MEDIA MATTERS: WHY I’VE STOPPED TAKING THE LOCAL DAILY

   

A sad garden of skeletal remains

Private investors with close links to the government have announced plans to create a pro-government newspaper to publicize good news and promote the state’s agenda.

An August dispatch from Johannesburg. South African president Jacob Zuma, faced with an unprecedented wave of poor people’s demonstrations and labour unrest, has also introduced a Protection of Information law aimed at journalists violating the “national  interest.” 

What does this have to do with the Kingston Whig Standard and my decision to join the legions of others who have given up – and given up on — the paper? 

On one level, the story is an old one, often told by longtime Kingstonians of a certain age. 

The Whig, once owned by the local Davies family, was sold to Southam twenty years ago. Since then, it has passed through the hands of various corporate owners, including those of the disgraced Conrad Black. The once a proud, well staffed and written paper that covered local affairs like the morning dew is now owned by Montreal’s Peladeau interests. The Quebecor octopus includes among its directors the disgraced Brian Mulroney.

Now that the Whig is part of Pierre Karl Peladeau’s Sun Media, local coverage has been diluted. Local editorials are rare. One of the few remaining reporters — and the only woman left in the newsroom — still spends all her time coverings the courts. The result? The most mundane petty offences are treated as news: “Teen pleads guilty to threatening another male while enraged.”

Management has even removed each staffer’s wastepaper basket from the newsroom….and the whole building. 

Quebecor bosses also cancelled the contract of the firm that looked after the Whig’s office plants.  The thriving greenery shriveled into a sad garden of skeletal remains. An all-too-obvious metaphor for the fate of the entire paper. 

When the Customer Service Supervisor asked a friend why he was cancelling the paper, Larry Scanlan’s reply was succinct. 

“The reason? I’m really disappointed in the quality of the newspaper — the lack of local coverage, the lack of good local columnists, all those Sun Media columnists, the woeful op-ed page. I feel a terrific allegiance to the newspaper; I worked for the paper for eight years in the 1980s when it could say with pride that it was one of the finest mid-sized dailies in the land. My history with the paper goes back thirty years, and I can assure you the current version cannot hold a candle to the old one. I will sound old and curmudgeonly by saying so, but I have seen a steady decline. Enough.”

Such is the carnival of ineptitude that lands on my doorstep every morning that I had for months been thinking of not renewing: Lost pet stories on the front page. A cascade of single source stories. “Receive” spelled incorrectly in headlines. Disgraced Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich’s name spelled BLOGojevich in a headline over a wire story that had the man’s name correct. 

More important than the editing blunders is the inescapable fact that the paper has a trashy look to it. That’s in good measure because the Whig is now overflowing with shared pages prepared off-site in a non-union sweatshop.

Then there’s skewed news judgement. On Sunday July 25 the New York Times and the Guardian broke the huge WikiLeaks.org story revealing 76,000 classified U.S.  documents about the Afghan war. The Whig missed the story completely. It belatedly ran a very brief item two days later, but the angle was not the startling revelations about civilian deaths and other “collateral damage” that have so damaged the NATO effort. It was about how the leaks might “endanger Canadian troops.” 

But these signs of declining competence pale next to the crude political agenda that has come to dominate Sun Media outlets. Which leads me to the second reason for not renewing my subscription. 

It has emerged that one Kory Teneycke had taken over Sun Media’s political coverage. 

Now, ever since the Sun chain bought the Whig we have watched as the editorial pages started to be paved with right-wing columnist like Peter Worthington and Lorrie Goldstein. (That is, when Whig editors who once featured an array of locally written opinion pieces weren’t putting reader photos of people sitting on a statue.) It was bad enough to have the eyes blur when confronted with screeds from climate change deniers and poor-bashing zealots. But now Stephen Harper’s former media handler was handling the political coverage in the local paper. And suddenly we’re getting an overdose from the right-wing extremist Ezra Levant. 

I had known that Teneyke was fronting Peladeau’s effort to set up a Canadian TV network modeled after Fox News in the United States. But word that Harper’s former mouthpiece was now determining the slant of the local paper spoke volumes. 

“It’s not every day,” observed Globe & Mail columnist Lawrence Martin, “that a prime minister sees his one-time spokesperson taking control of a giant media chain’s coverage of his government.” 

There you have it. I can no longer abide the idea of paying for a degraded paper that ships money out of the local market with the explicit aim of helping Harper. Soon after taking over Sun Media’s political helm, veteran Ottawa columnist  Greg Weston disappeared. He had just exposed Harper’s outrageous “security” spending for the G-20 summit, along with the exquisitely embarrassing “fake lake.” 

Christina Spencer has also walked the plank at Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau. She was the last experienced journalist to serve as editor of the Whig Standard. 

I started “taking the paper” – as my grandmother used to say – when I moved to Kingston 21 years ago. It was automatic, like getting the phone hooked up.  I also began to contribute to the Whig and even continued to do so after they stopped paying freelancers anything close to professional rates. 

I’ll miss longtime Whig reporter Paul Schliesmann’s coverage of city politics. The paper has a couple of other journalists left who really know the town. They still run Gwynne Dyer’s well informed and iconoclastic articles about matters military, but they will likely soon disappear.  I suppose I can find the weekend Doonesbury on-line and in colour, but it won’t be quite the same. 

Today’s Whig looks increasingly like a Harper house organ. It’s also a spooky reminder of what those private interests with close links to the South African government have in mind for that country. 

(Both Lawrence Martin and Larry Scanlan will be appearing at the Kingston WritersFest September 22-26 http://www.kingstonwritersfest.ca/.)

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