Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 11 - Evidence - June 10, 2003
OTTAWA, Tuesday, June 10, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:35 a.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we have a quorum. I welcome our witness, as well as members of the public across Canada. This is a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, which is examining the state of the Canadian news media.
[Translation]
The committee is examining the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent, and diverse, in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years, notably, globalization, technological change, convergence and increased concentration of ownership.
[English]
Today we have before us Mr. Kirk LaPointe, who is a former Senior Vice-President of CTV News, Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Hamilton Spectator, founding Executive Editor of the National Post, Editor-in- Chief and General Manager of Southam News, host on CBC Newsworld, Ottawa Bureau Chief of the Canadian Press, and he currently works on strategic projects for the Toronto Star. It is hard to get a more diverse view of the Canadian news industry than that.
Welcome to the committee, Mr. LaPointe. We ask our witnesses to give an opening statement and then we will move on to questions and comments.
Mr. Kirk LaPointe, As an individual: Thank you for the invitation to appear today before your committee, as part of its examination of media. I have had the privilege of working as a colleague of Senator Fraser, as some of you may know. Even if we were to stop right now, this would be the longest stretch she has ever really listened to me.
I have read with great interest the transcripts of the hearings to date, and I look forward to not only the other witnesses but also to your final report and what it will say. Even though I am working these days on some projects for the publisher of the Toronto Star and on a book on media, obviously my remarks today are as a private individual representing my experience but not any past or present employer.
What I hope I can bring today is contemporary understanding of our country's news organizations, an insider's view into mainstream media in this country, and advice on a particular priority for the craft of journalism in the years ahead. Therefore I will have a recommendation at the end here.
At its best, journalism is a calling, it is a form of public enlightenment, and it is a forerunner of justice and a cornerstone of democracy. Its founding principle is loyalty to the market it serves, and all its practices respect that principle.
From an economic standpoint, journalism trusts in a virtuous circle, that a commitment to strong content leads to greater public appreciation, which in turn leads to improved financial performance. If it had to be forced into a slogan it would be something like, "the good guys believe quality sells."
Good journalism leads the public affairs experience and it defines or reflects the day's talking points of a community it serves without breaching its standards. There are a few things I want to dispel. Journalists do not so much publish the truth as they do pursue it. Journalists are not guided by the unrealistic concept of objectivity or the mathematical precision of exact balance in their accounts. Instead they seek equitable treatment and a distributive fairness in their work.
We live in a media paradox. Never have we consumed so much media and yet found media so unable to serve our needs. Never have we had so much media choice but heard so many complaints about homogeneity of perspectives. Never have we produced better-educated journalists and yet considered them so untrustworthy. Never have we had so much information and so little context. Never have journalists involved themselves in and listened to their communities more and yet been so seemingly disconnected from the people they serve.
These hearings, I am sure, are bound to encounter many similar diagnoses. Where I might differ today is in the cause of what afflicts journalism and in the prescriptions. Some of my views might seem contrarian in this context.
First, while I am not an apologist for big media — of course I have been employed by big media a lot — I believe big media do greater things for the public than do small media. They invest more and they risk more in times of ambition, and they permit more and they protect more in times of difficulty than do small operations. In an era of tremendous media fragmentation and resulting declines in audiences for newspapers in particular, big media have preserved more and persevered more than small media ever could have.
Big media are not intrinsically or automatically bad, as someone suggested. In this country, compared with the rest of the world, they are very good. For their size they maintain strong records of community service, and high levels of employment and investment in journalism, by industry standards worldwide. The national newspaper war, which I would argue was the best tonic for journalism in this country in the last half century, endures because big companies chose to create it, fight it and sustain it.
We do not have much data in our country, but I note that a news study from the Pew Center in the United States revealed last month no connection at all between cross-media ownership and inferior or declining journalism. Good and bad media can occur in almost any corporate framework. Big media operate under stress, some admittedly of their own making. As imperfect as they are, they remain our best bet in ensuring competitive, enterprising media in the years ahead when, in my opinion, an organization's scale will be an important weapon in the fight to preserve adequate resources for journalism as audiences further fragment.
Second, while I am not a full convert to the benefits of convergence, it is far too early to declare it a failure or even judge its potential. Convergence is not dead; I do not even think it is truly born yet. Convergence will only arrive when a new experience emerges for media. Presumably it will be a sum larger than the component elements of pictures, sound and text. Presumably it will feature some interactivity with some ambit for the user to explore more deeply on a topic of his or her choosing. Presumably it will offer some direct access to the creators or to the subjects of the journalism, and presumably it will satisfy the next generation of media consumers who appear anything but interested right now in newspapers, television and radio.
I say presumably because we are not there yet, and we may not be for some time. We are not even really sure where "there" is right now. Therefore we need to wait for this new experience to emerge and do nothing to discourage people and companies from experimenting with it, from shaping it and creating it. When it happens we will have something to assess. Meantime, what we can assess is something a little different from convergence. It is more a form of corporate collaboration, the attempts to sell advertising and produce content, and move it across broadcast print and on-line platforms of particular companies.
The journalistic collaboration in all of this involves sharing information, joint investigation and synchronized but separate presentation of stories or special series. In my experience, particularly at CTV, it has been a profoundly positive addition to journalism overall. It is not perfect, but definitely positive. At the high end of journalism, where we put our best people on to stories and where we do our most investigation, what this collaboration ensures is that the best newsroom work is brought to a much larger audience — an audience for television that might not read a newspaper and vice versa. As a result, it achieves a far greater impact and offers, in the long run, greater potential for journalism to provide a wider public service.
The federal broadcast regulator already ensures distinct decision making and presentation structures in broadcast and print media. It does so in broadcasting, of course, where it has direct responsibility but it has an impact on print media as well. Broadcasters have committed to independent monitoring of their journalism to field public complaints. These new vehicles are valuable in serving the public interest, and before anything else is brought to bear on the conduct of journalism these measures should be given more time for evaluation.
The critics of convergence are really criticizing something else I think. It is either this collaboration, it is larger industry consolidation, or it is the matter of concentration of ownership. These words may start with the same two letters, but collaboration, consolidation and concentration are not convergence.
Third, while I am not a full defender of my craft, we need to appreciate the challenges of the role today and the accomplishments of journalists under extraordinary pressure. Yes, we are too often stenographers and too infrequently investigators. Granted we do not have the expertise or experience many days to qualify as surrogates for the public on many complex issues and areas. We are susceptible to spin, to sources with an agenda, to special interests and to the sophisticated. We slip up, we say and write things that lack precision or leave us open to criticism of bias and, agreed, we make mistakes. We make mistakes like everyone else, but we seem to hide them better than anyone else. We do not open ourselves to inspection the way we demand of others, and rather than building greater trust by acknowledging how human we are, we are trying to retain what remains of our trust by denying that we err at all. Of course we err. Is it any wonder?
