Television reporter Tom Clark parts company with CTV News, and the network issues a public statement to that effect. Kevin Newman steps down as Global anchor, and his network does the same. But what happens when dozens, perhaps hundreds of print reporters in this country leave their jobs, either voluntarily or otherwise? Silence.

Postmedia Network, successor to CanWest, has started cutting jobs at its newspapers. No surprise there. It paid $1.1 billion for the papers, and has to cover its costs somehow. This has been standard policy in the newspaper business for more than 30 years. Whenever publishers run into money problems, they devalue the product by getting rid of staff and then filling up the white space between the ads with more and more wire copy. Mind you, they rarely get rid of senior managers when they do this purging. These are the ones handing out the pink slips, after all. The managers get to stay so they can continue to manage . . . what, exactly? With fewer and fewer staffers to supervise, they busy themselves with other jobs. I knew a senior editorial manager at one paper whose job it was to check all the signed cab slips that came back to the newsroom after the reporters used taxis to carry out their assignments. The job of checking the slips could have been done by a part-time office assistant, yet it was given to this senior manager who remained at the paper from cradle to grave. How well did he handle his awesome responsibility? Let me put it this way: Every time I used a cab, I signed my name “Donald Duck.”

You didn’t read about the Postmedia job cuts in any of the Postmedia newspapers. That’s standard newspaper policy, too. Whenever the National Post lays off staff, it leaves it up to The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star to cover the story. The Post will write about job cuts in other industries, but it won’t cover any stories that happen under its own roof. The original source for the Postmedia story was an internal memo sent by a company vice-president to staff at the Victoria Times-Colonist. “We must continue to find ways to serve our readers and advertisers in more cost-effective ways,” wrote the VP, Kevin Bent. The memo was leaked to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, and that’s how you got to read about it in the Globe.

Postmedia has confirmed there are layoffs, but won’t give the numbers. Nor will it give any names. The Globe, citing sources, says about 20 jobs were cut at the Edmonton Journal and 30 at the Calgary Herald. An unspecified number will be leaving such other papers as the Vancouver Sun and Province, the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen. Are any of our favourite columnists affected? If they were working for one of the television networks, we’d know the answer.

The various human rights commissions that rejected the complaint against Maclean’s magazine — most recently the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal — were right to do so, of course. Members of the Canadian Islamic Congress had charged Maclean’s with inciting hatred and contempt towards Muslims when it published an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone, in which he advanced various xenophobic warnings about jihadists taking over the world. Much hand-wringing followed, as the media proclaimed that the media should be left to do as it pleases.

In its decision, the B.C. tribunal — and if they wanted to raise the spectre of totalitarianism, they couldn’t have done better than by calling themselves a “tribunal” — declared that “The article may attempt to rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims, but fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt.” I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Coyne that this bit of casuistry was just the members’ way to avoid enforcing B.C.’s human rights law. Whether Steyn’s article incites fear or hatred depends on the incitee, it seems to me; maybe it’ll cause wimps like me to flee from the nearest brown-skinned person, but your average good ol’ boy might react differently.

Still, except for one genuinely hateful paragraph, in which he links some teenagers’ violence to their North African background, Steyn’s article is soft soap. As usually happens when he cares about a subject, he ceases to be funny. And without the disarming laughs, Steyn is — here, at least — revealed as a common coin hysteric, even claiming at one point that Japan’s declining birth rate means it’s “likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.”

The CIC’s critics were right — dragging this stuff into court was unnecessarily heavyhanded.

Then again, I would say that. I’m white. And so are almost all the people running Maclean’s. And so are most of the journalists wringing their hands. But do you think if we were, say, Arab or South Asian or Trinidadian we might feel differently? D’ya think?

Maclean’s waxing about freedom of the press and creeping fascism and whatnot would be a lot more convincing if they could point to a few more non-Anglo Saxons on the masthead. Then we’d know that they know the marketplace of ideas isn’t just for the majority, and we’d know they have a genuine marketplace of ideas happening in their newsroom. Frankly, I don’t really care what Ken Whyte or Andrew Coyne has to say about the CIC suit; it’s all too predictable. What I would like to know is what their Features editor, Sarmishta Subramanian, has to say. (Has Subramanian commented on it? If so, I couldn’t find it.)

Similarly, Ian Mulgrew’s grumblings in The Vancouver Sun aren’t nearly as pertinent as Haroon Siddiqui’s analysis in The Toronto Star — not only because Siddiqui is liable to have the more nuanced view, but because The Star‘s hiring actually reflects Canadian multicultural reality. They’ve earned the right to an opinion.

This skirmish is a heads up for Maclean’s and all its journalistic brethren who are behind the curve. Time to change up their staffs to look more like the country they cover. Then maybe next time Steyn writes one of his nativist screeds they’ll decide to pass on it — not because they’re self-censoring, but because they can’t stop laughing long enough to get it into print.

Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin offered an unfortunate comment during last night’s broadcast of “At Issue,” The National‘s equally unfortunate political affairs panel. Discussing the Conservatives’ plunging poll numbers, Martin derided the “line of pale male faces, with one exception” on their parliamentary front bench. He was sharing the screen at the time with three other white guys and a woman. None had the presence of mind to look embarrassed.

