Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 12 - Evidence - June 19, 2003
OTTAWA, Thursday, June 19, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 10:48 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: Good morning.
Welcome to witnesses, senators, members of the public and viewers in television land to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, which is examining the state of the Canadian news media.
[Translation]
The committee is looking at the role the government could play to help our news organizations to remain effective, independent and diversified in the context of the many changes that have affected this field in recent years, such as globalization, technological change, convergence and the concentration of ownership.
We are meeting today as a roundtable. Then, we will welcome some very distinguished witnesses, and we will hear a witness speaking as an individual.
[English]
The panel with which we open today's proceedings consists of Mr. Hamilton Southam, Mr. Wilson Southam and Mr. Clark Davey. Mr. Hamilton Southam is a former director of Southam Inc. Mr. Davey is a former publisher of the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun, as well as the former president and chair of Canadian Press. Mr. Wilson Southam is a former director of Southam Inc. and the Southam Newspaper group. Each has vast experience in a wide range of other fields.
Thank you for being with us today.
As you know, we ask witnesses to open with a statement of approximately 10 minutes. We then have a period of questions and comments. Please proceed.
Mr. Hamilton Southam, Former Director of Southam Inc.: Madam Chair and honourable senators, let me say at the outset that I have no claim to speak to you as a journalist, although I was briefly a reporter for the London Times and an editorialist for the Ottawa Citizen just after World War II. I was a member of the board at Southam Inc. in the 1970s and early 1980s. My working life has been spent in the Department of External Affairs and the National Arts Centre. However, I was born into a family that lived, moved, breathed and had its being in newspapers, and I was raised to take a passionate interest in their welfare.
Let me give you a glimpse of that family's history. You may find it relevant.
Grandfather William Southam became part owner of the London Free Press in 1867, the year of Confederation. He sold that interest to become half owner of the Hamilton Spectator 1877. It was a Tory paper, and he kept it that way. He bought a second paper, the Ottawa Citizen, in 1897. It, too, was Tory, and he swore it would remain such.
He sent his strong-minded son to run it, my father Wilson, who was soon joined by his younger brother and dearest friend, Harry. Before long, they started to express ideas that smacked of liberalism. Alas, they had been taken to England as boys by their mother. They were closer to her than to their father. There they met her cousin, a Liberal MP, who interested them in such liberal ideas as imperial free trade and taxation of land values.
The Citizen loyally supported Tories at election time until Mackenzie King came on the scene, but grandfather found the occasional ventilation of these liberal ideas by the Citizen to be outrageous. He cancelled his subscription in 1912.
That gesture consecrated the Southam policy of local autonomy. From 1912 on, it was evident that there would be as many points of view as there were Southam papers. They were soon numerous. Grandfather had already bought the Calgary paper in 1908. He added the Edmonton Journal in 1912 and the Winnipeg Tribune in 1920. He then handed over to his sons who picked up the other half of the Spectator in 1925 and several other newspapers before World War II.
It became the unshakable conviction of the second and later generations of the Southam family that a newspaper's well-being depended on its freedom to reach its opinion on each and every issue and to express that opinion without fear or favour. We made that statement in every annual report. Over the years, this conviction was strengthened by our belief that Canada benefited greatly from this diversity of editorial voices as it a grew from a colony to a pluralistic, self-governing nation.
Two examples of the results of this editorial freedom are the creation of the CBC and the birth of the Social Credit movement in Canada.
The Ottawa Citizen was concerned in both. Its editor, Charles Bowman, with father's approval, was the first to recommend a Canadian version of the BBC to Mackenzie King. Later, he became the most effective member of the Aird commission, and then a powerful support to the apostolic work of Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt.
At the same time, father became interested in the Social Credit theories of Major Douglas. He brought him to Canada in 1932 and sent him on a cross-country tour. William Aberhart heard him speak in Alberta, and the rest is history. Neither development would have occurred had grandfather managed to keep editorial control of the Citizen.
Opinions differ about Social Credit, perhaps, but I am very proud that we helped the CBC.
What brought the Southams down was neither our policy of local autonomy, nor, as has been suggested to you, our failure to maximize profits. What brought us down was the second generation's decision to go public in 1945. Once we became a public company, as in my view we should never have done, the bottom line became all-important.
When my generation, the third, took over after World War II, we tended to overlook that fact and ran the business in the old way, the way we thought was good for the company and for Canadian journalism generally. We set up the Southam Fellowships, and we expanded the Southam News Service greatly. We even acquired another paper or two. However, we unwittingly prepared the way for a takeover.
Just as the forth generation was taking over in the 1980s, Conrad Black saw his chance and leapt at it. Maximizing his profits in a way we would never have dreamed of, he sold all our papers to CanWest.
There ends my glimpse into "a romanticized past complete with its business model" — to use a phrase that was used here recently. For obvious reasons, I am revolted by the CanWest policy of centralized editorial control, but I prefer to let Clark Davey and my nephew Wilson suggest what can be done about it. I know what they will say, and I agree entirely.
Mr. Wilson Southam, Former Director of Southam Inc. and Southam Newspapers: Thank you very much, honourable senators. I missed the wonderful rich heritage that my uncle Hamilton has described, growing up in the West.
I was a mountain guide and ski instructor. In my early teens, I started to hitchhike around North America. I have great respect for all that my uncle explained to you. I was asked onto the Southam board when I turned 40, where was a director for 23 years. I laughed happily and said to that wonderful man Claire Balfour, "I will drive you crazy." He said, "I know," and I did.
One of the first things that I said when I got there was that Southam should not have been allowed to become so large. It is not in the national interest. The fact that we had a good policy of local editorial independence is a wonderful example of the notion that the most feared despot should be the benign and kindly one because it accustomed us to the risks to our freedom and democratic opportunities. I had the chance to act behind the scenes a couple of times when Southam might have become larger, to ensure that it did not.
You cannot ever have a press that all points of view will see as wonderful. You will have Nazism at one end of the spectrum and other things in other places.
However, there does seem to be a risk in having too few voices in case they are all in tune with, for instance, the current passion in North America for persuading all of us that you and I, since we are not directly in business today, are some sort of elitists; that the only people who really understand our freedoms and liberties are people in business — the marketplace is the only place where freedom gets worked out properly.
The 70-year-old drive to have this set of rather stupid notions accepted has been largely successful in North America. Franklin Delano Roosevelt annoyed many wealthy people with his populist policies of looking after labour unions, poor people and so on. It was quietly decided that it would not happen again. Fortunes have been spent on the trend to persuade us to think that the real foundation of our freedom is the marketplace.
I am glad to be here with a group of people who do not have to scurry around to find election funds from corporations to do the serious, complex work that you have undertaken, which I am glad that you have.
I was trying to think yesterday, which is very painful for we older people. What occurred to me was that, when you look at media — a confusing job — and the calm study of media with so many different interested voices speaking to you, a matrix is useful in a way.
When I look at my own information experience, if I put down an axis across the bottom and I put down personal media. Then I put down community, and I put down national and international. To the annoyance of my oldest son, you can put down intergalactic for reasons we will probably never get to. You have an increasing breadth of issues covered by media at the bottom of this matrix.
If, up the side of the matrix, I put "free" as in free information, not-for-profit information; information for profit; public sector information; charitable information, we have 25 squares in which people asking themselves how public policy can help us make the very best use of media and preserve our diversity of voices, might operate effectively.
I arrived at the heritage committee on December 25th without a French translation for a booklet I wanted to share with everyone, so it could not be given out. On this occasion I have a somewhat similar booklet. I believe you have a copy. It is in two languages, thanks to Timothy Southam's very hard work at the last moment. I would like to address you to page 11 in this booklet.
There is a box at the bottom of the page, above which it says: "Once Famous Abroad for Peacekeeping; Next Target — World Class DOVE Media." "DOVE" is an acronym for diversity of voices everywhere.
It is the DOVE group, composed initially of 40 editors, publishers and directors, and later, of 45, that asked the question last year in national ads: Is freedom of the press being lost one newsroom at a time? Recently the group said: Hooray, we are so glad you guys are doing this work.
On that occasion, I offered 11 areas in terms of the brainstorming that, to me, is the very complex design process that you are doing. The first was that we revive a public government inquiry on the state of the Canadian media. You have done that, I think, although your budget is being shredded, I notice, by various other people.
The Chairman: Postponed.
Mr. Wilson Southam: Good for you, I hope you win. There are lots of corners of this country that need to speak to this issue.
Two, prevent cross-ownership of newspapers, television and other media, which Mr. Kent spoke to ably.
Three, a system of enforceable guarantees for local editorial independence, he has also spoken ably to.
Four, return to full support of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is fashionable to knock the neo- Conservatives, the paleo-conservatives, whomever, but it has largely been the Liberals who have gutted the financing of the CBC and that is a great shame.
I would mention Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board and so on, but I have a conflict of interest because Timothy is a film-maker so I will not mention them right now.
Five, safeguards for Canadian culture — return to pre-WTO ruling standards. It was, I am sure you all remember, that dreadful day where the WTO knocked down an old tariff, knocked down subsidies for transport, et cetera. We forgot to read the notwithstanding clause in NAFTA, and now we have had a small taste of what has ruined a number of countries around the world. We have had a taste of the interventions of the WTO, the IMF, et cetera.
Six, strength in national journalism fellowships — they are doing good work at Massey College to try to raise private funds. I am in support of what Mr. LaPointe had to say about investing in people who have learned the craft and are on the job.
It was Henry Mintzberg at McGill who refused to teach MBAs because he did not believe that young people, wet behind the ears, should be taught to run around bossing people. He has now set up an international system where adults whose companies will pay for attendance come from around the world as people with real experience with handling power — which is so badly handled in bureaucracies — come together and learn a great deal.
If we want to do something about the diversity of voices in this country, I agree with Kirk Lapointe that spending some serious money in the area of continuing education for adult journalists, something apparently the new corporations are not prepared to do, would be useful.
Seven, a system of investigative journalism awards to be funded properly — investigative journalism is expensive, time-consuming and it risks the wrath of advertisers. The figure of 2 to 3 per cent of time spent on investigative journalism that was presented to you today by Mr. Lapointe — in most organizations the percentage is not that good.
With the sorts of issues that I will close by mentioning, I think we will benefit enormously from both the quality and amount of investment in helping us all look further ahead and look at things more complexly.
In 1972, the Club of Rome, composed of scholars from 37 nations, came out with "Limits to Growth." The club has been laughed at because, like Thomas Malthus, they made the mistake of making predictions. They said that if this is the here-and-now, we move out to the universe, and so on, and this is a time span. Let us do the time line again. We move out through our children's lifetime, and here we move out through nation and so on, to the world. We have a hell of a lot of dots if that represents preoccupations in the here and now. We have a few in our lifetime and a few that go out to the nation state.
