CanWest CEO Leonard Asper. PHOTO: Reuters.

In a crowded bar in downtown Vancouver, a group of reporters from the city’s main daily newspaper, The Vancouver Sun, gather after work to do what most people revel in after a long week at the office: bitch about the boss. While images of the Iraq War, Wal-Mart and Kid Rock quickly flash and disappear on the television screens above them, editors are mocked, columnists are ridiculed and the paper their bylines appear in is panned up and down.

There’s nothing too radical about most of their complaints – it’s no secret to anyone in the city that the Sun is a dull suburban paper pretending to be a respected urban broadsheet. With few exceptions, there’s little investigative journalism left within its pages, and most of what gets printed is so tepid and banal that it’s almost entirely useless to read.

It’s when the reporters start talking about what’s happening inside the newsroom that they reveal a deeper and more disturbing problem with the flagship newspaper in Canada’s third largest city: one that explains everything that is wrong with the increasing consolidation of the media around the world.

Overly anxious that they’re not caught exposing the paper’s dirty secret, reporters at the Sun say that morale has hit rock bottom and an alarming atmosphere of fear and paranoia has infected the newsroom. With a tone of anger and resentment, reporters tell stories about vindictive editors who spend more time attacking them over personal and petty grievances than they do worrying about the deteriorating quality of the paper. Anyone that dares question the authority of Editor-in-Chief Patricia Graham is bullied, isolated and forced out of the paper.

Reporters say the story inside the Sun is that inexperienced editors rise through the ranks because they toe the company line or are personal friends with senior editors and not because they produce good journalism or defend the public trust. These newly empowered editors are known for not letting reporters pitch their own ideas and for pushing press releases onto veteran journalists who grudgingly grind out copy before deadline, caring very little about what they write. Reporters who challenge this system are moved out of their department, questioned about their stories and eventually given an ultimatum by the editors: quit or we’ll make your life hell.

“The culture at The Vancouver Sun is incredibly poisonous and it extends right through the newsroom,” confides Charles Campbell, a former editorial board member at the paper, who says he was surprised at how much disdain senior management had towards the paper’s star reporters. “There are very few [reporters] who are particularly happy or proud of The Vancouver Sun as a newspaper.”

While the Sun has a long history of acrimonious newsrooms and lengthy labor disputes, it was also once a respected paper that boasted some of the top journalists in the country and consistently broke stories that changed the political landscape of the city and province. When the paper was part of the Southam chain, the newsroom had a bigger budget and more independence – reporters were even allowed to criticize the paper in print. But once CanWest Global Communications got its hands on the Sun in 2000, it slashed funding, silenced writers and allowed an inexperienced, and strangely insecure, management to take control. The paper has never been as irrelevant or dysfunctional as it is today.

CanWest has such a stranglehold on the city that any reporter caught speaking out against them would have trouble finding work in Vancouver again. This toxic environment has created such a chill amongst reporters that getting them to talk about the turmoil is extremely difficult. One news staffer that initially agreed to be quoted as an anonymous source later backed out for fear of repercussion. A former reporter was so worried by the ruthless reach of the editors that they would only talk off-the-record. Most wouldn’t even take that risk.

“If [the Editor-in-Chief] found out I talked, I’d be finished,” said one reporter when declining an interview. “If there was another game in town it’d be different, but there’s nothing else in this city. There’s nowhere else to go.”

CanWest’s dominance over Vancouver is extraordinary even in an era of unprecedented global media consolidation and convergence.

Led by CEO Leonard Asper and the powerful Asper family, the Winnipeg-based corporation now owns both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers (the Sun and the tabloid Province), the city’s top-rated television station (GlobalTV), 12 community newspapers, eight analog and digital television stations, and one of two national papers. For good measure, it also owns the only daily in the nearby provincial capital, Victoria’s Times Colonist. A throwback to the classic Company Town, CanWest has turned Vancouver into the single-most media concentrated city in the western world.

