Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 3 - Evidence for December 1, 2004
OTTAWA, Wednesday, December 1, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 6:20 p.m. to examine the current role 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) presiding.
[Translation]
The Chairman: The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications is continuing this evening its examination of 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]
I would like to thank Mr. Allan Thompson of Carleton University School of Journalism and Communications for venturing through the winter snows to join us this evening.
Senators have biographical notes on Mr. Thompson. I note that before he joined Carleton just over a year ago Mr. Thompson worked for 17 years at The Toronto Star and has also had experience with a number of other newspapers. He has worked in Toronto, has had long experience on Parliament Hill and also worked in foreign bureaus, which I would like to know more about.
Again, thank you for joining us. I think you understand our drill. We ask for an opening statement of about 10 minutes and then we go to a question period.
Mr. Allan Thompson, Professor, Carleton University, As an individual: Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before the committee, Madam Chairman. This is a new experience for me, in every respect. As a career journalist, I am more accustomed to sitting on the sidelines, taking notes — not sitting here reading from them.
I am still in the midst of the transformation from journalist to academic. For the first 17 years of my career, I worked with The Toronto Star, and spent a decade on Parliament Hill as a political reporter. In the summer of 2003, I took up a full-time teaching position at Carleton in the School of Journalism and Communication.
I continue to publish a weekly column in The Toronto Star on immigration. It appears in the Life section, if you are interested in that subject. I do other work as a freelance journalist as well.
So I come before you as a journalist-not-quite-turned-academic. At this stage in my metamorphosis, I do not have a new research paper to share with you, no sweeping study on the state of the Canadian media, or a critique on the impact of convergence. However, I do have some ideas to share and I believe that they reflect on your mandate.
As I understand it, this committee has set out to examine the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent and diverse.
I would like to use my time to pick up on a couple of the questions you have set out to address, namely: Do Canadian citizens have appropriate amounts of information about international, national and local issues? Are Canadians receiving enough international news from a Canadian perspective via Canadian journalists posted abroad?
The answer to both those questions is no.
My focus is on international news. During my time on staff with The Toronto Star, my primary assignment was to cover foreign affairs, defence and immigration policy. I also completed a number of short-term reporting assignments for the Star to Africa, for example, but was never based abroad.
I will echo other witnesses before this committee who have argued that Canadian media outlets generally do not devote enough attention to foreign affairs and particularly to the developing world.
Look at the case of Africa. The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen wrote in the Ryerson Review of Journalism earlier this year that she was one of only a handful of full-time Canadian correspondents on the continent. As she put it, a handful of people
...to cover 56 countries, a half-dozen wars, three incipient famines, the most corrupt mining industries in the world — and, oh yes, the fact that 36 million people have HIV/AIDS and will die within the decade, barring some dramatic international intervention.
The Toronto Star, my former employer, closed its Africa bureau in the early 1990s, just as South Africa was emerging from apartheid and Rwanda was descending into hell.
The Globe and Mail opened an Africa bureau only recently. Several years ago, CTV News opened an Africa bureau in Kampala, Uganda, staffed by Mr. Murray Oliver.
CBC Television has a correspondent based in Dakar, Mr. Jean-François Bélanger, while CBC Radio, I believe, has no Africa bureau but makes extensive use of stringers.
CanWest/Global, one of Canada's most far-reaching media organizations, has little or no presence in Africa at all. Its predecessor, Southam News, closed its Africa bureau in the 1990s.
I may well have missed someone in this quick survey. However, I think you get the point. You could count on one hand the number of Canadian journalists assigned on a full-time basis to cover Africa.
As my former Toronto Star colleague, Mr. Jim Travers, told you last spring, the dearth of Canadian correspondents in Africa means that news organizations increasingly rely upon wire services, freelancers or so-called parachute reporters dispatched on short notice to cover complex and fast-breaking stories. What is lost is continuity, depth and context.
As Canadians, we lose when our media organizations are forced to rely upon news reports produced by others.
Earlier this year, we hosted a one-day symposium at Carleton called, "The Media and the Rwanda Genocide." By the way, a full nine-hour webcast of that event is still available on the symposium website, www.carleton.ca/ mediagenocide. I have left more detailed information with the clerk.
Our symposium looked at an important media equation — on one side, the role played by domestic media in Rwanda fuelling the genocide through hate radio broadcasts; on the other side, we examined the role of the international media.
It is widely held that most international news organizations initially misunderstood the nature of the killing in Rwanda, portraying it as the result of tribal warfare rather than an organized genocide.
At the height of the killing in Rwanda, many television viewers in the West were transfixed by another event — live television coverage of actor O.J. Simpson driving away from the Brentwood home where his wife had been murdered.
There is some debate whether or not more informed and comprehensive coverage of the Rwanda genocide might have mitigated or even halted the killing by sparking an international outcry. Some have asked: Did the western media's failure to report adequately on the genocide in Rwanda possibly contribute to the international indifference and inaction and hence contribute to the crime itself?