As a species, brilliant as we are, having climbed down from the trees and survived the tigers, we do not do well on things in our children's lifetime that are large issues or structural issues. It is just possible, the scientists of the world agree, that there are a category of problems that are new in kind, not degree, that we will be facing together as Canadians, next door to a giant that is increasingly using its media for propaganda. These problems will require a quality and a concentration of public discourse that can be aided by appropriately free press in an extraordinary way.
I would really look at continuing education for interested journalists.
Eight, a system of tax incentives for newsrooms meeting standards of independence — there was a lot of back and forth on that with the Heritage Committee. We are not talking about subjective assessments of newsrooms. If they are fascist, they are fascist, or they may be off the clock in some other direction.
We are talking about it being much cheaper to have one newsroom for 14 daily newspapers than to have 14. My son makes films, as I mentioned before. He is now facing one reviewer for the country in that chain, as far as I can make out. That is not what we want in terms of cultural efforts. It is much cheaper to have one newsroom than 14, no question. However, if someone was to go against the maximization of profits at the level of the local newspaper and say that they want to have the sort of deal Tom Kent talks about, where we have a local, independent newsroom, it would cost a lot of money.
If we truly care about this issue, as we put funds into the public sector at CBC, we could consider tax breaks for newspapers that reach certain standards of staffing and mix of jobs agreed to by a body of journalists and others every ten years. People could be counted without subjectivity — they could all be Nazis. Certain expenditure and investigative reporting could be one part of the mix. You count it, it is there and the subject does not matter.
We are not talking about putting government in the newsroom but we are talking about recognizing that it is very expensive to have a high-quality local newsroom. When you look in the personal box on that matrix I spoke to earlier, you will find wonderful information from around the world, in my own case principally from a psychologist in the West, a multimedia business person in the West, a minister, interestingly enough in the West, and from three highly educated people in the East. I am one of the luckiest people in terms of information in the whole damn world. They use all their intelligence to screen; they target accurately; and they are brilliant. With that personal box, where I am protected a little from pornography, I am in terrific shape. I choose at the national and international box to read The Globe and Mail. I can take a look at Harper's, Time and The Economist. People with business interests will come in and tell me time and time again that there are so many media available today that everyone is in great shape.
As I go through all of that, the business of honest, effective, high-quality coverage the subject of the local community and the farm district is in the toilet. I believe it was Mr. Davey who sent in a paper from Gillian Steward, who was an editor out West, which demonstrates that the flight from newsrooms of people who really know something in-depth is severe in the local communities. Today, some newspaper groups are looking for a universal reporter who can cover everything without any particular depth. If that is the kind of public discourse that will keep this country alive and healthy in this age, then good luck to us. There are some real issues to be addressed with that aspect of the media.
Nine, a not-for-profit newspaper à la The Manchester Guardian — was mentioned in the Heritage Committee on December 5, but unlike poor Mr. Watson there was not a reporter in place so I did not face all the abuse that he took for suggesting a national not-for-profit newspaper. I have put the Web site for the P.C. Scott Trust that handles the Guardian Media Group in the book about how they are structured; how they managed to have that wonderful Manchester Guardian; and about "public trust" before profit being the dominant bias in the selection and promotion of ideas in their media. We need good local coverage and we clearly need national coverage.
Several senators asked different witnesses if some stories are not being covered. I will talk about North America because, as a Southam, I would never get personal about one of the media companies here.
In September in Scotland, they broke the entire, accurate story of the Project for the New American Century, PNAC, and all the lovely details of six countries for regime change. This was first drafted a decade ago by Wolfowitz with Dick Cheney as his mentor and later joined by a host of others in the Bush administration, including Governor Bush from Florida. They were worried that Europe and Japan might become dominant powers like America. It was a secret American document until the story was broken in Scotland. They talked about renewing research in Star Wars, bio-nuclear and other weapons systems because they would offer advantages to America internationally. They talked about a large military presence, no matter what happens in Iraq and the Middle East. They talked about America being the logical people to run peacekeeping around the world instead of the UN. They talked about establishing a large base and military presence in the Far East because of the dangers of China. The meeting was not covered until finally, the Observer ran the story about a month ago and the CBC ran seven minutes of the story. That was late in terms of looking at the Iraq war. It did not get covered; it was very clear.
Mr. Greg Palast broke apart the entire detailed story of the theft of the American election in Florida — about the two years of pruning 87,000 people off the Florida voters list because they were felons, although not many of them were felons but most of them were Black and Democratic. Only Salon, a Web site in the States, ran that story at a time when it would have done some good before the election was over — before they went to the Supreme Court. Jeb Bush's office put pressure on them because the series was inaccurate and so they stopped half-way. It could not have been too bad though because the Washington Post ran the whole thing four months after the Supreme Court gave the election to George W. Bush. This is not the coverage of difficult issues that North America, and particularly Canada, needs. There are many other examples, as you know.
Ten, an Internet-supported DOVE forum on-line that would combine many of the features recommended by Mr. Kirk Lapointe, in terms of being an educational centre. I have a model that you can look at on page 10. It shows a Web site or a centre called Internet-supported DOVE centre. It has hosts you can speak to on-line; helpers that go out to run news-seeking programs; high-quality editorial staff; and international reach. It is much cheaper than a newspaper and it might be something for you to explore in terms of getting all those stories, such as PNAC and the theft of the election, and the Canadian equivalents on the air without delay. It would be an inspiration for the rest of our press to cover more of those kinds of issues.
Eleven — next we have the world-class DOVE Research and Development Centre for new media. I have included a picture of five young people because it was my privilege to set up a skunk-works at Southam that explored new media on the streets. The smart money on the street said that young people were two or three years ahead of the rest of the world in the work they were doing but the issues would be different. For the kind of work that this committee is doing, we need good model building; and we need good research on legislation. The Supreme Court and others are handing down decisions that are absolutely inadequately researched around media issues.
There is no doubt that you can liberate enormous talent, energy and creativity in work groups in news rooms and in other places if you pay attention to getting rid of the top-down nonsense that has gone on for far too long. The business of all Canadians is to continue to learn so that we can find our way through the Cs of Change, such as you will see at page 7. Any one of those could wipe us out in the next while. Crowding — we have gone from 1 to 6 billion in a very short time. At 1.2 babies per woman, we may get to 12.8 quite soon and it will then go straight up; in fact, we are at 2.6 babies per woman and we are not doing well with crowding.
Climate is a big one. Just yesterday, there was scientific information released that showed a severe drop in biodiversity of plants with slight changes in climate based on careful research done at Stanford University.
Concerning croplands, the UN tells us there are 30 countries now that do not have enough water to grow their own food. They are telling us that in 15 years it will be much more severe but I have not seen much in the press about that UN report.
Cupidity and cities — we used to learn all about the common good by living in our cities. The U.S. Highways Act of 1948 led a lot of us to live out of town. Now we have one child in four in the urban core living below the poverty line. We could spend a great deal of time on those figures. However, it is the kind of information that means — along with all the traditional reasons in our article in The Globe and Mail, which prompted our paragraph in support of what your committee is doing — that we have many new issues on the way.
Why? Well, by the time we wake up, it may be too late. One example and I am finished. If it warms up beyond a certain point, and it looks like it might, the carbon monoxide begins to be released naturally as a process from bogs around the world. At that point, we begin to cook no matter what we decide to do about the Kyoto Protocol, or anything else.
For those who are still being comforted by The Sceptical Environmentalist, scientific analysis from Denmark has shredded that best seller. Please, if that is where you are right now, do not stay with it because the Danish committee on integrity in research has decimated it.
The Chairman: Mr. Southam, I would draw your attention to the interim report of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and forestry on adaptation to climate change. It was published yesterday and I am certain that you will like its tendencies. The report does not contain recommendations; it is an interim report only.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I look forward to that. In fact, our research department probably has it already.
The Chairman: Our next witness is Mr. Clark Davey. Truth in advertising compels me to remind everyone that for numerous tumultuous years, Mr. Davey was my boss when he was the publisher of The Montreal Gazette. They were tumultuous and stimulating years. Our disagreements were, on occasion, famed and even making it to the pages of the newspaper on one glorious occasion. They were interesting years.
Mr. Clark Davey, Former Newspaper Publisher: Yes, I was compelled at one point, as publisher of The Montreal Gazette, to correct the editorial board led by your chair on the subject of free trade, on the Saturday before the election.
The Chairman: He did not, however, ever change a word of our editorials.
Senator Graham: Was that the 1988 election?
Mr. Davey: Yes.
Senator Carney: Who won?
Mr. Davey: The publisher always has the last word if necessary, but if you use it too often you are in big trouble.
Senator Corbin: The people spoke.
Mr. Davey: Indeed, they did. I should also tell you that I started my life as the barnyard reporter for three years in the late 1940s for the Chatham Daily News. I do know something about agriculture in that lovely breadbasket part of our country.
I also learned early on after the Southams joined me in Vancouver that one thing you must never do is allow Wilson to speak ahead of you. He was always the closing speaker at the family dinners that we all enjoyed so much.
When I retired ten years ago, after 45 fulfilling years in journalism, I and a group of Southam publishers formed a loose organization that meets sporadically. We call ourselves the FIPs, formerly important persons. It is nice to be remembered here today.
You have been remarkably well served by witnesses who appeared at earlier sessions. I thank your clerk for keeping us abreast of all transcripts.
I suspect that an entire generation of journalism students will be reading and learning from those transcripts. It will make a fascinating textbook to help journalists along the road to learning.
Not surprisingly, I identify most closely with the advice that Russell Mills gave you. I succeeded him as publisher of the Citizen, and he in turn succeeded me. I simply want to reiterate two points he made, add a few comments briefly and defer to your questions.
Mr, Mills warned that what you do not do might be more important than what you do. It was his way of saying to not do anything that would get governments, at any level or agencies involved in the content of journalism. It is bad enough that some owners are doing that to the detriment of readers, viewers and the public good. Any remedy involving more government influence, because there is obviously some creeping in, would be a cure worse than the current disease.
The other point he made, which was reinforced by other witnesses, most often those with newspaper backgrounds, is that newspapers are a public trust. Even though privately owned, they should be operated in the public and national interest.
I believe that the real reason that this committee came into existence is that public trust has been breached by an ownership group that operates newspapers as if they were licensed to do so, as they are in broadcasting. If CanWest Global had not taken over what used to be the Southam group of newspapers, or if they had continued to operate them in either the Southam or even the much briefer Black tradition, I doubt that this committee would have been created.
I am a journalist, and I deal in the sharp ends of the stick. In my view, the breaches include the plan to impose a national editorial view on all of their newspapers, which has subsided somewhat but has not gone away.