Cities thrive in diverse media markets. In Montreal, four different companies own the city’s four major dailies, each presenting four unique perspectives on issues that concern its citizens. The same is true in cities from Toronto and New York to London and Paris. But as a small number of corporations swallow up more media outlets every year, the conflicts within the Sun are being duplicated across the country. With the largest private newspaper publisher in Canada, Black Press, recently taking ownership of Osprey, one of the most diverse, just four corporations now control 70 percent of the country’s newspaper circulation.

Cities stagnate in consolidated media markets. CanWest has a total of 13 daily newspapers in Canada, where its only competitors are often vapid tabloid or commuter dailies. On the East Coast, the Irving family owns every English-language newspaper in the province of New Brunswick and a series of dailies and weeklies throughout the Maritimes. Without any real competition, these newspapers can manipulate their content to push a single point of view. In Canada, this had led to a one-sided debate on the country’s role in Afghanistan, where editorials back the country’s military intervention and pay little attention to the mounting civilian causalities and ongoing human rights violations. But nowhere is the freedom of the press in as much danger as Vancouver, where the CanWest monopoly controls an astonishing 70 percent of the entire media market and is the only voice of record for the city.

“The story of the Sun should be presented as a cautionary tale [to the rest of the world],” says Marc Edge, a former Vancouver journalist and author of Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly. “If you want to see the future of media, just look at Vancouver where you have the tightest control of media in the free world. If you allow cross-media ownership like the [Federal Communications Commission in the United States] has been considering, this is how it could end up.”

PHOTO: CP Images.

Editorial Eclipse

The internal turmoil of the Sun is a stark contrast to the colorless content on its pages. While almost all corporate newspapers have an obvious pro-business slant, the Sun leaves little doubt about where its bias lies. Corporate press releases are disguised as news stories, puff pieces on right-wing politicians pose as investigative journalism and hatchet jobs on activists purport to be fair and balanced reporting. In 2002, the Sun spent $3 million to run a series of advertorial stories praising the virtues of British Columbian businesses called ‘Believe BC.’ The stories weren’t marked as advertising features as they should have been, but were either listed as a ‘Special Feature’ or left completely unmarked.

The timing of the Believe BC series was especially insulting since it came right after the newly elected right-wing provincial government had slashed social services for the poor by $2 billion while cutting taxes for the rich by $2 billion. But there has been little coverage in the paper since then of how the cuts caused Vancouver’s homeless population to double in just three years. Although Sun reporters aren’t given direct orders to write glowing reports about the provincial government, they say they are discouraged from writing claims made by government critics. There has also been a conscious decision from the paper’s management to ignore government protesters, even when their actions are top stories for national news agencies. More often than not, the Sun is not the voice of the community, but a mouthpiece for the provincial government – over the years CanWest has donated thousands of dollars to the current provincial government and the Sun employs the premier’s brother as a columnist.

However, most troubling of all is that the Sun refuses to be held to account to the many criticisms lobbied at them by media analysts and their own current and former employees. A request for an interview with the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Patricia Graham, was denied because Adbusters is protecting the identity of the Sun reporters who have spoken out.

“The Vancouver Sun has a policy of avoiding the use of unnamed sources,” wrote Graham in an email. “We consider it a violation of journalistic ethics to permit people to criticize others while remaining anonymous. I do not care to participate in interviews with publications whose ethical standards I do not share.”

Aside from the fact that any Sun reporter named would immediately be fired, Graham overlooks the fact that most media outlets allow anonymous sources if the importance of their information outweighs the potential for public skepticism. But Adbusters couldn’t even get a copy of the Sun’s code of ethics to verify what the paper’s policy on using anonymous sources actually is. While other news agencies post their code of ethics online, a request to the Sun was denied on the grounds that it’s not available to the public. Like much of what is happening in the Sun, the paper seems to prefer keeping the public in the dark.

Black Hole

The Aspers bought the Sun and over 130 newspapers across the country from Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. at a time when major media corporations around the world were clamoring for convergence. But while CanWest had one of the largest television networks in the country, it had zero experience in newspapers. Like many newly formed media conglomerates at the time, it quickly lost millions of dollars trying to make its different media outlets work together. Just as newspaper circulation was plummeting across North America, the Aspers paid Black an inflated $3.5 billion for a product in an ailing industry that they had no idea how to run.

