8 Big Media, Big Stories

The 2000s upended the traditional business model of media and journalism. The lavish spending of the late 1990s had given way to tightened budgets, thinner newspapers and sparsely populated newsrooms. The lifeboat called convergence was foundering. Big media companies were not saving money or earning the profits they anticipated. The 2008 recession was not the blip many media managers had hoped. Craigslist and eBay had siphoned off classified advertising, and it was not coming back. Facebook and Google hijacked broadcast and print advertisers with large online audiences. Younger readers were migrating to sites like VOX, Reddit and YouTube.

As the 2000s progressed, the financial pressures from shareholders, the markets and escalating digital disruption hit the budgets and staffing at community newspapers and local radio and television stations hard. Big media companies dominated the lists of annual finalists.  

The threat to media independence to do stories in the public interest was on the mind of newly appointed Governor General Michaëlle Jean, a passionate defender of free speech. She had lived under a dictatorship in Haiti before escaping to Canada, where she worked as a journalist, presenter and news anchor on the French and English networks of the Canadian public broadcaster from 1998 until she was appointed governor general in 2005. Just forty-eight years old, Jean brought a youthful and less formal attitude to the position. Despite searing criticism in the media over her French citizenship — which she would later renounce — and suggestions that she was a separatist sympathizer, Jean remained a passionate supporter of the Michener Awards and what they stood for.

At that first ceremony in 2006, she urged journalists in the room to be vigilant. “This is why I am delighted that the Michener Award, which promotes not only excellence but also independence of thought, freedom of speech and the public interest, is awarded to a news organization. This award recognizes the commitment of an organization that endeavours not only to disseminate information, but also to arm the citizens with knowledge so that they might look more closely at reality.”¹

Her words resonated with the 2005 Michener finalists. Their journalism had made huge differences. The Toronto Star had helped to overturn a wrongful murder conviction, Radio-Canada exposed security issues at two major hydroelectric dams. La Presse found huge safety gaps in Montreal’s metro, The Canadian Medical Association Journal revealed privacy breaches involving women seeking emergency contraception at pharmacies, and the Victoria Times Colonist and the Vancouver Sun uncovered fatal flaws in B.C.’s child protection system.

That year, the Globe and Mail won the Michener Award for its in-depth coverage of the scourge of breast cancer. The recognition was a testament to the value of beat reporting. The lead reporter in the series, Lisa Priest, had been on the national health beat since the early 1990s. Before being hired away from the Toronto Star, Priest had been to Rideau Hall twice. In 1993, the Toronto Star received a Citation of Merit for her two-part series that detailed long delays in radiation treatments for breast cancer patients in Ontario. Those stories resulted in the government adding twenty-six more radiation specialists and the promise of a long-term cancer treatment plan.² Five years later, the Star won the Michener Award for its series that exposed further deficiencies in Ontario’s troubled healthcare system. Lisa Priest and Leslie Papp’s six-month investigation in 1998 documented lengthy delays in mental health services and cancer radiation treatment that resulted in the province adding $16.6 million to the system. “It was powerfully written and powerfully done,” said John Honderich. “I remember how that affected people and the reaction to it was very powerful. Very proud of it.”³

At the Globe and Mail, Priest continued her focus on health care, winning the 2005 Michener Award for two series about breast cancer. The judging panel noted how the coverage resulted in improved diagnosis and treatment. Her stories pushed the Ontario government to fast-track the approval process for the drug Herceptin and expand its availability beyond women who were dying of breast cancer. A second Globe series about mammogram screening resulted in tighter regulations for clinics including a national quality test for screening machines.

Priest’s then editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon said the 2005 Michener changed how the Globe and Mail approached and covered policy and social issues. “Changed it in terms of looking very carefully in various systematic ways at how policy affected people, how policy played on citizens. And you know, the Herceptin story was so outrageous. I mean, here you had this miracle drug so successful that they had to take it off, out of the trial because it would be considered unethical to keep trials and just not to move forward with that.” As Priest told him, “The most rewarding part of journalism is the ability to make a difference. It’s like oxygen to me. Journalists don’t change things all the time, but every once in a while, we do. And there is no better feeling.”⁴

The following year, the Globe was back at Rideau Hall, a Michener finalist for its “in-depth examination of the impact of cancer on the lives of Canadians.” The paper profiled more than sixty Canadians affected by cancer and told stories of Canadians who were experiencing delays and running up large debts to pay for basic treatment. While the series was running, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a national cancer strategy. Ontario promised more than $190 million for colorectal cancer screening.⁵ In 2011, the Globe received a Citation of Merit for Priest’s reporting on government funding cancer drugs, especially Herceptin. As a result, the government changed its policy and directed Cancer Care Ontario to review its guidelines. It amounted to an overdue audit of the historic move in the 1960s to a national Medicare system.

