Category Archives: Media

Rutherford shuts off his microphone

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Dave Rutherford

Dave Rutherford

Dave Rutherford, the king of Calgary talk radio, will quit his long-running show when his contract expires in July 2013. The 64-year-old broadcaster had been thinking about this for some time. His decision became final when the station, AM 770 CHQR, said it was looking for chatty on-air talent to provide “smart, stimulating and respectful conversation on a diverse range of topics.”

“I think the broadcast news industry, for lack of a better term, is dumbing down,” Rutherford told the Calgary Herald. “I don’t think there’s the desire to ask the next question, maybe to ask any questions.”

So what else is new? Rutherford knows better than anyone that, for the longest time, commercial morning radio in Calgary was about pandering to the lowest common denominator of public taste and intelligence. That was before he became the self-styled godfather of redneck broadcasting in the early 1990s.

Listeners didn’t want lumpy cereal for breakfast when Rutherford first hit the Calgary airwaves. They wanted instant junk food, pre-cooked and easy to swallow. Morning radio had to be banal. It couldn’t be otherwise. The alternative to banal was nobody’s listening.

In 1990, Rutherford was co-host of a top-rated breakfast program on QR77 that dispensed a lightweight combination of elevator music and vacuous commentary on stories ripped from the tabloid headlines. He characterized the format as “somewhat informational, somewhat humorous and warm, like a morning chat over coffee.” While sober CBC Radio gave its listeners tax tips and investment advice, Rutherford and his jolly sidekick, Jim Jeffries, talked about beauty pageants and pumpkin-growing contests. “Everyday information,” Rutherford called it. “Some of it entertainment, some of it trivia. You have to shake off some of the ivory-tower aspects of journalism when you do this kind of programming.”

Within two years, however, Rutherford had decided to trade triviality for substance. In February 1992, QR77 switched to an all-news format with a sharp focus on politics and current affairs. CFCN television news anchor Darrel Janz first accepted and then rejected a job hosting the QR morning show. Rutherford put away his beauty queen jokes and moved into the slot offered to Janz. Initially, he was paired with former CBC Radio announcer Sharon Edwards. But that combination didn’t work and Edwards was gone by July 1992. Rutherford was left to fly solo and The Rutherford Show was born.

At its height, the show was heard across Western Canada and simulcast on television. Rutherford became widely known for his rightwing views on topics such as welfare, justice reform and pay equity, and his ability to roast politicians and business leaders in the hot seat. His followers were proud to identify themselves as rednecks. When Rutherford asked them to define what they meant by redneck, one replied: “A politically incorrect Westerner stumbling around in the wilderness after being robbed by the people in the East.”

Now, it appears, the station that provided a pulpit for Rutherford’s right-wing rants over the past 21 years wants to return to something resembling the happy-talk format that worked successfully for it in the 1980s. No more depressing talk about carbon taxes, “radical environmentalists” and what the station calls “an undying commitment to keep listeners up to date on the latest crime stats.” Instead, opportunity knocks for a radio host in tune with the zeitgeist of the times; someone who can identify with those diverse segments of the population who voted for Naheed Nenshi.

If AM 770 wants to grow its audience in the future, it has to change direction and look beyond the rednecks who want tougher penalties for violent criminals, fewer immigrants allowed into Canada, and a radical reduction in welfare spending. It cannot do otherwise. The alternative to change is nobody’s listening.

Remembering Ralph Klein the reporter

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Ralph Klein circa 1975

I first met Ralph Klein in April 1974. He was a 31-year-old city hall reporter for CFCN TV in Calgary. I was a 30-year-old police reporter for the Calgary Herald.

As a newly-arrived staffer at the so-called “newspaper of record” for Southern Alberta, I was led to believe that television reporters were a lower form of journalistic life. They did little more than parrot on the six o’clock news the stories the Herald had broken earlier that day. “We have a saying about Ralph Klein,” one of my newsroom colleagues told me. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City and Ralph doesn’t have any of them.”

