Technology has erected barriers between journalists and their sources for a hundred years. Reporters once hung around police stations, legislatures, courts and public events to collect the news face-to-face from real people. The arrival of the telephone early in the last century, and email in the 1990s, eliminated the face and then the voice, both replaced with bloodless text. Today, newsmakers such as Donald Trump use social-media accounts to dodge any contact at all with journalists, issuing digital proclamations that get quoted in stories. The change is in some ways a reversion to the pre-industrial era, when powerful men posted edicts in the public square.
My journalism career began in the 1980s, at a wire service, where the telephone was king. Our reporters still staffed courts, legislatures and other venues filled with human beings. For most stories, though, nothing beat a telephone call. The gain in speed and efficiency was considered a fair tradeoff for the loss of face-to-face connection, still the gold standard for flushing out information.
In Ottawa in those days, newsmakers and their spokespersons answered their telephones. That began to shift in 1984, when the new government of Brian Mulroney curtailed direct, unfettered contact between public servants and reporters. As an investigative reporter in the 2010s, almost every contact I had with federal officials was mediated by email. Sometimes I would miraculously get someone on the telephone or cellphone, only to be told to put my request in an email. Eventually, I gave up calling.
Email contact typically set off a tug-of-war lasting days or weeks. I pressed for a speedy response, they asked for more time. Finally, an email response would pop up. Almost always, it read like a dry news release. The text, meticulously sanitized by a slew of insiders and the Prime Minister’s Office, was crafted to reveal little and to boast a lot. Too often it ignored my questions, or deftly obfuscated, triggering a second tug-of-war. The response frequently began with a wooden ‘mission statement,’ as if there was a chance in hell I was going to foist that on readers. Many times, though, I gave up waiting for a response. I simply let the reader know about the crickets. And in weak moments, I might even quote from the minister’s Twitter feed.
Each wave of technology offers new ways to connect people, and journalism has been seduced every time. But what a loss for public discourse, leaving us with a wide gulf between those with power and those holding them account.
Jan. 16, 2022