The breach also includes the act of discouragement of an informed debate on the Middle East by the suppression of views and news favourable in any way to Palestinians. There has been a skewing of the discussion of the leadership of Jean Chrétien by making it clear that criticism will be a career-limiting action. That phrase is used a lot in Winnipeg head office.
There has been the creation of a central assigning and editing news desk in Winnipeg that will, we are told, produce a one-view-fits-all coverage of major Canadian news events and even national reviews of movies and television. This, and the resulting layoffs, with more to come, is being done we are told by CanWest executives in the name of economy at newspapers that, with the exception of the National Post, are already very profitable.
I should interpose here that bad things, as Charles Gordon called them in his very good column in the Ottawa Citizen on Tuesday, are still happening. I commend that column to you. I also commend to you, if you have not seen it, the long piece in The Hill Times yesterday commenting on the most recent dismissals within the national bureau of CanWest.
These four initiatives and some other ancillary events have created a climate of fear that permeates the editorial departments of the CanWest publications. That is probably the very worst thing that has happened. This in turn leads to self-censoring editorial decisions that leave us all the poorer.
I should also mention another import from television that takes away from the credibility of newspapers that employ it. That is the sale of adjacencies, where a client advertiser is guaranteed a friendly editorial environment in the news sections for his advertisements. Adjacencies have also been a factor of life in television, but they have no place in the news sections of our newspapers.
All this is a long way from a public trust in the national interest. The damage, in my view, has been severe and will be lasting.
The committee in the other place took a major step forward last week with its courageous recommendation for a three-year moratorium on cross-ownership between newspapers and broadcasting licences in the same market. Although cross-ownership was not a major issue in its mandate, the members obviously see it as a serious problem and asked the government to act and develop a policy.
My strong belief is that the committee did not go nearly far enough in seeking to reverse the harm that has already been done to the many Canadian newspapers under the thrall of CanWest publications.
What is needed to set that reversal in motion is a recommendation from this committee to take that moratorium one vital step further. That would extend the ban on cross-ownership to all renewals of broadcasting licences and deny those licences to owners already owning newspapers in the same market.
Aside from the inordinate potential for thought control through cross-ownership, which is inimical to the public good, it has been amply demonstrated in the last two years that business and journalistic principles that may make good sense in television do not produce the kind of newspapers Canadian readers have come to expect and appreciate.
This policy, the ban on cross-ownership, worked well, as you know, in the 1970s. I believe our business, for it is a business and not a profession as some witnesses want to call it, made an enormous blunder in not fighting to keep it when it was rescinded.
Senator Graham: As a person who paid his way through university as the news editor and sports editor for the weekly Antigonish Casket, I feel humbled in the presence of such eminent people who have such distinguished and wide backgrounds, individually and collectively.
I am pleased with the interest and the concern that the three of you and others are showing about this study that will uncover problems.
I believe Mr. Wilson Southam mentioned the theft of the election in Florida. At one point I heard you say that was coverage that Canada did not need. Could you clarify?
Mr. Wilson Southam: I said that rather than pick on instances in this country of things uncovered — and I do believe there are a few — I would give you two examples of massive questions that were not covered effectively at all in North America.
The first instance I gave you was the Project for the New American Century, which had the distinguished list of people now in the Bush cabinet and elsewhere. That really laid out an agenda for America: sending the UN to a minor role, establishing bases around the world, exchanging six regimes instead of one, and so on.
There was a leak in 1991, but the American military got together and denied that it came from anybody important. It disappeared, except for a couple of points that came up in the last election. Then in 2000, the document is entire, it leaks and is published in September in Scotland. There was nothing to speak of in this country. Then the Observer ran a long and articulate piece on it, it made it to CBC recently, a month or five weeks ago.
It is an example of a large topic, with a large agenda, that would have been useful to have before decisions were made in the United States about Iraq. We made a good decision, in my view, in this country, so it is more academic.
The second one is the business of the gerrymandering that went on in Florida by Jeb Bush, the brother of the President, and Katherine Harris. It took two years to prune 87,000 people off the voters list. Later on, because they got to the Supreme Court before the vote count in Florida, it became clear that Bush had not won the election in spite of that.
These are examples of stories that will not be popular in — it is not a club — but with the interest that would have us, as Patrick Watson said to you, all shift the big "c" from our job as "citizens" to our job as "consumers."
There has been a huge shift in the public information around what our functions are as a society. It shows up in the excellent ignorance figures that were printed, broken by the CBC just this week, on who hates who around the world and who knows what in the United States. We do know that the United States adult functional illiteracy rate is approaching 42 per cent.
We know that the last time Southam looked, the functional adult illiteracy rate was 25 per cent. This figure was in a study done by Peter Calamai.
There are things that are not being covered in a narrower media environment. It is serious because so much of what you hear on the Internet is newspaper stories. Therefore, if they are not happening in the newspaper, they are not happening to an extent on the Internet either.
Those are two examples of large contentious issues that should have been on the table as information before decisions were made about going to war and not going to war, and related issues, like, did the president win the election in the United States?
The Chairman: This is fascinating, but I wonder if you could —
Mr. Wilson Southam: Be less verbose?
The Chairman: Not, not verbose, but I am gazing at the clock.
Mr. Wilson Southam: You have Jim Travers coming in and I want to stay and hear that.
Senator Graham: I agree with you because I think that the coverage of events like the theft of the election in Florida, were extremely important for the rest of the world to know, because we send people, including myself, around the world, trying to encourage democracy. We tell people that they have nothing to fear from democracy, because the heart of democracy is a secret ballot.
I talked with President Jimmy Carter, with whom I have done some election-observing around the world. He said we would not have even observed the election in Florida, because the election laws from city to city and from county to county, were not uniform. That is another story.
What did you think, collectively, of the coverage of the war on Iraq by CBC? We had somebody here who said that it was not balanced?
Mr. Wilson Southam: I think we should run Private Lynch for president. We now know that Private Lynch was not a combatant, she was not injured in battle, the Iraqis were trying to return her for a day and a half and were being shot at. The whole thing was a staged news event. We have shots on the Internet of the square where the statue was toppled. We have photographs of the Iraqis brought back from abroad by the Americans, coming in at the airport. We have close-ups of the people who were up on the statue, the crew they brought in. If you look at the Web site where that statue was, if you look at the photographs, you will find that the square is empty except for the small cast in front of the cameras that are tearing it down. I think it was a managed news event, yes.
Senator Graham: With respect to your open letter, you say in the final paragraph, before you list the people who signed it.
We believe such study, reporting and commentary are important and timely, particularly as some media owners are now seeking approval for increased foreign ownership of our media.
Why is that necessary?
Mr. Wilson Southam: To have increased foreign ownership?
Senator Graham: Yes.
Mr. Wilson Southam: If you have a larger bidding market, prices go up. Huge debts were incurred to make the acquisitions out there. There may be many other noble reasons, but in fact it is about cleaning up the debt and keeping as much as you can, if the market were to sag, as it may well with the American money market. Those people are enormously exposed to risk. I do not think we want Walt Disney talking to us any more than he does right now, so I think more foreign ownership is a big mistake.
Senator Carney: In the interests of disclosure, I want to say that I worked for Southam as a journalist and a columnist for most of 15 years, I think it was under Southam ownership. Just as a matter of record, when Southams bought the two newspapers in the same town, the Province and the Sun, we were not allowed in each other's newsrooms. It was possible to put out two different newspapers; two different voices, with a centralized location, with centralized distribution, with editorial diversity because we were simply not permitted in each other's newsrooms.
This is a fascinating subject and we could go on forever. I want to bring it back to the focus of the committee and ask Clark Davey, particularly, what is the role of government in this kind of situation?
We all, or many of us, share your concerns about the centralization of power, not just in newsrooms but also in circulation. My understanding is that a factor in the Victoria Times columnists' strike was the concept of taking all the Victoria circulation and centralizing the control of that in Winnipeg?
While we may dislike it, think it is terrible, and object to it, what is the role of government versus the marketplace? You have mentioned two things and we appreciate that.
You have mentioned the CRTC-type of control over the renewal of licences, radio and television, where there is cross-ownership. Other witnesses have indicated competition policy is a legitimate area of government; to strengthen competition policy so there is not an over-dominance in any market place.
Aside from tools like that, what actually can the government do as a government, versus the marketplace, in correcting the imbalance? In the marketplace, Canadians have shown that they do not care for the National Post. It is losing a lot of money. What would happen if you just left it to the marketplace, given the fact we have a diversity of sources? We do have the Internet. We do have a lot of weeklies and smaller papers. We do have other sources of information, particularly for the youth. I am just asking you, what can we do about it, beyond the tools that government already possesses, and keeping in mind the traditional freedom of the press?
Mr. Davey: One correction, the strike in Victoria was really about the fact that mailers who have to be able to count to 12 and tie their shoe laces to qualify for the job — they work in the mail rooms, shipping out the bundles — they wanted to hang on to their $37 per hour salary. That is really what the strike was about. There was some problem with centralizing complaint calls.
If you complain to the Ottawa Citizen about non-delivery, your call is answered in Winnipeg. I do not have a problem with centralization of call rooms.
What can the government do and what should the government do? Not very much. I see the CRTC control over licensing of broadcasting, as a legitimate role for that agency, and if there was a policy in effect now, as there was in the 1970s, we would not be in the mess we are in with CanWest Newspapers because CanWest would not own any of the newspapers.
If there was a policy put in place, I would argue that renewal of licences for broadcasting would not be considered for people who own newspapers. CanWest — some of them might be happy to do this, because the newspapers are an awful pain in the rectum for them — I am sure their decision would be to divest themselves of the newspapers. While the newspapers are very profitable — 30 per cent return on revenue for most of the big newspapers in their group — television is even more profitable; radio too, but television in particular.
Senator Carney: So you say, not very much. Now, in terms of competition policy, Southam has dominated their markets. Is there any area of competition policy that you think could be strengthened to reduce the centralization of control?
Mr. Davey: The competition policy in this country is almost a joke in terms of its effectiveness. The competition investigators visited me when I was publisher of the Sun in Vancouver. They came in, literally, and took material — they were so thorough, I was impressed by them. They found things I had lost in my own office, including the report that I was looking for of the judgment which sanctified the arrangement in Vancouver; and which was one of the reason why Paddy Sherman, as publisher of the Province, and myself, as publisher of the Sun, only met in what we called the competition boardroom, which was the joint boardroom that joined the two places.
I think there is a legitimate role for a competition policy in the country. If you will remember, the Irvings, I believe, were called in front of the Competition Bureau. You would remember this, senator, I think, back in the 1970s. Nothing happened. There was not then, and there is not now, enough teeth in the Competition Act.
