Some Personal Reflections on Manitoba Political Journalism

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DRAFT

By Frances Russell

Prepared for the Roblin Professorship Conference, St. John’s College, University of Manitoba, Nov. 20‐22, 2008

Manitoba political journalism

As a veteran of 46 years in journalism, I’ve witnessed one of the most profound and dramatic revolutions in the news business since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

I began my career at the Winnipeg Tribune in May, 1962 after graduating with a BA in history and political science. Back then, Winnipeg was a fiercely competitive newspaper market, boasting two broadsheet dailies representing the nation’s two major newspaper chains: Southam, owned by the family of the same name and FP Publications, owned by the Siftons.

Both the Trib and its bigger rival, the Winnipeg Free Press, put out a morning and up to three afternoon editions daily, re-plating the front page as necessary to carry breaking news. This was the era before computers, before tape recorders, before the internet, before the blackberry.

Reporters scribbled their notes on copy paper using thick yellow newsprinter pencils. They pounded out their stories on blank sheets of newsprint wadded, along with carbon paper, into heavy black Underwood typewriters. Sometimes as many as four or five copies were required, the first for the all-important Canadian Press wire and the remainder for various editors.

If they were on deadline, reporters would rip each page out as soon as they had completed a paragraph, shout “Copy” and hand it to a “copy boy” who would rush one page to the city editor, another to his assistant and literally skewer a third on CP’s long, very sharp metal spike resting on the city editor’s desk. Its contents would be scooped up every hour or so throughout the day by a telegraph boy who would take the stories to the CP office in the Winnipeg Free Press building at 300 Carlton Street. From there, Winnipeg’s and Manitoba’s news would be tapped out to the nation and the world.

With four deadlines every day, a newspaper office was a noisy, frantic and exciting place to work. You could hear, touch and literally, smell the news. I can still remember my first visit to the composing room on the floor above. The aroma of hot lead hung heavy in the air from the pots of molten metal hanging beside each huge, clanking linotype machine. Linotype operators took the words written by the reporters in the newsroom below and hammered them out into individual lead “slugs” that were then fitted into heavy metal- columned frames to create the “dummy” for each page of the newspaper. Immediately afterward, the lead slugs would be re-melted and readied for the next edition.

My first “beat” at the Trib was education. My Free Press counterpart and I covered the Winnipeg School Board. And I mean covered. Back at our respective newsrooms, we often stayed up all night writing as many as 12 or 15 stories from every meeting. All or nearly all, would run.

After two years, I won what to me was the lottery grand prize - the chance to cover the Manitoba Legislature.

It was the 1964 winter session. Duff Roblin’s Conservatives were in power. I will never forget the short and succinct lecture I was given by my city editor and on-the-job journalism professor, Harry Mardon. A war correspondent with British United Press, Harry, as we all called him, was a proud Brit and an avowed Conservative. But here were his words to me: “Your job at the legislature is to level the playing field. The government of the day has all kinds of ways to get its message across to the public. We‘re there to make sure the opposition parties have an equal voice.”

Researching my book on Manitoba’s French language crisis, I had occasion to read some of Manitoba’s earliest newspapers. From the 1870s to the 1970s, there really wasn’t much difference in the way Manitoba newspapers- and indeed, newspapers everywhere in Canada - covered parliament and legislatures. The coverage was wall-to-wall, from the daily opening prayer to the adjournment hour. In Manitoba’s case - and in the case of the B.C. and Ontario legislatures, which I also covered for The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail respectively - the adjournment hour could be extended into the wee small hours of the next day in the drive to wrap up all business to break for summer.

Unlike today, when all media attention is focused solely on Question Period, political journalism in Manitoba until well into the 1970s involved writing stories not just out of Question Period, but on everything else debated in the House that day: estimates, bills, committee hearings, matters of privilege, private members’ business, etc. etc. And all MLAs who spoke knew that at least a sentence or two of their comments would appear in the newspaper. It was gruelling work and the Free Press and the Tribune both maintained bureaus at the legislature numbering four or five journalists who would work in shifts. By the time I started in the press gallery, however, the newspapers had abandoned their earlier practice of reporting debates as though they were court stenographers and were applying news judgement to their coverage.