As it turned out, Ralph had lots of them. But they weren’t necessarily the kinds of stories Herald reporters were encouraged to pursue. We interviewed business leaders, sports heroes and politicians. Because of the unashamedly pro-establishment bias of our editorial bosses, we referred to ourselves, ironically, as the “fearless champions of the overdog.” Klein talked to bikers and hookers, and saw himself as a voice for the dispossessed. He offered the view from the street, focussing on those marginalized by society. In the process, he abandoned all semblance of journalistic objectivity.
He told me this after he’d been mayor for eight years. He said he eventually had to get out of television news because he reached a point where he wasn’t reporting fairly. “It bothered me when I realized I was writing one-sided stories instead of getting all the facts.”
Case in point was a year-long crusade he had waged, starting in 1978, against a grandiose city council plan to spend $234 million on a civic centre complex to house an ever-expanding city hall administration. Klein never tried to hide his feeling that this monument to civic bureaucracy would be a colossal waste of taxpayers’ dollars. “I really couldn’t present a balanced report because I thought everything that was happening was so wrong.”
Calgary voters who shared Klein’s concerns about the exorbitant cost of the civic centre rejected the proposed expenditure in a 1979 plebiscite. When the mayor of the day, Ross Alger, announced he would try to get the project approved when he ran for re-election the following year, Klein saw red. He decided to do something about it and run for mayor himself. “Nobody suggested I do this. Everyone thought I was absolutely crazy.”
But Klein didn’t think he was crazy. He felt Alger had lost touch with the voters, and that a television reporter who knew the inner workings of city hall could be a viable alternative. With a 27-year-old political science student named Rod Love orchestrating his campaign, Klein ran on a platform of keeping the lines of communication open at city hall. He soundly defeated the incumbent by more than 15,000 votes.
I never thought he was going to win. Neither did my Herald colleagues. We thought that if Alger lost, it would be to an opportunistic former alderman named Peter Petrasuk, not to a 37-year-old reporter named Ralph Klein. So in a spirit of journalistic solidarity we gave Ralph our sympathy vote. But in the end he hardly needed it. His support came from not from the suits who frequented the Petroleum Club and occupied the Stampede boxes but from the ordinary folks who went to the beer parlours and the curling bonspiels. In his first speech to the Chamber of Commerce Club after his victory, Klein quipped: “I’d like to thank all the people who voted for me in the recent civic election. I understand they’re all working in the kitchen.”
After having asked the tough questions as a reporter for 11 years, Klein was more than ready to mix it up with other reporters when he found himself on the opposite side of the microphones. When a CFCN newsman, Murray Cunningham, criticized the mayor’s office for refusing to act on a sexual harassment complaint from a Handi-Bus passenger, Klein – in the presence of other journalists, with cameras and tapes rolling – accused Cunningham of “torquing” the story, i.e. giving it a harder edge for the sake of urgency. Replied Cunningham, “Well, you should know about torquing. You did enough of it in your time.” Retorted Klein, “That’s how I can tell when a story is being torqued. I’ve been in the media long enough to know all the tricks.”
Afterwards Klein conceded that had he been in Cunningham’s shoes, he likely would have played the story the same way. “But maybe being mayor has taught me a little bit more about getting both sides of the story.”
There was nobody on stage to talk about Ralph’s journalistic achievements during his memorial this past Friday. All the eulogies were given by politicians, present and former, who talked about his political contributions and drinking escapades. That left a big part of his story untold. Ralph was a reporter before he was a politician. Though he often wore his heart on his sleeve, he did so because he cared. Even if he only told one side of the story, he could never be accused of having willfully distorted the truth for the sake of being sensational. He carried that reporter’s passion for truth telling through 26 years of often turbulent political life to the end of his days.

Remembering Elvis

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(Published in the Calgary Herald on Aug. 16, 1997)

Those who cared will still remember what they were doing when they heard the news, 20 years ago today. I was interviewing Calgary concert promoter Dave Horodezky at his office when he excused himself to take a call. “What a shame,” said Dave, after a moment’s silence. “What a black day for rock ‘n’ roll.”

What a black day indeed. For members of the first rock ‘n’ roll generation, Elvis Presley’s death at age 42 brought home to us the sobering reality of our own mortality. I was 33 then, and suddenly felt much older.

Other rockers — Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix — had died before Elvis. But we could rationalize their deaths as avoidable aberrations, caused by plane crashes or drug overdoses. Elvis’s death hit closer to home because he was the first of the original rockers to die from natural causes. Or so we thought at the time. It was only later we would discover that pills and southern-fried cholesterol were contributory factors.

I cared about Elvis because his music, wild, loud, uninhibited, was joyously different from the Mantovani music my parents listened to on Radio Eireann, the national broadcasting service in my native Ireland.

At age 13, it was important for me to have things private and unshareable — things that were exclusive teenage property. The sideburns and ducktail hairdo would come later. In the beginning, it was enough just to have the music, the raw sound, beamed to us from across the Atlantic via the only commercial pop music station, Radio Luxembourg, that could be picked up in Dublin in those unenlightened times. My friends and I listened to it surreptitiously after dark, when the station pointed its signal toward the British Isles.

Elvis didn’t invent white rock ‘n’ roll, of course, but he was unquestionably its first universal hero. Bill Haley, who scored the first huge rock ‘n’ roll hit with Rock Around the Clock, didn’t count because we knew he was just a failed country and western singer who got lucky with a new gimmick.

