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THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF JOURNALISTS SPRING/SUMMER 2008 • VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4 • $3.95 L’ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE DES JOURNALISTES–

Plus: Tips on learning how to write tighter copy, searching the Internet and reading financial statements.

Why do journalists do such a poor job reporting ...

... about themselves?

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I N S I D E DEPARTMENTS

First Word

JournalismNet

Inside the numbers

FEATURES The same as it always was

The fallout from NAFTAgate

Being accountable

Whither investigative journalism

Lost in translation

DEPARTMENTS Writer’s toolbox

For the Record

Legal opinion part one

Legal opinion part two

Fine Print

Computer-assisted reporting

Ethics

The Last Word

The state of media criticism in Canada is anemic. By David McKie

Finding court decisions online is getting easier. By Julian Sher

The New York Times’ financial troubles are spelled out in its audited financial statement. By Kelly Toughill

Recent controversial events on Parliament Hill involving reporters and politicians and their surrogates are a reflection of a symbiosis that continues to define relationships in the nation’s capital. By Chris Cobb

When the CTV hauled its former Parliamentary correspondent on the carpet for leaking the details of a conversation, there was a deafening silence among reporters and media outlets. By Simon Doyle

Journalists who used leaked reports to write stories that caused Maher Arar no end of misery should finally come clean and admit they were wrong. By Andrew Mitrovica

A conversation between two journalists some 30 years ago, led to the creation of the Canadian Association of Journalists’ predecessor. By Cecil Rosner

There has to be a better way to bridge the gap between the ethnic and mainstream media at a time when more and more readers, viewers and listeners are non-white. By Catherine Murray

Tight writing should not be seen as an attempt to squeeze the life out of a story, but as a way to remove words, phrases, sentences and complete paragraphs that are not doing their job. By Don Gibb

Journalists writing about Afghanistan should take a closer look at the “experts” making the case that Canada is fighting the good fight. By Amir Attaran

The Ontario Court of Appeal was right: Press freedom is not absolute. By John Miller

Be wary of offering sources blanket protection. By Dean Jobb

Responsible journalism. It’s a defence that could help warm libel chill. By Dean Jobb

A federal court ruling may embolden government departments to withhold even more data that is in the public interest. By Fred Vallance-Jones

Media criticism will fail to be effective so long as we think of it as complaining about bad coverage after the fact, in a piecemeal, story-by-story approach. By Stephen J. A. Ward

The federal Tories had trouble selling their message about our mission in Afghanistan so the government invoked the help of ex-generals and academics who pass themselves off as experts. By Scott Taylor

SPRING/SUMMER 2008 Volume 13, Number 4

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First Word By DaviD McKie

The art of introspection Why do media outlets seem so uncomfortable with writing about themselves?

The theme of this edition of Media magazine is the unwillingness of media outlets in general and journalists in particular to

examine themselves critically. We place many institutions under a microscope, analyzing flaws, suggesting reforms. But we tend to avoid submitting our own work, tendencies and flaws under the same lens. To be sure, upper echelons of media outlets spend money devising ways to increase their audiences: smaller newshole, shorter and snappier newscasts, more stories about people, fewer stories about government policies, and so on. Attempts to attract younger audiences while not alienating older and more faithful readers, listeners and viewers constitute a tricky and risky balancing act.

Similar energy, it seems, does not go into examining the behavior of journalists, our accountability or lack of it, and our abilities to tell people stories they care about. There is little introspection. The lens is foggy and no one seems to care. Too harsh an assessment? Perhaps. I’m prepared to be challenged, as I was recently by my own board of directors. But media criticism, I argued in my note to them asking for feedback and suggestions about this edition, in this country is lacking. And if my attempts to put together a coherent feature package for this edition is any indication, speaking frankly about some of the challenges and problems that beset journalists can be viewed as a career-ending proposition.

Recent events at the CBC, CTV and other media outlets raised issues that should have received wider attention and broad-based discussion. Just what is the relationship between journalists on Parliament Hill and their sources? Is the relationship too cozy, and are politicians being hypocritical in expressing outrage about the conduct of certain reporters whose dilemmas received more ink in the satirical magazine Frank, and the niche publication The Hill Times, and not The Globe and Mail, The CBC, CTV, The Ottawa Citizen and other CanWest newspapers. What’s going on? Why are we so afraid to use the same critical faculties to examine ourselves that we reserve for politicians and institutions?

When I threw out these questions to members of Media magazine’s editorial board, some agreed, others took me to task, suggesting that I was ignoring the critical role played by schools of

journalism. Fair enough. Many of this magazine’s columnists and contributors are from schools of journalism. They’re able to use their perspective and critical faculties to examine the issues of the day. And, of course, I was also reminded that Media magazine also attempts to fill the void.

Recent events

at the CBC,

CTV and other

media outlets raised

issues that should

have received wider

attention and

broad-based

discussion. Just

what is the

relationship between

journalists on

Parliament Hill and

their sources?

Still, I argued that to my knowledge, there are few if any journalists covering media as a beat, breaking stories, holding news outlets to account, challenging readership and viewer numbers.

It is for this reason that we have devoted a lot of

space in this edition to the examination of media criticism. In the wake of the incident involving former Parliamentary CBC correspondent Krista Erickson and her feeding of questions to a Liberal MP, Chris Cobb questions the nature of such relationships and whether the outrage expressed by politicians and fellow journalists is as genuine as it appears to be.

Simon Doyle of The Hill Times writes about the affair involving former CTV Parliamantary correspondent David Akin, whose outing of a “source” in my journalism class at Carleton University led to his eventual departure and a new job as CanWest’s national correspondent. Andrew Mitrovica is still puzzled by the way in which some reporters covered the Maher Arar story with their apparent willingness to run with leaks that damaged the torture victim’s reputation at a time when he was fighting to clear his name, which, of course, eventually happened. In his ethics column, Stephen J.A. Ward argues that media criticism should be more than examining the behavior of individual journalists. Rather, the lens should also focus on broader issues that seek to improve coverage and engage citizens.

And we give the final word to Scott Taylor who finds it worrying that journalists covering the Afghanistan story don’t seem to ask hard questions of the spokespeople who portray themselves as “experts,” but yet are being paid by the federal government. It was also with the theme of media criticism in mind, that we invited Simon Fraser’s Catherine Murray to write about her study that looked at the gulf between the ethnic and mainstream media outlets. Though her study is specifically related to B.C., her conclusion about the yawning divide that exists between the two solitudes can be applied to other cities with large ethnic media outlets such as Montreal and Toronto. The divide suggests that mainstream outlets are doing a poor job at connecting with a segment of society that Statistics Canada tells us is growing rapidly.

As usual, we have our array of columnists and a debate about the significance of a recent court decision that challenges our ability to protect sources.

We would love to hear from you about anything in this or previous editions. Feel free to contact me at [email protected]. Remember, this is your publication. Happy reading. l

MEDIA, SPRNG/SUMMER 2008 PAGE 4

JournalismnetBy Julian Sher

It’s easier to find legal information onlineYou can find everything from federal court decisions to

local conflicts settled in small-claims courts

Courts are a treasure trove of information for journalists — not just for reporters covering a trial or for someone investigating

a known criminal. People who are in your story may have been sued, got divorced, testified as an expert witness or received a reprimand from their professional body.

Court records also have the advantage of being, well, court records — they are official documents from the justice system and you have a lot of latitude in quoting from them, even if you cannot always prove everything in them is true.

If your newsroom subscribes to QuickLaw or one of the other databases (or you have a lawyer friend who will do a quick search for you) you’re in luck.

But more and more court records in Canada are now also online and searchable for free though the quantity and quality is uneven. A few words of caution right up front: there is an important distinction between criminal records and judicial decisions. The juicy criminal stuff —convictions, charges, search warrants — are largely not available online, except in Quebec.

On the other hand, most judicial decisions and rulings are. So if the target of your investigation committed murder and never appealed, his guilty verdict may not be online. Same thing if he and his wife divorced amicably. But if someone appeals a conviction or takes a divorce to a higher court, the juicy details are often online. You just have to be lucky.

Also, many courts only have decisions posted for the last few years or perhaps back to the 1990s. Few have longer historical records online.

If you have a lawyer friend who can do search for you on QuickLaw — www.lexisnexis.ca/ newquicklaw— that’s the best way to get access to judicial databases.

For those who don’t have legal buddies, below are some tips.

PROVINCE BY PROVINCE Each province lists its own court databases.

You’ll find a list with easy access to each province on JournalismNet’s legal pages at www.journalismnet. com/people/canadacrime.htm.

Almost all provinces have their major courts (Court of Appeal, Superior Court) online — big cases, important decisions. Some of the more interesting details on people can be found in lower courts (provincial or municipal Courts).

Several provinces have their family courts online — everything from divorce records to child abuse. In most (but not all) divorce cases, the full names are not there, but if you know enough details — place, date, the identity of the lawyers — it is not hard to get.

All child protection decisions shield the name of the minor — but again, if a social worker or aggrieved parent or one of the lawyers gives you enough of a lead, you should be able to track the decision.

Small claims courts are a treasure trove to get the scoop on a dubious local car repair shop or to see how many times your local McDonald’s restaurants have been sued.

Finally, some of the best story nuggets can come from the courts you don’t often think of right away — such as professional bodies, human rights tribunals system. For example, decisions against doctors or police who violated accepted standards are often online; same with landlords who discriminate.

Labour tribunals can give you extensive details of a company or union you are investigating.

CANLII BEST PLACE FOR MAJOR SEARCHES

Almost all the provinces, list their courts on the same web page, but you have to visit each court web site separately to do a search. In other words, you can’t search the Ontario Court of Appeal and

the Provincial Court at the same time. This is a problem, particularly if you are not

sure where a court decision was made. The solution is CANLII — the Canadian Legal

Information Institute, shown below: From its main website at www.canlii.org you

can search all of the provincial and federal courts: Or, by clicking on a province’s name, you can

conduct a province-wide search. Or simply select the court you are interested in.

You can find out the details of what CANLII stores — in particular the dates for how far back the court records go — at http://canlii.org/en/ databases.html.

Be creative. Not just with CANLII but with your other court searches.

For example, don’t just search for names. You can find story ideas. Put in search terms like “date rape” or “pit bull” and “bite” to find story ideas of leads.

If you’re really bored one evening, put in “Porsche” and “divorce” to read about how some rich people have too much to fight about.

International searches American criminal and judicial records are

much more plentiful. You often have to pay, but you can get criminal records for most jurisdictions. See www.journalismnet.com/people/uscrime.htm for a list of pay-for and free services.

Cornell University offers a free search of federal court decisions.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) at http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov is the U.S. federal government’s centralized site for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.

The beauty of PACER is that you can get the actual documents — indictments, pleas, sometimes some transcripts. You have to register and there is a charge per page (8 cents) — although no fee is apparently owed until a user accrues more than $10 worth of charges in a calendar year.

The Public Library of Law at http://www.plol. org offers free search of the U.S. Supreme Court and cases from all 50 states back to 1997.

For British and Irish legal decisions, the UK equivalent of Canlii is called Bailii (British and Irish Public Legal Information) at www.bailii.org.

As always, this article and other columns are available online with links to all the sites mentioned on the JournalismNet Tips page at www.journalismnet.com/tips.

Julian Sher, the creator and webmaster of Journalism Net (www.journalismnet.com), does Internet training in newsrooms around the world. He can be reached by email at [email protected]. l


The recent showdown at The New York Times was a big story. For the second time in as many years, private investors

demanded that the Sulzberger family share stewardship of the influential media empire. The battle played out in press releases and proxy statements, blogs and television news. The outcome would affect journalists across the continent, but the battle wasn’t about journalism, it was about money.

Financial statements are one of the few documents that most can’t read intuitively. Business reporters are trained to decipher them; the rest of us muddle through. Here’s a quick and dirty primer on how to read financial statements, using the New York Times as a case study. (For a reference, please refer to the table.)

The most important numbers are the audited financial statements. They have three parts: the income statement (sometimes called a statement of operations); the balance sheet and the statement of cash flows. Those are followed by notes that explain key details and assumptions.

Read the financials by looking for changes from one year to the next, and by calculating key ratios. Numbers that appear inside brackets are negative, and any number beneath a solid black line is a sum.

