In 1985, Toronto Star sportswriter Mary Ormsby became one of the first women in the history of the Canadian Football League to report from players’ locker rooms. By then, Ormsby had been in dozens of male athletes’ locker rooms. In her four years on the job, Ormsby, then 25, had learned to accept the reality… Continue reading Way Out of Bounds
Category: Spring 1988
The Incredible Shrinking Newscast
In 1981, the Federal Communications Commission deregulated radio in the U.S. and changed the character of American stations. Among the regulations relaxed were those governing news content-a station is no longer required to broadcast any news whatsoever-and the result has been that too many stations have become little more than free jukeboxes. The reason is… Continue reading The Incredible Shrinking Newscast
Raw Footage
A three-second aerial shot shows the tops of shacks in a rural slum. The as yet unseen narrator tells you it is Soweto, a black township in South Africa, “the scene of so many necklacings and violence.” Violins pitch and drone eerily behind his commentary. Now you’re on the ground, about 10 metres from a… Continue reading Raw Footage
More in Anger
Suddenly in April, 1987, George Bain, dean of Canada’s political columnists, disappeared from The Globe and Mati’s editorial page. Three months earlier, he had written his last column for the Globe’s Report on Business Magazine. Although inquiring readers were sent letters to the effect that Bain had simply quit writing the columns, they never learned… Continue reading More in Anger
No Mean Businesses
Joann Webb’s office door is usually open. Busy as she is, it’s the policy of Canadian Business’s 36-year-old editor to allow the publisher or a staff member to pop in during the day to discuss anything from next month’s budget to a copy-editing problem. But today the glass door is closed. Visitors are ignored, phone… Continue reading No Mean Businesses