Profile of CBC's Neil Macdonald in RRJ
Dan Say
Number of lines: 494
Number of pages: 8 pages (approximately)
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Rough, Tough, and Ready to Rumble
by Keren Ritchie
Ryerson Revie of Journalism Summer 2005
Why Neil Macdonald will never back down
Neil Macdonald licks his lips and pats his hair gently into place.
Sporting a slick navy suit, rose-coloured tie, and shiny brown
shoes, he paces the room reciting his lines. Macdonald is taping
intros and extros for CBC Newsworld's Face to Face, a show that
features interviews with passionate American politicos such as
conservative queen Ann Coulter. When he's ready for his standup,
he crumples the script, stares into the camera through his
black-rimmed glasses, and barks, "Let's start."
"Um, can you walk forward while you talk?" asks Ian Hannah, the
cameraman.
"You want me to walk? Are you serious?"
"Well, just a few paces."
"How many paces?"
"Just a few."
Macdonald rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "What the fuck is
this?" he shouts. "It fuckin' doesn't work."
Marcella Munro, the producer, and Hannah start laughing. So does
Macdonald. It all has something to do with a running joke about a
missing jib, a portable camera crane.
"Jesus fuckin' Christ," he grunts. "Piece of shit."
After his first standup, Hannah nods, "Okay, that's pretty good."
"Pretty good?" Macdonald smirks. "It wouldn't be a problem if we
had a fuckin' jib."
The crew is shooting in the decaying Crystal Ballroom of Toronto's
King Edward Hotel, which offers a panoramic view of the city, so
Munro suggests filming Macdonald in front of a Catholic church
that stands in the background.
"Ha!" he laughs and in a cartoonish voice says, "Then the
Catholics will complain."
At the end of the shoot, Macdonald comes up with a new title for
the show: "It's called, 'Fuck Off, with Neil Macdonald!'"
Everyone laughs.
"It'd sell," he shrugs, to more laughter.
The 48-year-old Washington correspondent for CBC Television News
often cracks up his colleagues. Friends claim he's evenfunnier
than his famous comedian brother, Norm. He can also be
intimidating -- he's six-foot-six, with a brawny build, a
baritone voice, and a penchant for liberal use of expletives.
"Being my size, all you gotta do is growl at people," he says.
Fellow reporters once dubbed him "Jaws."
"He likes to stick pins in big, fat, balloon egos," says Garnet
Barlow, his longtime friend. Since his start in journalism in the
mid 1970s, Macdonald has angered everyone from prime ministers to
media moguls to religious communities. In December, for instance,
the pro-Israel lobby group HonestReporting Canada (HRC) awarded
him an "Israel conspiracy award." Yet none of it has hurt his
career. Many of those who despise Macdonald admit he's good at
what he does. His fans are even more laudatory. "He has an
aggressive, trenchant style of reporting," says David Halton,
senior Washington correspondent for CBC News.
And it's that relentless style that gets him into trouble. It's
also, some say, what makes him a great journalist.
A rebellious and restless punk from rural Quebec, Macdonald left
high school early, joined the military for two years, attended
Algonquin College, and then quit that, too, though he was at the
top of his class. "I had a real problem with authority," he
recalls.
By 1976, the 19-year-old Macdonald had landed a job at the Ottawa
Citizen as a copy boy. It came with one condition: that he finish
his journalism courses. Still the rebel, he never followed
through on his part of the bargain. Former Citizen colleagues
described him as a brash rookie with talent. He started on the
police beat and made night city editor at 22. "I had no fuckin'
idea what I was doing," he says now.
In 1983, Macdonald moved to Vancouver to become assistant city
editor at the Vancouver Sun. "I thought he was spectacularly
arrogant," says former Sun colleague Ian Gill, adding that
Macdonald made his presence known weeks before he arrived. "I was
sitting at the city desk one day, and a package arrived from Hong
Kong for him. It turned out to be a box of shirts he had ordered
from some tailor with his initials monogrammed on the breast
pocket. People nicknamed him 'The Shirt.'" And on that first day,
The Shirt walked into the newsroom and set about evaluating the
strengths and weaknesses of the staff. "He pegged everybody
within 24 hours," says Gill. "He found the Sun very wanting in
terms of its vision -- it didn't have a lot of hard-hitting
reporting. It was a pretty soft place, and Neil was a hard guy."