With their fledgling newspaper empire quickly crumbling and its newly adopted national daily The National Post hemorrhaging profits from the other dailies, the Aspers tried to stop the hemorrhaging with massive layoffs – leaving already thin newsrooms stretched beyond repair. Today, reporters at CanWest papers have to write more stories in less time, which adds another level of pressure in already tense environments. Instead of investigative journalism, there has been an increase in one-source stories. Many reporters have been moved off of beats and turned into general assignment reporters, giving them less knowledge on the issues they cover and less access to sources that help them cultivate and uncover breaking news.

CanWest further exasperated the problem by carelessly spending $5 million launching its now-defunct, youth-oriented commuter daily, Dose, while saving $4.6 million this past June by abandoning its partnership with the national newswire, Canadian Press (CP). Reporters across the chain have been extremely distressed by this latest move, saying it will force shorthanded newsrooms to produce extra copy for which the CP co-operative could once be relied upon. Since newspapers are still the best, and often the only, mechanism that gives the public in-depth analysis on issues, all of these cuts have damaged the public’s ability to have the kind of qualified and informed debate required in a democracy.

“This whole corporatization of journalism is not healthy,” says Mike Gasher, director of journalism at Concordia University and a former Vancouver Province reporter. “I know journalism is a business, but I think it’s just a question of how you strike the balance between the quality of the product and the bottom line. My concern is that when you have these conglomerate ownerships, that not only own several newspapers, but radio, television, internet, then I think by definition the commitment to any one of those properties is decreased.”

CanWest did not return multiple requests for an interview. Adbusters Media Foundation is currently suing CanWest along with another national broadcaster for refusing to air its public awareness campaigns about mass consumerism on their stations, which was also one of the reasons that Graham gave for turning down an interview.

Burnout

The acrimony inside the Sun is excessive when compared to other newspapers, but there are high levels of dissatisfaction and depression in all of CanWest’s dailies. Not long after CanWest bought Black’s chain, it sparked international uproar when it broke the basic journalistic principle of journalistic autonomy and implemented a national editorial policy. In 2001, the Aspers dictated a series of editorials from Winnipeg and demanded its papers not run any editorial that held views opposed their “core positions” – which primarily focused on lowering taxes and supporting Israel in the Middle East. After journalists at Montreal’s The Gazette angrily withheld their bylines, the controversy forced CanWest to drop the policy. However, it sent an early message to its newsrooms that their independence had vanished.

“I can say to our critics and to the bleeding hearts of the journalist community that it’s the end of the world as they know it, and I feel fine,” callously said David Asper, the family’s publications chairman, about the The Gazette’s protest.

But the national editorial policy was almost benign compared to the firing of Ottawa Citizen publisher Russell Mills for running a feature about then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s suspicious financial dealings and an editorial calling for his resignation. Asper patriarch Izzy Asper (now deceased) had close ties to Chrétien and the country’s ruling Liberal Party, and the firing sent a chill throughout the entire CanWest chain that still exists today. Although CanWest has since toned down its editorial interference (its most recent act was to replace all mention of Palestinian “militants” with “terrorists” in newswire copy), reporters at its papers say the damage has already been done.

“People do their jobs, they roll their eyeballs, and a lot of them at quitting time stop thinking about it,” says one staffer at The Gazette.

The primary complaint heard from CanWest reporters today is that the corporation’s drastic financial cuts have done the most to sink morale. In an almost revolutionary development, editors and publishers at CanWest papers have also begun to openly criticize the Aspers to their reporters because of the budget cuts. The Aspers make a sharp contrast to the CanWest papers’ original owners, the Southam family, which turned its newspapers into some of the most competitive and respected in North America. Ironically, CanWest reporters even refer to the Conrad Black era as the “golden age.” Although Black cut back on reporters and was reviled as a tyrant with an overt political agenda, he also invested more in his newsrooms. Today, the computers in the Edmonton Journal newsroom are so old that staff can’t even access their own paper’s website.

