Alberta Press Council demise, a sign of unethical times

The Alberta Press Council (APC) began in 1972 as a way to protect freedom of the press, as well as mediate the general public’s complaints against the province’s newspapers. With one more member of the public on the board than newspaper members, the public’s input was always guaranteed when ruling on a dispute.

The reason I say “was”, is that last Wednesday we had our final meeting to close the books on the Alberta Press Council forever. It’s a board I had been sitting on for a number of years. But the APC had lost the support of Sun Media, then Post Media (Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald) and finally the board of the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association (AWNA) due to cost savings at a difficult time for the industry.

Personally, of the four Caribou Publishing newspapers I have only had one incident where the Alberta Press Council (in the late 1980s) had to intervene because of a public complainant. I was a young man at our office in Sedgewick, and we had some new staff. At the time all the news was either manufactured or were handwritten submissions. A pile of copy had been set aside for the new typesetter, and somehow a racial poem had found its way to that pile. As we laid out pages by hand, the poem was pasted up on the editorial page and published. . . . contd.