Whenever I hear how much the quality of Canadian political journalism has declined, I am reminded of the days when I was a young (age 19), innocent, research assistant to an MP on Parliament Hill.
Every Friday morning, the parliamentary reporter from my boss’s hometown newspaper would drop by. After a brief chat in his office, the reporter would emerge with a large bottle of Five Star Canadian whisky. When the MP was away, he thoughtfully left instructions with the secretary, who would wordlessly produce the bottle from her large lower desk drawer and hand it to our faithful correspondent when he appeared at the appointed time – roughly when the sun was over the yard-arm.
There’s a new book out on the current state of the political media, edited by my Carleton colleague Chris Waddell and David Taras, long a leading scholar in this field.
The book, entitled How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics, is indispensable but depressing reading for anyone concerned about the state of political journalism today.
The essays in the book catalogue the decline in newspaper readership, the shrinking of newsrooms, the workplace speed-up that inhibits research, the obsession with polls of increasingly dubious quality, the inclination to emphasize politics over policy, and the more-and-more sophisticated techniques of politicians and public relations specialists which have seriously affected the balance between reporters and those they cover.
Even after a lifetime in and around the news business, there was a lot in this book for me to learn – including the apparent relationship between the closure of parliamentary bureaus by newspapers in smaller cities such as Hamilton and Windsor, and falling turnout in those communities at elections.
In the most pessimistic of the essays, my onetime journalistic mentor at the CBC, Elly Alboim, argues that governments have reacted to a pervasive cynicism in the media by becoming less open, more secretive in consulting “stakeholders”, and thus less accountable to the wider public. I don’t doubt that. The refined deference of a David Halton has given way to the sly sarcasm of a Terry Milewski. And maybe that accounts in part for the taciturn character of the Harper government.
The media – and particularly newspapers, which are at the informational core of the political media – are suffering through a double-barreled crisis. The first is the cyclical economic downturn. The second is a more epic structural change caused by the Internet, which is undermining the business model for newspapers without yet throwing up an adequate alternative.
However, this book is suffused, as is much of the contemporary commentary on the media, with a tone of cultural pessimism that I think may be a little overwrought. There is not only an implication that the political media could do much better – which is clearly true – but that it once did. It is easy once you get onto the problems of today’s media to sound as if you are hearkening back to some ill-defined Golden Age.
Let’s think about that. Anyone who laments the decline of political journalism in this country would do well to spend a couple of days in the archives reading the coverage of federal politics in the provincial newspapers that most Canadians depended on forty years ago. Much of it consisted of a more-or-less faithful record of some government announcement, accompanied by perfunctory criticism from an opposition politician, and that was it.
There was very little of the context or analysis we routinely expect from our newspapers today. Not only that, the copy was frequently written in dreary, lifeless, inverted pyramid style.
The parliamentary press gallery at the time my boss was handing out the Friday bottle in the mid-1970s, was significantly smaller than it is today. Reporters were, in general, much less well educated than they are today. They may not have been as overworked, but they were a bibulous lot, a surprising number of them pounding out their copy in an alcoholic haze. I remember at the time dropping by the “Hot Room” where reporters worked on Parliament Hill and being amazed to discover a pop machine rigged to dispense beer.
My parents, back in Winnipeg, were more or less reliant on the local newspapers for political coverage because you could not get a same-day copy of the Globe and Mail in those days, and naturally there was no Internet. Maclean’s magazine, at the time, published once a month.
There was the CBC, of course, which had substantially improved the quantity and quality of its political reporting over the previous decade, from what had been not much more than a rip-and-read service delivered in the dulcet tones of Earl Cameron not so long before.
And doesn’t that also make a point? The Golden Age couldn’t have been the 1950s and 1960s, before the CBC had made its quantum leap, and at a time when, as we later learned, not only the lesser lights of journalism but some of the biggest names, thought nothing of writing speeches for the politicians they were covering, sometimes for cash.
In much of Canada, this was the political journalism on which the most engaged citizens needed to rely.
