February ’99 edition of American Journalism Review noted how homogenized cartoons were getting in the U.S.; Mosher believes this is a threat in Canada as well. Joel Pett, president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, was quoted in that article as saying,”It’s not unusual for people to have similar ideas.” The author continues,”The problem is that everybody heads in the same direction on the same days.” Pett is also quoted as saying that it isn’t only the cartoonist’s fault:”Editors tend to like stuff that doesn’t take much thinking or analysis.” The article goes on to note that”cartoons mirror the mainstream headlines.” As Pett points out,”Before Princess Diana’s death…you couldn’t print a cartoon about land mines to save your life.”

Fifteen years ago, when The London Free Press‘s long-time staff cartoonist, Merle Tingley, retired, the paper decided to use syndicated work. Today, the Free Press strikes a compromise: although still running syndicated cartoons, the paper also uses a local freelance cartoonist, Paul Lachine. Some weeks, like many staff cartoonists, Lachine is featured three times and sometimes more if there is a big local event going on, or as Helen Connell, who is in charge of the paper’s editorial pages, says,”If his work is the best of the pile that day.” Lachine is not paid as well as a staff cartoonist would be, and he does not receive benefits. Connell says that she pays top dollar for cartoons that are made for the Free Press, but adds that the paper’s budget does not allow her to hire a full-time staff cartoonist.

The expense seems to be a discretionary one, though. The London Free Press has a circulation of just over 100,000 readers, according to the January 1999 Canadian Advertising Rates and Data. Yet The Daily Newsin Halifax, which has a circulation of just over 28,000 readers, has a full-time cartoonist on staff. There are no French-language newspapers that use syndicated work. The specific regional issues and the language barrier mean that French dailies are more inclined to hire a staff or a contract cartoonist. Terry Mosher’s work reflects Montreal as surely as some of Alan King’s cartoons reflected Ottawa.

Steve Nease is a winner of the 1998 Canadian Community Newspapers Association’s award for editorial cartoonists. Like about half of the syndicated cartoonists, he acts as both the distributor and the creator of his work. Nease, who is concerned that papers are moving away from local issues in general, thinks that if a newspaper is relying on syndicated cartoonists, its readers are learning even less about local affairs.

This shift from local journalism is evident at the Ottawa Citizen. Cameron Cardow, its current cartoonist, lives in Calgary, so his cartoons rarely stray from international or national topics. Many cartoonists like to work at home, but when home is far away from the paper’s audience, the ability to gauge local issues is lost. For instance, one of Charles Jaff?’s cartoons made fun of Ottawa’s ice storm victims. He thought that he was helping readers lighten up about the experience, but the cartoon was not well received, especially by Neil Reynolds. On the other hand, many of Alan King’s cartoons were local. In fact, two of his cartoons hang on the walls of the mayor’s office in Ottawa. The importance of resident cartoonists is particularly evident in highly competitive local markets. In Halifax, the two dailies are serious rivals. Fighting for similar audiences,The Daily News and The Chronicle-Herald employ staff cartoonists who go for the jugular and cover the local angle. The situation is one that makes cartoonists across the country envious. Bill Turpin, the editor of The Daily News, says,”I consider it a real luxury for a paper our size to have a staff cartoonist.” He believes that editorial cartoonists should be the loose cannons rolling around the deck of a newspaper. As an editor, he adds,”What you really want is a cartoonist who makes you nervous.”

And nervous is what many editors are. Their concern is that cartoonists sometimes go too far and offend readers. And sometimes they do. There have been cases of libel suits being brought against Canadian editorial cartoonists, the most notorious occurring in British Columbia in 1978. Future provincial premier William Vander Zalm, then minister of human resources, sued the publisher, the editor and the cartoonist of the Victoria Times after the paper’s cartoonist, Robert Bierman, depicted Vander Zalm gleefully pulling the wings off of a fly after a major shakeup took place at the ministry. The original court decision found that the cartoon went beyond fair comment because it implied that Vander Zalm enjoyed hurting people, instead of just showing that he had indirectly hurt people as a result of layoffs caused by his ministry. But the paper was acquitted on appeal.

A year ago, in Saint John, N.B., Josh Beutel, a local newspaper cartoonist, was sued for libel by Malcolm Ross after Beutel produced a cartoon suggesting that Ross was a Nazi. Ross, a former New Brunswick schoolteacher, had published controversial material considered by many to be both anti-Semitic and racist. He had been removed from teaching in the classroom by the school board after an inquiry into his views. Beutel lost the case and the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association was forced to pay $7,500 in damages to Ross.

But given the freedom to take risks, cartoonists can produce true works of originality (despite their differences, Neil Reynolds refers to Charles Jaff? as a comic genius in his own way). If it is inevitable that papers are going to tighten budgets, perhaps the best choice is to use a local freelancer, as The London Free Press does, to address community issues.

At work here is a clash of philosophies between editors like Neil Reynolds, who think that cartoonists should be partisan and attack along those lines, and editorial cartoonists, who value the freedom to satirize every deserving target?what Serge Chapleau, editorial cartoonist with La Presse in Montreal, calls la b?te d’humanit?. And as he says,”that is not owned by one political party.”

Just after 9 a.m. on a cool autumn morning, Margaret Wente is greeted by the familiar sounds of The Globe and Mail newsroom. Reporters are checking phone messages, placing early calls and scanning the news wire to see what’s happened overnight. Some are chatting and leaning against a wall that displays seven clocks telling the time in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Moscow, Beijing and Berlin. Wente surveys the sea of desks as she makes her way to her office in the Report on Business section.

Nothing could have prepared her for this.

Some reporters are wearing white buttons with “Weak and Hopeless” printed in big black letters. They’re reacting to one of Wente’s memos-now known as the Weak and Hopeless memo-which was mysteriously leaked to the newsroom. A month earlier, William Thorsell, the Globe’s editor-in-chief, had asked Wente to jot down what she thought was wrong with the paper’s A-section, to which she’d responded: “The Toronto-based national news team is in exactly the same situation that ROB was in 1994. It is starved for good reporters. Key beats are uncovered. Other key beats are staffed with hopeless people…. No amount of clever editing or packaging will fix that. The only fix is to hire some top young reporters…. No amount of remedial training, rework, or memo-writing will compensate for a basically weak staff.”

A year and a half later, her reputation is still suffering. Even before the memo made the rounds, many Globereporters felt that Wente was difficult to work with. She’s often described as blunt and distant. As managing editor of the Globe, she’s renowned for her impenetrable vision of the paper. As an editor of other people’s work, she is highly skilled if not gentle. She expects the same level of professionalism from her colleagues that she demands of herself. She has no time for hand-holding or stroking reporters’ egos. This is a woman who believes in hard work, not flattery. Colleagues who’ve known her for years say they still can’t read her thoughts or predict her next move. She will admit to being painfully shy but says little else about herself-especially to her staff. Which, of course, builds suspicion and paranoia. In an industry that attracts more than its share of suspicious and paranoid types, Wente’s reticence can cause problems. As shocked as she might have been that morning, faced with a newsroom of “Weak and Hopeless” reporters, Wente remained silent as her eyes fixed on the white buttons.

It’s last October, and I’m visiting the Globe while its newsroom is being renovated. The ceiling has been removed, and wires dangle above reporters’ heads. The lighting is dim. A plastic tarp separates the staff from construction. I’m waiting for Wente in her small office on the edge of the newsroom. It’s unassuming and sparsely decorated-a map of Toronto on one wall and a bulletin board with a Kim Campbell button on another. The only personal touch-a dream catcher hanging on the back of her door-seems somehow uncharacteristic. I’m sitting in one of two green upholstered chairs when Wente walks in. We’re ready to start the interview, but the whirring of drills invades our conversation, and we decide to move upstairs to the new Report on Business section.

The office we borrow has freshly painted walls, new leather chairs and polished furniture. Everything smells as if it’s just been unwrapped from its plastic. We’re discussing her job as ME. I ask about her day-to-day experiences in an executive position. There is a long pause-she’s famous for them. She leans back, bites into a bagel and looks to the side. Finally, she says she doesn’t consider herself an executive; she is a working editor who sits near the reporters in the newsroom, not in a big corner office upstairs. She says the kick in her work is the creative part, it’s putting the paper out. In fact, she feels sorry for executives who are removed from the creative work. They can’t feel or taste or do anything. For them, work is simply manipulating numbers, which, if she thinks about it, is quite the opposite of what she does. She laughs at this thought.

The A-section is a direct reflection of her work. Her daily goal is to make the front page dramatic and vibrant. Working with a team of senior editors, she decides which stories should be placed above the paper’s fold-attracting readers to newspaper boxes-and how these stories should be developed. She also helps choose the Globe cover photo. “We try to find something with good human values that’s going to have an impact on the page,” she explains, adding that she thinks the Globe’s photos are more effective in colour. Last Christmas she decided to run a cover photo of the National Ballet’s Sugarplum Fairies, who were practising for The Nutcracker. “Some of the men said, ‘It’s not a news photo, it’s just a piece of eye candy.’ And I said, ‘It’s a beautiful piece of eye candy.'”

Those kinds of choices have become more crucial with new competition on the market. Wente admits theGlobe has made some changes since the National Post’s launch. Using skyboxes under the masthead to promote the contents of each issue is an example, something the staid Globe never would have considered a few years ago.

What does she think of the Post so far? Too much feature material for readers who “don’t have time in the morning to wallow around in the long stuff.” And too much ink on inconsequential stories. But “they’re going after women hot and heavy…. I think it’s smart of them. The Globe and Mail’s front section has never been known for its female friendliness.” The competition has encouraged the Globe to diversify its news coverage “without detracting from our essential seriousness and purpose.” If the Post excels in one area of coverage, the Globe tries to leap ahead in other areas. “In that respect,” she says, “it’s a good old-fashioned newspaper war. And it’s certainly true that life will never be the same for us. But I’m not losing sleep…yet!”

Since the threat of the new daily, the Globe has been tightening expense control. A September memo issued by Earle Gill, the Globe‘s executive editor, informed staff that the new design and transition to colour printing were more costly than originally anticipated. According to the memo, “All spending on meals and entertainment is frozen unless authorized in advance by a department head. All staff travel must be kept to an absolute minimum…. All overtime must be approved in advance…. Taxis are to be used only for work-related purposes when required and…the Globe must be reimbursed for personal calls made or received on company cell phones.”

The cost-cutting has deflated working relationships and heightened fear of the Globe’s uncertain future. ThePost “has money for cakes and parties and a whole bunch of other bullshit,” complains one senior reporter. “A thrashing machine has gone through this newsroom.” Wente’s managerial style does little to alleviate reporters’ anxieties.

Chicago, 1953. Three-year-old Peggy Wente has taught herself to read. A year later, she and her baby brother, James, get a new sister, Sally. When Sally’s old enough, Peggy reads to her at night. “My youngest child cannot even remember me reading her a bedtime story,” says Wente’s mother, Barbara McNeill, a retired pharmaceutical executive. She is telling me how, in some ways, her eldest daughter hasn’t changed much since she was a little girl. She’s always been reflective and responsible. By the age of five, she says, Peggy was reading many of the children’s classics, including The Enchanted Garden, the Little House on the Prairie series and The Little Princess, which was her favourite. Learning, she discovered, was as limitless as her imagination. When Peggy skipped Grade 2, the principal at her school warned McNeill that it could be traumatic, that Peggy would probably have trouble catching up to the older students. “I was all prepared for tears and disappointment,” McNeill recalls. “It took about a month and then she was top of the class again and we never looked back.”

Emotionally, she blended in well with the older girls. But physically, she stopped growing at 10. “She was exactly the same size [5 feet 4 inches] and shape she is now,” her mother says. “That makes one feel socially rather inept. She was very self-conscious about it.”

When her parents separated, she moved with her mother and siblings to Toronto, leaving her father in Chicago. She is still close to her dad, seeing him when she can. At 14, being the new kid at school, Wente struggled with where she belonged. For one year, she attended Victoria Park Secondary School. “Peggy was never doing any homework, but bringing home high 80s,” her mother remembers, “and I thought this is for the birds. So we sent her to Bishop Strachan.”

After grades 11 and 12 at the private girls’ school, she left to study English at the University of Michigan. “It was the late ’60s, a lot of fun,” Wente says. “People were marching, demonstrating, occupying the admin building.” When asked where she fit into this age of social protest, she laughs: “I was a voyeur demonstrator.”

She returned to Toronto to do her MA in English at the University of Toronto and took a course with Robertson Davies. There was only a handful of students, and they would sit in Davies’s study, listening to his sentimental Victorian tales. For a break, the “maid” would serve them tea from an ornate silver service.

Davies’s class ignited in Wente a passion for literature. But her taste of grad school persuaded her that she didn’t have a strong enough calling to survive the long, dreary road of the doctorate student. “I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t think of journalism. I thought I was way too timid to be a reporter.” As a compromise between the academic and commercial world, she tried book publishing. “I thought it might be quite genteel and I’d be able to work with words.” But as a publicist for Doubleday, she encountered authors who were nothing like what she’d imagined. “I mostly remember meeting them and going, Uh! Those are authors?” She rolls her eyes. “My God! They’re so scruffy and ill-mannered!”

In 1974 she left Doubleday to become associate editor of the Royal Ontario Museum’s magazine, Rotunda.Within two years she was editor. After a couple of years there, she decided to move into mainstream magazines, and copy edited at the now-defunct Canadian magazine.

Business journalism was thriving in the late ’70s, so Wente simply went where the jobs were: Canadian Business, as an associate editor, and then editor; CBC-TV’s Venture, her first and last foray into broadcasting; Report on Business Magazine as editor; and, finally, the Globe’s ROB section, where she stayed until the winter of ’97, when she was appointed news director.

The managing editor of the paper, John Cruickshank, had recently resigned to become editor of The Vancouver Sun. Although deputy editor Colin MacKenzie was in line for the job, Globe management held a nine-month search for a new ME. Many reporters were outraged; they signed a petition supporting MacKenzie. He was ultimately appointed, but Thorsell was attempting to redesign the A-section at the time, and he felt it was changing too slowly under MacKenzie’s direction. He asked Wente what she’d do to liven things up. Her response: the Weak and Hopeless memo. Thorsell liked her thinking.

By January of 1998, MacKenzie was gone and Wente was promoted to ME. The staff may have agreed with some of the suggestions in her now-infamous memo, though they were probably too insulted to admit it. Many also believed that MacKenzie wasn’t improving the A-section quickly enough. But he was respected and well liked in the newsroom, and his supporters felt he was squeezed out. In other words, it wasn’t an easy position for Wente to inherit. After a year and a half in her new job, Wente’s relationship with many of her co-workers is as it’s always been: cool and impersonal.

On another October afternoon-still no sign of winter-I return to the Globe to talk with Sarah Murdoch, associate editor in charge of the paper’s opinion pieces and a friend and colleague of Wente’s for the past 15 years. She greets me in the lobby, and we make our way to her slick new office in the ROB section. Each decorated cubicle I pass tells something about its occupant: an “I am Canadian” poster, a Clinton rubber doll with lipstick on its cheek, a life preserver.

Murdoch tells me she thinks Wente is succeeding with the redesign of the A-section. The hard-news stories are shorter and livelier. But in the A-section, the pendulum between news and gossip swings back and forth. “I think when she first became managing editor she maybe went too far in one direction to be popular,” Murdoch says, “putting Leonardo DiCaprio on the front page or being a little bit too showbizzy.” Since then, though, she feels Wente has found the right balance. At least one Globe veteran reporter doesn’t agree. “She’s turned on by Clinton on a day when APEC is breaking in Canada,” he told me. During the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky saga, Wente would continually scan the wire for the latest details.

When I mention this to Murdoch, she points out that the APEC story is complex-the protest happened a year before the media got involved. While the Clinton scandal was on everybody’s minds, no one was certain where the APEC story was going. She says the talk in the newsroom reminds her of the trouble Tina Brown faced when she became editor of The New Yorker. “There were people who liked the old New Yorker and thought Tina was destroying it. And people who thought, Yes, it’s a bit glitzier than it’s ever been, but it’s much more interesting.” Trying to mix serious and respectable with sexy and fun is a challenge, she says-it doesn’t happen overnight.

