Scrum Filter: Unspinning the Year's News

Gordon Campbell's drunken escapade grabbed the headlines at the top of the year. Very briefly, I might add. Yes, the Pissed Premier's mug shots made front pages - as they did across the country. Our province's newspapers, though, quietly declared the story played out by the end of January, two weeks after the Premier was pulled over. Questions about his fitness, as a convicted criminal, to govern were briefly raised, then dismissed. What drinking and driving said about the man's judgment never was seriously considered.

The story of Premier Under the Influence made the Vancouver Sun rediscover a commitment to getting reliable sources and accounts. What else could explain the Sun's decision to spike a Petti Fong story about the premier's night in the Maui drunk tank?

Sun editor Patricia Graham later claimed that Fong's story never made the paper because it was a single-sourced story, one where the source had a criminal record and a history of amnesia. One might think that the Sun would tell its reporters to dig deeper and get some accounts to corroborate the story. This is not some ordinary DUI; it's the province's chief executive. No dice. The story was dead - until it was leaked to Terminal City's Brian Salmi, the Vancouver Courier's Allen Garr, and Monday Magazine in Victoria.

Mair's revenge tastes Good

Vancouver's broadcasting brass should be thankful that Pat Burns, Jack Webster, and Doug Collins are no longer with us. Those three firebrands wouldn't approve of what passes for talk radio these days. What would Webster say about B.C.'s number one news and talk station boasts the safe and inoffensive Bill Good and Jennifer Mather as its stars? I'd guess "Rubbish!"

When CKNW gave ratings champ Rafe Mair the boot, it signalled a commitment to blandness at the once-proud station. Aside from weekender Peter Warren, 'NW's  lineup has none of the orneriness or unpredictability - or the willingness to take unpopular stands - that makes for good, entertaining, talk radio. These days, the former Top Dog's schedule is dominated by the fiscal conservative/social moderate opinion that offends as few people as possible. Gordon Campbell? Good. Animal welfare? Like it. Welfare for humans? Encourages dependency. Drugs? Bad. Unions? Put them in their place.

You, too, can play the super-simple game of "guess what Billifer will say next." I'd advise against it.

Mair's return to his old haunt of 600 AM, the former CJOR, perked up the station's ratings after his September debut. After only three months head-to-head, Mair is in a dead heat with replacement Bill Good despite Good's strong lead-in from the Frosty Forst morning show. It goes to prove that on-air talent matters - it makes a difference of thousands of listeners, and millions of advertising dollars. Unlike bean-counters, you can't interchange air staff like widgets and expect that listeners won't notice or care. The ratings show that they do.

Grassroots radio revival

Across Canada, small communities have been losing their radio stations. Big owners like Pattison, Standard, and Corus have been cutting staff and turning small-town stations into repeaters of their big-market properties in order to save money. In Fort Nelson, the trend reached its ridiculous end. Last year, Standard Radio turned the town's only radio station into a ghost, with programming piped in from Fort St. John. There were no longer any Standard staff left in Fort Nelson apart from travelling advertising representatives,

This past spring, a storm threatened to knock out hydro in Fort Nelson. Facing this emergency, mayor Christine Morey, fire chief Walt Lutsiak and a bunch of Rotarians needed to get the word out about the town's emergency plans. Their response was to get Standard to broadcast announcements from their studios in Fort St. John - except that there was nobody on the job at that time. Morey and her cohorts had to break into the shuttered station's studios to do what Standard would no longer do - relay information in an emergency. Standard Radio was not amused: they responded by rebuilding the studio doors.

The trend away from local radio in small towns isn't universal. When the Jim Pattison Group shut down Mackenzie's only local station, the locals, led by former morning man J.D. McKenzie, got even. Instead of pleading that Pattison reconsider the closure of CKMK, they instead started a community radio station. Less than two years after Pattison abandoned Mackenzie, CHMM-FM signed on. Not only is CHMM the rebirth of local radio in Mackenzie, it's an expansion. CKMK broadcast only four hours a day; the rest of the time, it repeated a station from Prince George. The new station provides 100 hours a week of locally produced radio.

In Fort St. John, CKFU-FM (we kid you not) "Moose FM" hit the air in August as the Peace Country's only locally owned station. Further south, Kamloops's full service station CHNL expanded its operations this summer. Radio NL's Merritt station went from being strictly a repeater to airing original programming for Merritt - just in time for fire season.

That other Black

Think that CanWest are the poster boys for media concentration? That the Aspers are the champs of chain-wide editorials? Try David Black instead - and we're not talking about the NDP bigwig; rather, the Victoria based newspaper proprietor. Five years ago, Black beat the Aspers to the forced editorial when he made all his B.C. papers to run a series of commentaries against the Nisga'a treaty by the late Mel Smith. In May, Black Press bought Bowes Publishers' community papers in Summerland, Penticton, Invermere, Golden, and Revelstoke. Sixty-two of B.C.'s hundred or so local rags are now in the Other Black's empire - most of them in places where there is no other local media.

Of course, owners aren't the only obstacles to journalists doing their jobs. Reporters dispatched to cover the burning Interior had to deal with the threat of being arrested and jailed for going into the fire zones to do their jobs. Authorities were also trying to keep the press from reporting on the fate of places like Barriere. Ostensibly, police were concerned about the reporters' safety; it later became clear that it was about controlling information. Police believed themselves the only ones capable of breaking the news to the evacuees. Naturally, those annoying journos were quick to find residents who just wanted to know if their homes were still there, and didn't care whether they got the news from police or the press.

The burning interior was B.C.'s story of the year according to a survey taken this past October by the Jack Webster Foundation. Forty-three percent of respondents named the forest fires as top story, compared to 15 percent who thought it to be Robert Pickton and Vancouver's missing women. By contrast, only 6 percent of respondents mentioned Gordon Campbell's drunk-driving conviction, leaving it a measly fifth. Does that suggest that outlets like the Sun were justified in letting Campbell's conviction slide? Not likely - the survey was taken nine months after Campbell's arrest.

Did the Straight play it straight?

The "independent" media had their moments this year. In August, Republic publisher Kevin Potvin fired unpaid columnist Karin Litzcke. Potvin made the announcement in the issue where he began a series on CanWest Global's suppression of views contrary to the party line. Officially, Litzcke was fired because her means of coming to her conclusions were unsatisfactory to proprietor Potvin.

Most observers interpreted something rather different: Potvin gassed someone with whom he disagreed - much like what, say, CanWest Global might do. The two traded laborious arguments over the next few issues, Neither Potvin's nor Litzcke's arguments proved anything except their wordiness.

Georgia Straight publisher Dan McLeod showed his flair for the dramatic this year. McLeod announced last October that the Straight faced a million-dollar back tax bill. A provincial government auditor decided earlier this year that the Straight's unpaid event listings are not editorial content; by that logic, the Straight had less than the 25 percent editorial content required for the sales tax exemption given newspapers.

McLeod mounted a brilliant PR campaign against the government, accusing it of trying to bankrupt the Straight in order to silence the only paper consistently critical of the B.C. Liberals. (Of course there are other weeklies, as well as the college papers, that are consistently critical of the Campbell government, but never mind - this is PR!)

The public's response, aside from a couple of alternative papers' editors and the usual bunch of Liberal toadies, was clear: the Straight is a newspaper, and to quote Vaughn Palmer, the law is an ass. The day after McLeod went public with the news, revenue minister Bill Barisoff announced that his ministry would review the Straight decision, effectively killing any threat to the Straight. While McLeod's accusations about a conspiracy to kill the Straight were never proven, it didn't matter in the end. He got what he needed.

Finally, this little online news service that you are now reading launched. We couldn't possibly write this far without mentioning that TheTyee.ca is a vital part of your media diet, full of reporting and opinion you won't see anywhere else. All this self-congratulation is already getting your humble scribe very uncomfortable. Instead, how about holding out hope that the Tyee will outdo B.C.'s mainstream media, and maybe push them to clean up their acts?

I can look forward to that.

Ian King, whose Scrum Filter column runs regularly in The Tyee, thinks that year-in-review pieces are the refuge of lazy journalists devoid of original ideas. He also realizes what that says about him for writing this thing.