The closest Canada’s political media came to a Golden Age in my memory was in the 1980s, when a generation of bright young bilingual reporters washed into Ottawa from Quebec, where they had covered the Quiet Revolution and the rise of René Lévesque. In Ottawa they turned their energies to the patriation of the constitution, the Mulroney sweep and free trade.
But hang on, these were also the years in which my parents lost one of their local newspapers – the Winnipeg Tribune – in a cynical deal between two media chains that also cost the city of Ottawa its second newspaper, the Journal. It was, as well, the decade in which the relentless cuts to the CBC began.
Now let’s look at the other side. The Internet, which has done so much to challenge the business model of newspapers, also gives us, nowadays, bright new voices like Althia Raj at the Huffington Post, and Kady O’Malley at cbc.ca, whose pre-occupation with process should please even the most practiced curmudgeon. Not to mention iPolitics, of course, with its peppery wonkery.
Non-journalists like Éric Grenier at threehundredeight.com and Alice Funke at Punditsguide.ca crunch numbers and supply technically detailed information in a way that was not previously possible. Academic economists and political scientists have – through blogs and Twitter – broadened the intellectual resources readily available to journalists beyond the usual suspects of self-interested commercial pollsters and bank economists.
It is true that the current government is throttling access to information. It is also worth remembering that Canada did not even have a legislated access-to-information system prior to 1983, about the same time that Canada’s Auditors General started aggressively taking on the problems in government programs. That the current government is now systematically weakening mechanisms of public accountability is a problem for the media but not a media problem per se.
Modern communications technology mean that today’s far-flung political columnists such as Barbara Yaffe in Vancouver, Dan Leger in Halifax, and dare I say it, Andrew Coyne in Toronto, have as much access to the enormous cascade of data government does still produce as do reporters in the parliamentary press gallery.
The Internet has revived the long-lost political relevance of Maclean’s magazine and its retinue of excellent writers. Most fascinating of all, it is the Internet that is largely responsible for rescuing the venerable Canadian Press from near-death. While this book of essays mentions that CP’s Ottawa newsroom is half the size it once was, it doesn’t mention that its current bureau is arguably producing more original journalism than ever, getting more scoops and winning more awards.
Meanwhile, back at the old-fashioned print newsroom, Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor at Postmedia are proving that investigative reporting isn’t dead.
Newspapers are, as ever, overwhelmingly conservative in their editorial views, reflecting their ownership. This is true also of many of their columnists, though there are also dissenting voices, such as Tom Walkom at the Toronto Star. Ordinary reporters, like knowledge-workers more generally, may tilt mildly left of the Harper government – as does the Canadian population as a whole at the moment, as it happens.
Mostly the media, columnists and reporters alike, are excessively attached to the two or three dominant strains of conventional wisdom. They operate in a bubble, if possibly a somewhat larger, more diverse and better-informed bubble than the one I lived in when I reported on the Hill in the 1990s.
It is worth saying, since it seems easy to forget, that the engaged citizen has vastly more information at her or his fingertips than a generation ago.
The problem is that large numbers of Canadians have become disengaged. The political media are as much the victims of that phenomenon as they are a contributing cause.
Political disengagement is essentially a generational phenomenon, with young people having lost interest in both politics and the news. But this is not principally a media story.
When Pierre Trudeau was elected prime minister, the median age in Canada was mid-twenties; today it is early forties and rising. The median voter, of course, is considerably older than that. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, politicians have chased the Baby Boom generation because that’s where the votes are.
As a consequence, we have a politics that has failed over two decades to do much meaningful about the climate change that will fundamentally compromise the lives of today’s young. When politicians talk about post-secondary education, it is all about helping Baby Boomers save to support their kids, and very little about helping those kids avoid student debt, or helping them to pay it off in an increasingly uncertain job market.
These are huge structural issues our country faces, but their roots are with the political system and not the journalists who report on it.