After only a year on the West Coast, Macdonald returned to the
Citizen in time to cover the 1984 federal election. While on the
campaign plane, he faced a crucial decision: whether to publish
remarks Brian Mulroney thought were off the record. The
Progressive Conservative leader was chatting about recent
patronage appointments by then Prime Minister John Turner, who
had just named Liberal Bryce Mackasey ambassador to Portugal.
"Let's face it," the soon-to-be PM said, "there's no whore like
an old whore. If I'd been in Bryce's place, I would have been the
first with my nose in the trough, just like all the rest of
them."
The convention at the time was that back-of-the-plane chats were
always off the record. Macdonald, though, chose to report the
quote, and was the only journalist to do so. "He recognized that
it was the middle of a federal election campaign and the stakes
were high," says Tonda MacCharles, who then worked at the Citizen
and is now at The Toronto Star. "It certainly set the bar high in
that politicians were going to be held to their words, and
journalists were expected to report what they said."
After the article ran, Mulroney refused to speak to him for 13
years. Macdonald knew he was risking access, but recognized the
value of a good story. "He was always interested in the scoop,"
says former college friend Dave Buston, who now works for
Canadian Press in Calgary. Years later, Michel Gratton wrote a
book about Mulroney, devoting a chapter to the incident on the
plane. He sent Macdonald a copy and on the first page wrote: "To
Neil, who won't let anything stand in the way of a good story?
and shouldn't."
On a typical day in Washington, Macdonald wakes up early, scans
the city's major dailies and flips through every news channel.
BBC Television has the most balanced news coverage, he says. Some
conservatives consider the BBC too left-leaning, particularly
with what they see as overly sympathetic coverage of Palestinian
issues. Macdonald then takes his two children from his second
marriage -- to Radio-Canada reporter Joyce Napier -- to a nearby
international French school, and heads to work with his wife.
At the CBC bureau in March 2004, associate producer Heather
Loughran sits in the edit suite watching a Macdonald story before
it goes to air on Canada Now. It's a report about Condoleezza
Rice, then National Security Advisor, agreeing to testify
publicly before the 9-11 Commission, while President George W.
Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney plan to do so in private. At
the end of his standup, Macdonald says: "In fact, so high are the
stakes here that Bush himself has now agreed to appear before the
Commission along with Vice-President Cheney, but the President's
appearance will have two conditions: It will not be public and
the President will not have to swear to tell the truth." Loughran
and her editor chuckle. "That is a Neil Macdonald line," she
says. "He delivers the news with bite, and sometimes his viewers
don't even catch it."
Average viewers may not pay much attention to him, but the
subjects of his stories certainly do. In the early 1980s, while
with the Citizen, Macdonald spent a year in Germany reporting on
Nazi war criminals. "At the time, I was the most heavily
litigated reporter in Canadian history," he claims. "I think I
still am." At one point, he faced three lawsuits. In a case
involving Macdonald's coverage of Conservative defence minister
Robert Coates and a brothel in Germany, the Citizen paid
approximately $1 million in legal defence fees before the lawsuit
was dropped. Clearly, Macdonald's take-no-prisoners style came
with a price, but his bosses were willing to pay it.
So were others. In November 1984, on assignment in Florida, he ran
into Peter Mansbridge, then parliamentary correspondent for The
National. "I was giving him the gears about television,"
Macdonald recalls. "I said, 'You get paid too much money for
reading stuff other people write for you.'"
"You think you could work in television?" Mansbridge responded.
"There's no doubt in my mind."
In late 1987, on Mansbridge's recommendation, CBC offered
Macdonald a job on the news desk. He accepted the position,
vetting scripts mostly, but hated it and wanted to be a reporter.
"I threw a little temper tantrum," Macdonald laughs. "I said
goodbye and I quit." The next day, the CBC made him a reporter.
Early in his television career, Macdonald met Napier while
covering a story in Ottawa. He tried to impress her by playing
classical music and pretending to read Madame Bovary. Truth was,
he hadn't read a word of it. (Watching Star Trek is his true
passion.) The two got married in 1991 but it would take another
few years before Napier realized her husband wasn't really into
Mozart. Instead, he's a huge Meat Loaf fan -- although during one
of his very first interviews Macdonald infuriated the Bat Out of
Hell singer so much that Meat Loaf punched a dresser.