But even the people who acknowledge Wente is doing a good job keep coming back to her distant character. Martin Mittelstaedt, the vice-chair of the Globe’s union, the Communications, Energy and Paper Workers Union of Canada, has worked at the paper for 18 years and is currently covering environmental news. He says people are frustrated with an unapproachable managing editor. “There’s a general feeling that she is aloof. There is a feeling that she is a good editor and is knowledgeable about stylistic issues, but is very difficult to deal with on a personal basis.” As a representative of the paper’s editorial, circulation, maintenance and advertising staff, Mittelstaedt acts as his colleagues’ sounding board.

Personally, he’s had only one run-in with Wente. Last fall she was planning to release a memo in violation of the Globe’s contract with the union. Management is supposed to post job openings before hiring new staff. Instead of going through the proper channels, the senior staff were planning to simply announce that they had selected people for the jobs. Mittelstaedt wouldn’t allow it. So there was a competition that he says was largely a sham. In the end, the people who were named to the positions were the ones who had already been chosen. “Look at my situation,” says Mittelstaedt. “She was going to put out a letter that shows she didn’t give a damn about the agreement the company signed with the union, which basically means the deal they signed with the staff. That suggests to me somebody with a personal touch that is wanting.”

Kimberley Noble, a national business correspondent for Maclean’s, worked with Wente for a decade at bothReport on Business Magazine and the ROB section. She says Wente hasn’t discovered that different people need to be dealt with in different ways. Yes, there are some who respond positively to harsh criticism, but there are others who need reassurance, an occasional pat on the back. In 1994, according to Noble, the ROB section was badly understaffed and several editors were venting their frustration at the reporters. Noble remembers arguing with one editor “to the point where I was jumping up and down yelling ‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ Peggy hauled me into her office the next day and essentially told me to get stress counselling.” By the end of the year these editors were squeezed out, but Wente never discussed it with Noble. “It’s not like I would have expected an apology, but it was never acknowledged that the working conditions were just terrible. She told me I was too hard on my managers.”

Despite their difficulties, Noble stresses that Wente is a superb editor. She feels she produced some of her best stories while working under her. But to this day, Noble remains affected by her former boss: “Peggy earned my respect; I guess the most painful thing is that I thought I had earned hers also.” Wente, she says, has always reminded her of Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News. In one scene, Hunter, a senior producer for a television news program, disagrees with a decision made by the network’s president. They’re at a work party, and she asks to speak with him in the backyard, away from the other guests. She tells him that it’s her responsibility to offer her view on the situation. He listens and nods, saying, “Okay. That’s your opinion.”

“It’s not an opinion,” she replies, her eyes fastened to his.

“You’re just absolutely right, and I’m absolutely wrong?” he asks. She nods.

“It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.”

“No,” she says. “It’s awful.”

Always the professional, Wente doesn’t want to be viewed as the gentle female editor who is absorbed in her colleagues’ personal problems. She doesn’t want to appear emotionally affected by her work. She spent much of her editorial career catering to the business needs of men and still presents the news to a predominantly male readership. Maybe her stubbornness is a reaction to being one of the few female senior newspaper editors in the country. Although she feels her gender is rarely an obstacle today, every so often she’ll attend a managerial meeting where she is the only woman. “It feels terrible,” she says. “You look around, and you say, Oh my God, the world hasn’t changed very much.”

Born in 1950, she was among the second generation of working women and feels she benefited from what the first wave had already accomplished. Women, she acknowledges, are still, in the main, absent from the top echelons of the big companies, but it’s often their choice. To climb the corporate ladder you need to be single-minded, dedicated, highly ambitious-characteristics that usually favour the male lifestyle. “The trade-offs for women doing that are much greater than the trade-offs for men. A lot of women start to climb up there-I’ve seen this over and over again-and at some point they say, Hey, this is no fun. I’m just taking a lot of shit. I’ve given up my whole life for it and it’s very unpleasant. It’s not worth it. And they bail. Good for them.”

At a meeting five years ago, a group of Globe editors decided they needed more women’s voices in the paper. Wente said they should look for a columnist who wasn’t an ideological feminist but who could turn a steady gaze on the world. Someone suggested her, and she wrote the column for the next four years. She offered an honest, compelling commentary on issues ranging from anorexia to pay equity.

In a 1997 column entitled “Why I’ll Never Be CEO,” Wente paralleled the male CEO of Coca-Cola with the woman responsible for Pepsi’s North American beverage business. Both Douglas Ivester and Brenda Barnes had lives marked by constant travel and separation from their families. But Ivester enjoys his work, and Barnes, after 22 years, finally quit. “Human males are aggressive, hierarchical and territorial,” Wente wrote. “That so many of them channel their energies into selling Coke instead of bashing each other over the head with clubs is a remarkable testimony to the progress of civilization. Human females have other strengths. They know, for example, that Coke isn’t it. They know that channelling all your life’s energies into selling sweetened fizzy water is, on some level, ludicrous.”

It’s a long way from Wente’s single-gal-in-the-’80s column for The Toronto Star. A 1984 piece called “Toothbrush Says a Mouthful About Amorous Intentions” examines a dating predicament: is it presumptuous to carry your toothbrush in your purse? “What if he overhears you the next morning merrily brushing away in there?” Wente wrote. “Will he think you’re an easy sweep? Or will he suspect you’re using his toothbrush without asking? Whatever you decide to do, my advice is to run the water very, very loud so he can’t hear you.” In another column, “A Brief Note to Santa Claus on Real Women’s Underwear,” Wente attempted to enlighten her male readers: “On Christmas day, an alarming number of women are going to get a surprise. A cute black garter-belt, say with little pink rosebuds. I have news for those men, before it’s too late. Real women don’t wear garter-belts.”

Wente was writing this column when she and Don Obe first became friends. Obe, a former magazine editor and now a journalism instructor at Ryerson Polytechnic University, describes her as “totally generous, utterly warm and uncritical in the sense of accepting you for what you are, which is so different from her image as a perfectionist and tough boss.” Last year Wente finally married her long-time partner, Ian McLeod, executive producer of CTV’s W5. For years the two kept their separate houses, living together in each house for a year at a time.

Penny Williams has been good friends with Wente since the early ’80s, rooming with her in 1984 when Williams moved from Calgary to Toronto to edit Your Money magazine. The Star column, she feels, still reflects the Peggy that she knows. “People underestimate her sense of humour,” she says. “We seem to think that in order to be serious, we must be solemn.”

But it’s not easy interacting with someone who doesn’t let on what she’s thinking. During our interviews there are several long, unnerving pauses. At one point I ask if it’s difficult for a shy personality to become managing editor of a national newspaper. Twenty seconds pass. Then her eyes widen as if she’s going to speak. But still no words. Just as I am about to rephrase my question, she utters with perfect enunciation: “A lot of managers are introverts. So there’s hope for the introverts of the world.” She chuckles. “You learn how to operate. I’m very surprised to have wound up here. You go where the challenges are. And you work around your personality flaws.”

This, I think, is why Wente is considered such a mystery. No matter how straightforward your question might be, that yawning gap of silence ensues. During those seconds of quiet contemplation, you have no idea what she is going to say next, and no hint as to what she thinks of you. Some colleagues aren’t willing to work through Wente’s silences. To them, Penny Williams says, “Everybody, get over it! It’s just who she is. It’s not a plot. She’s not Bill Gates plotting on the world. She’s just a more reticent, more thoughtful person who takes longer to answer. Deal with it!”

Even on the job, a kinder, gentler Peggy Wente occasionally surfaces. On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1994, Kimberley Noble visited the newsroom with her five-year-old daughter, Lucy, to check some facts for the next day’s story. She greeted Wente, who decided that she wanted to run Noble’s piece as Monday’s top story. Converting her brief into a B1 article would take some time, and Noble wondered how long her daughter would last. Taking Lucy by the hand, Wente told Noble not to worry and led the little girl into her office. For the next two hours, Lucy played Barbies with the editor of the Report on Business section. “And not in a kind of patronizing way, either,” says Noble. “In a way that Lucy just had a great time. She was completely involved.”

Whether or not they get a taste of that side of Wente, supporters and detractors alike seem to have respect for her tenacity. They see her as smart, self-assured and ambitious. She is never accused of slacking; she is never described as the victim.

Last fall, a few minutes before I met with her, I had scanned her office, jumping from one thing to the next in search of a defining object. Then I saw it: beside the Kim Campbell pin on the bulletin board above her crowded desk there was another button: “Weak and Hopeless,” printed in big black letters.

Three minutes before airtime. An editorial assistant darts up to the host and points at a clock. With only three minutes left he really should be in the studio, but he doesn’t budge. Two and a half minutes before airtime, the host waits for his scripts. Two minutes, still waiting. Hearing the printer, he grabs the pages as they emerge and sprints to studio 302. Seven, six, five, four, three…. “This is Canada at Five. Good afternoon. I’m Bernie McNamee.”

Ten minutes later, the “fish edition” of Canada at Five-broadcast at 4 p.m. from Toronto-has been aired in the Atlantic. McNamee strolls back to his desk in the national radio newsroom at the headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. He runs his hands down the front of his green khaki pants, sits down and takes a deep breath before starting to write for the second edition. Maybe this time there will be a couple of minutes to read through all of the scripts before he heads for the studio again. In 1985, whenCanada at Five started, there were six people working, leaving more time to read through the research, says David Tweedie, the producer and only other person working on the show. But, of course, that was in the “salad days” of the CBC, he says. At this, McNamee turns toward Tweedie.

“What is it now?” he asks. “The Twilight Days?” Indeed, the CBC has seen brighter times. After the creation of the public broadcaster in November 1936, CBC employed 142 people and spent less than $1 million in its first five-month, partial fiscal year. At that time, only half the country was able to tune in to the modest radio service. But over the years the CBC expanded. In 1990, almost six decades after its creation, the number of permanent staff exceeded 10,000, expenditures totalled $1.4 billion and 99 percent of the country was within broadcast reach. From a single radio network of 1936, audiences could now choose among four radio networks (CBC Radio and CBC Stereo in English and SRC AM and FM St?r?o in French), two TV networks (CBC Television in English and La T?l?vision de Radio-Canada in French) and CBC Newsworld through cable subscription.

The years following, however, have been a sort of Dark Ages in the history of the CBC. Miserly budget slashings have resulted in severe cuts to staff and resources at a time when the nation’s public broadcaster is more needed than ever. While the recession of the early 1990s drove several private broadcasters off the air and forced others to amalgamate to cut down on costs, most private radio stations shifted their programming focus to attract advertising dollars. Radio journalism virtually disappeared. In this environment, CBC became the last bastion of Canadian news and information programming, which is reflected in the Broadcasting Act of 1991: CBC is supposed to provide “programming that informs, enlightens and entertains” that isn’t offered by private Canadian broadcasters. But with the budget cuts, this mandate may be threatened.

December 5, 1990, is known as Black Wednesday for obvious reasons: that day, the CBC board of directors told staff that over 1,000 of them would lose their jobs. Never before had the corporation issued so many pink slips. Then, during the fiscal year 1994-95, the CBC declared that more and even deeper cuts would have to be made. From April 1995 to April 1998, $414 million in federal funding was axed and 2,300 permanent jobs across the corporation were lost. For CBC Radio-considered the country’s most important cultural institution-this meant one third of its staff received layoff notices and the budget was gutted by 21 percent. Twilight fell over the jewel in the crown corporation.

The English component of CBC Radio is divided into two networks: Radio One and Radio Two, formerly called CBC Radio and CBC Stereo, respectively. The two major areas of Radio One are news and information. (Radio Two concentrates mainly on classical music, performing arts and culture.) The largest news-gathering organization in Canada, CBC Radio broadcasts the national news reports World Report, Canada at Five, The World at Six and The World This Weekend. (Regional CBC stations air their own hourly news with local coverage as well as national and international news from CBC Radio’s syndication service.) What CBC calls information programming is a separate unit, with its own shows and staffs. Defined as anything that isn’t hard news, it encompasses analysis, documentaries, sports and current affairs, with shows like Quirks & Quarks, Ideas and This Morning.

For CBC Radio’s news and information departments, this decade’s budget cuts, layoffs and restructuring meant that national information programs such as Morningside, Sunday Morning, Gabereau and Now the Details came to an end. Regional radio stations cancelled local shows, foreign bureaus were closed and remaining staff were often put into slots for which they didn’t have experience-reporters started editing tape and editors began reading newscasts. Almost overnight the staff had to become multiskilled, and journalists started to worry about the quality of the product they were putting on the air.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, on June 29 last year, senior radio management revealed an accounting error amounting to $3 million of the news and information budget. Managers never pinpointed how the mistake occurred or if spending was under control after the incident. Results from an inquiry into internal reporting and control systems were never released either to the staff or the public. As a result of all this, management had to cut another 14 positions and reduce spending in various areas, such as foreign coverage and travel.

In July, almost 300 employees signed an open letter to the CBC board of directors. Journalists demanded that a special investigation into the incident be undertaken by the auditor general, and they wanted to meet with the board to draw its attention to their “grave concerns about the deteriorating quality of CBC Radio’s news and information programming.” The board did not grant any of these demands, nor has it addressed the staff’s concerns.

In news, the budget cuts over the past few years have caused four big problems:

• Journalists work with little backup producing newscasts, increasing workloads.
• With fewer staff members, there’s less time for checking, which in turn leads to factual and language errors on the air.
• With announcers gone and sound technicians on the endangered-species list, journalists now read news and perform technical jobs, a policy known as “multiskilling,” often without adequate training. Some people don’t know how to read on the air, and many taped segments are of poor sound quality.
• With fewer Canadian foreign correspondents, and those remaining burdened with greater workloads, non-Canadian freelancers and wire services are increasingly becoming the source for world news.

Some of these problems apply to information programming as well. There are fewer documentaries being made and more items are being repeated. Some interviews are run longer, whether justified or not. Instead of producing original material, journalists find their time is increasingly eaten up with filing, tracking down guests and rewriting stories from the wires. Some argue that quality has declined because management decided to cut too quickly and in the wrong places. Given the problems associated with the budget slashing over the past few years, can CBC Radio live up to its mandate? Can it maintain the quality of programming that sets it apart from the privates? No, say many journalists who work, or have worked, at CBC Radio.

Bernie McNamee is one of the journalists who have opted for staying in the arms of Mother Corp. But he’s had reservations. Before becoming host of Canada at Five last September, he was host of The World This Weekend, a show that started in September 1994 with two producers, an editorial assistant, a host, an arts reporter and a sportscaster. By last year, there were only two people left: McNamee and Jim Handman, the producer. After the $3-million shortfall last summer, newsroom management told McNamee that Handman was going to be reassigned and not replaced. Instead, management discussed reconstructing the program.

“I was led to believe I would be a producer/host,” says McNamee, although that job description doesn’t exist within the CBC. He questioned how only one person would be able to research, write, edit, produce and host two half-hours of original programming every weekend and still maintain quality. Running a one-person newscast “is contrary to even the most basic journalistic standards,” wrote employees in a petition distributed last summer to the CBC board of directors. When an opportunity to replace Barbara Smith as host of Canada at Five arose, McNamee took it. Today, there’s still no permanent replacement for McNamee on The World This Weekend, and the program’s focus and direction are in question.

With fewer staff and staggering workloads, checking facts and scripts is in question too-it’s more and more becoming a thing of the past, increasing the potential for mistakes. Last fall, a news segment about the Health Protection Branch and results from a study into bovine growth hormone was aired on World Report in anticipation of a Senate hearing on the issue. But the hearing had been cancelled two days before the item was broadcast-which no one had time to check. The time spent on the story could have been devoted to something relevant that day. But there are lesser mistakes made all the time in language, grammar and pronunciation.

McNamee and David Tweedie put together the nine-and-a-half-minute Canada at Five newscast-which airs live in five time zones-with the help of writers and editors from other national news programs. There’s little time for vetting, and sometimes McNamee goes on the air without having read the copy beforehand. If he makes mistakes while reading on the air, it’s usually during the “fish edition.” Even if the second edition has one or two new stories, he’s already familiar with the rest. Still, errors slip through that shouldn’t.

