After a final scan over his question sheet and a nod from the control room, Carlin went to work. For the next 40 minutes, the host of The Media File, CBC’s half-hour discussion show that runs Tuesday nights at 7:30, turned the apparent confusion into a comprehensive debate on the ethics involved in sports journalism. Williams lambasted professional baseball broadcasters, calling them “clowns” for drooling over the “carpet-bagging baseball player who spends his winters in California.” Short called the Toronto Blue Jays “foreign mercenaries” and criticized the press for labelling them “Canada’s Team.” Frayne took a rip at team owners and suggested the media should ignore them completely. When it was over, Carlin again smiled. After a good edit, it would make a critical, interesting and entertaining item that would run less than a week later on January 21.

It’s these qualities that Carlin, senior producer Stuart Allen and editor Dale Ratcliffe have tried to inject intoThe Media File since it first went to air last October. It wasn’t always easy, but then again, no one expected it to be. When the trio took the assignment, they knew they were breaking new ground. And despite their share of unforeseen difficulties, they’ve created a program that has made front-page news, done well in the ratings, and generated response from its listening audience. “This type of program is a major, major breakthrough for radio news,” says Allen, a veteran newsman at CBC. “The standard view is that radio doesn’t have opinions.”

The idea for the show developed one day last September. A group of CBC news executives, including Allen, had met with managing editor of radio news Michael Enright to come up with an idea for a show to fill the Tuesday time slot following As It Happens.

The CBC decision-makers were interested in a show about the media, but under one condition: it had to appeal to regular listeners, not just journalists. Allen agreed to this, but quickly added a condition of his own. “We had to make it clear to the hierarchy of the CBC that we were going to take a hard look at all the media-CBC included.”

This was easier to envision than to implement. As Allen and company would soon find out, breaking ground can be a harrowing experience. Time would prove to be the first problem. The original format called for as many as three items per show as well as a response to listener mail-all crammed into 30 minutes. This left little time for details. On one occasion, a taping session was arranged among six people at once-four in the studio and two on broadcast lines from studios in other cities-for a story on the manipulation of the press by the government. Even though Carlin managed to fit everyone in, the result was too many opinions and not enough focus.

But time wasn’t the only problem. The trio quickly discovered that journalists are not quick to criticize themselves. In the early stages of the show, the refusal rate for those asked to appear was close to 50 per cent. And when the journalists did consent to an interview, Carlin often found them hesitant. He faults himself for not being able to bring out the replies he wanted. “Interviewing a person in a short period of time was a new technique for me,” says Carlin, “I found I was letting easy answers go by.”

Throughout the first month, the trio struggled to overcome these problems. Then came a break. CBC president Pierre Juneau called one morning in October to agree to an interview for a story on the latest government cutback plans for CBC. Recalls Allen: “We agreed beforehand that if he said absolutely nothing, we wouldn’t run it.” Despite warnings from their peers that they were wasting their time, Allen and his associates gave it their best shot. Juneau responded to the first question from Carlin by saying the CBC would be “destroyed” if current cutbacks continued. The CBC news department immediately wanted the story, but Allen told them to wait until after it aired on the November 5 Media File. When it did, CBC used the story as did others. The Globe carried the story on its front page.

From here, the evolution of the show seemed to speed up. In the fall ratings, The Media File was tops among the five CBC special-interest programs that filled the 7:30 p.m. weekday time slots. Listener response has also been good. During the first month, fewer than five letters a week were received. During one week before Christmas, 86 listeners wrote in. Journalists as well seemed to be paying attention. “Now only about 15 per cent won’t talk to us,” says Allen.

Understandably, Carlin, Allen and Ratcliffe are all happy with what they’ve accomplished. But they are not about to let their minds slip into neutral. Says Allen: “My personal philosophy is that there is no such thing as a perfect show. But we’re striving for that.”

The Canadian Radio-TV News Directors Association also accused the CRTC of violating the Charter of Rights. The broadcasters were so incensed they sent a letter to CRTC Chairman Andre Bureau demanding assurances “to make it clear this case will not become a dangerous precedent which could lead to regulation of newscast content being imposed on other broadcasters in the future.” Journalists from Kamloops to Montreal reflected their concern.

The trouble was that all this preoccupation with freedom of the media clouded another journalistic principle-getting the story right.

Doing so in this case requires an understanding that the situation for Windsor broadcasters is unique. Less than 1,000 metres separates downtown Windsor from downtown Detroit. Windsor’s population is 250,000, Detroit’s more than 4 million. Besides the CBC and university radio stations, Windsor has only four stations. Detroit has more than 40. Advertisers wishing to reach Windsor listeners often buy time on Detroit rather than Windsor stations. Two Windsor stations, CKLW and CKEZ-FM, were suffering badly from listener and advertising losses. In an attempt to compete with the neighboring giant, Windsor stations were turning more and more to American programming, according to Bob O’Brien, station manager for both CKLW and CKEZ-FM.

In July of 1984, the CRTC deferred the license renewals for CKLW and CKEZ-FM while it held public hearings into the special problems facing the Windsor area. The formal CRTC decision, dated last March 29, stated that stations applying for renewal should show “how they will meet the particular needs and interests of the Windsor area, and remain a Canadian service.” CKLW and CKEZ-FM each had to submit a Promise of Performance-an outline detailing how they would accomplish this. When the CRTC received their Promises of Performance, each of the stations had voluntarily offered to program 45-percent Canadian content into their news broadcasts.

Pierre Baril, an information officer at the CRTC, calls the Promises of Performance “awkward” but says the editorial writers took the final decision out of context. “We are not imposing or requiring anything.” He explains that the stations had to win back listeners, and as long as they abide by regulations, the CRTC can’t tell them what they can or can’t do. As for the backlash from other news media, Baril says the CRTC isn’t worried. “We will have to live with that.”

Does the quota mean required Canadian content news will replace Detroit news that may be more relevant to Windsor listeners? Keith Campbell, president of CKLW and CKEZ-FM and former executive vice president of CTV, says no. “It shouldn’t happen that you have to stack [Canadian content] news at the end. If that happens the newspeople aren’t doing their jobs.”

Station manager O’Brien says that before the stations drew up their Promises of Performance, they analyzed the past 90 days of their newscasts and found they had been airing at least 45-per-cent Canadian content anyway. That was why O’Brien chose to mention newscasts in his outline.

And according to Campbell, the new quotas have been good for the stations. In less than a year, their ratings have jumped to five per cent of the market from less than one per cent. Eventually, the quotas won’t be necessary. “I don’t see it as a forever circumstance,” he says.

Since those early tirades, the attitude of at least some of the media has mellowed. Don Johnston, news director at CFRB, says little can be done to change the situation. “I feel very strongly that no government body should be in on the handling of any news medium, but they asked to be regulated and we’re not in any position to contest the ruling,” he says. “What’s done is done.”

Life‘s editor at the time was John Macfarlane, who’s currently at Saturday Night. When he headed there, we talked on the telephone. He promised he’d be calling me-that it wasn’t a matter of if, but when-because he needed good writers. He’s never called, but then he’s been real busy publishing Canada’s most important whatzit against all odds and good judgment, and I’ve been out a lot. Moral: stay by the phone, and you will get to profile bureaucrats, bagmen and cabinet ministers of the hour, at whatever length you please.