Income Statement The income statement is a record of revenues

and expenses over the year, including non-cash expenses such as amortization. The most important lines in any income statement are total revenues and net income.

The New York Times 2007 income statement shows total revenues of $3.2 billion, a shade lower than 2006 and 2005. Most worrisome is advertising revenue, which provides two-thirds of the company’s total income. It is down 5 per cent from the year before. The notes show that ad revenue dropped almost 12 per cent in one division of the company.

The next section of the income statement is expenses. If revenues fall, expenses must also fall or the company will lose money. The income statement shows that the New York Times Company chopped roughly $100 million from its books by chopping jobs and reducing newsprint.

Depreciation, amortization and impairment of intangible assets can dramatically change profit, even if they don’t affect cash flow. The 2006 income statement of the New York Times shows an expense of $814 million for impairment

Inside the Numbers By Kelly Toughill

Trouble at The New York Times Much of the story is told in the company’s financial statement

of intangible assets. The company didn’t actually spend $814 on anything. It decided that things like the value of its brand, its customer lists and the expertise of its staff were worth dramatically less because of the overall drop in value of the newspaper industry. So, it wrote down the value

2005 and 9.1 cents in 2004. The income statement shows that revenues, net

income and profit margins are all headed in the wrong direction for the New York Times.

Balance Sheet

as an expense. That wiped out its 2006 profit, even though the expense was nothing more than a bookkeeping entry.

Net income (profit) is usually found two thirds of the way down an income statement. The New York Times had a net income of $208.7 million in 2007, up dramatically from the $543 million it lost the year before. (Remember, the 2006 net income was negative only because the company wrote down the value of its intangible assets.) More important, the 2007 net income is below the $253 million it earned in 2005.

The key calculation for any income statement is profit margin, or how many pennies of profit are retained from every dollar of revenue. To calculate profit margin, divide net income by total revenues. The New York Times kept 6.5 cents from every dollar it collected in 2007, down from 8.7 cents in

The balance sheet is a snapshot of a company’s wealth on the last day of its fiscal year. It shows what a company owns (assets) and what it owes (liabilities) and the value of the company held by stockholders (equity).

Current assets are things that can be turned into cash within three months, such as stocks, and money owed to the company by customers (accounts receivable). Long term assets include land, buildings, and equipment, minus depreciation charges, as well as intangibles assets.

Short term liabilities are debts that must be paid soon, such as money owed to creditors. Long-term liabilities are obligations such as leases, long-term loans and pension obligations.

The crucial calculation on the balance sheet is

Continued on Page 9


Feature By chriS coBB

The same as it always was The symbiotic relationship between journalists on the Hill and politicians just won’t go away

The late, gregarious New Brunswick premier Richard (Disco Dick) Hatfield, a tireless party animal who liked nothing better than

jetting to New York City for the weekend, once walked into a Manhattan gay bar followed shortly afterwards by a Canadian reporter looking for the goods on the premier’s swinging private life.

As told (second hand) by the late Ottawa Southam News columnist and bureau chief Charles Lynch, Hatfield sat with a young man while across the room, the reporter waited for something to happen. Hatfield drank and chatted the night away with his young companion, easily outpacing the tired reporter who eventually got up to leave. ‘’It’s OK,’’ the premier shouted after him, ‘’your secret’s safe with me.’’

Hatfield genuinely enjoyed partying with Ottawa political reporters and many knew that the premier had a private life that New Brunswick voters would have frowned upon— to say the least. But the voters never found out. His secret was safe with them.

And who can remember the member of Parliament falling over drunk during the 1964 debate over the Canadian flag? He voted along party lines and slumped over. It wasn’t reported because he voted as expected. His drunkenness was nobody’s business.

So what does any of this have to do with CBC reporter Krista Erickson publicly banished to Toronto by management who disapproved of her providing questions to a Liberal MP who presumably couldn’t think of any of his own ahead Coming from the Conservatives, who are wondering whether you’d like to comment.” of Brian Mulroney’s appearance at the Commons a mixed bag led by former Reform Party and After a brief explanation of the story from the ethics committee? No small irony there. Canadian Alliance members with a few Mike Harris reporter, the opposition critic would issue forth

“Following an investigation by senior Ontario Tories in, the outrage was especially rich. with an outraged pro-forma criticism and the management of CBC News, we have determined During the Chrétien years, when Liberals story was good to go: “The Opposition blasted the that our reporter Krista Erickson did, in fact, dominated, opposition MPs courted the Press Chrétien government’s proposed new policy on (fill provide questions to a member of Parliament in Gallery shamelessly to get the occasional mention in the blank) yesterday, calling it an outrageous the lead-up to the ethics committee meeting in in the news media. It’s what Opposition parties waste of taxpayers money.” Or whatever. December,” acknowledged CBC publisher John have to do, but they had to work especially hard Several federal elections ago, early in the Cruickshank in an open letter to the Conservative at it during the height of the Chrétien years when Chrétien reign, I got a call from a newly appointed Party. the Liberals were so dominant that the National opposition critic who wanted to meet for an

It was an unprecedented admission of guilt, Post publicly fashioned itself into the official informal lunch to chat about matters related to obviously deemed necessary to appease the people Opposition. his portfolio. who control the CBC’s purse strings and who have For their part, Gallery members fed stories, or I knew something about the issues he had no love for the public broadcaster. But it would portions of stories to Reform/Alliance MPs to spice been made responsible for but as we chatted, it have had Conservative political veterans high- up the final goods with some opposition voices. became clear that he didn’t have a clue. He wanted fiving down the corridors of power. A story without contrary opinion is not much of to know what I thought were the most pertinent

Ottawa’s journo-political axis is no stranger a story. issues in the portfolio. I expressed opinions as he to hypocrisy and phony outrage. So it wasn’t How many Hill reporters have phoned made notes. especially surprising when Erickson kicked up opposition critics and offered: “I have a story But think of this headline: “Outraged Liberals great quantities of both in January. running tomorrow about (fill in the blank). I was accuse biased Hill reporter of colluding with the

After much speculation about when the CBC would address the issue, the corporation’s publisher, John Cruickshank, offered up this explanation in an open letter to the Conservative Party: “Following an

investigation by senior management of CBC News, we have determined that our reporter Krista Erickson did, in fact, provide questions to a member of Parliament in the lead-up to the ethics committee meeting in December.”


Opposition.” In my case, it would have been an almost impossible charge to defend even though I have no political bias and was interested in nothing more than cultivating a future source who might one day find himself in cabinet. He didn’t.

Retired Press Gallery members who managed to emerge from their careers without leaving too many brain cells in the Press Club bar will remember 40 years or more ago when the relationships between Hill politicians and Gallery members were

How many Hill reporters have phoned

opposition critics and offered: “I have

a story running tomorrow about

(fill in the blank). I was wondering

whether you’d like to comment.”

incestuous to a degree that would be unthinkable today. The media and political class drank together, philandered together and some Hill reporters even acted as unofficial communications advisors to their political friends.

The issue of Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff Ian Brodie and CTV reporters, dealt with on page 10 of this edition by Simon Doyle, is a more subtle, modern example of the Hill’s journalist-political operative relationship. The Prime Minister’s Office controls all messages coming out of government and appears to believe that CTV gives those messages a more favourable airing than other media outlets.

The Brodie-CTV case is more complicated than the Erickson episode but oddly, Brodie had been painted as some kind of victim – a highly-placed source who was exposed by reporters he trusted as opposed to a political operative doing a bit of media manipulation. When uncommonly tight-lipped people in high places start chatting to reporters they are being deliberate and have a motive.

The truth is that Hill reporters have always been susceptible to overly chummy relationships with the people they cover and many have been unable to resist getting sucked too deeply into the power game. It isn’t an excuse, but history shows it is a reality.

Chris Cobb is an author, senior reporter with the Ottawa Citizen and member of Media’s editorial board. l

Continued from Pg.6 Trouble at The New York Times

the current ratio, which measures the capacity of a company to pay its immediate bills if it runs into trouble. In general, analysts like to see a 2:1 ratio, or twice as many current assets as current liabilities. In 2007, the New York Times Company had $664.4 million in current assets and $975.7 million in current liabilities, or a current ratio of 68 cents in current assets for every $1 in liabilities. Not only is that a terrible current ratio, previous statements show it has been getting worse for years.

Cash Flow Statement: This is the strongest narrative of the financial

statements; it tells you exactly where cash came from and where it was spent by removing non-cash distortions such as amortization. Companies will often try to manipulate the income statement and balance sheet by doing things like stockpiling inventory to beef up current assets, or hiking revenues by including uncertain sales. It is more difficult to manipulate the cash flow statement.

The cash flow statement has three sections: operating activities, investment activities and financing activities. Operating refers to core operations of the business, such as publishing newspapers and websites in the case of the New York Times. The investment section shows how much was spent on capital items used to support the core business, such as land, buildings, new equipment or patents, or whether parts of the company were sold. The financing section shows how much cash the company borrowed and how much debt it paid off.

If a company has a negative operating cash flow and a big financing cash flow, that shows it survived the year on borrowed funds. If the cash flow statement shows very little spent on investing activities for several years, it may mean the company isn’t planning for growth.

Cash generated by operating activities is often the truest measure of general trends.

The New York Times generated $111 million in 2007 through its core operations, according to the cash flow statement. The year before, it generated almost four times that much from operations: $422 million. The year before that, it generated $299 million. By any measure, cash flows from operations are going down.

So, the financial narrative for the New York Times in 2007 was grim. Revenues and net income were down, profit ratios were down and the current ratio was dangerously low by most standards. Add in that cash flow from operations dropped dramatically, and it is no wonder shareholders are worried. Kelly Toughill is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and a former writer and editor at Toronto Star. l


March 6 was a big day for the national media. CTVglobemedia’s flagship national newspaper, The Globe and

Mail, ran a front-page news story about goings-on in its flagship national television network, CTV. And it wasn’t a good-news story. It was about a leak— a curious conversation between Ian Brodie, the Prime Minister’s then-chief of staff, and a few reporters from CTV’s Ottawa bureau.

As they so rarely do, the news media had

reported on themselves, and duly. The story behind the so-called “NAFTAgate” leak is loaded with the kind of intrigue reporters don’t much talk about publicly, such as the sometimes cozy yet often insulated relationships between reporters and politicians, government leaks, and reporters reporting on reporters.

The Globe story followed similar reports by the Canadian Press and CBC. The media outlets were tipped off about Brodie’s conversation with CTV accidentally and in an unusual way: through a journalism class.

Speaking at Carleton University’s master of journalism program on March 3, CTV Hill reporter David Akin recounted how Brodie approached himself and CTV Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife at the budget lockup in Ottawa on Feb. 26. Brodie began making small talk, as he often does. Only this time he mentioned that Hillary Clinton had told Canadian officials that her rhetoric about re-negotiating NAFTA was not a serious policy position. To CTV, this must have seemed like a

pretty good story. It was passed on to White House correspondent Tom Clark, who broke it (but with a focus on Barak Obama) the following day.

This became what we now know as the “NAFTAgate” story. In fact, the day the Globe splashed the Brodie conversation on its front page, there was a rumour around Parliament Hill that Akin had been reassigned. I recall sitting in the press gallery of the House of Commons that day, getting ready to watch Question Period, as CTV’s Mike Duffy walked in. He looked down the row of seats to his CTV colleague, Graham Richardson,

Speaking at Carleton University’s master of journalism program on March 3, former CTV Parliamentary correspondent David Akin recounted how Ian Brodie approached himself and CTV Ottawa bureau chief Robert

Fife at the budget lockup in Ottawa.

Feature By SiMon Doyle

On the outs with CTV A former Parliamentary correspondent for the network found himself in deep trouble after being too frank with journalism students

and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “What a day.”

Akin’s remark before the journalism class must have perked some ears, not least of all one of the class’s instructors, Canadian Press investigative reporter Jim Bronskill (the other instructor, CBC investigative reporter David McKie, was away). Both CP and the CBC began working on the story about Brodie, each of which heard about Akin’s remarks independently. Confirming the story with CTV sources, the CBC later reported that, “A CTV reporter told CBC news on Wednesday that Brodie was, in fact, the source behind the network’s report.” (ABC had reported earlier, on Feb. 29, that the leaker was Brodie, citing a source close to the PMO.)