Senator Carney: Maybe we can pursue that, because that is an area of government where we have concerns we can look at. As a publisher, maybe you could answer a question that a lot of us cannot. If you have convergence, like we have, where one owner owns the television station, the radio station —
Mr. Davey: And a sports team.
Senator Carney: Yes, and a sports team, and a whole lot of platforms, where do you take your profits? This is the big question of convergence. Everyone is converging and buying all these different elements because they are supposed to be more efficient, make more money, but where do you actually take them?
Mr. Davey: Senator, convergence is not making money for anybody at this point. Three and four years ago, people were flocking out of Canadian operations to Florida to visit the two locations where convergence was supposed to be working like a charm, St. Petersburg and Orlando. When they got there, they were knocked over by what they were doing in terms of convergence, creating a variety of platforms off one person's back, in a sense. At the end of the day, they were all taken aside and told quite candidly, we have not figured out how to make money out of this.
Senator Carney: So as a business model, the case for convergence is still to be proven?
Mr. Davey: It is still to be proven. I am a strong believer in the new technology and all the ramifications. I believe, at some point down the road, someone will come upon the right formula for making convergence work, for making it profitable. I am offended now, by going to most of the newspaper Web sites in Canada and being assaulted — before I am allowed to see what they are offering me on the Web site — by an advertisement that I have to get rid of before I can see what the news is.
Senator Carney: The youth is getting its information mainly by the Internet. I learned that you do not start reading newspapers until you have assets. People start reading newspapers when they have a car or a house — they want to know what their car is worth — then they get the paper to read the classifieds. Youth has never been a big market for newspapers. However, increasingly, young people are getting their news off the Internet. Do you see a day when newspapers become irrelevant to today's Internet addicts? Are we talking about something that is not relevant?
Mr. Davey: I think not. One of the newspaper groups in the States invested a large amount of money in what Mr. Southam refers to as a "skunk works" — a think-tank about new technology.
Mr. Wilson Southam: There is no line of authority over it; it is free to go where it wishes.
Mr. Davey: He was set up in Boulder, Colorado, working for the newspaper group. He produced a machine that looked almost like a toaster, literally. I went and visited him, and I think Mr. Southam was with us on that trip. You would program the machine the night before as you would a computer, and in the morning, it would have gone through the news databases and selected out whatever you wanted. Popping out of the toaster-like machine, which was really a computer, was a tablet that you could take to the bathroom with you, which was one of the arguments that people made for the future of newspapers — as long as you can take them to the bathroom, they will still be around.
Senator Carney: You still can take them to the bathroom.
Mr. Davey: You have to learn how to fold them properly. That toaster concept, and the tablet concept, was technologically okay; but, again, no one could come up with a business plan for it. That was back in 1990 or 1991, and it actually worked. We saw it.
Senator Carney: It is a whole new concept that audiences want news on demand. They do not want to read a whole newspaper or watch television necessarily; they want to be able to get what they want it, when they want it and in the form they want. That is where the media business is going.
Mr. Davey: And they do not want to have to click to see a second screenful.
Senator Carney: Thank you very much. I wish all the witnesses at the Senate committees that I sit on were as refreshing as you.
The Chairman: We have been having a pretty good run.
Senator Gustafson: I want to thank you for a very interesting morning. I grew up in a Social Credit family when my father ran; and I came to the conclusion that they were just good Conservatives because the world would not adopt the Douglas theory of putting money in by credit instead of debt. So I gave up on it. However, there is a lot of good thought about that situation, and I really appreciated your note on that, Mr. Southam, because I went through the same thing myself.
One set of paper media — one set of media for Canada. I am also afraid, as a Conservative, that we are heading for one-party rule in Canada. That bothers me. My real question concerns rural neglect.
I seem to be the lone voice around here — I am getting some support. Agriculture in Canada is hurting severely. The media coverage is very important, as to its balance in how it responds to the urban centres and rural. If I may use the problem in the cattle industry just now, there was a lot of coverage on the scare part, but very little coverage on the hurt part of what was happening.
That triggers something that Alvin Hamilton mentioned to me when I first ran in 1979. He said there is an undeclared war in Canada between the urban centres and rural Canada. I have often thought of that. We are facing some very serious problems. This is a wonderful country. We have everything in natural resources that anybody in the world could want; and it seems that our profits are made in the natural resources — whether it is agriculture, forestry, oil, gas, mining, you name it — but how much of it stays there? We have forgotten our roots.
Mr. Southam commented on the fact that we were dropping in the toilet on it. I would like to hear your comments on that.
Mr. Wilson Southam: One of the things that strikes you — and it came up with all the numbers — is the British spend $3.9 billion on their public sector.
They have twice our population. We are under $1billion. The CBC was doing a good job locally and regionally. It is largely closed down because we decided it is an area to save money rather than have a national strategy around the quality of broadcasting. We were asked specific questions about private-sector activities of newspapers.
One of your witnesses said that there are limits and controls for what you would like to do there, such as the Competition Act, or whatever. You really want to look at what the public sector could do to balance the situation, because there are huge appetites and power tied up in this. There are many sacred documents about interference. Tie up with constraining your activities to improving the quality of coverage in that private stratum of the box, the matrix I talked about at the beginning.
One of the ways to do it is give the public broadcaster a clear mandate to cover this country and do the job, whether it is Inuit communities or street people or all sorts of things that get little coverage. You need to pay for it. It is certainly within the purview of your study. If you are at a point where you think the issues are important in a balanced way, you could shift some of the attention back to public answers, such as the model for media centre supported by the Internet. It could do a job there.
Senator Spivak: It is quite comforting to know that there is a group like yours out there, of which I was not aware. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate hearing your views this morning.
By the way, I suppose you know that Senator Gore is now looking at setting up a competing media outlet. I do not know if it is newspapers or television. It would present, as he puts it, the liberal side in the United States. That will be tough.
The Chairman: Is he a senator?
Senator Spivak: I am sorry, former Vice-President Gore. They never lose their titles. I did not realize that the Manchester Guardian is a non-profit paper. How is it non-profit?
You seem to be in favour of a non-profit newspaper in this country, which I think is a great idea, even though it has been pilloried a great deal. How would this come about? What are the auspices? Who would pay for it? How do you suggest that be done?
Mr. Wilson Southam: If you go to the Web site that is in the booklet under that point, you will find the Guardian Media Group with a complete description of how it came about in 1936 when there was a death due to these issues so a family put a newspaper trust. They have since built a large for-profit operating group, and it sees to it that The Guardian is secure.
The Guardian, based on its track record is able to talk about anything it wants, and to hell with the advertising level. The Nation is apparently structured similarly.
How would you go about it? The Southams missed their chance. We should have given our shares to the national trust and set up a parallel thing. It was all there at the time.
You could identify a newspaper that you thought was run by professionals and was well-placed. Perhaps it should not be in Toronto. Buy it and turn it over on a trust basis to a mix of government and other people, and let it go to work. Give it a clear mandate that is broad, and do not stick your nose in it. It needs to be funded so it cannot be interfered with by the Privy Council changing its mind on a Wednesday.
It needs to be up and running. Let it buy some supportive for-profit smaller organs as they did in England. They grew with it.
Senator Spivak: It is not just the fact that we have concentration of ownership. It is also the fact that we have dumbed down the populace.
If you look at what gets the most viewers, it is the sensationalism — the tabloids, reality TV, things like that. I think we missed the boat in that we did not have competing exposure. Our symphonies are not being attended because people have not listened to them. They are listening to that noise.
That problem will be very difficult to counter, because people vote with their feet. I do not know what the circulation of Harper's is, but I will bet you it is not anywhere near all those tabloids in the states. What are your views on that?
Mr. Davey: One thing you should understand is that newspaper ownership is much less concentrated now than it was ten years ago. Osprey has the largest number of titles, 22. It was brought to life by young Mr. Sifton. He has 22 titles in small Ontario dailies. The concentration of ownership is not as big a problem.
Senator Spivak: Is that the Winnipeg Mr. Sifton?
Mr. Davey: Yes.
Senator Spivak: Everything is coming out of Winnipeg.
Mr. Wilson Southam: Your witness on Tuesday explained to the group that there are now 15 owners of groups of papers instead of eight. It was really an interesting observation. Let us be absurd for a minute. Once you go over six newspapers, you get a management view that comes in that is good, sensible, bottom line. It starts to dominate gradually over the public trust concept of a newspaper that a few of the independent owners could have. You got that sort of attention. Under this absurdly simplistic model, as the thing grows, the dominance of the business perspective on profitability, et cetera, starts to really grow, too.
You have got 15 of those groups now in terms of staffing newsrooms and being sensitive to many public trust issues. You have 15 business-oriented groups. Hooray. What sort of diversity is that?
Your other question was?
Senator Spivak: How to combat the dumbing down of mass culture, and the fact that people vote with their feet. They like sensationalism. You hear nothing now except Laci Peterson. You do not hear anything else now that Iraq is winding down. That is a problem as large as ownership control.
Mr. Wilson Southam: It may well be a larger problem, but it would be nice if there were survivors. I do not regard myself as one, but I never watch television, except CBC national news.
In a design project you define the problem, brainstorm, set design criteria, and work back to get a first step. You work out a time line, a budget and do all those disciplined things if you want to take this country in a different direction.
Regarding your other point, it may already be too late. There are people who say that our species, hurtling past 6 billion, will not make it. It would be very good for the other species.
We are dumbing down. The average American student gets 12 hours of screen time to one hour of page time. That is the current number.
Senator Spivak: I want to leave you with one hopeful note. Young people are very interested in the environment. The newspapers, both the National Post and The Globe and Mail have increased environmental stories. I do not know if they are read.
Our public television and radio are now attempting to reach young people in a way that they think fits their taste. It is terrible.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I do too.
Mr. Davey: One of the things that might be interesting for the committee to know is to test the theory put forward this morning that young people are getting their news off the Internet. I am not sure that is true and how many hits on news databases come from young people.
The Chairman: It seems to me that the few young people I know go to the Internet for other things such as eBay and music but not necessarily for news.
Senator Carney: My information comes from a seminar that the University of British Columbia School of Journalism held on convergence, where American researchers presented data on readership trends that included readership trends on the Internet by age breakdown. I earlier advised the committee that that information was available from the UBC School of Journalism. I would urge that you obtain it because its basis is research data.
The Chairman: We have received some material from UBC following Professor Logan's appearance before the committee but I am not sure we received that exact data. We will check it.
Mr. Wilson Southam: Do you know the Internet site, by any chance?
Senator Carney: No, but UBC or Ms. Donna Logan could supply it. Many journalists and communications people, including representatives of CanWest Global, attended the seminar. The data are on record. I have advised the committee that these American presenters are potential witnesses for this committee and that may be followed up.