But I digress. Let’s see how the piece you’re reading came about. Marq de Villiers, Life‘s present editor in excelsis, decided a couple of years ago to savage his regular contributors, and quite naturally turned to me. Many people have flirted with the idea of a Life parody, but nothing’s ever come of it, and just as well. Readers might not be able to tell the difference-and if by chance they did, the magazine might not recover. In any case, DeV, having regained his senses or lost his nerve, depending on how you look at it, decided not to run these gems of wit. They sat in a drawer until last October, when he realized that one of his upcoming Ryerson journalism classes (Penmanship and Advertorials 101; batteries not included) was bereft of content. In desperation, he seized the manuscript, summoned his failing powers, and treated his youthful charges to what I’m told was a spell-binding recitation. Several of these golden lads and lasses happened to be putting this publication together, and moved with agility to cook up a piece labelled “parody of magazine writing styles” by someone named Ed Haylwood. But they too had second thoughts-prompted I suspect by Don Obe, a.k.a. the Gloomy Chairman of Ryerson’s journalism school. Perhaps he figured that to float a bunch of sorry pastiches without permitting readers access to the originals might push everybody’s luck, and (considering that he previously occupied DeV’s office; the piano wire and leg-hold traps have since been removed) be a mite incestuous to boot. So it was that I got a very nice note from Janet Crocker, this issue’s editor (who’d meanwhile bothered to check my name), asking for a fast 1,500 words on whatever tickled my fancy, in return for $200. News Flash: Ryerson has been transported back in time to the fiscal year 1973; you read it here first.

I therefore propose to amuse myself by writing about how so-called freelancers paint themselves into corners, and reflecting on the nature of one such small pond. You all know Toronto Life-the last bastion of lucite bidets, the Magazine for the Whining Rich, and so on. You’ve heard that it demeans a noble calling, grovels at the feet of powerful interests, and in general compromises all and sundry to various points of the compass. Come on by any time, and you’ll find once-upright human beings knocking off the latest light-weight atrocity, and cackling the while. One has only to survey the editorial pecking order to grasp why matters have reached so dire a pass. DeV governs the whole enterprise by osmosis, ably abetted by Steve Trumper, who should return without delay to his former duties as a police dispatcher, and Jocelyn Laurence, who secretly mainlines glue. All the work, such as it is, gets done by scrofulous juniors, who drudge for pitiful wages and photostat their resumes when no one’s looking. Worse yet, Peter Herrndorf (the publisher, and welcome to it) prowls to and fro like a superannuated elf, patting luckless bystanders in a bizarre, post-est fashion, the better to further dilute their Journalistic Objectivity.

Well, now. As Hunter Thompson (to whom we turn more and more frequently for solace in these unsettled times) has remarked, the only example of truly unbiased reportage he ever clapped eyes on was an antishoplifting camera in the general store in Woody Creek, Colo. Let me rephrase that. The camera’s a fine and private device, no question about it, but Life is a cabaret. In other words, I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather (albeit loosely) be, warts and all.

Mind you, I’ve been elsewhere, mostly to no good end. I’ve written for magazines too fierce to contemplate, mumbled away on the radio, ghosted books and churned out stage revues-anything to keep jail and craziness at bay. The only National Magazine Award I ever won was for something that appeared in Quest, affording Michael Enright, its former whatzit, his sole moment of glory at last year’s dog and pony show. That was interesting, because I’d submitted the piece myself, on a bet. The entry fee was $25, which paid off 400 times over. Moral: aggressive promotion, if nothing else, permits otherwise dormant editors to behave like a jack-in-the-box. A string of famous victories, to be sure! But somehow I keep returning to the Front Street fern bar, for one very simple reason.

Why do you think the Life parodies worked? Because the magazine attracts Canada’s best writers, who bring to it their best efforts, knowing they’ll be treated accordingly. Some, it’s true, tip-toe to the brink of excess, but that’s OK. I’m talking about skill, substance and infinite variety, not to mention the modicum of trust, affection and respect that exists between traditionally warring parties. Whenever I stumble across yet another tedious diatribe bemoaning the death/dearth/demise of general interest publications, I wonder where the author’s parked his/her criteria. Does nobody read Life when it’s firing on all cylinders?

Maybe not. Maybe even the so-called readers don’t. Would they derive equal satisfaction if Life were solid ads, relieved only by the odd puff piece on up-market indulgences? I hope not, which is why I take photo captions to five and six drafts, just in case. It’s my belief that widespread misconception (only a lifestyle mag in a gilded cage) hinges on context; that if you took Life‘s editorial content and put it somewhere else. unbuttressed by high-priced shoe stores and million-dollar condos, its merits would shine more clearly. Of course, if the shoe stores weren’t footing the bill for said merits, we’d all be out of a) luck, b) work, c) town. Check one, then let it pass.

But no one is guiltless, let alone me. For better or (quite probably) worse, I have become identified with Gomorrahon-the-Newsstands. I have published hundreds of thousands of words in Life‘s glossy pages, speeding the development of a house style known as Urban Glib, and anonymously rejigged an equal number. (My delight is to see a patchwork piece in nomination for the Mag Awards; a short list is available on request). I have watched the passing of several editors, for whom I’ve harbored degrees of regard ranging from qualified to zip. I have walked out once, and on occasion objected to the balance tilting too far toward what seemed to me real triviality. I am not fond, for instance, of laundry lists, to which Life is prone. The most recent example was last year’s journalistic “inner circle.” I was there, along with half the masthead. branded a “top stylist” and “bona fide curmudgeon,” both of which struck me as a premature obit and raised the time-honored question: Where do I go from here?

Maybe that’s the problem. There ain’t a better hole, which is why I sit brooding over projects of extreme complexity, pocketing vast sums, and flaunting my contributing editor’s credit card in posh bistros. (In fact, Revenue Canada alternately sends me flowers and forms inquiring why I’ve never had a job, retainer or dental plan). But what the hell! Because I lurk about, fomenting mopery and doom, I’ve become a quasi-fixture, like the acoustical dividers. My eccentricities are largely tolerated; my copy (which would otherwise be hacked to bits by fevered guardians of Good Syntax) is usually waved on through, despite its manifest lapses. A cosy arrangement, you’ll admit-but not necessarily a healthy one.

So I have an idea. Trumper got all enthused about my writing this piece (although he had no idea what I was up to). “Wow!” he chirped. “The Ryerson Review is read by lots of influential people!” Well, if so, let’s indulge in a test case. I place on record the fact that I’ve felt a tad restless at Life, ever since they suppressed dwarf-tossing contests. So I’m sporadically available, just for a change of pace. Anybody who wants fifth- and sixth-draft hack work is welcome to call. But fair’s fair; if you place an ad, you pay the paper. That’s why I hereby pledge to forward to a Ryerson scholarship, or any other fund designated by the School of Journalism, 10 per cent of all monies that stem from this announcement in the year following its appearance. Plus, I’ll write a follow-up piece (no charge) for next year’s issue, detailing what if any offers arise. But where, I hear you chorus, should prospective benefactors be in touch? Care of the Front Street fern bar is bound to reach me. In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s where good writers tend to congregate, uttering languid, incestuous cries, and scribbling their names over and over, in the hope that someone, someday, gets them halfway right.