CTV had become part of the NAFTAgate story, and with that in mind, our newsroom watched Mike Duffy Live attentively that afternoon. There was something of an expectation that CTV might touch on the leak. The issue was ignored, however, and perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised.

There’s always a need for newsroom transparency in such situations, but reporting on your colleagues in Ottawa isn’t an easy job. Parliament Hill media don’t tend to report on one another, especially in a negative way, partly because there’s a bit of a camaraderie between Hill journalists. They’re a reasonably small group who see one another almost every day, comparing notes, sharing insights, analysis and information.

Reporting on journalistic standards and integrity—or a lack thereof— makes it a little more difficult to chum it up the following day.

Imagine one reporter calling up another and asking who was his source? That’s very delicate. And I’ve done it. The Hill Times, by exception, covers the national media. It was the only newspaper, by small example, to report that CTV planned to reassign Akin just before he left CTV to join Canwest News Service in March (a reassignment apparently related to his talk at Carleton). After a couple of years on the Hill, reporters still tend to get their guards up a little when I come walking.

We cover the national media partly because it’s in our readers’ interest, but there is also a public interest. A well-connected lobbyist told me recently that the most powerful people in this town are the members of the National Press Gallery, and if that’s true, the powerful have an obligation to be held accountable. That’s certainly a power held to some degree by the relatively new world of blogging.


Reporters kept on their toes are better reporters. The NAFTAgate affair, as it was sensationally

dubbed by the American media, was a big story because it involved allegations of Canadian interference in the U.S. democratic process. An equally big story, you could argue, was the role of the media. In his NAFTAgate report on Feb. 27, CTV’s White House correspondent, Tom Clark, cited “Canadian sources” as saying that the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had told Canadian officials not to take too seriously the rhetoric surrounding the renegotiation of NAFTA.

The CTV report sparked an outcry within the American media, which called into question the credibility of the candidates. Obama and Clinton fiercely denied the allegations, and the Canadian embassy in Washington issued a statement saying that no candidate had contacted the embassy to discuss NAFTA.

That was followed by another leak on March 2. This time it was to the Associated Press, which received an internal memo originating from the Canadian consulate in Chicago, and which corroborated the Obama portion of Clark’s story (to a degree).

On March 4, Obama lost the Ohio primary to Clinton by a wider-than- expected margin, and in a state where a top issue was job losses and the impact of Canada-U.S. trade.

It seemed to some that Obama’s loss was at the hands of political interference from the Canadian government. Observers noted the suspicious nature of the double-barreled leak. The second seemed designed to corroborate the first.

It’s not clear why the story was leaked to CTV. In fact some speculate that the motivation was to simply downplay Canadian concerns about renegotiating NAFTA. Still, leaks can be very damaging. There are many serious leaks that have never been reported on extensively.

Few have faith that the RCMP will ever get to the bottom of the defamatory leaks against Maher Arar, the innocent Syrian-Canadian who was the victim of torture and extraordinary rendition. (Please read Andrew Mitrovica’s story on page 12) Earlier this year, there was the leak of a confidential, ministerial letter to Linda Keen, former head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which effectively said her job was on the line. The leak sparked a political firebomb that arguably led to her removal.

Through leaks, the news media can be used to serve rather brutish political purposes, and very effectively. All the more reason to report on them. Governments have always played favourites with certain journalists and bureaus in Ottawa (with the latest example being the Conservative Party’s awkward attempt to brief a select group of journalists, the CTV included, on the contents of

a search warrant that allowed the RCMP to search party headquarters for e-mail correspondence and other documentation related to spending on advertising during the last federal election), and it’s no secret around Parliament Hill that the Conservative government tends to view the CTV bureau as an important ally. The bureau often receives scoops about government initiatives, strategy, or, in at least one damaging case, a Senate committee’s expenses on a trip to Dubai.

Nor is it any secret why. The Conservatives are seeking a majority government, as they should be. That means targeting specific swing voters with messages about the government’s plans, priorities, and initiatives, and, when necessary, negative stories about the opposition. How do they reach those swing voters who are leaning Conservative? Not through the CBC, the Toronto Star, or CPAC. Those are the wrong audiences. CTV, on the other hand, reaches a large audience that is important to the Conservative government, and it is smart to strategically target that market. But it also makes for one of those interesting relationships on the Hill that you may not read about anywhere but in Media magazine.

Simon Doyle is deputy editor of The Hill Times, Canada’s Ottawa-based independent news weekly that covers federal politics. l


Feature

In early March, this magazine’s editor, David McKie, told me he was in trouble.

David, as regular readers of Media know, is inhumanely busy. He juggles editing a magazine,

teaching, digging for investigative stories at CBC radio and a hectic family life. In an e-mail, David explained that he was planning a special issue that tackled the paltry scope of media criticism in Canada.

“Not surprisingly, I’m having trouble finding

By anDrew MiTrovica

Where’s the apology? Journalists whose stories contributed to Maher Arar’s misery have yet to be accountable

people,” he wrote. “Given your willingness in the past to take the gloves off and call the proverbial spade a spade, would you be willing to write something?”

I briefly wondered how many other writers David had approached before my number came up. In any event, true to my nature and to help an old friend and a respected colleague, I said yes.

I suppose David was having difficulty finding people because the nation’s media landscape is

decidedly parochial. “Taking the gloves off” and “calling a spade a spade” in the notoriously thin-skinned and insular world of Canadian journalism can be risky.

Indeed, writers who are inclined to point an accusatory finger at their brethren know they are inviting trouble and possible retribution. The payback can take many forms. Friendships can end. Writers are likely to be quietly barred from appearing in newspapers and on broadcast networks they offend. Invective will almost certainly be hurled your way.

“Taking the gloves

off” and “calling a

spade a spade” in

the notoriously thin-

skinned and insular

world of Canadian

journalism can be

risky.

I know this because that is what happened to me after I wrote a piece in Walrus magazine in late 2006 that dissected the role that a slew of reporters and editors played in smearing and compounding the suffering of Canadian torture survivor, Maher Arar.

Rather than recoiling from this predictable response, I welcomed it. I understood that the piece had satisfied one of the principal aims of investigative journalism: to prick the fragile sensibilities of the powerful.

From time to time, the Fourth Estate requires a blunt reminder that it is not immune from criticism from within the fraternity. This is particularly true because we routinely congratulate ourselves at awards banquets, journalism conferences and occasionally in newsrooms that journalists are

Through their stories precipitated by anonymous sources, some reporters falsely labelled Maher Arar a terrorist, a liar and a snitch. What the reporters didn’t do was offer any apologies for tarnishing his reputation.

MEDIA, SPRNG/SUMMER 2008 PAGE 12 PHOTO CREDIT: CP/Jonathan Hayward

in the noble business of monitoring power, and of demanding transparency and accountability from powerful individuals and public and private institutions.

Yet, as David understands, most Canadian writers — with the notable exception of the courageous Linda McQuaig and a coterie of perceptive bloggers — are unwilling to challenge, question or criticize the nation’s media establishment.

So, having agreed to take the plunge again, the question David and I had to agree on was: What would be the focus of the piece?

David suggested examining the case of a CBC parliamentary reporter who had been disciplined for apparently passing on questions to a Liberal committee member probing the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. David was adamant. He implored me to examine “the appalling lack of discussion” in media quarters about the controversy. I considered the idea, but ultimately rejected it.

I told David that there was still unfinished business to deal with concerning the media’s sordid involvement in the injustices visited upon Arar. He agreed.

I pointed out to David that in the aftermath of my Walrus piece (“Hear No Evil, Write No Lies” won the 2007 CAJ award in the magazine category.) I had challenged the reporters and editors I named to participate in forums organized by a journalism group devoted to promoting free expression at Osgoode Hall Law School to publicly discuss the piece.

I had hoped to trigger an honest exchange with these reporters and editors about the issues my story explored: responsibility, the pursuit of verification, personal conscience. I was willing, able and prepared to debate my criticism of their work — face to face.

Regrettably, they declined the offer. They were content, it seems, to have their surrogates -- friends and lawyers -- defend their work and respond to my challenge that they not only apologize to Arar and his family for falsely labelling him a terrorist, a liar and a snitch, but that they reveal the still-anonymous scoundrels who participated in a sinister campaign to destroy Arar.

I argued in both forums that I suspected that the reporters and editors were anxious for this dishonourable episode in Canadian journalism and their undeniable roles in it, to be quickly forgotten, to be swept away by indifference and inattention. I was determined, I said, to blunt the inevitable admonition that ‘it was time to move on.’

Their silence was instructive for a number of important reasons. It appeared evident to me that the journalists and editors I singled out — many of them based in Ottawa -- were adept at mimicking the tactics for avoiding accountability routinely employed by the politicians they cover.

That self-serving strategy, I suggested, was to weather the mild storm stirred by a reporter by ignoring the story. My piece could be consigned

to the one-day-wonder dust-bin. The other tactic, alluded to earlier, was to shoot the messenger. I was stamped a “smearer,” “grandstander,” and even a threat to Canada by allies of the reporters I named.

I think that to their chagrin the tactics didn’t work. The piece gathered momentum and to use another popular phrase in our profession, traction.

I appeared on a variety of public affairs programs on CBC Radio and television and TVO where I reiterated my call that these journalists promptly apologize and reveal the identities of powerful state officials who orchestrated the smear campaign. It is important to note that these public

It appeared evident

to me that the

journalists and editors

I signalled out—many

of them based in

Ottawa—were adept

at mimicking the

tactics for avoiding

accountability

routinely employed

by the politicians they

cover.

institutions — CBC and TVO — played no role in discrediting Arar.

Nevertheless, a few other writers and academics were prompted to raise their voice.

The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui wrote that “it was time for the media to come clean.” The former PEN Canada head decried one reporter’s “hatchet job…[that was] part of an organized smear campaign by officials to first, keep Arar in Syria and, when that failed, to ward off an inquiry.” Siddiqui’s colleague at The Star, Antonia Zerbisias, asked in a column “weren’t [the media] willing conduits of the leaks that made Arar out as a terrorist who deserved what he got?”

But it wasn’t a journalist who offered the most searing criticism of some of the Canadian media’s

conduct, but an academic. In a letter published in Walrus, Professor

Reg Whitaker, policy review advisory panel member for the Arar inquiry, condemned the “discreditable role of certain reporters and news organizations….in acting as willing tools of those elements within the RCMP who attempted to cover-up their bad behaviour by smearing Maher Arar’s reputation.”

Whitaker went on. “Particularly odious are the self-congratulatory accolades much of the media has accorded Juliet O’Neill of the Ottawa Citizen as a martyred heroine of the ‘free press,’” he wrote. “But Ms. O’Neill is no heroine…and she’s never shown any glimmer of recognition of the hurt her actions caused an innocent man. Instead, she invoked her ‘duty’ to protect her sources, winning unjustifiable praise for her ‘courage.’”

It was a powerful letter. But like my piece, it had little impact on the reporters and editors Siddiqui, Zerbisias and I had previously challenged. They remained unmoved and unrepentant.

I have often asked myself why these reporters and editors have not done the decent thing and publicly apologized to Arar.

At first, I reasoned that to issue an apology might be considered legally unwise. That obstacle evaporated when Arar made it clear that he wasn’t interested in suing any Canadian journalist.

Others have argued that the reporters and editors I named may have been sloppy, made errors, or were simply having a “bad day.” Thus, there was no need to apologize. I believe journalists who share these evasions probably find comfort in their ethical blindness.

To make that point I quizzed an audience made up of journalism students, teachers, and concerned citizens that had gathered to listen to a debate about the Walrus story. I asked the large group four questions.

What would happen to reporters who committed plagiarism? Most agreed that reporters would likely be fired. What would happen to reporters who were found to have repeatedly fudged expenses? Again, the consensus was that they would be fired. What would happen to reporters who repeatedly arrived to work late? Fired. So, plagiarism, fraud and lateness, the audience agreed, are firing offences.

Finally, I asked: What has happened to the Canadian reporters and editors who repeatedly labelled an innocent man a terrorist, a liar and a snitch? The answer: no one was fired, reprimanded, or disciplined and apparently there still is no need to apologize.

That is unpardonable.