For the purposes of today's discussion, I think it is fair to say that we missed the story in Rwanda, in large measure because we do not care and we were not there.
We could be making the same mistake right now in Ivory Coast and Darfur, or some other location that is well off the news radar.
I echo here the longstanding lament that you will hear from those interested in foreign affairs, and particularly Africa and other parts of the developing world — these issues get short shrift in Canadian news media. There is an irony that the more capability we have, the less we seem to do with it.
On my first trip to Africa as a reporter in 1990, my only piece of gear was something that would make my students today laugh. It was called a typewriter, albeit an electronic one with some capacity to store text. I faxed my stories to Gemini News Service in London.
On my most recent trip to Africa this past April, when I accompanied Mr. Roméo Dallaire on his return voyage to Rwanda, I arranged ahead of time for someone to hand me a working mobile phone when I arrived at the airport. Literally, from the moment my feet hit the ground in Kigali, that mobile phone was pre-paid, ready to go and worked from every corner of the country. I filed my stories and digital pictures to the Star by e-mail, using the Internet connection in my hotel or any number of Internet cafes that have sprung up in Kigali and across the country.
In some respects, it has become relatively easy to report from virtually any corner of Africa. However, for some reason, we have less reporting from Africa, not more.
That said, the reality is that Parliament cannot tell Canada's newspapers, television or radio networks that they need more foreign bureaus, or that they should pay attention to the developing world or foreign affairs.
Trying to foster more comprehensive media coverage of foreign affairs and the developing world is a laudable goal, but you have very, very few public policy tools with which to try and accomplish that goal.
However, I think there is one tool that is very much underutilized, one that has in fact been left to atrophy in recent years after the budget cuts of the early 1990s.
My goal here today is to help you write a single, focused recommendation for your next report — so get your pens out.
Government should direct more resources to fellowships, awards and research grants directed at journalism students and particularly at working journalists who are in the early stages of their careers.
As I said, there are few public policy tools available to those who seek to influence directly the content of our newspapers and newscasts, and perhaps that is as it should be. However, I think there is reason to work from the grassroots and seek to cultivate a cadre of inquisitive, well-informed and well-travelled journalists. These journalists will make a direct contribution when they file media reports during their research fellowships. More important, in my view, for years to come, they will work from within the media establishment to push their organizations to pay more attention to Africa and the developing world.
I am a product of this system. After graduating from journalism school, I did my master's degree in international relations because I received a $10,000 scholarship from the Gordon Sinclair Foundation. That award changed my life. It also resulted in me meeting my future wife while at university in England, but that is another story, and a happy one might I add.
A few years later, at a time when I was anxious to get out in the world, I was fortunate to win the Gemini Fellowship, which was funded at the time by the International Development Research Centre, a Canadian Crown corporation. This $25,000 award directed at young journalists allowed me to work for eight months with Gemini News Service in London, a news agency devoted to developing world issues. It also financed a five-month field trip to Africa, my first foray into that kind of reporting.
I will spare you my clippings and photo albums, but let me tell you this — that government-funded fellowship transformed me as a journalist. That trip to Africa became the first of many that I would make in the years that followed.
Because of my interest in Africa, fostered directly by a grant from a government agency, in the years to come I successfully pushed the Star to send me back to Africa nearly a dozen times, to such places as Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire and Sierra Leone.
Over the years, the Gemini Fellowship changed other peoples' lives as well. Other Gemini fellows included Kelly McParland, who went on to a long career as a foreign correspondent and is now foreign editor at the National Post; Tina Spencer, who did remarkable work on the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda; Scott Simmie, who reported for CBC from Tiananmen Square; Jane Taber, now with The Globe and Mail; Sue Montgomery, veteran reporter and columnist from The Gazette in Montreal; and many more. By the end of 2001, more than 30 Canadian journalists had passed through the Gemini Fellowship.
Regrettably, the Gemini Fellowship was killed off a year or so ago for lack of funds. I think this was a grievous error. In effect, we lost one of the few mechanisms in place to foster more media attention to the developing world.
I think you should examine more closely the current state of government support for media training, development and fellowships of this nature. My argument is that they are an excellent tool to promote in the long term greater diversity in the Canadian media and more attention to international issues.
A number of branches of government are involved with Canada's foreign policy. They include the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Department of National Defence, the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the Privy Council, and the Department of Finance. All these departments and agencies expend vast amounts of money on what is loosely described as "public affairs and media." However, almost all that money is spent on polishing the image of the respective departments and their ministers, crafting a message to the media to promote policies and programs. Fair enough. However, I would argue that each of these departments should develop a comprehensive program for open-ended media fellowships, awards and professional development, akin to the Gemini Fellowship that I spoke of earlier.
Imagine the impact if each year every one of these agencies funded even one or two of these fellowships, making it possible for young or mid-career journalists to expand their horizons, to tell Canadians more about the world around us and Canada's place in that world.