A few years ago we tried in Hamilton to count the number of decisions in one day that our newsroom made in producing the paper. We lost track around 500,000, in one day. It is fair to say that we should be surprised more things do not go wrong.
The Attorney General of the United States — I believe it was Schlesinger at the time — once wrote a newspaper editor to say that the section of the paper that made him most angry was the area devoted to corrections, not because of what it contained but because it led people to believe that the rest of the paper was true. I think there is a greater generosity of spirit in our audience than we realize, and failing to concede mistakes is only creating doubt, uncertainty and eventual suspicion and mistrust.
Still, while they may not be perfect, before we further run down those who own and conduct our media, we need to ask ourselves exactly when was there a golden age. I came to Ottawa in early 1980s and as I arrived for my first night shift I noticed that almost everyone had a stubby bottle of beer or a tumbler of booze on their desks. I think we employed someone at night principally to fetch drinks from the Press Club. The Press Gallery, working over in the Centre Block, had an absolutely wonderful bar that opened extremely early and often. As I recall, it was the first bar that gave me a credit line.
When was this golden age? Was it when women and visible minorities were excluded systematically from our newsrooms? Was it when the lives of women and newcomers to Canada were marginalized or misrepresented in our media? Was it when reporters would tuck their note pads into their pockets when world leaders would tell off-colour stories? Was it when members of our press gallery had free passes to ride the train? Was it further back when newspapers were not only extensions of political parties but denied entire streams of political views to be heard?
I respect the power of the call of independent journalism, but I wonder about the power of recall. I worry that those who crave restoration of the great old days carry a little revisionism as they wax nostalgic. Money was much easier to spend in earlier times in media with little or no competition because money was much easier to make. We have never had a more diverse, educated, conscientious, disciplined and democratic media in our history, and our country stands alongside any other country in the world as one with strong protection, freedoms of expression and minimal involvement of the state in the media.
I understand the frustrations many have with journalism. The few times someone is silly enough to write about me, I feel the same way. Whenever I know a lot about a topic, I am often astounded at how inelegantly it is handled in the press or how they missed the real story or how they took things out of context. I use all the same terms that critics do about the stuff that I used to write.
If you want to improve the quality of media, please do not recommend launching another outlet. I would be happy to explore what I have seen in the testimony in the way of a proposal for a new national newspaper idea that has been discussed here, but I have some serious doubts about its true editorial need. I have absolute conviction that any newspaper created to fulfil a public policy of national accessibility, like the CBC, would easily cost more than the CBC.
The most significant need for our journalists right now is professional development. In my experience, this is a weak point with our industry. We typically wind up, as Canadians, going to the United States for mid-career training. We need a built-in-Canada solution, a centre of excellence in this country, to help journalists in mid-career better understand law, economics, international issues, statistics, technology, cultural diversity, spirituality, the arts, government, and even politics. Media need a place to help them master such new techniques as computer-assisted reporting and freedom of information, and to revitalize such traditional techniques as basic research, interviewing, broadcasting and writing. This would generate greater expertise and competence in the working press in much shorter order.
Canada also needs an independent research centre to help organizations understand changes in society and their influence on media; to understand trends and best practices in media, here and elsewhere, in ethics and in such fields as performance management. We do not have that today. Again, we go to the United States for that. The general public needs a centre to help it understand and demand the best media. Done properly, a new national centre of excellence could be an international asset. Other countries have them, through government involvement, through charitable trusts or through non-partisan financing, various arrangements that draw partly on journalistic revenue with strong permanent underwriting.
Our communications in journalism schools are terrific for the most part. They are sending plenty of great new voices into the craft, but the turnover in our business is not high, and it could take two, three or four decades before that new workforce is actually the incumbent workforce. A centre for journalism would address needs much sooner and in a much more sustainable way.
In closing, rather than focus on particular companies and outlets, rather than further diluting our audience and workforce with another media choice, rather than trying to, in some respects, capture an earlier time that might not be possible, I would suggest building something that will improve the entire craft, something that will enjoy the support of all its elements, and something the public will use in an era where media will be increasingly important.
The Chairman: I have listened to you in the past, and it was interesting. It was interesting today, so there.
Senator Graham: Thank you for coming, Mr. LaPointe. Your bona fides are substantial, and your record and your performance precede you.
You mentioned at the outset that newspapers do not necessarily publish the truth but pursue the truth. I would hope they do both. It reminds me of a story. Years ago, a well-loved mayor of Halifax ran into the news editor at CJCH. He said, "I do not care what you say about me, but say it." In other words, he just wanted his name before the public.
I guess what people are looking for is the truth, absolutely, and balance. Perhaps you would like to comment on that, but I will throw in a second question. We had Patrick Watson before the committee a few weeks ago, and he talked about a taxpayer-funded newspaper. I just happened to pick up an article from The Sunday Halifax Herald that had a picture of Mr. Watson, and the headline was, "A Taxpayer-Funded Newspaper" and the sub-head is, "A bad old idea that should be buried for good." He referred back to this idea first coming up about 30 years ago in discussions between Mr. Watson and Peter Gzowski. Do you have any views on that?
Mr. LaPointe: I have read as many transcripts as I could find on the Internet. I would say the Internet might ultimately be the solution to the concept of publishing a national newspaper.
The secret about newspapers is that they lose money on printing and distribution. They make money on advertising, which usually comprises 75 to 80 per cent of revenue. Circulation money would be another 20 per cent. Your actual publication, the newsprint, the ink, the printing presses, the trucks to drive them to the places and the carriers to deliver them, are tremendous loss leaders for a newspaper.
When I examined the idea and studied carefully what Mr. Watson discussed initially, what he was proposing was something I inferred would be every bit as accessible to Canadians in almost every town and hamlet as the CBC, which is almost universally available in this county. Less than 1 per cent cannot receive CBC over the air, by cable, or by satellite. To emulate that with a newspaper project would consume a vast amount of money. If you want a big city newspaper that is somewhat competitive with The Globe and Mail and National Post, you can create a business model like that, but what do you then say to people who want to get it in parts of the country where they now get the CBC? They consider this the same sort of vehicle, a media vehicle underwritten by tax dollars.
I think you will be spending more on creating it and distributing it than you are now in all of the CBC, or you would have to obtain massive amounts of advertising revenue to offset those costs. I am sceptical that such advertising exists in this country. If it does, it would certainly come out of the hides of the people who are already churning out newspapers in each of these communities.
It is not like launching the CBC when broadcasting was getting launched overall. What you are doing here is backing into a business that has existed for upwards of 150 years in our country. It is a very difficult entry.
It is possible that over a number of years ahead there will be things like broadband technology and other things that give people online or other sources of access where you conquer those physical, infrastructural hurdles of publication and distribution. In that sense maybe you then have a business model that works, where all your expense is not going into pushing out the product, but into your content. However, that is a long way off. It is a major hurdle. It is not yet something worth contemplating because we do not really know the evolution of technology: how it will be available; whether we will have any kind of a technological divide in our country yet; whether there will be public policy to give everyone access to the Internet; and other types of things. Until we know we would receive it as easily as we now receive television or radio, I would counsel away from it. It is a very big financial burden.
