bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1999) — Fall 1999 // Automne 1999, pp. 39–40
BREAKING NEWS by Robert MacNeil,
Doubleday Canada, Toronto, 1998, 371 pp..
$34.95
YESTERDAY’S NEWS: WHY CANADA’S
DAILY NEWSPAPERS ARE FAILING US by
John Miller, Fernwood Publishing, Halifax,
1998, 272 pp., $24.95
TRIVIA PURSUIT: HOW SHOWBIZ VALUES
ARE CORRUPTING THE NEWS by Knowlton
Nash, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto,
1998, 240 pp., $26.99
SINCE YOU ASKED by Pamela Wallin,
Random House of Canada, 1998, 295 pp.,
$3.95
Reviewed by Geoff White
News is today undergoing a radical transformation. How its transmitted and received, who makes and defines it, even what it is — all of these are in rapid flux as we are borne collectively toward 2000 and beyond. Television audiences are spread across the multi-channel market. The Internet is an increasingly common source of information. Newspapers face an uncertain future, struggling to compete with electronic media while pondering how to become part of it.
This is the background against which four respected Canadian journalists offer their own individual takes on the direction of their profession today and the implications for modern society. If there is a common theme in the work of these four authors, it is that, faced by the proliferation of media and the barrage of information that people receive today, the work of the qualified journalist in ordering and interpreting “the news” is more important than ever.
One can dismiss this conclusion as self-interested — professionals seeking the perpetuation of their own caste. Do citizens need journalist intermediaries when they have more direct access to a wider variety of information than ever before, especially e via the Internet? Aren’t people better equipped today to gather and interpret directly their own responses to the events that interest them? Good questions. And I think ones to which these authors give good answers, though a distinctly “whistling-past-the-graveyard” quality troubles them all.
The latter is most obvious in Robert MacNeil’s novel Breaking News, a novel by Robert MacNeil, the co-host until 1995 of PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer report. His protagonist, respected network anchorman, Grant Munro, is worried about the future of the nightly news broadcast when he retires, which, despite management denials, he appears to be under pressure to do. It looks as though the program will be morphed into a “magazine” of personality-dominated pieces, ideally about crime and sex, played for melodrama and anchored by a host who is more entertainer than news person. The adaptation would have the purpose of improving the “show’s” ratings and attracting advertisers. Despite Munro’s success in fending off the network re-fit by book’s end, his victory appears temporary and the switch from news to magazine seems ultimately inevitable.
MacNeil’s book reads like an elegy to news, which it is, but only to news of a certain type — the nightly newscast. One of the reasons his hero is so beleaguered is that the availability of news at all times in modern media means that audiences need no longer sit down in front of the television at a given time each day to see and hear “the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite would say in his nightly sign-off. The common, even unifying, moment of the nightly TV broadcast is fast disappearing. But the passing of the revered anchorman does not equate to the loss of quality journalism as we know it. And MacNeil understands that. In fact, his novel is certainly as much about a somewhat bewildered, aging man adjusting to change as it is about journalism.
If such prominent broadcasters as MacNeil are worried about the future of TV news, what angst must beset the newspaper journalist. Newspaper circulation has been falling steadily for two decades, people tell pollsters that TV is their primary news source and — most galling of all — they say TV has greater credibility. Yet John Miller, former Toronto Star editor and ex-head of the journalism program at Ryerson Polytechnic, is convinced that newspapers will survive and prosper provided they re-connect themselves to their readers. In Yesterday’s News: Why Canada’s Daily Newspapers are Failing Us, Miller argues that Canada’s biggest dailies have lost touch with their readership and fail to provide the information citizens need to be conscientious and active participants in a democracy. Newspapers are too solicitous of the opinions of major institutions and too little interested in the concerns of their readers. Much newspaper writing displays an imperious, know-it-all attitude, he argues, that condescends to readers and smothers a genuinely open expression of views.
Interestingly, Miller finds some of the remedy for newspapers’ ills in what has traditionally been the object of scorn for most journalists — the smalltown weekly. In fact, the second half of Miller’s book describes his experiences after volunteering his services to the Shawville, Québec Equity, which offer, when accepted, immediately doubles the paper’s reporting staff. The weekly, much more accessible to comment and criticism from its readership, is more deeply a part of the community than most dailies. And rather than mock weeklies’ obsession with getting names in the news and pictures of cheque presentation ceremonies, dailies, if not imitating these practices, should recognize the community connectedness that they represent.
