A Few Thoughts On The Latest Newsroom Massacre And What It Means For Democracy And Our Sense Of Community

By Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

The evisceration of news departments in this region and others across Canada and the United States just goes on and on and on and on.

So much so that we may not be far away from the day when there are no professional reporters left working in our communities at all – a circumstance that will surely tickle those politicians and others who’d feel a heck of a lot bolder doing whatever without any watchdogs from the fourth and fifth estates around.

Lauran Sabourin, a long-time reporter of affairs in Niagara for CHCH news

The latest news department to get run through the meat cutters was the one at CHCH TV in Hamilton/Niagara that began the morning of Friday, December 11^th with more than 150 full- and part-time staff and ended the day around a declaration of bankruptcy and a new corporate owner – something rather fittingly called Channel Zero – offering to hire back about 70 of them.

The rest – many of them veteran journalists with families and strong roots in the community – were herded out the door with no severance pay and low chances of finding another gig in a field where there are less than half as many jobs across the continent than there were two decades ago.

But no hard feelings and, while we’re at it, enjoy the rest of the holiday season.

Two members of the CHCH news staff who were among the casualties in this massacre were two people I had the pleasure to work beside on some of the same stories going back to my early years as the environment reporter at the once good St. Catharines Standard three decades ago. So I’m declaring my bias here as one of many of fellow journalists in this region who had a great deal of respect for these people – a respect, I would stress, that was well deserved because they earned it through years of good reporting on issues that mattered to our communities.

Those people are Lauran Sabourin, who was the Niagara beat reporter for CHCH, and cameraman Dwight Penner who were given the daunting job by their Hamilton-based Channel 11 station of – just the two of them – covering a region of more than 400,000 people with 12 local municipalities and councils, a regional council, a diversity of sectors from manufacturing to tourism and agriculture that includes one of Canada’s major grape and wine industries, two post-secondary institutions that have grown by leaps and bounds, a key shipping channel and border crossings, and the list goes on.

Strong? Where is the strong?

It always seemed to me to be outrageous that a TV station with a broadcasting license from the CRTC (that’s short for the mostly useless Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) that says something about Niagara being part of its coverage area to assign only two news staff to the region. But Lauran and Dwight did it as well as any two journalists could by almost always being in the right place with their mikes and cameras when it mattered.

And Lauran and Dwight did it with an intelligence and respect for the issues they covered, and with sensitivity for the people affected that is almost unheard of in what passes for the news media these days. One of the few other television reporters I can recall doing their job with as much intelligence and class was Marie Rice who worked for Buffalo’s Channel 4 news, who covered stories as heartbreaking for people as the Love Canal disaster while never being exploitive and always being sensitive to the feelings of the victims, and who was rightfully inducted into the New York State Broadcasters’ Hall of Fame a few years back.

By contrast, Lauran (as she reportedly put it in a statement to a local newspaper) “expected something better than ‘just being kicked to the curb’ and left without a job, and without any severance.” That certainly doesn’t speak well for the characters who now own this station, even if they are right in saying that the channel has been losing money and they had no choice but to cut staff. But it is typical of most corporations these days that shower big bonuses on their executives and board members and throw anyone else they have no further use for in the dumpster.

And what does all this mean for the rest of us?

In the days following the bloodbath at CHCH, there was the usual reaction of ‘wow’ or ‘that’s a shame’ and ‘I feel sorry for those who lost their jobs’ from people’ that you get almost every time something like this happens. And as heartfelt as the reaction may be, a week goes by and we just go back and adjust to yet another ‘new normal’ that means even less coverage of news that matters to the lives of people and their communities.

To the extent that news reporters provide some of the glue that bring communities closer together around issues that impact on their health and welfare, ever more of that glue is gone and it’s not being replaced by social media with people posting selfies to “friends” on Facebook, saying ‘here I am at the rally’ or sharing a few bumper sticker slogans on Twitter.

Millions of people in Canada and the United States look at a character like Donald Trump, with nothing more than bumper sticker lines to throw out himself, and wonder how he could be topping polls in a race for the highest office of the land.

You still have all kinds of people saying, as they did in Canada’s recent federal election, ‘you’ve got to get out and vote’. But isn’t it just as important to have informed voters and where are people supposed to get the information they need to make an intelligent choice?

We are in big trouble as a democracy when we lose news coverage folks. Every dictator in history knows that. That’s why they shut down the kind of reporting that is supposed to be delivered to the community without fear or favour and replace it with self-serving propaganda.

There was a time when most of the newsrooms across North America were owned and operated by people who were true believes in the valuable role good reporting can play in a community themselves. Now we more often have people with backgrounds in business administration who refer to news as a “product” and readers and viewers as “customers” and communities as a “markets” or “target zones” for advertising.

And that’s all that what used to be real newspapers and news stations are for these corporate people – vehicles for advertising with a few puff stories and  Rush Limbaugh flavoured rants passed of as news and commentary.

As a person who has worked most of my adult life in the news field, I have often found it disheartening that in countries like Canada and the United States, where the role a free press plays in a democracy is written into our Constitutions, more people seem to get upset about shopping malls being closed for a day on a holiday weekend than about newsrooms being gutted in their communities.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the principle authors of America’s Declaration of Dependence, said that if he had to choose between having government and having newspapers, he would choose newspapers.

Today, we have governments and the corporate masters that run both them and our media outlets.

Where is the public outrage over that?

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