Here’s a look at the wall of white that greets you on the “At Issue” website:

Lotta testosterone happening there, too. But just as strikingly clueless is The National‘s practice of rousting Andrew Coyne (he of Maclean’s), Chantal Hébert (she of the Toronto Star), and Alan Gregg (he of whatever it is he’s doing now) from their various central Canadian redoubts each week and then tossing in, usually, one guest panelist from not Central Canada. This is how they prove they’re a national newscast, y’see.

It’s kind of like Survivor and other reality shows, only here, instead of your token gay guy or black woman, you have your token westerner or Maritimer. Mind you, sometimes one of the Coyne/Gregg/Hébert troika will be visiting the colonies — Gregg in particular seems to get around — in which case they get to fill the role of regional correspondent that week. It’s all much more pleasant when it can be kept within the family compact.

The funniest attempt by the “At Issue” producers to appear national without actually having to be national occurred when they took the show out to Vancouver for an extra special panel discussion from the Chan Centre at UBC. This, of course, was an example of the CBC fulfilling its mandate: Getting out there amongst the people! Taking the temperature of the nation! Reflecting Canada to itself! So, did they, say, use the opportunity to bring on four B.C. pundits? No — instead they flew Hébert, Gregg, and Coyne (or “Chalandrew,” as I like to think of them) out to Vancouver as well, there to instruct the locals on matters of state and entertain their questions. On this occasion, the role of regional ringer was filled by Kirk LaPointe, who was introduced as the managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and “adjunct professor right here at UBC.” LaPointe is both those things; the fact that he is also the ultimate example of a Canadian parachute journalist, having arrived at the Sun in 2004 after a few decades spent in newsrooms in and around Toronto, was, naturally, rather too much to get into.

With a militant regionalist occupying the Prime Minister’s Office, and a family from Winnipeg running most of the country’s media, it’d be unseemly for those of us outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal vortex to feel hard done by. It’s just not necessary at the moment. What’s nettlesome, then, about CBC’s “At Issue” panel is its absolute tone-deafness to the changes in Canada over the last 20 or so years — not just the spread of political power to the West, but also the increasing place of what used to be called “ethnic” communities in our national affairs (communities that have become so central to the conduct of the country that the ethnic label, like the old “The West Wants In” slogan, is simply irrelevant now.) And yet here they are, Coyne, Gregg, Hébert, and their hapless sidekicks, still floating about the airwaves like the unsettled ghosts of the old Morningside political panels of the 1970s. It’d be appalling — if it weren’t so inadvertently entertaining.

The “At Issue” panelists have left personal video messages on the show’s website. Inspired, I’ve created this special plea to the “At Issue” producers:

Update to story below: CBC Radio announced on January 18 that it is cancelling the pop-culture show “Freestyle” effective mid-March and replacing it with an as yet unnamed daily arts magazine program hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. A CBC executive told the Globe and Mail “this does not mean an increased emphasis on pop culture.” I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Some time around the end of December, 2006 — there was no announcement in the mainstream press about this — Kelly Ryan quietly left her post as co-host of “Freestyle,” the weekday Vancouver-based afternoon chit-chat and pop music show on CBC Radio One. She was replaced without fanfare by Marsha Lederman, previously featured on air as a national arts reporter for the radio network.

There had been some surprise expressed in Canadian newspaper columns during the Fall of 2005, when Ryan took on the “Freestyle” job, because she had earned her stripes as an investigative reporter. Why, asked the columnists, would a seasoned journalist who had led the radio network’s reporting on such cases as the Swissair Flight 111 crash and the arrest of alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton want to squander her broadcasting talents on a fluff show billed by the Corp as “water-cooler fodder at its finest?”

Ryan explained that she needed a break from the hard-news reporting. But one got the distinct impression she was gritting her teeth during every scripted exchange with “Freestyle” co-host Cameron Phillips, a former television actor who actually did seem to enjoy yapping about the playful habits of dolphins and the litter left behind in movie theatres after the patrons finished their fizzy drinks and buttery-topped popcorn.

Loyal CBC Radio One listeners reacted with predictable outrage when “Freestyle” first aired in November, 2005. It came on as a replacement for “The Roundup,” a show that had lost its focus after veteran host Bill Richardson left in 2004 to host a short-lived weekend Radio One program called “Bunny Watson.” The expression “dumbed-down radio” was prominent in most of the 144 negative phone calls and 173 negative e-mails received by the Corp during the first two weeks of “Freestyle.” So were such expressions as “white bread” and “banal chatter.” The listeners pointed to such other CBC programming aberrations as Brent Bambury’s “GO” and Jian Ghomeshi’s “The National Playlist” (now mercifully put to death) as further evidence of the Corp’s limp attempts to lure a youth audience by moving in the direction of dumb and dumber.

The CBC stuck to its guns with “Freestyle” and so did Kelly Ryan, who gave the show a year. Her bio on cbc.ca now lists her credits as an investigative reporter, but makes no reference to the time spent on “Freestyle.” Fine. Time to move on.

What still galls, though, is the spectacle of those print columnists claiming the high road while CBC wanders down the low.

To hear them tell it, the press alone now functions as an oasis of intelligence and serious coverage in a desert of pop-culture banality. But is this, in fact, true? Let’s pick a random date — Tuesday 2 January 2007 — and turn to the entertainment section fronts of some CanWest newspapers to find out: