the fifth estate
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For a quarter of a century, the fifth estate has been Canada's premier investigative documentary program, acquainting viewers with a dazzling parade of political leaders, shady characters and ordinary people whose lives were touched by triumph or tragedy. The tradition of provocative and courageous journalism which began with Adrienne Clarkson, Warner Troyer and Peter Reilly on September 16, 1975 continues unabated with our current team of Hana Gartner, Linden MacIntyre and Bob McKeown. After airing more than 1,600 stories and more than 600 shows, the program has become a ritual for millions of Canadians from coast to coast. Many of its shows attracted spectacular numbers of viewers. More than two million tuned in to watch stories such as Eric Malling's "Who killed JFK?" Hana Gartner's "Life with Billy" and Trish Wood's "Karla Homolka." These numbers reflect an appetite for the weekly dose of thought-provoking, insightful journalism practiced by the fifth, which often makes headlines and influences public policy. Its stories are routinely shown around the world as well. Television networks in 16 countries from Norway to Korea to Argentina showed Linden MacIntyre's provocative Emmy winning story about the 1991 Gulf Conflict called "To Sell a War."

In addition to its impact among viewers and on society, the fifth estate is also recognized by its peers. It has won a remarkable 227 awards, including an Oscar for best documentary, three international Emmy Awards, 28 Geminis, 20 awards and certificates for investigative reporting from the Canadian Association of Journalists and dozens of honours from The New York and Columbus International film and video festivals. Last year, the fifth won a prestigious Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism and the Justicia Award from the Canadian Bar Association for a series of reports on the police and justice system.

What makes the fifth estate so successful? Long time host Linden Macintyre probably says it best: "We aren't interested in a lot of the distractions of the mass media. We're not into marketing and we're not into celebrity. We're interested in getting information, in exploring important issues and illuminating public policy, and about telling the stories in a strong narrative fashion."
The mission of the program could also be described this way; to be the home of incisive and compelling investigative journalism, to challenge assumptions and question conventional wisdom, and most importantly to give voice to victims of injustice who deserve to be heard but have been silenced.

The Early Years

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. 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 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. (xx people tuned in that night. It was the most watched program in the entire 26 seasons.) (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.

On The Road

In their quest for stories, the hosts and crews of the fifth estate are constantly traveling, across Canada, the U.S. and around the world. It's an intense life, in which the logistics of scheduling meetings and setting up equipment is complicated by the perils of encountering uncooperative, occasionally menacing, individuals. Crews often find themselves in potentially dangerous fixes. Escaping safely can mean relying on a combination of wits, charm and good luck.

In 1993, host Linden MacIntyre and his crew were driving from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, to Peshawar, a frontier town near the Pakistan border. Along the way they picked up a hitchhiker and by the end of the trip they'd become friendly, sharing cigarettes and snacks with him. As they were dropping him off, though, he drew a gun and began threatening them as a crowd of his friends gathered.

We've had it, MacIntyre thought, recalling that several western aid workers had been murdered in the same area a month earlier. The hitchhiker knew there was valuable film equipment in the back of the truck and probably assumed that MacIntyre and the crew were carrying plenty of American dollars.

Trying not to panic, MacIntyre distributed Afghani currency as quickly as he could, hoping that would satisfy the mob. Just as he was running out of money, a man appeared and began vigorously arguing with the hitchhiker and his friends, shouting and gesticulating wildly. As he talked, he shoved MacIntyre into the van, slammed the door shut and pounded on it with his fist, a signal to get moving. "I'm not a war correspondent. I don't seek them out," says MacIntyre. "I have been shot at and shelled. But perhaps the most frightening escapade was that drive to Pakistan."

It's sometimes said that we can taste imminent danger. Once, when Adrienne Clarkson (host from1975-82) and her crew were on assignment in Northern Ireland shooting footage out the window of rented car along Falls Road in Belfast, they were abruptly surrounded by British soldiers who mistakenly thought the camera was a weapon. Clarkson viscerally remembers that moment, an electric tension in the air and a gang of jumpy soldiers pointing guns at her head. "I had a kind of metallic taste in my mouth," Clarkson recalls, "which I think is just the body's reaction to total and utter fear."

