Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

Yesterday’s News: Why Canada’s Newspapers Are Failing Us

by John Miller

John Miller is fed up and he’s not going to take it any more. The professor of newspaper journalism at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University has written an exceptionally researched, lively lament of the current daily newspaper industry. In a period of rapid change, when we need them most, our newspapers have become “gaudy and greedy, lazy, elitist and remote, untrusted, out of touch with our lives and filled with information that we somehow value less and less.” As a result, Canadians are falling out of love with newspapers.

Not suprisingly, as Miller has been a reporter, a deputy managing editor (of the Toronto Star), and head of Ryerson’s newspaper journalism program, his criticisms go to the heart of the newsroom: Newspapers are arrogant, unreceptive to self-criticism, and they’ve lost the ability to connect with the community. Bowing to a corporate agenda, they are engaged in “lipstick journalism” promoting sizzling but vapid redesign as a replacement for quality journalism. Victims of downsizing and the increasing concentration of ownership (yes, there’s a whole chapter on Conrad Black), newspapers don’t have a mission or a vision for their future.

Disillusionment notwithstanding, the book has a certain charm, stemming from Miller’s fondness of and devotion to the business. Falling in love with the “musty smell of ink on newsprint” early in life, he confesses that the book is a “quest for the survival of his craft.”

Miller prescribes basic journalistic accountability – that journalists know when to respect privacy, that they rediscover their watchdog role and decrease their coverage of the upper echelons of society, that they write less for their advertisers and cater to our higher instincts, rather than offering salacious gossip.

Journalism needs desperately to rebuild its professional institutions, to establish codes of professional practice and mid-career training. He recommends a people’s commission on the free press with nation-wide hearings and possibly a Swedish-style readers’ representative to report abuses of the free presses.

Miller is gravely concerned. While above all, we need to rebuild public trust, offer insight, and establish credibility, we’re nowhere near this, he asserts. “Newspapers need to get there soon, or they may be finished.”

 

Reviewer: Jenefer Curtis

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 272 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55266-000-1

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 1999-1

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs