Shortly after Peter Herrndorf was appointed head of current affairs for CBC television, he developed a blueprint for a program with a working title of
The Current Affairs Magazine. Working with executive producer Glen Sarty, the goal was to produce a showcase current affairs show "whose journalism is distinguished, professional, aggressive, candid and iconoclastic." The show's content was not going to be driven by the headlines, like most TV newsmagazines of the era, and would be devoted to investigative journalism. To this end, a team of the top investigative journalists in the country were hired, among them Brian McKenna and John Zaritsky.
A Fresh Approach
One of the most original aspects of the show, introduced by a producer named Bill Cran, turned the camera on the host and crew as they pursued the story. This pioneering approach provided visually dramatic storytelling and was adopted by documentary television producers around the world and has become a convention in broadcast journalism. Another innovation, not commonly done on television at the time, was frequently devoting the entire hour-long show to a full-length documentary, which resulted in many memorable shows, among them Zaritsky's Academy Award winning Just Another Missing Kid.
"There was a wild rush to get the show done," recalls Adrienne Clarkson, who along with Warner Troyer and Peter Reilly were the program's first hosts. "Until about three weeks before we went to air we didn't even have a name. We were all canvassing each other as to what the thing should be called." Today, several people believe they came up with the title, the fifth estate. Historically the first three estates were the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. In the 19th century, the press became known as the fourth estate. An English writer is credited with first referring to radio as "the fifth estate," a term that was later expanded to include television. Today it commonly refers to the electronic media, but in the mid-1970s most Canadians wouldn't have known what it meant. Aside from feeling as though they were popularizing a term, Herrndorf points out that an unfamiliar title had its own advantages. "We thought, if people didn't understand what 'the fifth estate' meant, that was okay," says Herrndorf. "If the program was going to be as successful as we thought it would be, the title would come to mean the kind of quality programming they saw on the show."
"I think those first two years were the most demanding of my professional life," says Clarkson, who remembers barely having time to get her laundry done before she'd be on the road again. Describing a typical schedule, she says: "I once spent ten days interviewing the Shah in Iran, then rushed back to Europe to finish another piece before coming back to Toronto to package the show."
The Debut
The first show, which attracted an audience of 1.3-million Canadians, documented an investigation into a plane crash in the arctic and at the time Clarkson realized that the fifth estate could examine at the actions of people in positions of power and hold them accountable for their actions.
When Kelly Crichton joined the show after serving as European producer for CBC News, she arrived with firsthand experience of the significance of investigative journalism. "I worked in so many countries where people did not have the right to know what was happening," she says. "Where uncomfortable questions never got raised, where there was no forum for debate or discussion. I felt a great burden of responsibility because the fifth estate had a mandate to ask tough questions, to raise all sorts of questions about how we were functioning as a society."
Asking Tough Questions
In 1977, early in her career at the fifth estate, Hana Gartner experienced this responsibility firsthand when she investigated the story of Jane Stafford, a Nova Scotian who experienced years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her alcoholic husband, Billy. Finally she took the law into her own hands by shooting him, for which she served a jail term. The interview itself has become famous at the fifth estate for its emotional intensity. The sound recordist on the crew twice interrupted recording because of a loud rhythmic pounding he was picking up from her lapel microphone. He soon realized it was the sound of Jane Stafford's heart as she relived the terrible trauma.
Gartner remembers how shocked she was to learn that Stafford's plight was known within the small community in which she lived, but citizens and even the police were so intimidated by Billy's ferocious behavior that they were afraid to intervene. "This wasn't abuse in any simple way," says Gartner, who believes that the fifth estate is one of the few programs that would do justice to a story like this. "We give context and background. We try to understand the degree to which this woman suffered. Among the horrible things he did to this woman was force her to have sex with the family dog. I wanted to include this and the debate in the editing room was whether we could put it on television. I said, why can't we put it on television? She didn't kill the man just because he tormented her, preyed on her self-esteem. This was torture. In the end, her story became a rallying point for abused women everywhere, and I quickly understood the power of the program and the degree to which it can reach people."
Many were attracted to the fifth estate for these reasons. Anna Maria Tremonti, an award winning foreign correspondent with CBC-TV, became a host in August, 2000 the fifth estate had been on my radar since I was a teenager," says Tremonti. "From the time I became a journalist I aspired to work there one day. We could take an issue and unravel it, follow the trail back to see why it happened, who made it happen and who didn't prevent it from happening. Then we could ask who should be held accountable."
Defining Investigative Journalism
Over the years, host Eric Malling was responsible for a string of recognizable fifth estate shows – ranging from political patronage and squandered development funds to Canadian involvement in arms shipments to South Africa -- that defined investigative journalism on TV.
In 1983, Malling and producer Brian McKenna explored the many theories – ranging from kooky to convincing – allegedly explaining the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy. A year later, in a model of storytelling, Malling's report on a botched oil drilling operation off Cape Breton Island began with a Hamilton grandmother who tasted oil in her ice cubes and bought drilling permits and led to a fast-talking promoter and his backer in Oklahoma. The year after that, Malling's celebrated Tunagate story, which probed the public sale of a million cans of "tainted tuna," led to the resignation of John Fraser, then federal fisheries minister.
Today, having won more than two hundred awards and certificates, the fifth estate is ingrained in the psyche of the Canadian public. It continues to be a trail-blazing documentary program, still producing headline-worthy exposes while it tells uniquely Canadian stories.