You do not have to reinvent the wheel. CIDA has by far the most comprehensive program of this type, the Development Information Program. CIDA devotes several million dollars a year to this initiative which funds journalists who want to make reporting or research trips to the developing world. I am not here to provide you a detailed briefing on CIDA's Development Information Program. However, you may want to invite someone from CIDA to do just that.
The International Development Research Centre, IDRC, often described as a sister agency to CIDA, also has a development media program, but for now it is targeted primarily at graduate students in journalism programs. The fellowship for working journalists that I took advantage of in 1990 no longer exists.
Foreign Affairs Canada does not have a dedicated media fellowship or awards program. It does provide briefing and training sessions annually for journalism students.
The Human Security Program within Foreign Affairs Canada has a range of research grant programs, but none, as far as I can tell, are open to journalists who wish to travel abroad.
Foreign Affairs Canada and International Trade Canada also run something called Young Professionals International, a co-funded internship program designed to help young people secure work terms abroad, a program that conceivably could be taken advantage of by journalists, but is not designed for their use.
The Department of National Defence runs an extensive media relations operation, and provides some training to journalists who intend to visit war zones or hostile environments. Again, the department, as far as I can tell, does not offer any kind of media fellowship or awards program. The same is true of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Finance Canada, Privy Council, and all of these other branches of government that touch on Canadian foreign policy.
This is a quick survey. As a committee, I think you should ask each of the government departments involved in crafting and implementing Canada's foreign policy to report back to you on their programs for media fellowships and awards of this nature.
Look for a way to make that information more readily available to the public. My suggestion would be through a dedicated web portal. Then identify the gaps and urge the Canadian government to devote more resources to media training, fellowships and awards.
Senator Carney: Your idea is excellent. I do not know, chair, whether we have an inventory of those programs, or whether we could ask for an inventory of existing programs.
The Chairman: We do not have it; and, believe me, I plan to suggest to the steering committee that we ask for it forthwith.
Senator Carney: That is excellent.
Can you tell us more about the Gemini Fellowship scholarships? Who funded them? What were they? Were they adequately funded? How did it work? If it was $10,000, it would not do much for you today.
Mr. Thompson: I can dig up information as to when it was created. I was about the fifteenth or twentieth person who had done it. Sometime in the early 1980s they funded this program, initially at $25,000 per year, which even at that time was not quite enough money to live in London and to travel in the developing world.
Senator Carney: Who is "they"?
Mr. Thompson: The International Development Research Centre, which is a Crown corporation, a sister agency to CIDA, but primarily focused on development research and not development programming.
They funded this fellowship. It was in conjunction with a small news agency based in London called Gemini News Service, which was primarily a developing-world-issues news agency that produced a package of news features that were distributed to 200 or 300 newspapers around the world.
As to the way the program worked, in effect, IDRC was indirectly subsidizing this small news agency by providing them with a Canadian each year to work there as an editor. The Canadian was a young, mid-career journalist. You had to have about five years' experience to apply for the program. You got the award based on the pitch you made for a field trip. Eight months were spent in London. For four to five months you could go wherever you wanted with these resources and do research and reporting on an issue that touched on the developing world.
My pitch was to go to North Africa where I did a study on what was then the Arab Maghreb Union, which was sort of North Africa's answer to the European Union.
Senator Carney: It was tightly focused on development. What you are suggesting is that more government agencies producing more fellowships would allow a broader scope than just development reporting, which is a good idea.
Can you tell me why it was terminated, when it had 30-odd journalists go through the program? Obviously, it was wanted.
Mr. Thompson: I think it was a funding decision. My understanding is that they wanted to re-direct the attention away from supplying labour to a British-based news agency and to direct the funds directly to Canadian students. In this case, they replaced the Gemini Fellowship with a program that offers research funds to graduate students, masters' students in journalism programs, who want to go to the developing world and do research for a media project, and Carleton students have done this. It is a good and admirable program. I think they should not have killed off the other one in order to finance the MA research program.
Senator Carney: Is there not a need for mature journalists, like some of us have been, who need a sabbatical to get away from the weekly column, the editorial or something and reenergize themselves with new information and increase what Ms. Kim Campbell calls the intellectual capital? If you look around at your colleagues, would there be any interest in that?
Mr. Thompson: I think there definitely would be. It would depend. If you had to set your priorities, where would you go first? Where would you target? The most leverage is with early mid-career journalists, people who may not have had any opportunity for exposure to the developing world and these issues, and who get this opportunity because of funding from an agency. By the same token, however, had I stayed at the Star longer, I would have become one of these people. Increasingly, there are people who have worked their way through the system, who have been to a foreign bureau and come out the other end of that system, and who are at a later stage in their career and would like to do some research and change direction. Certainly, by suggesting that you target something toward early career journalists, I am not excluding doing it with other people.