In November, on a special phone-in segment on the noon-hour show Ontario Today, Alex Frame, then director of programming at CBC English Radio, took listener complaints and comments about the service. One loyal listener from Haliburton asked Frame if anyone in management is listening. There are errors on the air all the time, she complained. Pronunciation is inconsistent. One announcer, she said, trying not to be personal, refers to Radio “Niewn.” A second announcer drops his voice at the end of every sentence. “It’s depressing,” she said, referring to the dumbing down of CBC Radio.

In the past, there was a separation between announcers and journalists. It wasn’t until 1985 that reporters in the national newsroom started reading the news they’d written. Traditional announcers, or “golden throats,” argued that journalists wouldn’t sound as professional. But many journalists, including Vince Carlin-a CBC veteran and current chair of Ryerson Polytechnic University’s School of Journalism-can deliver a newscast with more authority than an announcer. (Peter Mansbridge, Alannah Campbell and Russ Germain are examples of good reporter/announcers.) This, however, depends on a commitment to training journalists, which as a result of the cuts isn’t always the case. “The presentation of a newscast is as important as its content,” says Carlin, who was the first person qualified as a “broadcast journalist” in national news. “People who make a lot of mistakes on the air don’t sound authoritative, no matter how good a journalist they are.”

With multitasking a reality at CBC Radio, journalists not only take on announcer jobs, they’re also forced to become skilled in technical areas. Those who still have jobs must learn how to edit tape since there are now fewer technicians to do it for them. Although the technical aspect isn’t as complicated now that digital sound is replacing analog tape, some say quality isn’t always up to the same standards as before. Paul McInnis, the technical associate producer on the Ottawa morning show, says sound quality isn’t as polished since reporters started doing their own tape, and sometimes reporters bring items that can’t be used at all. A few days a week there are feeds-taped items filed from other stations-that have to be thrown away.

On Ontario Today’s phone-in show, a listener from Manotick told Alex Frame that technical problems are common, particularly on the news side. Taped items differ hugely in volume compared to the live voice of the announcer, and some of them are so low they’re almost inaudible.

Dave Stephens, host of Ontario Today, worries CBC Radio is getting too thin on the technical side. When his program was in Toronto last fall for live broadcasts from the Royal Winter Fair, there weren’t enough technicians to do troubleshooting. When a problem occurred, the show went off the air from the site for 15 minutes. Someone in Ottawa had to fill in by reading scripts from the studio.

But it’s not only the national and regional newsrooms that have been affected by the cuts. International news coverage is being reduced. Ten years ago, CBC Radio had five full-time staff foreign correspondents: one each in Washington, Moscow and Johannesburg, and two in London, which is considered one of the most important locations in the world. The South Africa bureau disappeared three years ago. Today, there are only four full-time staff correspondents: Jennifer Westaway in Washington, Mike Hornbrook in Moscow, Patrick Brown in Bangkok and Rick MacInnes-Rae in London. Joan Leishman reports half-time for CBC Radio from Mexico City (she also reports for CBC-TV). But this is about to change. Come summer, the only full-time staff correspondents left will be Brown, Hornbrook and Westaway. Due to the mysteriously missing $3 million, MacInnes-Rae is being reassigned to Toronto. And in February, TV management unexpectedly decided to call back three of its correspondents, including Leishman. Yet, Frame, who was promoted to vice-president of English radio in January, insists foreign coverage is “operating at a consistent level.” By comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation has 250 foreign correspondents and is now expanding its international coverage. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation boasts 22 full-time staff correspondents, nine of whom report for radio and four who file equally for radio and TV. Even Sweden, with a population less than a third of Canada’s, has a public radio service that employs 13 full-time correspondents and three contract stringers.

In response to journalists’ concern that foreign coverage would shrivel as a result of the $3-million debacle, CBC Radio management promised that “pocket bureaus” would be opened as events in far-flung countries warranted them. “That was the same bullshit they said when they opened the Delhi and South African bureaus,” says Michael McIvor, a CBC veteran with almost a decade’s experience as a foreign correspondent. “Where are those pocket bureaus? I’m not seeing them-it’s a fraud to pretend foreign coverage is sustained, because it isn?t.”

As in any other department of CBC Radio, the accumulated budget cuts have resulted in foreign correspondents doing more with fewer resources. McIvor remembers the effects of the early rounds of slashing. Correspondents were filing more and more stories for CBC Newsworld and the main TV network at the same time as they were filing for radio. “When you’ve got to file three or four times a day for radio as well as a television piece and a couple of question-and-answers for Newsworld, when is there time to do the original reporting?” asks McIvor.

Aside from spreading themselves too thin, foreign correspondents must devote more time to administrative details. With shrinking travel budgets, they’re often forced to stay in their offices, relying on feeds from wire services. But that’s no slight to the correspondents. Westaway’s work on the Clinton scandal, MacInnes-Rae’s stories on Iraq, Brown’s reporting on the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hornbrook’s ongoing coverage of the crisis in Russia demonstrate they’re among the best the CBC has.

The Canadian perspective on world events is also being lost. With fewer staff correspondents travelling a lot less than before, CBC Radio has to rely more on freelancers, who are most likely to be American or British. If Hornbrook hadn’t been in Moscow last summer, Canadians might not have heard what the crisis there meant to our economy. Or if Leishman hadn’t been covering Latin America, Canadians might not have learned that of the 1,500 Canadians living in Colombia, none was hurt in the January earthquake. Freelancers are often skilled journalists, but they aren’t going to take the time to put news into context for one particular country or network. The more stories they file, the more they get paid. McIvor recalls a journalist in Moscow working for a major international newspaper who also filed for 20 other media outlets, making only minor changes to each story.

News is not alone on the budgetary operating table. Information programming has been hit too. The sports department, for instance, is down from 29 people in the late 1980s to seven today, with jobs lost across the country and in Toronto. To fill the loss in the regions, programming now originates in Toronto, increasing the workload of that now understaffed unit. Afternoon and evening sportscasts have disappeared, and weekend sports has been reduced to one segment on the Saturday edition of The World This Weekend. To fill more than 40 sportscasts each weekday morning, staffers now have to rewrite wire copy. Critics in the department say sports stories aired by CBC are no longer distinct from those of the private broadcasters.

Meanwhile, in the past five years, the science program Quirks & Quarks has had its staff reduced from three producers and one host to two producers and a half-time host (one producer was lost after the budget bungling last summer). It’s now more difficult to find content and guests for the show, and what might have been a feature story a year ago is more likely to be an interview today. Instead of one investigative story every week, listeners may only hear a handful per year. Quirks & Quarks staff complain that programming has been reduced to filling airtime rather than exploring complex ideas and creating a forum for discussion. Interviews are longer to make up for fewer items. “The program isn’t as good as it once was,” says Ann Stewart, one of the two remaining producers. “But I try not to think about it.”

Other information programs affected are This Morning and As It Happens. This Morning produces three hours of original programming every day except Saturday. That’s the same amount of airtime that Morningside andSunday Morning offered combined before they were folded into This Morning in September 1997. This Morning, however, has a staff of 26, about half the number working on the previous two shows. Michael Enright, who co-hosts This Morning, says radio can’t take the hit it has over the last five years without this having an impact on programming. If resources aren’t there anymore, you have to change the show.

In the case of This Morning, hard-hitting documentary series like the one on mental health in Canada that was aired last fall are becoming a rarity. Producers don’t have the opportunity they had on Sunday Morning to cover Canada and the world, since This Morning doesn’t have a travel budget. “Now, if we want to put one of our producers on a plane,” says Ira Basen, This Morning’s executive producer, “we have to apply for special funding.” The most recent time such expenses were granted was for the “Russia in Crisis” series in January, and before that for Israel’s 50th anniversary last year. Basen is concerned much of the programming consists of interviews from the Toronto studio, when the objective of journalism is to go places, get different points of view and have an analytical journalist figure out what’s going on. But it’s cheaper to produce interviews than sending somebody to a remote area of British Columbia to do a documentary on the Nisga’a treaty.

As It Happens has also shrunk, both in staff size and programming. Today, the show has 14 staff members and broadcasts nine to 10 items each day compared with 18 persons putting 12 to 13 items on the air three years ago. George Jamieson, a senior producer on As It Happens, says the show can put a program on the air with fewer bodies, but it can’t replace curiosity. One fewer brain means fewer ideas. Cutbacks have also meant that As It Happens has lost individuals with expertise in certain areas: one was a fluent Spanish speaker, another had covered Parliament for 10 years and knew the insiders, and a third spoke five languages and had grown up in Europe and southeast Asia. In their own ways, each of these individuals had strong journalistic backgrounds and was able to provide access to hard-to-find sources and countries that are difficult to penetrate.

When As It Happens started 30 years ago it was revolutionary. To call people about what had happened in the news that day hadn’t been done before. Instead of calling official spokespeople during the bombings in Northern Ireland, As It Happens researchers phoned local pubs. And the day Iran’s government put a bounty on Salman Rushdie, says Alan Guettel-a former producer on As It Happens now with the radio syndication unit-researchers were going full speed to get somebody at one of the Iranian phone numbers the show had on its Rolodex. One of the researchers dialed the wrong number but was fortunate to get someone on the line willing to be interviewed. Enright, who was host of As It Happens then, was rushed to the studio. “We got somebody on in Tehran!” That somebody wasn’t an official spokesperson, but an English-speaking Muslim architect who was glad to talk. He would have been honoured to take Salman Rushdie’s life. He would have done it for Allah.

That kind of luck doesn’t happen accidentally. Three researchers called Iran nonstop that day. “It’s much easier to take wire copy and say, ‘A bounty was put on Salman Rushdie’s head. Human-rights activists are aghast,'” says Guettel. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but you haven’t done the job that could be done.”

Another information item that’s becoming rare on the public airwaves is radio documentaries. Radio documentary makers in Canada today broadcast their stories primarily on This Morning, Ideas and Out Front.(Before This Morning existed, they were also aired on Morningside and Sunday Morning, with the latter being their prime focus.) But the Sunday edition of This Morning airs only one documentary each week, compared to six or seven a week a decade ago on Sunday Morning. Documentaries are time consuming and a drain on shrinking resources, says Ira Basen. It’s difficult to take producers off the daily work to spend three weeks making a 25-minute documentary.

There are also more repeats of documentaries. Listeners responding to the Ontario Today phone-in show last November complained of hearing the same episode of Ideas three times. “We don’t have the money to do the number of additional editions of Ideas that we would like,” explained Alex Frame.

The people who make radio documentaries are hard to find at the CBC these days. Steve Wadhams is one of a handful of full-time documentary makers left. He was one of the founding journalists on Sunday Morningwhen it was launched in November 1976, and is one of a group of people who started specializing in documentaries for the show. With the budget squeeze of the 1990s, staff documentary specialists were let go to make room for freelancers. Now, Wadhams says, 80 percent of his work is taken up doing what he calls “documentary midwifery”-helping freelancers bring their stories to life, making sure no parts are missing. Many of the freelancers he works with now have very little experience with the genre or even with the medium. As a result, some pieces are inspired while others barely meet the CBC’s high standards. Using more freelancers means opening the doors to new ideas, but at the expense of established and skilled documentary makers.

Not all documentaries are expensive to produce. Alan Guettel points out that Sunday Morning was “a product of the cassette case.” You could put a fairly reliable machine in your bag, go into the prison that was the centre of Idi Amin’s terror and walk out with a nationally acclaimed documentary. In 1979, Wadhams toured Amin’s prison with a survivor. “Yes, this is blood on the floor. I think these are people who were murdered. You can even see the remains of their heads there. That one belonged to a boy. They brought him here thinking he was a guerrilla when he was just a student going to Kenya.” All it took to describe a boy who had been reduced to a stain on the floor was a cassette recorder and a plane ticket. “But we don’t have the plane ticket anymore,” complains Guettel.

With fewer plane tickets, foreign correspondents and technicians, inadequate training for multiskilling and less time for journalists to find and break stories, CBC Radio is struggling to keep up its image as Canada’s last fortress of serious journalism. But there are those who say the cuts are good. “Welcome to the real world,” says Ken Rockburn, host of Ottawa?s afternoon drive-home show and formerly employed by a private broadcaster. What exactly does he mean by “the real world”? Is the real world American-style commercial radio or is it news and information that matter to Canadians? Is it Howard Stern’s outrageously sexist “jokes” or is it a documentary on mental health in this country? If CBC Radio doesn’t offer programming that informs Vancouver stockbrokers about the life of Cape Breton miners, Toronto wildlife enthusiasts about prospecting in Temagami, Montreal shopkeepers about language laws or hemophiliacs about tainted blood, nobody will. Higher profit margins, not a higher purpose to inform the public, is what drives private radio. “That’s not a mandate that holds the country together,” says Guettel. Twilight hovers over the national public broadcaster. Or is that the shadow of the Grim Reaper coming closer?

Bernie McNamee sits in front of the computer, writing for the second edition of Canada at Five. On his desk there?s a six-inch mini colour TV showing Newsworld. Beside it is a photo of the original crew of The World This Weekend and a few issues of Toronto?s Star and Sun. The top national story this afternoon is the first test flight of an old Labrador helicopter, grounded since another Labrador crashed and killed six crew members last fall. A producer from The World at Six asks McNamee if there’s a clip from CFB Greenwood, where the Labrador took off. “Is there good helicopter sound?” asks the producer. McNamee pounds his fists on his chest like King Kong. As he speaks, his voice imitates the sound of a helicopter. “If you don?t have the sound, you make it,” he says, and the newsroom fills with laughter. Improvising sound effects may become a regular practice at CBC Radio if the budget cuts continue. Or perhaps the cuts will leave CBC Radio facing the same fate as the Labrador: it will disappear from the air.

It’s July 27, 1998. As the sun sinks behind the Detroit skyline, the diamonds splashed across the fa?ade of Windsor’s new casino begin to fade. So too does the glare thrown off by the bone-white streets specially constructed to accommodate the big, shiny white-and-aquamarine monstrosity. In the half-light of dusk, the massive, rainbow-coloured neon canopy protecting the main entrance makes the casino look like a UFO-a UFO that, disguised to land on the Las Vegas strip, has been blown off course and crashed into the north bank of the Detroit River, across from the site of the old Windsor farmer’s market.

They must be friendly aliens, though, because they’ve invited 6,000 area residents inside. The gala marking the opening of Windsor’s permanent casino facility promises to polish Windsor’s reputation as party capital of the province. Along with decidedly B-list celebrities like Regis Philbin and Robin Leach, there’s an Austin Powers look-alike, a 007 impersonator who descends to the floor by pulley-rigged jet-pack and bungee gymnasts. The food includes 3,500 pounds of shrimp, 30,000 canap?s and-I didn’t get an invitation so I can only imagine the magic-turnips carved to look like angelfish. Prudently, the party planners have stocked 180 cases of champagne and 510 cases of wine to wash it down. (Similarly prudently-and in accordance with gaming commission regulations-the PR people have ordered all media cameras off the floor by 9 p.m.)

The gathering has been in full swing for a couple hours when Marty Beneteau, metro editor for The Windsor Star, ducks out the back door to call the paper. He almost doesn’t need a phone-the Star’s offices are only three blocks east-but he pulls out his cell and punches in the newsroom number. He’s checking on the night staff, busy stuffing late copy and photos into tomorrow’s edition for the 200,000 other plebes who didn’t get an invitation.

When the paper goes out-headed “Opening Night Glitters” in 90-point-it features a two-page photo spread and 70 inches of copy. As the climax of the biggest event in the life of the city this decade, the magnitude of the story has not been lost on the Star. Each day during the week preceding the opening, the front page carried a special casino feature (“Roomier Casino Will Improve Life for Workers”) and a small, colour graphic of dice under the tag line “Ready to Roll!” counting down the days. On the big day, the A-section carried instructions on how to play roulette, baccarat and blackjack. An intern at the time, I had done the puff piece de r?sistance the week before: 12 inches of snappy copy on what people would be wearing to the gala.