Andrew Mitrovica teaches in the Internationally Trained Writers Program at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. He is a contributing editor at Walrus magazine and a seven-time winner of the CAJ award for investigative reporting. l


investigative journalism in Canada

Feature By cecil roSner

Thirty years of the CAJ The evolution of the CAJ is critical to the development of

Exactly 30 years ago, a brief encounter between two investigative reporters was the spark that led to the

establishment of Canada’s most important organization of journalists. The place was a CBC studio in Toronto, and the occasion was a routine interview with an author on a book tour. Henry Aubin had adapted a series of articles he wrote for the Montreal Gazette into a book called City for Sale, a groundbreaking examination of land ownership in Montreal. As he walked into the studio, he met CBC journalist Jock Ferguson. The men realized they had a few things in common. Both were doing provocative journalism that was calling powerful institutions to account and challenging the status quo. And they were both encountering resistance from their respective managements. The enthusiasm to rock the boat and push the boundaries of conventional journalism was not always eagerly shared by private owners and public sector managers. Ferguson, in fact, soon found himself fired after pushing too aggressively on a civic corruption story, even though his report turned out to be right. The two men decided a new organization of like-minded practitioners was needed, and they resolved to build it.

Aubin and Ferguson began contacting other journalists, and by June 1978 a group of 20 reporters got together and published a brochure proposing that a new organization called the Centre for Investigative Journalism be created. “The Centre would try to end the isolation between investigative reporters across the country,” said the brochure. “The Centre would provide expert legal advice to journalists or their employers. As it stands now, many employers have inadequate understanding of the application of libel law and the Official Secrets Act.” Canadians were following the lead of their U.S. counterparts, who had successfully formed Investigative Reporters and Editors in 1975. Further planning through 1978 led to the new organization’s founding conference in Montreal early in 1979. The Centre for Investigative Journalism was born, and a little

Rosner’s new book Behind the Headlines tracks the evolution of investigative journalism in Canada and the origins of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

more than a decade later it renamed itself the Canadian Association of Journalists.

The 1970s witnessed an explosion of investigative journalism in Canada and many other parts of the world. To attribute this process solely to Watergate would be to miss the unique convergence of social and political forces in the 1960s that began to embolden journalists

and encourage a more receptive public. The world was in motion, resistance to American intervention in Vietnam was growing, and there was an upsurge in the youth and student movement. U.S. administrations could no longer command widespread trust, and a credibility gap emerged. Independent journalists like I.F. Stone challenged conventional wisdoms, and alternative


newspapers and magazines began applying investigative techniques to their journalism. Still, the mainstream media were slow to follow. When Seymour Hersh uncovered evidence of deliberate atrocities in Vietnam, he couldn’t convince any large American magazine or broadcaster to touch the story. Hersh eventually used a small and obscure news agency to distribute his report about My Lai.

With incidents like My Lai and the revelation of the Pentagon Papers exposing U.S. policy in Vietnam, mainstream media outlets could no longer ignore investigative stories that challenged the status quo. Suddenly investigative work became a marketable commodity, just as it had been during the turn-of-the-century era of American muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. Newspapers and broadcast outlets rushed to form teams to do investigative work, and this process only accelerated with the Watergate revelations. In Canada, there were indications that investigative journalism was becoming part of the permanent mainstream landscape. The Globe and Mail was breaking stories ranging from municipal corruption to systemic abuse by Toronto police.

Still, any

commodity

is subject

to the pressures

of the marketplace,

and investigative

journalism

was no

exception.

The CBC probed deeply into organized crime with its Connections series. And a host of reporters uncovered widespread dirty tricks by the RCMP, eventually leading to a royal commission and the disbandment of the force’s security service.

Still, any commodity is subject to the pressures of the marketplace, and investigative journalism was no exception. The expansion of the genre saw many people practising it without proper training or procedures, leading to some spectacular mistakes and catastrophic lawsuits. By the beginning of the 1980s, increased consolidation

and monopolization of the Canadian media meant fewer outlets and editorial voices. High interest rates and economic pressures during the same era led to rationalization and layoffs, and private media owners began looking at other forms of stories. News managers often see investigative work as time consuming and unproductive, and potentially dangerous given the legal implications. By 1982 the CIJ Bulletin was reporting that “Investigative journalism on the country’s dailies, always in fragile health, is wheezing worse than ever as the strangle is put to editorial budgets.” Multi-million dollar defamation lawsuits have only made some media outlets even more hesitant.

Since then, investigative journalism has waxed and waned. One year a newspaper or station will form a team and trumpet its muckraking, only to shut the process down a year or two later. The general trend, though, is towards far less scrutiny than in the past. Thirty years ago every Canadian city had a number of reporters scrutinizing every city hall and legislature across the country, watching, recording and paying attention. Some of those same places go largely unnoticed by the media today. But these are the realities of media enterprises that see circulation and audience growth, and the bottom line, as the key drivers of decision-making surrounding content.

What Aubin and Ferguson realized 30 years ago is that the interests of the journalists who are passionate about holding powerful forces to account are not always congruent with the interests of the institutions where they happen to work. That is why they recognized the need to establish an independent organization of journalists that crossed institutional lines, one that would support and enhance the genre of investigative journalism without having to worry about profits or audience growth. After all, there is an inherent contradiction in supporting a form of journalism that challenges the powerful and tilts against the status quo when a media institution is both powerful and a pillar of that same status quo. Sometimes, when the commodity is hot and investigative work is in vogue, that contradiction can be overlooked. But it tends to resurface at critical moments, as many investigative journalists who have come into conflict with their own institutions have realized over the years.

There remains a strong contingent of talented investigative journalists in Canada, working for organizations large and small, who are dedicated to looking for the truth and holding power to account. The need to exchange experiences, provide mutual support, and stand firm in the face of every kind of pressure is as strong today as it was 30 years ago.

Cecil Rosner is Managing Editor of CBC English Radio & Television in Manitoba, and the author of a new book on the history of investigative journalism called Behind the Headlines: A History of Investigative Journalism in Canada. l



Wider, deeper, faster Canwest News Service draws on the skills of more than 1200 journalists across Canada and around the world to bring audiences the most comprehensive news package in the country.

Canwest News Service is Canada’s leading news organization committed to quality journalism delivered when and where today’s readers want it.

Contact us at 613.369.4848 or [email protected]

FeatureBy caTherine Murray

Lost in Translation? There must be a better way to bridge the gap between the ethnic and mainstream media

The last census revealed growing numbers of immigrants and visible minorities in many major cities. Many are arriving with

education, skills and capital to build their new life in Canada. More media ventures are starting up

or aboriginal languages, or targeting specific ethnocultural groups.

The findings were surprising. The sector was much larger than supposed with 144 ethnic print, radio and TV outlets—almost four times as many as

in new languages to serve those arriving: Farsi, Korean in addition to Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi already widely available in cities like Vancouver. What do we know about this wave of new talent, and how is it changing the landscape of Canadian journalism? The Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities at Simon Fraser University set out to learn about the BC media produced in other than English, French

conventional directories identify—and employing an estimated 1100 journalists or freelancers. As many as one-third of the print sources in the unregulated media sector were started after the year 2000, often reflecting the aspirations of a new business class of immigrants. Turnover is high, with 20 outlets going under and nine starting up during the study period that produced the report, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Media in BC.

Korean and Farsi media are the fastest-growing. SFU then conducted a content analysis of 20

ethnic media outlets, and compared them to seven of their counterparts in the mainstream media, generating a database of more than1500 stories.

Not surprisingly, since the dominant assumption in the industry has been that ethnic media are “niche” or “complementary” players, the study during the sample period of May of 2007 showed the ethnic media did what the Vancouver Sun and Province did not: they had significantly higher coverage of international news from the respective country of origin. The surprise was the more nuanced and intensive focus on local news, concentrating on issues of direct relevance to recent immigrants such as social policy and programs, health, education, cultural events, religion and employment news. This is the news new Canadians can use—and ethnic media do a better job at providing it than the main local papers such as the Vancouver Sun, for example. Unlike mainstream media, ethnic media provided very little national or provincial coverage (certainly less than 10% of the space ) on their front pages or at the top of the TV newscasts.

Assuming a new citizen reads or watches news in both the mainstream and ethnic media, then, she or he will receive a balanced news diet. But such assumptions are false: a recent study of 3000 new Canadians in MTV (the major metropolises), by Kaan Yigit of the Toronto-based Solutions Research

Group, found that half of Chinese respondents do not follow any news beyond their language of origin. These immigrants are caught between here and there—existing in what some academics call a “translocal” orientation with little insight provided about the larger adopted country. Surprisingly, the oldest and largest Asian-language media outlets originating in BC carried very little about Canada’s war effort in Afghanistan, a major story in the

There is some very good journalism in the ethnic media, but awareness and recognition of quality ethnic journalism is low.


English-language media in the sample period, and a ballot issue in talk of impending election threats at the time. When queried, journalists confirmed many ethnic media accept there is a “special” (informal) news practice featuring more Canadian national or provincial coverage in place during election time—but this was beyond the scope of the current study. Even more interestingly, some outlets like the new Vancouver M-Channel, tried simultaneous translation of debates in the provincial election, an essential service to immigrants who do not speak English.

Significantly, different news practices were found. Ethnic media in general, but especially print media, are much less likely to put staff copy at the front of the news line-up. Twenty percent of items—especially in Korean and Punjabi media— have no by-line, suggesting reliance on Internet sources and different copyright awareness. In print or on air, news items tend to be shorter. Headlines are just as sensational. Yet Chinese and Korean media appear less value-laden, editorial or personalized in their writing style than the Punjabi media.

Other potentially disturbing signs may be found in sharply different news agendas across language groups. Diversity is good—but too much of it challenges the capacity of any citizen to form a coherent world view of life in Canada. Even more important, local news about other ethnic groups was rare, suggesting a tendency to in-group orientation. For example, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese media paid little attention to the Air India inquiry in May of 2007, despite important revelations that dominated English media coverage. By contrast, news about a Korean American youth killing students at a U.S. campus was muted in other languages.

Community leaders, journalists and analysts interviewed by the Simon Fraser University team in all linguistic communities expressed concern about the training and credentials of journalists in ‘other’ language groups—but especially among young aspiring journalists, and the new wave who had arrived since 2000. The problem for a new journalist on entry is difficult. The TV channel M (whose purchase by Rogers is pending CRTC approval) and Shaw’s Multicultural Channel are pioneering acceptance of foreign credentials and offer on-the-job training in their news studios, working at cultural remediation. But breaking into the mainstream media is hard. Canadian credentials are expected. Yet a look around the J-schools in the Lower Mainland reveals they are still predominantly white.

There is some very good journalism in the ethnic media, but awareness and recognition of quality ethnic journalism is low. The Jack Webster Foundation in B.C. offers awards only for stories in the Chinese media, overlooking some of the fastest-growing cultural groups. To the best of our knowledge, no award or other incentive for investigative reporting among third-language

groups is available in Canada, suggesting a new intercultural mandate should be forged for the Michener Foundation Award series and others for 2010. Experiments of the type begun in Europe by Mediam’Rad, which held a simulated intercultural editorial meeting to explore the way different cultural perceptions may influence news values and news selection and identify ways to change. The Council of Europe has made 2008 the year to encourage a number of such roundtables across European cities.

The SFU study found that the mainstream-ethnic gulf is still wide: the verdict from many participants interviewed was that under-representation and misrepresentation of Canada’s multicultural reality in the mainstream English news media are as serious today as in the past. Mainstream media are diversifying in the board

The under-

representation and

misrepresentation

of Canada’s

multicultural

reality in the

mainstream

English press

are as serious

today as

in the past.

offices or at the news desk at a glacial pace. The degree of their oligopoly power is significant. By contrast, the ethnic media sector (except for TV) is widely held, quite competitive, and like the community news sector in Canada, the last bastion of a competitive news culture. However, many new ethnic print or magazine ventures are still financially precarious. They may be vulnerable to selling out, or establishing partnerships to swap editorial content. Co-ventures of the type between Canadian Express, a new B.C. Korean paper, and CanWest are hopeful, as they promise to repackage and translate relevant English news for B.C.’s Korean Community. However, they also represent a hidden face of editorial concentration, without questioning how news is produced (or why, for

example, CanWest has only one correspondent in Asia who does limited travel) or what can be done to improve news quality in both languages.