The Chairman: Mr. Davey, could you expand on your remarks about adjacencies and what they are, what you understand to be happening now and how this differs from policies that were enforced when you were in the business of publishing newspapers?
Mr. Davey: Newspapers have been guilty of a peculiar form of prostitution in dealing with some classes of advertisers. When was the last time you read a nasty story about a travel experience in a travel section? When was the last time you read a story about a clunker in the automotive section? The newspapers have been dealing with adjacencies by sectionalizing them and pushing them off, assuming that the readers are sophisticated enough to know what they are doing.
The Chairman: The story about the clunker does not appear in the automotive section but it appears somewhere.
Mr. Davey: It appears in the news section.
There were two separate occasions that I will relate to you and one of them was some months ago when Microsoft was the advertiser. Our DOVE Web site has detailed all of this. I wrote a letter to the Ottawa Citizen, which ran the story and we have done a great deal of research in this area. Microsoft was the advertiser and there was a group-sell to them.
The Chairman: What is a group-sell?
Mr. Davey: Group-sell applies to the major newspapers. I think Maclean's was included in that.
The Chairman: Is that the selling of advertising?
Mr. Davey: Yes. Microsoft had a full-page ad in the major newspapers. The facing page was an article written by a professor from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, which was dealing with the subject of competition, by and large. I believe that the series ran six or seven weeks with one full-page ad per week. Needless to say, none of the competition stories dealt with what the competition police and the courts had said about Mr. Gates and Microsoft in the United States. This was guaranteeing Microsoft a favourable environment for their ad.
More recently, on the health pages of the Ottawa Citizen and other newspapers, I believe the advertiser was a decongestant such as Claritin. The head office provided them with a series of two or three stories to run on top of the ad.
The Chairman: The paper provided them to the advertiser?
Mr. Davey: No, head office provided the stories to the newspaper. Each one of those stories dealt with the problems of breathing in the current environment or the need for decongestants. Again, that advertiser on the health page, in the front news section of the paper, was guaranteed a certain favourable environment. It was not marked. As you know, we used to mark some things like that with an advertising special. The Globe and Mail years ago used to run a box at the top of what we called "Advertorial" which said that the material on this page was supplied by the advertiser. That was a clear warning to the reader to be careful what you believe.
Adjacencies originate in television in the latest move by CanWest Global. In television, if you want to be on the news show, your space-buyer or time-buyer buys that time and space. If you want to be on a sitcom, you buy space on that sitcom show. In that way, you know what the entertainment/editorial environment is before you pay your money.
The Chairman: I have done my time fighting with advertising policy gurus but I will try to probe a bit further. What is actually different between saying that we will run the ad for a decongestant in the lifestyle section on a day when we will run stories about allergies or asthma. What is the difference between that, which is kind of new, and what has been done for years, as you noted — running ads for travel packages, cruises and airline specials in the travel section?
Mr. Davey: There is integrity in the health page that does not exist in the automotive, travel or home section in the Saturday papers. Once you break down that integrity in the news sections, then the integrity of the newspaper disappears — the faith that people are supposed to have in news sections of the newspaper — if the reader perceives it. It will be over a period of time, that the advertiser is influencing those decisions.
The Chairman: It spreads rather than being something new in kind. It is a spreading of something that ought not to spread.
Mr. Davey: That is my view.
Mr. Wilson Southam: To illustrate the spread of the disease, I will tell you about a distinguished Canadian journalist who ran that new media skunk works I talked about. He went to work for one of the largest Internet chains and ran into a management group that simply could not understand why Sony recordings could not write their own reviews if they were going to pay for such good ads. That is the logical progression that is beginning to take hold. It is starting to permeate much more readily because of the absence of gatekeepers in new media.
Mr. Davey: Fro example, the argument is for a single movie reviewer for movies cross the country because the same movie is being shown across the country so why not save money and have only one reviewer once. That potentially leads you down the road to influencing what that reviewer will say.
Newspapers have lost heavily in movie advertising in the last 15 years. You do not see many full-page ads for movies. The newspapers are very aware of the threat and have taken many steps to try to ensure that they do not lose any more space.
The Chairman: All three of you have suggested that you were alarmed by the national editorial policy of CanWest. What is wrong with that, in and of itself? You have taken great pains to say that, particularly what this committee might consider recommending, we should not be talking about the content of newspapers. On the other hand, you seem concerned about the content of the newspapers. What is wrong with the owner of a newspaper saying, "This is what I want my newspapers to say"?
Mr. Davey: He has every right to do that. It was initially conceived to do that three times a week, 52 weeks of the year, and to tell his editors that they could not quarrel with that decision. I think that was totally wrong. They have now backed off from that. I have yet to see an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen that quarrels with a view taken by a national editorial from Winnipeg. We all know what happened to the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen when he, in fact, ran an editorial suggesting, on the basis of a news story, that the Prime Minister should resign.
The Chairman: The problem is not editorials from head office. It is the absence of competing viewpoints that concerns you.
Mr. Davey: It is my major concern now, because Winnipeg has said that the editors are now free, as they had not been originally, to voice dissenting opinions in the editorial space on the same page. As I said, I do not think that has happened.
Senator Graham: Mr. Hamilton Southam went further than saying he was alarmed by CanWest editorials. He said that he was revolted. He used the word "revolted" by CanWest editorial control. Is that correct?
Mr. Hamilton Southam: Yes, sir.
Senator Graham: Do you want to expand on that?
Mr. Hamilton Southam: This country ultimately should be run by its people. It is the people who elect those to whom they entrust the task of government from day-to-day. The fact is that the better educated the people are, the better their choices will be in selecting people to handle government.
I was brought up to believe that you should have access to as many intelligent opinions as possible before you make up your mind on any subject. I think I learned that at school. It was certainly confirmed at university.
You never chose an opinion based on one source of advice. You were told to go to the library and read three or four books before you made your mind up.
That is why we strongly support the notion of a diversity of voices. We should hear a conservative opinion and a liberal opinion. We should indeed listen to the NDP and the Bloc Québécois opinion before we make up our mind.
I am revolted by what CanWest is doing. It is simply saying that as far as our papers are concerned, we will have one opinion. They say now that you can have others, but, in fact, there is an editorial chill on that great group of newspapers. It revolts me because it used to be ours, and we had a more intelligent view of how to run them.
Senator Ringuette: I am fascinated by the wisdom that I am hearing.
I have been looking through your presentation. I am quite interested in your suggestion of a DOVE research centre. I was wondering if there were any way that you could elaborate, if not today, in some kind of written form that we could pursue this notion of providing a variety of opinions in another form.
Mr. Wilson Southam: If it suits, I am not sure how you proceed, but Blair Mackenzie, a lawyer in Toronto, has given much thought to the legal wing of that. I would be pleased to get four or five of these very bright people to brainstorm a page for you on how that might function rather than tell you right now. I have ideas on it, I have mumbled at such length. Perhaps it is better that I send that to you.
The Chairman: That would be exceedingly interesting.
[Translation]
Senator Corbin: I want to ask a controversial question.
[English]
The other night I was listening to Izzy Asper. It was probably a rerun program. I know you are great supporters of certain parts of CBC. Izzy Asper said the CBC was openly pro-Palestinian. I found that shocking. I get my news basically from Radio Canada in the morning and the CBC in the evening. I go home, when I can, for my evening meal at 6:00. I time it so that I can listen to the major news broadcasts of the day on the CBC.
I have been telling my wife for years that all we hear on the CBC is news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, night after night, week after week and year after year, as they did when they covered the Northern Ireland problems. That went on for years. It was pretty well spread out in terms of various views.
Would you like to contradict Mr. Asper?
Mr. Davey: Mr. Asper fired the Jewish publisher of the Montreal Gazette because he was too fair in his coverage of the Middle East. Michael Goldbloom has now happily gone to his reward as assistant publisher in training at the Toronto Star. I can say this having been there. He was probably the best publisher The Gazette had since Southam owned it. He was a brilliant young lawyer who got infected with printer's ink when he came to the Gazette. He did a magnificent job of running the newspaper, both editorially and from a business aspect. He was the first casualty.
That was about 18 months ago. He signed a confidentiality agreement so he cannot speak publicly about why he was removed from his position, but all his friends in Montreal believe very strongly, and I gather this from conversations that they have had, that he was told his coverage of his Middle East in The Gazette and his commentary on the Middle East was too fair, which means it was not Israeli enough.
Senator Corbin: The question was about the CBC.
Mr. Davey: Mr. Asper and his publications had particular trouble with a man named Neil Macdonald, a first-class correspondent, who spent much time covering the Palestinian side as well as the Israeli side. His reports were probably too fair for Mr. Asper. Neil has now gone to his reward as the CBC correspondent in Washington. He is not in the Middle East any more.
Senator Graham: And doing a good job.
Mr. Davey: And doing a good job. Mr. Asper is incredibly sensitive about the Middle East. As I said, editors have been told that they have to tread carefully, because being too fair is "career limiting."
The Chairman: I should just note for the record that what Mr. Davey has said about Michael Goldbloom and the Montreal Gazette is, in fact — as he said, I want to stress this — based on what people understand to have happened. We have had no formal testimony before this committee to confirm the accuracy of that statement. It certainly is widely believed; I know that to be the case. I just wanted to be clear that this is a report of something that many people believe to be true. We have no evidence of its truth.
Mr. Davey: This is hearsay that has only added to the chill.
Senator Corbin: You are not questioning what I heard Mr. Asper say.
The Chairman: I think what you are referring to is a public speech that Mr. Asper gave, but I do not believe he has ever commented on the case of Mr. Goldbloom, either.
Senator Ringuette: In regard to investigative journalism, I find that is probably the most costly form of journalism because of the length required in research before producing an article. I like your suggestion that we should have a national award for it.
Mr. Davey: We do have one, the Mitchener Award.
Senator Ringuette: It was also part of your suggestion, Mr. Southam.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I would like to see much more funding behind it and much more support for it. It is very expensive. We are moving into a time of greatly diminished newspaper readerships. Not all the newspapers are into convergence. There are still independent papers, many of them. The woman who appeared before you said they had 82 members out of 103 identified papers in the country.
If newspapers are willing to take the risk, and provide part of the funding, some tax incentives could be used as some way of supporting investigative journalism. That would be helpful at a time when complexity is rising sharply and new issues are coming at us.
Senator Ringuette: You are suggesting some sort of tax incentive.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I am suggesting honourable senators might look at it carefully — that is just my input.
Senator Graham: On a matter of clarification, Mr. Davey, you said that newspapers are a public trust.
Mr. Davey: Yes, sir. In fact, the Canadian Newspaper Association, which was before you here, has a statement of principles in which they warmly embrace that idea.
Senator Graham: Then you said that you felt that government influence is creeping in.