Aesthetically, the coverage, like the people at the party, looked good, wrapped up as it was in a recent banner redesign and printed on the Star’s new press. But the casino story represented change on a much more fundamental level than page layout. A few years ago, if you wanted to gamble you went to Nevada or New Jersey. Now, in an age of reduced government expenditure and lower tax revenues, legislatures are approving casinos as a fast way to make a buck. Among the seven provinces that have legitimized gambling, Canada is now home to 52 casinos. Of course, gambling hasn’t gone completely downtown-in Ontario it’s banished to the dark corners of the province: Niagara, Windsor and Orillia. But as a local or regional issue, the debate has become a big story for small papers like the Niagara Falls Review and Orillia’s daily, The Packet & Times. And because it’s a story about changing the nature of a city, it often generates more controversy than consensus.

On one hand, it’s the usual business tale about depressed communities, jobs and economic opportunity. But a casino isn’t the same as a car plant. Gambling is a pastime associated with personal loss and public crime, or, at the very least, a less than family-like atmosphere. Which confronts citizens with a choice between the pragmatic economic reality of, say, 5,000 new jobs, and the idea of preserving a certain kind of lifestyle. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. As the only daily in Windsor, the Star was in a position to influence how the casino question was handled. But when the editorial board showed its hand, it was of the same opinion as the mayor’s office and the business community: the casino was a good bet. This select group of people, the city’s elite, seemed to start the game before the public was at the table, an action at odds with the traditional role of the newspaper as a populist defender of democracy existing outside established power structures. What happened to the watchdog? Perhaps it’s my own na?vet?, but the only question the Stardefinitively answered was this: Was there ever a chance the casino wouldn’t be built?

By most measures, The Windsor Star is a model of a community-minded newspaper, maybe one of the best examples in Canada. The banner boasts “Canada?s #1 Metro Newspaper in Readers Per Capita.” After the 80,000 copies printed daily have been passed around, more than 80 percent of Windsor residents will have read the Star. And although there are more wire pieces because of staff cutbacks in the early ’90s, the copy doesn’t have the anonymity and “story by numbers” feel of many big-city dailies. There are no cell-phone advertisements disguised as technology sections and you usually get to A7 before you hit a full-page ad. Instead, when it can, the Star devotes its resources to running special features on issues important to local residents, like education and the economy. The work hasn’t gone unrecognized: two of the Star’s four National Newspaper Awards have been in the special projects category.

But the most telling symbol of the Star’s place in the community is that residents don’t just read it, they use it. There’s a steady stream of letters to the editor, and a regular duty of the photographers is to shoot the couples who show up in the newsroom dressed to the nines to have their 50th wedding anniversary pictures taken for publication. Readers still celebrate graduations and 40th birthdays with an ad and picture in the paper, while the obit page runs more In Memoriams than most larger papers. It sounds like a line you’d see on the side of a bus, but The Windsor Star is a real part of the community.

So in March 1992, when a local Windsor developer, Bill Docherty, first proposed building a small, unobtrusive, European-style casino as part of a sports complex he had planned for downtown Windsor, it was with the good of the community in mind that the paper supported the idea.

“Windsor was in desperate shape in those years,” remembers Chris Vander Doelen, now an editorial writer for the Star but at the time the city hall reporter. “The business and labour community had gone through a two-year process trying to identify what they could do to improve their economy. Windsor’s historic problem has been overreliance on the auto industry; when that sector goes in the tank, Windsor’s entire economy follows. What we needed was something else to depend on. And after study and discussions with economists, they decided, since tourism is the world’s fastest-growing business sector, that increasing tourism was the city’s best chance of diversifying its economy. I thought this was a reasonable assumption.”

At the time the Docherty proposal surfaced, the Star was running one of its special series, “Economy Under Fire,” which looked at how residents were coping with the recession of the early ’90s. The answer was “Not well.” A study by a University of Windsor business professor had found only 61 percent of the area’s wage earners over the age of 18 held down full-time jobs at the time (even the former mayor, David Burr, was out of work). An editorial published a few days before the announcement had taken the Rae government to task for ignoring the plight of border towns that were seeing their local economies sucked dry by cross-border shopping. A proposal that might shower the city with money appeared as a light in a very dark sky.

The provincial government certainly saw the light. The Ontario Casino Corporation (OCC) was created to oversee the operation (Docherty was out of the picture by then), an American firm was hired to run it and Windsor’s art gallery was moved to a mall to make room downtown for an interim casino until the permanent facility was opened last summer. On May 17, 1994, the doors swung open to a lineup that stretched around the block. The casino had gone from idea to opening in two years.

Of course, it helped that there wasn’t much opposition. Two days after the proposal surfaced and long before the government had made a final decision on where and when a casino might be built, the Star’s editorial board had already placed its bet. Its first editorial on the subject detailed the economic benefits the city could hope would accrue to it. While the writer fretted about the absence of a government agency to supervise the project, the paper’s conclusion was “There’s nothing in this proposal that raises red flags.” The Star’sinfluential opinion columnist, Gord Henderson, didn’t even bother with the qualification. “What took so long? Why the heck didn’t Windsor’s…civic leadership pick up this ball and run with it years ago?” he wrote on March 12, 1992.

Of course, a newspaper is entitled to its editorial opinion, but the coverage in the news hole in those early days showed the same willingness to follow suit. The first story, which appeared March 11, 1992, announced Docherty’s proposal on the front page. It was accompanied, on A4, by a second story: “Profit a Sure Bet at Manitoba Casino.” The lead explicitly stated Winnipeg’s casino was experiencing “bigger than expected profits.” The story went on to detail how many jobs the casino had created and noted that the profits went to charity, although it did briefly suggest there were some downsides for the city.

The next day, high up in a story by reporter Scott Burnside, a local bishop noted, “The economy does involve moral decisions;” he also said “there are a lot of pitfalls” associated with casino gambling. Much lower, the former general manager of the local convention and visitors’ bureau, John Deneau, was quoted as saying that a casino “sounds like an excellent idea.” The story ended up headed: “Casino Gambling Good Bet, Tourism Officials say.”

The following day, there was another story: “City Casinos Could Lure High Rollers.” This time Deneau had been moved up to the fourth paragraph of a story that featured the succinct lead “There’s no shortage of high rollers around to make Windsor Canada’s Monte Carlo.” The bishop had disappeared.

Eventually, Burnside was sent to Winnipeg to document the impact casino gambling had had on that city. He filed a well-sourced and balanced story that investigated both the pros and cons of gambling in Winnipeg and ended with a plea for a plebiscite on the issue. But a headline-skimmer wouldn’t have had that impression. “Winnipeg Casino Pays Handsomely” was the story’s head.

It’s the kind of coverage that makes James Winter cringe. “I think all along it’s been a case of cheerleading for the casino,” says the University of Windsor communications professor of the Star’s coverage. Winter, who has been called a thoughtful media critic by some Star reporters and a lunatic by others, says he still has to search for negative casino coverage in Windsor. “Maclean’s magazine has done critical stories, I’ve seen critical stories in The Globe and Mail, in the [Toronto] Star, I’ve even seen Southam do a series which ran inThe Windsor Star but didn?t have any local material. The material is out there but it tends to be ignored,” says Winter. According to the even-voiced, earnest professor, there’s a simple reason for The Windsor Star’ssupport. “They would say, well, it’s good because it’s good for the economy and it provides jobs. But I really question whether they’re concerned about jobs at all or whether they just have this knee-jerk support of development and business because it means more advertising for them.”

Not surprisingly, Jim Bruce, the managing editor of the Star at the time the casino bid was announced, is quick to dismiss Winter’s criticism: “He seems to have no understanding that the newspaper business is like any other business in a free-enterprise system, that you have to make money. People like him get on their high horse and say that all editorial departments do today is kowtow to advertisers. If it weren’t for advertisers we wouldn’t have too many papers in our country. Somebody has to pay the freight.”

In 1995, Bruce became publisher of the Star, a position he held until he retired in 1997. That insider perspective has left Bruce with a keen sense of what makes a paper viable. “I’m telling you, if there’s a recurring message I got from readers over the last many years of newspapers, it would be we’re too negative. I always used to say, ‘Yeah, you can’t bury your head in the sand, that really happened out there, we’re duty-bound to report it.’ And that’s true to a degree. But there seems to be a lot of thinking that things that are negative have more value than positive things.” And for some readers, a photo spread of locals arriving at the gala, decked out for the biggest social event in Windsor’s history, was simply the paper documenting the success of the city.

Not that Bruce is making excuses. He’s unabashed about his paper’s decision to support the casino: “One would have to be a fool to think it was not a good thing for Windsor. You wouldn’t want a casino in the ideal world, but it certainly has brought a lot of jobs and money to Windsor.”

The numbers certainly bolster his argument. In 1993, 1.35 million cars crossed the border at Windsor; three years later, the figure had risen to 2.75 million. Just 400 tour buses stopped in Windsor in 1993; in 1996, 10 times that many middle-aged American residents showed up and left $1.5 million a day at the casino. Windsor job seekers have also cashed in: the casino has a staff of 5,000, making it the third-largest employer in the city, after Chrysler and Ford. Even David Burr, the unemployed former mayor, got a job as a dealer.

But Les Hyttenrauch, a team leader for production and customer service at a local tooling firm, isn’t swayed. He opposed-and still opposes-the casino for decidedly uneconomic reasons. “I think it has a detrimental effect on the family,” he says. “I think you should earn money the old-fashioned way and not expect to get it handed to you through a lottery or casino situation. As well, you’re promoting an addictive behaviour and making profit off of it.”

Two weeks after the proposal first surfaced, when city council considered a resolution supporting the idea of casino gambling, 200 people, roughly half for and half against, crowded the council chamber. The next day, in an issue that featured a large picture of Docherty and a small one of Hyttenrauch, the Star’s editorial was polite toward, but dismissive of, the people who had appeared in opposition. “While those speaking against the plan were eloquent in the opposition, their arguments rang hollow.” But it was the wording of the resolution that burned Hyttenrauch. It stated in part, “The Windsor community has clearly demonstrated acceptance and support for the concept [of a casino],” even though the Star reported an even split in those for and against at the council meeting. Believing that the community had done no such thing, Hyttenrauch formed Voters Expressing True Opinion (VETO) and began the “Did I say that?” campaign, reproducing the phrase on fliers to protest what he and others interpreted as a short-circuiting of the democratic process.

When it comes to an issue like a casino, backing a referendum would seem to be a natural extension of theStar’s right-of-centre, almost libertarian, editorial stance. But Hyttenrauch thinks the Star purposely went after him in print. “Anyone who was in opposition was a heretic,” he says of the Star’s attitude. “This was going to be a great thing for Windsor… and anybody who thought it wasn’t was either an extremist or had their head in the sand.” Eventually Hyttenrauch caught the eye of columnist Karen Hall, who, in a piece titled “And the Family Will Survive This One Too,” mocked him for being a family-oriented, fundamentalist Christian. “Basically, she said we were a bunch of nose-up hypocrites and how could we be so stupid. It was a pretty nasty article.”

Hall’s story, the last lines of which read, “I may never set foot in the casino, but I don’t feel the least bit intimidated by its existence. I’m more threatened by all those good people who want to protect me from it,” made a noble point about free choice but failed to mention, let alone engage, Hyttenrauch’s position on the referendum.

Alan Halberstadt, a former Star columnist, first elected to city council in 1997 as a fiscal conservative, supports the casino, but still agrees with Hyttenrauch. “I’m not saying they should have come out against it editorially, but I think they could have pushed the democratic process to say let the people decide. [The role of a paper] is to question things, not just to let things glide through.”

James Winter isn’t so diplomatic in his assessment. “If they were so democratically oriented, they would have demanded a vote like the people of Detroit had. [Detroiters were asked three times if they wanted a casino.] But it was something they didn’t want to consult the people on because what if the people said no?” (The provincial government now requires any city seeking a casino to put the question to a local vote.)

But Gord Henderson, the current opinion writer for the Star, says a referendum was impractical. “Unless you organized one, which would have been humongously expensive, the only other way to do it would be to wait until the next civic election. But there was such a sense of urgency. I don’t think we had the luxury of hanging around two or three years for an election.”

Three years after the interim casino had opened, the Star did support a motion by city councillor Margaret Williams to add a casino question to the ballot because a second casino was being discussed by the mayor’s office and provincial officials.

Williams originally proposed asking, “Do you feel that on balance casino gaming has been good for Windsor?” That way, she believed, “People morally opposed to gambling would be able to answer it truthfully.” But the wording was changed by council to ask whether residents thought casino gaming had been of economic benefit to Windsor. As Williams says, “A bit of a no-brainer.” More than 31,000 voters agreed that the casino was good for the economy, compared to 9,314 who disagreed. A second question on whether residents wanted another casino-in a sense asking whether they wanted Windsor to become Las Vegas north-also passed, but not by much: 21,642 to 19,066.

“It was in favour but it showed there were a lot of people that don’t want the city turned over to casino gambling. I know there’s a large segment of the population that feels that way,” says Halberstadt. For his part, Henderson favours the theory that a larger majority of people wanted the first casino, but residents, sick of hearing about casinos, didn’t express that opinion at the ballot box.

Kate Milberry and Rodger Levesque, copublishers of Room, a local monthly news and entertainment magazine, agree that a majority would have voted for a casino in the first place but wonder how much of that consent was manufactured by the Star. Like Winter, they criticize the Star for selectively reporting on the casino.

“There’s what you put in the paper and what you leave out, and what you leave out is just as important or just as damning as what you put in. I think they’re leaving a lot of information out,” says Levesque.

He thinks the real impact of the casino has never been calculated and maintains it’s the Star’s mandate to provide that information when the other players in the deal, like the casino corporation and city hall, won’t. “How much of a subsidy is the casino receiving? Are they paying their fair share for the damage their customers are doing to our roads? There are a lot of questions that go unanswered. We don’t have the staff or resources to do a real good story on it, so you’d expect someone with the resources to do it but they don”t,” said Levesque in a rant worthy of Rick Mercer. “I think the Star was completely misleading the public that this was pure opportunity. On one level, you have people saying the economy has improved. But it’s improved at what price?”

Milberry believes the paper failed to inform its readers about all the implications of having a casino. “Of course there are the stories of devastation and loss. Why don’t we have these in-depth features on addiction and the effect of casinos on cities, starting with Windsor? What’s happening here and how are they dealing with it? What do other communities have? What are we doing differently? How well-attended are Gamblers Anonymous groups? What are the stories of the families of gamblers who are addicts? Do we do these in the Saturday features section? No.

“The community was not told about the implications of having a casino. We were just told the benefits of the economic spin-offs. Great, I’m all for telling that, but then tell the other side.”

A current Star reporter attributes the positive coverage to the nature of newspaper reporting: “I think our stories reflected the way the community was feeling about it. You certainly didn’t see any negative stories, but then I don’t think there was a lot of negativity in the community.”

But doesn’t that say more about the mindset of the paper than public opinion? In any case, Scott Burnside, the reporter first sent to the Winnipeg casino and now a sports writer for the National Post, defends the coverage when he was working there. “I think that while we weren’t necessarily critical in our news coverage, we were balanced in taking a look at a whole range of [issues], whether it was the offshoot of jobs or the potential ramifications to the social fabric of the city. I think they’ve made a point of not merely being a cheerleader for the casino. I think the paper’s having a reporter that’s dedicated to the casino beat is an indication of the paper responding [to that].”

When I identify myself to Sue Bailey, the Star’s casino reporter at the time of the opening, a wariness creeps into her voice. “All I can say is that I’ve never felt any pressure to cast stories in a positive light,” she says, before mentioning the Freedom of Information requests she’s filed to pry financial information from the reluctant hands of the OCC, and her stories exploring cost overruns associated with the construction of the casino. She mentions she’s working on a major feature dealing with addiction. “We’ve written the stories about the jobs that have been created, the spin-offs for local restaurants and other entertainment places, but at the same time we’ve also written about health and safety concerns, working conditions and the concerns of employees.”

Bailey, who took over the beat in 1997 but has now moved on to a new job with the Canadian Press, certainly hasn’t endeared herself to casino management. The casino hired Toronto firm Shandwick Canada to handle PR for the gala opening. Shandwick assigned an employee, complete with radio headset ? la CIA operatives, to trail Bailey over the course of the evening because she was considered a “troublemaker” for a snide article she had written on the d?cor of the new casino hotel rooms prior to the opening.

