Fake news? We didn’t have to invent it. It just came naturally.
Barely out of my teens I am two weeks into my first job as a reporter on the Woodstock Sentinel Review, a daily broadsheet covering rural Southwest Ontario. Total journalism training so far: a quick read of a book on how to become a reporter. The secret to finding scoops, it says, is keen observation of your surroundings. As the book suggests, I look around. Sure enough I spot large numbers of black and white Holstein Friesian cows dotted around the Oxford County countryside. Hard to miss them, actually. The idea comes to me in a flash. Why not start a feature called Cow of the Week – a picture of a champion cow and an interview with the farmer?
The city editor loves the idea. Soon I am crashing gears in the company Volkswagen as I race out for the first cow job. With me is the staff photographer who en route confesses to me he only got the job at the Sentinel after failing the exam to become a mailman. No matter, he gets the cow photo. But the farmer proves monosyllabic. So I make up his quotes for him and he grunts assent.
Next week we repeat the process with a similar result – picture of cow standing in mud and grunts from farmer. A week later I thought: To hell with all this stomping through the mud. Why not just phone a farmer, get the grunts and then flip last week’s cow picture so it faced the other way and make up the quotes as usual? One Holstein Friesian looked much the same as the next one. So this is what we did for succeeding weeks. We had the looking-right Holstein and the looking-left Holstein. Not a grunt of complaint came from any of the farmers. And my secret was safe with the photographer.
Thus I took the first of many steps down the proverbial slippery path of journalism. The Sentinel was a small-town parody of a stereotypical Hollywood newspaper. A beer-bellied city editor lorded it over a newsroom not much bigger than a two-car garage. Flanked by a weedy minion busily ripping copy off clattering wire machines, he barked orders as spit dribbled from his pipe. The ad salesmen and reporters were either old hacks on their way down or youngsters like myself hoping to be on the way up. One salesman had the distressing habit of getting drunk and running naked around the city park scaring the children. He always reported for work the next day as if nothing had happened. We were paid a pittance by the stingy Thomson organization. But no matter, it was a foot on the ladder to greater things and larger deceptions.
Four years of journalism school? Why bother? Here I was a mere kid and local big shots were actually slathering to be my friend when I called on them for the news: the mayor, the chief of the four-man police department, even the chairman of the golf club – I mean, how much more important could a youngster like myself get?
But, alas, dishonesty didn’t stop with Cow of the Week. Still worse was to come. In fact, outright corruption. A couple of French-Canadian businessmen turned up in Woodstock with a machine tool they wanted to sell to a local factory. They told me their story then thrust two crisp $20 notes into my hand – equivalent to my weekly salary. Before I could protest they were out the door and away. Shamefully, I pocketed the notes and told nobody. No doubt, I told myself, this was the way business was done in Quebec. Did I write their story? My memory fails me.
Other forms of back-sliding were more subtle. One of my tasks was theatre critic. This involved reviewing the local amateur dramatic society’s dire productions. On the first night I tactfully wrote that so-and-so was good in this role, so-and-so not quite so good in that role. “No! No!” shouted the city editor. “That’s not the way you do it. What you do is you start off by saying ‘The Woodstock Amateur Dramatic Society gave an interesting and informative performance of …’ And then you say everyone was outstanding.”
One highlight was meeting my first Great Man. This was Lester Pearson, already a Nobel prize-winner and future prime minister now campaigning as leader of the opposition. Diligently, I briefed myself on important local issues – the collapsing textile industry, agricultural prices, funds for rural highways. Entering his modest hotel room I was surprised to see he had no entourage – just himself and an open suitcase on the bed in which nestled a large bottle of rye whiskey. I blurted out my questions that were met with a look of total incomprehension. It became clear that the Great Man knew nothing of local affairs. His mind was on much larger questions – world peace, for example. Yet the city editor wanted his views of local matters so I simply obliged by simply making them up. No complaint was ever forthcoming.
Always the idea was to make every story as long as possible in order to make up for the lack of any real news. Overall it took me mere days to get the hang of being a reporter. Am I boasting? I don’t think so. Anyone who’d been taught the basics on how to put together an English sentence could have done it. Back then in the early 1960s, few bright, well-educated young persons wanted to go into journalism. Better-paying, more prestigious careers beckoned in the law, in medicine, in business. Journalism as a fashionable career came later. Meanwhile the drop-outs – like me – took the starter journalism jobs.
Soon word of my success with Cow of the Week raced through the journalistic grapevine and I was off to the Winnipeg Tribune at more than double my salary. Here, too, corruption reared its ugly face yet again but in slightly different ways.
The Tribune – alas, no longer with us – was a giant step up from the Sentinel. A bustling newsroom filled with reporters, young and old hacks engaged in fierce competition with the rival Winnipeg Free Press.
My first Tribune friend was an Edinburgh Scot I’ll call Fergus. He’d arrived in Winnipeg by an unusual route. At some international conference the publisher of the Minneapolis Star met the publisher of the Edinburgh Scotsman. Over drinks – perhaps one too many – in a hands-across-the-ocean gesture – they decided to exchange their most promising young reporters for a year. Fergus duly arrived in Minneapolis where he immediately showed his gratitude by organizing a strike. The FBI none-too-gently invited him to cross the border into Manitoba where he found his berth on the Tribune. Given a job on the copy-editing desk he started slashing away at the voluminous copy handed in by reporters. In Edinburgh, where space was short and news abundant, the art of compression reigned. He was quickly told what I’d learned at the Sentinel Review – in Canada the longer the story the better. All that space between the ads had somehow to be filled up.
