CTV’s week from hell shows what happens when broadcast media’s flaws converge into a toxic and (career) fatal brew

Most newsrooms are not disciplined enough to organize conspiracies but that doesn’t mean the ingredients aren’t there to scandalize

If you think you had a bad week, just think: you could have been working for CTV News.

Reeling from a rather thorough paddling from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for making a mess of its reporting on the new capital gains tax, Bellmedia’s flagship became one of the week’s biggest stories.

So, let’s dive right into it with some insider knowledge from behind the scenes and then I’ll give my FWIW on an event some passed off as pilot error but that others saw as confirmation of institutional bias in the way news is reported.

Here’s what happened and how.

Vassy Kapelos is host of a CTV/Bellmedia Sunday morning program called Question Period which typically involves interviews with politicians and pundits. These shows - CBC has an equivalent - are quite popular among the ruling classes. They repurpose resources, are shown at a time that doesn’t interfere with NFL football, are low cost Cancon and serve the public interest. Normally, they are pre-recorded in Ottawa.

It has long been the practice of networks, because they have exclusive access to the recordings, to extract a news story from these interviews and release it prior to the program. This is intended to assist the company in setting the news agenda for the day and driving viewership to the show. CTV did just that, posting a written story online that you can read here. You will note that it doesn’t contain any balancing comments from people who might disagree with what Kapelos is told by her guests. This is intentional, in order to protect “the scoop.”

In this case, someone decided that the hottest story it had coming out of Question Period was Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Public Works and the government’s new Quebec lieutenant, noting that should the NDP fail to support the government in a confidence motion proposed by the Conservatives, its vaunted dental care program for seniors was at risk. You can see that here at the nine minute mark.

The common practice, once the written promo story was posted, is to follow up with a story for the Sunday TV newscast.

This is when it all began to go wrong.

Instead of assigning one of its Ottawa reporters to the story, someone at CTV News HQ in Toronto decided that Cristina Tenaglia, a weekend reporter in Toronto who previously work as a reporter/anchor for CP24, should do the story. Why this took place is unclear, although from what I’ve heard it’s not normal practice. Working with a 37-year veteran editor in Ottawa, Tenaglia set about producing a story that Duclos was on to something and Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s non-confidence motion was essentially a vote on dental care.

CTV News then went about searching for evidence to support that narrative, building a story primarily based on clips on file. A number of politicians were featured. The controversial part was when a couple of clips of Poilievre were blended together.

My understanding from sources is that the words “we need” were lifted from one Poilievre clip and then inserted elsewhere to build a sentence that the Conservative leader never, in fact, spoke.

The result was a story that misrepresented Poilievre and fed the narrative that Duclos had laid down in his interview with Kapelos. The Liberals would have been delighted. The Conservatives, understandably, went ballistic.

CTV News posted and read a hasty apology on air, blaming it all on a “misunderstanding in the editing process,” to which Grande Prairie Conservative MP Chris Warkentin responded “you spliced three parts of different sentences together to create a new one that Pierre never said.

“That’s not a misunderstanding during editing, that fabricating disinformation.”

Summa Strategies Kate Harrison appeared on CBC’s Power and Politics.

“This is not a misattribution,” she said, explaining her belief that what occurred was “journalistic malpractice.”

To make a long story short, the Conservatives decided that until CTV News concedes to the maliciousness involved in the story’s structure they would no longer speak or respond to questions from their reporters, Poilievre tore a strip off Bell CEO Mirko Bibic and the Liberals did their best to play knight in shining armour to media in distress. By Thursday, though, CTV News had completed another investigation, which was amazing seeing as at least one person involved didn’t even get back to work until that same day. It was then announced that two people involved were no longer part of the CTV News team. Tenaglia and her editor had been fired.

The Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt interpreted this as a sacrifice to the gods.

“I think this (is) CTV saying they fired the people who offended a politician,” she posted on X.

While you digest that, here’s my take:

As the saying goes, when you Assume, you make an Ass out of U and Me. Or to quote another one muttered in old-fashioned newsrooms, assumptions are the mother of all screwups.

The assignment of the story appears from the outcome to have assumed that Duclos was on to something. Whether that involved being a willing or naive dupe to a Liberal talking point … well, fair to say readers are coming to their own conclusions.

It looks to me like the assignment could have been: “The Conservatives are basically presenting a nonconfidence vote on dental care - let’s flesh that out for the evening news.”

I have no information to indicate that was the case. This is pure conjecture on my part. But, theoretically - and I’ve seen this at play in newsrooms many times - the story could have been based on the assumption - as was the online report that preceded the show - that Duclos was correct in his assessment and the reporter was expected to back it up in her report.

If organizations are going to manufacture news stories to promote their shows they should at least use proper journalism when doing so. In this case, the proper approach should have been to take Duclos’s statement and run it past the NDP - who had pushed for dental care - and the Conservatives who were authoring the confidence vote. A reasonable “NDP/Conservatives react to Liberal claims vote could seal the fate of seniors dental care” story could have been produced. But that might have involved legwork and something I understand is not favoured at CTV News these days: overtime.

Lastly, digital manipulation isn’t exactly new to television. Whether it’s projecting virtual ads and first down markers that don’t exist onto sports fields or putting a digital poppy on an anchor or reporter who forgot to wear one, reality is often distorted in the name of creative license.

But I also think it’s highly unlikely a conspiracy was involved. In my time in newsrooms I would often explain to people that we were nowhere near smart enough to pull off one of those. But when all the stars aligned, we could be stupid enough, ambitious enough, ideologically biased enough and incompetent enough to do harm to others, ourselves and our industry.

Adding fuel to the fire these days is the fact that the Liberals are subsidizing news media. Just the week before the CTV debacle, Government House Leader Karina Gould was calling upon reporters to show solidarity with cabinet in keeping an eye on Poilievre. “Make sure we are holding him to account,” she told them.

To which they should have responded “Whaddya mean WE lady?”

I see no evidence that they did.

(A previous version mispelled Ms Tenaglia’s last name. Apologies. I told you we aren’t smart)

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And that’s all I have room for this week. Thanks to The Hub for publishing my take on Michelle Rempel-Garner’s alternative to the Online Harms Act and to Senator Pamela Wallin for having me join her on her podcast. You can listen here. And a very big thank you to all the new regular readers and subscribers who’ve encouraged this project recently.

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Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).