Mr. Davey: Yes.
Senator Graham: Presumably, broadcast licences are a public trust, is that correct?
Mr. Davey: Within the gift of the government, broadcast licences.
Senator Graham: I would consider them a public trust. Yet, you suggest, and this is the point of clarification, that when next broadcast licences are reviewed — whether it is Global, CanWest or whatever — that CRTC bear in mind or take into consideration the fact of whether or not they should be issued broadcast licences if they own newspapers — not just CanWest, but any other organization.
Mr. Davey: That is right. It would apply to Quebecor. It would apply to Bell Globemedia.
Senator Graham: Are you suggesting that anyone who has a newspaper should not own broadcasting, television or radio interests?
Mr. Davey: In the same market — that is correct.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I would extend that to anywhere. I agree with Tom Kent's testimony before you that circumstances have changed.
The Chairman: I am sorry to be precipitous, but the difficulty with these hearings is that everyone is interesting. It is difficult to try to respect the time requirements.
Gentlemen, you have been extremely interesting witnesses. We are grateful to you for having been with us this day. Do please send us the information that you are talking about, if you wish, Mr. Southam. Either of the other of you send us anything that you think might be useful to us. In particular, Mr. Davey, we have not seen the report from Gillian Stuart. Very early in this morning's proceedings, there was reference to a report or paper by Gillian Stewart.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I have her permission to share it with other DOVE members. I will contact her to see if she is comfortable with it coming to you as evidence.
The Chairman: Fine, because we understood you to have said it had been sent to us. If it were appropriate to send it to us, we would be glad to have it.
Mr. Davey: I had sent it; it may be one of those attachments that did not go from my Mac to whatever it is you are using. Did you get a copy of my speech?
The Chairman: Yes, and we have circulated that.
Mr. Wilson Southam: I will get you both of those.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Our next witness is also an illustrious journalist of vast experience. While he is coming to the table, I will stretch out my introduction of him so that he can get the chance to sit down.
He is Mr. James Travers. He has worked in news in print in Canada and overseas. Mr. Travers has reported from Zimbabwe, Cyprus, South Africa, Ethiopia, Lebanon, other parts of Africa and the Middle East.
In Canada, he has been editor and general manager of Southam News, which was a news service, then editor-in- chief of the Ottawa Citizen. Since 1997, he has worked with the Toronto Star, first in a very senior management position and now as a national affairs columnist.
Today, however, and we have been asked to stress this, Mr. Travers is appearing as an individual, not on behalf of the Star. I think I may have said that slowly enough to give him a chance to sit down and catch his breath.
Senator Corbin: Not necessarily for the record, but are we able to hear witnesses in the absence of the other party?
The Chairman: Yes, that is why I said that explicitly, so it would be on the record. They were here and they are all right with this.
It is frustrating, but you know how it is in June when the number of events sandwiched on top of each other grows.
Mr. Travers. I think you understand our basic practice — an opening statement followed by questions. Please proceed.
Mr. James Travers, As an individual: Honourable senators, with the previous witnesses and your comments about how interesting all the testimony has been, you have set the bar impossibly high, but I will do my best.
There is nothing a life-long newspaperman enjoys more than talking about newspapers. This opportunity to discuss some of the many contentious issues touching Canada's concentrated, and now converged, media is most welcome. As the chairman pointed out, I just wanted to make clear that the opinions that I am expressing are my own. They do not necessarily reflect those of the Toronto Star or of Southam, where I worked for many years and happily, I might add.
Since our time is brief and the subject broad, I will focus these preliminary comments on the threat posed to a vibrant, diverse industry by a demonstrably unhealthy confluence of forces. Those forces are an unprecedented concentration of ownership, the convergence of electronic and print media and the corporate behaviour of some, but not all, who have taken advantage of Canadian tax law and market conditions to increase dominance of an industry that is vital to a healthy democracy.
I will outline how those forces affect newspapers, their readers, staff, and ultimately the quality of our society.
I will contend that corporate culture and business behaviour have enormous impact on newspaper quality and the diversity of debate in a pluralistic nation. Newspapers have the financial strength to both stand alone in most markets and to meet the needs of readers with high journalistic standards. Vital news services once protected by ownership concentration are now victims of that process. Years of study must finally lead to action that reverses ownership and newspaper trends.
Much has been said and written about the current concentration of media ownership in so few hands. That is undoubtedly a significant concern. The concentration is not solely responsible for the loss of jobs, voices and editorial independence. Those are symptoms of a more complex malaise rooted in the still unsuccessful attempt to join print and electronic media in forced marriage, and in the insensitivity of some owners to the role of newspapers in the community, as well as in the political process.
Let me be more specific. At about 37 per cent, CanWest's grip on English language circulation is only about 4 points higher than that held by Southam in 1980. However, that is cold comfort to consumers in a market where a single company dominates print and electronic news delivery. In Vancouver, for example, CanWest owns both major newspapers and the most-viewed television stations. That level of concentration is unmatched in other industrial countries and is exacerbated by a corporate culture. CanWest is a much different company and behaves in significantly different ways than the Southam Group or even Conrad Black's Hollinger.
Editorial independence and the commitment to journalism were defining Southam characteristics. Local publishers were encouraged to act as proprietors. Editors were refreshingly free to follow their instincts and for more than 60 year, the company generously funded a national and foreign news service dedicated to explaining one region to another and to providing a Canadian perspective of world events. That approach benefitted readers, particularly in small markets where Southam papers were notably superior to those published by rival groups. It also served the company well.
As members of the committee are aware, questions have been asked frequently over the past half-century, sometimes by Royal commissions, about the increasing concentration of media ownership. When those questions were put, Southam's answer was, in part, that group ownership made it financially possible to provide all its papers with national and international reporting that normally only the largest and most profitable could afford. That answer was true, and the reason for maintaining the news service is not as cynical as it first might seem.
Southam believed that operating news bureaus across the country and around the globe was a corporate responsibility that came with its considerable share of a lucrative market. To put it bluntly, along with waving the flag of journalistic excellence, Southam News was the Southam's compensation to communities that, in some cases, had lost competing and much-loved newspapers.
I am concerned that both that service and that sense of community obligation have been lost. The Globe and Mail, Power Corporation in Quebec, the CBC, to some extent CTV and my own paper, the Toronto Star, continue to staff bureaus at home and abroad. Readers of the former Southam papers are, in my view, inadequately served. Regional bureaus are being replaced by news-sharing between papers and a comprehensive international service is essentially a thing of the past. What is lost is significant and cannot be adequately replaced by exchanging copy written for a specific audience by national or international wire services, by freelancers or, as we now frequently see, by reporters dispatched to cover distant complex and fast-breaking stories.
The journalistic result of those parsimonious fixes is a loss of continuity, context and depth. Nationally, regional bureaus help to connect the country. No amount of editing can add the subtlety and understanding that a skilled correspondent weaves into a story about local issues written for national audiences. The difference between that copy and, say, a Calgary Herald story massaged for national consumption, is as different as a television news report and a magazine article.
Internationally, correspondents see the world through Canadian and different eyes. Anyone who doubts that need only compare domestic and U.S. coverage of the Iraq invasion. One struggled for balance and understanding while the other tilted to jingoism, and occasionally tumbled into propaganda.
Maintaining foreign bureaus also ensures momentous events will not take readers by surprise. That has never been more important and the importance will continue to grow as world events accelerate and this country tries to find its place in them. More practically, keeping Canadian journalists in the field ensure that the government and its agencies do not operate overseas with a unanimity that taxpayers would never tolerate at home. If we are to understand ourselves and be full citizens of the world and if we are to grasp the importance of evolving patterns, then newspapers must have the resources to play a meaningful part. Without those resources, readers, newsrooms and the quality of public debate suffer irreparable harm.
I do not want to suggest that the past was Utopia and I do not want to leave the impression that a highly concentrated, converged media is incapable of serving the public interest. The past was in many ways imperfect and it is still possible that the promise of convergence would one day be fulfilled. Some corporate owners clearly understand and accept the responsibilities that come with remarkable influence over an industry that is part of the warp and weave of an open, consenting society.
However, it is deeply troubling that current trends are moving in the wrong direction. Instead of benefiting from group ownership, newspapers, with the rare exception, are needless victims of concentration, convergence and cross- media ownership. Often it seems that newspapers are being sacrificed to benefit their electronic siblings. In the three years since the big bang of 2000, resources have been continuously stripped from papers. Corporate groupthink is a reality on the largest chains' editorial pages, and some of the country's most experienced publishers and journalists have lost their jobs in circumstances that might be politely called "suspect." None of this has been necessary.
Newspapers are more than profitable enough to sustain themselves outside multimedia empires. Large and even small newspapers can comfortably sustain the staff compliment needed to provide their readers and the democratic system with the information they need — premier proprietary news services that are not beyond the financial grasp of groups.
The challenge now is to encourage and insist, if necessary, that those who have been allowed to seize control of Canada's media manage those assets in ways that are consistent with public interest and not just the enrichment of the bottom line. An independent press requires an arm's-length relationship with government. Any institution into that independence, either direct or indirect, must be rejected. That said, measures are available and should be employed to ensure that the broadest possible information stream flows to readers and that ownership trends, which only seem to accelerate in the aftermath of federal inquiries, are reversed.
I strongly support the recent findings of the Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on the problems of cross-ownership. Those problems are so self-evident and the rewards are so problematic that federal action is clearly required. It is my view that that action should be guided by the knowledge that newspapers can financially stand on their own, that press freedom thrives when there are alternatives for journalists as well as for readers, and that callous, absentee ownership is an acid that dissolves the essential connections between newspapers and their communities.
As problematic as it may seem to unscramble the current egg, I could not believe that it would be impossible to do. Market conditions, burdensome debt and the failure of convergence to provide the expected profits continue to put newspapers on the block. Government can and should encourage diversification of ownership by banning sales between companies with cross-media holdings. At the same time, government should encourage a return to local ownership and a review of all sales for their impact on culture and not, as is the case now, only for advertising competition and for circulation competition.
Finally, there is the issue of foreign ownership. Protection of newspapers has long been an important cornerstone of Canadian sovereignty. That policy should only be reconsidered as a last resort remedy applied in the absence of adequate competition. I believe it would be fundamentally wrong to reward companies with a windfall that, with federal blessing, have created the current, unhealthy concentration and, in some cases, have been influenced more by shareholder interest than in public interest.
Instead, this committee might usefully explore changes to foreign ownership regulations that might act as both carrot and stick. Rather than allow foreign companies to buy existing newspapers, Ottawa should explore the potential merits of permitting offshore firms to establish, with or without Canadian partners, new communications in communities poorly served by domestic media empires.