Senator Carney: I would like to switch to the reason the newspapers and television stations close bureaus. I know cost is a factor. Mr. Joe Schlesinger, CBC foreign correspondent, has, on or off the record, given the cost of supporting someone in the field. It is very high. Is it the cost? Is it safety factors? Is it lack of interest among the readership? What reasons do they give for closing a bureau at a time when most of the news is happening in Asia and Africa and places we do not even know about?
Mr. Thompson: What I can tell you is anecdotal. I have never worked at the management level where these decisions are made.
In the case of The Toronto Star, I understand that they shifted their priorities and decided that they would like to shift the money they were spending on a bureau in Africa or in Latin America toward coverage of local issues in Toronto. They beefed up their GTA Toronto section in the newspaper. I do not know if it was directly a transfer of the resources, but my understanding was that that was the rationale.
Senator Carney: That would reflect the local competition, I imagine. With the entry of the National Post, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun, The Toronto Star had an economic need to increase its domestic coverage in order to keep its position in the market. That is what I think would have happened. That is helpful.
Senator Milne: Mr. Thompson, you spoke of being back in Rwanda with General Dallaire and how you went from your early electronic typewriter to using a telephone. Hopefully you could take pictures of yourself as you spoke into it, because you can certainly do that nowadays.
The way Canadians are getting their news is changing so rapidly, and it is a generational change. There is a difference between the younger people and people my age. Since these new methods are so available, I know the committee has heard arguments that the Internet is providing competition now to the traditional news media. What do you think about this kind of an emerging news stream?
Mr. Thompson: What a lot of people miss in any kind of discussion about technological advancement in the media, competing media outlets, is that I have not yet found a computer that can conduct interviews, do research and write stories. No matter what vehicle you are using to transmit to or reach your audience, fortunately, so far, you still need a human being who is that voice at the other end who is literally making these decisions. Of the billion things that occurred yesterday, which one will get my attention? Which one will I research, document, write about and transmit back to an audience in Canada? We can get lost sometimes in the arguments about technological advancement, and lose sight of the fact that it is still a question of who is telling our stories for us. Who is in these corners of the world making decisions on the ground about what deserves our attention? If we lose that, I think we lose something. We lose a Canadian voice and interpretation of events and a Canadian sense of what matters in the world. Technologically, you can make an argument as a news organization about the ease with which you can obtain news and information from a variety of sources. We are swimming in information. Yet, I still think it comes back to the voice and the reporter that is on the ground, who that person is, who they are, their grasp of Canadian society and what they feed back.
Senator Milne: You are absolutely right that you need somebody there doing it, and you need somebody with some interest and experience doing it. Since the Star that you worked for closed down their Africa bureau, and since the other media biggies have done the same, where are our newspapers getting their coverage of Africa from now?
Mr. Thompson: In the case of the Star, they make extensive use of freelancers and wire copy. They have arrangements in place with big news organizations such as The New York Times to obtain copy.
Senator Milne: Is it mainly through American media that we are getting it? Are we getting any through European media at all, to at least get a different perspective?
Mr. Thompson: It is largely American, I think, but that warrants some study. That is almost a content analysis kind of question.
To The Toronto Star's credit, at present it has a foreign editor who used to be an Africa correspondent. When he can, he finds ways to finance direct reporting assignments. He sent me to Africa twice this year alone as a freelancer. I went in January to report on Mr. Roméo Dallaire's testimony at the Rwanda tribunal and returned in April with Mr. Dallaire when he went back to Rwanda for the tenth anniversary of the genocide. On both occasions, the Star paid to have a freelancer report for the newspaper from Africa.
Senator Milne: You were probably not going to get that story from the Americans.
Mr. Thompson: That is actually a very good case in point. There was very little media attention to either of those stories. Had the Star been relying upon wire services, there is no way they could have gotten the material that I sent them, just because I literally was their eyes, ears, notebook and pen. I knew what my audience was. I knew the importance of Mr. Dallaire, I think, as a Canadian, as a public figure, what he represents, what he stands for, all kinds of things. An American or British reporter could write a good story about his testimony, but they would not write the same kind of story a Canadian would write. In fact, I sat there with a British reporter, who was sort of dishevelled — I do not remember his name so I do not have to worry about saying it — sat beside me. He had been flown in at the last minute and did not have a clue who this guy was or what the story was. He was asking to share my notes, and if I could bring him up to speed on what had happened the day before. He may well have been supplying some of my Canadian competitors who did not have a reporter on the ground.
Senator Milne: You made an interesting suggestion that government departments should take a chunk of their media budget, which is usually used for advertising purposes for that department or puff pieces for ministers and such like — I did not say that — and use it to fund research fellowships. That is a very interesting idea. It would be difficult to persuade them to do it, but I thank you for suggesting it.
Mr. Thompson: There is something in it for them. CIDA, for example, has made it possible for dozens of journalists to do serious work in the developing world. Some of it is not of a dog-and-pony show nature, but they want to draw attention to CIDA programs and priorities. Fair enough.