But sometimes they don’t. Perhaps they arbitrarily change the writer’s words in such a way that a sentence, a paragraph, or even the whole story is distorted. Perhaps they change the writer’s point of view. Or perhaps they rewrite the article completely, taking away the writer’s most important contribution-her authorship. She may then demand that her name be taken off the story-or, as a last resort, that the whole story be withdrawn from publication.

Wendy Dennis is just one of a number of writers who have had to make such demands of Chatelainemagazine. Dennis used to contribute to Chatelaine fairly regularly-until last summer, when she had what she calls a “unique and horrifying experience” with the magazine.

She was asked to do a story in March, 1985, about Wendy Crawford, a 19-year-old model who was left a paraplegic after a car accident. Crawford had been on her way to the Toronto airport for a flight to Tokyo and her first big modelling job when a drunk driver rammed his car into hers. Dennis researched the story, wrote it and sent it in. She was asked to do it over again, but she admits this first rewrite was her own fault: she had mistakenly written the piece in the first person, as if she herself were Wendy Crawford telling her own story. “That was my mistake,” she says. So this first request to redo the piece didn’t surprise her.

And the long letter that followed the rewrite asking more questions and suggesting more changes didn’t surprise her either. Each of Chatelaine‘s four senior editors had gone over the story, and it seemed to Dennis that each was vying with the others to “out-fix” the story. “But that goes with the territory at Chatelaine,” she says. “I was prepared for it.” But she was not prepared for what was to follow.

She did the second rewrite and got it back a few days later. The editor who had assigned the piece had attached a note asking if this “condensed version” would be acceptable. The piece had been completely rewritten by the Chatelaine editors. Not only were Dennis’s style and voice gone, but her point of view had been changed. Dennis notes the irony of this: in one of her first letters from Chatelaine, the assigning editor had written, “I think the pathos of her situation would come through much more strongly seen through your eyes.” But in Chatelaine‘s version, most of Dennis’s personal observations and insights had disappeared. “All the feeling, all the humanity in the story had been squeezed out,” she says. In her estimation, the magazine had taken a dramatic and compelling story and turned it into a “computer printout.”

“They might have been writing about 10 Christmas gifts,” she says. There were huge cuts in the story. Many of Wendy Crawford’s own words had been removed-quotes that in Dennis’s view would have made the reader’s heart ache for Crawford. Dennis says the Chatelaine version would have hurt Crawford. “It made her look like a widget.” She told Chatelaine she would simply withdraw the piece unless they went back to her version of the story.

A couple of days later, she got the story back again. It was her own writing this time, though still with massive cuts. Enclosed was a two-page letter with still more questions. The assigning editor was asking for more points clarifying exactly what had happened at the scene of Crawford’s accident. One request particularly shocked Dennis. The editor wanted to add a dramatic detail to the description of the accident-a detail Dennis knew was highly questionable.

Wendy Crawford had been pinned in the car after the crash. Her lifeguarding experience told her she definitely had a serious spinal injury-she had lost almost all feeling in her body-and that she should not move. The smell of leaking gas was only one of many things that overwhelmed and terrified her. She was afraid she was going to die. The Chatelaine editor wanted to clarify and substantiate Crawford’s fear of death by saying that rescuers had used blowtorches to try to cut Crawford out of the car: she was afraid the torches would ignite the leaking gas and the car would explode. The editor then suggested taking it all out if the fact-checker found it to be false. Dennis refused. Nothing in her extensive research had suggested the use of blowtorches. In a letter to Chatelaine, she wrote, “I have written for several major publications, both in Canada and the United States, and never have I encountered a situation in which an editor requested that I invent a fact….”

It was not until August that Wendy Dennis and Chatelaine reached an agreement. It was a compromise,” says Dennis. The magazine agreed to publish, more or less, her version of the story, with her thoughts and her point of view. “They wanted that piece-it was their story. They might have realized that if I had pulled it, I could have sold it somewhere else.” Dennis hasn’t seen the final galleys yet-she agreed to publish the piece only after approving them-but she knows this will be her last story for Chatelaine.

Dennis is not the only writer who has balked at Chatelaine‘s treatment of freelancers and their writing. Over the last eight years or so, many writers have smarted under or rebelled against the magazine’s editorial methods. They include such established bylines as Carroll Allen, Norman Snider, Sandra Martin, Carsten Stroud and Terry Poulton. They also include some well-known freelancers who would not allow their names to be used for fear of losing a good, if difficult, market (Chatelaine pays up to $2,500 for a major article). One such writer wrote her last piece for Chatelaine three years ago. “Chatelaine has a house style,” the writer says. “And the magazine tends to browbeat writers into that style.” She adds, “Chatelaine doesn’t trust writers and doesn’t give them enough leeway.”

Her last story for the magazine was on female heroes. The editors told her to write the story from her own perspective. “It would be me talking,” she recalls. Or so she thought.

She wrote the story. But before the fixing and rewriting began, the assigning editor she was working with abruptly left the magazine. “The new editor told me I had to cut 100 lines from a 600-line galley,” she says. “Besides, I was told, there was too much personal stuff in the story that had to come out anyway.” The writer said she would take out 50 lines and no more. The editor said that wasn’t enough. So the writer pulled her byline. The story eventually ran, under a house name. “What they wanted was not the story I had been contracted to do,” the writer says. “I would assume that because a magazine asks me to write a story for them, it wants my style. But you can’t make that assumption at Chatelaine.”

Chatelaine‘s editors have a standard reply to most writers’ objections: they point to the magazine’s huge commercial success-the end that justifies the means. If their logic is questionable, their success is not. Every month Chatelaine comes out about 200 pages strong: fat, glossy and full of ads. It’s a packaging marvel, with a total readership of 2,919,000-one in three Canadian women.

Cathy Wilson of Chatelaine‘s advertising department says the magazine can’t sell any more copies than it does now. If it sold even 200,000 more (it now sells 1,106,597 copies with about 2.6 readers for each one), the number of readers per copy would simply go down. The total audience would stay the same and advertising rates would have to go up because of the added cost of printing those extra issues. And higher ad rates could mean fewer advertisers. Already a full-page, four-color ad on a one-time basis in Chatelaine is a hefty $23,410. The same ad in Maclean’s national edition costs $19,010. In Saturday Night, it’s $6,640.

The woman behind Chatelaine‘s success is Mildred Istona, the editor. She is the epitome of a top business-woman: bright, attractive, well-dressed, and in full control of the magazine’s operations. Other than that, most writers know little about her (she refused to be interviewed for this article). She is probably the most private magazine editor in the country. She keeps her home life-she’s married-very separate from her work, which takes up most of her time. “She gives her work 110 per cent,” says Lynda Hurst, a feature writer at The Toronto Star. Hurst worked as a copy editor and staff writer for two years under Istona, then editor of Miss Chatelaine (now Flare). Hurst says, “I always felt she was doing so much more than me, no matter how much I did. She always worked very hard, but then that’s her obsession with details and perfection.” Hurst says that many people may criticize Istona, but nobody wants her job.

Istona rarely, if ever, deals directly with writers. Wendy Dennis mentions that during all the time she wrote forChatelaine, Istona never once asked to meet her. Dennis thought that was a little odd. “Most magazine editors want to know who’s working for them, “she says.