Senator Graham: You referred to a centre for journalism, a world-class institute to develop professionally those who are going to work in the field of journalism, be it print or broadcast media. We do have Carleton, Ryerson and King's in Halifax and other schools. How would you differentiate between what you are thinking about and the schools I mentioned? You mentioned they exist in other countries. Perhaps you could give us an indication of the countries and the schools.
Mr. LaPointe: I am familiar with the institutes in the U.S.: the American Press Institute, the Poynter Institute, and the Pew Centre for Press and the Public. These all wear different types of hats. With Poynter it is in conjunction with the universities in Florida. How they differentiate from schools of communication and journalism is they see their mandate as the professional development of people already in the craft as opposed to those who are approaching it. Rather than get students ready for the working world, they get workers ready to study more. They reverse the flow on this and they are typically of greatest use to people who want to develop a form of expertise after a couple of years in reporting, managing and editing. They hold different types of professional ensembles, and they conduct research that is a little bit more market driven than some of the institutions in Canada where there is a slightly more academic bent to the research being produced.
The standard people use for industry is that you should be spending between 1 percent and 2 percent of your overall revenue on professional development training, reskilling your employees. I do not think there is a media company in our country that would be doing that. I think that it is often extremely difficult. You hire people. You like them and you try to keep them in their jobs as much as possible, and you do not free them much for professional development because you often cannot afford to replace them. It is particularly acute as a problem for smaller organizations that do not have the flexibility. A professional centre would enjoy the support of an industry, because I think it would enjoy it in a way that schools are not always going to enjoy it. I think it would be a positive contribution to a craft. I would see it more widely than the creation of greater expertise in the craft of journalism and the conduct of media in this country. The public is increasingly interested in media studies and affairs. Our schools are replete now with media studies courses that go back into grade school now. There is a greater use of media than ever before, more time that is being spent with it, critical examination of it by the public and greater scrutiny. Something like this would also serve a tremendous public role in that it would facilitate a better exchange and dialogue with the public and the media on the processes and the techniques and lead to probably a better understanding — maybe not a better appreciation, but certainly a better understanding.
Senator Graham: How would this professional centre be funded?
Mr. LaPointe: The models vary here and abroad. Principally in the United States you have tremendous tax incentives for people to contribute to a foundation that ultimately builds these. In some cases you have different forms of post-secondary institution financing that can be used. You have a greater sense of endowment in the United States with some of these facilities. They do draw on the journalistic community to finance them. It is expensive to send a journalist to one of these places and to take a course for a week. What they do serve is as great facilities. They have the expertise, state-of-the-art intelligence around best practices, and so they get great buy-in from the media industry because they are seen as credible and practical. They are not seen as things that have any sort of agenda. They are non- partisan in nature. They furnish revitalization in the workforce and it is hard to put a dollar value on all that. All of us have probably felt best in our craft when we have been able to go away for a couple of days, do some thinking, get some new training and come back to our workplaces rejuvenated. I hate to see that happening as a bit of a drain into the United States. I would prefer to see it happen in this country, but the momentum for it does not exist because the incentives are not necessarily there.
Senator Phalen: I am curious to know whose role you think it would be to establish a national centre of excellence? How does it get off the ground?
Mr. LaPointe: You have to assert leadership at a governmental level to put the incentives in place, whether they become tax measures that provide incentives for companies to do more in the way of training or to finance, and whether there are other either one-time or sustaining grants that go to a facility like this to secure its financing to make sure it is going to be launched successfully and sustained. I am agnostic about the approach on this. I do not have the magic bullet on this one. It is a concept worth exploring. It would develop great currency at the grassroots of journalism where I think our journalists would be very interested in it. Also, I think there would be an acceptance in management and leadership of media that an institute aimed at professional development on common ground would avert all these organizations from sending their journalists abroad to get the kind of training that know they can get here. We might be able to reverse the flow and have other journalists from other countries come to take in some things. There are fantastic endeavours, particularly through CBC, of international training measures. The CBC sends people abroad all the time to train. In this country we have an excellent reputation internationally for the calibre of training we get and on-the-job conduct that sets a very high standard. We can export a lot of our expertise to a lot of other countries to teach them, but we do not do a great job in teaching our own and continually upgrading them.
Senator Eyton: Over 20 years ago, a group of Canadians representing academe, business and journalism got together and founded the Canadian Journalism Foundation. I make the observation as a participant that, at the time, it was driven from the top and the notion was that all of these clever leaders could fashion a foundation that would instil the proper attitudes, research and professional work by Canadian journalists. It seemed to me it did not work very well.
Approximately 10 years ago, someone made the brilliant suggestion of asking the journalists what they would like to see and learn and do. Since then it has been quite a remarkable success, on a small budget.
Are you familiar with the work of that foundation and whether it may be part of the solution when you refer to a national centre for journalism? Perhaps, I am thinking here of the Canadian Journalism Foundation squared, or something of that nature?
Mr. LaPointe: I am more than happy to praise the foundation because the organization I ran last year won its award of excellence. I have attended many of those sessions that are in an informal setting, where 20, 30 or 40 people gather to discuss something like justice issues, Aboriginal issues, and a number of different issues. They have a great night-long exchange that builds a better appreciation between journalist and expert in the field.
The foundation has had its ups and downs. In recent years, it has enjoyed, and then sometimes not enjoyed, the support of many of the media organizations. However, in terms of the spirit of the intention of professional development and widening expertise, it serves that role extremely well. In terms of exponentially trying to build on it, I believe that would be well received in our communities.
The downside of the foundation is that often its activities are in Toronto and sometimes in Ottawa. There is a great need in the wider part of the country, but there are budgetary issues obviously, involving the foundation, that mitigate against that.
These types of initiatives need to be national in scope and need to reach into the regions. Particularly, they need to bring along the local journalist, the person who is not operating at a national level, who does not have the access to resources that people in the parliamentary press gallery have, or in a legislative press gallery across the country. Those are the ones where you can make a difference in a short stretch of time with a small amount of professional development. They can be finding better stories, better serving their community, and understanding its needs. That is a positive addition and a real contribution.
The Chairman: I want to be sure I understand what you are talking about.
When I was in the business, I went more than once to the American Press Institute outside Washington for various training experiences. Those were absolutely terrific, but they were of another order than the kind of thing that the Canadian journalism foundation has been even able to dream of. These were courses of a week or 10 days, extremely intensive with instructors brought in from all over the United States, very detailed critiques of your work.
If you were doing senior management courses, there was a sophisticated computer program where you ran model newspapers for a week and you lived and died by the bottom line.
If you were journalistically oriented, they provided, more than any other experience I had had, a concentrated exchange of withering criticism, encouragement and introduction to best practices.