Chris Vander Doelen, Bailey’s predecessor, now an editorial writer, was the first casino beat reporter in Canada. Like Bailey, he’s a bit defensive when I call: “If you’re asking me to give an opinion on what kind of job I did, I think I did a good job.” As an editorial writer, Vander Doelen supports the casino (he thinks the first one wasn’t big enough and would like to see another), but he says as a reporter he approached the casino beat like any other. He found the biggest impediment to stories was the brick wall put up by the American firms hired by the OCC to run the casino. “I was a reporter trying to find out stuff. They were determined I wouldn’t.”

He compensated by “scraping and digging and hanging around and keeping my ears open and asking people questions.” He says, “I’d be at a bar after work and I’d hear somebody say they were a dealer, I’d start asking questions. I’d go into the casino at least once a week and talk to staff. I’d buy a draft and shoot the shit with the bartender, ask him how things were going.”

Vander Doelen thinks the Star devoted too much space to the casino, especially in the early days. “We started to get a backlash from some readers saying they were sick of reading about it. It was the biggest thing going on in the city but there were days when we had five or six stories in the paper related to this.”

Today, critics like Milberry admit the current coverage is no longer as blatantly boosterish as it was in the very early days. Inevitably, the casino has become just another part of the community, subject to the same treatment by the Star as any other institution. But the fact remains that by not challenging the casino in the first place, The Windsor Star, at least in the early days, was an accomplice in, rather than a questioner of, the move to a casino economy. Winter believes the paper, by not exploring other options, has allowed the city to saddle itself with a second-rate industrial base. “I think that the paper, if it is going to live up to the way in which newspapers in the media represent themselves, that is, as serving the public interest, should be concerned about the people. And that doesn’t mean just being concerned about jobs, but concerned about the type of jobs people have.”

Levesque agrees that by adopting a casino economy, the city is settling for something second best. “[The Star] is looking at how the largest amounts of dollars can come into a community, not how the largest number of people can have dignity.”

Dignity is not a word that comes to mind when you walk through the casino. The noise generated by thousands of slot machines numbs the senses, while the rows of slot players-the majority of them low-income Americans, slumped on stools, blank stares fixed on the tumblers, robotically dumping tokens into the machines-leaves you with an impression of anything but the glitz of the opening. I notice how much fun they’re not having.

But that Windsor had to do something about its economy was obvious. What was the question. As the world economy shifts to a-pick your adjective-global/knowledge/digital economy, local municipalities are left to deal with the fallout of a manufacturing base draining to the developing nations of the world. Some municipalities, like the suburbs around Ottawa or Toronto, have countered by going high tech. The only other option seems to be the service/tourist industry.

And sure, a job at a software development firm in some lovely, landscaped industrial park where everyone’s pulling down $200,000 a year and driving his SUV to Starbucks instead of standing around in a cheesy tuxedo at 11 bucks an hour would have been nice. But let?s face the facts: this is Windsor. It already had a reputation among Americans as Tijuana North for its strip clubs and lower drinking age, and millions of Americans live within a day’s drive (which means that the money spent at the casino is coming from outside the community, and the problems that result from losing that money disappear when the Americans leave).

If you were going to design a city for a casino, you’d look to Windsor for the blueprint. Besides, ask any of the employees: they’ll tell you it’s not a great job but it’s not bad and in some cases it pays well-dealers can make $60,000 a year. In that way, the editorial board was right, the casino has paid off. But that?s still an opinion about where the final bottom line lies. An opinion like Rodger Levesque’s and James Winter’s comments are simply that-opinions. And, to extend that line of thinking, those are the views of just three of Windsor’s 200,000 residents, a group of people who, according to the policy-makers of the city, can’t be trusted to make the right decision.

As for Hyttenrauch, when he appeared in front of council the night it decided to support the casino proposal, he argued it would only add to Windsor’s seedy reputation. The last thing he said to a Star reporter that night was that he hoped prostitution is never legalized in Ontario “because the city of Windsor will be the first to have brothels.” As a potentially lucrative economic activity, it’s probably an initiative the Star could be trusted to support.

The bright afternoon sun illuminates the crimson and gold autumn leaves of October. Massive white clouds-the kind that often take the shape of animals and people-slowly drift across the bright blue sky. Fairport Marine and Tackle, a weathered, powder blue and white building with a red, hand-painted “Minnows” sign, sits beside a gently flowing river. Empty docks and gravel parking lot suggest that fishing season has closed. Across from Fairport’s front stoop are two bridges-one for trains, the other for cars-that stretch over the river. Along the water’s edge, bulrushes quietly nod in the cool wind. Suddenly, a Ford Explorer boasting vibrant shades of school bus yellow and fire engine red comes to a dusty halt. As the Sesame Street song goes, “One of these things is not like the others.” Passing motorists stare as the driver, Danny Petkovsek, hops out of the vehicle and begins talking to a small, silver digital video camera held above his head. Petkovsek, who resembles the singer Phil Collins, is a videographer, a news reporter and cameraperson rolled into one. He’s preparing a story on a new highway extension for the 6 p.m. edition of VRLand News-part of The New VR, a television station located in Barrie, Ontario, that has redefined how middle-market stations service an established rural audience and new suburban viewers.

Almost four years ago, the newscast was called Total News and the station was simply CKVR. Major renovations came when the station’s owner, CHUM Ltd., took creative control. At the helm was Moses Znaimer, the creator of Toronto’s much applauded and much analyzed Citytv, also owned by CHUM, a flashy station geared to a young, urban crowd. He sees “the news as a soap opera” with reporters and videographers as character actors.

The New VR was an experiment to see if a jazzy style could be exported to a rural area in the throes of demographic change. The owners were so pleased with the results that, in the fall of 1998, Znaimer and company turned newly acquired CFPL in London, CKNX in Wingham, CHWI in Windsor and CHRO in Pembroke into The New PL, The New NX, The New WI and The New RO. Collectively, all five stations are known as The New Net. It’s an appropriate term, considering that residents who want to watch local coverage are now trapped-they have no choice but to watch Znaimer’s hip version of the news.

The New VR officially began on September 1, 1995, the day the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and CKVR ended an affiliation that lasted over 30 years. In his presentation to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in the spring of 1994, vice-president and general manager Doug Garraway said the station was in trouble because “the CBC no longer wants us, in point of fact we can no longer afford to remain affiliated with them.” By the end of 1995, CKVR expected to have lost a total of $5 million.

In his CRTC speech, Garraway also mentioned that the station’s “survival plan” was based on “strong local news, active community service and a strategic program linkage with Citytv.” Garraway told the CRTC that the proposal “safeguards the extensive news and community service the residents of central Ontario have come to expect for almost 40 years.” The result: the station invested over $1 million, which was put toward new equipment. Among the purchases: a satellite dish, editing machines and FRED, a 10-foot-high video wall for the newsroom. In addition, CKVR’s “Classic Television” series such as I Love Lucy and The Beverly Hillbillies was replaced with shows like Hercules and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Only Leave It to Beaver survived the cut.

About the only other thing that remained the same was the VR of CKVR, but even that had a new meaning. Originally, VR stood for Ralph Snelgrove, who started the station back in 1955, and his wife Valerie. But now the letters stand for slogans like “Very Rugged, Very Raptors,” a reflection of the station’s new style and its broadcast rights for 41 Toronto Raptors basketball games.

VR was also used to help define the station’s broadcast area. Znaimer dubbed it VRLand and all those who inhabit the domain became VRLanders. He believed the station was one of the few things these people had in common. In the September 22/28, 1997, edition of Variety, he said, “How do you bring a new identity to people who are supposed to be rural, conservative and vague about who they are? You tell them they live in New VRLand.” The region encompasses York Region in the south and Muskoka to the north. It goes as far east as Peterborough and as far west as Owen Sound. Videographer Petkovsek refers to it as “the area our footprint covers,” which means it treads on more than a million people.

In 1995, Znaimer predicted residents would warm up to the name in a few years. But most of the people I spoke with see it for what it is-a marketing scheme. As an example, I met Colleen (she refused to tell me her last name), who works in downtown Barrie and has lived in the city for 17 years. She’s one of the few people I talked to who enjoys VRLand News. She likes that it doesn’t report as much crime as the Toronto stations. But she wants a name change. She finds it ironic that “people hate the name so much that they’ll always remember the channel.”

That name is, to borrow a term, everywhere. “VRLand News” is festooned all over the newsroom, from the back of the anchor’s clipboard to the black letters on the studio walls. The broadcast is presented directly from an 1,874-square-foot, bright yellow newsroom. While the style is based on Citytv, the visual images can be a little more laid-back. So instead of the flashing lights and police tape of a Toronto murder scene there are pan shots of ice huts on Lake Simcoe. Or instead of people frantically editing tape and rushing around in the open-concept newsroom, only one or two people can be seen talking or working at a computer. Bob McIntyre, The New VR’s weather forecaster, calls the Citytv style “rock and roll news,” but the VRLand tempo is more adult contemporary.

Behind Lance Chilton, the 6 o’clock anchor, viewers can see the editing stations, reporters’ work areas, the sports corner and the assignment board. One thing missing is an anchor desk, allowing Chilton to wander around, lean against tables or perch on a stool. This is supposed to break down the barrier between the audience and the news, to show the viewer how the news is made as it’s presented. As well, the newsroom is the only place in which tripods are used; elsewhere, hand-held shots are the norm, resulting in shaky, gritty and, at times, dizzying effects. In the April 21, 1997, edition of Broadcasting & Cable, Znaimer said that he likes “an intense kind of immediacy. The objective of the media is to get closer and closer to the real thing.” Another way of accomplishing that objective is done through reporter involvement. VRLand reporters are seen throughout the story. For instance, in a series on fire safety, the audience saw videographer Bill Mantas climb ladders, crawl through hallways and interview firefighters. He followed the fifth of Znaimer’s 10 commandments, which Znaimer revealed in the three-hour documentary TVTV: The Television Revolution in 1995. “Television is as much about the people bringing you the story,” he said, “as the story itself.”

The fifth commandment is repeatedly drilled into employees. Last October, for example, six people gathered in the office of John Thornton, VRLand’s director of news and operations, for their morning story meeting. Tapes were piled up here and there; the walls were practically bare. It looked as though Thornton hadn’t finished moving in, even though he’s been there over a year. During the meeting, the group swiftly moved from one story idea to the next. Within the first few minutes, Thornton asked what Gina Livy, the director of sports, was covering that day. “Jujitsu,” replied Cindy MacDonald, the 6 o’clock news producer. “So, she’s going to participate?” Thornton asked sarcastically. No one said anything, so he continued: “You make sure you talk to her, Cindy.” About 15 minutes later, MacDonald suggested a follow-up about a hospital that was supposed to get money from the provincial government. Since Chilton, formerly an entertainment reporter for Citytv’s CityPulse Tonight and co-host of MuchMusic’s Fax, originally reported the story, she thought he could talk to the hospital again and ask what it will do with the money. Thornton piped in: “Did Lance talk to any patients yesterday?” Tense silence. Thornton looked directly at MacDonald: “Are you going to talk to him about that?” MacDonald nodded. Then, as though she might not have understood, Thornton asked: “So what makes us think if we put him on the story today he’ll talk to any patients?” MacDonald lowered her voice: “We’ll talk to him about talking to patients.” With a smug smile Thornton responded: “Great. Well, I’ll be watching.”

Michael Nolan, who teaches media history and media politics at the University of Western Ontario, wonders about the relevance of journalists injecting themselves into a story: “Is the viewer really interested in what the journalist feels or thinks about?” Bill Patrick, who was the first manager of news and operations at The New VR and is now at The New RO, visited professor Janice Neil’s journalism class at Carleton University last year. She remembers him telling her students that the reporter is forefront in the story because “it’s making the audience familiar with the storyteller. You trust somebody whose face you know much more than a disembodied voice.” Anne Marie Green, a VRLand reporter and the 12:30 news anchor, believes that reporter involvement is natural. She says VRLand News “doesn’t want reporters to pretend they’re not part of the story. We’re part of the story. If someone cries, you give them a hug. That’s what you would do out on the street.”

The reporters almost have to get involved to avoid committing the ultimate sin: the voice-over. Viewers watch reporters conduct interviews and give commentary out in the field, as Petkovsek did on the bridge. Or, to cite another example, shots of a car accident will flash on the screen and the voice that’s describing the situation will be a police officer or a witness. “We’re personality driven,” explains Green. “We want the people in the story to tell the story, not the reporter.”

Pictures have to tell the story too. While Petkovsek, who worked for Citytv for 18 years before coming to The New VR last summer, covered the highway extension, he also filmed a preview promotional segment. To convey a sense of danger to the viewers, he showed a dump truck passing by a group of schoolchildren waiting to cross the street. Then he pointed the camera at himself and explained that a highway extension would relieve in-town traffic volume. Petkovsek says his commentary and the visuals are supposed to give the viewer “a connection between dangerous roads and a community’s well-being.”

Because videographers do it all-reporting, filming and editing-they face special challenges in following the house style. VRLand has four videographers: Mantas, Petkovsek, Tonya Rouse and Darrin Maharaj. To tell their stories, they film themselves at arm’s length, often resulting in a fishbowl look, or they film their reflections in mirrors or windows. Sometimes they’ll set up a second camera to film themselves filming an interview. Mantas has what VR calls a “third eye,” a headset that has a small camera lens that juts out from the left side of his head, making him look like a Star Trek character. David Akin, a technology reporter at theNational Post, believes that videographers are a “cost-cutting exercise to reduce a news crew that would normally consist of a cameraperson and a reporter.” But Petkovsek argues that videography is a way of claiming authorship: “When I go out and work, the product that goes on the air at the end of the day, whether you like it or not, good or bad, is mine.”

Most of VRLand’s on-air news staff are young and fashionable. They like black and sport trendy hair styles-from flippy to short and sleek. With three reporters and one videographer who are visible minorities, the ethnic mix is better than it was three years ago. VRLand News is mirroring Citytv’s multicultural blend. As Green puts it, “CHUM is famous for recognizing the importance of having a newsroom reflect its audience and also recognizing that people walk different paths, come from different points of view.” While visible minorities only make up 2.6 percent of Barrie’s population, the area is more multicultural than it used to be. This change can be attributed to the fact that Barrie has become one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada. From 1991 to 1996, its population grew by almost 23 percent as people moved from Toronto to settle in a quieter area.

Some wonder if the Citytv style works in a region like VRLand where there isn’t a major population centre, only farms, cottages, quaint villages, towns and a few small cities. Even though Barrie has a population of 119,000, it still feels like a small-town community where people say hello to strangers on the street and aren’t too concerned if they forget to lock their doors at night. Bob McIntyre, VRLand’s weather forecaster, says that Barrie is “a beer and hamburg town. We’re not sophisticated but we’re not dumb.” John Allemang, The Globe and Mail‘s television columnist, comments that the VRLand style “is a little more thrusting, aggressive, assertive and that’s not been the small-town approach, where it’s been more important to be friendly, affable, nice, nonthreatening, asexual…. There’s always sexuality in a Citytv newscast.” However, Petkovsek says that “people living up here, they’re not all hicks and bumpkins. A lot of people used to live in Toronto and those who didn’t are just as well educated, just as up on popular culture as anybody in Toronto. They can afford a few visual jolts, they’re up to speed on that.”

I got a chance to see the Citytv style in the making when I tagged along with Petkovsek while he reported on the highway extension. He stopped in Holland Landing, a town with a population of approximately 9,400, when he saw a man and a little boy raking dirt on their front lawn. Petkovsek asked the man if he would give his opinion of the highway extension. After the man agreed, Petkovsek told him where to stand and asked his son to keep raking. When Petkovsek began the interview, I almost started to laugh. The man, wearing his red and black plaid lumber jacket, construction boots and blue work pants, stood where he was told. Petkovsek then zoomed in with his little camera to about a foot from the man’s face. Petkovsek started walking around him, crouched down to get an up-the-nose shot and then he walked up a little slope to get a bird’s-eye view of the top of the guy’s head. Petkovsek’s camera angles would make most people uncomfortable, but they seemed even more absurd given the context of a simpler, quieter, rural way of life.