Istona’s intense concern for detail is reflected in Chatelaine‘s editing process. Every story that goes into the magazine is worked over minutely, often by all four senior editors, though only one works directly with the writer. Each story, with its lists of criticisms and suggestions attached, is handed over to Mildred Istona. It is she who has the final say. “Mildred has veto power,” says Ontario Living‘s editor Liz Primeau. Primeau worked at Chatelaine as a senior editor for about a year in 1981. She agrees there is nothing wrong with having an editor who gets involved with various stories. “You have to have one strong person at the top,” she says. But, she adds, Istona tends to get into the nuts and bolts of basic copy editing. That’s what the other editors are there for. Istona can be a tough editor, but because she seldom faces writers herself, the four senior editors often end up as go-betweens, running back and forth between Istona and the contributors. Editing like that not only frustrates writers, it also makes the writing itself, as Lynda Hurst puts it, “dull, flat prose. You can put 20 different bylines on it, but it’s as if it’s all come out of a computer.”

Even so, not all of Chatelaine‘s contributors are unhappy. There are some whose names appear regularly in the magazine who are anything but. One is Rona Maynard. She has been contributing to Chatelaine for about three years. “There have been occasional problems,” she says. “If I had taken a shorter view I might have gotten more upset, but I always negotiate. It’s been a satisfying experience.

“Chatelaine is good with feedback,” she says. “They always respond to a story very quickly. At some other magazines you hand in a story and you don’t hear from them for six weeks, and then they tell you they’ve lost your invoice. Another thing I really appreciate about Chatelaine is that they pay more quickly than any other magazine I know. And they pay top rates.” Maynard adds, “I’m not going to say Chatelaine never makes mistakes, because they do. But it upsets me greatly to see writers overreact to what goes on at Chatelaine.”

Sidney Katz is another writer who appears frequently in the magazine’s pages. “I’m well aware of problems other writers have had with Chatelaine. I respect their point of view and I appreciate it,” says Katz. “I think my experiences with Chatelaine have much to do with the type of work I do for them. I specialize in behavior and health, and there’s not much room for disagreement. And usually when I’m assigned a story, I know quite a bit about it because I’ve been working in the field for years. I think the editors at Chatelaine realize that I know more about the subject than they do.”

Writer Winston Collins finds the Chatelaine editors easy to work with as well. “I’ve heard of problems,” he says, “but I get along well at the magazine. They’re quite demanding in the amount of research they want for a story, but they’re very prompt in responding and in payment as well.” Collins admits that sometimesChatelaine‘s idea of a story doesn’t leave much room for the writer, but he feels that’s also true of other magazines.

Allan Gould also does a lot of work for Chatelaine. He says he doesn’t like the way magazine takes all the “Gouldism” out of his work-“but Chatelaine has been very good to me. They’ve thrown stories my way and they’ve paid me well.” He says that one year his earnings from Chatelaine made up 80 per cent of his income.

But for writers who have a run-in with Chatelaine, money becomes secondary. For Terry Poulton, it came down to a matter of personal ethics. Poulton is now a columnist for The Toronto Star‘s Starweek magazine, but she used to be a regular contributor to Chatelaine. In 1982, she did a story for the magazine on single mothers, women who had had children out of wedlock and had chosen to raise them by themselves. In the story, she focussed on three women. They talked to Poulton about their experiences. Yes, they said, there were problems they had to deal with-how to explain the word “daddy” to the child, for instance-but, on the whole, they weren’t all that badly off. They had jobs, they loved their children dearly, and they had an optimistic outlook on life. But that’s not what Chatelaine‘s editors wanted.

“The magazine wanted me to diminish the strength of these women,” says Poulton. “These mothers were very proud of what they had accomplished, but Chatelaine wanted me to focus on the idea that they weren’t as lucky as everyone else; that they didn’t have a man to help them.” Poulton felt very strongly about the piece. She felt that if she wrote the story the way her editors wanted her to, she would betray these women, as well as the whole essence of the article. The story was not about how poorly these women were doing (though not all single mothers are as successful) but about how surprisingly well they were handling their lives. Chatelaine didn’t agree.

But Homemaker‘s magazine did. Poulton pulled the story from Chatelaine and sold it to Homemaker‘s, which printed it almost word for word, including Poulton’s original lead and ending, both of which Chatelaine had rejected.

Carsten Stroud is another Toronto writer who wouldn’t accept Chatelaine‘s editing demands. When the magazine approached Stroud in 1981, he had never written for it before. But the story idea sounded reasonable: a piece on male-female relationships in the ’80s. After discussing the idea with a Chatelaineeditor, Stroud went out, did the interviews and wrote the story. “It was a very anecdotal, atmospheric piece,” he says. “I tend to write with more emotion than hard fact. I don’t like to rattle off a lot of statistics.”

When he brought the story to Chatelaine, he was told it was unacceptable. What the magazine really wanted was a story emphasizing the “weaknesses of men’s love.” Stroud reluctantly went back out and did more interviews, but he could not find a case to prove the magazine’s point. He did a rewrite, which eventually landed on Istona’s desk. When Stroud got the manuscript back, he found it had been severely edited, with much of his writing style and personal insight removed. “All Chatelaine wanted was my name,” he says. They had formulated their opinion of what the story should be, and they wanted me to go out and prove it. They wanted none of my voice or style.” Stroud wrote a letter to Chatelaine expressing his frustration. He also pulled his byline, and has not written for the magazine since.

Even writers who seem to have had a fairly good run with Chatelaine can leave expressing some sort of dissatisfaction. Judith Timson was a columnist and contributing editor for almost a year and a half. Timson does not go into great detail about the magazine, but she does say that toward the end of her time there, she began to feel unappreciated. Her final comment is: “I used to work there, and now I don’t.”

Still, for all the flack Chatelaine takes, and all the problems it’s had with writers, it pushes steadily on. It’s a Canadian institution. It’s been around since 1928, and it looks, from its current success, as if it’ll still be kicking 50 years from now. As Lynda Hurst says, “Other magazines have gone down the tubes, but notChatelaine. It’s unassailable.”

And so, it would seem, are its editing methods. Charlotte Gray has been writing frequently for the magazine for the past six years, and she says: “You have to adapt to Chatelaine‘s style. You have to write for its audience. It’s got a large circulation, and it can’t take too many risks. Chatelaine is an editor’s magazine, not a writer’s magazine. If you accept that fact, you’ll find it easier to work for them.” Undoubtedly so, but for some writers, the fact that their individual styles, their voices, their points of view are of little value is impossible to accept.

“It’s weird,” comes the reply. Pulling her chair closer and lowering that famous throaty voice, Gray tells a story that underlines the ironies of her situation. She points out the staff mailboxes where a thoughtful new clerk has appointed her a new slot. “She was very well meaning, but she put me right under Dennis Trudeau,” Gray says. “I had to laugh.” Trudeau, another long-time CBC employee, began hosting As It Happens in September, 1985, three and a half months after Gray was dumped from the position.