Nothing like that exists in this country. Is that what you are talking about?
Mr. LaPointe: It is, in large measure. However, I would say that some of the discussions that the foundation and other places have occasionally set up are also the types of encounters that we need more of in this country. Yes, there is that kind of boot camp approach that the American Press Institute has. There is always a happy ending by the way. They always try to leave you upbeat so you do not feel deflated and wanting to move into public relations. I believe it is a mix of all these things.
What do we do once we arrive, once we get in? The schools are terrific and very competitive. They judge your work critically, and they do not make it easy to get through. The entrance interviews are spectacularly harsh sometimes, to make sure you have the mettle to work in a newsroom.
Once you get there, you can go months and years without anything beyond on-the-job training. It is not through a malignant approach of the employer. Professional development and performance management, and that type of thing have happened to mature industries. Journalism is not yet a terrifically mature business. We are still largely fashioned as a craft. We resist a lot of the professional standards. We seem to enjoy the fact that we do not have them, but, at the same time, we know our responsibilities are supremely high. We know that we have an obligation to bone up on the most complex things existing in the world.
It is hard to get from here to there. You often are left on your own, or with a mentor or two, in a newspaper. I think professional development is something whose time has come.
Senator Gustafson: Mr. LaPointe, I want to say that you brought a very interesting witness, especially on big media and small media.
I will use an example of my own experience of 24 years in politics. Big media never knew I was there in rural Canada. Small media, 15 newspapers in rural Canada, covered every step I took. Maybe had big media followed me I would not have survived, who knows?
However, there is something happening in Canada and that is the collapse of rural Canada. In Western Canada, Western alienation is very active and it appears to me that media plays a part in this. I would like to hear your comments on that and what could be done about that?
Mr. LaPointe: That is a very tough and large question with which I have had to contend on a number of fronts in the organizations I have run. At CTV we actually created a job that was all about rural issues. We decided that there was something vital to be heard from smaller communities and the agricultural sector. There was an entire, different country out there that was not making it to our airwaves. We took it upon ourselves to create the beat and place it in Saskatchewan. We moved other efforts into different places. We had developed a beat on food safety, again to try to bring greater expertise to the real clash that is taking place out there on fronts like the food supply and genetic engineering. These are areas where I think we are susceptible, as media, to hearing loud cries, to going to press conferences and to accepting the protest noise without further studying it. We were trying to bring greater sense and expertise to what can often be a bit of a shouting exchange.
As for the issue of Western alienation, I have worked here for nearly 15 years and I heard routinely in both houses, and at committee level, and certainly among the MPs and senators who were from the West, that there was a national media that really did not pay much attention to them. I think it has frequently been a fair point.
The last time I was at the Canadian Press we still had an agricultural beat. We still considered it important because we had so many newspaper members in the West that were looking for news from this city. When you fail to cover things, when you fail to return a message home from Ottawa, you contribute to the disconnection. It becomes one of those issues like the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it. There are vast amounts of work being done day by day in this precinct that are never reported back. They could be tremendously relevant to those communities, but the resources are not applied to them. I know it was extremely difficult to balance, as a manager, when you looked at your available resources, your available talent, and tried to put equitability into your system.
The good organizations continue to do it. They consider regional coverage every bit as important as their overall national coverage. Local coverage still is uppermost in the minds of any media I know. We run the risk of creating a phony national dialogue if we do not continue to honour the things that take place in our regions and the work that is done in the national capital for our regions. I concede that there is a real point in what you say.
Senator Gustafson: You mentioned American media several times. I live 20 miles from the U.S. border and I would say, within the 100 miles of the U.S. border there is a strong American influence, even in the media, in this way. If I wanted to get the market on cattle or on grain, I would put on Williston radio station because it is almost impossible to get it in Canada.
You can get it if there is a farm broadcast on Saturday morning, but if you want to get the market currently and every day, you turn on the American station.
They have had rural problems too. All you have to do is drive through North Dakota and Montana and it is, in some cases, more deflated than Saskatchewan. The media is there. You hear the same thing in advertising and in general consensus. I would like to hear your response to that.
Canada is becoming very quickly an urban-controlled society. In the country where land is so important, it seems that, in my opinion, we are missing something very serious.
Mr. LaPointe: The importance is to not lose that perspective, all the while making sure that you document and chronicle the tremendous changes taking place in our urban communities right now.
There is also, I think, fair criticism of media that it did not keep abreast of what was happening in our cities, particularly as the complexion of our population changed, as we developed greater multiculturalism and greater ethnicity in centres like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa.
This was a profound change in our demography and, as media, we did not keep up. We neither portrayed the situation all that well, nor did we employ people who had a better sense of communities within our community, to tell the story. I think cultural diversity is still a profound challenge for all media.
However, your point is not lost in this either as one of relevance. You have to make sure that your diversity includes many other factors, that it is multidimensional, and that it includes the rural diversity of our country.
Senator Merchant: I am from Regina. I want to follow up on Senator Gustafson's point. Sometimes, out in the regions we feel that we have good journalists, but they do not stay for long. They all seem to gravitate toward Toronto, or one of the other big centres. I see good journalists and the CBC pulls them into Toronto. We have this problem out there. I do not know why we cannot keep them, whether it is the corporations, the businesses that want to be centrally located and have the good journalists working for them from there.
Mr. LaPointe: It is an interesting phenomenon, but there is another thing that has been in play for a dozen years, which is that Ottawa is no longer considered such a brilliant career destination. When I came into the business I would have done anything to get here. I was lucky to get here within a year of joining the Canadian Press. In my view, I had died and gone to heaven. At the time there were not many of us under the age of 25 or 30. These days, it is difficult to persuade many young journalists to come to this city. Largely what you see is a bit of poaching that takes place between organizations.
I find that is an interesting phenomenon. I have been thinking of doing some writing about it. I think it has something to do with the nature of the way government has treated information in the last decade or so. It has a lot to do with the fact that opposition parties have been so splintered and have had real challenges to develop sustainable opposition or drive with governments, particularly in the Commons. I think Ottawa just has not been as interesting as a result.
Toronto still holds a great deal of fascination for people until they realize that they have to add an extra zero on the end to buy a house.
Ottawa is still a great place for its media diversity and to acquire mid-career skills. Interestingly, it is not an easy place to recruit people into national bureaus. There used to be tremendous competition for any organization to get here but now, organizations will often bypass their own people because they do not feel they are the strongest and so they hire locally.
Senator Gustafson: It appears to me that Montreal does not have the draw that Toronto has. On the other hand, Vancouver is a kind of isolated community being on the other side of the Rockies. They tend to run their own program as if they were in a different country.
Mr. LaPointe: The language issue is an important factor in moving into Montreal. You should not be working there if you are not fluently bilingual. In Ottawa, bilingualism is an asset but it is not a prerequisite. It is easy enough to get along because of translation services and because so many of our representatives are bilingual and the public service as well. One can be unilingual and still function well in this city. However, in Montreal an important language issue has to be honoured.
