PRESS GANGS
Ex-journalists flock to government gigs
Next time you see a media scrum at the Alberta legislature on television, let your eyes travel to the edge of the screen and look for the alert, voice recorder-wielding person who looks too well-dressed to be a journalist.
They’ll be lingering on the fringes of the scrum, listening intently, sometimes glancing nervously as the politician, the star of the show, delivers the lines.
That’s a press secretary, just one of the many unsung workers trying to keep government in motion without careening off the tracks or grinding to a halt.
Like a good hockey referee, the less you notice them, the better they’re doing their job. But who are they? And what do they do?
Popular culture tells us they are either anxious, calamitous go-getters like Amy Brookheimer from HBO’s Veep, upright do-gooders like The West Wing’s C.J. Cregg or amoral schemers like a character from House of Cards. The truth? “It’s not as Machiavellian as people imagine,” says Richard Liebrecht, who worked as a communications officer for the Alberta New Democrats from 2010 to 2012, after working as a journalist for three years.
No current government press secretaries would speak to Postmedia for this story.
Liebrecht says the jobs require a similar set of skills and, since he was already a politics junkie, it made a lot of sense for him to make the jump.
“It’s about storytelling. It’s about explaining the who, the what, the why,” he says. “It’s a very similar way of thinking, so the transition wasn’t that hard because the job function is strangely similar.”
The strategic side of a press secretary’s job is about anticipating what stories are going to break that day, how they’re going to be received by the public and figuring out how to get your side some favourable coverage.
While in opposition, the job can be a lot more reactive. Liebrecht says he sometimes wouldn’t know what the issue of the day was going to be until mid-morning and press secretaries will often lurk in the corridors of the press offices to get an idea of what might be coming.
In government, the job is to set the agenda, rather than react to it. So when Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP went from a measly four seats to 54 in the 2015 election, they had a majority and a strong mandate but, most of all, they needed people.
Among the new hires were about 20 former journalists, plucked from an industry undergoing a profound disruption. Most of those former journalists now work as press secretaries and many of them went directly from reporting jobs to political jobs.
It’s almost sport these days to accuse the media of being biased in favour of a political party and most journalists laugh it off. But what does it say when so many reporters pack up their stuff and take a highly partisan job with the party most identified with the left?
Critics worried journalists were auditioning for jobs with the government while still working as reporters, which would be a breach of trust in a profession that prizes its objectivity. Most of the journalists hired by the NDP weren’t covering politics before they made the jump. The fact that the NDP victory was so unexpected also makes it unlikely that anyone was consciously auditioning. Up until the campaign started, anyone auditioning for a job would have been focusing their efforts on Jim Prentice’s Progressive Conservatives.
Cheryl Oates, a former Global journalist and now head of communications for the premier, who was with Notley in her opposition days, declined to comment, saying she didn’t like to distract from the government’s agenda.
John Archer, a former CBC journalist who was president of the press gallery in the Alberta legislature and now works in a communications role for the premier, also declined to comment for this story.
Former Progressive Conservative MLA and deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk says several reporters who went to government sought his advice before making the switch and he didn’t hold back about what he saw as the pitfalls.
“When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, do you see a journalist? If the answer is yes, are you willing to say goodbye to that? Because after you’ve embedded yourself in any government you can never be a journalist again,” Lukaszuk says he told them.
“You know, usually I get silence on the phone,” he says.
A journalist’s skill set would seem to translate nicely to the often-frantic life of a political aide. You work quickly to meet unreasonable deadlines, you balance several responsibilities at once and, most of all, you try your best to be accurate. Lukaszuk disagrees. “No reporter ever does well in government. And government officials would probably end up making poor reporters,” Lukaszuk says.
“The skill sets you have as a journalist are actually not the skill set any government needs. Your skills are to dig up the news and start a fire. The skills government needs is to bury the news and put out a fire,” he says.
So why would so many journalists put down their matches and pick up the press secretary’s leaky fire extinguisher?
For one, it’s a time of unprecedented upheaval in the news business.
The rush of journalists to government is happening at a time when the media landscape could be charitably described as “grim.”
Postmedia, the company that publishes the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun, recently announced it was looking to cut its wage bill by 20 per cent through voluntary buyouts. The Globe and Mail recently announced 40 voluntary buyouts due to revenue declines and the Toronto Star laid off about 50 people due to the lacklustre performance of its tablet edition. Local TV and radio stations also haven’t been immune to revenue declines caused by the Internet’s massive disruption of conventional advertising.
The ratio of public relations people to journalists is now four to one, according to census data. In 1991, the ratio was two to one. The lure of these new jobs is not just in the security they provide: PR jobs tend to pay about 40 per cent more than journalism jobs, according to data from the United States.
Chris Waddell, a professor for Carleton University’s journalism program, says he has some sympathy with journalists making the jump to government.
“If you’ve lost your job and have to feed your family, you have to look for whatever job you can get,” he says.
While he thinks the idea of a “cooling-off” period before moving from journalism to government would be smart, Waddell says it’s a tough thing to enforce and, “it’s hard to tell people you can’t go to another job.”
For anyone who makes the move, the perception of bias will always be there, says Waddell.
“The difficulty in all this for journalism, as a field, is that a lot of people already question the impartiality. Lots of people out there try to tell you that journalists and news organizations have an agenda. When journalists go to work for the politicians they previously covered, it makes it difficult to argue that journalists are truly independent,” says Waddell.
The path from journalism to politics is a well-worn one, though. NDP MLA Sandra Jansen was a broadcast journalist before getting into politics and Conservative MP Ron Liepert covered politics for the broadcast arm of The Canadian Press before joining Peter Lougheed’s team as a press secretary.
Liepert left the media when it still had a functioning business model and, in the wake of the Watergate scandal that brought down U.S. president Richard Nixon, the profession commanded new-found respect. Alberta’s legislature, which used to house only local journalists, started attracting a Canadawide audience due to Lougheed’s emergence as a national figure.
It was an exciting time to be in government, Liepert says.
No day was ever the same as the next. He would sit in on cabinet meetings, caucus meetings, deal with scheduled interviews and manage the impromptu scrums in the halls of the legislature building. He spent a lot of time holding a telephone to his ear because, in the days before email, that’s how it had to be done.
That personal touch is gone now, Liepert says. He laments that he rarely sees cabinet ministers defending something — they instead prefer to let press secretaries respond with a canned statement.
“Today, it seems the media just doesn’t trust elected officials, and maybe for good reason, because everything is done by email, it seems, by a spokesperson,” says Liepert.
Liepert doesn’t think journalists jumping ship has anything to do with that eroded trust and actually encourages the move, considering it worked so well for him.
For Liebrecht, the former NDP communications officer, it’s a caseby-case issue that requires being publicly accountable for work done on both sides of the fence. Any good professional has to stand up to that scrutiny, he says.
“I don’t think someone’s automatically a traitor to the public good, whichever direction they move.”
Today, it seems the media just doesn’t trust elected officials, and maybe for good reason, because everything is done by email, it seems, by a spokesperson.