Elvis was the real thing, an American hillbilly with danger in his voice and rebellion in his soul, who took his surly look from the movie characters of Marlon Brando and James Dean, took his good-rocking music from the black gospel, and rhythm ‘n’ blues singers he heard on the radio as a kid, then synthesized these various borrowings into something original, something distinctively his own.

Competing for our young ears during the same period were other top U.S. rock ‘n’ rollers, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Little Richard. But good as they were, they could not compare with Elvis, who commanded from the first day we heard him. First with Heartbreak Hotel, and later with Don’t Be Cruel and Hound Dog, he ruled the airwaves like never before.

My friends and I would suffer through two hours of hit-parade Perry Como and Dean Martin on Radio Luxembourg every Sunday night just to hear three minutes of Elvis singing Don’t Be Cruel. By the end of that memorable year, 1956, Elvis had racked up half a dozen record hits, and earned the right to be forever called the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. No one would ever dethrone him. From that moment onward, Presley would be the once and future king.

The generation that followed, the teenagers who had their life’s soundtrack composed for them by the Beatles, would doubtless disagree. They would say Elvis was nothing more than a brooding singer with an average voice, swivelling hips and limited guitar-playing ability. Heck, he didn’t even write his own songs.

But then they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t understand why Calgary Herald editor Bob Parkins showed up for work on Aug. 17, 1977, wearing a black arm-band. They wouldn’t understand why, for those of us who were teenagers in 1956, even the most mediocre of the first Presley recordings could make the pop music that followed seem as nothing, to be blown away like chaff.

I don’t much understand it either. I don’t understand why Pavarotti appeals to me more than the technically superior Placido Domingo, and I can’t explain why Elvis ruled and Pat Boone didn’t. Boone also released several rock hits in 1956, including Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally. But he couldn’t hold a candle to Presley. Maybe it was because Boone sounded like someone my parents would have approved of.

I almost never listen to Elvis’s recordings nowadays, though I will always play his Blue Christmas in my house at Christmastime while resolutely refusing to listen to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Fats Waller and John Field have taken the place of the popular music I craved as a teenager. The Presley impersonators have ruined his songs for me by reducing them to parody.

But whenever someone suggests, as a 30-year-old friend named Tom did recently, that Elvis was not very good, I put Presley’s July 2, 1956 recording of Hound Dog on the turntable, and listen to it one more time. I hear what you say, Tom, but I have to disagree. Elvis was good. He was very good.

 

No more Sunday papers

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Postmedia Network has scrapped the Sunday editions of the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen, put the National Post’s Monday edition on hiatus for the second summer in a row, and announced plans to stop publishing print editions of the chain’s papers on national holidays. More newsroom jobs will be lost, local news coverage will continue to shrink, and the future of the business will continue to look bleak. Pat O’Callaghan must be turning in his grave.

It seems like only yesterday (it was actually in 1982) that O’Callaghan came to Calgary from Edmonton to become the Herald’s publisher. At the time, the upstart Calgary Sun had a Sunday edition, but not the Herald. ”This minor daily paper should not have the Sunday market all to itself,” said O’Callaghan. He announced that the Herald would thenceforth publish its own Sunday edition because “we live in a seven-day world.” Three years later, he added a Sunday magazine to the paper. That supplement appeared for the next six years, and won a few national and regional awards for writing and photography. (Full disclosure: I was one of the magazine’s writers.)

Although the Sunday magazine had its own dedicated staff – two full-time writers, one full-time photographer, two full-time copy editors, and an editor-in-chief – the same did not hold true for the Sunday paper itself. That was a missed opportunity, to my mind. Instead of stretching six days of coverage over seven, Herald management should have put a full-time team of reporters, editors and photographers in place to produce an independent Sunday paper.

Management should also have taken some of those additional Sunday advertising dollars and used them to recruit a rotating roster of guest columnists (Aritha van Herk, Sharon Pollock, Fred Stenson, Sid Marty, Sam Selvon, etc.) to give the Sunday paper its own voice and identity. The resulting publication might not have had the same cachet as the Sunday New York Times, or even the Saturday Globe with its great standalone book review section, now much missed. But at least it would have stood out from the Monday to Saturday editions as a paper with a distinctive style and tone.

By the time Herald management finally got around to remaking the Sunday paper in accordance with reader surveys, it was too little too late. The paper was heavy on cosmetic changes and light on content reimagining. There was little in it for readers who had grown used to living without a local Sunday paper.

What will the Herald lose when the Sunday edition is axed at the end of July? We have yet to hear what sections will move to Saturday and to other days of the week. But I think it’s fair to speculate that books coverage will not be one of them. Book reviews don’t attract advertising and now, more than ever, advertising support is the key to the Herald’s survival. Sad but true.

