What has a newspaper chain like Canwest got to do with an environmental website and its quest to save our environment?

A very great deal.

Undoubtedly newspapers have lost much of their onetime influence. Certainly when I was growing up, although our parents would admonish, “don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers”, the three papers in Vancouver, the News-Herald in the morning and the Sun and Province in the afternoon were very powerful influences on public opinion. For solid factual news coverage one listened to the CBC but the issues of the day in British Columbia were fashioned and debated in the print press.

Television, in my case in the early 50s, began to take over the coverage of public affairs. Starting with the brilliant Edward R. Murrow and continuing perhaps until the development of Fox, TV gave the hard edge to stories. Shows like 60 Minutes exposed what needed to be exposed.

Now the Internet so threatens TV and the newspapers that advertising revenue has sunk calamitously and even the mighty, like the New York Times, which exposed the disinformation by which the US government kept the war in Vietnam going, and the Washington Post, which exposed Watergate and drove Richard Nixon from power, are in serious financial difficulties.

Vancouver and, by extension British Columbia, has always marched to its own drummer. Until the last decade or so, opinion was driven by hard-hitting columnists and political talk show hosts. Names like Jack Webster, Marjorie Nichols, Pat Burns, Gary Bannerman and dare I add Rafe Mair, in radio and Allan Fotheringham, Jack Wasserman, Denny Boyd, Vaughn Palmer, Les Leyne, Jim Hume, and his two talented sons Mark and Stephen in print, and others consistently held all governments, municipal, provincial, and federal, accountable to the public. As they say, held their feet to the fire. There was a strong feeling of a journalistic obligation to question whatever the government alleged to be true.

Television played an important role as well, especially BCTV, and there are several names that come to mind, but theirs was not so much led by an individual as by the news department – led by the likes of Cameron Bell and the late Keith Bradbury. As a cabinet minister in the Bill Bennett government in the mid seventies I well remember the bashing we took, night after night, from BCTV over scandals real or imagined.

A clear distinction must be made here between columnists who write interesting analyses of the goings on of the times and those who, like a dog with a bone, pursue governments they see as practicing bad unto evil policies and being economical with the truth. Those who used to do the latter have been forced to do the former in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

That tradition of “show me” journalism and the will to see government bullshit exposed have all but left us.

Talk radio is a bad joke and television is little better. The guns of the print journalists have been retired or spiked.

The purchase of Canwest in separate lumps, Global-BCTV to Shaw Cable and the newspapers to a conglomerate of investment bankers and former employees led by Paul Godfrey holds out some promise for change.

Mr. Godfrey, with a minimum of subtlety, has criticized what’s happened in the past and promised changes for the future and here’s where the environment comes in – for unless the Canwest papers are going back to holding governments’ feet to the fire, what meaningful changes can Mr. Godfrey be talking about.

The environmental issues which have emerged as important in the last decade in BC are the fish farms and private power and both issues have been largely ignored by the media. In days of yore, Fotheringham and Nichols in the papers, Jack Webster and Gary Bannerman on radio, and Cameron Bell and Keith Bradbury at BCTV would have been all over the government on both of these issues. Moreover – and here’s the critical point – the Campbell government would never have got away with rank and demonstrable deceit on these two issues had Canwest, TV and print, and talk radio not badly let the public down – badly.

Hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of wild salmon would have been saved. Our rivers and the ecologies they support would be free of private dams on our rivers, roads and transmission lines scarring the countryside forever more. BC Hydro would be free of billions of dollars debt incurred paying for power they don’t need to the profit of the shareholders of General Electric.

This is the legacy of Canwest to the people of British Columbia. Mr. Godfrey can’t undo this but he can direct his papers to a return to the sort of journalism that prevented this sort of governmental abuse in the past.

We have reason, I think, for cautious – very cautious – optimism.