Still, Winnipeg’s two daily newspapers - and, by this time, CBC Radio and TV, CKY Radio and TV and CJOB Radio staffed the legislature full time when it was sitting. In those days, the media, as it was by then being called, respected the fact that the legislature was Manitoba democracy at work. Its members were the representatives of the people and the people who had elected those 57 MLAs had a right to know what they were saying and doing every day they were tending to the public’s business.

In keeping with the noisy, rough and ready nature of their craft in that era, journalists were a far cry from the well-paid, well-dressed, well-behaved, button-down professionals and TV stars of today. Winnipeg’s newspapers and all of its television and radio outlets with the exception of the CBC were non-unionized and pay was, to put it mildly, poor. The “ink-stained wretches” as they were proud to call themselves, didn’t all go home to family and dinner at night, but more often than not, collected at the Winnipeg Press Club to raise more than a few prior to retiring for the day.

The St. Regis Hotel, favoured by rural MLAs during sessions, was another major watering-hole. To this day among oldtimers, there are many stories of well-lubricated

evening sittings of the House when some MLAs were too drunk to speak and some reporters too drunk to write. There is even one famous yarn about a scion of the Tribune bureau being so inebriated one evening that he climbed up onto the gallery desk in the House to unleash a torrent of foul-mouthed criticism at the honourable member speaking below.

That dirty laundry aside, the era of spin was still a few years away. The government had an information office that drafted press releases and that was about it. There were no ministerial press aides, nor were there departmental communicators let alone communication branches. In fact, the premier himself didn’t even have a full-time press secretary.

Individual journalists were on their own when it came to digging up news. It was tough sledding - and very competitive. Press gallery veterans had a distinct advantage over newcomers. They had had years to establish not just contacts, but in many cases, close friendships, with politicians and senior bureaucrats. As in most walks of life, who you know is all-important. Sometimes, an MLA or minister would shun you simply because of the news organization you worked for. But most of the time it was just reality that the better you were known, the more information you were able to get.

The civil service was especially important to reporters and columnists back in the days before cabinet communications and press secretaries. They often knew a lot more about what was really going on regarding a certain issue than ministers themselves.

There used to be a saying in the gallery, especially in the Roblin era: “The civil servant knows but can’t say while the minister can say but often doesn’t know.” Manitoba was – and still is - a small enough province that government tends to be a one-man show. All roads led – and lead – to the premier’s office. If the premier is open and professional with the gallery, the entire government tends to be the same. If not, the ship on Broadway can be very leak-proof indeed.

Back in the competitive era, if you were beaten on a story, you heard about it around 6 a.m. the next day from your irate city editor. Oblivious to the fact you may have been up half the night completing your assignments, he would be yelling down the phone at you, reading out the opposition’s front page story you had missed and berating you to get on it, post haste. A far cry from today when media outlets often simply ignore opponents’ “beats”, thus denying the public important information.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, Manitoba entered the modern era of politically-polarized journalism with the stunning leap from third to first place by Ed Schreyer’s New Democrats in the 1969 provincial election. The lead on the Trib’s front page the next day, written by veteran legislative reporter Chuck Thompson, said it all: “Nobody was more surprised than everyone…”

The Tribune, nominally a Conservative paper, took the arrival of the socialist hordes with some equanimity. Over at the offices of the Liberal Old Lady of Carlton Street, however,

such was not the case.

Free Press publisher and editor-in-chief Brigadier R.S. Malone set himself a mission - to rid Manitoba of the Schreyer government as quickly as possible. He used his editorial page to fulminate against virtually everything the NDP proposed - and the new government was not shy in offering lots to be upset about, from public automobile insurance to an end to health care premiums to the sequence of development of Manitoba Hydro‘s enormous Nelson River power plants to the unification of Winnipeg‘s 16 area municipalities into one city.

I had occasion to run smack into the brigadier’s principal passion. I was by this time writing an editorial page column for the Free Press from the legislature. There had been many news stories denouncing public car insurance and I set up an interview with Sidney Green, then the minister responsible for MPIC. Green, who had run against Schreyer for the leadership and lost in 1969, never completely reconciled himself to his fate and seized any opportunity to, if not openly defy the premier, at least roil the waters.