This concentrated, continuing focus on the shortcomings of the healthcare system remains an outstanding example of the essential role of journalism in the public interest in Canada. Now a new generation of reporters, editors and producers had questions about how well the system served a growing diverse population. People, policy, process and priorities were all on the agenda. In this striving, a Michener Award was the ultimate badge of honour for the Fourth Estate. A Michener Award — or the prospect of one — helped to open up the purse strings of media executives and buy precious time to conduct investigations. This is especially true when it comes to difficult and sensitive stories that take time, commitment and money and can piss off people in authority.

The prospect of a Michener may be on the minds of journalists but not the primary motivation of reporters who set out to expose systemic institutional problems — illegal activity, corruption, cover-ups, sexualized violence and discrimination in local, provincial and national organizations. However, many a reporter considers the possibility when pitching these uncomfortable stories that would shake the foundation of pillars of democracy and Canada’s self-narrative — for example, investigations into Canada’s military and police services, institutions that, for years, were regarded as “above the law” because they were defenders of our democratic freedoms.

Questioning military and police services is fraught with problems, given the weight of institutional secrecy that persists to this day. For example, in 1995, the horrific revelations from the Michener Award-winning story involving Canada’s military and a failed peacekeeping mission in Somalia were still very raw. CBC Radio’s revelations of torture, racial slurs and a cover-up damaged the reputation of Canada’s peacekeepers — once thought to be above reproach. Two years earlier, 900 Canadian peacekeepers had gone to Somalia on “Operation Deliverance” to restore order. Citizens were suffering from civil war and famine. The CBC investigation revealed “wrong-doing, a breakdown of discipline and a failure of leadership and accountability.”⁶ It was brutal. Peacekeepers had tortured and murdered a Somali teenager and killed another local man, and there were reports of other atrocities. The results were immediate: several courts martial, an inquiry and the disbanding of the Canadian Airborne Regiment.

In the aftermath, CBC’s Michael McAuliffe discovered that senior officers had deliberately altered some documents given to CBC Radio and erased computer logs that contained information about what happened in Somalia. The subsequent Somalia inquiry was so damning that after sixteen months the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien shut it down in 1996 — before it had the chance to examine the details surrounding the torture and killing of Shidane Arone, a Somali teenager. Despite the premature end, the Inquiry produced a 2,000-page report that concluded the Canadian military system was “rotten to the core.”⁷ It made 157 recommendations to deal with institutional failures, including higher standards for overseas recruitment and training, and reforming of the military justice system. This kind of journalism required time, commitment and money from an organization. The results were profound, and a Michener nomination was a way to recognize and encourage enterprising journalists who uncovered problems with Canada’s military and law enforcement agencies closer to home.

The top-down rigid culture of the military exposed its members to physical and mental abuse with few options for redress. In 2014, the magazine L’actualité received a Michener citation of merit for its eight-month investigation into sexual assault and harassment in the military. The series started just weeks after a review had pronounced the army’s sexual harassment policies effective. L’actualité found that more than 15 per cent of the 6,700 females in the military had been sexually assaulted or had unwelcome sexual contact at least once a month. But only one in ten reported the incidents because of a culture of inhibition where their superiors pressed them to forgive and forget or face retaliation. Crimes Sexuels dans l’armée garnered a swift response from senior government and military officials. The military set up a response team, and an independent investigation recommended sweeping changes. That did not end the problem.

Ongoing media coverage of Canada’s military continues to bring to light further scandals and allegations of sexual harassment. In 2021, the Department of National Defence commissioned former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour to review the “policies, procedures, programs, practices, and culture” in Canada’s armed forces and the Department of National Defence. Her Independent External Comprehensive Review (IECR) report, released in December 2022, made forty-eight recommendations. The then federal minister of defence, Anita Anand, committed to ensuring both institutions acted on all the recommendations.⁸

In 2011 Michener finalist CBC Vancouver exposed similar abusive behaviour in Canada’s national police service when journalists cracked open the RCMP’s culture of suffering in silence and exposed “a toxic and long-standing environment of systemic sexual harassment of women.”⁹ It took one courageous female RCMP officer to speak out. Catherine Galliford “shook as she told us about her agoraphobia and PTSD after years of working with bosses who made offensive comments, unwanted sexual advances and assaults,” CBC reporter Natalie Clancy said in her speech at Rideau Hall. She said that after her story aired, more than four dozen officers contacted the CBC and described a chilling culture of fear and bullying. The female officers said they were more afraid of their bosses in the detachment than the criminals on the street. They told CBC their experiences of “constant sexual harassment, cover-up, and minimal punishment for offenders.”¹⁰

Reaction came swiftly. The federal Public Safety minister promised an investigation and legislation to modernize the RCMP Act.¹¹ “Something I don’t think would have happened had we not forced the government to deal with an organization where women tell us they do not feel safe,” Clancy told fellow journalists. The amended RCMP Act received royal assent in June 2013. It strengthened the Review and Complaints Commission and modernized discipline, grievance and human resource management for RCMP officers.