Much of that funding is completely open-ended. People can make a proposal: I want to go to Mali to report on this issue that I think is of great importance. That kind of initiative will be funded.
Their website on this is quite good. They give breakdowns on all of the projects that have been funded in recent years. You can get a quick snapshot of the kind of media initiatives that they are funding.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: Media owners are looking to make a profit. Canadians are either entitled to, want to receive or need to have some news or information. Is this quest for profit incompatible with our right as Canadians to get the news?
[English]
Mr. Thompson: It is a very difficult conundrum. We do have quite good media sources in this country. We are pretty well served by the news media. Part of the reason that we have such good media outlets is because this is a profitable business. Money can be made in the newspaper, television and radio business. If it could not be made, they would not be there.
There are few truly altruistic media outlets. In another era, a previous owner of The Toronto Star tried to take his newspaper in that direction and the provincial government prevented the newspaper from being a truly altruistic corporation as opposed to a business. The reality now is that all of these big media organizations are businesses with an absolute priority to turn a profit.
The case is in the profit margin. What is the trade-off between a 20 per cent profit margin and very little foreign coverage and a 10 per cent profit margin and more significant foreign coverage, when looking at foreign coverage as a desirable goal?
How can newspapers and media organizations be held to any kind of standard? There are few tools for doing that. We do not really do it of other industries.
We have safety standards on heavy industry. There is a core requirement; you must do this. Whether it is profitable, you must meet these kinds of standards. We do not have an equivalent concept in the news media, because it runs up against all of the principles of freedom of expression. Anything that amounted to dictating to an organization the content of the publication or newscast starts to cross that line.
Hopefully, media organizations, which often act in ways that are not purely profit driven, have some kind of sense of responsibility. I can say this and it does not look like I am trying to curry favour because I do not work there anymore. I think that The Toronto Star is an example, in some respects, of a type of media organization that historically devoted a disproportionate amount of money to its foreign coverage, even when some of the bean counters may have suggested that it was eating into the profit margin.
I have no idea what is going on in the current sort of corporate hierarchy of The Toronto Star, and whether that type of philosophy could shift in the interest of greater profits. It is a very real conundrum. It is one to which there is not any satisfactory answer because it brushes up against the principles of freedom of expression.
[Translation]
We hear people talk about freedom of expression. In your opinion, who in fact can we say enjoys freedom of the press? Is it the media owners, editors, reporters or readers?
[English]
Mr. Thompson: I do not know where that freedom resides, because publishers certainly approach the news media as both an editorial product and a business enterprise. Journalists, hopefully, approach this purely from the point of view of an editorial product.
I always tried, to the degree that I could working in the Ottawa bureau, to use the tools that I had to make a point of covering stories that I thought deserved attention and to make the most of the liberty that I enjoyed working in this country as a journalist.
You make choices every day about what story will get your attention. Other witnesses have spoken about the unfortunate role of economic pressures and downsizing in many media operations in putting journalists in a difficult situation where they often cannot do the kind of stories that they would like to do and make the kind of contribution they would like to make. There is simply so much pressure to produce output, to crank out material.
The Chairman: I want to ask a couple of devil's advocate type questions, if I may.
What difference does it make for Canadians to have foreign bureaus of Canadian media? I understand when you were sent as a freelancer to cover the two Dallaire events that those were of interest to Canadians. However, you were sent as a freelancer. Canadians were not deprived of that news. On a broader level, what difference does it make? In what way is Canada's interest served by having Canadian bureaus abroad covering things that The New York Times covers wall-to-wall anyway, such as the AIDS crisis or Sierra Leone. Why is it so important to have Canadians?
Mr. Thompson: Much of it is nuance and a comprehension of what does or should matter to Canadians. Obviously, we have difficulty defining it but we know that we see the world differently from the Americans, British or French. Those are some of the countries that we often turn to for our media voices and for information when we cannot produce it ourselves.
American journalists would have looked at Somalia very differently than Canadians did. Americans and the French, for different reasons, looked at Rwanda very differently than Canadian journalists would have.
Certainly, the same is true now of the Ivory Coast. The French media will have a very different sense of that story; why it matters; what information is crucial; and what really needs to be delivered to a media audience.
The Chairman: Are there different national interests at stake here? I am not talking about what is interesting to readers or watchers but actual national interests that cannot be served by other media.
Mr. Thompson: I do not know if journalists think of themselves as serving a national interest or seeking to serve a national interest.
The Chairman: Public interest.
Mr. Thompson: A public interest. They can often be different because national interest can sometimes be determined by the government of the day whereas public interest is obviously supposed to be a constant.
We should not lose sight of the degree to which journalists truly shape the way people see the world outside their daily lives. Apart from the direct experience of our daily lives, you pretty much must rely upon others to inform you about what is going on in the world. Those others are almost always the news media.
