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The best Canadian
television news talent isn’t here in Canada. It’s in London. And Cyprus. And
Bosnia. And New York and Hong
Kong and Moscow, working for
American TV networks. Every Canadian knows the US network stars who learned
their craft north of the 49th parallel: Morley Safer, Robert MacNeil, Peter
Jennings. Throughout TV’s almost 60 years on the North American continent,
broadcasters from Canada have regularly migrated south to bigger salaries
and organizations.
In the 1980s,
Peter Mansbridge was celebrated for not doing that. He resisted the
blandishments of CBS, choosing instead to keep working for CBC. But
Mansbridge’s decision to stay right here in Canada was an anomaly; usually
those journalists offered anything that even smells like a spot with an
American news outfit pursue it right away. Indeed, the recent exodus of
journalists from Canada makes Mansbridge’s decision look even stranger.
In Canada, CBC is
still our main television news source. Though CTV works hard to keep up, it
doesn’t have as much money, as many people or as extensive a web of
correspondents, producers and personnel. That is changing, of course; CBC is
slicing budgets and cutting staff, and TV news has always been one of the
biggest single chunks of its budget. Each time an employee announces an
offer for more money from someplace else — an offer the corporation knows it
can’t possibly match — what can a manager do but shake the person’s hand,
wish them good luck and then heave a grateful sigh once they’re out of the
building: Phew, it’s one less buyout; and it’s one less troublesome
reassignment or layoff.
The exodus seems
to be speeding up. As CBC shrinks, the US market is burgeoning. CNN keeps
growing, extending its brand with initiatives such as its financial news
channel, CNNfn, and its new sports news operation affiliated with Sports
Illustrated (CNNSI). NBC and Microsoft are staking turf on the channel
changer and the World Wide Web with a joint 24-hour news service, MSNBC (up
and running since mid-July). Rupert Murdoch’s 24-hour Fox news channel
promises a rightward tilt to balance what Murdoch sees as a leftist bias
elsewhere. ABC was gearing up for yet more round-the-clock news, but shelved
its channel when its new owners at Disney decided the service would cost too
much money. (But shelved doesn’t mean scrapped; ABC says that the plan
remains viable, just not right now.)
All of this helps
to explain an increasingly common experience for Canadian viewers: seeing a
familiar and trusted correspondent or anchor suddenly disappear from the map
— no explanation, no fanfare, just gone — only to resurface months, weeks or
even days later on an American news broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN.
We polled seven
recent TV emigrants and found that their reasons for leaving Canada were
different; their conflicted feelings about their former Canadian employers
often similar, and their observations about the main differences between the
US and Canada to be pointed, insightful and thought-provoking.
HILARY BROWN.
When Hilary Brown came to anchor CBC Toronto’s supper-hour newscast in
1984, she’d already proved her reporting credentials with 11 years of
assignments for ABC News on every continent except Australia. For many with
such a track record, an anchor desk might seem a more comfortable place than
a free-fire zone to run out the career clock, but talking to Brown now at
her base in Cyprus (she also works from London), it’s clear she prefers her
current slot with ABC, where she’s been since late 1992.
She describes her
itinerary for 1995: “New York
and Switzerland
in January. I was in Burma doing a documentary for Nightline in February and
March. I was in Vietnam in April for the 20th anniversary of the fall of
Saigon, Bosnia in May, June and again in July, Turkey in August, back in
Bosnia in September, Greenland in October doing a crazy feature on the
world’s first Santa Claus summit, and Mali doing a feature on stolen art in
sub-Saharan Africa. Then, in
December, I was in the Middle
East, doing the hand-over to Palestinian self-rule. What a year, huh? That’s
the kind of mobility you have.
“Canadians are
very good broadcast journalists; they’re among the best in the world,” she
adds. “The Americans recognize that and they go for it. They don’t mind if
you’re Canadian, where the reverse is rarely true. I would encourage anybody
I thought was good to join a US network. They’ll have a longer career and
more opportunity. It’s just a fact of life.”
Brown misses
Toronto terribly, but doubts she’ll return — unless she could cut a deal
with ABC that would allow her six months on and six months off. But the
relentlessness of the news makes that unlikely. “I don’t think I’d be able
to pull that off,” she says. “The setup I have is pretty good. I’m pretty
good.”
GILLIAN
FINDLAY. After three years at CBC’s London bureau following
Toronto-based stints at The journal and The National, Gillian Findlay moved
to Moscow and ABC News. She’s been covering the faltering first steps of Russia’s
fledgling democracy, the war in Chechnya, Russian elections and President
Boris Yeltsin’s health.