Survivors launched a class-action lawsuit, supported by an independent investigation by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Michel Bastarache. His 2020 report, “Broken Dreams, Broken Lives,” found evidence of “entrenched issues of misogyny, racism, and homophobia” at every level of the RCMP and called for a “wholesale change” to build an inclusive and respectful workplace for all employees.¹² In the settlement, more than 2,000 survivors received a total of $125.4 million. In tandem with the Bastarache investigation into policing and sexual assault, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security investigated “the pervasive nature of systemic racism” in policing. Its 2021 report “concluded that a transformative national effort is required to ensure that all Indigenous, Black and other racialized people in Canada are not subject to the discrimination and injustice that is inherent in the system as it exists today.”¹³ While the report focused on federal policing, there was recognition of a supplemental report by the Conservative provincial government that made the point that provincial and municipal policing also faced similar issues regarding racist attitudes and actions, especially in Canada’s largest and most diverse city — Toronto.

In the fifteen years since the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star each won the 1985 Michener Award for their coverage of immigration and multiculturalism, Canada, and in particular, Toronto had been transformed by the continuous influx of newcomers from around the world. However, it was increasingly evident that Canadian institutions struggled to keep up and to reflect that diversity in their attitudes and practices. “The Star’s always been the unofficial police complaints bureau. So starting early in my career, I heard a lot of anecdotal stories about people of colour being treated differently — driving while black, those kinds of phenomena,” said reporter Jim Rankin.¹⁴ The Toronto Star’s groundbreaking investigation into race and crime started in 1999 when Rankin received a police report that used the colour yellow to describe a suspect of Asian descent. He discovered that Toronto police services used five colours to code racial features of suspects, and all this information was kept in a database.

The Star, through an access to information request, gained access to five years of data for police arrests and charges. The data provided evidence to support the anecdotal complaints of systemic racism in Toronto’s police service. “No matter how many variables were considered, race always emerged as a factor in the harsher treatment of blacks by police,” Rankin said.¹⁵ The first of hundreds of stories, that drew on the data, appeared on the front page of the Toronto Star on October 19, 2002, with the headline, “Singled out, Star analysis of police crime data shows justice is different for blacks and whites”:

But Toronto’s black community has long worried about being singled out by police — especially its young black men.

“I don’t think a day will come, in my lifetime, when I won’t be profiled or identified for who I am, and what I am,” said Jason Burke, 28.

Employed as a buyer in the fashion industry, Burke is suing Toronto police after being accused of dealing drugs, pushed to the ground, pepper sprayed and forced to rinse his burning eyes in toilet water while in custody. He was held for three days.

No drugs were found. All charges against him were dropped just before he was due for trial.

“I was violated that night for no good reason,” Burke said, adding that just being black puts young men at risk of undue attention from police.

Nowhere in Canada has debate over keeping, and analyzing, race-based crime data been as angst-ridden as in Toronto — a city boasting of its multicultural identity with a motto declaring diversity its strength. Latest census figures show that blacks make up 8.1 per cent of the city’s population.¹⁶

That year, the Star’s landmark investigation won the Michener Award and the ire of the Toronto police, its union and municipal politicians.

The win came with high costs — the paper invested money and time in the investigation by a team of top Star reporters. It also risked its financial sustainability to tell the story. Supporters of the Toronto Police Service cancelled their subscriptions and companies withdrew their advertising. The financial hit came at a time when the Star had just been through two newspaper wars. Classified advertisements and readers were moving online. The paper was also slapped with a $7.2 billion libel lawsuit from the police union. The Star successfully fought the lawsuit to the Supreme Court of Canada and won. A loss would have sunk the paper. Its publisher and editor, John Honderich, said public interest was too great to back down. “We, in effect, broke the back of those who said racial profiling does not exist in this country. I thought after that, no police force or no one anywhere could ever say there is no such thing as racial profiling because here you had the entire database and we showed exactly, with every practical information, what went on. We had to fight the police. We had to fight the city establishment, but we did, and we won, and it was an unbelievable victory.”¹⁷

The story didn’t end with Star’s 2002 Michener Award or the Supreme Court ruling. For the next twenty years, Rankin and Star’s investigative team has continued to hold Toronto police services accountable. They continued to question racism in the police services including carding — the random stopping and documenting of racialized people. They looked at other institutions. “It’s not just a policing story. These differences are seen in all systems — school suspensions and child apprehensions and the patterns are almost identical to what we found in policing. So it’s systemic racism.” While racialized people are still being stopped; they’re no longer documented. In June 2022, speaking on behalf of the Toronto police services, acting chief James Ramer said he was sorry and apologized for systemic disparities towards members of the Black and other racialized communities. It was vindication for Rankin. In the intervening twenty years, he has seen incremental changes in police practices and more open discussions in Toronto about racism.

Rankin admits winning awards, especially the Michener, “always helps with you with your bosses. It buys you time and resources.”¹⁸ Time and resources keep the microscope on important issues and hold those in authority accountable. In its limited way, the Michener Awards provided incentives and validation for a struggling industry to aim high.

As it approached its fiftieth anniversary, the Michener Awards Foundation found that like the industry, it, too, had to face brutal economic realities and faced both internal and external challenges to how it operated.