While it is to be hoped Canadian companies will do the right thing for the right reason and that government will never be forced to choose between protecting national interests and encouraging adequate competition, current practices suggest additional market persuasion may eventually become necessary.
Clearly that would be a watershed decision. Only a committee like this one has the resources to evaluate the possible benefits, as well as forecast the implication for markets, competition, and cross-border trade agreements.
Finally, in reaching your conclusions and making recommendations, I urge you to consider the newspaper industry's soul as well as its body. While parts of both are healthy, others clearly are not. Always a dyspeptic lot, journalists at some of the country's major papers have rarely felt less valuable and more vulnerable. Jobs are disappearing. Editors are learning not to say no to their masters. Opportunities to spice careers with variety and experience are at an all-time low. An authoritarian newsroom atmosphere is encouraging censorship, the form of censorship that most effectively fast-freezes editorial freedom.
If these problems persist, the best people will flee newsrooms and the next generation of journalists will find occupations that are more rewarding.
The last few observations are subjective, but they are as real and as damaging as the numbers that measure corporate concentration. Thirty years ago, Senator Keith Davey reported on both in his royal commission. That the situation has only deteriorated since then is cause for more than sober reflection.
Senator Corbin: I suppose it is more of a comment that aims at eliciting your own comments. I do not know if you were in the room when I said that I am a fan of the CBC. I pick up most of my news on the CBC, French and English networks. However, for some years, we have been subjected to a trend, which is as follows: The CBC has drastically cut its international scene news coverage. They do have one or two staffers here and there, but you know, very sparsely located. They cannot possibly do a very good fundamental job of explaining the rest of the world to Canadians.
In exchange for that belt-tightening, especially in the French network, they now have correspondents from some other news media; shooting in some brief commentary, spot commentaries. This is usually from people who have no knowledge, nor understanding of the Canadian scene and Canadian concerns.
I think, personally, that is a great tragedy. We used to have, to name just one, Roméo LeBlanc, who eventually became our governor general. He would be seen on television, in black and white in those days, or just as colour was coming along, every other day.
Senator Graham: Do you remember black and white?
The Chairman: He is too young.
Mr. Travers: Columnists see everything in black and white, sir.
Senator Graham: Touché.
Senator Corbin: I think that is one of the more grievous failings of the CBC in the process of belt-tightening. Of course, you cannot blame the CBC for that; you have to blame the government.
What I am really asking is for your comments on the necessity of having Canadian journalists covering external events in a way that Canadians can understand, and not just the neutral, clinically clean, emasculated type of reporting we are being fed now, by not only Radio-Canada, but other broadcasters who buy those services.
I wonder if you could enlighten my dark land?
Mr. Travers: I can only enlighten you by largely agreeing with your premise. I can tell you as an aside, as a former foreign correspondent, I used to be worried watching correspondents in the field do what they call stand-ups for Irish television, Australian television, and BBC, and the only difference in the report was in the trailer saying this is so-and- so reporting for such-and-such.
Obviously, I feel it is essential to see the world through the perspective of Canadians. That was essentially self- evident in the 1970s and 1980s. It has been reinforced by current events. I no longer hear anyone ask why they should care about what happens over there. It is now apparent to everyone that international events are local events; that foreign news is local news. If anyone was in any doubt, September 11 changed that.
There is an enormous benefit to having Canadians in the field. One is the core coverage. There is the issue that I mentioned about being able to observe and report on Canadian activities abroad, which I can assure you, no other international service will ever cover. No one cares what Canadians are doing in the Middle East or in Botswana, even though Canadians are doing some interesting things in both places. Those are just two examples. No one will report those issues because they have no market for them.
The other issue, and I think it is an important one because it affects the quality of the overall publication, is that, by having a foreign service, it effectively acts as a magnet for the rest of the staff. The idea, still, for many journalists of being able to operate overseas, against the best journalists in the world, is both a reward and a challenge that is enormously valuable to the organization. It attracts better people to journalism, and it gives people a level of training and understanding that they then bring back to their newsrooms.
It is a multi-faceted benefit, and one that I am very concerned is being lost. You are using a print example, but obviously the loss of Southam News was a major blow to Canadian journalism, as well as a personal one to those of us who worked there and felt that it was a kind of minimum contribution to Canadian reporting. I think it would be very difficult to overestimate the value of having people in the field.
The Chairman: When Southam News was at its most healthy, how many bureaus did it have and where were they?
Mr. Travers: I was trying to work through it today. It is like trying to establish the staffing of a newspaper, no one is ever entirely certain. At its heyday, I think we were operating 11 bureaus internationally, plus bureaus across the country. I will check the number.
The Chairman: That would be helpful, because, since you ran the place, you were as well placed as anyone to know. One of the things we try to do is measure trends. There have been references, both laudatory and sneering, to our romanticized past. We do not want to romanticize; we want to know what we are talking about.
Senator Graham: It is always nice to see you, Mr. Travers. I watch you Friday afternoons.
Mr. Travers: That is the only thing that proves we are actually real.
Senator Graham: You are on a very interesting programme between 5 and 6 on CBC with Don Newman.
I am looking for the raison d'être of a newspaper.
I know that they have a bottom line for the shareholders. What is the most important aspect of newspapers? Is it to inform public opinion? Is it to educate? Is it to influence public opinion? Would you comment on that or add to it?
Mr. Travers: The simple answer is all of the above, but hopefully in the appropriate places. The role of news pages is as much as possible to cover current events and to add whatever context is necessary so that readers can (a) stay abreast of those events, and (b) hopefully, put those events into some sort of meaningful relationship to their own lives.
There is also the aspect of education in newspapers. One of the greatest qualities of newspapers, something missing from the Internet and electronic forms of newspapers, is serendipity. When you are flipping through a newspaper, you always find things that surprise, delight, and change the way you think about the world around you. In some ways, that is education at its most palatable.
I do not want to duck the last part of your question, because it is obviously quite germane in the context of what we have seen in the debate over whether it is appropriate for a company to impose the core of its editorial policy on group papers. There is obviously a role for newspapers in influencing decisions, but it is very important that effort to influence be framed in a way that is clear to readers.
I do not think any newspaper person would claim that the paper can be entirely objective. It does strive to be fair and not to let propaganda, or proselytizing, slip into its news pages. On the editorial and opinion pages and in clearly defined areas of the paper, it is proper to expose readers to what the newspaper believes is a proper approach to an issue. More importantly, and this was referred to earlier, it is proper for the newspaper to give readers a chance to assess and evaluate the full range of opinion on any current issue to help them make the kind of decisions that fall to us as citizens in a democracy.
Senator Graham: Does cross-media ownership pose any problems for newspapers?
Mr. Travers: Yes.
Senator Graham: Would you agree with the Southams, who appeared as witnesses earlier today, that the CRTC ought to play a role and be more explicit when the CanWest broadcasting arm applies for licence renewals? Should the CRTC take into consideration that they also own newspapers?
Mr. Travers: Yes, I do agree. I feel very strongly, for a variety of reasons, that cross-media ownership has turned out to be a mistake, at least for newspapers. I cannot comment authoritatively on the impact on the other side of the business.
In attempting to make Canadian corporations competitive in a global climate, we, as a country, forgot the important and fundamental role that newspapers play in a democracy. By allowing newspapers to be taken into the convergence model, we have exposed them to much more harm than anyone anticipated.
I do not want to ramble on here, but if I could, I would just explain a couple of those issues. First of all, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the beast. To people looking at media as a corporation in an abstract way, it made perfect sense that you would combine print and electronic sources of information. For those people who wanted to reduce costs, it made sense to them to have the same journalists function in multiple roles.
That ignores that the parts of the business are fundamentally different. I will use a very simplistic example. At the end of a hockey game, a newspaper reporter's job is beginning. At that point, he or she must interview coaches, players and examine whatever issues are around. They must add that context to their piece.
However, immediacy is the issue in television. You want to be on the air with instant analysis or an interview. In most cases, it is simply impossible to combine those two aspects successfully.
The other thing that worries me greatly is that we might be importing the values of television. Some public affairs television is of a very high standard, but television is fundamentally entertainment. To be successful, newspapers must go much beyond that to the very things that you raised, such as the principles of education, informing people and adding a context that is not available on electronic media.
Another great worry is that we have taken businesses that were very profitable and tied to their communities in many ways and put them inside a larger corporate body. We have not only broken the ties to the community, but we have also made them vulnerable to the financial ebb and flow of the larger corporation.
Originally people thought of that as protection for newspapers, but it does not seem to be working out that way. As we have all seen over the past couple of years, whenever a part of the corporation has to be stripped of resources, they seem to go first to newspapers.
At the very core of what I was arguing this morning is that companies that could stand alone and be profitable, and while being profitable, could still operate in the public interest, are being lost by their very presence inside conglomerates with much broader interests. That is extremely unfortunate, and it is dangerous for the quality of our public debate.
Senator Graham: Have you been affected by the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times? What are your observations on that as a journalist?
Mr. Travers: Every journalist has been affected by it. We have all been first curious but also looking at it for the lessons that might be exported to our own organizations. Some of the things that Mr. Blair was accused of are not unheard of in newspapers.
The fundamental issue is how to balance the issues of journalistic excellence — The New York Times is obviously a standard bearer of journalistic excellence — with the other issues of matching the diversity of your audience with the diversity of your reporting staff?
If I could, I would add one last point. One of the most intriguing and perhaps encouraging aspects of what was a very damaging affair was the way that The New York Times approached that in the responsibility that they took in exposing their own dirty laundry to the public; and the kind of analysis of their own flaws that most newspapers could not undertake — just do not have the editorial resources to do. They took it so seriously and were so damaging to themselves. I think it speaks to an understanding of the role of newspapers and — something that in the context of this hearing is important — that the organization itself understands that it has nothing more valuable than its credibility. It did everything possible to explain to its audience what had gone wrong. In that sense, it restored its credibility. That, again, speaks directly to the connection that a newspaper must have to its audience and to its community. I think The New York Times did an admirable job of that.
Senator Graham: I have a question in regard to the Iraqi war and the specific instance of saving Private Lynch. A more general question would be the coverage of that war. One witness told us that he felt that the coverage by CBC and BBC was not balanced. When I asked him about the coverage by CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, he said he did not watch any of those. My own opinion was, by contrast — because I watched them all, switching the dial — I thought that the coverage by CBC was balanced, given their limited resources; and the coverage by BBC was better than any of the American outlets. Then we have this situation with saving Private Lynch, a story that was broken by one of your colleagues at the Toronto Star through good, foreign investigative journalism.
The Chairman: Do you mean the debunking? I think you are referring to the debunking of the story of saving Private Lynch, which was broken by the Star.
Mr. Travers: Although it may not be a perfect example, it does speak to the necessity of having both senior journalists and people on the ground who are there long enough to understand, and have their own context, and can move beyond the range of the delivered story.