The Chairman: I would observe that Montreal is for francophone journalists even more important than Toronto is for anglophone journalists in Canada.
Senator Oliver: Welcome, Mr. LaPointe. I must commend you for your introductory remarks. I want you to know that I am long-time fan of convergence because for me it was a way of getting more information at a lower cost.
Senator Graham: We discussed that in Bill C-62.
Senator Oliver: — yes, among others. It was a way of gaining greater access to more information more quickly and more conveniently. I have four specific questions to ask you based on your experience. Convergence refers to obtaining information from newspaper, radio, satellites and TV, et cetera. In my opinion, there is still room for what I call the "weekly newspaper" and for "independent newspapers." Is it in Canada's interest to find ways of strengthening our independent newspapers?
For instance, there is only one independent provincial newspaper left in Canada, The Halifax Chronicle Herald. It seems to me, subject to what you have to say, that there is a real need to find a way of strengthening it to ensure that we avoid the problems of big conglomerates. What could we do to strengthen independent newspapers? What could we do to strengthen the need for weekly newspapers? They are incredibly important. I too live in a rural area and read the local papers that talk about the issues that concern us, whereas the national newspapers do not.
Most people do not have anything against the wonderful investigative journalism in print but they do seem to have something against the reporting journalism on television news and the commentaries that are highly subjective, often misleading and often looking for headlines. My third question is: What do you recommend we do about the inappropriateness and the subjectivity and lack of objectivity in so much of our news reporting on public events? You said in your introduction that you were writing a book. What is in that book that may be relevant to the subject matter that you would like to share with us?
Mr. LaPointe: I will not give that one away.
Concerning your third question on commentary, there is no question that our craft has been derided in the last number of years for the insinuation of commentary into straight news reporting and the lack of labelling of it. There is a great, healthy need for opinion in newspapers, and I think the perspectives are often what people remember most about a newspaper. However, they have to be clearly labelled as to commentary or opinion, et cetera. Occasionally, one might label an article or item an "analysis" but I would stop short of doing that.
The trouble comes when the item is not labelled and is simply incorporated into a news story because a reporter or an editor decided that there are things to say about the issue. They steer away from what I would consider to be important contextual background, synthesis of viewpoints and important relevant background into editorializing. There is no place for that because it is shabby journalism. In those cases, the public should phone and write letters about it to ensure that the newspaper knows that the public is alert.
Senator Oliver: Is it the public's responsibility? This is one area that brings into disrepute your whole profession.
Mr. LaPointe: What else is there but a public that will vote with its pocketbook or with its feet and move away if it feels ill-served by the media. It is incumbent on the public to demand the best media. Inasmuch as I know that that is heavy lifting and a little tedious for everyone who is busy during the course of a day, I do not see another way. The craft knows that it has standards in that respect. Journalists know individually that they should not do it but sometimes people are naughty. It does not get picked up in a newsroom; and it gets into a paper or on the air.
The only way to deal with it is to use the good recourses that do exist. Letters to the editor get the attention of the editor. I have been one and I paid a great deal of attention to the kind of concerted public complaint about our conduct. It is good to make the phone calls and send e-mails, and rally your friends and neighbours on the issue, to say that it was out of line. Those kinds of small-scale sieges make a difference in efforts to correct bad behaviour. In the end, if you feel it is way out there, there are press councils that work with many papers, in most cases. Not all papers belong to a press council but those that do belong pay pretty critical attention to the deliberations of the councils.
For better or worse, it is often in the public's hands. Again, harkening back to the issue of professional development, you can work through these kinds of things in a setting where there is more concerted discussion about the qualities of the craft so that people understand the great distinction between legitimate, contextual and analytical work in their journalism, and deciding to provide an opinion that is in the wrong place.
Independents and weeklies are definitely a diminishing breed in the independent daily paper arena. However, the weeklies in this country are booming because they found that below the local daily paper or the national newspaper there exist tremendous opportunities to cover the communities. I read mine in Port Perry, Ontario, where we have two, local community papers. Of course, they are tremendous, affordable advertising vehicles for the communities, whereas the daily paper might be out of reach. These papers thrive and the weekly is one of the few areas of growth in the industry right now.
Again, if you want to use the tide to lift all the boats, training and development would have as grand an impact in a small place as it would have on any larger organization. It would also provide the kind of equal access to expertise that is often out of the reach of some of the smaller organizations.
Those are my main comments. May I ask what your first question was, Senator?
Senator Oliver: My three questions included independent newspapers, weeklies and investigative journalism.
You have pretty well answered them all. You did not want to comment on the book.
Mr. LaPointe: Perhaps I will comment some day. I want to point out the issue about convergence again. We are now in a phase that was roughly like the phase that television found itself in during its first five to 10 years where almost everyone who had a radio show got a TV show. They then found that some people sweat on camera, do not look at the camera and had odd mannerisms. Television needed its own talent to define the medium.
We are still some distance away from defining a convergent media. I do not know if it will be a translucent tablet that you can carry around with you that will have moving pictures, audio, and text and be able to find things worldwide. I do not know if it will look like the newspaper that was being read on the commuter train in the movie Minority Report that looked fabulous. Will it be a blanket of Mylar? Will it be small or large? The days ahead will tell us that.
In the meantime, we do not have anything to judge or assess, but we ought to be encouraging people to experiment and create this. If anything, we should ensure we are not taking a back seat to other countries in developing this technology.
Senator Phalen: I am hoping this is a supplementary to Senator Oliver's question.
Could you give us some comments on the idea of a national media ombudsman? It was suggested at this meeting at other times. It seems to flow from your first question. Could you give us your opinion on that?
Mr. LaPointe: I have blown hot and cold on ombuds depending on whether I was running a news organization where one could be used. I have had to park self-interest at times.
I have come to the conclusion that ombuds serve a great role, but they should not take the editor, the executive producer or the president of news off the hook. I found it was important when I was editing the paper in Hamilton to have a phone number that was listed in the book where readers could find me, complain to me directly and cause me to rethink some of the things that we had done.
There is also a tremendous role in all of our media for the managers, leaders and more prominent people to talk about the processes and their decisions with the public. The public brings a newspaper into its home six or seven days a week. It brings a newscast into its home seven or more times a week. Yet, we do precious little explaining as a craft how we arrived at a decision, why we went right instead of left and what we learned subsequent to a decision.
It is not self indulgent at all. It is a profound community service. More media outlets should be explaining themselves because there is tremendous loyalty, trust, equity and currency in our communities. There is great generosity of spirit among people who buy newspapers or watch newscasts that we are not bothering to engage.
These are people that really do care about their local papers, national paper and local newscasts. They would like to know more. They do not specifically want to know what the anchor earns, but they want to know why a particular story was played or why a particular emphasis was chosen. Some of the better papers in the country are beginning to develop a sense of that explanation because there is not only a keen interest but also a right at play among the consumers.