From Fergus I learned an essential reportorial skill – the pickup. This involved rushing over to the home of a traffic or crime victim and trying to get a photo of the recently deceased. Often relatives were in shock. Fergus was a master of distraction with his fetching Scottish accent while I lifted the silver-framed photo of the victim from the mantelpiece. A shoddy and shameful practice nevertheless demanded by the city desk.
Fergus loved to repeat the ancient joke whereby the pickup man beats the police to the deceased’s house and asks the woman who opens the door: “Are you the widow Smith?” She looks bewildered and says: “No.” The pickup man then says: “Well, you are now.”
At the next desk to me sat the ever-ebullient Bob Hunter, already a published novelist and later to be famous as a co-founder of Greenpeace. My first hint that all might not be quite right with Hunter came as a result of The Coffee Break Scandal. A group of us went daily to a nearby hotel for coffee which operated on an honour system of putting money – what was it? A dime, a quarter? – into a pot. One day the manager emerged crying out that we’d been cheating. He pointed his finger at me. In fact it was Hunter who disdained the bourgeois habit of actually paying for things. He didn’t confess and the episode ended in confusion.
Years later Hunter published a book of hippy-like travel memoirs in which he described enjoying underage Thai prostitutes. Not surprisingly this was used against him when he ran unsuccessfully as a provincial Liberal candidate in an Ontario election. Hunter argued that the book was fiction even though at the time of its publication it was described as a true-life adventure. In any event this nasty business sullied his reputation. Sadly he died of cancer in 2005 after perhaps unwisely seeking a miracle cure in Mexico. Obituaries in the world’s press hailed him as an important eco-warrior which indeed he was despite his real or imagined personal sexual habits.
For some mysterious reason I was appointed City Hall reporter which involved long tedious hours listening to a bunch of blow-hard aldermen heckling each other. Finding this more than I could bear I applied to the Toronto Star and got a job offer from the city editor, Richard J. Needham. Learning this, the Mayor of Winnipeg, Steve Juba, promised he’d make me an honorary citizen of Winnipeg if I wrote a favourable story about Winnipeg in The Star. This I did and duly received the certificate – disappointingly numbered 949 – which today hangs in my bathroom. I believe it entitles me to march with a fixed bayonet through the city.
Finally, the big time. I took the train to Toronto and presented myself to Needham at The Star. He asked me if I had a place to live. Of course I didn’t. He then pulled from his pocket a large bunch of keys. He selected one and told me to take a cab to a certain address. This turned out to a plush apartment that obviously belonged to a woman – the closet full of furs was an unmistakable clue. I crept into the crisp linen of the bed, terrified that she would return and scream with horror. But nothing happened. It turned out the apartment belonged to one of Needham’s numerous female fans that was away at the time. That Needham would have admirers was at first curious as he was not an instantly prepossessing character. Dressed in a scruffy suit and dirty shirt he often exuded body odour. A story spread that female secretaries had even lodged a complaint about this with the union.
I soon settled in despite a distressing rumour that Needham had hired me because he had suddenly turned gay. All three of his previous reporting hires had been attractive women. Naturally this led to suspicions in the ever-nasty minds of the hacks. In fact, Needham, for all his eccentricities, was a sympathetic teacher of young journalists and in his own way a brilliant writer. Soon he tired of The Star’s bullying management and moved to the Globe and Mail where he built an adoring female following by writing a column of aphorisms and musings on the meaning of life and love.
One onerous duty at The Star was the annual Christmas charity appeal. Reporters were told to search out and write up deserving welfare cases to boost donations to the fund. Not surprisingly no one wanted to do this chore. The rewrite desk of half a dozen hacks agreed on a hassle-free solution. Each person on the desk would write an invented paragraph and then pass it on to the next person who would write the next paragraph and so on. The game was to increase the pity of the case without actually going over the top.
So you might get paragraph one: “Five year-old little Jimmy has been blind since birth.” Paragraph two by the next writer might be: “His father has been out of work for two years and his mother has crippling arthritis.” It was tempting at that point to write: “And not only that, but little Jimmy has to have both his legs amputated.” But moderation always prevailed and The Star management never caught on. Of course this nonsense would be unthinkable at today’s newspaper but standards in those days were, shall we say, different.
And so it went. My next steps were into other, marginally more respectable worlds. Maclean’s Magazine, where the drinking started at an early lunch and often ended at midnight; as editor of Vancouver Life magazine; then as a producer with the perpetually about-to-go-on-strike CBC TV News; then founding editor of Quest Magazine, which sadly did not survive my departure.
And then … my inevitable slide into the world of business where there is more money but less fun. But that is another story for another time.
Postscript: I’d assumed the Woodstock Sentinel Review had folded along with so many other small-town newspapers. But, at this writing, no – Google shows it alive and well in both print and digital formats. I dare to think that in my own small way, all those years ago, I contributed to its survival today.