Poor judgment, short memories in the Alberta press gallery

edia organizations and individuals should not be denied accreditation strictly on the basis of their point of view. Whoever decides on issues of accreditation must also take the evolving realities of new media into account.”

Those words are taken from the Boyd report. It was authored by retired journalist Heather Boyd, who over a four-decade career worked for the Canadian Press and the Edmonton Journal. Alberta’s government approached her in 2016 to resolve a niche, but important, issue: Who gets to cover the provincial legislature as “official” journalists, recognized by the Alberta Legislative Press Gallery.

Rachel Notley’s then NDP government had refused to recognize The Rebel, Ezra Levant’s obnoxious online news site, which has been home to a succession of cranks and bigots since its inception. Notley’s ban limited access to government events by Rebel correspondents. As offensive as the Rebel may be, Notley was still wrong to ban it. Members of the gallery at the time spoke out against the decision. The NDP government admitted its mistake. The Boyd report was intended to keep it out of such trouble.

It was a good report. It’s a shame the Alberta Legislative Press Gallery then failed to take its conclusions to heart. Until it does, Postmedia will withdraw its reporters from the gallery, effective immediately. We will continue to provide the same political coverage, with the same mandate to hold those in power to account. We will just have to do it from outside the Alberta gallery.

This step was made necessary by the gallery’s recent decision to hold a vote denying official accreditation to, yet again, The Rebel. (Unlike Ottawa’s press gallery, where such decisions are made by a board, Alberta’s group lets majority vote rule.) Let us be clear: We do not seek to defend The Rebel. Its own work makes the case against its dubious standards better than we could, and its frequent personal attacks on other journalists are not just disgraceful but dangerous. However, we agree with the words of Alberta’s press gallery association, circa 2016, as noted in Boyd’s report: “The Press Gallery supports the right of journalists to provide vigorous and diverse coverage of the Alberta Legislature.”

Those are the principles Postmedia stands for, although it appears the Alberta gallery no longer does.

We believe that “journalist” must be defined as broadly as possible. Journalism is not a regulated profession. There is no college of journalists, or a guild to which one must belong (certain news outlets are unionized, but not journalism as a whole). Duncan Kinney, an Alberta left-wing activist no less, was quoted in the Boyd report defining a journalist as “someone who goes out there, makes calls, and reports.” That may include what others might consider shoddy journalism, but it is, nevertheless, journalism.

The news industry is undergoing a rapid, painful transition. Legacy organizations — including our own — are smaller than they were, in line with a dramatically changed economic reality. Our primary revenue sources have been pummeled in the face of new technologies and publishing platforms. The environment, however, has created an opportunity for new players to emerge — to go out there, make calls and report. The journalism of the future may well include volunteer journalists, activist journalists, online journalists selling stories directly to the public, or large outlets that don’t yet exist. It is essential for our democracy, and healthy, to have this diversity of views, this competition among reporters and columnists. We could use more journalists, and more journalism outlets, not fewer.

This difficult process of reinventing our industry to meet the challenges and needs of 21st-century readers cannot be threatened by established legacy players strangling ambitious new outlets. Let The Rebel report. Let the gallery provide rules that govern conduct in the legislature — not barriers to entry. And let the dilettantes and bigots fail in full view of the public.

The road map on how to approach this is clear. The Boyd report laid it out only four years ago. Journalists are said to be tasked with writing the first draft of history. They should be careful not to forget their own.