The News: Inside the Canadian Media

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

Content, which began in October 1970, is a professional magazine devoted to excellence in journalism; it is written by and for journalists, and up through 1980 it was edited by Zwicker and MacDonald. The magazine as I remember it was full of material about honesty, ethics, and solid investigative work (with attention being paid to sources and verification), and it also offered constructive criticism about the owners and regulators of the “news” in Canada. This anthology reprints some of the best articles from ten years of Content, and reflects the balance and the themes that I remember: there are sections here covering ethics, history, the law, freelance work, and regulation of the business. All the reprinted articles have been dated as to when first published, and many have a “postscript” added on for a brief updating since its original publication.

New material includes Barrie Zwicker on the Kent Commission, Peter Desbarats on credibility, Richard Lunn on journalism education in Canada, a selected (and good) bibliography, and a “News Consumer’s Guide” which explains how to access the media and their regulating agencies. But I do have two rather large complaints. One, the scope of the material is definitely slanted to the world of print, and to newspapers in particular. More of an effort could have been made to comment on “broadcast electronic journalism.” And two (understandable in these days of enormous printing costs), the book is printed on an exceptionally low grade of what is already termed “newsprint.” Still, this book should be required reading for all media types.