Canadian journalists offer their own individual takes on the direction of their profession today and the implications for Miller praises the efforts of some bigger dailies to reach out to their communities, such as the establishment of neighbourhood sections and the erstwhile invitation to members of the community by the Ottawa Citizen to take one-month internships on the editorial board. Yet one wonders whether Miller’s idealism can win the day, especially when the biggest development in the Canadian newspaper business in the last year, the launch of Conrad Black’s National Post, has produced the sort of imperious, voice-from-on-high paper that Miller rails against. At the same time, the paper’s conservatism, resonating well with a broad spectrum of Canadian readers and its superior writing seem to bode well for its success.
Surprisingly more keen-sighted on the economic future of newspapers is the former anchor of CBC’s The National, Knowlton Nash. Nash, in Trivia Pursuit:
How Showbiz Values are Corrupting the News, has identified perhaps the greatest single threat to the survival of the local, daily newspaper, the flight of classified advertising to the Internet. Nash points out that classified ads generate revenues of about $650 million for Canadian dailies, about a third of all advertising revenue. But non-newspaper classified advertising is now proliferating on the Internet, and its truly international reach offers a much larger readership than any print newspaper can even hope for. Loss of half their classified advertising would render the majority of today’s newspapers insolvent, Nash points out. Is it any wonder then, that daily newspaper now give pride of place to classitied ads on their web sites even when many of them contain only a small portion of their news content?
Nash is convinced that the Internet will supplant other media on news delivery, effectively absorbing television and newspapers when what the experts call full convergence is achieved. He’s not worried about this. He is more concerned, as the title of his books states, with the subordination of news to entertainment and with a boundless proliferation of information that is often false and unreliable. And this is where Nash makes his pitch for the journalism profession. The torrent of news that citizens will have to contend with from the wired world requires processing. It will need journalists to take it, question it, assess it, and re-work it in a form that is usable, reliable and credible. What will be most valuable in the world of Internet journalism will be trustworthy brand names — whether a reputed title like The New York Times or some Internet arriviste who has built its own reputation. Readers/viewers will choose the sites that they find provide them with the most accurate information, carefully edited and analysed. So if the medium is different, the role of the professional journalist will still be indispensable.
Lewinskv scandal Whis process is already underway. first broached by web-site tattlers such as Matt Drudge, first became a significant news story when it was recounted by Newsweek. Some of course would argue that rather than dignifying the story, the telling of it soiled Newsweek’s reputation as it stooped to the standards of the cash check-out tabloids. This is another concern of Nash’s, but he remains convinced that the future will still hold a market for serious journalism.
Pam Wallin, who at a mere 46 has held many of the biggest on-air jobs in Canadian television, is a staunch defender, in her autobiography Since You Asked, of the need for well-rounded generalists in journalism. She says she tells aspiring journalists to get their journalism degrees but also not to forego a broader education. “I can never stress strongly enough the importance of the lectures in political science or economics or history. As a journalist you report on how the world works. You need to know the rules by which the game is played. And those psychology classes are just as important, because fundamentally those who make the rules or break them are human beings. Journalism is about divining human nature to find out not just what people do but why people do what they do.”
Interesting advice in this technology-obsessed age. But advice that comes with considerable experience. She has witnessed stunning technological change in her short career. The transistor radio — portable and run on batteries — was cutting edge when she received hers in the late ’50s. The primary piece of technology at CBC’s As It Happens, where Wallin worked in the mid ’70s, was the telephone — maybe a black desk-set with dial. The Toronto Star’s reporters were apparently filing their typed reports from Ottawa by some kind of early fax technology, not computers, when she worked there in the late ’70s. No one had established live TV hook-ups to remote locations when she started at CTV’s Canada AM in the early ’80s. The widespread adoption of Internet research and e-mail roughly corresponded with her arrival at CBC’s Prime Time News in 1992.
So what was important for her was not technological proficiency, but the energy, endurance, flexibility and resilience. And those attributes come through strongly in her book. Wallin never let the left-leaning feminism of her early career as a social worker get in the way of good journalism. Beyond working harder than nearly anyone else in the profession, surviving on a bare minimum of sleep, her openness to emerging ideas and her understanding of the ebb and flow of political power have helped her persevere as one of the best, and invariably impartial, observers of the Canadian scene.
“My hope,” Wallin writes, “is that despite the increasingly isolated and individualistic approach to consuming news that technology affords, there will still be a role for the journalist to keep sifting and seeking truth … Perhaps we will come to see the modern journalist as a live search engine who will continue to help sort through and determine what is most important to know out of all we might know.”
Yes, technology is changing journalism. But despite Marshall McLuhan’s assertion the medium cannot utterly subjugate the message. Good minds are still needed to help people understand the passing scene. Newsrooms may look different in the future. But good journalists will still be in demand. That is at least what all four of these writers hope, and they make a good case, despite their fears.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1999) — Fall 1999 // Automne 1999, pp. 39–40. Read the rest of this issue →