In his interview with me, Green said the most important thing about Autopac wasn’t that it was going to save Manitoba motorists a lot of money, as the premier kept emphasizing, but that Manitobans’ car insurance premiums would be staying right here in this province helping to build hospitals, schools, nursing homes and roads and not fattening the coffers of some big multinational insurance corporation in Toronto or Chicago.

I wrote the column and handed it in. In no time I received a telephone call from Peter McLintock, the editor of the editorial page. Peter was a kindly and very able newsman with moderate political views. He asked me how determined I was that the column be published. Naturally, I said I thought it was important information that the public should know. I could have it published, he said, but in the want ads section, not on the editorial page.

Malone never stopped taking runs at his socialist nemesis on Broadway.

Just before the 1973 provincial election, he, along with several other prominent Winnipeg businessmen, set up what they called the Group for Good Government. Its purpose was to identify, endorse and financially support the Liberal or Conservative quote unquote “free enterprise” candidate with the best chance of unseating the NDP incumbent in certan specified ridings. The GGG hired a polling firm and publicized its results, much to the chagrin of both opposition parties. In the end, the GGG effort only materialized in nine ridings.

Still, the GGG or single free enterprise candidate effort was spectacularly successful on two fronts.

Despite a four-point increase in popular vote, from 38 per cent in 1969 to 42 per cent, the third highest since 1920, the New Democrats only netted 31 seats, two more than at dissolution but the same number they had a year earlier before the defections of northern

MLAs Joe Borowski and Jean Allard to sit as independents.

And the outcomes in five ridings - Wolseley, St. Boniface, Gimli, Crescentwood and the premier’s own riding of Rossmere - were either close enough or contentious enough to cast a pall of doubt over the election and the government for the next two years.

Herb Schulz, Schreyer’s brother-in-law, provides a sardonic look at the wreckage of the GGG’s 1973 electoral shenanigans in his 2005 book, A View from The Ledge:

“We even knew who the two votes [that lost St. Boniface election night] were. A couple, both good friends of the Schreyers and strong NDP supporters, came home from work and decided to have a short nap before going out to vote. They awoke at 8:10 p.m. and realized the polls had closed…”

A measure of the antipathy towards the NDP and Schreyer in particular in certain quarters was the effort to controvert the premier’s 600-vote win in Rossmere. Continues Schulz: “Rossmere had the largest concentration of Mennonites of any constituency in Canada, many of them first or second-generation émigrés from the Soviet Union and [Conservative candidate Alfred] Penner played to the prejudices of his constituents. He billed his candidacy as offering ‘A Choice Between Freedom of Opportunity, or Socialism…We now have a government that stifles initiative, restricts freedom of choice, downgrades standards of decency and morality and compensates lawbreakers.’ Additionally, he wanted ‘studies of Socialist, communist and Marxist doctrines’ in schools replaced with ‘the Bible and Christian principles.’”

Nevertheless, Penner based his controversial challenge on the grounds the returning officer, an NDP appointee, was Mennonite lay preacher and the Elections Act prohibits ministers, priests or ecclesiastics from acting in that capacity. After hearing lengthy arguments on both sides about whether and when a preacher is a minister, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge threw out the case.

Shulz concludes: “And so, after two years almost to the day after the 1973 election, after five electoral challenges, four judicial recounts, three by-elections and one court case, and after all the agonizing and the expenditure of time and staggering court costs which had drained some private pockets as well as that of the party, our representation in the legislature was exactly what it had been in June 1972...”

After all this, the bad blood the Free Press displayed towards the NDP was being returned with interest. In his address to the NDP’s post-election convention, the premier, normally a low-key, at times, ponderous, speaker, was punching the air with his fists and roaring with fury at his newspaper tormentor while its journalists sat uncomfortably at the press table trying to overlook the hostile stares and rude remarks coming at us from the platform and the audience.

Relations between the province’s government and its biggest newspaper normalized during the Tory Sterling Lyon years. But the hostility resumed after Howard Pawley

brought the NDP back to power in 1981, consigning Lyon to the status of the only one- term premier in Manitoba history.