In that case, it is important that the world view is informed as much as possible by people who understand your interests and needs. Indirectly, it is another equation that we do not fully understand. Indirectly, that media product becomes part of our world view. It ricochets back and becomes part of the place that we take in the world because we have set the agenda for what is deemed to be important to our foreign policy. All those factors feed into that equation.
The Chairman: You can tell that we are all tantalized by your proposal for fellowships. Then there is the old concern that he who pays the piper calls the tune. It seems to me that a concerted program of government financing of journalistic endeavours would likely raise serious suspicions about the quality of the resulting journalistic endeavours. When I was a young journalist yearning to cover distant stories, I would never have taken any kind of grant that came from a government body. How do you deal with that?
Mr. Thompson: This does rub up against ethical questions about journalists accepting everything from food and plane rides from government agencies about which they will write. When this is fashioned, it will not be just window-dressing. It will be truly in the realm of research, professional development, training, and, particularly, open-ended competitions. This will not be just a junket where the lucky winner will go to Afghanistan to spend time with Canadian soldiers in Kabul, although that happens as well. You have to find a way to disengage this from a notion of a junket or such where the outcome is known or devised by the funders.
The Chairman: How do you do it? Do you have independent juries or independent foundations?
Mr. Thompson: The criteria would have to be clear and thus transparent. This is based on the proposals made by the particular journalists. It is strange that journalists cannot accept money from someone but they can accept an award, a research grant or a fellowship. In some cases, depending on their particular media organization, they may have to take a leave of absence to do that work. In some measure it comes back to the integrity of the recipients as well. They know why they are undertaking this research and this is not to win the favour of the Department of National Defence.
Some agencies do not think of themselves as being in the same ilk as CIDA, for example, which is mandated to conceive of the importance of funding this kind of research because they want more media attention to the developing world and more questions of development. Other agencies involved in Canadian foreign policy would be well-served also by having better trained, better educated and more well-informed journalists who are writing about those issues. I was lucky that I had many opportunities to go to Africa. I enjoyed it and I pursued it with my employer. I travelled with former Prime Minister Chrétien three times to Africa. On some of those trips, most of the other journalists from political bureaus sent to cover the Prime Minister had not been to Africa before. Many of them were senior, veteran, experienced journalists who were just blown away by what they saw when they arrived in such a place. You cannot underestimate the value and the transformative power of that.
In that case, it was because they went on the Prime Minister's plane and no one seemed to mind being subsidized, even though they pay their way. They are subsidized when they travel with a prime minister on a foreign trip. There is no question about it. Media organizations do not feel that they are somehow ethically crossing a grey zone because they agree to fly on the prime minister's plane to go on a foreign trip.
The Chairman: I will come back to this but we are into the second round.
Senator Carney: I have two comments and then a couple of questions on areas that we have not covered. First, we have had those kinds of programs in Canada before. At the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, DFAIT, we had, and perhaps still have, an Australian program whereby there is an exchange or an award and the Canadian goes to Australia and spends some time. We have had site-specific programs in the Department of Foreign Affairs that never seemed to raise any issues. We might want to look into that.
Second, the knock against the CIDA programs is that they tend to be hard to access. I am told that is if you do not have a Gatineau-Ottawa postal code, you do not have those programs. It is parcelled out tightly in central Canada, and the regions do not have access to it. We should take note of that and suggest recommendations.
My question is about the use of freelancers. One of the worrisome-to-me trends is to replace bureaus and paid-staff-with-benefits by Canadian communications outlets, including Maclean's. The trend is to cut the domestic or foreign bureau, save the money and then hire freelancers, who typically do not have benefits. They work for much less money and, in my mind, there is a question of quality control. If you are a freelancer and you have to service many agencies to pay the high cost of being there, then the quality of your product may deteriorate and may not be as reliable. No one back in the news desk may know, if you are not familiar with the atmosphere or do not know the scene, that the person filing the story may be getting the story out of the bar next to someone else because they cannot afford to get out into the field. Does that concern you?
Mr. Thompson: There is a hierarchy of concerns. The ideal would be for media organizations to have bureaus in the regions that they want to cover. Basically, you go down a notch from there in terms of quality control and the material that you get from the journalists that you hire. There is a problem. I did good work but much of it was probably good luck, good fortune and happenstance. When I referred earlier to parachute reporting, I was referring to people who literally dropped into a situation with virtually no context and no time to prepare. They literally land on the ground and write their first story that night.
I did that several times and it is quite prevalent now. Much of the coverage we see will be done by staff journalists who are dropped into a situation. As is the case with freelancers, you can lose the continuity, the context and the depth of knowledge.
Senator Carney: I have a related question about the motivation of the parachutist. We all know cases of reporters who have been sent out by major agencies and dropped into that situation. I know one very close to home who took a look around at where he was and questioned what he was doing, because he had a wife and three kids, in the war zone unprepared, untrained and with no survival skills. He had the guts to say that he was not prepared and went home.
Part of the proposal that we are discussing is that these people have to be adequately trained, and they have to be motivated. They cannot be shipped off and parachuted in without adequate training or resources.