Steve Hurlbut, Citytv’s vice-president of news programming, mentioned in a Toronto Sun article last year that Znaimer often says people must “think globally, watch locally. If you understand your community, you can understand the world.” Translation: report local stories. Petkovsek explained that VRLand News is meant to “hold up a mirror of the community and shine it back on the community.” Allemang says that having a local focus is a smart business move since it helps to gain a strong following from viewers, which larger networks struggle to do.

Tony Panacci, the supervising producer of VRLand News, says his newscast covers all the hard news, such as local politics, accidents and crime. But “we focus on recreation stories, sports, we focus on human-interest stories.” Those are the stories that “make us what we are.” The main criterion for any story on VRLand Newsis that it “has to affect the people in this area.”

With such a strong focus on the local, it’s no surprise that national and international events are relegated to the end of the newscast and presented in headline fashion only. McIntyre remembers one day when “the Hutus and the Tutsis were beating the crap out of each other. There were bodies all over the place. Not one call. A cat’s up a tree, 65 friggin’ calls in 15 minutes to get the damn cat out of the tree.” The New RO has the same intensely local coverage, and Richard Gray, its news director, says that “we will answer your fundamental questions on [national and international news], but if you’re looking for more depth, then you should probably look somewhere else…. We’re going to give you depth and breadth on local issues.”

In order to measure the depth of VRLand News, I looked at the elements of a good local newscast that were developed last year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an affiliate of New York City’s Columbia University graduate school of journalism. A team of 13 local TV journalists in the United States “defined quality as doing an accumulation of basic things well: Good local news broadcasts should accurately reflect their whole community, cover a wide variety of topics, cover what is significant, and balance their stories with multiple points of view, a variety of knowledgeable sources and a high degree of community relevance. In short, Journalism 101.”

The elements for analyzing a local newscast include: “Topic Range,” in which the number of topics in a newscast is divided by the number of stories-a measure to ascertain if the local news reflected the entire community; “Story Focus,” in which each story is examined to see if it focused on a larger issue or everyday occurrence; “Enterprise Level,” in which the station is evaluated to see how much effort is put into the story; “Number of Sources,” in which the sources in a story are tallied; “Viewpoints,” in which the different viewpoints in each story are calculated; “Source Expertise,” in which the quality of sources is measured; and “Local Relevance,” in which a story’s connection to the community is assessed. I took some of these criteria, peeled away the flashy style of VRLand News and tried to assess the quality of its coverage.

I randomly selected eight 6 o’clock newscasts from a time span of three months. Two aired during last November’s sweeps period, four were from the week of December 7, 1998, and two aired at the end of January of this year. I didn’t look at weekend shows because they’re only a half-hour instead of an hour.

After viewing these examples, I found VRLand News lacking in the “Enterprise Level” category. In the eight newscasts, most of the stories were about fires, accidents and local events. There weren’t many innovative story ideas. Only 15 percent of the local stories didn’t seem to stem from a press release, the wires or a phone call. Janice Neil of Carleton’s school of journalism, who worked for the CBC for 12 years, makes an observation about news coverage on The New RO that also applies to VRLand News: “The kind of news they’re doing is quite different. They’re not tackling policy stories…. They are tackling things that have happened.” Occasionally, VRLand News took an “event” story and tried to make it relevant to local residents. For example, Petkovsek went to a local hog farm on December 10, when the provincial and federal governments announced they’d provide aid for hog farmers. Not only did he explain why the money was needed but he also showed the viewers how the farm operated.

With coverage of so many one-time events, VRLand News didn’t report many larger issues. Only 21 percent of the stories focused on topics like the effects of local teachers’ strikes or the government’s suggestion that higher taxes on cigarettes might encourage people to quit smoking. When VRLand News reporters covered these stories, they often presented them from a local angle. In doing so, large issues were connected to local faces. For example, on November 4, VR reporter Sherine Mansour did a story about a little girl in the small town of Inglewood who needed a heart transplant. Through interviews with the parents, viewers learned about the daughter’s rare heart disease, what size of heart she needed and the difficulty of finding a replacement. The viewers were brought into the girl’s home and saw the necessity of organ donation.

I tried to measure “Source Expertise,” but VRLand News didn’t always tell viewers who was being interviewed or why that person was significant to the story. Sometimes the person who appeared on the screen wasn’t identified by the reporter or by graphics on the bottom of the picture. Other times, the person’s name appeared but his or her connection to the story wasn’t explained; instead, a quote from the interview appeared under the person’s name. For example, on December 8, a younger woman was interviewed at a seniors’ home where little kids were singing Christmas songs for the residents. Her name, Lydia Whelan, appeared on the bottom of the screen while she was talking, but underneath her name we read “Seniors love it.” She did say that the seniors enjoyed the performance, but the general viewer couldn’t tell if she’s a parent, a doctor, a nurse, a teacher or someone who just hangs out at seniors’ homes. Her opinion would have been more credible if she was a caretaker for the seniors than if she was a parent watching her little Johnny sing.

With so many local stories, VRLand News did the best in “Local Relevance.” Besides its World News segments, only 11 percent of the stories were from outside of VRLand’s borders. Some reports, though, seemed irrelevant in terms of news value. For example, on November 4, a reporter drove around and took shots of snow on the ground. She then asked people what they thought of the snow, as though the sight of white flakes in November was new to an area that lies in a snowbelt. Other stories were too narrowly focused to have much meaning for most viewers. For example, Maharaj, the entertainment videographer, did a report last January about a 16-year-old boy who has size 17 feet and couldn’t find shoes to fit. So Maharaj took him to a shoe store that didn’t carry shoes that big. Then he made a plea to the public to help the boy find shoes. In a follow-up report on January 25, Maharaj drove the boy and his mother to Toronto, where the Toronto Raptors gave the teenager size 17 shoes and team paraphernalia. A nice plug for the Toronto team, considering its connection to The New VR, but was it news? Maharaj failed to make this story effective. He could have looked into how many large sizes are made by manufacturers, what the average size of shoe is for a 16-year-old boy, the problem people have buying wide shoes or people who can’t find shoes because they have small feet.

Sandra Leduke, 32, moved to Barrie in November 1997 from Mississauga and usually watches the first few minutes of VRLand News to find out what’s happening in the area. As we sat in the back of the hairdresser shop where she works, surrounded by rows of lipsticks, nail polishes, eye shadows and blushes, she told me that she doesn’t think VRLand News presents in-depth coverage. For example, when it reports on a fundraiser, it doesn’t show what happened or how much was raised. Instead, the event is presented as “by the way, there’s a fundraiser for such and such.” Leduke doesn’t mind the style, but she says, “When you’re watching, something doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel entertained and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten all the information. I feel like I’ve been shortchanged.”

But VRLand News does live up to the promise made by The New RO’s news director, Richard Gray, of delivering breadth on local issues. The station covers a huge area. It can’t possibly squeeze in all the news from every hamlet and village of VRLand in less than 14 hours of news each week even with about 26 newsroom staff, which consists of producers, production assistants, assignment editors, reporters, editors, directors and videographers; 11 camera operators, who usually work for the newsroom each day; 12 vehicles; and a videophone to do live coverage. VRLand News doesn’t try to cover every story and every area in one newscast. Petkovsek says, “We make sure we cover all the bases on a regular basis.” The bases include everything that might be of interest to local communities, such as local sports and charity events, accidents and crimes. VRLand News tries to cover them depending on its resources, which follows Znaimer’s philosophy that “the true nature of television is flow not show; process not conclusion.” VRLand Newsbelieves in covering stories as they develop over weeks and months. For example, the eight newscasts had three reports about Barrie gas stations charging higher prices than Toronto stations. The story moved from Lance Chilton discussing the situation with local MPP Joe Tascona in November to the MPP looking into the problem in January.

VRLand News lineups also have a good geographical mix. On December 7, the newscast had stories from 11 cities and towns, including Collingwood, Victoria Harbour, Bolton, Barrie and Newmarket. The average newscast had local stories from eight different places. But it isn’t enough coverage for some VRLand residents. I met four women from Bracebridge, part of VRLand, at an Irish pub in downtown Toronto. Dianne, Candice, Joan and Joan had sipped away at a round or two of Coors Light by the time I asked them what they thought of VRLand News. After some groans and eye rolls, the criticisms began to fly. Joan put it bluntly: “It sucks. I used to watch the news every afternoon. I’d stop whatever I was doing, but now I couldn’t care less. I watch CKCO [a station located in Kitchener, Ontario] instead.” The other Joan agreed: “Kitchener news covers Bracebridge more than The New VR.”

I also taped the October 2, 1998, 6 o’clock VR newscast and brought it to Howard Bernstein. He brings a lot of experience to the broadcast classes he teaches at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University. Among other things, he worked at CTV for seven years, where he produced Canada AM and was the head of news specials; he was also the executive producer of news and current affairs at CBC Toronto and the news director at Global Television. After we sat down in one of Ryerson’s editing suites, Bernstein popped the tape into the machine and pressed play. As we watched the newscast, he pointed out that three stories had absolutely no news value, such as the one that revealed the astonishing fact that there’s no known cure for the common cold. “If people have to watch the news to basically find out to take cough medicine,” said Bernstein, “I don’t think those people need medical help, they need psychiatric help. This is basically talking down to the audience. There’s no real information in any of this.”

Videographer Tonya Rouse did another of the stories that lacked news content: a follow-up to a piece she had done the week before about bare shelves at the Barrie food bank. In this newscast, she reported that many people made donations because they saw her original story. But she failed to interview any donors. It came across as a look-at-me-I’m-a-great-reporter piece. “Theoretically, they’re supposed to be helping the food bank,” said Bernstein. “What you’re helping is this woman further her career.”

Bernstein also noticed that Petkovsek didn’t deliver the story that he promised. He began his report on the opening of a Wal-Mart in Orillia by saying that some people in the area were upset about it. However, every person he interviewed, including a local shop owner, was happy about the event. “Frankly, I hope Wal-Mart paid for this because they couldn’t have come up with an ad that’s this good,” Bernstein remarked sarcastically. Bernstein noted that four reporters missed the opportunity to interview people when there was an obvious need for local reaction. Reporter Sharon Posius, for example, had the lead story on contaminated soil and pointed out that there was a condominium nearby. But she didn’t ask any people who lived there if they were aware of the problem. After the second story that failed to include local residents, Bernstein commented that VRLand News “gives the impression when it comes on that this is about people in VRLand. But so far, there haven’t been any in the show. It’s all officials.”

In the newscast, several people weren’t properly identified, and in some cases, their names weren’t given at all. Bernstein believes this sends a message to the viewers that the person isn’t important. “If they think they’re important enough to put them on the air, the least they should do is tell us who they are.”

Overall, Bernstein felt that the hour was wasted because there wasn’t any news. He liked the production but mentioned that this style of fast-paced news presentation doesn’t allow for mistakes or technical glitches, of which there were many. “As far as I can see,” he said, “all of the thought goes into production and none of the thought goes into coverage.”

University of Western Ontario journalism professor Michael Nolan agrees with Bernstein that the Citytv style delivers more flash than content. Nolan considers “roving anchors and these types of devices or techniques cosmetic at best, with little or nothing to do with the highly important factor of communicating the day’s news to you.” Viewers can “get caught up in the techniques as opposed to the substance and the content of the news.” Nolan watches The New PL in London, which is based on The New VR, and he feels the news “represents the triumph of style over substance; maybe it’s not quite there, but it’s dangerously close.”

But the ratings for VRLand News indicate that many residents aren’t distracted by the style because they’re not watching it. More than three years have passed since the newscast went from humdrum to bright and bold, and the ratings still haven’t improved. In fact, they’ve decreased. In the spring of 1995, just before the switch to The New VR, the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement found that 79,000 people who lived in the Barrie area watched Total News. The latest published ratings indicate that in the spring of 1998, 59,000 people watched VRLand News-a loss of 20,000 viewers in just three years. Also, VRLand’s prime target audience of 18-to-34 decreased from 13,000 in 1995 to 6,000 in 1998. McIntyre, The New VR’s energetic weather forecaster, says immediately after the transition to VRLand News, “We really got smashed because people said if you’re going to change then do it well. We weren’t doing it well. That was our biggest problem. If you’re going to change something, you have to make it every bit as good, if not better.” Whether it’s because of the new style or the lack of substance, VRLand News has yet to increase its audience share.

I had hoped to get The New VR’s reaction to the preceding criticisms, but I was politely told by public relations representative Anita Cenerini that the station would no longer cooperate with my story until I promised to show them a copy of this article before it was published. I politely refused.

VRLand News has room to improve. It has only been on the air for three years and is still adjusting to the new style. The show reminds Petkovsek of Citytv when he first started working there: “City was very much an upstart station and many of the issues that we’re hearing now about VR were issues we heard then about City.” Those issues include viewers’ adverse reaction to the style and the type of stories VRLand Newsreports.

Leila McDowell, 24, sits patiently as her hairdresser prepares to colour her long, auburn hair. She has lived in Barrie all her life and watches VRLand News about once a week. She doesn’t like the newscast, especially the style. But McDowell realizes that “what we’re watching is their learning process. I would just like to watch someone who knows what they’re doing, like the news on CTV.”

At last spring’s convocation for the University of King’s College, the keynote speaker was the 62-year-old publisher and editor of the Prince Edward Island weekly Eastern Graphic: a man renowned for journalistic bravery, who forbade his reporters to attend press conferences, regularly scooped the dailies and insisted on paying his interns. On May 14, 1998, Jim MacNeill exhorted the graduating class not to trust what they read in newspapers or be intimidated by those in power. He concluded with a loose translation of the mock-Latin motto of an old Nova Scotia newspaper, the Cape Breton Highlander. Nulle illigitim carborundum: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

It was not the first time MacNeill had spoken to King’s students-he visited the university’s journalism school annually to talk to and drink with the aspiring journalists-but it was the most auspicious. At that ceremony, MacNeill received an honorary doctorate in civil law. Sadly, this address would be his last: two days later, on board the ferry that was to return him to the Island, MacNeill suffered a heart attack and died.

MacNeill was a newspaperman in a small town on a small island. Colleagues admit that he was not a great writer-he used plain English, mixed his metaphors and tended to rant-but they also agree that he exposed inadequacies and even corruption in his community, his county, his province. For MacNeill, “the bastards” was an all-purpose term to describe people in power, no matter what their position or political stripe. It’s hard to be a scrapper in a small town, where a potential friend could be a neighbour, advertiser and elected official all at the same time-MacNeill could have written himself into a very lonely place. But over 35 years, Jim MacNeill developed a symbiosis with the people in his community: he needed them for stories, they needed him for news.

Graphic columnist Jack MacAndrew describes P.E.I. social politics in this way: “On the Island, people like to pigeonhole you so they know what to avoid in conversation.” Islanders consider it their duty to know everyone else’s business but never discuss it with them. That tacit agreement never sank in at the Graphic. MacNeill not only wanted to know everybody’s business, he wanted to print it. MacNeill did the unthinkable when he published the salaries of Island MLAs; readers were both outraged and ecstatic.

Graphic practice is to print the story and let the offended party respond the next week. P.E.I. Premier Pat Binns puts it this way: “Jim liked to be harsher than the facts might suggest. But normally you would have the opportunity to bring the pendulum back to centre.”

Not everyone accepted the Graphic’s after-the-fact style of verification so quickly. Over 20 years ago, Montague entrepreneur Jimmy O’Halloran owned apartments in the area. After O’Halloran tried to collect back rent from a problem tenant, the woman went to the Graphic and said her apartment had rats. The story ran in the next issue. O’Halloran marched over to the newspaper office and said, “Mr. MacNeill, we need to talk.” After that, the two men’s worst disagreements happened over games of pool, and O’Halloran, among other things, is now proprietor of the Dr. Jim MacNeill Memorial Pub. Most people couldn’t seem to stay mad at Jim, no matter what he printed in the Graphic.