I would say that an ombud serves as a form of appeal when initial entreaties to the news desk or executive producers go unheard. They are also good independent investigators. They study what is being produced every day. They look for areas of inconsistency and areas for improvement. They serve as a good detached voice that can provide sensible advice and understand how a newsroom works. The danger of getting too far detached from a newsroom is that you do not know its ecosystem well.
My only concern about having a national office of that sort would be that there are really peculiar local situations that affect and influence all our media. I do not know how you could ever find a place that would so intimately know how to deal with some of those intricacies and some of those decision-makings. You would spend much effort educating yourself and little time being able to pronounce.
The importance of a good ombud locally is that it is almost real time reaction. Weeks should do not go by. The public does not forget about a particular issue before it resurfaces in a report.
I used to like the fact that I could write a column every Saturday and explain things that had happened in the paper, because I felt they were fresh enough for my readers to remember. If you put any distance and time between the initial action and the response, you lose the impact.
Senator Gustafson: In response to the question of Senator Oliver, is there any interrelation between the big media and the small media? I will use an example from last week.
I was riding a tractor. An announcement comes over the radio that Paul Martin was in Regina. He made the statement that if he ran a term and did not change the sad situation of agriculture in Western Canada that he would consider his term a failure. I went to the house. My youngest son came in and said, "Dad, did you hear Paul Martin?" I said, "Yes, I heard, and I thought that was good news."
As a Conservative, I do not want to give him a political plug, but you never read a thing about that down here. That was big news out there for every young farmer and every old farmer. Someone was paying attention to a serious situation and yet, I did not see it in the National Post or The Globe and Mail.
Is there anyone who monitors what is happening out there?
Mr. LaPointe: Yes, there is. I worked nearly 15 years for the Canadian Press, the national news agency. It enjoys almost universal membership among the daily newspapers, among most of the private broadcasters and a number of periodicals that contribute news in real time and is broadly distributed across the country. In some cases, it distributes only regionally, but mostly nationally.
The organization has existed now for nearly 85 years. That is the most critical relationship between big and small media. One great thing that a cooperative such as that provides is that it permits the smallest organizations to benefit from the largest organization's coverage.
Some will complain that this leads to some sort of homogeneity of information when everyone can carry the same thing. It is a small trade-off when you consider what it gives people.
CP was founded in the First World War to permit Canadian correspondents to travel to the front and to report for all the papers. That kind of pooling of resources is critical when you are dealing with such a range of economic models in our media, where small media operations might easily have total revenues of under $1 million, and some have hundreds of millions. It is a nice equalizer and permits a sharing. However, you cannot guarantee, just because it is distributed, that it will then be published.
Senator Gustafson: I would like to point out a positive point in the media, and how it has worked. In the mid-1980s, I chaired the committee on western drought and The Toronto Star actually contacted us and said, if there is any way we can help you, please let us know. There is some positive between big and small, but it is difficult.
Mr. LaPointe: It is unbelievable these days to sit in a newsroom. I was not exaggerating earlier when I said there were half a million decisions made in the course of a day to produce one daily newspaper. The fax machine, the e-mails, the phone calls — most newsrooms get most of their news from the public. The public calls and says there is a serious development here, and off you go.
The kind of input that newsrooms now get overwhelms them. It is next to impossible to keep up with even a small percentage of those inputs. The danger I have often found in running newsrooms is how do you set aside time to pursue your own ideas? You could go from staged event to staged event all day long and build an entire career out of it without doing anything of your own initiation — finding out what is really going on in the country, as opposed to simply being the receptacle for people telling you to go here, go there.
Senator Oliver: I should note that convergence even came to his tractor. He got the news sitting on his tractor — TV, radio, everything on his tractor.
Senator Eyton: As usual, I have heard a disproportionate amount from Western Canada. I have so many questions that I will ask one large question and maybe some of it will stick.
There is really unprecedented conglomeration and convergence going on at the same time. It seems to me that is driven by business or business considerations — and it makes sense — but there must also be some positive aspects of that, that it is a worthy and good thing in some particulars — maybe in many particulars, maybe in all particulars.
I say that in the context of where I live. In Toronto, I am blessed with all sorts of media and choices — I am talking in terms of variety and the number and the quality. It seems to me we are uniquely positioned.
I travel a great deal and I have great difficulty finding comparable media in other places worldwide. London would be a remarkable exception, and perhaps New York — although I have some qualifications there, particularly as of late. However, it is difficult, for example, for me to be satisfied about my personal needs for current information about the world that we live in, in most American cities. That is an example. It seems to me we are well served, and that some of this must come from the conglomeration and convergence I referred to earlier. What are the goods things about those trends?
Mr. LaPointe: In my opening remarks, I did say that big media still do more than small media on a lot of fronts. Let me try to give some examples.
What really changed the course of the media business in this country and other countries was when we began to license many more television outlets. We began to heavily fragment the media outlets in communities. We opened up the airwaves, we permitted radio stations to change their formats, and some of this contributed to a profound fragmentation of the market.
Where a daily newspaper or the local television station had huge penetration in its market, and large audiences that permitted it a great deal of control over the advertising picture in those markets, suddenly there were new competitors. There were weekly papers and local ones — in some cases in Toronto, there are papers serving the suburbs that are as substantial as many of the other dailies in the country.
I would not want to go so far as to say that the only characteristic of media in the last decade has been this, but it has largely been a decade of preservation of resources. Very few places have truly grown, because the audiences have been in such rapid decline.
There is extremely harrowing data now about the potential to not have the next generation enter the sphere of consuming mainstream media. The drop-off is so remarkable that it is frightening for people managing media now. How will we reach out and appeal to the first generation that actually has the tool to bypass mainstream media?
It used to be you did not have much other choice. You bought the local paper, you looked at the local television station or listened to the local radio station. Maybe you bought a national newspaper. Now you have so many other choices, and you have a conscious ability to entirely bypass the local condition if you want. You can get your information from anywhere in the world, and you never have to really learn a lot about what it is like to live in your community. You never become a mature information consumer.
It is because of big media that we have been able to preserve what we have. I am not saying it has been a perfect situation. I know there have been situations where there have been some cuts, but there also have been tremendously ambitious enterprises. The paper I helped launch — the National Post — was born out of that kind of ambition. A small media company without other media properties would certainly not have been able to sustain it to this point. It would have long since folded.
Again, I do want to portray the picture as entirely positive. I know there are complaints. I think you will hear from witnesses, as you conduct your hearings, who will speak more relevantly to those concerns. I have never experienced it. I have only experienced big media either as a growth opportunity or as a business that has ambitions to try to do things more properly, and be of greater service to the community. I have been fortunate to be around at the right time and place, where that was the instruction and the mission.