“It’s depressing,” says a Journal reporter, “and it makes you wonder about the future. There are all sorts of new pressures going on in today’s media, and most of us don’t have confidence that the Aspers have the business acumen to deal with these pressures in an effective way.”

Shine A Light

While CanWest’s control over Canada’s media sheds a disturbing light on the future of media consolidation, the concentration of ownership has in actuality been a major problem brewing in Canada for the past half-century. When The Vancouver Sun and The Province first merged their competing newspapers under a single management company called Pacific Press in 1957 because of economic problems, the federal government investigated the deal and found it would likely be “to the detriment of the public.” However, it backed away from taking any action.

When corporate chains came to control an alarming 77 percent of the country’s circulation, the 1970 Davey Committee stated that “all transactions that increase concentration of ownership in the mass media are undesirable and contrary to the public interest – unless otherwise shown,” and recommended the country form a press review board to rule on mergers. However, none of its recommendations were implemented.

When two major newspaper chains, Southam and Thompson, colluded to each shut down a competing newspaper in Ottawa and Winnipeg in 1980 and both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers were officially handed over to the Southams, the Royal Commission on Newspapers stated that “freedom of the press is not a property right of owners,” and recommended strict ownership limits. Again, no action was taken.

And when a Senate committee on media concentration released a report in 2006 stating, “the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable” and recommended that large mergers be publicly reviewed, it was outright dismissed by Heritage Minister Bev Oda who argued that “convergence has become an essential business strategy in order to stay competitive.”

Despite an endless amount of evidence provided by federal commissions and investigations showing how dangerous it is to a democracy when fewer companies control the media market – foreign bureaus are reduced, staff is cut back and quality diminished – no Canadian government has ever tried to put the brakes on consolidation. By ignoring the problem for the past 50 years, it has been allowed to grow into a full-blown crisis.

Today, reporters at CanWest simply go through the motions and many veteran journalists say their main goal is to try and get an early buyout from the corporation. Others say they personally tell journalism students to stay out of the business. Seeing the writing on the wall, many journalism students at colleges and universities from Vancouver to Ottawa say they have little interest entering an industry that they had such high hopes for only a few years earlier. Once considered a respected and noble profession that challenged authority and represented its community, CanWest’s consolidation has killed any sense of pride Canadian journalist once had in their job.

The most obvious example of consolidation run amok is Vancouver, where one corporation has such a tight control over the city that it gets away with bullying its reporters and slanting its news coverage without ever being challenged. The problems inside the Sun and CanWest papers will be repeated across the country if consolidation is allowed to continue unabated. Because the priority of the paper’s corporate controller is on the bottom line instead of the public trust, a once-proud newspaper chain has turned into a skeleton of its former self. Reporters at CanWest papers who don’t conform the corporate perspective have few options or alternatives since CanWest owns the majority of media in most of their cities. Despite the restrictions, some reporters have managed to produce good journalism, but those that try to speak out have been harassed, silenced and sent packing. When journalists are denied the resources and can’t truthfully disseminate information, the entire public is held hostage. It’s time to set them free.

_Sean Condon

 
 

COMMENTS:

check out Canadians For Democratic Media: http://democraticmedia.ca
democratic

why don't the reporters all threaten strike or start their own alternative paper in vancouver? or how about the blackpost... a play on blackspot?
project aristotle

Granted, the consolidation craze has gone too far to have any good impact on civil rights and the democratic process in general, but i'm skeptical whenever someone tries to sell the story of a city held hostage or an editorial tyranny that's just short from summoning thunderclouds over the paper's office. People can't be boxed into an opinion as easily as one might expect, and even if Asper or Murdoch choke all dissent within their ranks and continue to grow, the people whose minds they are trying to change will soon reach out to other venues for their media dose, most notably the internet. Media isn't as static as it once was, and a close look at history can tell us that even when the ruling elite had full control on the media (radio, tv, papers and billboards), the information that goes against the party line simply heads underground where it can enjoy a lot more notoriety and therefore leave a stronger impression with its audience. The best thing we can do is let them flail vainly at what they believe is the threat, let them spend their billions, replace the rational by the rabid, and dig their own way down to inescapable irrelevance. The middle class suburbanites that make the bulk of the readers are an endangered social class, and most of the bingo grandmas are heading for the Big Sleep. Their base is fading away, anyone under 30 who buys a paper is either an exception or just got a puppy for their birthday.
Alex