Gray, 48, became host of As It Happens four years ago after 19 years of radio journalism experience, including previous guest host spots on As It Happens. Her resume reads like a current affairs program guide. In the early ’70s she hosted the first 4-to-6 p.m. talk show in Canada, a CBC Ottawa production calledNow…Just Listen! Besides As It Happens and Sunday Morning, she’s written for, reported, hosted or commented on Morningside, The House, Cross-Country Check-Up, This Country in the Morning, and in 1976 the weekly program Politically Speaking. She won an ACTRA award in 1976 for her hour-long documentaryThe Supreme Court of Canada and another in 1984 for “excellence in broadcast journalism, radio and television” for her work on As It Happens. Gray’s credentials outside of radio also shine, including magazine and newspaper writing and guest host spots on television.

There was a general cry of disbelief and anger when Gray was let go last summer. Allan Fotheringham, in his weekly column for Maclean’s, called it, “quite about the most stupid decision in years in an organization that has quite a record in stupidities…. Her abrupt dismissal after four distinguished and hardworking years on the job makes you wonder if the CBC budget cuts did not also include a few cuts in the intelligence of those responsible for the decision.” Richard Gwyn, a friend of Gray’s, commented in his column in The Toronto Star, “Gray’s fault, so one bureaucrat has allowed, was that she wasn’t ‘showbiz’ enough. This is to say she preferred to be excellent rather than to be a celebrity, a questioner of others rather than a projector of herself.”

Gwyn added that there is a problem at large concerning the future of CBC radio: “Certainly CBC Radio was overdue for polishing; As It Happens certainly needed brightening. Instead, the best are being thrown away.” And Sid Adilman, also for the Star, said, “It’s not because Gray lacks talent, but because she’s a scapegoat for problems with the show, which now has imitators around the world but still remains the best of them.” A faithful listener, Stan C. Roberts of Burnaby, B.C. was one of about 30 who wrote letters to The Globe and Mail. “She was just doing too well,” Roberts wrote. “Her interviews are too penetrating. She’s making the mistake of asking the tough questions. Worse, she refuses to accept wishy-washy or evasive answers. Or, perhaps the toes she occasionally steps on are located under a particularly influential desk in Ottawa.”

The CBC received about 200 letters in Toronto. Twenty-three senior parliamentary reporters in Ottawa petitioned against the change in hosts as did more than 100 CBC hosts and producers. They feared radio was losing a first-rate journalist. Many on the CBC petition had left radio themselves against their will and they wanted to stop the exodus. “It is difficult enough for those of us who love and are loyal to CBC to withstand the body blows dealt from the outside in the form of budget cuts and criticism; it is unbearable when those body blows come from within,” stated the letter dated June 10 and addressed to Pierre Juneau, president of CBC.

While the CBC petitioners accepted that it is management’s right to change on-air talent as it sees fit, they objected to the method by which the change was made. There was never any discussion with Gray about her shortcomings as a high-profile host, no evaluation, no constructive criticism, no opportunity for improvement. They couldn’t understand why Gray was not offered an “equally challenging alternative so that the corporation could continue to benefit from her abilities.” The letter concluded, “We give loyalty and we expect loyalty in return. We cannot remain silent while a colleague like Elizabeth Gray is so capriciously and wrongfully dismissed.” The letter was meant to provoke an honest probe into poor management/staff relations. Instead it provoked a rebuff from Margaret Lyons, vice-president of English radio networks, and little was accomplished. So Gray’s colleagues supported her in other ways, offering her work when they could. She co-hosted CBC-TV’s Midday for one week in August and did a series of commentaries for CBC Radio’s Saturday morning parliamentary review, The House, in September.

“Our regular commentator, Brian Kelleher, has been temporarily assigned to host As It Happens,” the introduction to The House began on Sept. 7. “So during his absence, we’ve invited broadcaster Elizabeth Gray to assess the government’s first year.” In the commentary that followed, Gray referred to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as a slippery character who slides under doors and compared his voice to that of an obscene phone caller-“that perfectly modulated voice that manages to sound like an anonymous, unwelcome phone call in the middle of the night.”

“That’s fairly gutsy commentary,” says Susan Murray, then acting producer of the program. “Some CBC producers would not allow that on air because it steps over the line of what the public sensibility will accept. Because we’re publicly funded, we don’t want to upset that sensibility.” Murray adds that The House generally gets very little feedback from its listeners, “but as soon as we put Elizabeth Gray on the air we did” and it was not all favorable. She had indeed stepped over the line for some listeners.

The man who told Gray her annual contract at As It Happens would not be renewed was Andrew Simon, head of CBC Radio current affairs. “It had nothing to do with her journalistic abilities,” Simon stressed in a telephone interview. He said that after much thought and discussion, management decided Gray was not attracting a wide enough audience, and that her tone and range of interests were too narrow. “One reason, but on a very secondary level, was the issue that in four years she should have accomplished a wider public profile,” he added. Months earlier he had banteringly told Gray over dinner that she should accept the fact that she was supposed to be a “star.” Barbara Frum’s personality had defined the initial tone of As It Happensand Simon wanted that star quality back. Simon underlined that Gray had not been blacklisted. “We just didn’t want her as host of that program.”

Simon wanted more listeners and As It Happens‘ audience share seemed to be dropping. Since the BBM Bureau of Measurement changed its method of compiling statistics between spring 1981 and spring 1982, it’s impossible to accurately assess As It Happens‘ audience over the span of Gray’s four years as host. But the number of people who tuned in at any time during a week in spring 1982 was 632,000 compared with 555,400 in 1985, just before Gray left the show. However this drop must be viewed in connection with the reduction in 1983 of the show’s length to one hour from 1½.

As It Happens‘ share of the English-speaking audience in CBC areas was nine per cent between fall 1984 and spring 1985 when Gray was host. It rose to 10 per cent in fall 1985 after she left. However, bothMorningside and Sunday Morning experienced similar one-percentage-point increases in audience share between spring and fall 1985. Morningside went to nine per cent from eight, while Sunday Morning rose to 13 per cent from 12. Increases for all three programs make it unreasonable to conclude that specific changes within one program drew more listeners.

Nevertheless, Doug Caldwell, As It Happens‘ executive producer, maintains that Gray was wrong for the job. He says there had been too heavy an emphasis on “political institutions and political process” during Gray’s time and he hopes to restore to the program an “entertainment value” that existed under Frum. Caldwell says new host Dennis Trudeau has the “lively, curious, informal approach to interviews” that’s needed. Caldwell recognized that changing the host was not enough to improve the show, but, “in order to do a complete re-examination, a new host was necessary.”

Gray agrees that the zing had gone out of As It Happens during her final year. But she feels it was because the show, whose strength lies in getting right to the heart of current events, was badly produced. The executive producer must be able to read the news, understand if it’s important, and then decide whether As It Happens should handle it and if so how. “More and more in that final year, we were missing things,” Gray says, citing an international hijacking and an Ontario mining accident as two examples of stories that were not covered as they unfolded. Gray’s vision of the program was to play up its immediacy and ability to go straight to the principal characters involved, capitalizing on direct phone lines and a team of first-rate researchers. Being in the middle of breaking news stories resulted in fascinating listening. On one occasion, for example, Gray tried to phone someone in Beirut and instead reached a 21-year-old woman. “You never know if you’re going to be alive tomorrow,” the woman told Gray as Israeli bombs exploded around her. Her words turned out to be prophetic; the As It Happens crew found out later that she had been killed the next day, and Gray wrote a poignant epitaph. On another show, Gray spoke directly to New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange during the controversy surrounding his decision to keep nuclear-equipped warships out of his country’s ports.