One of the great ironies out of all of this is that we have great local coverage in our communities, but we live in the back yard of the United States. It is still strikes me as astounding, that for all of the hue and cry that many organizations have about covering the world with Canadian eyes — how it is so important that we cover the Iraq conflict, the Middle East, Asia and parts of the world with our own eyes — we permit Americans to cover America for Canada. We have almost no resources in the United States in any of our news organizations. They are all in Washington where, frankly, it is pretty much of a commodity in the way that news is created there. There is not a great deal of differentiation that you can create by sitting in your bureaus in Washington. We carry story after story in our newspapers and on our newscasts by Americans about America. It is one of our great challenges in the time ahead to get out there and cover the country about which we are most fascinated, and with which we have the greatest in common. Interestingly, we do not allocate resources to it, and I find that strange.
The Chairman: You make a good case for the benefits with an explanation of the benefits of large media, of converged media and of concentrated media and clearly, apart from anything else, a financially healthy corporation is that. Indeed, there is one element that may be worth drawing to people's attention, other than being able to survive. In terms of old journalistic principles, some times a large corporation can be better placed than a small one. I can remember being intensely grateful at one time that I worked for a company big enough to withstand intense pressure from a major, local advertiser who did not like what we were writing about his industry. He said that he would pull his ads if we continued to write that way about his industry. There was a large, national corporation behind that newspaper and so we told him that we would continue with good journalism. If he wanted to reach our readers he could buy ads in the newspaper, and if not, we would be sorry to sever relations with him. A local publisher without that kind of national backing could not withstand such a loss. One understands that, on many layers, there are advantages to size and concentration and convergence. However, in an imperfect world no situation is perfect.
You said that you had not personally come across disadvantages but you think about the media a great deal. In your view, what are the actual or potential weaknesses or risks in concentration of ownership, cross-ownership and convergence? As you rightly point out, we are not nearly there, yet.
Mr. LaPointe: Unchecked, any corporation or entity that controls media can do terrible things with it. I suggest that there are greater checks on our system than we recognize. I would worry more if there were an unfettered expression by a media outlet that did not have any public accountability built into it, was not subject to laws of the land such as liable and slander, and did not have other oversight or vehicles for the public to complain and to be heard and seen to be heard.
For instance, we were cognizant at CTV that as a company under Bell Canada Enterprises, BCE, it might be perceived that somehow we would be silent any time BCE became an issue in the news. We were responsible for Report on Business Television and we had a number of local newscasts. However, we were proactive. We submitted that, at the time of our licence renewal with the CRTC, we would create an independent monitoring committee to field public complaints and report directly to the board. It would not be an ombudsman situation in a newsroom but would have reporting lines that were higher up than the working managers of a news operation. That way, we ensured that the public and the board would be satisfied that journalism was being conducted properly.
The monitoring committee has been in place for about one year. I have been away from CTV for seven or eight months so I do not know much recent information about it. It was a critical issue in addressing the potential concern that media tend to take care of themselves when they become bigger. I do not subscribe to that view but I understand the perception, and I understand that some people hypothesize motives. I see vehicles, such as the monitoring committee, as being able to squarely address that.
Other broadcasters had made the same commitment to the CRTC when they appeared for licence renewals to ensure that the CRTC sees that effort is being made by the broadcasters that it regulates. Indirectly, it has an impact on the overall journalistic operation of a company with media properties in more than one medium.
I believe that there are two other small things to mention in defence of this. Our next real issue with more and more fragmentation will be how to actually preserve as many resources as possible. The economics of news gathering for television, and to a lesser extent for print, run well ahead of inflation over all and advertising revenue is not concurrently keeping pace. There will thus be greater pressure on broadcasters, particularly conventional broadcasters, in the times ahead. It may not be evident yet but those days will come. To be part of a large company provides better housing in that respect.
I am rambling on this one a bit, but the low end of journalism — we all love the investigative work — is often tedious and consumes many smart people doing many dumb things in the course of a day. It means going off to some marginal, staged events — pseudo-events that purport to create news but are ostensibly the creation of public relation houses and special interests and are not terribly relevant. I enjoyed one thing about having a relationship with the newspaper while I was at CTV and the online division. We could occasionally say: "This one is not all that important for us although we still want surveillance of it. Is it more important to you? If so, will you go and tell us what happened? If it is significant, we will jump on it. We would like to send just one person rather than two."
I cannot tell you what that means in the overall morale of an operation where some of the better people can be applied to issues that are more important or relevant. You can permit them to pursue some of their own ideas instead of going off and being a stenographer for one hour or so. That kind of staged news is a pox on our business. Some newsrooms feel so under siege that they can never truly turn any resources over to the pursuit of their own ideas. The best managers in the best newsrooms still find ways to maintain that pocket of initiation going but it is extremely difficult.
Some of that collaboration has other effects. It means that smarter people do not have to do dumber things at times and you save a bit that you can then turn over to your own initiatives, although you can never budget for it.
It is like found money on a given day, and it is an ad hoc opportunity to see the world.
The Chairman: Are there limits? Does the need to preserve our resources, indeed, perhaps enhance our resources, mean that we have to go down an unending road of ever more concentration and ever more cross-ownership, which has been a huge issue in the States recently. If there are limits, where are they?
Mr. LaPointe: You have seen much divestiture in the last couple years in this country. We are not as concentrated in our ownership of media as we were even three years ago. It is finding its level.
What can companies bear? What kinds of properties do they want to have strategically? What sort of regional presences do they want? What sort of national presence do they want? What kind of on-line work do they want to create?
Ultimately, on-line journalism may be the great opportunity to break down many issues that involve this in terms of the more traditional models of concentration that people have examined over the years.
You saw it at your own paper at the time, you saw it at a number of other properties that there was a reasonable renaissance in newspapering in this country in the last part of the last decade that had much to do with re-investment. There was some risk-taking occurring.
Did that translate into more readers? Not in all cases. When I look at the track record of newspapers in the last quarter century and the systemic decline of readership, I am often surprised that there are so many journalists still in our major metropolitan newspapers because the declines have been severe. The declines might be disproportionately higher than the restraint taking place in some of the news operations.
I have seen owners far and wide attempt to restrain operations by placing as much emphasis in cuts on the non-news operations as possible. Every owner loves to have a paper or a newscast that is the talk of the town on a given day. They love to have their scoops. They love to be competitive on stories and beat the other guy to the punch. To the greatest extent possible, the people that I have known in this business, the people who have decided where the cuts take place, have all opted for non-editorial cuts long before they turn their attentions to news rooms even when there have been some rather precipitous viewership or readership declines.
The Chairman: Large numbers of us have important meetings beginning at 11:30, and I know that there are senators who wish to go on a second round. I will cut off our session with this witness in 10 minutes because we need to go in camera for about three minutes to talk about future business of the committee. That ought to enable us to get to our 11:30 meetings as required. This is a plea for brevity.
Senator Graham: Thank you, Mr. LaPointe. Your testimony has been very interesting, and I would be happy to stay here through lunch if we could because I am sure that some of the stuff we are doing here would be more interesting than the stuff we might be doing elsewhere.