What about the safety issues? I have a relative, a young woman, who is the technical producer for the Arab radio network, working out of Egypt. You do worry about whether there a safety concern if you are sending your newsmen and women out to some of these places. What can you do about it, and do people stay home because their responsibilities are such that they do not feel comfortable in covering Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan?
Mr. Thompson: There is a very real safety concern. It probably runs counter to what I am advocating, in the sense of the need to have more people get out there and see for themselves what is happening. Because we have so much capability now to go anywhere, and to land in a place and to report back — in the case of broadcast — live from virtually anywhere on the planet, there is a competitive drive to do that and to be there.
Safety does become an issue, but it is an occupational hazard, I think. Hopefully, people can make their own informed choices about what they want to do and what they will not do. Although I have to admit there is a bias — they would never be allowed to say it because it would result in a grievance — but I think there is a bias, on the part of many of these news organizations when they do have a foreign bureau, against people who are not willing to go into hostile environments or to do those kind of assignments.
Senator Carney: Do Canadian readers want to know about Rwanda?
Mr. Thompson: That is a really important point; again, I have not been in a managerial position. I have not read the kind of focus group information that big newspapers and media outlets use to drive their economic decisions about their coverage.
My experience has been from the other end. However, whenever I write about, for example, Roméo Dallaire, I get a flood of e-mail. Typically, in daily journalism, if you get two or three e-mail messages or phone calls from readers, that is not a flood, but that is actually a fair amount of interest, believe it or not, because people have to look you up; they have to find you. The Toronto Star does not include your e-mail address at the bottom of your dispatch. In cases where I write about Romeo Dallaire, I get dozens of e-mail messages, all positive, saying I am so glad this is being written. His is a sort of particular case, I think. There is quite an interest in what he does.
I have never been convinced by news organizations that claim that Canadians do not want foreign news. I think they are asking the question in the wrong way, or they are asking questions because they do not want to spend the dollars on this type of coverage. I do not know. I am speaking as someone who has always been a reporter, and has never been privy to those kinds of deliberations. However, the feedback I get from relatives, friends and strangers is that they really want to read more about places like Rwanda.
The Chairman: For what it is worth — I do not know whether it is proper for me to say it or not — I was, for some years for my sins, in a position where I had to look at an awful lot of that research. In the market where I was, which was English Montreal, study after study showed that our audience was indeed intensely interested in foreign affairs. American expert after American expert would come in and say, oh, I do not believe that, we will have to do another study to check your old data, and they would find the same thing.
I wonder if this has to do with the fact that Canadian cities have become so diverse, in terms of population and the huge proportion of our metropolitan populations that consist of people who were not born in Canada or whose parents were not born in Canada; I am not sure about that. I also wonder whether we are not being a little too facile in leaning on research from elsewhere in other areas as well.
That was not my question. That was just my self-indulgent intervention. We have questions from senators Chaput and Milne, and then I will have a question.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: Throughout your career as a journalist, you learned a great deal. Based on your experience, if you had one recommendation to make to the Canadian media, what would it be?
Mr. Thompson: Based on my experience as a journalist?
Senator Chaput: Yes.
[English]
Mr. Thompson: Media organizations all claim they want to give journalists more time to do the kinds of stories that they want to do — they want the thoughtful, in-depth, contextual reporting — and yet very few of them seem to give their journalists the time and resources to do that. There are so many competing interests and not enough people to feed the goat and produce the news stream. You often end up with these competing demands to file, in a political bureau, for example, one or two news stories per day, but also work on that thoughtful, insightful, weekend feature, which can end up being written on the Thursday night.
You become quite good at that kind of multi-tasking and can often produce fairly good material in those conditions. However, in an ideal world — and I do not know if there really ever was this golden age or not — it would be nice if professional journalists had more time to pursue more of the kinds of reporting that they truly want to do.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: In so far as journalism studies are concerned, are there any changes that should be made to these study programs to better prepare young people for a career in this field?
[English]
Mr. Thompson: This is not an advertisement. The only one I know is Carleton University, because I studied there as an undergrad. I did the four-year bachelors' program in the 1980s and now I am teaching there, this year primarily in the masters program.
I think those disciplines have evolved, the way journalism is being taught. Nothing is adequate, but I think it is fine.
I do not know if there is really anything necessarily that we are missing. All I worry about is what is happening to the people that we produce from these schools of journalism, because it is a very different climate from the time when I graduated in the mid-1980s. I was able to secure full-time employment with a major media organization the day I walked out of school, the day I was ready to work, and spent the next 17 years there. It is not that kind of climate at all now.
Senator Milne: Senator Carney spoke about parachuting untrained people into dangerous situations, which is where I am tonight. I am brand new to the committee. I do not know, Madam Chair, if you will allow me to change the subject a little bit?
The Chairman: You are an autonomous senator and you have the floor.
