Posted by Sudbury Northern Life
Muting the watchdogs Toronto – The good news for Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, as he struggles with an economic recession, is there will be fewer watchdogs around to scrutinize how he handles it.
The number of reporters, photographers and columnists covering the legislature full-time is dwindling fast and only about half what it was a couple of decades ago.
The latest casualty is Globe and Mail columnist Murray Campbell, who, after six years, has been told by his newspaper he will be returning to head office and will not be replaced.
The Globe will now have to cover the legislature with only one reporter, which is two fewer than it had during legislature sessions when this reporter worked at The Globe more than four decades ago.
This is worrying for journalists, who see many jobs in their profession disappearing, as they are in others, but also a blow to the public, which needs media able to report and interpret events that affect it.
The Globe also is a special newspaper, if a bit pretentious about it, read more than others by the more literate, which includes those wanting to be informed on politics. The Times in Britain boasts “Top People Read The Times” and this also is true of the Globe.
This writer has covered politics provincially and federally for several newspapers, but doors opened more quickly when he could say he was from the Globe and Mail.
The Globe’s columnists at the legislature, going back to the 1960s, have included Norman Webster, related to the paper’s then-owner, Howard Webster, but thoroughly able in his own right, Hugh Winsor, Robert Sheppard, Tom Walkom, now writing columns on national affairs for the Toronto Star, and Orland French, who had a rare flair for humor.
These Globe columnists probably were as well known and are as much remembered as some politicians they wrote about. They needed abilities, including that of understanding legislation sometimes so complex they almost had to be lawyers to find their way around it.
They needed to understand what motivates politicians to introduce, or refuse to introduce, legislation, which often is not what they claim it is, and their countless other maneuvers
They needed to build contacts in the parties, to know what is going on there, and know the past, because it has huge bearing on the present.
Usually they had experience of politics provincially and elsewhere. Campbell covered provincial issues on-and-off for a decade before becoming legislature columnist. A good memory was as essential as a pen and paper.
The Globe columnists also tended to be less politically partisan than those on other Toronto newspapers and more independent of their paper’s official opinions, as expressed through its editorial page, which once were moderately Conservative, but have become dominantly far-right wing.
Columnists on other Toronto newspapers, with a few exceptions, have tended to echo their employers’ editorial stances, which in the Star have been overwhelmingly pro-Liberal, while those on the Sun and National Post mostly have stuck like Krazy Glue to their papers’ pronounced extreme-right preachings.
This does not mean the Globe has led in all areas of coverage. The Star notably, and to some extent the Sun, have done more in recent years to expose inadequacies in government, while the Globe has not provided enough staff for this. But there are reasons to miss Globe columnists.
The Toronto papers, and particularly the Globe, are replacing journalists commenting on politics by offering endless space to non-journalists to write on political issues.
They include retired politicians, back room strategists, spokespersons for think tanks, company CEOs and many organizations from taxpayers’ associations to unions.
They cost nothing or little and sometimes have views worth knowing, but they lobby for partisan causes.
The papers seem to operate on the premise if they provide many opinions that are biased, they wind up presenting a balanced picture, but a single account by a journalist striving to be non-partisan probably will get closer to the truth.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