But there were a few grudges. Albert Fogarty, a former MLA and now the executive director of the P.E.I. Institute of Adult and Community Education, dismisses the Graphic as a sensationalist publication and calls its hard news coverage “a joke-not balanced, and the opinion of the publisher.” Fogarty believes MacNeill wrote his stories “to sell papers [rather] than represent facts.” Fogarty insists he just ignores the Graphic’sharsh coverage, but his emphatic dismissal suggests something more than indifference.

Provincial Opposition House Leader Robert Morrissey says MacNeill didn’t see any reason to show politicians in a flattering light. After 17 years in P.E.I. politics, Morrissey should know: in spring 1994, the Graphic ran a story Morrissey says implied that he was peddling influence in the allocation of hospital beds. Morrissey sued for libel, but the jury found in favour of MacNeill.

“We’ve never been a paper to put issues in perspective,” says Paul, MacNeill’s younger son and theGraphic’s current publisher. “It takes time, money and staff to call for comment.” This justification rings hollow in journalistic ears, but somehow, rightly or wrongly, on the Island, in the Graphic, the approach seemed to work. Which is not to say that the paper was ignored: angry responses to controversial, even one-sided, stories were expected. In competing with established regional media, the Graphic’s outrageousness helped more than it hurt-controversies sold papers. But whatever else they did, these stories opened eyes and prompted discussion.

Jack MacAndrew, quoting the American humourist Finley Peter Dunne, likes to say that MacNeill wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But his writing was not malicious. “MacNeill was never a ‘gotcha’ journalist,” says Michael Cobden, a professor and former director of the journalism program at King’s. MacNeill raked more than his share of muck, but never with the intent of burying anyone. He was an equal opportunity critic, always the official opposition, no matter which party was in power.

James Joseph MacNeill was born on January 18, 1936, in Glasgow, the youngest of six children. Seumas, as MacNeill was known as a child, spent his early childhood on the island of Barra in the Hebrides until his family returned to Glasgow when he was seven. Wee Seumas spoke only Gaelic when he began at the city school, but he proved a quick study in English and an exemplary student.

At 18, MacNeill began his national service in the Royal Navy and later worked as a bouncer, a brush salesman and a building surveyor in Glasgow before emigrating to Canada in 1958 with a suitcase and $100. Arriving in Toronto, the 22-year-old MacNeill worked on a road crew and sold insurance. As a volunteer at the Catholic Information Centre, instructing new Catholics, he met Shirley Nicholson, a native Prince Edward Islander. Within three weeks of their first date, MacNeill proposed. They married in Charlottetown on August 26, 1960, and the Island became home.

After much pavement-pounding, MacNeill found a job selling newspaper advertising for the Summerside Journal-Pioneer. He made sales, but because he had a gift for talking to people, he also returned to the office with story ideas and news tips. It had never crossed MacNeill’s mind to become a reporter, but his news sense was sharp and, suddenly, Jim MacNeill was a journalist.

By 1963, the MacNeills had begun a family-they had two babies already, Sheila and Kevin, and were planning a third: a weekly newspaper. MacNeill had been reading up on the subject and once he made up his mind to do something, you couldn’t tell him otherwise. Warnings and admonitions only strengthened his resolve. Drawing on his reporter’s wage, Shirley’s earnings as a legal secretary and a $1,000 loan from Shirley’s mother, the weekly Eastern Graphic was born on December 11, 1963. It was the size of a church bulletin, grotesquely mimeographed and riddled with spelling mistakes. Its tag line-“Serving Kings County and Eastern Queens”-marked it as different from the outset. No other paper devoted much ink to the eastern counties; the P.E.I. dailies were based in Charlottetown and Summerside, and their coverage never strayed far from the city limits.

The second issue featured “An Editorial of Sorts,” the first hint of how MacNeill would gauge his success. He wrote: “Possibly the supreme moment came when we entered a restaurant where a group of diners were discussing the new newspaper. Luckily, they did not recognize the editor, although the fact that their comments left him, at times blushing all the colours of the rainbow and, at other times, jumping ready to do battle with anyone, must have made them wonder. Now that we have calmed down, we can say that we have taken some of their remarks to heart.”

By January 1964, the MacNeills had moved to Montague, a small town on the “untouristy” side of the Island and eventually bought a house on Main Street, a stone’s throw from where the Graphic office stands today. Both MacNeills were ever-busy: Shirley keeping the books and typing the copy, Jim selling ads and writing the stories. Even sick with the mumps, MacNeill was scribbling down copy as soon as the fever subsided. To add to the work-load, baby number three, Jan, was born that year.

From the outset, MacNeill addressed the concerns of ordinary people, fighting by writing. In early editorials, he warned about unsafe bridges and ridiculed the attorney general’s belief that stricter liquor laws would eliminate bootlegging. He criticized tourist publications that left eastern towns like Montague and Souris off their maps. In the mid-’60s, MacNeill wrote on “What Montague Needs from Its Next Council,” he spoke out against the “gentlemen’s agreement” that saw certain political candidacies being given to Protestants and others to Catholics, writing that “a man can represent us faithfully whether he is of our faith or not.”

A favourite issue was closed-door school board meetings; in a preelection editorial, MacNeill wrote, “Because of the refusal of the present board members to allow open meetings, we would suggest that there is no one among the voters in Unit Four who can judge whether they warrant re-election.” MacNeill even staged a one-man sit-in, and in 1975 the meetings were opened to the public.

The paper was not all civic target practice, though. MacNeill made a special effort to print local stories that mattered to his readers: strawberry festivals, fishing derbies, fundraisers. The June 1975 story on an Alliston woman’s collection of 1,000 sets of salt-and-pepper shakers, or the April 1978 half-page piece on a local boy’s worm business-11 column inches and a big photo-these were the kinds of items that would be fluff in a daily but that earned the Graphic a loyal following.

MacNeill culled these stories from daily discussions with area residents. He was always out of the office, talking to people on the streets and in stores, diners and bars. MacNeill’s daily ritual included a visit to his friend Tim: Tim Hortons, that is, where the drive-through line stretches to the street and chatty coffee-breakers pour in throughout the day. In places like this MacNeill discovered what people were thinking about, what affected their lives. His best-known advice for reporters was to talk to 50 people every day. If you don’t come back with a story, he used to say, you’d better rethink your career.

Personally and professionally, MacNeill was the same eccentric man: insatiable coffee drinker, champion napper, notoriously absent-minded. He even had a name for his subconscious mind: Sam. If MacNeill was planning a difficult editorial, he would tell Sam the topic and then take a nap or work on another story. When he was finished, Sam would have written the column-MacNeill would just have to get it down on paper. When MacNeill took up curling, he credited Sam with any good shots, but his son Paul says, “Even Dad’s subconscious wasn’t very good at the hit game.”

MacNeill was tall, with dark hair and whiskers: the grey first appeared at the ears and worked its way around. His soft voice rumbled with a touch of Scottish brogue, and he jabbed at the air with his pen, his pipe, his coffee cup, when he was making a point. Listening intently to a story, he would look over his glasses at you and say, “Is that right?” Family friend Ann Galloway thought he didn’t believe a word she said when they first met.

At a bar or party, MacNeill always drew a crowd. He was a Gaelic gadabout-he told stories, loved music and dancing, enjoyed his whiskey and bought drinks even when he couldn’t afford it. “Jim was insulted if you tried to buy a round,” says curling buddy Larry Dewar with a smile. “He?d sit back with a drink, put his feet up and say, ‘Ah, that a man should live so well.'” MacNeill met his best friend, Denis Ryan, a Halifax investment consultant and Irish musician, in a pub in 1969. When Ryan lived in Lower Montague, MacNeill would call late on press nights and say, “She’s put to bed, are you up?” They would break out the single-malt scotch and watch the sun come up over the Strait.

In 1968 the MacNeills moved to 117 Chestnut St., where the rounded foyer is hung thick with family photographs, graduation portraits, wedding pictures and a black-and-white rendering of Jim?s parents. The house on Chestnut Street was, until the mid-’70s, a full-time centre of operations. Money was tight, but the MacNeills were resourceful. The MacNeill children-five in all-sold papers and licked and pasted address labels. Paul says, “You just prayed you didn’t get the Charlottetown or Miscellaneous bags-those had the most in them. And the black ink taste in your mouth….” Paul remembers a beer stein where Shirley kept the money. “Mom had three lists: the things we wanted, the things we needed and the things we could afford.”

For the MacNeills, having a large family and running a community newspaper weren’t incompatible; in fact, Dad’s job often affected the family vacation. MacNeill was involved with the Canadian Community Newspapers Association, which held a family-oriented convention in a different province every year. Over the years, the Clan MacNeill made it to conventions all over Canada. The kids not only got to travel, they also learned about newspapers. Today, three of the MacNeill children-Paul, Jan and Gail-are involved in the family business.

By the mid-’70s, the Graphic bore the tag line “The Lively One,” but it had settled into a stylistic groove. “Jim won a style award in the ’60s and he never forgot it,” says Andy Thompson, laughing. Thompson, a stringer for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and former MacNeill employee, notes that readers were comfortable with theGraphic’s familiar look and its profusion of spelling and grammar mistakes.

Stephen Kimber, the director of King’s journalism school, says the Graphic has long been an example in design classes-of what not to do. MacNeill hated front-page jumps; he wanted readers to get the story without having to chase it through the paper, so whenever possible, stories would run no more than 500 words. MacNeill favoured content over aesthetics, and it showed. The Graphic might be six columns on one part of the page and three on another, but these inconsistencies didn’t seem to bother the readers.

The 1980s were a flurry of activity: MacNeill started two more papers, the West Prince Graphic, to cover the opposite side of the Island, and Atlantic Fish Farming, a sister publication to the Island Farmer, which MacNeill had launched in 1974. As the number of publications grew, so did the staff; MacNeill was soon able to leave the day-to-day operations at the Graphic for other projects. He served as president of the Atlantic Community Newspapers Association from 1980 to ?82 and later became the youngest honorary life member of the CCNA and the first Canadian president of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. A less prestigious but more entertaining distinction was the 1989 Atlantic Journalism Association’s Red Lobster Award for mismatched headline and photo: “Rats Invade Harbour Village” with photo at right of Brian Mulroney shaking hands with a Montague woman.

But MacNeill was most prolific when “the bastards” in Charlottetown struck again. In 1987, when the provincial government announced a plebiscite on a proposed fixed link to the mainland, MacNeill plowed through stacks of documents and wrote nearly 40 stories in six weeks, criticizing the ministry of public works procedures and cautioning readers to consider the issue carefully. MacNeill’s research and insight earned him a nomination for the Michener Award for Meritorious Service in Journalism. Faded green and red Yes and No buttons still decorate MacNeill’s office.

For all his professional success, MacNeill had human failings. In December 1990, he was charged with impaired driving in Nova Scotia. Keeping with Graphic policy, MacNeill’s conviction ran on the front page. For the year his licence was suspended, MacNeill barred himself from writing editorials; he left that to managing editor Heather Moore and the rest of the staff. Moore, now in her 26th year at the Graphic, says MacNeill’s decision was not unusual-he had quit editorial writing before to give others a shot at it. In this case, MacNeill felt his reduced mobility might prevent him from gathering the information to do justice to the job.

Like the fixed-link stories, MacNeill’s best work at the time sprang from something that simply made him mad. In 1991, Charlottetown teenager Michael Miller was killed by an off-duty Mountie who was driving home from the RCMP mess after having a few beers. The investigation was a disaster-evidence lost, questions unasked-and two years later, the officer was acquitted. Islanders were outraged and Charlottetown newspapers received letters crying injustice, many of which were never published.

MacNeill had long denounced what he called the “two levels of justice” in P.E.I. When he got word of the Miller?s case, the editorial claws came out. In his December 15, 1993, Fact or Fancy column, MacNeill wrote: “This case [must] be appealed…. If it isn’t, it will simply mean that the Miller family hasn’t been given justice. Neither have other Islanders-justice denied to one is justice denied to all…. Michael Miller was killed by a police corporal who was legally found to be drunk. That can’t be left as simply ‘Not guilty.'”

The victim’s parents launched a civil suit against the attorney general of Canada, and MacNeill followed the proceedings: “The Millers are claiming damages for the loss of care, guidance and companionship suffered by the wrongful death of their son. What’s the RCMP response to this? Certainly not one word of apology; not one word of condolence; not one word to ease the terrible loss and stress of the Miller family…. The RCMP, in its defence, claims that the teenager failed to look out for his own safety and that he actually walked into the path of Cpl. McGregor’s unmarked RCMP car…the official position of the force is that Mike Miller was mainly responsible for his own death. That is almost obscene.”

Even after the suit was settled with the Millers, MacNeill’s outrage didn’t abate: “This isn’t a case any longer of wrongdoing by Cpl. Gary McGregor…. It’s of wrongdoing by other RCMP, in superior positions, who have allowed their men to act in a totally unprofessional manner. Who haven’t ensured the public scrutiny this whole case needs. The settlement may be sealed but the questions remain right out there in the open-dangling, unanswered-telling us the Mounties got their man. Clear, that is!”

In recognition of MacNeill’s work on the Miller case, the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors gave MacNeill the 1994 Golden Quill Award for best editorial and the Eugene Cervi Award for “a lifetime of courageous editorial writing that adheres to the highest standards of the craft…and also recognizes consistently aggressive reporting of government at the grassroots level and interpretation of local affairs.” However, two RCMP officers involved in the case sued MacNeill and the Graphic; the case was still pending at press time.

In June 1994, seeking a new challenge, MacNeill bought a faltering weekly in Truro, Nova Scotia. At the time, the Weekly Record published mostly social announcements, but MacNeill intended to make it a real newspaper on the model of the Graphic: close to the community, but sharp and surprising. He made frequent trips to Truro and brought some of his own staff, including former Graphic intern Shawn Fuller, a graduate of the journalism program at Charlottetown’s Holland College. Despite Fuller’s youth, he was soon named editor and hired another young journalist, King’s grad Andy Thompson, who would also wear the editor’s hat.

The young writers practised MacNeill’s “bird-dogging” style of journalism and turned out stories of a whole new kind: a hidden camera in a Department of the Environment boardroom used to spy on employees following computer thefts; an attempt to cover up misuse of a county credit card by the CEO. Thompson recalls looking over the flats and seeing sticky notes with MacNeill’s scribble on them: “Dandy story” or “Good friggin’ story”-high praise from MacNeill.

At first it seemed as though MacNeill might be able to make a go of it-under his guidance the circulation went from 1,400 to its peak of 5,300 in the winter of 1996, but the Weekly Record ultimately became one of his few failures. What had worked in Montague fell flat in Truro-he tried to shake up a town that preferred to be stirred. Andy Thompson explains it this way: “Truro is a very staid, Tory town, very cliquish. They never understood what Jim was trying to do.”

The beginning of the end was Shawn Fuller’s story on employee safety in the Sobey’s grocery chain; after that, the East Coast’s largest advertiser took its business elsewhere and others followed. No ad boycott had ever seriously wounded the Graphic, but this was a mortal blow to the Record. Resources dried up, bills were unpaid, and the office locks changed. On May 13, 1997, the last issue of the Record hit the streets, but distribution was almost nil, since the postal bill was past due, too. Four days later, at the Atlantic Journalism Awards, Andy Thompson represented a defunct paper in the Enterprise Journalism category.

The failure of the Record may have disappointed MacNeill, but he didn’t discuss it. He had the thriving Island Press papers, and a new project as well: the 1997 launch of Atlantic Gig, a magazine celebrating East Coast music. The subject was near to MacNeill’s heart, the publication less so: it was run out of Halifax and sold after MacNeill’s death.

MacNeill had been diagnosed with diabetes in the late 1970s, a condition he had always managed quietly. In May 1998, he developed a foot infection: he was hospitalized for a month and doctors amputated his left big toe. But rather than take it easy, MacNeill decided to walk around the Island, talking to folks and writing stories he dreamed of compiling into a book. The walks seemed natural outlets for his restless energy and curiosity. MacNeill published 17 of these stories before he died-not enough for a book, says Shirley, and MacNeill wouldn’t have wanted it done halfway.

The King’s College doctorate was the highest honour MacNeill had ever received. Proud as he was, MacNeill was a little unstrung. He had occasionally appeared on television and radio, but as a public speaker, Graphiccolumnist Jack MacAndrew says, “He was terrible. He didn’t have the gift.” He worked on his acceptance speech for weeks, rehearsing after Shirley had gone to bed.