Senator Milne: In your experience, is there more editorial content creeping into news stories in our newspapers these days?
Mr. Thompson: It is a good question and there is a real debate. I do not know if it is editorial comment so much. There is much discussion, again, about a golden age of dispassionate, objective news coverage with very little analysis injected into it. The argument from some quarters is that there is too much opinion, analysis and editorial comment injected into news coverage.
I am not sure I buy that argument. Generally what I always tried, or try, to do is to inject enough analysis and commentary to help readers understand what is at issue. I think a real problem is the impact of the 24-hour news cycle, the sort of threshold of news worthiness or the thresholds of, when am I ready to hit send on this story? Do I do this story today or wait to do more interviews and do it tomorrow? Do I repeat the allegations that I have just heard on CBC or some other broadcast outlet, or simply take them as given and seek out the reaction and do that story, or do I go back to the source and confirm all of that material by doing original reporting?
Much of what is being lost because of the competitive pressure, because of the 24-hour news cycle, is that threshold of when you were ready to file a story and when your story was really complete, accurate and fair. There is a lot of pressure to jump on the scandal du jour. Do your story quickly. Generate your own scandal story because that is where it is at, to some degree.
I am not so much worried about the inputs of editorial commentary or content because I think there has been a shift in style in the way news stories are written. We do give more context and comment than in another era. That does not concern me. What worries me is a lowering of standards in a real sense; the use of unnamed sources because of the pressure to produce stories, the manipulation that can take place in that environment, and sometimes scandal-driven journalism. It is not that there are not scandals that warrant attention because the watchdog role is very definitely a part of our function. I am not deriding a story about so-called stripper-gate and all of the media attention being devoted to whether or not a minister appropriately or inappropriately intervened in a case to give someone a resident's permit. That is a valid story and part of the watchdog role. Where I fault that story is the lack of attention to immigration policy, to what is going on behind the scenes. The story in my view is not about 600 Romanian exotic dancers who get permits, but about thousands of people married to Canadians, who are forced to leave the country and cannot pursue their immigration application from within Canada. That was a policy change made a couple years ago. It is quite complicated. It is hard to explain to readers. That issue that is interwoven with this whole stripper decision, in my understanding, affects thousands of people and garners very little media attention because it is easy on deadline to do the stripper story-of-the-day.
Senator Milne: That leads into my next question. I am concerned about converging ownership of some of the media in Canada. If I am sitting in Ottawa and I go down to my hotel lobby in the morning and pick up a free copy of the National Post and then I buy a copy of the Ottawa Citizen, how much variety in the news stories am I going to see?
Mr. Thompson: Probably not very much. You will likely have to go to the corner store and pick up a Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.
Senator Milne: The Toronto Star is my standby.
Mr. Thompson: We have a fairly significant degree of diversity in media voices despite convergence.
I am not sure we are as well served as we could be, but if newspapers have a point of view and if that point of view is infused into some of the news copy, I am not as concerned about that as long as there are still alternative voices in the marketplace.
The Chairman: Newspapers have always had a point of view, if only in terms of institutional tradition about judging what is important and what is not. Paper A would put the brawl at the soccer game on page 1, and paper B would put the argument over the Constitution on page 1. That is the way it works.
I am not discounting your concerns, Senator Milne. Some are not as new as all that.
Senator Milne: But I am.
The Chairman: The questions are valid and have come up at many of our hearings. The situation is what I was talking about there. My question goes back to the foreign bureau discussion. Your remarks focused essentially on Africa, because you know it best and that is where your heart is. Does the same hold true for Canadian foreign bureaus in more developed parts of the world? Have they been closing and if they have, does it matter?
Mr. Thompson: Some newspapers cover all of Europe from one bureau, which is a vast expanse culturally, geographically and politically, to be covered by one person sitting in London. That is, arguably, as grievous a mistake or as significant a factor to be worried about as coverage of the developing world.
I focused on the developing world because the shrift is shorter if there is such an expression, than the developing world.
I do not think we understand the United States as well as we should. Most news outlets, if they have anyone at all based in the United States reporting back to Canadian readers, probably have one correspondent, most likely based in Washington. I do not know if there is any news organization that has this, perhaps Washington and New York. However, if anyone covers the U.S. with a bureau in Los Angeles, Miami or in the West, it is treated as one big amorphous story.
The Chairman: What price do we pay for that?
Mr. Thompson: It is hard to determine because there are other sources of information. The way people inform themselves, the way they seek out news, is changing. I do not know if there ever was a golden age of more informed comprehensive coverage, and more attention to foreign news. I have a sense that there was. Arguably, the rest of the world matters more to us than it used to in terms of globalization, trades and career prospects. The likelihood that you will either work in another country, buy products or somehow rely economically on what is going on in another country is much more so than a generation ago.
That means it is important to have a world view about what is going on outside our borders.
The Chairman: It has been an interesting session. We are grateful to you.
We will get ourselves an inventory and take it from there.
The committee adjourned.