Her move to ABC
followed several years of overtures from the network, which first noticed
her while she was reporting for CBC from South Africa on Nelson Mandela’s
release from prison. “They first approached me when I was still working in
Toronto for The National, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in going
to Berlin
for them. I decided against it.” CBC offered a slot on its investigative
weekly show the fifth estate as an inducement to remain. That lasted for six
months before Findlay’s move to
London. “I still believe that was the right decision,” she says. “There was
a whole lot I learned at CBC; ABC would call me occasionally. I didn’t ever
close the door on them. I just said: ‘Very nice, but not right now.”‘
She finally
relented in 1994, after a lot of soul-searching: “You spend an extraordinary
amount of time thinking, ‘Is this being unpatriotic?’ It takes most
Canadians a while to get used to the idea. They were interested in finding
women to go overseas, and a number of Canadian correspondents were
approached on that basis. I had been warned that this was going to be
difficult, that it would take time to get used to the system. Frankly, I
didn’t find it that much different — maybe that’s just me and the story I
was on.”
Findlay had also
been warned there’d be less appetite for international coverage at an
American network. She didn’t find that true either, noting it’s also
becoming tougher to get foreign stories on Canadian newscasts. Findlay
speaks with admiration of her CBC colleagues in Moscow, who produce more
coverage with one-third the resources that ABC has. “When I phone up and
say, ‘I’m the ABC correspondent,’ that opens doors. The process is made
easier by belonging to a bigger, wealthier company.”
Asked about the
possibility of her returning to Canada someday, Findlay says, “I’m not very
good at living life in the long term. I know I want to live in Canada at
some point. I would like to think I would be employed by somebody there. I
also have fond memories of CBC and like most people who’ve worked there, I
have a real commitment to it. But I’m taking this one year at a time. And
whether that CBC will ever exist again, I don’t know. I’m thoroughly
enjoying what I’m doing and who I’m working for, and 1 quite honestly don’t
have any huge regrets about making the decision — no regrets.”
KEVIN NEWMAN.
Kevin Newman, now co-anchor of Good Morning America Sunday and an ABC News
correspondent, used to be the male counterpart of Thalia Assuras on the
overnight shift at World News Now. Before going to ABC, Newman was happily
anchoring CBC’s Midday
with Tina Srebotnjak in Toronto. But that was before CBC began wooing
Vancouver-based CBC reporter Ian Hanomansing to take over Newman’s position
— even though Hanomansing refused to leave the West Coast. Newman said he’d
rather leave than fill a chair he was going to be asked to vacate. CBC then
promised Newman they would find him something at The National. Two months
later, there was still no offer on the table.
Then, one morning,
Newman’s voice mail at work was beeping: “This is ABC News in New York. I
have a tape in front of me — how did I get this tape? Give me a call.”
Newman still doesn’t know how they got that tape. Despite his uncertain
future with CBC, he hadn’t been looking elsewhere. “I am one of those gushy
Canadians. I could step off a plane anywhere in the country and know my way
around; that familiarity was very comfortable.”
When Newman told
CBC he’d had an offer from the US, management presented him with several
options. Newman decided to go with the ABC challenge.
Now, Newman is
working to become as familiar with that country as he is with Canada. “The
politics and the history of the place are different,” he says. “Your
journalistic antennae are misaligned. And I console myself with the thought
that being Canadian isn’t just living in Canada. It’s exporting Canadian
things to other societies. There are neat moments when I feel I’m bringing
Canadian eyes to a story that I’m broadcasting to Americans.”
THALIA ASSURAS.
Thalia Assuras caught ABC’s attention in early 1993, when, as an anchor for
CTV’s Canada AM, she reported on the resignation of Brian Mulroney. She was
the show’s main news reader and co-host of its weekend edition following
stints at Global, Citytv and CBC.
The ABC call was a
surprise. Unlike many colleagues, Assuras had never considered looking for
work in the US. “They’re quite astounding,” she says of the ABC talent
scouts. “They have tentacles everywhere. They happened to be watching,
called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to talk to you.’”
In March, Assuras
made another move, this time to CBS’s new cable network, Eye on People,
after three years anchoring ABC’s overnight newscast, the smart, irreverent
and entertainingly quirky World News Now. She is developing a daily
prime-time show for the cable channel that she’ll anchor while handling her
regular reporting chores: long-form interviews plus field work — much like
what she did at ABC, but with more editorial say.
“A journalist is a
journalist is a journalist,” says Assuras, commenting on her varied
responsibilities. “Your essential task is to gather information and
communicate it. But there are major differences between Canadian and
American networks, the main one being money.” Indeed, when it comes to
things like facilities, equipment, satellite time and travel, there is no
regard to cost.
“It’s hugely
competitive here, which brings out the best and the worst in people. The
focus of the stories is very much American. This is a world power; it sees
the world through its own eyes. So much that happens in the world is related
to the US, they can’t help it. You can go through a whole newscast here
without one foreign story.” Would she return north? “You never close the
door. I never expected to be here, and I don’t know where I’ll end up.”
MARINA KOLBE.