Two hours before the ceremony, Michael Cobden, a professor at King’s, asked to see MacNeill’s speech and marked it with corrections. Cobden says the gesture was friendly-familiar with MacNeill’s “rough” style, he wanted to save MacNeill embarrassment. Perhaps he succeeded: in the original draft, MacNeill mentionedGlobe and Mail columnist Robert Fowler. Cobden changed it to Fulford. However well-intentioned, the incident rattled MacNeill further.

When he rose to give his address in the Cathedral Church of All Saints, MacNeill dislodged a tooth. There was a pause while MacNeill tucked the tooth into his cheek with his tongue before continuing. In the end, MacNeill gave his original speech: he had earned the doctorate by being himself and he was determined to accept it in the same way. When it was over, MacNeill was visibly relaxed, grinning, brandishing his degree. “It was the highlight of his life,” says Shirley firmly.

On May 16, two days after the ceremony, the MacNeills enjoyed a leisurely morning before driving to the ferry. Noticing that her husband was restless, perhaps sleepy, Shirley offered to drive, but MacNeill declined. At the dock, MacNeill rushed to the restroom and returned looking unwell. The moment they stopped on board the ferry, MacNeill was out of the car. Shirley last saw him alive as he dashed to the restroom.

Despite the efforts of crew members, a retired Cape Breton nurse and an Ontario pharmacist who tried to revive MacNeill, he was dead at 3:45 p.m.

MacNeill’s funeral was a P.E.I. event. Cards and letters arrived from all over Canada and the United States, and guests included colleagues, competitors and a group of recent King’s grads. A dram of whiskey sat atop MacNeill’s coffin and Dave Cadogan of The Miramichi Leader gave a fond eulogy. Dr. James Joseph (Seumas) MacNeill was buried beneath a simple headstone bearing a Celtic cross and the traditional newspaper symbol marking the end of a story: -30-.

At the Curling Club for the reception, Shirley approached the bartender and said “Open up-and put it on MacNeill’s tab.” The drink flowed freely in MacNeill’s memory until the small hours. In the end, members of the Curling Club insisted on paying the tab. That might have been the only part MacNeill would have objected to.

The ironic and untimely nature of his passing would have pleased MacNeill. He was never one to rest on his laurels and it would have been hard to top his doctorate. “It was the way he would have wanted it,” says Shirley, “He went out on a high.”

Indeed he did. The bastards never got him down.

The silence was powerful. On November 7, 1997, just days before the municipal election, almost 500 people met at the fork of the Thames River and paced wordlessly through the streets of London, Ontario, to City Hall. Mothers wheeled their children in strollers, men volunteered to stand at the street corners to ensure that the marchers-some sporting green ribbons with “Haskett” printed on them, others carrying signs reading “Re-elect Haskett for Mayor”-obeyed traffic lights. People in cars passed by, honked and waved in encouragement and still nobody spoke.

They marched in support of Mayor Dianne Haskett, who had herself been silent for almost three weeks, despite being in the midst of a municipal election campaign. No kissing babies, no interviews. Haskett was protesting the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s October 7 ruling that found her guilty of discrimination, fined her $10,000 because she had refused to proclaim a Gay Pride weekend in 1995 and ordered her to proclaim any future Gay Pride events. Haskett, an evangelical Christian, said that proclamations of this kind went against her religious beliefs. She felt that even as mayor she had a right to remain silent on issues with which she didn’t agree.

The opposition, led by Deputy Mayor Grant Hopcroft, was anything but silent. Hopcroft and a group called “People Opposing Principled Bigotry”-comprising a number of political heavyweights, including two former London mayors, a former provincial solicitor general and a former provincial attorney general-had held a raucous, noisy rally earlier in the day, in contrast to their silent opponents. On election day, they put out newspaper ads signed by over 100 recognizable local figures, and didn’t mince words in their press release, accusing Haskett of fostering “an environment where homophobia and gay and lesbian bashing have become acceptable, even respectable, attitudes and behaviours.”

On November 10, Haskett beat Hopcroft by a margin of two to one. Her silent backers had spoken.

Newspapers across Ontario and, indeed, Canada covered the story. Some praised the Ontario Human Rights Commission; others denounced it as Big Brother-ish. A freelance writer in The London Free Press declared it high time to discuss religion and morality in relation to politics; a columnist responded, “It sure is irritating to keep reading about the religious affiliations of London council members….” Morris Dalla Costa, another columnist for the Free Press, wrote an article about all of the anonymous phone calls he’d received from Haskett supporters in response to an earlier piece criticizing Haskett’s religious stance: “You disgusting pig,” said the sweet-voiced woman. “How can you pick on a saint like Dianne Haskett? She’s God’s voice in London,” and “Gays are perverts. It’s time we had someone like her stand up and tell everyone. She’s a leader….” Dalla Costa was baffled by just how nasty some Londoners could be.

Lots of coverage, but it was incomplete. Not one writer looked at what was behind the story: a woman and community motivated by religion. Aside from a few sarcastic or dismissive remarks on the issue of religion, the papers were as silent as Haskett and her supporters.

It’s not a new problem. When it comes to addressing the religious and spiritual roots of issues and events, the majority of Canadian newspapers systematically fail to come through. And readers have noticed. An Angus Reid poll released on June 7, 1998, for the first-ever faith and the media conference in Ottawa, revealed that 4.5 million adult Canadians attend religious services every week (be they Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Sikh or Hindu), and 65 percent of this group feels the media do a poor job covering faith and religion.

And consider this: a study done for the same conference looked at Canada’s 19 largest daily newspapers and found only five full-time religion writers, compared to 76 full-time sports writers. Yet it’s likely that more Canadians attend churches, mosques, temples and synagogues every week than pro sporting events.

At the same time, sales of spirituality-related books have taken off. Once huddled on a single lonely bookstore shelf or segregated in special-interest bookstores, religious and spiritual titles now hold rank on best-seller lists and dominate whole sections in mainstream bookstores. Even television has tapped into the rising interest: CBC Newsworld recently launched a program called The Moral Divide, examining news and current affairs from a religious and spiritual perspective.

It isn?t just churchgoers who have an interest in better coverage of religious issues. Clearly, not every voter in London, Ontario, goes to church, but all could have been better informed on the religious issues behind their municipal election. And at a time when cultural and religious diversity in Canada is greater than ever, Canadian newspapers are failing their readers by ignoring God.

Last September, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) held its inaugural press conference at the Colony Hotel in Toronto, a centrally located facility that could accommodate up to 50 reporters, including camera crews. The goal? To announce the findings of a study of major Canadian newspapers documenting a steady flow of blatant generalizations and errors about Muslims. Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, national president, another CIC member and an invited guest waited on a platform at the front of the room. Three reporters showed up. Only four newspapers reported the story themselves (though some others printed a wire story on the event).

Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, has called the persecution of Christians “the fastest-growing human-rights issue in the world today.” In his book Their Blood Cries Out,published in April 1997, Marshall documents the persecution and mistreatment of Christians in 65 countries around the world, where the Christian population stands at approximately 200 million people. Yet only newspapers with religion writers found his statistics and stories interesting enough to write about. As Marshall writes in his book, “It is a story that is all but ignored and unknown in the world at large, and little better known in the Christian world.”

It’s a story that is still relatively unknown-the only paper that published it on the front page was the Ottawa Citizen.

Even the stale, overworked Clinton/Lewinsky scandal could do with some religion writing. Jack Kapica, onceThe Globe and Mail‘s insightful religion writer and now a news editor, says the press missed out on the essence of this story: the fact that fundamentalist Christians, who only represent roughly 25 percent of the American population, are expert at vocalizing about morality. The rest of Americans are much more liberal, and a lot less vocal. “So what happens when the right wing gets hold of an ecclesiastical sin and starts going crazy over it? You shut up and let it continue.” The problem, says Kapica, is the fundamentalists don’t know that beyond their little sphere, nobody else shares their “puritanical hysteria.” Kapica says most international events-such as those in Lebanon, Paraguay, Iran and Israel-are rooted in religion and need to be written about from that perspective. But it’s not happening. Why?

William Thorsell, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, has one explanation, which he presented during a panel discussion before 300 people at last year’s faith and media conference (later aired on CBC?s National Magazine ). Thorsell made no bones about the fact that his paper steers clear of religion, “particularly religion that we don’t know very well…. I sometimes think that we pull our punches when it comes to religion and to faith and to churches because we’re afraid of inciting the kind of discourse where, because one side is faith and one side is logic, it’s very hard to come to an outcome there that’s satisfactory to either side…. You’re going to end up for months dealing with groups where the very paradigm upon which a discussion is being held is so different.”

It sounds like a reasonable defence-unless you substitute the word “politics” for “religion.” Then, conflict, discourse, logic and emotion would appear to be essential elements of the story, rather than reasons not to cover it at all. Thorsell’s argument is flimsy, but it speaks to a reticence, even a shyness, about tackling religion and spirituality that can be found in newspapers across the country. Jack Kapica puts it more bluntly. He sees the lack of coverage as evidence of outright hostility toward religion: “Newspapers are filled right now with basically old, recycled hippies from the ’60s and ’70s. And we all have these attitudes, and the attitudes are basically, Religion is evil.”

And while Kapica’s might be an overstatement, there are statistics that back up his view. Lydia Miljan is the director of the National Media Archive at the Fraser Institute, the right-leaning, nonprofit economic think tank and research organization. She’s now writing her doctoral thesis on politics and the media at the University of Calgary. In her research she’s found that only 31.7 percent of journalists definitely believe in God, as opposed to 65.8 percent of the general population. She also says that while 42 percent of journalists claim some religious affiliation, most don’t attend religious services.

Those numbers might explain why a born-again Christian journalist working for a “major media outlet in a major Canadian city” felt the need to remain anonymous when writing an article for Media magazine. “I am not hate filled, bigoted, extreme, right wing or violent-and neither are the vast majority of other believers that I know,” wrote the journalist. “Nowadays, however, it is still politically correct to be prejudiced against believers, particularly if they are conservative Protestants or Catholics. As a result, I’m remaining ‘in the closet,’ anonymous for the purposes of this article. Why? Unfortunately, some of the worst perpetrators of that prejudice and ignorance are fellow journalists.” In the same issue, Bob Bettson, who was a religion writer for the Calgary Herald for four years, expressed surprise-though not disbelief-at the other journalists’ fears. “We have a long way to go in respecting religious belief in the newsrooms,” he wrote.

Before the 1960s, respect for religious belief wasn’t really an issue. A uniform-and Christian-religious point of view was assumed to be underlying stories, and journalists could be confident their readers would know enough to pick up on it. But with the social changes of the 1960s, religion was recast both as anti-intellectual and unworthy of serious consideration, and at the same time as potentially dangerous territory, as cultural and religious diversity were acknowledged, if not embraced. Most reporters and editors simply avoided religious news, and in many newspapers it was ghettoized in a once-a-week page at the back of the paper-which explains why traditionally few good journalists have pursued the religion beat.

And rather than improving, the situation appears to be getting worse. Since the study for the faith and media conference, the number of full-time religion reporters working at major Canadian newspapers has dropped from five to three: The Vancouver Sun’s Douglas Todd, the Calgary Herald’s Gordon Legge and the Ottawa Citizen’s Bob Harvey (with both Legge and Harvey now cast as city beat reporters focusing on religion issues). The Toronto Star, which has a rich history of full-time religion reporters who still contribute freelance articles (notably, Tom Harpur and Lois Sweet), has Leslie Scrivener on staff as faith and ethics reporter, but only part-time. In October, Casey Korstanje, the Hamilton Spectator‘s religion and ethics reporter for four and a half years, got a new job as production editor and won’t be replaced. Korstanje, who is an ordained evangelical minister, said he was tentatively planning to write weekly religion columns, but nothing has materialized yet. The Globe and Mail has no religion writer.

And how about the new kid on the block, the National Post? Martin Newland, deputy editor of the Post, says the paper makes a point of “letting people exercise their moral muscles” by combining softer stories on ethics and religion with more hard-hitting news. It?s a tool used to slow down the pace of a news page. Newland, who has an MA in theology, says that employing a full-time religion writer would be nice, but that it isn’t a priority. “It’s a simple matter of resources. We would take a justice or political reporter over a religion reporter right now.” He feels confident the Post will be able to provide quality ethics and religion coverage using its regular staff members and columnists.

It might work, though based on the examples of other Canadian newspapers, no full-time religion reporter typically translates into little or no religion reporting, and certainly none of the kind of reporting Gordon Legge did around Calgary’s hot video-lottery terminal issue last spring. When a plebiscite to ban VLTs became news in Calgary, the Herald put both political reporter Jim Cunningham and religion reporter Gordon Legge onto the story. Legge looked at the people behind the movement: churches and their members who had joined forces across denominational lines to fight to ban VLTs. He provided an in-depth and perceptive look at what motivated them, and credits his background and contacts within the church community with making a substantial difference in the quality of the Herald’s coverage.

It was a controversial issue, but covering its religious underpinnings added to readers’ understanding of the issue and satisfaction with the coverage, says Legge. “If anything, we are complimented for the fairness and balance that we bring to our coverage because we try to cover all faith communities,” he says. “But we do it in a way that we don’t sit in judgement.” Legge says religious communities usually criticize the media when they perceive biased coverage-especially bias rooted in ignorance.

Bob Harvey of the Ottawa Citizen agrees. He’s heard religious leaders recount tales of being questioned by reporters with no background in or understanding of their religious traditions and has seen the results: stories with errors. It’s no different than politics, he says. “I would not like to be parachuted onto the Hill to cover some subject that I have no background in and haven’t been following.”

Luckily for Harvey, he’s got an editor who also sees the value in employing skilled religion writers. Neil Reynolds, editor of the Ottawa Citizen, believes religion reporting is an integral component in covering the news. “Newspapers are essentially a conversation, a flow of information about moral issues,” he says. “So I think that religion belongs right up there, not only on par with, but probably above most other subject areas.”

And it shows. When Conrad Black bought the Citizen in the spring of 1996, it was in bad shape. Circulation had gone down by 6,000 readers. Reynolds, as its editor, responded with some bold changes in 1997. Readers got a new typeface, an enlarged letters-to-the-editor section, more local and business coverage, and more editorial comment and analysis on current issues. He also gave the religion-page editor and columnist Bob Harvey a call. Harvey says Reynolds told him that religion pages had become a ghetto where reporters were writing for the converted. What the paper needed was to explore the religious side of issues for a more general audience “on the front page and not buried in the back pages of the paper.” Harvey?s position changed from religion editor and columnist to city beat reporter.

Reynolds was as good as his word. In the next nine months, Harvey had 45 front-page bylines, compared to five in all of 1996. He’s now the most published religion reporter in Canada. And readers are happy with the change. Harvey says the paper gets more positive reaction about the changes in the Citizen’s approach to religion and spirituality than anything else.

Harvey hasn’t written a religion story about Mayor Dianne Haskett, however, or about the mayors in Hamilton, Oliver, Osoyoo, Kelowna and Fredericton who have also refused to proclaim Gay Pride events. Chances areThe London Free Press isn’t likely to do it, either-it only publishes a few religion pieces in its Saturday Forum section.

But the story continues to unfold. Last spring, Haskett won the Pink Stinkweed Award, which is “given to an individual who consistently displays willful malice to the gay and lesbian community” by the Pink Toronto Awards, an organization set up to honour the business and community achievements of gays and lesbians. Even after the Human Rights Commission ordered her to proclaim all future Gay Pride events, Haskett refused to do it personally and gave the job to her council instead. But even that’s not necessary anymore. London’s council has voted out proclamations altogether. Now Haskett and her electorate can go back to their powerful moral silence, even though they’re affecting people’s lives.

And still, nobody’s looked behind that religious curtain: what does Dianne Haskett really believe? How has religion shaped this community and how does it influence its daily life? Is there any common ground between Haskett’s supporters and Londoners who don’t share her religious views? They are the kinds of questions a reporter on the religion beat would be primed to ask. But for now, there’s just silence.