It is what we, as political journalists used to refer to as the daily gainsburger — the thing that was handed out to you on Prime Minister Trudeau's plane, to begin with. I am sure you may remember that. You may have actually had something to do with the mix in the gainsburger.
It is extraordinarily important to be able to go beyond that. What really worries me about the decline in Canadian representation abroad is that I do not believe that you can get that kind of depth of reporting — and to go beyond the surface, and the embedding is a whole subsidiary issue to that — without maintaining bureaus and without maintaining people who have been abroad long enough to say, "You know, I have looked at this story and there is something that is just not right about this and we want to do more on it." It is that kind of instinctual thing that journalists have to develop, and they develop it better in the field than anywhere else. I am deeply worried that we will end up just looking at the veneer of stories, without ever getting below the surface, if we continue to lose our foreign bureaus and foreign correspondents.
Senator Ringuette: I am very interested in the discussion going on. Like many of us, I was distressed by what happened to some of your colleagues a few weeks ago. We have been hearing some points of view, in regard to schools of journalism, that they are cookie cutter types of training. We have heard also the fact that it would be better if journalism would be developed, not within a school of journalism, per se, but from different academic fields.
I see that you sense that your colleagues in the industry feel vulnerable with the latest events. What would you suggest to a young Canadian who would be interested in going into journalism? With your experience, your background and recent events, what would you say? Go into economics and then learn how to write about it, or go and learn how to write and then find the issues?
Mr. Travers: For me that is not a hypothetical question. I have a son who is just completing grade 13 who happens to be quite a naturally talented writer. He has an interest in journalism. He asked me whether I thought he should go to journalism school or pursue a career in journalism.
It was quite a sobering moment for me. As deeply as I believe in the importance of journalism, I was extraordinarily reluctant to say to him that he should pin his career in a narrow way to a business that is essentially controlled by three companies in this country. A really significant concern for all journalists is that we are rapidly running out of choice.
I will come to your education question, but you can understand that we have heard a lot about newsroom chill and how people feel vulnerable. If you have left the Toronto Star to work for the National Post, and somewhere earlier in your career you happened to work for The Globe and Mail, you have basically used up all your options in this country.
There are a number of problems with that. One is that it encourages good people to leave and do other things. The other is that it makes people even more easily controlled by their newsroom masters. You are living in a world where your connection to your livelihood is with that one company. If that thread is severed, that could be the end of a career. As we all know, at certain ages it is difficult to restart careers, and all those sorts of personal considerations.
To answer the education part of it, the best journalism schools are now doing two things. First, they are getting people who understand the business as it is today to join their faculty. That is happening more and more frequently. That is a very good thing. Second, to your point, they are encouraging people to get the broadest possible education.
If I were to be offering that kind of advice, I would tell a young person to read everything they could possibly read from every political and other point of view. I would tell them to get a good background in politics and economics and history — because those are the things that really matter to journalists — and to focus on the broadest aspects of the business.
In many ways, a significant amount of time is spent at journalism schools teaching things that are learned quite quickly in the hothouse of a newsroom. You can bring most to the business by understanding as many other things as possible, particularly economics, which we are not strong at.
The Chairman: Can you recall, when you were editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, how many journalists worked there?
Mr. Travers: Yes, when I started the full newsroom complement — library support, editors, reporters, and artists — the whole department was 196. When I left, the number was just slightly below 175. Those figures are from 1991 to 1996, when there was a dramatic decline.
Senator Corbin: Could that be explained by new technologies?
Mr. Travers: Some of it could be explained by new technologies but most of it could be better explained by the downturn in the economy. Again, there is the process of corporations buying companies that means the debt must be serviced by that new company. In the newspaper business, there are only a couple of ways to increase revenues or improve performance. One is to sell more newspapers, which does not have a quick substantial impact. The other is to sell more advertising, which you will probably not do in a recession. After that, you are down to what we most often did through the 1990s — the buzzword at the time was "right-sizing newspapers," which basically meant slashing staff.
The Chairman: Do you know if this trend is continuing at the Ottawa Citizen?
Mr. Travers: I do not know what the current numbers are, as you know. I do not want to be the vehicle or the vector for rumours but there is a great deal of speculation that more cuts are coming across the chain in the near future.
The Chairman: In your presentation, you talked about the difference between stories about local issues written for national audiences and, essentially, local stories written for local audiences and then shipped out to the national audience. Could you give any examples of the kind of differences that you are talking about?
Mr. Travers: Yes. There are many examples. Essentially, an article written for a local audience assumes knowledge of the characters and the plot, if you will, and people have usually been exposed to the story. I can use any number of examples. A Calgary Herald story on development in the oil patch is written in a very specific way for that audience with the writer's knowledge that the audience understands the story and the context. However, that story, when read in Dundas, Ontario, needs to be written in an entirely different way, in a more explanatory way and in a more analytical form so that the reader can get something out of it to understand the implications of the story. All of that may be quite apparent to a reader in Calgary but would not be apparent to a reader elsewhere in the country.
We have found at Southam News that not every journalist would be able to accomplish that. Often people put in the field would still see stories as local and not understand that explanatory difference that makes the story worthwhile and worth reading away from its locus, if you will. I tried to use the example of a magazine story because it is such a different approach, a different thought process and a different writing process for a different audience. I think there are great advantages to sharing copy between papers. However, I do not think it makes up for having national bureaus and national correspondents posted around the country whose only focus is to explain that region to another region, knowing that the region they are writing for has a limited understanding.
The Chairman: You might even have difficulties with unstated assumptions about what is important, what is not important, what is good and what is bad. When you cited something out of the oil patch, I was thinking that a story in Calgary to the effect that oil prices are rising would probably be viewed as good news, whereas in Dundas, Ontario, it would be viewed as unalloyed bad news.
Mr. Travers: Your example is better than mine.
The Chairman: The other thing I wanted to ask you about is this question of corporate influence in the newsroom and the editorial. By "editorial" I mean newsroom autonomy, decisions, and priorities. You talk about vulnerability and the witnesses who preceded you today talked about advertising departments' intrusions into what formerly would have been newsroom decisions. Do you want to talk about that?
Mr. Travers: It is a very important point and stems from your background. Not to extend a hockey metaphor but often an editor feels more like a goalie than a forward.
The editor is constantly trying to stop intrusions into the newsroom by those whose interests at the newspaper, which is a complex, corporate organization, are not the same as those of the editor or someone who is responsible for the news department.
In other words, you are trying to protect your staff from those who want to influence their stories in such a way that it is beneficial either to the rest of the business or to one of their friends. That is a constant process that every editor is aware of. It is one of the reasons that every inquiry into the state of Canadian journalism is always trying to find some remedy to build a kind of defence around editors to make them more independent. Many mechanisms have been considered so that you can actually say to a publisher, "Who is your boss" and, "No, I will not do that", and not be fired the next day. There is a huge gradation between "no" and "yes." There are many ways of managing that enormous concern. I can only say that the world in which I lived as an editor seems to be more comfortable than the one that current editors live in. The relationship between editor and publisher and editor and proprietor is clearly changing with the appointment of publishers who are not the kind of local proprietors that the Southams knew but are more like branch plant managers from head office. That makes it even more difficult to say no.
It is only fair to say that newspapers clearly do have their own internal interests. People pursue them inside the papers quite aggressively and editors have to have both the moral compass and willingness to put their job on the line to rebuff those efforts.
The Chairman: We have heard testimony and seen data to the effect that concentration of ownership is less now than it was before. We have heard some testimony to the effect that convergence in pure journalistic terms would be good because it would allow innovations. We have heard various witnesses suggesting that there is not a problem. Why are we holding this inquiry? That is my last question. The Canadian Newspaper Association representative who appeared before the committee suggested, in as many words, that people get exorcised over personalities rather than over structures. The Senate committee's business is not to inquire into personalities. Is that true or are we looking at structural problems?
Mr. Travers: I think you are looking at structural problems and behavioural problems. I do believe that there is problem with the structure.
It is clearly demonstrable that there are problems with Canadian newspapers. Any once-thriving organization that is constantly losing staff, readers and its sense of purpose is in trouble. It is important to look at that. As I said in my presentation, a combination of factors is accelerating problems that we have known about for more than 30 years.
Cross-media ownership was a mistake. I do not see the benefits of it. It may be that in 10, 15 or 20 years someone will finally find a way to make convergence as profitable as its proponents suggest. Perhaps they will find a way to make it as interesting as those who saw it as a combination of different media into a new, exciting product that would draw more people to the business. We will wait to see if that happens.
In the relatively short term, you see damage. There is considerable damage. There is a ripple effect to that problem. I am sure everyone at this committee recognizes this.
In raw terms, only newspapers are still gathering and disseminating information. Most people will get their core, top-of-the-wave information from electronic media. Not only do the print media usually drive that agenda by gathering the information and exposing the story to the light of day, but they also add the context that keeps it alive.
I always found it extraordinarily frustrating as the editor of a paper when people would call me in the morning and say, "I do not know why I bother reading the Ottawa Citizen. I just heard everything on the front page on the local radio station?" I was tempted to say to them, "Could you also hear them turning the pages?" Those organizations literally have no staff and no editorial budget. Anything that eats away at the heart of newspapers will eventually be a virus that eats at the entire information stream upon which we depend as a functioning democracy. Nobody else is doing that work.
It seems that whenever some part of the organization of the new cross media conglomerates needs to be sacrificed, it is journalists who go first. The money is then used either to pay off debts or reinvested in the electronic side of the business. That is a negative spiral that we need to break.
Senator Graham: I want to return to what some people have called newsroom chill in the light of the recent dismissals. Is there such a thing as newsroom chill that would cause journalists to practice self-censorship because of the known views of the editors or owners?
Mr. Travers: The short answer is "yes." It is a part of life in every newsroom. It is the form of censorship that worries newsroom managers the most for a variety of reasons.
One reason is that it is uncontrollable. It essentially works on rumours and the belief that people know what they are supposed to report, which may or may not be true. It is far away from what you want them to be doing as photographers and reporters. You want them out there aggressively pursuing everything they can find with all the vigour they can muster.
I will use an example to give you a sense of how bad that self-censorship can be. I wonder who would take the job as the Middle East correspondent for the Aspers having read their editorials. There is not room within that framework for honest, balanced reporting of a very difficult, inflammatory situation. That is chill that you could almost measure.
The Chairman: Mr. Travers, thank you very much. We could continue questions, but as I explained, the committee cannot sit while the Senate is sitting. Your presentation has been extremely interesting.
If there is anything that, upon reflection, you want to add, do not hesitate to let us know. You agreed to see what you could do about setting down some detail about the bureaus that Southam news had.
The committee adjourned.