J-schools have been slow in diversifying training for new immigrants to break into the business, and journalists have been slow to identify the need to develop a news code on intercultural reporting (for news directors’ associations, for example).

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Media in BC represents one initiative to begin to build a culture of media criticism in Canada. University researchers, Civil Society Organizations, and journalist organizations such as the Canadian Association of Journalists must push for an independent media analysis capacity, much like that established by the Pew Trust and issue report cards on the media. In this country, the Bell-sponsored Canadian Media Research Consortium attempts to do this, but its efforts need to be more concentrated. Timely, regular research should feed into debates among professionals about their standards and about what represents quality coverage, and garner recognition for the professional rigour and intercultural responsiveness of their work.

Canada needs Mediam’Rad-style roundtables to compare different news values, and orientations to democratic news culture. J-schools must revise their curricula, and reach out to other policy, political science and communication schools to build a longer-term research program.

A healthy news culture requires strong professional credentials, a vigilant competition policy (preventing the swallowing up of diverse ethnic media and addressing intergenerational inequity in media chances afforded different ethnocultural groups) and an active self-regulatory system which is both more open and transparent, and more responsive to changing public needs. While mainstream (and mostly white) policy focus has been on the need for a code of journalistic independence to protect against growing oligopoly power, much more discussion is needed.

What defines irrelevant racialization of news coverage? What is systemic under-representation and why does it occur? Without multicultural dialogues to understand the impact immigration is having on intercultural reporting in Canada’s news culture, most journalism today is lost in translation.

Catherine Murray is a Professor at SFU’s Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities and co-author of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Media in BC. She is indebted to the Department of Canadian Heritage for the funds to collate the database and to co-investigators Sherry Yu and Daniel Ahadi. Special thanks to Faiza Khan, BA Hon. SFU, for the title allusion. For more information see http://www.bcethnicmedia.ca. l


Writer’s toolBoxBy Don giBB

It’s time to put your writing on a diet Tight writing is not just about cutting words, it’s also about getting the most out of them

This is a column about dieting. How, with good mental exercise, you can learn to trim the fat from your writing.

Redundant words. Clichés. Bureaucratic jargon. Too many people saying the same thing or not much of anything. Bloated quotes often regurgitated from a digital voice recorder.

But like any diet, you have to be committed and accept the challenge.

Easy to say, harder to do. Hey, hanging around with a personal computer hasn’t done wonders for our writing. It devours words, gobbling up everything you give it with megabytes to spare.

Then, every once in a while, a memo makes the rounds of newsrooms suggesting it’s time to write tighter because of a shrinking newshole. Today’s slimmer broadsheets have prompted a renewed call for brevity. Tabloid and broadcast writers already know the limits of space or air time.

k k k

Try mental exercise #1. Tighten these:

1) with the possible exception of …2) due to the fact that …3) he totally lacked the ability to …4) until such time as …5) at this point in time …

k k k

Writers will convince themselves there’s no point in interviewing too many people because they can’t use them anyway. But the reason for interviewing many people is to understand the story—not to include everyone. And that presents another concern, writers tell me. If they have spent an hour with an interview subject, they feel obliged to give them at least a few paragraphs. This is a poor reason to include someone in your story. Just thank those you interview. Tell them they may or may not be part of your story, but the information they have provided has been crucial to your understanding of the story. You’ll feel less guilt and you’ll be able to sleep at night.

As William Blundell (The Art and Craft of Feature Writing) says:

“Too many stories are cluttered by the inclusion of too many people. The few doing or saying something interesting are buried by the many who are just beating their gums.”

Writers will convince themselves there’s no point adding colour because it will just get cut anyway. Leaving out an unnecessary fact or two or condensing what someone says into one sentence rather than two allows you to add colour. Colour should not be sacrificed for another droning comment. And remember that colour can be a single word or a few words.

Writers will convince themselves there’s no point including quotes because they’ll get cut anyway. Quotes add life to a story, but too often reporters over quote—one of the major drawbacks of using a voice recorder. Bloated quotes are as sinful as baggy sentences. There’s no need to set up a quote or use a quote that repeats what the previous sentence said.

Example:

Although the city did not declare a state of emergency, Mayor Smith said at a press conference yesterday that the city was “on high alert.” Smith said: “We are not declaring a state of emergency.”

Tight writing, however, should not be seen as an attempt to squeeze the life out of a story. It should be seen as a way to remove words, phrases, sentences and complete paragraphs that are not doing their job. They made a decision should be they decided. They began to shovel the snow should be they shovelled the snow. When you attack a series of sentences in a row that are bloated with excess language, you’ll feel the satisfaction of cutting the fat. Why force readers to hack their way through the undergrowth of wordy sentences?

So, ask yourself: Is every word working? Can any thought be expressed in fewer words?

k k k

Mental exercise #2. Tighten these:

6) He put the blame squarely on Harper’s shoulders.

7) The classroom is located on the second floor of the building.

8) The house was completely destroyed at 7 p.m. Monday night.

k k k

Every story should have a clear focus. Writers who fail to kick-start their stories find themselves

meandering and wandering aimlessly—often repeating themselves—until they run out of steam.

U.S. writing coach Don Murray describes the news writer as a territorial animal with a primitive instinct to use up as much newsprint as possible. But the stories that survive, he says, are usually short, precisely limited and clearly focused. “Most good stories say one thing. They tell not of a battle, but of a soldier.”

Knowing what the story is before you begin to write is the first step to tight writing.

These brief excerpts from two writers show that colour, detail and lively quotes need not be sacrificed for space. In the first piece, Julie Sullivan, writing for the Spokane-Review in Spokane, Washington, tells the story of a 17-year-old drug addict in about 325 compelling words.

She’ll make $100 a day getting into cars with strangers, but she can spend twice that much on cocaine. Her last meal was a box of macaroni and cheese, made with water, no butter, no milk.

“I like the high,” she says softly. “It keeps me from being depressed all the time.”

In this second piece, Thane Burnett, of the Toronto Sun, tells the story of the death of a man’s wife when a truck rams into their house. It, too, was told in little more than 300 words.

Fan Yan Wong laboured yesterday in the home where his wife died – working without food or rest because the effort meant he could delay telling his children the awful truth.

“They keep asking about their mother. They keep asking and all I can do is lie,” said Wong as he stood among the rubble of his North York townhouse destroyed by a runaway gravel truck less than 24 hours earlier.

Short, punchy, clear … and colourful. Neither writer sacrifices colour and both keep their quotes short and to the point of the story.

Ask yourself: What is my story about? Try to sum it up in a word, a few words or a sentence. Then, as you write, ask: Does this detail, quote, or fact advance the story I want to tell? And if it doesn’t, have the guts to delete it.


k k k

Mental exercise #3. Tighten these sentences:

9) MP Judy Jones toured the building this morning after being informed of the situation. After spending about two hours in the building, she said she couldn’t work in the building because of the fumes. (A story on federal government workers who say renovations to their building are causing health problems.)

10)If a woman senses she is in a dangerous situation, Jones said, the best thing for her to do is to get inside or if possible get to a phone and contact security.

k k k

Tight writing is a challenge. It can’t be achieved by simply eliminating a word here or there. And editors don’t do writers any favours by squeezing paragraphs together so that white space (or breathing space) is sacrificed for a densely-worded story.

OK, let’s shorten the sentence above: Tight writing can’t be achieved by eliminating

a few words. Editors shouldn’t sacrifice breathing space by squeezing paragraphs together to create densely-worded stories. (Forty-one words reduced to 23 words without losing the meaning.)

The goal is to remove secondary detail that doesn’t advance the story; to avoid repetition by removing an idea expressed in a previous sentence; and to streamline by combining two sentences into one.

But don’t ignore the little words that fill our stories and can be easily excised without affecting content. Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) call them the little qualifiers or leeches that suck the life out of stories: very, quite, extremely, possibly, somewhat, basically, totally.

And the word “that.” See how many times you can remove it from your own copy without affecting the meaning of any sentence. In fact make “that” your starting point.

Writers restricted by a word count or column inches should write without obsessing over length. Focusing on length during the writing process can be a distraction because writers will think too much about what to omit. Write it—then rewrite it. That’s not to say that a 400-word limit should come out as 1,000 words in the first go-around. But once writers have a first draft, it’s easier to see what to cut.

The more writers engage in this process, the sharper news judgment and writing become. As William Zinsser (On Writing Well) notes: “Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out that shouldn’t be there.”

Tight writing shouldn’t be seen as a death sentence to creative writing. It’s a chance to improve clarity and rhythm by eliminating jargon, clichés and padding that bog down a story and slow its pace.

It’s a diet worth trying for the sake of bettering your writing and for the sake of the busy reader who finds it all too easy to turn the page.

k k k

Possible answers to mental exercises above: 1) except 2) because 3) he couldn’t 4) until 5) now 6) He blamed Harper 7) The classroom is on the second floor. 8) The house was destroyed at 7 p.m. Monday (or

Monday night). 9) MP Judy Jones, who toured the building today,

she said she couldn’t work there because of the fumes.

10)A woman who senses danger, Jones said, should get inside or phone security.

Don Gibb teaches newspaper reporting at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. He apologizes for writing such a lengthy column on tight writing. Feel free to edit. He can be reached at [email protected]. l

TIPS ON TIGHT WRITINGPreparing the story: 12) Justify the need for everything in your story: Does the reader need to

know this? Does this advance the story? Why is this important?1) Organize first. This makes the difference between good short writing and lazy short writing. It’s also the main reason good short writing 12) Make quotes short and punchy. takes a long time. (USA Today writer.)

Rewriting:2) Shorter stories don’t mean fewer interviews. You need as many as

13) Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly it takes to understand the topic and explain it to readers, viewers or behind. Look for the clutter and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for listeners. Some of those you interview won’t make it into the story, but everything you can throw away.they might be essential in helping you understand the piece.

14) Ask the tough questions: Is every word working? Can any thought 3) Exercise harsh news judgment. Constantly ask yourself: Does this be expressed in fewer words? Is anything pompous or pretentious? advance the story? Am I sticking to the main theme. Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s

4) A story needs a clear focus. Cover a single issue well. beautiful?

5) Ask lots of follow-up questions related to the main theme. This will 15) Omit the little qualifiers: a bit, a little, sort of, kind of rather, pretty keep you on topic and help you understand the story.

much, in a sense, quite, very … and more.6) Do not move on in your interview questions until you fully understand

16) Most first drafts can be cut. They are heavy with words and phrases each topic. If you do this, your questions will be sharper and so will that don’t serve any function.your focus.

17) Reporters suffer form the “cramming impulse”—the compulsion to 7) Don’t get locked into using your voice recorder. Overuse of a recorder mash as much detail into the available space as possible. They spend a makes it more difficult to use good news judgment and to paraphrase. lot of time and skill and ego collecting stuff, and they want to squeeze If you use a recorder, simply go back to retrieve a good quote.it all in.

Writing the story: 18) Review a story you wrote a month ago. Rewrite it. 8) Watch for a sentence that repeats what the previous sentence said 19) Read short stories and features.

or says something readers don’t need to know or can figure out for20) Read your stories aloud. See how they sound. Rewrite when they feel

themselves. wordy or you stumble over clumsy sentences and paragraphs.

9) Never have two or more people saying the same thing, but be sure to get all sides into the story. Don Gibb turned to William Zinsser (On Writing Well), Strunk and White

10) Write without looking at your notes. Write quickly. The story is in your (The Elements of Style), and Don Fry (Coaching Writers) to supplement his head, not in your notes. Slow writing usually means adding stuff. own ideas.


Student Journalist Hong Kong Fellowship

Exploring Hong Kong – Asia’s world city

Hong Kong, Asia’s world city, is a Special Administrative Region

of the People’s Republic of China, run by Hong Kong people

under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. Hong Kong

is one of the most open, externally oriented economies in the

world. It is also considered the springboard to the growing

China market.

Hong Kong has been rated the world’s freest economy by the

Heritage Foundation, and Fraser Institute.

What makes Hong Kong tick as a great world city are: its

unrivalled location; its liberal investment regime; its low tax

regime; its transparent common law legal system and rule of

law; its world class infrastructure; its free flow of information;

its entrepreneurial spirit; and a truly international lifestyle.