One of the bullets you gave us was that journalists spend too much time covering and not enough time uncovering. I presume you are talking about investigative journalism and whether they are uncovering the latest scandal.
You are all too young to remember Robert Fulford. Forty years ago, while working for The Toronto Star, he did an investigative report on what it would be like to spend a month on a welfare cheque. That got massive coverage across the country. Is that the kind of thing that you were talking about?
I may be cut off but I may as well ask my second question. When you said that with respect to Iraq and more generally what it was like for Canada living in the back yard of the United States and that it was important to cover Iraq with our own eyes. We had a witness recently, Professor Maule, who said that the coverage by the CBC and the BBC was not balanced. He said that McNeil-Lehrer Report, on public broadcasting in the United States, was balanced. When he was asked about CBS, ABC, CNN, NBC and others, he said that he had not watched them.
Then there is the question of the smoking gun. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Are we doing enough investigative journalism to find that answer? Were we misled by the American media?
Mr. LaPointe: We will only find out if we keep journalists there and continue to scrutinize the country. Sadly, partly because of what the media have themselves conditioned audiences to expect, attention spans are rather short. They are insufficient.
Media do not do a tremendous job overall at sustaining issues. The public may be contending with those issues, but the media have already moved on. The more time that you can spend on uncovering the better, because it really permits people to think along with you as you are processing it.
The criticism I generally have is that we have great sophistication right now in special interest groups in making messages that are palatable and get through to the media. They create visuals for it. They certainly create text that generates information. It has become a colossal industry that is breaking the back of the initiative of a typical news room on a given day.
The amount of time spent on pursuing an idea that you had on the way to the office to get into the paper the next day or get on the news cast that night is in massive decline. I once did a bit of an analysis of a media outlet, which I will not name. I found that about 50 to 55 per cent of all the information in the paper was staged for it. It was presented. Another 42 or 43 per cent was material about which the organization simply had to react — disaster, fire, crime. Less than 2 or 3 per cent appeared to be of a paper's initiation where it was not staged or did not take place on the day before. It was an idea that started with a journalist or with a team of journalists and made it all the way through to the paper.
That is a sad commentary on where we are. I am sure I could do the same analysis today and find the same result. Every time I tried it, it has been the same. That is where our problems are.
Our time is being commandeered so much by organizations and individuals seeking publicity for their information. We have the best-trained journalists, but they are proving to be our country's highest paid stenographers.
Senator Oliver: When looking for a response to issues of cross-ownership, concentration in the media and huge Canadian conglomerates owning and controlling our media, one of the things I am reminded of is that our Constitution says, in the division of powers, give some powers to the federal and some to the provincial. You know, as a journalist, that an awful lot of the debate each day in Canada is that this is a provincial matter and that is a federal matter and so on. Many decisions are made on that basis. With that background, and with that in mind, is there any merit in terms of new public policy and our looking at ways to strengthen the role of independent provincial papers across Canada? Is there any need for it, or do these conglomerates that have national editorial policies so the one running in British Columbia is the same as in Newfoundland? Is that more important than doing something independent and provincially? This harkens back to my initial question about the role of provincial independent newspapers. I really did not give you a chance to explain it in the detail that I would like to have heard.
Mr. LaPointe: I do not have a particular view about the whole issue of common content, common editorials. It has not been my experience, and so I feel a little miscast in attempting to get at that. Any proprietor I have ever worked for has given me the same sense of mission, which was to serve the local community, reflect it as best you can, lead its experience a little bit, and engage your local situation — that is what is highly relevant to you.
To the degree that some of our independent papers — some of our weeklies, some of our other forms of press — have fallen into economic difficulty, I also see a great boom taking place in this sector that outstrips anything taking place now by major media, proportionately anyway. I happen to think that those papers are going to find their place. In some cases, it will be a rather robust niche that they will find because local newspapers, big city dailies, will find themselves perhaps concentrating more on a smaller urban audience, or a segment of that urban audience.
I do not have the same sense of dread about the fate of some of that regional press as others might. Actually, it appears to be increasingly healthy. It seems to be attracting people to work for it for quality of life issues as well. Therefore, it is attracting tremendous journalism in many smaller communities by people who simply love to live where they are. They do not have an interest in moving to Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto. The schools are producing larger numbers of graduates who will get their start in those places, and continue to sustain the quality of them — and, in fact, even bring new things to the table.
I wish I could say I have given it a huge amount of thought, senator, but it is not, to me, one of our crises in the country right now, all things considered. It is actually one of the rare areas where there appears to be growth.
Senator Eyton: Mr. LaPointe, I will start with a nice short little question and then I have a little background.
Who has it right? We are gathered together here; it is a Canadian study done by Canadians speaking to Canadians, and concerned about some issues that we are facing here in Canada. I assume those issues have also been faced by other people. In business, for example, you are always looking around to see who does it better than you, and you try to emulate that and make it better. In that context, is there any jurisdiction or country that has got it right, in your experience?
Mr. LaPointe: All have great attributes, and all have things I would not want a part of. Some of the best American media surpasses almost anything we see in the world. Some of the great British media does. Some French media is extraordinary, but also some Canadian media. There are companies in our own country that do things very well, that have best practices that are the envy of a lot of other countries.
I know we savage ourselves about the quality of our daily papers in this country, but head south and see what a similar-sized newspaper does in a community. It makes you want to weep. I am not saying we should necessarily put to rest our concerns, but we often do not realize how good we have it.
Is anyone really nailing it? No, I do not think so. Everyone has an interesting thing or two or three that, if you could accumulate an all-star model, would be a great contribution. However, each makes their own choices about the nature of the business, the approach they want to take, and the strategy they have. Each decides to define the audience that they want to capture. In some cases, they define an audience they do not want to capture. Each has approaches editorially that may or may not be broad-ranging; some may be rather specific. It is not that anyone is a better model than the other; they are just so different.
However, I happen to share the view you expressed earlier, Senator Eyton. I work in the Toronto market, and it is unique in the Canadian model. I do not think even Montreal has the same sense of diversity. You have five daily newspapers, two substantial alternative weekly papers, second language papers galore, three all-news television outlets, three or four all-news or information radio outlets, and a pile of Internet sites. If you cannot find what you want, then you are just not looking. They are all over the political spectrum, and I think that is one the glories of it — that it is diverse and there is no cookie-cutter approach. We all take our different roads to the destination.
It would be interesting — I have done a little bit of work around this — to examine the best practices in all of media and to try to accumulate the all-star model. Unfortunately, it does work out to designing a horse by committee. You do end up with the elephant in the end.
The Chairman: We are a committee after all. Thank you very much indeed, Mr. LaPointe. It has been a most interesting session and we are grateful to you. You have answered all our questions in a sufficiently challenging way that, as you could tell, was provoking more questions, which is a tremendous exercise.
The committee continued in camera.