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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 had a mandate to ask tough questions, to raise all sorts of questions about how we were functioning as a society."
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."
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.