Student journalists, who are interested in seeing Hong Kong

to gain first-hand knowledge, are invited to apply for the

“Student Journalist Hong Kong Fellowship”, organized

by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (Canada) in

association with the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ).

Two student journalists will be selected by CAJ each year.

Each will be awarded a package including a five-day official

visit program with an economy class air ticket and hotel

accommodation. When in Hong Kong, the winners will have

Application Deadline: September 15, 2008

stories about Hong Kong within six months upon completion

of the trip in the local media or in their university/school

publications. They will have complete editorial freedom.

The award is open to any journalism student who is currently

in a recognized university or college level journalism program.

Applicants must be a paid-in-full member in good standing

of the CAJ. Non-members may take out membership upon

making an application. For application procedures, please

visit the CAJ website at www.caj.ca

Selection of the successful candidates will be made and

announced in early-October. The visit program must be

completed before the end of March 2009.

Application must reach:

The Canadian Association of Journalists

Algonquin College

1385 Woodroffe Avenue, B-224

Ottawa ON K2G 1V8

By Monday, September 15, 2008

For enquiries, please contact

Mr Stephen Siu, Assistant Director (Public Relations) of the

Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office at (416) 924-7374 or

email: [email protected] or the opportunity to visit various points of interest, and meet

with people of diverse views and backgrounds. The winning

student journalists must publish or broadcast at least three

John Dickins, Executive Director, CAJ at (613) 526-8061 or

email: [email protected]

For the recordBy aMir aTTaran

War’s first casuality When think tanks produce propaganda, at the very least, credible

public intellectuals should disclose the source of their funding

The war in Afghanistan is one of ideas and ideologies. Ideologies, in that the Pashtun extremist worldview is far from our own.

Ideas, in that our society is likely to prevail only if it makes wiser and cleverer decisions than theirs. That is why, when one adds up Canada’s advantages in this war, there is none greater than our values of inquiry and debate.

But recently, a new threat has emerged. The Department of National Defence is intruding on academic financing, spending millions of dollars sponsoring think tanks and scholars to offer up agreeable commentary.When these intellectuals comment, they are not always quick to disclose that the military funds them.

Take the Conference of Defence Associations, a think tank that got $500,000 from DND last year. That money comes not with strings, but with an entire leash. A current DND policy reads that to receive money, CDA must “support activities that give evidence of contributing to Canada’s national policies.” Apparently, if CDA’s activities were neutral and unbiased, or even-handedly supported and questioned government policy, DND would refuse to pay!

CDA gets away with shilling because it is so discreet. Nowhere on its website does CDA disclose its half-million dollars of DND sponsorship.

The Harper government knows what the money is for, because cabinet reviewed the funding agreement between DND and CDA, and it has been secret ever since. Nonetheless, Maclean’s got CDA’s executive director, Colonel Alain Pellerin, to admit that the contract obliges it “to write a number of op-eds to the press”—propaganda paid for by you and me.

More disturbing still is the manner in which DND spends money to elicit friendly comment by Canadian scholars.

Most people would find it strange that DND sponsors the salaries, research, travel and tuition of dozens of professors, post doctoral fellows and graduate students. But DND’s Security and Defence Forum does exactly this. The list of Canadian universities receiving more than half a million dollars of SDF money is extensive: York University ($580,000),UQAM ($630,000), Wilfrid Laurier University ($630,000), Université Laval ($655,000), McGill ($680,000), UBC ($680,000), University of Manitoba($680,000), UNB ($680,000), Carleton University ($780,000), Dalhousie University ($780,000), University of Calgary ($780,000) and Queen’s University ($1,480,000).

An Afghan boy who was wounded in an explosion recovers in a hospital in Herat, Afghanistan,

Sunday, June 29, 2008. An old land mine exploded in Herat killing one child and injuring four others

police said.

What’s the money for? It’s not for the technical work that militaries obviously require—building better airplanes, for example. Instead, it sponsors policy scholars, who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians’ perception of the military and the war. And the evidence suggests that the military and government have politicized some SDF grants. The same bureaucrat who administers SDF grants to scholars also manages DND’s liaison with cabinet and Parliament.

When DND needs a kind word in Parliament or the media—presto!—an SDF-sponsored scholar often appears, without disclosing his or her financial link.

There is one Canadian professor who received an $825,000 SDF grant.

For that money, DND expects the professor to “conduct outreach activities with the Canadian public . . . and Parliament about security and defence

issues.” And reach out he does—eloquently, but not always disclosing that he is funded by DND. He made no disclosure when he testified to Parliament that the government’s Afghanistan policy “is the right mission for Canada and the right mission for the Afghan people.” He also made no disclosure in a published op-ed where he praised former Conservative defence minister Gordon O’Connor as “an outstanding success,” and assailed “years of Liberal [party] neglect of . . .defence policy and the Canadian Forces.” I don’t ever want this professor to stop saying and writing what he believes. But I do want Canadians who encounter his interventions to know how he has been funded.

That is why, at the very least, credible public intellectuals owe disclosure to their public.

But the government, too, should know better. Rather than have DND dole out cash to public

The Department of National Defence is

intruding on academic financing, spending millions of dollars

sponsoring think tanks and scholars to offer up agreeable commentary.

intellectuals—and risk tainting their scholarship and their conferences—it should give the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council that money to award grants on an arm’s-length basis. This is how other public intellectuals in Canada get funded.

Parliament, the Auditor-General and journalists need a watching brief on this file. As the war in Afghanistan becomes bigger and longer, it will prove dangerous to let DND sponsor intellectuals.

Canada needs fresh ideas—not groupthink— to win.

Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa, is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council—and not by DND. This is an edited version of a piece that originally ran in The Globe and Mail on February 21. l

PHOTO CREDIT: AP/Fraidoon Pooyaa MEDIA, SPRNG/SUMMER 2008 PAGE 23

Which is more important — fighting crime or writing about it?

Judging from the overwrought reaction of Canada’s largest association of journalists, you’d think freedom of the press should always come first, even trumping the legal tools that police need to find out whodunit.

The Canadian Association of Journalists, representing 1,500 members, says it is dismayed by an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling, released on Feb. 29, that ordered the National Post to turn over leaked secret documents to police investigating former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s role in the so-called Shawinigate affair.

CAJ president Mary Agnes Welch said: “Police are on a witch hunt to root out a whistle-blower who exposed important and embarrassing information. … If that isn’t an attempt to subvert the relationship between journalists and confidential sources, I don’t know what is.”

The CAJ believes that journalists should have the unfettered right “to protect the identity of their confidential sources, period.”

I disagree. A closer look at the facts of this case show that the judges got the balance between press freedom and crime detection just about right.

They overturned a lower court ruling that quashed an RCMP search warrant for documents that Post reporter Andrew McIntosh received from an anonymous source. According to the documents, a hotel in Mr. Chrétien’s riding, L’Auberge Grand-Mère, had an outstanding debt of $23,040 to “JAC Consultants” during the time Mr. Chrétien admitted lobbying the Business Development Bank of Canada to approve a loan to the inn. “JAC Consultants” is a Chrétien family holding company.

If genuine, the document proved that Mr. Chrétien had a conflict of interest. But both Mr. Chrétien and the bank claimed the document was a forgery. The RCMP asked for a warrant so it could determine whether it was. Their way was blocked when Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto of the Ontario Superior Court ruled in 2004 that the request violated press freedom guarantees in the Charter of Rights.

A key fact accepted by both Judge Benotto and the appeals court panel was that police had reasonable and probable grounds to suspect the document was a forgery. It was also no trivial


legal opinion part one By John Miller

Keeping restraints on the messenger The Ontario Court of Appeal was right: Press freedom is not absolute

If genuine, the document proved that Mr. Chrétien had a conflict of interest.

crime. As Mr. Justice John Laskin wrote in the 3-0 opinion overturning Judge Benotto: “This is an especially grave and heinous crime. Assuming the document was forged, either the forger or some other person sent it to the National Post to create controversy and undermine the authority of a sitting prime minister of Canada.”

It follows then, Judge Laskin wrote, that “as a starting point, press organizations and journalists, like everyone else, owe a duty to give relevant evidence in a case before the courts.”

What the CAJ and some other critics of the appeals court ruling fail to recognize is that Judge Laskin did, in fact, write a strong statement acknowledging the importance of reporters being able to protect their sources, even though there is

A closer look at the facts

of this case show that the

judges got the balance between

press freedom and crime detection

just about right.

PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Bregg

currently no law allowing them to do so. “If the journalist-informant relationship

is undermined,” Judge Laskin said, “society as a whole is affected. It is through confidential sources that matters of great public importance are made known. As corporate and public power increase, the ability of the average citizen to affect his or her world depends upon the information disseminated by the press. To deprive the media of an important tool in the gathering of news would affect society as a whole. The relationship is one that should be fostered.”

But clearly not in all cases. Judge Laskin continued: “This does not mean that press organizations or journalists are immune

from valid searches under s. 8 of the Charter. And s. 2(b) does not guarantee that journalists have an automatic right to protect the confidentiality of their sources. The court must ensure that the privacy interests of the press are limited as little as possible. But the court must also balance against the privacy interest of the press, the state or other societal interests in getting at the truth.”

In other words, in this case, an RCMP forgery investigation was more important than Mr. McIntosh and the Post protecting the identity of its anonymous source. It’s hard to imagine many Canadians arguing strongly against that concept.

The Post, which has had the document since 2001, was never able to verify if it was genuine or forged and, in fact, did not publish the damaging allegation against Mr. Chrétien. It was published first by other media in the context of Mr. Chrétien’s denial. So you’d think the newspaper would welcome the chance for the police to do a thorough investigation to find out whether the newspaper was duped.

This case should also cause journalists to be wary about giving sources blanket, unconditional promises to protect their identities, which Mr. McIntosh, an award-winning investigative journalist now working in the United States, did in this case.

John Miller is a professor of journalism at Ryerson University and a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. A version of this article also appeared in The Globe and Mail. l

legal opinion part tWo By Dean JoBB

Blanket protection Two recent court decisions should give journalists pause to consider the

The National Post’s Andrew McIntosh is not entitled to protect the identity of a key source who aided his investigation into

former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s financial affairs. Ken Peters of the Hamilton Spectator defies a court order to protect one of his sources, yet cannot be punished for contempt of court.

Ontario’s Court of Appeal issued these seemingly contradictory rulings within a three-week span earlier this year. The result is a partial victory for press freedom and some understandable confusion about whether Canadian journalists have the right to protect a confidential source.

First, the good news. The country’s most influential appellate court has recognized that journalists may have to promise to protect the identity of sources in order to do their jobs.

“It requires no blind

The need to identify Andrew McIntosh’s source—and solve what Justice Laskin termed the “grave and heinous crime” of using a forged document to try to force a prime minister from office—outweighed any claim of privilege.

leap of faith,” Justice Robert J. Sharpe noted in the Peters ruling, “to understand that a person who gives information to a journalist only on condition that his identity will not be revealed will be less likely to give that information if he knows that, despite the journalists’ assurance, his identity may in fact be disclosed.”

His colleague, Justice John Laskin, seconded that motion in the National Post ruling. The “relationship between a journalist and a confidential source should be diligently fostered for the public good,” he wrote, adding that “some matters of public interest could not be thoroughly investigated or investigated at all without confidential sources of information.”

Journalists and media lawyers have long warned that exposing sources has a “chilling effect” on newsgathering, causing people with important information to clam up. It’s about time our courts took this warning seriously.

While there’s no blanket protection for journalists’ sources—as there is for the information exchanged between lawyers and their clients— both rulings recognize the media’s right to claim privilege, on a case-by-case basis, to protect a confidential source.

deals they offer source

The bad news? To date not one journalist has been able to convince a court their sources are worth protecting.

McIntosh and the National Post came close. In 2004 an Ontario judge ruled the newspaper’s Shawinigate investigation was a story important enough to justify protecting the source of a leaked bank document (possibly faked), which suggested Chrétien was in a conflict of interest. Justice Mary Lou Benotto invoked the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of the press to quash an RCMP search warrant used to seize the document.

In overturning that ruling in February, Justice Laskin acknowledged “the gathering and dissemination of news and information without undue state interference is an integral component” of the media’s constitutional rights. But the Charter does not make journalists “immune from valid searches” or afford them “an automatic right to protect the confidentiality of their sources.” A balance must be struck between “the privacy interest of the press [and] the state or other societal interests in getting at the truth.”