“You want to know why she was really fired?” asks a former As It Happens producer now at The Journal. “She wanted to take the show to new heights and the executive producers couldn’t meet her challenge.”

Gray worked with three executive producers during her time as host. The first was Bob Campbell. He left the show in 1983 after many years and Ian Wiseman replaced him. Wiseman had taken leave from a teaching position at King’s College School of Journalism, and was hired in part to incorporate a documentary style intoAs It Happens. He was fired several months later. Wiseman now says that he may have unwittingly added to management/ staff tensions by coming in from outside the corporation and trying to alter an established program. “CBC management know they want changes in the show but they have no idea what changes they want or how to impose them,” Wiseman said retrospectively in a telephone interview from Halifax, adding that a typical change means some experimental elements are thrown together and if they don’t work, they are dumped.

Wiseman believes Gray should have been made executive producer. “She had a vision of what the show should be, the strength of character to carry it through and the support of the producers.” Even though Gray had never been interested in Caldwell’s position, there was antagonism between the two because they had separate visions of what the show should be. Gray was convinced that As It Happens should be more reflexive and immediate, contrary to Wiseman’s documentary ideas.

Caldwell also found Gray difficult to produce. However, he never gave her any formal evaluation or feedback. He had difficulties, as well, in holding on to a senior producer. The program went for seven months in 1985 with no one in this vital right-hand role until Ian Porter, a current affairs producer from CBC-Halifax, joined the show last November.

“It’s a fact that Elizabeth is difficult to produce,” says The House‘s Susan Murray. Gray is “talented and opinionated and she drives herself and those around her,” Murray says, adding that she’s also a lot of fun. “She’s the type of person who fills a room with her energy.” She’s also the type of journalist who will “fight for every word.”

Gray, meanwhile, admits that she didn’t want to leave As It Happens. “I will not be on As It Happens after today and I’m very sad about that,” she announced to her listeners last June 14. “I have had, for the past four years, the best job anyone could ever possibly have and I cannot think of any other time in my life when I have learned so much-every day-when I’ve been more excited by what I have learned and felt as privileged because I was in a position to pass it on.”

“Maybe at heart I’m a bit of a firechaser,” she admits today. “I don’t know how I’ll look back on it. I don’t know what it’s done for me in the long run. I mean, I’m getting all sorts of bloody speaking engagements that I never got before.” She spoke on “Journalism in South Africa” at the 1985 Lethbridge Herald Lecture series last November. “The hardest part of the whole thing was not the summer, because I was going to take the summer off anyway. It was getting back in the fall and realizing that I was suddenly totally peripheral. It was as if I just didn’t belong anywhere.”

Radio was not something Gray had originally aimed for, or been brought up to consider. Her father worked in insurance; her mother sometimes wrote short stories. Gray too was going to be a writer (“That was the plan”) and after growing up in Toronto and graduating from Havergal College with top grades, she studied for a B.A. in English language and literature at the University of Toronto. It was there, working for the Varsitynewspaper with John Gray, her husband-to-be, under the “wonderful” editorial guidance of Peter Gzowski, that her interest in journalism grew.

She did her first radio story while she and John were living in England, where they had moved after working for Toronto newspapers for a year-she at the old Toronto Telegram and he at The Toronto Star. She did a series of stories for a CBC show called Countdown, and continued to freelance until her children were teenagers. Then she went after the As It Happens position.

Probably more than anything else, strong family support has helped her weather the events of the past months and given her the courage to walk back into the CBC. Gray shares a sprawling three-storey house with her husband, now foreign editor at The Globe and Mail. Their three children are 18, 20 and 24. Last summer was hard on them, she says, and on her dad, 82, who just can’t understand why his only child was sacked from a job in which she had excelled. Losing the job, she says, was much harder on her family than the years she spent commuting from Ottawa when she first accepted the As It Happens position in Toronto. The family moved to Toronto last year.

When she’s not working, Gray is often reading. Relaxing over coffee in her kitchen, she says that she is currently very interested in South Africa-she recently reported for Sunday Morning on South Africa’s ambassador to Canada, Glen Babb. Though it’s 6:30 p.m., the radio is not tuned in to As It Happens. Instead we listen to a tape by Tony Bird, a South African musician. Gray finds time for such special interests despite a heavy weekly ration of newspapers and magazines; a favorite is The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town” column. The high calibre of it “makes you feel how inadequate you are as a journalist,” she says.

There is nothing inadequate about Gray’s work in the Sunday Morning studios as the show nears its weekend deadline. To say the pace is picking up is an understatement. Gray is trying to clear up the technical details needed to record an interview with leftist author James Laxer for the National Energy Program story. He’s waiting to talk from a pay phone in a Texas restaurant. And between coordinating soundmen, technicians and Laxer’s public relations people, she’s madly trying to collect a coherent set of questions for an interview she hadn’t expected to get for another three hours. “I hate to go in unprepared,” she says later. She rushes down the sleek grey corridors to the studio where one of Sunday Morning‘s hosts, Barbara Smith, interrupts her own work to free up the equipment. Headphones clamped on, nervously rolling a pen in one hand and chewing on a finger, Gray launches in. Her questions are well-framed and to the point. She sounds totally collected. You can tell she’s got something good when she starts nodding along with his answer. You’d never know that she was mapping things out as she went.

“I hired her because she’s a good journalist,” says Norm Bolen, executive producer of Sunday Morning, who renewed Gray’s 13-week contract in early January. But whether or not she’ll still have a job at the end of this second stint depends on other things, such as budgets and shuffles. “If I have budget problems she would be the most vulnerable,” Bolen states frankly. Gray knows this. And she accepts it. But she’s not giving up. “I love the CBC,” she says. “I have major differences with a few people there, but I figure the radio service is bigger than all of them. To their credit they’re not stopping me.”

She doesn’t blame the institution. Gray believes in public broadcasting. “I think they made a mistake,” she says of CBC management’s decision to drop her from As It Happens. “And I’m not really prepared to let them get away with it, that’s all. So I will haunt the place and see what happens.”

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.

Every so often even the best writers become too enchanted with a story. They are captivated, and perhaps a wish not to disturb the tale causes them to overlook any faults that might be found by less involved observers.

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.

So why did that same Saturday edition of the Star run a travel section titled “Mexico, land of the sun”? And why did the next day’s edition of The Toronto Sun also run a travel section on Mexico, while the paper’s front-page headlines screamed about the ravages of the earthquake? Both travel sections contained stories and ads promoting tourism in places such as Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo. After the stark, front-page headlines, the travel sections came as a slap in the face to readers. The Mexico on the front looked like Dante’s Inferno, while the Mexico in the back looked like the Garden of Eden.

George Bryant is travel editor at the Star. “This is one of the perils of preprinting,” he says. “Any major newspaper that preprints faces the same risk.”

The Star-especially the Saturday edition which has 10 sections-is too big a paper to print on the day it appears. The presses can’t handle it, which means that some of the sections must be printed in advance. Travel, for example, is printed on Thursday morning, along with other sections such as New in Homes. Entertainment is printed on Wednesday night. Only the hard news sections go to press just before the paper comes out.