While Macdonald enjoyed his time as a domestic reporter, he itched
to get overseas. Using a CTV job offer as leverage, he told CBC
he was quitting. When his editors asked what it would take for
him to stay, he announced: "I want to go to Jerusalem." In 1998,
Macdonald began his five years in the Middle East -- the period
of his career for which he is best known, and about which he says
he won't speak. But does.
PUT A CONTROVERSIAL MAN IN THE WORLD'S most contentious region,
and there's bound to be fireworks. And Macdonald didn't
disappoint. His reports from the Middle East, as they have been
throughout his TV career, are rife with his point of view. He
makes no apologies for it. "All good reporters use some form of
editorializing in their stories," he says. "There are people who
tell you that you shouldn't judge other cultures -- which I have
no problem at all doing. That's what you're there for."
To prepare for his new post, Macdonald studied Arabic and read
dozens of books about the Middle East from both Jewish and Arab
perspectives -- he has half a wall of shelves filled with cracked
book spines to prove it. When he first arrived in Israel, it was
a safer place. He took trips with his family across the country,
basking in the desert sun and floating in the Dead Sea. "We could
go to Bethlehem for lunch," he says, "and Jericho for supper."
But when the second intifada broke out in 2000, life got more
dangerous. His children once brought home an Arab friend, who
said she hated Jews. It wasn't easy, and as he learned more about
life there, Macdonald's views shifted. "He really is the kind of
guy who can go to the story with certain assumptions, do the
research, and then change his mind," says Sandro Contenta, former
Middle East correspondent for the Star. Macdonald spent hours
discussing the conflict with Barlow, his close friend in Ottawa,
who recalls, "Neil said, 'Garnet, there is no question that the
sympathies of anybody who arrives here for the first time will
naturally side with the Israelis. It's just crazy what they have
to put up with.' About six months later, he said, 'I realize that
the Israelis are such bastards. They're so oppressive.' And he
said about a year later, 'You realize it's just an impossible
situation.'" His views kept shifting and in a speech at the 2002
Canadian Association of Journalists conference in Ottawa,
Macdonald summed up the situation in just one sentence: "The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a nasty
ethno-religious conflict between two peoples who loathe one
another and want the same piece of land. Period."
Whatever his personal feelings about the Middle East, publicly he
was accused of taking sides. In a 2001 documentary called "The
Two Faces of Gaza" for The National, Macdonald described life in
the Jewish settlements as "a beach," and referred to the
Palestinian towns as an "open-air prison." While Palestinian
Canadians wrote supportive letters to CBC, many Jewish viewers
were outraged by what they called an unfair depiction of life in
Gaza. One wrote: "How about we see some real balance for once
where the suffering on the Israeli side is also finally
acknowledged?" Macdonald defends his position by explaining: "In
that documentary, we included the family in Gaza whose children
had their legs blown off in the school bus. Is that not
Jewish-Israeli suffering? I thought it was."
He began receiving hundreds of emails a week from people
denouncing his work. Initially, he responded to every one -- a
friend had warned him never to let a false accusation sit on the
record. But Macdonald couldn't keep up. Most of the criticisms
came from pro-Israel activists. "Some journalists say one of the
ways to gauge whether you're striking the right balance is if
you're being criticized by both sides," says Dov Smith, executive
director of HRC, pointing to the sustained praise from the
Palestinian community. But Macdonald argues that the Jewish
community is more vocal than the Arab community. "Arabs have been
in Canada for less time," he says. "A lot of them come from
authoritarian regimes where if you criticize the state
broadcaster, you're going to go to jail." It was the beginning of
a storm that would only grow.
THE CBC'S MIDDLE EAST BUREAU IS ON ONE of the most dangerous
streets in Jerusalem. A four-lane artery carrying the city's
traffic, Jaffa Road is filled with hundreds of city buses and
honking taxis. It's also home to some of the most deadly suicide
bombings in Israel's history. "You have to be here to tell the
story," says Azur Mizrahi, a CBC cameraman in Jerusalem who
worked with Macdonald for five years. "Before you report, you
have to see what's happening."
In April 2002, following a series of suicide bombings that took
the lives of 87 Israeli citizens and wounded nearly 570 others,
the Israeli Defense Forces invaded the West Bank town of Jenin,
where it believed some of the bombers originated. The news media
were initially denied access to the site, but after the Israeli
army pulled out, most journalists reported that there had been a
massacre of Palestinians -- with the number of deaths on the
scale of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya.
