We love watchdogs.

May 11, 2024

We love watchdogs. Of the journalist breed, that is.

That is the article of professional faith to which Kim Kierans subscribes in her new book about Canada’s Michener Award in public service journalism, Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at 50.

A one-time chief judge and president of the Michener Foundation, Kierans has written a needed institutional history of the investigative journalism award that was created under the flag of Governor-General Roland Michener in 1969 to pace the famous American Pulitzer Prize.

Public service journalism, writes Kierans, ferrets out the misdeeds of the powerful, “stands up to bullies, uncovers secrecy, fraud and wrongdoings, and gives voice to marginalized communities.”

This kind of journalism, alas, is blindingly expensive. Consider this graphic I put together a few years ago that puts a price tag on it:

Watchdog journalism risks being romanticized, particularly if indulging in cringeworthy homilies like “speaking truth to power.” In the book’s Foreword, former Governor General David Johnston quotes literary great George Orwell’s maxim “journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

That sentiment is mostly bullshit, but as Kierans works her way through fifty years of winning stories and exposés, you are reminded of just how explosive Canadian public service journalism has been, each and every year throughout our adult lives.

Especially important to the folks running the Micheners, recognition is awarded to stories that have had produced measurable change: a public inquiry launched, legislative action taken, restitution made, wrongdoers fired or thrown out of office.

Have a look at this list to be reminded of how many Award winners were at the centre of a major political controversy or prodded action on a burning policy issue that years later we simply take for granted as a citizen’s due.

This walk down investigative journalism’s memory lane is the best part of the book (Kierans weaves the chronology of the annual awards with the narrative of the Michener Foundation’s financial and governance issues). If you can’t respond with respect and gratitude to journalists after reading these stories, buddy you are a dead loss to humanity. 

Contemplating the idea of watchdog journalism is a good opportunity to observe the political animus towards the media that is cynically stoked by bad actors on a daily basis. Most of it comes from the right, but the populist left puts a lot of effort into it too. 

The accusation made over and over again is that journalists and their newsrooms are political, in fact partisan on a left-right basis. There could be something to that on a “curatorial” level: what kind of stories do and don’t get commissioned or published. But on a story-by-story and journalist-by-journalist basis, the huff about left-right bias is nonsense and usually spewed by people who haven’t met too many journalists.

If journalists subscribe to any “ism” it’s to the watchdog creed: that the powerful are usually up to something nasty, are covering it up, and need to be exposed so we can fix it. 

And on that basis, Kierans’ book is a salutary and enjoyable read.

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2023 Michener Award finalists announced.

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