Marina Kolbe (who is originally from Montreal, and fluent in English, French
and Italian) can be seen on CNN’s main channel on an hourly basis, reporting
on the financial situation from Wall Street. She started the job in January
1996, after five years with CBC and Newsworld, where she also did hourly
business news updates in addition to working as a correspondent and anchor.
“With all of the
problems in Canadian television, you have to think about the future,” Kolbe
says of her move to CNN in New
York. “I was working in Italy as a freelance reporter, and I
had met people from CNN. Then, when they started the financial channel [CNNfn
was launched the same month Kolbe started], they called me up.”
Along with its
uncertain future, Kolbe says she was glad to leave other aspects of CBC’s
corporate culture behind: “There’s a young culture here, and not all the
union pressures. You can get things done. Here at CNN, unions don’t get in
the way. I have no problem doing everything. And everyone does.” What some
might see as pressure, Kolbe views as accountability. “Here, you’ve got to
get your job done or you’re out.”
Kolbe’s job adds
up to a total of 20 hourly “hits” for CNN, CNNfn and CNN International, seen
in more than 200 countries and territories around the planet. Between all of
her on-camera appearances, Kolbe and her producer are responsible for
tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average and gathering information and
intelligence about its performance from investment wizards. “We’re both
flying, working really hard to keep up with everything. You’re talking with
people who move megabucks and they really know what’s happening.”
When she’s not
working the phones or reporting on-camera, Kolbe occasionally trades e-mail
with other Canadians who also work at CNN (Patricia Chew, Jonathan Mann and
Brian Yasui, to name just a few), some expressing their utter relief at
having escaped CBC when they did; “there but for the grace of God and/or Ted
Turner.”
SHEILA
MACVICAR. Sheila MacVicar is starting her sixth year as a London-based
foreign correspondent with ABC News. She was hired just about the time the
Gulf War was heating up, in 1990. Like Hilary Brown, MacVicar’s itinerary is
similarly frenetic and far-flung, including — in just the last year — Bosnia,
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Moscow and back to Moscow again. “And
in 1996 we were in a US presidential year, so this was a slow cycle for
foreign news,” she says.
Two networks there
approached MacVicar in 1986, when she was a foreign correspondent for CBC.
She turned them down. But as the corporation’s future grew bleaker and
MacVicar’s self-confidence grew, she rethought her earlier decision. “No one
works at CBC for the money, let’s face it. You’re committed to an
institution and its values. For me, the decision to leave was not a matter
of the economic factor. It had more to do with the opportunities and what I
saw happening at CBC.”
MacVicar has
watched the BBC go through difficulties similar to those facing CBC, in the
process remaking itself into a much stronger, smarter broadcaster. She’d
like to see CBC do likewise, but acknowledges that six time zones and two
official languages make that much tougher to do in Canada. “But CBC is a
master at doing smart coverage — getting the best use out of their people and
their limited resources.”
The biggest
professional challenge in making the switch was trading a dispassionate
professional distance — the hallmark of CBC reporting — for something more
visceral and more involved. “Basically, here they want you to have the
entire control room in tears.”
PATRICIA CHEW.
Patricia Chew wanted an overseas posting anywhere but in the US. She is
currently working for CNN as an anchor/correspondent in Hong Kong for CNNI
(known as CNN International). That move began with a message on her voice
mail in CBC’s documentary unit: “‘Hi — calling from CNN. Looking for someone
for Hong Kong. You interested?’ I was delighted.” A deal allowing CNN and
CBC the use of each other’s material meant that the people in Atlanta were
well acquainted with Chew’s work. Still, adapting to CNN’s corporate culture
required some adjustments. “This is a test of everything you’ve learned,”
Chew says. “At CNNI, they don’t hire anchors, they hire journalists. They
rely on you to use your judgment a lot. You will say to them, ‘This is a big
story, it’s an important issue. We should do this.’ They’ll say, ‘OK. What
do you need?’
“Leaving CBC was a
wrench,” she adds. “I never wanted to leave; they’d been really good to me.
But I have to say it is truly wonderful to work for a place that’s expanding
instead of contracting.”
In her current
slot, Chew anchors two newscasts on weeknights, hosts a weekend magazine
show, which is called Inside Asia, and reports from the field — most recently
in a half-hour special on the issues facing Hong Kong as it prepares for its
hand-over to China. “This is the story of the decade, and I wouldn’t miss it
for the world,” she says.
The Hong Kong
posting is both a personal and professional homecoming. “I went to high
school here, and the place was just thrumming,” says Chew. “There were the
May-June riots, bombs going off; the Vietnam War was in full swing. There
was a huge purge happening in mainland China — bodies were washing up on the
beaches. I think it was then I decided, ‘I want to be a journalist.’ It was
a very pivotal time in my life. It’s like a second home, and I think that
gives it a special resonance for me.” |