The need to identify McIntosh’s source—and solve what Justice Laskin termed the “grave and heinous crime” of using a forged document to try to force a prime minister from office—outweighed any claim of privilege. The RCMP can seize and examine the document in search of fingerprints and traces of DNA.

The Peters case, as it turned out, was as much about the arcane law of contempt of court as it was about protecting sources. The issue was how Justice David Crane dealt with Peters’ refusal to identify who leaked damning information about conditions at a nursing home.

The Spectator was ordered to pay more than $31,000 in costs. The appeal court found the penalty “excessive” and ruled that citing a reporter for contempt is a last resort. Peters’ source came forward on his own, the court noted, so the contempt finding was a moot point. The message to judges is clear—journalists trying to protect a source should be treated with respect, not as if their goal is to defy the court or subvert justice.

All of this should make journalists think twice before promising confidentiality to a source. As Justice Laskin warned, “journalists can never guarantee confidentiality.”

It’s good practice—not to mention legally and ethically sound—to warn sources that an iron-clad promise to protect their identities is impossible. Journalists can promise to do everything in their power to protect confidentiality, but if they make

a blanket promise they do so at their peril. Protect yourself by negotiating an exit strategy, allowing you and the source to revisit the promise if legal action is taken to expose the source.

John Miller has defended the National Post ruling as striking the proper balance between the rights of journalists and the need to fight crime. “An RCMP forgery investigation,” he noted in a Globe and Mail opinion piece reprinted in this issue of Media on page 24. “was more important than Mr. McIntosh and the Post protecting the identity of their anonymous source.”

I’m not so sure. A police investigation can be

The Ken Peters case, as it turned out, was as much about the arcane law of contempt of court as it was about

protecting sources. The issue was how Justice David Crane dealt with Peters’ refusal to identify who leaked damning

information about conditions at a nursing home.

a poor way to get to the bottom of a political scandal—Think Airbus. Whi le McIntosh’s document may yield some evidence to identify his source, that will not expose a forger. There’s evidence McIntosh’s source obtained the

document from another, anonymous source and merely passed it along. One suspects this is really about chasing a leaker, not fighting crime.

The Post is seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and hopefully the high court will seize the opportunity to clarify when journalists can protect sources. As well, Bloc Québecois MP Serge Ménard has introduced a private member’s bill to formalize the evolving common law principles in an American-style shield law. His proposed amendments to the Canada Evidence Act—which passed second reading last fall—would oblige judges to consider alternative means of obtaining information and the media’s right to gather news before issuing a search warrant or demanding testimony that would reveal a confidential source.

In the meantime, as Miller notes, journalists should remain wary about making an unconditional promise to protect a source.

Dean Jobb is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and author of Media Law for Canadian Journalists, available from Emond Montgomery Publications http://.emp.ca. l


Ontario’s Court of Appeal has finally imported the defence of “responsible journalism” into Canadian defamation

law, following the lead of courts in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

In last fall’s ruling on a libel award against the Ottawa Citizen, the appeal court said it was time to overhaul defamation law to strike a better balance between the Charter right to freedom of expression and the need to protect reputations.

“Debate on matters of public interest will often be heated and criticism will often carry a sting and yet open discussion is the lifeblood of our democracy,” Justice Robert J. Sharpe noted in the unanimous ruling in Cusson v. Quan (2007 ONCA 771).

But under existing defamation law, he added, “there is simply no margin for error or allowance for the expression of views honestly and reasonably held.” The media’s defences are limited; journalists must prove facts and allegations are true or fair comment, or were made in a privileged forum or document. People can also consent to be libeled, but subjects of stories rarely incriminate themselves to the point where this defence is possible.

As a result, there’s “a powerful incentive to err on the side of caution and to avoid controversy,” as Justice Sharpe put it, creating “a chilling effect” on free speech.

“A newspaper that has properly investigated the story and has every reason to believe it to be true still walks on thin ice. The fear or risk of being unable to prove the truth of controversial matters is bound to discourage the publication of information the public has a legitimate interest in hearing,” the judge wrote.

“There is a very real difference between what a speaker honestly and reasonably believes to be true and what can be proved to be true in a court of law. The threat of litigation under a legal regime that leaves no margin for error, even where the speaker took all reasonable steps to verify the facts, discourages free and open debate on matters of public importance.”

Journalists have been complaining about this for years, and waiting for the day the responsible journalism defence pioneered in Britain a half-dozen years ago would reach Canada.

Here’s how the new defence works: if the story is important enough, and the journalists involved have done their jobs thoroughly and properly, a

Fine print By Dean JoBB

Responsible journalism It’s a defence that could help warm the libel chill

libel action may fail even if the story is wrong. This is not a defence for the faint of heart or for

reporters who are sloppy or fail to keep an open mind as they do their stories. A journalist’s actions and methods will be put under the microscope. So dust off the ethics handbooks and make sure your methods conform to your news organization’s code of conduct.

I’ve always told my students that good

Here’s how the new

defence works: if the

story is important

enough, and the

journalists involved

have done their

jobs thoroughly and

properly, a libel action

may fail even if the

story is wrong.

journalism—stories that are accurate, fair, balanced and deal with matters of public interest— offer the best defence to a libel suit. This responsible journalism defence encompasses all four.

When assessing whether the defence applies, judges must consider 10 factors that were first formulated in the British case of Reynolds v. Times Newspapers Ltd. [2001] 2 A.C. 127.

They are, to quote the Reynolds ruling: • The seriousness of the allegation. The more

serious the charge, the more the public is misinformed and the individual harmed, if the allegation is not true. • The nature of the information, and the extent

to which the subject-matter is a matter of public concern. • The source of the information. Some

informants have no direct knowledge of the

events. Some have their own axes to grind, or are being paid for their stories. • The steps taken to verify the information. • The status of the information. The allegation

may have already been the subject of an investigation which commands respect. • The urgency of the matter. News is often a

perishable commodity. • Whether comment was sought from the

plaintiff. He may have information others do not possess or have not disclosed. An approach to the plaintiff will not always be necessary. • Whether the article contained the gist of the

plaintiff’s side of the story. • The tone of the article. A newspaper can raise

queries or call for an investigation. It need not adopt allegations as statements of fact. • The circumstances of the publication,

including the timing.

The British courts have made it clear that journalists need not satisfy all of these requirements in order to claim the defence. In 2007 the House of Lords cleared the Wall Street Journal of libel even though it did not wait for comment from a Saudi Arabian businessman accused of funding terrorism (Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe Sprl, [2007] 1 A.C. 359).

How the defence will play out in this country remains to be seen. The Citizen established the precedent but, ironically, lost its bid to overturn a $100,000 libel award to a policeman accused of hampering rescue efforts at Ground Zero after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Since the newspaper did not raise the responsible journalism defence at trial, the Court of Appeal ruled, it could not use it after the fact.

The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear the Citizen’s appeal, and the result will be a ruling that’s binding on judges across the country.

Will the high court endorse the responsible journalism defence or will Canada ignore a growing body of sound, progressive rulings on libel law? Stay tuned.

Dean Jobb, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, is author of Media Law for Canadian Journalists, available from Emond Montgomery Publications (http://www.emp.ca). l


computer-assisted reporting By FreD vallance-JoneS

The CBC versus Health Canada A federal court ruling may embolden government departments to withhold

In the 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix, people live in a simulated world created by machines to keep the human population docile

while the machines harvest heat and energy from the people’s bodies.

It made great science fiction, and became a successful franchise, with two sequels.

Now the matrix is back, and it’s almost as fantastical as the movies. I’m referring to the “the matrix effect,” the latest brainchild of Canada’s relentless privacy advocates, and of government bureaucrats looking for any way to dodge the intense scrutiny that has come with the rise of computer-assisted reporting.

The matrix effect refers to the idea that not only should the government refuse to release identifying information about individuals contained in a database, but it should also withhold anonymous information that could be merely connected in some way with other information in the public domain, to identify someone.

Federal bureaucrats have been advancing the matrix effect for some time as a basis on which to scrub anything from databases that could possibly be connected to an individual in the real world. And now, they have an important decision from the Federal Court of Canada to back their contention.

The case at issue is the CBC’s longstanding battle with Health Canada over the adverse drug reporting system, or CADRIS. CBC used the data as the basis for two major investigative series on drug reactions among the young and seniors. It was award-winning journalism that shone a bright light on a dark part of the world of big pharma.

Health Canada had already released many of the fields in the database, and the decision handed down February 27 dealt only with the field that indicated the province of the person who reported the adverse reaction.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the arguments, Health Canada felt that releasing the province field greatly increased the chances that a person whose adverse drug reaction was recorded in the database could be connected, by means of some of the details in the database, with an identified individual in the community. It argued that this was especially a problem in small provinces such as Prince Edward Island where the number of persons who might have suffered a particular adverse reaction was small.

CBC felt that adding the province field did not significantly increase the risk of someone being identified. To back its case, Health Canada

even more data that’s in the public interest

compared adverse reaction reports in the database with obituaries available on the internet.

“The combination of this information made it relatively easy to identify personal information if the province field was known,” said Bill Wilson, head of the database and terminology at Health Canada, in an affidavit. A data expert from Statistics Canada backed Health Canada’s interpretation that by including the province field, it was far easier to connect data in the CADRIS tables to identified individuals.

The federal court ruling means that media outlets such as the CBC can’t use Health Canada’s

adverse drug reaction database to examine what’s happening in certain provinces.

The court decision is silent on whether Health Canada was actually able to forge any connections with the living, but I am pretty certain that if the department had been able to provide proof, it would have trumpeted the finding from the mountaintops.

It is a reflection of the unbalanced nature of our privacy laws — the privacy of dead people is protected until they have been buried for 20 years -- that the court accepted Health Canada’s argument that the dead needed protection from the prying eyes of reporters. Ironically, the CBC’s own success in tracking down someone who had died of a drug reaction, even without the province field, was used as evidence of the potential invasion of privacy.

The court can’t really be blamed. The law has slowly evolved to the point where the prohibition on releasing information “about an identifiable individual” has now been interpreted to mean “information about an individual who could be identified through diligent detective work.”

It doesn’t matter that the person can’t be identified on the face of things. If someone could identify the person by going through libraries of publicly available information until a match could be made, even with a dead person, that’s enough to qualify the information as personal information as defined by the Privacy Act and interpreted by the courts.

It’s horrible law, and the implications for access are clear.

Let’s take the Health Canada-CBC case. You might think that being able to report on the

deaths of individuals killed by adverse reactions to prescription drugs would be a good thing. You might even think the families that lost their loved ones would support such reporting. It would be in the public interest and might help prevent future deaths.

But no matter. Because of the matrix effect, Canadians are left in the dark about such things. And while there could be an argument that protecting the identities of people who died of drug reactions could be defensible, it’s not hard to see how this decision will be used.

Departments will hire armies of privacy consultants to comb through databases requested under the Access to Information Act to see if any fields could be connected to publicly-available information. If any connection can be made, the court case will be cited as the reason why anonymous fields should be withheld. Less and less data will be made public. Canada will retreat toward the official secrecy that helps senior civil servants sleep well at night.

And don’t think this will be limited to sensitive areas such as health care.

Remember that under Canada’s access laws, any detail about a person, no matter how innocuous, and no matter what public interest there might be in making the information available, is a matter of personal privacy. So, if departments feel there is any chance anonymous data about anything to do with individuals can be connected to identifiable people, living or dead, get ready for demands that ever more data be deleted prior to release.

It’s almost surreal, a bit like the plot of The Matrix.

Maybe it’s time for another sequel.

Fred Vallance-Jones is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. You can contact him at [email protected]. l


Dateline Hong Kong 2008 A Working Fellowship for Canadian Journalists

Hong Kong, Asia’s world city, is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, run by Hong Kong people under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. Hong Kong is one of the most open, externally oriented economies in the world.

With China’s unprecedented economic growth, Hong Kong has been used as the gateway to the robust Mainland market. It has also served as the springboard for the Mainland companies to go overseas. Hong Kong has been rated the world’s freest economy by the Heritage Foundation, and Fraser Institute.

Working journalists are invited to experience Hong Kong at first-hand and write or report on various aspects of the city by applying for the “Dateline Hong Kong Fellowship 2008” organized by the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office in Canada in association with the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ).

Selected journalist(s) will be awarded a package which includes a five-day official visit program, business class air travel and hotel accommodation. When in Hong Kong, the journalist(s) will have the opportunity to visit various points of interest and meet with people of diverse views and backgrounds.

Neither the Hong Kong SAR nor the CAJ will have any control over or rights to the work of the participating journalist(s) and they will enjoy full editorial freedom.

Application Deadline: September 15, 2008

Each application must include a resume, and a written statement of support from the editor/producer of designed media organization to publish/broadcast at least three Hong Kong stories produced by the selected journalist within six months upon completion of the trip.

The proposal can concentrate on any area of life in Hong Kong, including but not limited to business, trade, politics, infrastructure development, IT, tourism, housing, education, culture and environment, etc.

Selection of the successful candidates will be made by CAJ and announced in early-October. The visit program must be completed before the end of March 2009.

Application must reach: The Canadian Association of Journalists Algonquin College 1385 Woodroffe Avenue, B-224 Ottawa ON K2G 1V8

By Monday, September 15, 2008

For enquiries, please contact Mr Stephen Siu, Assistant Director (Public Relations) of the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office at (416) 924-7374 or email: [email protected] or John Dickins, Executive Director, CAJ at (613) 526-8061 or email: [email protected]

Ethics By STephen J. a. warD

Re-Thinking Media Criticism Articles about journalistic misbehaviour are important. But they must be

supplemented by other, deeper forms of media analysis

In 1859, American journalist Lambert Wilmer wrote one of the first books on media criticism in North America. It was entitled,

Our Press Gang or A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers. Wilmer accused the press’s sensational news provoking violence among the “rabble.” He decried press subservience to corrupt “moneyed interests.”

By the late nineteenth century, media criticism had grown from a trickle of articles to a stream of books, articles, and speeches decrying the yellow journalism of powerful press barons. This criticism signaled a growing discomfort with the press, and it acted as one of the first forms of media accountability.

Today, criticism of journalism is as ubiquitous as the iPod. It is a flourishing industry. Best-selling books by journalists, academics and others roll off the printing presses. Media criticism occupies the attention of many bloggers and occupies large portions of journalism websites. The news media is blamed for many things – the decline of democracy, the misrepresentation of minorities, or the Iraq War. The critics can be more biased and ideological than the journalists they attack. They also can be thoughtful and revealing.

Whatever its qualities, media criticism today is not as effective as it could be. The problem is not that we simply need more media criticism. We need to re-think what media criticism should be, and what forms it should take. The main fault of current media criticism is that it tends to be too “individualistic.” The focus is on today’s media scandal – some unethical act by individual journalists or newsrooms on specific stories. Media criticism needs to ‘think bigger’. It needs to show how specific problems are related to the economic, social, and political climate of today’s journalism. And media criticism needs to “turn positive” and bring forward constructive ideas for improving journalism.

In short, journalists and concerned citizens need to create a more effective system for media discussion and debate. Media criticism needs to be part of a much larger process of informed public analysis of journalism and the news media. Yet one can’t really say how to improve journalism unless one also has a clear idea of the role of journalism in society, or Canadian society. Therefore, media criticism must be based on journalism ethics – on a clearly defined view of ethical journalism and its principles. Articles about journalistic misbehaviour are important. But they must be supplemented by other, deeper forms of media analysis.

Re-thinking media criticism contains a conceptual and a practical task. Conceptually,

we need to stop thinking about criticism as exclusively negative and unproductive -- carping about journalists, for whatever purpose. Instead, we should think of criticism as part of a more constructive activity of analyzing, fairly and comprehensively, how our news media system functions to serve democracy, and how journalists operate within that system. In this manner, media criticism is embedded in a process of media accountability. The idea of journalism’s “self-regulation” is widened to include the “public regulation” of journalism – a joint dialogue among journalists and the public about how to sustain and protect quality journalism.

Finally, media criticism should be “informed” by objective, rigorous, and comprehensive research into the state of the news media. Canada is slowly developing journalism research at its schools of journalism and elsewhere, and such efforts need to be encouraged and tied to public deliberation on journalism.

The practical task is to provide mechanisms for this deliberation. It would require fundamental change in attitudes among journalists and members of the public. For instance, journalists and news organizations would have to be willing to be open to public scrutiny. Journalists would need to find a ways to write about crucial decisions on the news media system, such as CRTC rulings, that are both understandable to most Canadians and encourage their participation in the debate. To re-think media criticism along these lines is to re-define journalism ethics as involving essential reference to citizens. Journalism ethics is not only a concern of professional journalists within newsrooms.

How could we accomplish all of this? We could start with a coalition of concerned journalists, journalism schools, public-interest organizations, and citizens who create a system for the regular study, analysis, and discussion of state of the news media. The coalition could be modeled on organizations such as the Committee of Concerned Journalists in the United States. Moreover, the deliberation should include a range of views and expertise so that the criticism cannot be dismissed as the political agenda of certain individuals or groups. Also, there is need for the development of objective criteria and methods by which to evaluate the performance of journalists and their media system. These criteria, in total, would express a vision of journalism appropriate to Canada’s pluralistic society. Once one has a structure for informed deliberation, and appropriate criteria, one can proceed to consider specific options for improving journalism, in line with facts and values.

The latest research into the state of journalism could be presented at annual, high-profile, public conferences.

There are many practical questions for this inclusive process of media criticism to consider. How can we encourage diversity of media content? Should we revamp existing mechanisms of accountability such as press councils? Are there new ways in which journalists can discuss editorial issues with citizens and articulate their journalistic values?

Media criticism will fail to be effective so long as we think of it as complaining about bad coverage after the fact, in a piecemeal, story-by-story approach. We need a broader, structural approach to discuss and act upon issues of media ethics. Journalism will be properly “critiqued” only when citizens have a rigorous process for evaluating their news media as a whole, and are motivated by a sincere desire to support quality public journalism. Without such collective effort, individual books, articles, and complaints will have limited impact.

I acknowledge that I speak in terms of ideals and what might be. But how else is one to consider media criticism and reform? Many journalists and citizens may not be sufficiently interested to participate in this public examination of journalism. However, when one looks around, one sees many media-related groups that could be brought together, productively. In the end, if most people prefer to carp about journalists, rather than take steps to address problems, then they probably deserve the journalism they get.

The problem of media criticism and reform is not a battle between “us” the virtuous “people” and “them” -- unscrupulous journalists in newsrooms. There are many working journalists who share the concerns of the public. They should talk to each other. They should get to know each other and break down the stereotypes. It is futile in this age of interactive media to draw a sharp line between the public and the “media,” or between journalists and non-journalists. Canadians don’t just passively watch media. They increasingly share information, like journalists. They are immersed in media, as users and as participants. We are the media. Therefore we are all, to some degree, responsible for our journalism. Criticism and reform of news media begins with us.

Stephen J. A. Ward is director and associate professor of journalism ethics at the graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. He’s also the author of The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond, published in 2005 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. l


the last Word By ScoTT Taylor

Pay attention to who’s doing the talking Getting the straight goods on Afghanistan is made harder by the “experts” who tell us everything’s okay

Canadian troops have been in Afghanistan for more than six years, have suffered nearly 90 killed and more than 700

wounded, and as a result of media coverage generated by this controversial mission, the Canadian military was named newsmaker of the year in 2006. Despite the constant attention, the public remains largely ignorant about the core issues surrounding our objectives in this war-torn country. From the absence of any substantial domestic political debate concerning Canada’s foreign policy in Central Asia, it would seem that our parliamentarians are similarly ill-versed in the staggering complexities of the Afghan conflict.

Very few real Afghan experts have emerged to lend their weight to the public discussions, and as a result, the punditry has been polarized into two finger-pointing camps: the pro-mission and bring-the-troops-home-now varieties, each claiming that the other side just “doesn’t get it.”

This does not exactly amount to a fact-based challenging and compelling exchange of ideas. Many of those shouting the loudest on the pro-mission side attempt to justify their position with the fact that they’ve walked the ground in Kandahar.

The vast majority of the journalists who have reported on the Canadian contingent in southern Afghanistan have limited themselves to simply providing their audience with a worm’s eye view of soldiering—albeit through the official restrictions of the Canadian Forces’ embed program. A few notable exceptions to the straight reporting have emerged in the form of journalists who are double-hatted as columnists. Taking their very narrow perspective of our troops performing a challenging task in a dangerous little corner of Afghanistan, they subsequently opine that our soldiers’ professionalism and sacrifice in itself justifies the continuance of the mission.

While the Defence Department and Prime Minister’s Office were certainly thankful for such media support to help them sell the mission, still more needed to be done. In addition to their own legions of commanders and public affairs officers, the Defence Department felt it was necessary to create an arm’s-length cadre of spokespersons who can put forward the same official pro-mission message to the media, albeit from an independent pulpit.

To achieve this goal they have created a group they have dubbed “stakeholders,” which consists almost entirely of retired senior officers with friendly ties to the still-serving senior brass. The

title stakeholder is in itself somewhat misleading, as very few of these ex-officers served in Afghanistan during their career, none of them are Afghans, nor do any of them have a commercial or long-term personal stake in Central Asia.

Therefore, it should be made clear to journalists who interview these individuals or quote them as sources, that the stake they hold is in preserving and promoting the image of the Canadian Forces. Providing media with material is exactly why these old generals and colonels were recruited for this new task.

The Defence Department felt it was necessary to create an arm’s-length cadre of

spokespersons who can put forward the same official pro-mission message to

the media, albeit from an independent pulpit.

At regular intervals the stakeholders are flown into Kandahar Airfield where they are given a series of briefings and taken on escorted tours. Although their access is limited to the same vantage point of the embedded journalists, but with a briefer exposure, the stakeholders are then expected to provide expert analysis to media outlets when they return to Canada.

Although these stakeholders are only reimbursed for their expenses—and not officially paid to publicly represent DND’s interests—there is a grey area in this arrangement. Many of the stakeholders are drawn from the membership of the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA).

In an article published in the Globe and Mail earlier this year by University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran ( and re-printed in this edition of Media magazine on page 23) , it was revealed that the CDA received an annual $100,000 grant from DND. In the contract detailing the grant, it stipulates that in order to receive the payment, CDA must “support activities that give evidence of contributing to Canada’s national policies.” In other words, the CDA is not meant to encourage debate or give voice to the opposition; the organization is meant to cheerlead for the Conservative Party and the Canadian military. In

order to qualify for renewal of the funding, the DND contract with the CDA obliges the association to write a number of op-ed pieces for publication in the mainstream media.

While some may argue that the government funds a large number of special interest groups, media outlets should be aware of this mercenary arrangement before they decide on the value of using a CDA spokesman as an “independent” resource.

Even more onerous was the revelation in Attaran’s column that DND also funds “the salaries, research, travel and tuition of dozens of professors, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students.” He listed 12 Canadian universities that presently receive grants in excess of half a million dollars in annual grants through the Defence Department’s Security and Defence Forum. Many of these same academics who owe their livelihood to the military are called upon to make presentations to parliamentary committees without disclosing their financial link.

According to Attaran, there is one well-known Canadian professor and author who received an $825,000 grant from the DND program. It was specified that in exchange for that substantive remuneration, the good professor would “conduct outreach activities with the Canadian public ... and Parliament about security and defence issues.” There is no question that this highly regarded academic is keeping his side of the bargain. Mainstream media use him extensively as a subject matter expert without realizing that he is being paid handsomely by DND to broadcast those opinions.

With our troops committed to Afghanistan through December 2011, it is a safe bet that the mission in Kandahar will remain a headline-garnering news story for the foreseeable future. The debate will continue on Canada’s role, and it is therefore important that the national press corps exercises due diligence in understanding who is funding the arguments they are giving voice to. Our soldiers are simply following orders in the belief that they are serving the interest of the Canadian government. That this same government, through the Defence Department, is using duplicitous means to sway public opinion in favour of the mission is a dishonour to their sacrifice.

Scott Taylor is an author and Ottawa-based journalist who edits Esprit de Corps, a Canadian military magazine. He also served in the Armed Forces. l


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