One section deserves to die. The paper should get rid of the Sunday spreads of photos from the local cocktail party scene that, to my mind, take up an unnecessary amount of valuable space. But Corporate Calgary has to be kept happy, I suppose, so these pretty pictures are undoubtedly here to stay. Atwood will become irrelevant but the Stampede Queen must reign forever.

O’Callaghan was handed a great gig when he became the Herald’s publisher. Not only did he have the freedom to launch a Sunday edition and magazine, but he also had the freedom to make the Herald reflect his philosophy that a newspaper should “never be bland, colourless or gutless.”

Today, there is plenty of bland, precious little colour, and hardly any gutsiness. That’s what happens when you’re owned by a bunch New York hedge funds that care only about profit.

I see no light at the end of this tunnel. The demise of the Sunday editions is just the beginning of the end for Postmedia as a publisher of printed newspapers. I can only echo the wise words of a first-year journalism student who said to me recently, “I feel like we’re being trained to work for a business that will no longer exist by the time we graduate.”

 

 

Calgary heritage endangered

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As soon as I read in the paper yesterday morning that the old Calgary Herald building was slated for demolition to make way for a 50-storey office tower, I wanted to have my picture taken in front of the 7th Avenue landmark. A CBC Radio reporter, Mary-Catherine McIntosh, kindly obliged after first interviewing me for a story about the seven years, 1974-81, that I spent working in the building as a reporter and columnist.

I told Mary-Catherine I was saddened to hear about the pending demise of this former workplace of mine because it’s another part of Calgary’s history that’s being sacrificed at the altar of commercial progress. Granted it’s not the most architecturally striking building in the world – a functionalist 1967 makeover took away much of the aesthetic character of the original 1912 structure – but it’s still an important link with our city’s past.

A lot of good journalism was done in that building. A columnist for the competing  Albertan used to dub our paper “The Old Grey Lady of 7th Avenue,” which he intended as an insult but which we accepted as a compliment because of the obvious comparison with The New York Times. Like the Times, we saw ourselves as the trusted newspaper of record for our region, not as a purveyor of cheap thrills or sensationalism.

We earned that trust by dint of hard work and independent reporting. We didn’t pander to politicians and we didn’t pander to advertisers. Of course I can be accused of bias but I always felt we were standing on the shoulders of distinguished predecessors who  believed their fight to preserve the freedom of the press was a fight for democracy itself.

That's me on the left circa 1980, with a lot more hair than I have now!

During my first week on the job there I was surprised and pleased to discover that back in 1938 the Herald, along with four other Alberta dailies led by Edmonton Journal publisher John Imrie, had been honoured with a special Pulitzer Prize – the first one given outside the United States – for its spirited crusade against the Social Credit government’s attempt to gag the press. I was proud to be part of a news organization that would take a government to the Supreme Court of Canada to establish its right to tell the truth.

The 7th Ave building was the Herald’s headquarters from 1932 to 1981. Located across the street from the Bay, it was connected to the downtown’s beating heart in a way that’s never possible when you live in the suburbs. City hall, the police station, the courts, the library, the school board and the corporate head offices were all within easy walking distance. We did most of our interviews in person, not over the phone. If a freight train had derailed near the Palliser Hotel, the Herald’s reporters and photographers would have gotten to the scene before the fire trucks.

I was disappointed when the Herald moved in 1981 to a new building northeast of downtown near the intersection of Deerfoot and Memorial. Our bosses told us there was a practical reason for this. We had purchased new printing presses that the paper’s 7th Avenue mechanical building was too small to accommodate. But did we have to move the paper’s editorial offices out there as well? I never thought so, but then I was just a reporter. I didn’t have any say in the executive decisions made by senior management.

We did maintain a Herald presence in the 7th Avenue building for a short time after moving out to the Deerfoot and Memorial location. If you wanted to buy a classified ad, you could still do so at the downtown office. But maintaining two separate offices proved impractical during the ensuing economic downturn, and the downtown office was quietly closed in 1982. Removed from the front window were the big clocks announcing the time in Tokyo, Berlin and Los Angeles, and the only remaining visible reminders of the building’s journalistic history were two small “Herald building” signs outside on the southeast corner.

The City of Calgary considers the Herald building to be of significant historical value and has included it in its heritage inventory. It seems baffling to me, therefore, that a developer can simply send out eviction notices to 60 existing tenants and announce this pending demolition without any word of protest from city council or the city’s heritage planning department. This is supposed to be Calgary’s big year for commemorating its cultural heritage, with centennial celebrations planned by the Calgary Public Library, the Stampede, the Grand Theatre (just across the road from the old Herald) and the Pumphouse. Let’s not spoil it by destroying one 100-year-old landmark while remembering the others.