GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

15. The facts, the truth, are what matters

copyright © 2015 WandaS All rights reserved

ON MY LAST DAY AT THE TELY  IN 1958, Managing Editor J.D. MacFarlane mentioned my departure in his daily report to the newsroom about anything he thought its occupants should know. He wished me well in Switzerland where, he wrote, I would "join the International Movement of Catholic Students". Not correct. I went to work for  IMCS, an association of student associations, not of individuals.

When I began working for The Canadian Register in 1960, Editor-in-Chief J.G. Hanley introduced me in a front page article headed "Carleton graduate on Register staff". He wrote that my parents "managed to escape with their family before Hitler invaded" Poland. Not correct. They left after Germans invaded, and I was the only family they carried out.

Those errors caused me to think I should run final drafts of articles I wrote past interviewees, to make sure I got everything right. Wilf Eggleston drilled into us in J-School that reporters are recorders of an era; what we put on paper would be filed and read later by people who wanted to know when, why, how, etc., something happened. Nothing that appeared in print, he insisted, was so unimportant that we could let it be incorrect.

He taught us to use at least three sources for research. Around 1980 I began checking five and eventually, seven. In 2015 sources are so confusing that I despair. Will a future historian be able to describe our times as they really are? Do we even know today what's true?

Some editors opposed my idea of showing copy to people I wrote about. "A free, independent press is essential to democracy" they argued. Only journalists should decide what will be published.

Woah!

Journalists are self-appointed. All publications trace their origins to someone, or a group, with a printing press and a message to proclaim. Readers who wanted to read different points of view bought different papers; those who didn't bought the one that agreed with their views. After advertisers began covering costs for paper, ink, production, distribution, publishers began avoiding truths which would offend advertisers. (Chapter 3 has examples.)

During the second half of the 20th Century "media" (plural of 'medium') became profitable businesses using information to fill the time and spaces between commercials. The operative word is "using". To discern truth today one must read between the lines of everything we read, hear, or see, and even then truth isn't easy to find.

A few years ago I pointed out to an editor that one of his columnists had misspelled Sir Sandford Fleming's first name (as 'Sanford') four times in one article, and because there was no fifth mention of him readers had no cause to wonder about it. We must publish a correction, I said. The editor replied "We don't do corrections". What I heard was 'We don't care about our readers, or about anyone in the future who may be unfortunate enough to use us as an historical reference'.

The Canadian Register was founded at some moment (which no one can pinpoint) early in the 20th Century to inform Roman Catholics about the religious institution they belonged to, the Faith it proclaims, and persons who run it and do the proclaiming. Those are three very different elements. 

In 1960 it was being mailed to RC homes registered in the parishes of the seven Ontario dioceses which subsidized it. By the late 1950s it was "a losing newspaper publishing operation in Kingston, Ontario". That's how it was described by William B. DeMeza, a non-Catholic American jack-of-all-journalistic trades hired in 1958 to be its Managing Editor.*

Right Rev. J.G. Hanley, aka "Monsignor", appointed years earlier to be its Editor-in-Chief, was in his spare time a prime mover of the Canadian Federation of Newman Clubs, so we had met often. He decreed in 1960 that I owed the Church: Because the CFNC had led me to a fabulous year in Switzerland, I must work for The Register.