And who said Hitler is dead? His use of propaganda and media convergance in Nazi controlled Germany was a primer by which corporations now operate globally. It's a sobering reality that these so called democracies are beginning to look like corporate run oligarchies. The only way I see to put an end to it is unrealistic but, for everyone to stop financial participation with those corporations at any level. Maybe, one day we'll see a form of Neurenberg trials for CEOs and other corporate lackeys for their overt crimes against humanity.
RT

Alex...you are correct that anyone under 30 hardly reads the paper but it is also true that hardly anyone under 30 votes or makes enough money to buy a house, car, shop at the supermarket....the tyrannical, despotic, mainstream media has chosen their audience wisely. And heading underground is the worst possible thing that can happen. How many people are like you and I and take the time to dig to the bottom and explore the underground? Sadly the answer is very few. Please don't underestimate their power. There are shades of Ellsworth Toohey in your post, from Ayn Rand's novel Fountainhead. I do agree with your ideas about the internet, being a new, truthful, unrestricted area for free speech, as you mentioned that media has control of radio, TV, papers and billboards. The question is how to get people to hit the truthful websites?
wormwood

I read newspapers less and less. Newspapers lie. With this rag's predictably bland style of journalism, very rarely are writers' works published who are brave enough to report something with even a bit more truth to it. I suspect that in slipping past the corporate editorial censor, the braver writers have risked losing some income or a job at the paper. As I read: you do not use money and you encourage us to quit the job. And, I get myself more and more that I am worth immeasurably more than the lie of a murderous job in exchange for worthless money. Stop reading the rags. And, write. As for a faceless news corpse talking about my father, I don't talk about other people's stuff. Mayhaps, I speak about my experience of someone else's experience. Better, I speak my truth about my stuff. Shit comes up. We don't get to choose, we only get to choose how we respond. Attitude.
Mark Stock

this is utterly frightening. i like the blackpost idea, project aristotle.
vanessa

It's just not happening in Vancouver. In smaller cities and towns, many of their newspapers have been taken over and most of the staff replaced with specially selected followers of the new ownership's views who drop news for advertising for corporations and bogus political campaigns.
Mike Smith

The one form of media that traditional media companies cannot control is the Internet. While TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards are all controlled by a handful of corporations and the CRTC preserves their monopoly in the case of TV and radio, the Internet is largely unregulated and has low barriers to entry. Sure, large media corporations can have a web presence, but on the Internet they face heavy competition from foreign mainstream media and untraditional media like blogs and wikis. Starting a website is cheap and easy, and thousands of them are popping up daily. Websites are an ideal place for criticism and advocacy since they are independent and free of the influence of advertisers, media conglomerates and shareholders. Since we cannot compete with the mass media's advertising budgets, we must rely on word of mouth and postering to advertise these so desperately needed alternative news sources.
Andrew

Anyone know any for-profit newspapers run as social ventures – all profits go to running the paper as opposed to quarterly returns for shareholders?
John

The only thing that will make these people pay attention is the loss of ad revenue. A boycott of their advertisers would be the first step. The thing is, and I've seen this many times, is that any desperately needed alternative news source that dares call itself authoritative will quickly be demonized by the same lefty voices who are crying out for it now. So, basically, we're screwed. I LOVE GEORGE BUSH! Say it a few times. It gets easier and easier.
SFJohn

Oh god, stay away from anything CanWest, complete garbage. Two year olds could come up with more interesting stories. I don't blame the writers, but the owners know NOTHING of print, still stuck in the Barber Green Road era Global TV thinking. Think CNN light.
Robert

