MORE JOURNALISTS SPINNING NEWS THESE DAYS THAN REPORTING IT
Media companies are eliminating jobs while government agencies are hiring
Forgive me if today’s column is a bit too much inside baseball.
It’s about press secretaries and how Alberta’s NDP government has gone on something of a hiring spree for spin doctors since winning the 2015 election.
My colleague Stuart Thomson wrote an interesting feature on the topic last Saturday, pointing out that a whack of the new press secretaries hired by the government are former journalists. There are almost a dozen.
You might not care. But you should.
Journalists are jumping to the government not because they suddenly have an urge to spin the news rather than report it, but because they need a job.
The number of journalists covering news has dropped alarmingly the past few years, not just at the Alberta legislature, but everywhere.
Because of declining revenue, news organizations are laying off workers or enticing them to retire early. That means fewer reporters covering stories, fewer cameras at news conferences, fewer journalists investigating issues.
And then there’s the whole optics thing.
I worry that people who think the Alberta media are too soft on the government will think the news media is little more than a farm team for the government.
But you know what? I’ve thought that for a long time. For at least a decade, as a matter of fact, long before the NDP formed government.
It was 10 years ago this month, almost to the day, that the Progressive Conservative government of then-premier Ed Stelmach poached two of Alberta’s highest-profile journalists from the press gallery.
One day Paul Stanway was writing political columns for the Edmonton Sun and Tom Olsen was writing political columns for the Calgary Herald.
Then, poof, they disappeared from their offices like assistants in a magic act and reappeared in the premier’s office as director of communications and director of media relations, respectively.
As I said at the time, they went from watchdog to lapdog in a single bound.
It wasn’t as if they were the first journalists to be caught, stuffed and mounted by the government.
Over the years, from Peter Lougheed onward, there has been a steady trickle of journalists flowing uphill from the press gallery to the government.
But that trickle has turned into something of a deluge the past two years.
That’s because as the news media was forced to toss jobs overboard, the government was casting about for press secretaries.
You should keep in mind that press secretaries are not impartial civil servants who get to keep their jobs as governments come and go.
Press secretaries are political staff who come and go with the ebb and flow of the electoral tide.
And because the NDP had never been in power in Alberta, it was desperate to fill positions left open when the PC government lost.
That meant Premier Rachel Notley’s press secretary, Cheryl Oates (a former journalist), had to build a communications branch from scratch.
She says journalists were a natural fit.
“The reason journalists make such good press secretaries is that they know what it’s like to wait for a call back from government while they’re on deadline. They know how to get information out quickly.”
Which is true for some of the scribblers-turned-spinners, but not for all of them, as those of us still in the media trenches working to deadline can attest.
The troubling issue here isn’t that some journalists have taken jobs with the government so they can continue to pay their mortgage.
It’s that the number of journalists is shrinking.
In the past, when a reporter jumped to the government, that journalism job was filled by somebody else.
Nowadays, those jobs are being cut as the media struggles to find a new business model. People are reading and watching professional journalism, but they’re doing it online for free.
The size of government is not shrinking, but the number of journalists keeping an eye on government is getting smaller.
That’s a problem not only for the state of the news media, but for the health of democracy.