The Toronto Sun also pre-prints, though only for its Sunday edition and 92 of 200 pages for the Boxing Day edition. “No presses can handle all the sections of a weekend paper at once,” says Mike Burke-Gaffney, theSun‘s Sunday editor. The Sunday Sun‘s Showcase and Going Places are printed early Friday morning. Comment/Lifestyle and Homes/Classified are printed Friday night. The Sun‘s TV Magazine is printed on the preceding Monday or Tuesday, and the comics are printed two weeks before publication, in Buffalo (most Canadian papers get their comics from U.S. syndications). And all of it goes into the same paper.

The Globe and Mail pre-prints as well. “As news sections grow,” says Lazzlo Buhasz, assistant editor, “the other parts of the paper have to be pre-printed.” The Globe pre prints its Saturday Travel and Saturday Homes sections. Both of these hit the presses Thursday night. The food and recipe section, Shopping Basket, which comes out on Wednesday, is also planned and printed in advance, on Monday night.

The whole process is a race against time: get the story, get it printed, and get it to the reader-fast. By the time the news sections of the paper are printed, other sections such as Homes and Travel have to be done and ready to hit the streets.

But maybe once every 10 years, something goes wrong. For The Toronto Star and The Sunday Sun it was the Mexico story. “But we’re talking about an act of God here,” says Star ombudsman Rod Goodman. “Can you suggest a solution?”

“I am as sensitive as anyone to something like this,” says the Star‘s Bryant. “I feel bad-though helpless is more the word to use. But it’s done, it’s fact. You just have to go on and do the next weekend’s section and hope nothing happens in the Caribbean.”

“Generally speaking, all-season tires, such as the Michelin XA4, are so good that they meet the needs of 90 per cent of Canadian motorists, says Michelin.”

These sentences are taken from a file of newspaper filler supplied by News Canada of Toronto. They are not advertisements. The headline on the front of the file calls them “the clipbook of free features for newspapers.” The clipbook is 24 pages long with an average of 100 articles at about 500 words each, laid out in newspaper style on glossy paper, and ready to cut out for insertion into a newspaper layout. News Canada is sent free every month to nearly 1,300 newspapers across Canada. “The newspapers give us nothing,” says News Canada editor Terry Wheelband. “They’re not our bread and butter.”

The service was founded 4? years ago by Paul Aunger, a Ryerson Journalism graduate. Since then the service has carried articles from more than 250 commercial and government interests. Contributors to News Canada, such as the Bank of Montreal, General Motors and Betty Crocker, pay $413 and up to have their articles included. Some of the articles are helpful service pieces, but in many cases they are simply advertisements for the contributing company in the guise of news features. They are not identified as ads, though some bylines include the name of the company for which the writer works, and no payment is made to the newspapers that publish them.

News Canada carried a supplement last July on the federal budget. None of the articles had bylines and only one person, Finance Minister Michael Wilson, was quoted. All the pieces were positive, unquestioning explanations of the budget, with headlines such as “New tax exemption can benefit all” and “Improving tax fairness.” The only indication to readers that the stories were written and paid for by the federal government was the (NC) date- line on each.

The nature of the service poses hazards for both newspapers and their readers. Newspapers that pick up and run stories provided by News Canada without identifying them as stories written and paid for by companies or groups with vested interests are undermining their own credibility. Readers, meanwhile, are likely to assume that they are reading stories written by reporters from a bona fide news service.

Yet News Canada is very successful and is regularly signing new clients. One of its clients is the Bank of Montreal. Brian Smith, manager of media relations for the bank, doesn’t worry about the ethical questions of publishing ads that look like news. “It’s a paid service. It’s part of the newspaper editors’ duties if they feel someone is trying to flog a product to treat it as such.”

News Canada‘s Wheelband has no qualms about what many editors would call “advertorials.” “It’s a great idea. Everybody seems happy with it on all sides,” she says. According to News Canada, 60 per cent of the papers that receive the file use at least one item, and half of those are used as is.

For the most part, the pieces are picked up by small-town weekly papers-the dailies have little use for them. And there are editors who use News Canada and recognize the danger. Kenora’s Daily Miner and Newssometimes uses clips from the service, but editor Ross Porter gives the file to the sales department. The sales manager appeals to local commercial interests to sponsor the articles as advertisements.

“What I don’t like is that they don’t have ‘This is an advertisement’ on top of the articles,” says Porter, “or if they say ‘Use Uncle Ben’s’ instead of other products.”

Toronto’s three daily newspapers-The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail-all jumped on the Zundel trial bandwagon. A combination of ill-considered and inaccurate headlines, insensitivity to the implications of the stories, and the predictability of the press’s response allowed Zundel and his associates to make the most of trial coverage. The practice of journalism, which equates objective reporting with simply reciting testimony from both sides of a trial, gave a bogus legitimacy to Zundel’s views. The result was a tremendous disservice to the Jewish community and the millions who died during the Holocaust.

“The media, in reporting the trial, all too frequently shifted its attention away from the reality of the Holocaust to report uncritically on the Holocaust denial lie,” writes the Canadian Jewish Congress director of Community Relations, Manuel Prutschi. His article, “Anti-Semitism on trial,” appeared in the Bulletin, a quarterly publication of the Centre for Investigative journalism, last spring. Holocaust denial became the news story of the day while the Holocaust as historical fact faded into the background.

Prutschi says, “Coverage of the prosecution’s case tended to focus on defence cross-examination and on efforts to cast doubt on survivor and expert testimony.” He cites a Jan. 12, 1985, Globe story in which prosecution witness Arnold Friedman, an Auschwitz survivor, gave in to relentless questioning by Zundel’s lawyer and said he couldn’t prove that missing prisoners had been gassed. “The unjust impression given was that the witness had wavered in his testimony when, in fact, he stood up well throughout the cross-examination.”

Zundel’s trial, along with fears within the Jewish community regarding anti-Semitic propaganda and its effects, divided Jews into two groups with two different outlooks. Though both sides agree coverage of the trial was sensationalistic, Meir Halevi, national director of the Jewish Defence League, says the press “had to cover what was happening and did exactly that.” In his view, press coverage was weighted heavily in favor of the defence because Toronto Jews lacked the courage to play the game by Zundel’s rules; that is, the Jewish community “refused to resort to some theatrics and propaganda of our own. We couldn’t have expected anything more or less from the press. I was pleading with Jewish organizations to counter Zundel but unfortunately they were too afraid.”

In contrast, Helen Smolack, chairman of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, which initiated the charges against Zundel, believes the newspapers, not the Jewish community, were at fault. “Reporters don’t seem to have a grasp of the whole [Holocaust] situation.” If they had a thorough knowledge of the Holocaust and of the background of anti-Semitic propagandists such as Zundel, they would not have resorted to blindly reporting the claims of the defence while largely ignoring the other side, she says.

“The trial raised serious questions about traditional notions of journalistic objectivity,” wrote Kirk Makin in theColumbia Journalism Review. Makin, who covered the trial for the Globe, said the media were caught in a dilemma between diminishing the reality of the Holocaust and censorship. “Was the mere fact of reporting Zundel’s views an insult to those who had suffered in the Holocaust? Should news organizations therefore have ignored a story as significant as the trial of a man being prosecuted solely for his views?” Makin called it a no-win situation.

Yet lying beneath the objective form-reporting defence and prosecution testimony without comment-are the inherent judgments made by the papers in their decisions of what to emphasize and what to omit. These underlying judgments, which are applied to every story every day, resulted in undeserved credibility for Zundel and his followers.