In 1986, the city editor of the day instructed one of the gallery reporters that she had to “get” a cabinet minister before Christmas. Subsequently, the paper broke a story claiming Energy and Mines Minister Wilson Parasiuk, a Rhodes scholar and former senior economic advisor to Schreyer, was in a conflict of interest due to a business partnership. The province’s retired chief justice, Sam Freedman, was appointed to inquire into the affair and cleared Parasuik of all the paper’s allegations.

Perhaps it was a matter of once bitten, twice shy, or just plain old political bias, but the paper was circumspect to the point of inaction when the Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon found itself immersed in the infamous vote-rigging scandal of the late 1990s.

As outlined in the 1999 commission of inquiry by retired Chief Justice Alfred Monnin, senior Conservatives created and funded a bogus political party to run aboriginal candidates in selected ridings with large native populations in an attempt to split the NDP vote and elect Conservatives in the 1995 provincial election. In that contest, Gary Filmon’s Conservatives won a third term and a second majority.

Free Press senior legislative reporter Alice Krueger first got wind of the audacious attempt to buy an entire election in the dying days of the 1995 race. Pressed for time and working flat-out on the province-wide campaign, she was unable to write more than a single article outlining the NDP’s allegations and the premier’s denials the weekend before the vote. The paper’s managing editor was as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof about running it, but finally did so under the bizarrely chatty headline, “Hey, who’s side is he on.”

Krueger continued to chase the story after the election, but met more and more resistance from the newspaper, a situation that became so intolerable for her that she finally resigned.

Subsequently, CBC Radio’s national affairs reporter in Manitoba, Curt Petrovitch, pursued and broke the story, for which he won the Michener Award for public service journalism.

In his report on the affair, the province’s former chief justice wrote this damning indictment: “As a trial judge, I conducted a number of trials. As an appellate court judge I read many thousands of pages of transcript in a variety of cases: criminal, civil, family, etc. In all my years on the Bench I never encountered as many liars in one proceeding as I did in this inquiry.”

The world of journalism changed forever in Canada on Aug. 27 1980 when Southam closed the Winnipeg Tribune and Thomson Newspapers closed the Ottawa Journal. Competitive broadsheet newspaper markets are now all but gone. Millions of Canadians

in Western Canada are now partially or wholly dependent on CanWest Global for all their news. A CanWest executive never spoke a truer word than when he said privately “Freedom of the press belongs to the owners of the press.”

Manitoba now boasts two daily newspapers, the Winnipeg Free Press and the Brandon Sun. Both are owned by FP Publications Ltd., a partnership of businessmen Bob Silver of Winnipeg and Ron Stern of Vancouver. They also own the network of free community newspapers. Their only local competition is the Sun Media Group’s tabloid, the Winnipeg Sun.

Following national and international trends, newsgathering is now largely infotainment, a commodity to help sell ads. Crime, celebrities, sports and entertainment frequently drown out or sideline political and public affairs. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The famous “Five W’s” – who, what, where, when and why – of basic news coverage is now harder and harder to find in newspapers now crammed with columns on everything from pets and lifestyle to civic, provincial and federal issues. Journalism is personal and journalists are personalities – stars complete with pictures and their own blogs.

The use of the first person pronouns “I” and “me”, a journalistic capital crime in the past, is now ubiquitous. Reporters are expected to serve up the news with their own commentary. They don’t cover the news any more. They tell you what you should think about the news.

Go to the Manitoba Legislature on most days and you will find the press gallery empty except for one or two Free Press reporters. It is largely ignored by the electronic media except for major news conferences and Question Period. Still, because political and legislative coverage is focused so narrowly on that one 40-minute legislative event, the media drives the agenda in ways that it didn’t when it covered the legislative function in its entirety. Indeed, it often functions as an informal research bureau for the opposition parties.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t think the revolution I have witnessed in my 46-year career has been for the better, especially where politics is concerned. Our understanding, even our basic knowledge, of our provincial and national politics is more fragmented and sketchy than ever before, a fact eloquently demonstrated by the shockingly-low voter turnout in last month’s federal election. Technology is a liberator in many endeavours, but in news, both it and the arrival of giant, vertically-integrated media conglomerates, has led to fewer voices, less diversity of opinion and, inevitably, a narrowing of democratic choice.