Today’s political journalists could do much, much better than they do, and this book will help them figure out how. No one today would argue that we are living in a Golden Age of political journalism. But I am betting that in a few decades’ time, someone will be looking back – and writing about it – as if it were.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams
Every Friday morning, the parliamentary reporter from my boss’s hometown newspaper would drop by. After a brief chat in his office, the reporter would emerge with a large bottle of Five Star Canadian whisky. When the MP was away, he thoughtfully left instructions with the secretary, who would wordlessly produce the bottle from her large lower desk drawer and hand it to our faithful correspondent when he appeared at the appointed time – roughly when the sun was over the yard-arm.
There’s a new book out on the current state of the political media, edited by my Carleton colleague Chris Waddell and David Taras, long a leading scholar in this field.
The book, entitled How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics, is indispensable but depressing reading for anyone concerned about the state of political journalism today.
The essays in the book catalogue the decline in newspaper readership, the shrinking of newsrooms, the workplace speed-up that inhibits research, the obsession with polls of increasingly dubious quality, the inclination to emphasize politics over policy, and the more-and-more sophisticated techniques of politicians and public relations specialists which have seriously affected the balance between reporters and those they cover.
Even after a lifetime in and around the news business, there was a lot in this book for me to learn – including the apparent relationship between the closure of parliamentary bureaus by newspapers in smaller cities such as Hamilton and Windsor, and falling turnout in those communities at elections.
In the most pessimistic of the essays, my onetime journalistic mentor at the CBC, Elly Alboim, argues that governments have reacted to a pervasive cynicism in the media by becoming less open, more secretive in consulting “stakeholders”, and thus less accountable to the wider public. I don’t doubt that. The refined deference of a David Halton has given way to the sly sarcasm of a Terry Milewski. And maybe that accounts in part for the taciturn character of the Harper government.
The media – and particularly newspapers, which are at the informational core of the political media – are suffering through a double-barreled crisis. The first is the cyclical economic downturn. The second is a more epic structural change caused by the Internet, which is undermining the business model for newspapers without yet throwing up an adequate alternative.
However, this book is suffused, as is much of the contemporary commentary on the media, with a tone of cultural pessimism that I think may be a little overwrought. There is not only an implication that the political media could do much better – which is clearly true – but that it once did. It is easy once you get onto the problems of today’s media to sound as if you are hearkening back to some ill-defined Golden Age.
Let’s think about that. Anyone who laments the decline of political journalism in this country would do well to spend a couple of days in the archives reading the coverage of federal politics in the provincial newspapers that most Canadians depended on forty years ago. Much of it consisted of a more-or-less faithful record of some government announcement, accompanied by perfunctory criticism from an opposition politician, and that was it.
There was very little of the context or analysis we routinely expect from our newspapers today. Not only that, the copy was frequently written in dreary, lifeless, inverted pyramid style.
The parliamentary press gallery at the time my boss was handing out the Friday bottle in the mid-1970s, was significantly smaller than it is today. Reporters were, in general, much less well educated than they are today. They may not have been as overworked, but they were a bibulous lot, a surprising number of them pounding out their copy in an alcoholic haze. I remember at the time dropping by the “Hot Room” where reporters worked on Parliament Hill and being amazed to discover a pop machine rigged to dispense beer.
My parents, back in Winnipeg, were more or less reliant on the local newspapers for political coverage because you could not get a same-day copy of the Globe and Mail in those days, and naturally there was no Internet. Maclean’s magazine, at the time, published once a month.
There was the CBC, of course, which had substantially improved the quantity and quality of its political reporting over the previous decade, from what had been not much more than a rip-and-read service delivered in the dulcet tones of Earl Cameron not so long before.
And doesn’t that also make a point? The Golden Age couldn’t have been the 1950s and 1960s, before the CBC had made its quantum leap, and at a time when, as we later learned, not only the lesser lights of journalism but some of the biggest names, thought nothing of writing speeches for the politicians they were covering, sometimes for cash.
In much of Canada, this was the political journalism on which the most engaged citizens needed to rely.
