Attempt to interfere with newsroom disturbing
The lengths to which regional officials and politicians will go to influence news coverage from backrooms came further into the spotlight last week.
Standard reporter Grant LaFleche’s story on attempts made in 2015 to influence the then-owners of Niagara’s daily newspapers to oust newsroom management is a disturbing example of the behind-the-scenes plotting we have, unfortunately, come to expect among much of the leadership at Niagara Region.
The episode also displays the lack of understanding among those same local leaders of the role of news media in a functional democracy.
On Feb. 10, 2015 a group of local politicians, along with then NPCA CAO Carmen D’Angelo, met with Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey. The meeting was organized by MP Rick Dykstra’s office.
Eleven local politicians attended along with D’Angelo, Dykstra and his regional liaison, David Schulz.
Schulz wrote a memo summarizing the meeting titled “Briefing for Paul Godfrey by Niagara Leaders on Postmedia Direction in Niagara.”
The memo was signed by a select group of local politicians, outlining the group’s concerns about the local newspapers and calling for changes.
The document makes several unsupported allegations of unethical reporting by The Standard and included a short list of “potential improvements” to Niagara’s daily newspapers. When asked in an email by Schulz to comment on the document before it was sent to Godfrey, D’Angelo suggested the introduction of a new management team.
“Introduce a new professional management team that is locally receptive to the concerns of the community,” wrote D’Angelo.
D’Angelo became the Region CAO in October 2016 in a hiring process now under third-party investigation by Toronto law firm ADR Chambers. The investigation was launched following a Standard expose that found a memo containing confidential information about regional CAO candidates was leaked to D’Angelo during the hiring process.
“We want the newspaper to be a partner in the community and focus on reporting the stories that are taking place and not manufacturing the news,” the document also said.
“It sounds to me like Mr. D’Angelo has attempted to exert some kind of influence that he doesn’t have over the news media,” said Peter Conradi, the editor of communities for Brunswick News in New Brunswick, who was the editor-in-chief of The Standard and the other Niagara dailies in 2015.
“All I can say about that is that it never came to my attention. Our bosses at Postmedia never instructed us to write anything or not to write anything. We covered the Region the way we saw fit like we did for everything else.”
Conradi’s statement remains true today under new ownership from Metroland and it’s good news for readers to know their newspapers won’t buckle under to this kind of manipulation. But it’s also disturbing to learn the lengths to which these local leaders will go to try and influence coverage, to intimidate newsrooms.
The document’s statement that these local leaders want the newspaper to “be a partner” displays a critical misunderstanding of what function newspapers, and the news media, is meant to perform.
We are not partners with politicians — we are there to report fairly and accurately on what they and their administrations are doing. We are not their cheerleaders. This can be an adversarial process as we expect they will often not like what we are reporting.
But that’s the role of the journalist. And it’s important to democracy because without an informed electorate, governments cannot be held to account for their actions and our system of governance cannot succeed.