The Newsmakers: Behind the Cameras with Canada's Top TV Journalists

Dean Tudor is a professor of Journalism at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute.

There are three levels to stories about journalists and journalism.
First there is a textbook level, a sort of show-and-tell on how to get a
story and how to get it right the first time. This is augmented by the
second level, a more personalized storytelling: how “I” (a
journalist) got a particular story and how “I” screwed it up (or
even got it right the first time). The third level is devoted to what
“I” really think about a story or a person, which will never see
print because of defamation laws. These are the stories one hears
wherever journalists gather. Unfortunately, Frum’s book stays at the
second level. It concerns only television journalists who have the
effrontery to consider themselves “newsmakers”: the media stars made
by an adoring public that lusts after gossip. But there is no good
gossip here; merely self-effacement. There is no real bloodletting, no
real passion for the job, no concern. Just stories about how tough it is
to cover a war, how to meet the famous and the notorious, how to survive
natural disasters. The reader won’t find out what these journalists
think of each other, their employers, their sources, their
cover-ups—all the juicy stuff. What is here are what the National
Library describes in its subject descriptor as “anecdotes”, arranged
by topic (for example, “What is news?”; “Getting the Story”;
“Wars”) and without an index. Forty-nine television personalities
contributed, including Mike Duffy, Tom Alderman, Pamela Wallin, Brian
Stewart, Ann Medina, Wendy Mesley, and Bill Cameron. But there is no
sign of Peter Trueman, Harvey Kirck, or other local reporters from
outside the networks. And there is nothing really tough here. It would
have made a nice magazine article.