Macdonald was one of the first Canadian reporters to enter Jenin.
And he was one of the few who exposed the Palestinian attempt to
manipulate the media. "I could smell death," he recalls.
Then some people approached him and said, "You must see, there is
a lot of killing!"
"Show me!" Macdonald said.
The people showed him.
"Well, that's a dead dog. And that's a dead goat. Where are the
dead people?"
The mukhtar (or mayor) of the refugee camp said to Macdonald, "We
are standing on a mass grave of bodies."
"Okay," Macdonald said. "Let's get some shovels."
Eventually, the people led him to a school where he found
sand-covered body bags. They told him children were inside.
"Open the bags!" Macdonald demanded.
There were dead bodies inside, but they were Palestinian fighters,
not children.
That evening, while other journalists described a mass slaughter,
Macdonald reported that there had been no massacre in Jenin.
Three months later, the United Nations and Human Rights Watch
listed the final fatalities as 26 Palestinian fighters, 26
civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers. CBC ombudsman David Bazay
says, "It took the UN team investigating several months to come
to the same conclusion that he did by going in there for a single
day."
When Macdonald finishes a piece, he must send it to Toronto for
vetting. Then the debating begins. "There's an eternal tension
between journalists and editors as to what constitutes editing,"
he says, "and how far editing should go."
Macdonald often called senior producer Greg Reaume, now his
producer in Washington, from Jerusalem and said, "Reaume, you
prick!" Pleasantries over with, they would argue about the
script. On one occasion, a writer asked Macdonald to inject the
term "terrorist" into his piece to make the story clearer.
Sitting in his Jerusalem office seven time zones away, Macdonald
sighed in exasperation and removed his glasses. He then angrily
explained that as a reporter with 27 years of experience, he felt
he was in a position to decide whether or not to use that word.
"I had been out seeing people get shot all day," he says. "I'm
the one who's doing the writing. I'm the one whose face is on the
piece. I'm the one who just came back from what's going on here."
Macdonald never used the term "terrorist" in his reports from the
Middle East. "Everybody's a friggin' terrorist!" he says. "The
word has lost all meaning. It has been misused so often." But
pro-Israel activists complained when Macdonald refused to call
Palestinian suicide bombings terrorism. And when he questioned
whether the Hezbollah was a terrorist organization -- even after
the Canadian government declared it was -- it didn't sit well
with his critics. That's when the fight became a national brawl.
CanWest launched an editorial campaign against Macdonald and the
CBC, accusing them of biased reporting against Israel. In the
end, the Asper editorials were an embarrassment because they
misquoted him. Some days, defending Macdonald must seem like a
full-time job for CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman, but the
boss doesn't mind. "Our role at the CBC is to probe and challenge
and inquire," says Burman. "Neil does that. He's not satisfied
with the pat answers to really important questions. In spite of
the controversies, he's highly respected by our viewers."
Not all viewers. Though he wasn't reporting at the time, Macdonald
stoked the usual passions with a putative slight of Ariel Sharon.
Each year, the Israeli prime minister holds a news conference and
reception for the Foreign Press Association. In January 2003,
Macdonald sent an email to his colleagues urging them not to
attend because he believes reporters shouldn't mingle with
politicians. The Canada-Israel Committee and HRC got wind of his
email and accused him of organizing a boycott against Sharon and
attempting to publicly embarrass the leader. "I did no such
thing," says Macdonald. "I have no intention of having a drink
with Ariel Sharon any more than Yasser Arafat." When it comes to
schmoozing with politicians, Macdonald says: "I just don't do
it."
For his critics, Macdonald's stint in Jerusalem couldn't end soon
enough. And even the reporter wanted out. Early in 2003, a
suicide bomber blew himself up outside his children's school. The
bomber's head landed in the schoolyard and a caretaker quickly
covered it with a garbage bin. Not long after, there was another
bombing close to Macdonald's home in west Jerusalem. "We had an
imaginary line," explains Napier, who was born in Montreal and
raised in Europe. "These bombings crossed that line." But it was
really the impending war in the Persian Gulf, and preparation for
biochemical warfare in their children's schools, that convinced
Macdonald and Napier to leave.