I have been in a somewhat parallel situation as the one the Vancouver Sun writers face. Ultimately it comes down to this fact: When you are willing to put your life, time, and effort into the advancement of the unworthy, in this case it is the newspaper and corporation they feel oppressed by, you are contributing to the success of the unworthy and are partly to blame for their power. Your effort their success. IT takes a lot of soul searching but there is ultimately only one thing on the table here and that is ones own sense of integrity and dignity. You cannot get away with a-weeping and a-wailing about the wrongdoers, while your efforts support them, forever. You'll just get incredibly sick. You must decide, to quit or not to quit the newspaper, and whether or not you will go down fighting. Dear writers, you have the opportunity to be historic and heroic. Everyone has at least one mouth to feed and I know the cornered feeling one gets when ones livelihood is on the line. And it is particularly painful when you went into your profession for the noblest of reasons, having to turn your back on it and regroup. But I can say from experience that very often the universe seems to take care of you when you face these tough decisions, in spite of the odds against you. Chin up writers, and fight the good fight or quit while you're ahead. In this case ahead means you still have the will to get out of bed in the morning. Just know that if you have a strong sense of integrity, you will get sick if you don't do something. Take your stand and prove that journalism is a calling and not just a job. This situation is just the stuff your best stories are made of and everyone loves a hero.
Dewi

Project Aristotle? Some people have gone underground, namely David Beers, once editor of the Vancouver Sun, to create one of the best sources of investigative journalism in Canada and perhaps even North America. Definitely worth checking out, and this coming from someone still shy of 30. come on, 20 somethings aren't that apathetic... thetyee.ca
Candice

The situation can't be as hopeless as this article makes it out to be. Why aren't veteran journalists, instead of recommending students don't enter the industry, supporting newer journalists in starting their own newspapers? Or examine new ways to disseminate information? There is such a strong community of student journalists crosscountry. Why aren't more established journalists working with organizations like Canadian University Press to help the new crop of reporters to be entreprenurial. Yes, people under 30 may not be reading a hard copy of the newspaper so why not examine how to improve online journalism? The convergence and editorial control exerted by CanWest and others is definitely the reason I chose not to pursue employment with a major paper but I've never for a moment considered giving up on journalism entirely. I've just had to rethink how to apply it.
Miranda

Saturday, March 29, 2008 NEW Content Regularly Front Page Free Bulletin Subscriptions Donations Your Feedback Classified Ads Boutique RSS/Newswire Search Our Sponsors About Us Useful URLs The decline of the Kingston WhigStandard New Editor also serves on the Kingston Chamber of Commerce. Dateline: Monday, March 24, 2008 by Jamie Swift Kingston's WhigStandard once enjoyed a reputation as a quality newspaper. Owned locally, the Whig had a big newsroom and reporters could cover specific beats like the Ontario city's famous prisons. No more. The WhigStandard was sold again last year. It may have been just before or just after the passing of a local car dealer made frontpage news for two days running. In the seventeen years since the paper fell into the hands of corporate chains, the Whig has been owned by Southam, Hollinger Conrad Black and his fellow kleptocrats, Osprey and now Sun Media, part of the Peladeau family the Peladeau family's Quebecor empire. The new regime at the Whig has meant that even less money is being invested in covering the news. The Whig's publisher is Ron Laurin. And reporters have even been told by the publisher how to compose their stories. A case in point: On November 28, 2007 Laurin sent a memo to theneditor Christina Spencer instructing his underlings how to describe Kingston's controversial downtown arena, a pet project of the city's business elite. We need to discontinue our practice of referring to our City's new Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre as an arena, wrote Laurin. This is an ad man's perspective. It's all about branding. Understandable, if you see a local paper simply as a promotional vehicle for pet projects of the booster boys. But troublesome if you're a journalist who values the integrity of your craft. In all the years I've been there, it's never been this bad, said one longtime Whig reporter. This is an attack on our ethics. How can they tell us what words to use? The new regime at the Whig has meant that even less money is being invested in covering the news. Few reporters remain. Photographs get bigger, even though the number of photographers has shrunk. On one midwinter day Page Two was dominated by three large photos of senior citizens playing pingpong. Longtime photographer and community columnist Jack Chiang departed last year. The Whig hired no one new to fill his shoes. His salary seems to have left town, headed for Sun Media's bottom line. For three days running around Christmas last year, the Whig ran a series of large front page photos above the fold. They featured people shopping at the mall. Newspapers have traditionally placed what editors consider an important issue of the day in a prominent place. Hence, the use of the term above the fold in a broadsheet like the Whig. In early January, as Kenya was rocked by postelection riots in which hundreds died, the front page of the National/World section trumpeted an Associated Press story out of Los Angeles: Britney Spears had lost custody of her children. Editor Christina Spencer quit late last year. Instead of considering the seasoned crew of reporters with lots of Kingston experience, the Sun Media boss interviewed but one person, a junior staffer with scant daily newspaper experience. As it turns out, his choice, Steve Serviss, serves on the board of the local Chamber of Commerce. When the Whig announced that Serviss would be stepping up to the Managing Editor job, it reported his leadership position in a prominent special interest group unblushingly, without any sense of embarrassment or inkling that this could be considered a conflict of interest. As City Editor, Serviss once assigned an awardwinning reporter to cover a jump in ridership of the Confederation Tour Trolley, run by the Chamber of Commerce. When a newspaper's senior editorial staff are heading up the local Chamber of Commerce, any sense of independent news analysis goes out the window, said prominent local author and former magazine editor Wayne Grady, incoming chair of the Writers' Union of Canada. Suddenly, what is perceived as being good for business automatically becomes good for the newspaper, whether it is good for the community or not. A journalist cannot run with the hares and hunt with the news hounds. In a February letter to the Whig a writer sympathetic to the US invasion of Iraq and Canada's war in Afghanistan was sputtering angrily about a Whig editorial sympathetic to American deserters seeking refuge in Canada: Deserters are cowards without honour. This sort of thinking is common enough in Kingston, a retirement town with a military base, legions of old soldiers and streets named after Crimean War battles and artillery shells. Yet this particular scribe had a point. How could the Whig keep displaying a yellow, supportourtroops symbol from its masthead and still run editorials supporting deserters? Such editorials were decidedly unsupportive of our forces were they not? Running them along with the yellow ribbon was a marvellous display of hypocrisy, was it not? Despite the general decline of the local daily, things still sometimes work as they should. A thin divide preferably a solid firewall still separates the publisher from the people who actually provide the paper's content. So it was that the same paper could carry the yellow ribbon and a message that did not hew to the Official Story. Of course, the Official Story in Kingston is that yellow ribbons have nothing whatsoever to do with the Afghan war's merits. It's just about, well, about what the ribbon says. Support Our Troops. It's not about the crucial question of why our troops are, in the words of the old World War I song Over There. It's simply assumed that, once the war starts, ours is not to reason why. Justifying the decision to dangle the yellow ribbon from the paper's masthead, publisher Ron Laurin claimed in a Remembrance Day advertorial that it was the Whig's way of supporting the troops whose efforts allow us the freedom we enjoy everyday sic. The Canadian military are apparently somehow involved in a replay of our liberation of Normandy from Hitler's claws. The freelancer hired to pen the advertorial described this with no apparent irony as an insight. Jamie Swift is a Kingston author of 10 books including, most recently with Keith Stewart, Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario's Electric Empire.
Jamie Swift

Name:
Your thoughts:

Note: To eliminate spam and other abuses, all comments must be manually approved by a moderator before posting. Rarely, this can take up to a couple of days. Legitimate comments may be subject to light editing for the sake of clarity.

To foster open dialogue, pointlessly abusive or threatening comments will be deleted, as will comments that clearly violate hate speech laws in Canada (where Adbusters' servers are located). A note from the moderator will always be posted to indicate that such a comment has been deleted.

If you have any comments or concerns about this process, feel free to email websubmissions[at]adbusters[dot]org.