Press coverage during the defence’s portion of the trial failed to put Zundel’s views in the context of historical fact and failed to point out that the trial itself was about hate literature. Because Zundel used truth as his defence, the Crown was forced to prove the reality of the Holocaust. While Toronto’s newspapers played prominently on the defence’s Holocaust denial, the hate literature issue, the point of the whole case, was shoved into the background.

Defence counsel Douglas Christie was quoted in all three papers on Jan. 12 on his cross-examination of a Holocaust survivor who had relived his memories of the smoke and smells of the crematoriums. Christie contended that it was impossible for such emissions to come from a crematorium where people were being burned. The Star‘s story, “Nazi camp survivor wrong on deaths, trial told,” and the Sun‘s “Zundel defence lawyer: ‘No smoke from Nazi crematorium,'” both gave Christie’s assertions more prominent play than the witness’s replies. This left readers with an impression that the existence of crematoriums in the death camps was in doubt.

“Lawyer challenges crematoria theory,” the Globe‘s headline on the same day, took the side of the Holocaust deniers. By running the word theory without the appropriate quotation marks, the paper condoned skepticism about the reality of the Holocaust-an event that is historically documented fact. Emphasizing Christie’s claims gave them a veneer of authenticity.

When Zundel took the stand he was quoted liberally in the Feb. 21 Star on his assertions that there were no lethal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and no German policy to methodically exterminate Jews. Zundel noted that a number of authors have written to the effect that “Dachau was a pleasant compound with tree-lined streets, peaceful chapels and large, efficiently run kitchens.” Although the Star story mentioned that Zundel’s testimony “contrasted sharply” with earlier prosecution evidence, the paper did not give equal weight to this evidence.

The Globe ran this headline on Feb. 6: “No gas chambers in Nazi Germany, expert witness testifies.” The same story mentioned that the judge had denied the witness, Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature, expert status on the gas chambers. The contradiction between headline and story was far less obvious than the headline’s sensational implications.

When Ditlieb Felderer, a Swedish defence witness, produced a photograph in court of a swimming pool allegedly situated at Auschwitz concentration camp, the photo was published in the Globe, implying that the existence of the pool was a fact and that the photograph was genuine. The important information that Zundel is known as “probably the best photo retoucher in Toronto” was not in the caption, but near the end of the story.

The press’s focus on the unusual and bizarre made its response predictable and thus left the papers open to manipulation by Zundel and his lawyer. Every statement, every move that Zundel and his hard-hatted followers made was given extensive coverage. Photographs of a smiling, contented Zundel walking in and out of the courtroom, flashing his victory sign, often appeared alongside the stories. Zundel’s actions became the trademark of the trial, symbolism for his cause. To Zundel’s delight he got “a million dollars worth of publicity” he could never have attained otherwise. When Zundel appeared on the courthouse steps carrying a 12-foot cross, the Star and the Sun ran the resulting photographs.

The Globe‘s metro editor, Colin MacKenzie, admits the paper was manipulated by Zundel’s lawyer. “Doug Christie played us a little bit like a guitar in terms of the way he laid out his case,” he says. “There were some pretty had headlines. There’s no question they showed an appalling lack of sensitivity and the ignorance of a newspaper that prides itself on being fairly close to the way the world thinks.” He singles out the “crematoria theory” headline as “appalling and wrong and indefensible, so I’m not even going to bother to try.”

Of the editors interviewed at the three dailies, MacKenzie is the only one to admit having made mistakes in trial coverage. Ken MacGray, the Star‘s deputy city editor, says, “In terms of news, Zundel wasn’t treated differently than any other case. There are two sides to any story.” He discounts criticism that coverage of the case was unfair. “We presented both sides of the case, giving equal weight to the views and let the readers make their own judgments on Zundel’s guilt or innocence.”

The Sun‘s city editor, John Paton, “didn’t find any problems” with his paper’s Zundel coverage. His response to criticism is, “That’s utter bullshit. As far as when the case was going on, if anyone knows anything about Canadian law as it applies to the media, you know that you cannot comment on a case when it’s before the courts. You’re restricted to reporting what happens inside the courtroom and that’s what we did.”

Robert Martin, professor of law and journalism at the University of Western Ontario, disagrees with Paton’s interpretation of the contempt of court law. “That’s a fairy tale. To say as a general rule you can only report what is said in court is not true…. There are limitations, but there is no blanket rule that you can’t talk about anything that doesn’t happen in open court.”

Martin says it is contempt to purport to resolve issues that have to be decided in court, but there are other ways to put defence testimony in perspective. For example, an editorial discussing the restrictions of court reporting would not have legal implications. “It is not contempt to discuss the content of the law.”

Martin also says making a judgment to downplay a story, or one side of a story, would circumvent the restrictions. “The problem I had with the coverage was that it was too balanced. Giving balance to Zundel gave legitimacy to despicable opinions.”

In fact, there were no interpretive stories or commentary until after the quilty verdict was reached. Frank Jones of the Star wrote in his March 1 column that “bogus experts were accorded respect just like learned professors earnestly debating maybe the Punic wars of ancient Greece.” Although the trial was a racial-hatred case, Jones noted that “the whole impression in the headlines day after day was that these people represented a respectable school of revisionist history, concerned only with getting at the truth of distant historical events.”

In a March 1 Globe story, Kirk Makin revealed that “for several months, Mr. Zundel was listed as an editorial board member of Liberty Bell, a journal published by George Dietz, who owns what is considered to be the largest neo-Nazi publishing house in the United States.”

Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski delved into Zundel’s background, again on March 1. He disclosed that Zundel, writing under the name Christof Friedrich (his middle names) was the author of a book that was reviewed inLiberty Bell. Bonokoski related a portion of that book review: “[Friedrich] leaves no doubt. Hitler was well-loved and loved in return but the relationship between the leader and his people was not the gushy, sickly sweet effusion of an obese Jewish mother for her pimply, draft-dodging son.”

Although the editorials and interpretive stories put Zundel’s trial in better perspective, they came too late, after most of the damage was done.

As far as future coverage of racial-hatred trials is concerned, the Globe‘s MacKenzie says, “We’re not going to suspend the rules of journalism no matter what the cause.” However he says such trials will be approached with greater foresight. “We have become sensitized to the concerns of the community and to the need to deal a little carefully with Holocaust denial…. We’ll look at what we’re writing and assess if counsel is pursuing the ends of his client or using us to get publicity.”

Future racial-hatred trial coverage by the Star will not change, MacGray says. The paper will report both sides of cases, print only the testimony and do no out-of-court reporting. “Readers must decide for themselves…. It’s a basic rule of journalism and the Star won’t break the rule for any court case,” he says. Nor will the Sun, says Paton. “We will still report what goes on in any courtroom, for both sides.”

It’s ironic that the press, one of whose main purposes is to prepare society for change, is itself so little open to it. Newspaper journalists have long known-especially since the McCarthy ’50s-that printing unexamined statements can place them in the service of hatemongers. The rigid news mentality that Senator Joseph McCarthy fed upon was again in evidence in the coverage of the Zundel trial. Yet, with the limited exception of the Globe‘s MacKenzie, spokesmen for Toronto’s three big dailies weren’t even prepared to consider new approaches. Reader beware.