The closest Canada’s political media came to a Golden Age in my memory was in the 1980s, when a generation of bright young bilingual reporters washed into Ottawa from Quebec, where they had covered the Quiet Revolution and the rise of René Lévesque. In Ottawa they turned their energies to the patriation of the constitution, the Mulroney sweep and free trade.
But hang on, these were also the years in which my parents lost one of their local newspapers – the Winnipeg Tribune – in a cynical deal between two media chains that also cost the city of Ottawa its second newspaper, the Journal. It was, as well, the decade in which the relentless cuts to the CBC began.
Now let’s look at the other side. The Internet, which has done so much to challenge the business model of newspapers, also gives us, nowadays, bright new voices like Althia Raj at the Huffington Post, and Kady O’Malley at cbc.ca, whose pre-occupation with process should please even the most practiced curmudgeon. Not to mention iPolitics, of course, with its peppery wonkery.
Non-journalists like Éric Grenier at threehundredeight.com and Alice Funke at Punditsguide.ca crunch numbers and supply technically detailed information in a way that was not previously possible. Academic economists and political scientists have – through blogs and Twitter – broadened the intellectual resources readily available to journalists beyond the usual suspects of self-interested commercial pollsters and bank economists.
It is true that the current government is throttling access to information. It is also worth remembering that Canada did not even have a legislated access-to-information system prior to 1983, about the same time that Canada’s Auditors General started aggressively taking on the problems in government programs. That the current government is now systematically weakening mechanisms of public accountability is a problem for the media but not a media problem per se.
Modern communications technology mean that today’s far-flung political columnists such as Barbara Yaffe in Vancouver, Dan Leger in Halifax, and dare I say it, Andrew Coyne in Toronto, have as much access to the enormous cascade of data government does still produce as do reporters in the parliamentary press gallery.
The Internet has revived the long-lost political relevance of Maclean’s magazine and its retinue of excellent writers. Most fascinating of all, it is the Internet that is largely responsible for rescuing the venerable Canadian Press from near-death. While this book of essays mentions that CP’s Ottawa newsroom is half the size it once was, it doesn’t mention that its current bureau is arguably producing more original journalism than ever, getting more scoops and winning more awards.
Meanwhile, back at the old-fashioned print newsroom, Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor at Postmedia are proving that investigative reporting isn’t dead.
Newspapers are, as ever, overwhelmingly conservative in their editorial views, reflecting their ownership. This is true also of many of their columnists, though there are also dissenting voices, such as Tom Walkom at the Toronto Star. Ordinary reporters, like knowledge-workers more generally, may tilt mildly left of the Harper government – as does the Canadian population as a whole at the moment, as it happens.
Mostly the media, columnists and reporters alike, are excessively attached to the two or three dominant strains of conventional wisdom. They operate in a bubble, if possibly a somewhat larger, more diverse and better-informed bubble than the one I lived in when I reported on the Hill in the 1990s.
It is worth saying, since it seems easy to forget, that the engaged citizen has vastly more information at her or his fingertips than a generation ago.
The problem is that large numbers of Canadians have become disengaged. The political media are as much the victims of that phenomenon as they are a contributing cause.
Political disengagement is essentially a generational phenomenon, with young people having lost interest in both politics and the news. But this is not principally a media story.
When Pierre Trudeau was elected prime minister, the median age in Canada was mid-twenties; today it is early forties and rising. The median voter, of course, is considerably older than that. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, politicians have chased the Baby Boom generation because that’s where the votes are.
As a consequence, we have a politics that has failed over two decades to do much meaningful about the climate change that will fundamentally compromise the lives of today’s young. When politicians talk about post-secondary education, it is all about helping Baby Boomers save to support their kids, and very little about helping those kids avoid student debt, or helping them to pay it off in an increasingly uncertain job market.
These are huge structural issues our country faces, but their roots are with the political system and not the journalists who report on it.
Today’s political journalists could do much, much better than they do, and this book will help them figure out how. No one today would argue that we are living in a Golden Age of political journalism. But I am betting that in a few decades’ time, someone will be looking back – and writing about it – as if it were.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams
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