By March, the family moved to Washington. And Macdonald was more
relaxed: a joker by nature, on slow news days he'd sometimes just
start dancing around. "Or he'd say, 'You want me. You think I'm
sexy,'" Loughran says, laughing.
But the transfer didn't reduce the scrutiny of his work. In May
2004, he filed a story on the Abu Ghraib scandal. At the end of
the report, he quoted Eugene Bird, president of the Council for
National Interest, who suggested that Israeli intelligence was
responsible for the prisoner abuse. However, Macdonald didn't
mention that Bird is a pro-Palestinian activist, nor did he
present evidence to support the accusation, which later proved to
be false. Smith wrote on HRC's website: "Macdonald brings no
facts or sources to substantiate these grave charges. Further, by
including Bird's statement, Macdonald manipulated two unrelated
stories in a way that only a journalist with an anti-Israel
agenda would have even considered." The reporter says he never
wanted to include the comment, but his producers insisted. "Had I
known Eugene Bird was also fronting a pro-Palestinian group, I
would have said so," he concedes. "Anyway, I didn't see HRC
complain when we aired comments from pro-Israel activists without
identifying their bias."
Burman admits it was a case of sloppy reporting. Within a week of
airing the report, CBC made two on-air apologies. "There have
been times when I've found fault with Macdonald's work," Bazay
says, "but no reporter is perfect." In his report, the ombudsman
wrote: "Editors and producers must not only avoid bias; they must
avoid the appearance of bias. And, I agree, the May 4 report did
expose The National to the appearance of bias."
And the feud rages on. "When Macdonald moved to Washington, people
exhaled," Smith says. "Here, he still manages to show his bias."
In December 2004, HRC presented Macdonald with a "Dishonest
Reporting Award" and Smith wrote an op-ed piece in the National
Post entitled "Neil Macdonald must go."
The controversy doesn't seem to faze the reporter, though. "I've
got a skin as thick as a rhinoceros," he boasts. "If I had five
dollars for every time somebody called me an asshole, I'd be
pretty rich." In fact, Antonia Zerbisias, longtime friend and
Star media critic, wrote in a column, "I suspect he enjoys the
attention." Either way, CBC is intent on keeping him around. "He
does high-quality work," says Burman. "Canadians are lucky to
have Neil reporting on their behalf."
At his suburban Maryland home in November 2004, Macdonald paces
around the kitchen, talking on the phone: "Well, I don't fuckin'
care," he growls. "Look, I've got someone here. I'm going to have
to call you back." Bobbie, the family dog, maniacally licks my
leg while I wait in the dining room. Macdonald returns, walking
stiffly. Fresh from heart surgery that doesn't seem to have
affected his energy level, he sits at the head of the table,
kicks his feet up, and pops an olive into his mouth. When
Macdonald talks politics or journalism, he gets all worked up. He
bangs his fists on the table, pounds his knees vigorously and
smiles a boyish grin, while his cheeks turn rosy red.
"Canadians have internalized liberal, pluralistic, and democratic
values," he begins. "And that, of course, is an editorial slant.
If you remove that from your reporting, it would be horribly
boring."
As he's talking, I notice a cordless phone sitting on the table.
The display screen reads: "I am sexy." After a few moments, the
phone rings and Macdonald leaves the room to take the call. When
he returns, he dims the lights, hovers over me, clears his throat
and says, "You know, I Googled you."
Here it is: the confrontation I've feared.
"I take it you are the Keren Ritchie who participated last year in
a conference sponsored by the World Zionist Organization," he
says, making a cappuccino.
I start babbling ineffectually in my defence. I tell him I just
went to the conference for the free trip to Israel. My political
position on the Middle East isn't close to the WZO'S, but I feel
caught nonetheless.
"Look," he cuts me off. "If you're going to write a story on
somebody surrounded by controversy for his Middle East coverage,
you're going to have to pause at some stage and tell your readers
that you participated in this conference."
I'm at a loss for words.
"I'm not saying that in a judgmental fashion," he continues. "You
know, the French Canadians considered me biased against French
Canadians. The Liberals considered me pro-Tory. The Tories
considered me pro-Liberal. The Israelis considered me
pro-Palestinian. And I can assure you there are Arabs that deep
down consider me to have bought far too much into the terminology
propagated by the establishments." But as Macdonald later tells
me, "It's a rough-and-tumble business."
I figure that's why he loves it.
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