Adrienne Clarkson remembers the danger

Hana Gartner felt that kind of fear not only for her own safety but for that of her baby. She was seven months pregnant when she found herself on the Akwesasne Reserve at a time when there were stories of armed Mohawk Warriors involved in cigarette smuggling and illegal gambling, terrorizing the community.

Hana Gartner's experience at the reserve

Gartner and the crew were shooting near their van when a car filled with Mohawks pulled up. A menacing Warrior told Gartner that she should pack up the cameras and leave. As Gartner boldly asked the man some questions, another car filled with Warriors arrived, then a third blocked the van from behind. "My instinct was, excuse me, I have every right to be here," Gartner says with a laugh. "Then I looked at my pregnant belly, looked up these guys, and realized I was really scared."

It's not just the hosts who must deal with uncomfortable situations. Longtime fifth estate camera operator John Griffin points out that it's often the camera crew that's on the front line. "If you see someone throwing a grenade or something like that, it's the person taking the picture who's out there. Everyone else is behind him." Griffin trusts that the crews are seen as non-combatants, providing them some protection. He also thinks that camera operators like himself draw courage from the fact that the camera is between them and the action.

John Griffin, a cameraman's experience

Many times, however, subjects have become antagonistic, pointed a finger at the camera, and ordered it be turned off. "You have two choices," Griffin explains. "If we're filming so-called "bad guys," and we usually come with the knowledge of who the people are beforehand, it's important to let viewers see their anger and hear what they say, so you don't stop the camera. However, when it's an emotionally charged situation, above and beyond what people are used to, we would turn the camera off. The question is, are they trying to avoid answering questions, and telling us to shut off the camera is their way of getting out of it, or are we intruding too far into someone's privacy?"

Despite their own discomfort on the road, fifth estate hosts and crews can, in the end, go home to the safety of Canada. In the early `90s, Anna Maria Tremonti, then a foreign correspondent with CBC, remembers trying to sleep while staying in a bombed-out hotel, in a room with bullet holes in the walls, in Sarajevo. All night there was the chilling sound of shells and gunfire. "But I had a ticket out," she remembers thinking. "The people I was there to cover didn't have that luxury. The story isn't about us; we have an obligation as journalists to continue to go into places like that and cover the people going through wars like that."

But it isn't all about danger and fear. There are also many funny, often absurd, circumstances that characterize life on the road. While working on a story about the connection between cattle on farms and E.coli contamination, Tremonti was doing a stand-up in a pasture.

Tremonti remembers she kept flubbing her lines, and the cows in the background kept moving around so they weren't always in the shot. As she concentrated on her lines, Tremonti noticed her producer and the crew staring at her wide-eyed. Glancing behind her, she jumped at the sight of a huge cow with its nose nudging against her.

Crowding the Shot

Hana Gartner has been bitten by goats while trying to deliver a stand-up. And in the Falkland Islands, she was surrounded by a huge colony of giant King penguins, who seemed to be embracing her as one of their own.

Hana Gartner "regarding penguins"

For a story on the Ahiarmiut (the people of the deer), a nomadic tribe that are among the oldest communities on earth, Gartner flew to the far north, sleeping in a tent on permafrost with no electricity or other amenities.

It was a challenge for a self-confessed urban girl. "I am not a girl scout," Gartner says. "I don't do well in Algonquin Park. I had outfitted myself with a sleeping bag from Eddie Bauer and some equipment that was suitable for a fall sleepover in someone's backyard. The people we were going with met me at the airport, looked at what I'd brought, and just laughed. Someone was kind enough to give me their sleeping bag and some equipment."

Gartner, who admired and liked the extraordinary Ahiarmiut, went hunting with them. After a kill, they hunters would butcher the animal on the spot and carry the pieces back to camp. Gartner found herself carrying viscera with blood dripping down her Eddie Bauer jacket.

Laughing, Gartner says: "On most assignments, after a long day shooting, we end up in a hotel, having a nice dinner. Here I squatted around a fire eating a dead raw fish. It was very difficult for me. I lost a lot of weight on this shoot."

A Difficult Story To Tell

Working at the fifth estate means confronting many ethical issues. "What we do is much like any other kind of journalism," says David Studer, executive producer of the fifth estate for the past 10 years. "But it's different because the stakes are very high. People involved in our stories face consequences of some kind, whether they're bravely coming forward with information or they're to be held accountable for their actions. The stakes are high for us, as well, because we don't want to get it wrong."

Former host Adrienne Clarkson remembers the terrible dilemma she felt after interviewing political opponents of Afghanistan's military dictatorship in 1978. They were very open, inviting her into their homes and talking freely about their activities. A short time later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which made Clarkson's story even more current. But after reviewing the interviews with the members of the opposition, Clarkson and the producers elected not to use any of them. "We knew that the fifth estate might easily be seen even in their country," she says. "We didn't know what would happen to them, but we felt they would be harshly dealt with, in a manner unacceptable to Canadians. Our story had a little hole in it, but we were able to cope with that. We never felt we had to get the story no matter what, who cares about these people?"

Linden MacIntyre vividly remembers two stories that addressed issues of life and death and brought him in unusually close proximity to his subjects.

Stan Faulder was a Canadian on death row in Texas. Shortly before his scheduled execution date, he agreed to give MacIntyre an interview, the first time he'd ever spoken to the media. Although Faulder had murdered a man while in his 20s, he had suffered a brain injury and had been under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

Now he was a grandfather in his 60s, and in MacIntyre's eyes substantially different from the man who committed the crime for which he was sentenced to die. After the interview, Faulder was given a stay of execution. "I thought that would be the end of it," MacIntyre recalls. "Reason would prevail and eventually his death sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment."

To MacIntyre's horror, Faulder's execution was re-scheduled and he asked MacIntyre to be a witness to it. The sentence was postponed and rescheduled again, and finally, at Faulder's request, MacIntyre spent significant parts of the man's final two days talking to him about life and death, religion and justice.

Stan Faulder on his upcoming execution.

"I have never been afraid to tell anyone that I am profoundly philosophically opposed to the death penalty," says MacIntyre. "But afterwards I asked myself about the wisdom of allowing myself to get so close to subjects. Certainly an experience like this is a bit of baggage that one will carry around forever. But now that a couple of years have gone by, I realize that I'm glad that I did it."

MacIntyre faced a similar challenge on a story so complex and troubling that he later wrote a book about it.

While working on a story about the effects of child abuse, MacIntyre met a young criminal named Tyrone Conn who had experienced abandonment and deprivation in a series of foster families.

After the story, Conn kept in touch with MacIntyre and his colleague, producer Theresa Burke. Assuming he would never be professionally involved with Conn again, MacIntyre became a surrogate big brother, doing his best to help the young man whenever he could.

Listen to Tyrone Conn's interview.

In 1999, while a prisoner at the maximum security Kingston Penitentiary, Conn sparked a media frenzy when he became the first prisoner in 40 years to escape. Two weeks later, when the police surrounded his Toronto hideout, a desperate Conn called his friends at the fifth estate. Theresa Burke tried in vain to calm the young man down over the phone and then listened in horror to the shotgun blast that ended his life.

Producer Theresa Burke reflects on the story.

"I didn't quite know how to deal with it at first," MacIntyre says. "We knew that his life and death raised a lot of really important questions. Did my friendship with him handicap my ability to do a story about the system? Many old-time journalists would have said I was the worst person to do it. I thought, I know more about his life and death and that system than anyone else, so why shouldn't I tell the story? As with any story, whether it's in a newspaper or on television, it succeeds or fails in the eyes of the audience. And nobody has yet told me that this story failed."

Sometimes journalists bring a personal relationship to stories. At the time of the 10th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, Francine Pelletier had a special interest in an item examining the tragedy and its effects on the victims' families.

A year after Marc Lépine killed 14 women in a shooting rampage at École Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, Pelletier learned that her name was on a list of potential victims found among his effects. "The Montreal massacre has changed the lives of many people, as it haunts many more, mine included," says Pelletier, who won a Gemini Award in 2000 for best writing on the Lépine piece. "From the time I found my name on Lépine's hit list, I have felt the need to get inside the man's head, find out what could possibly have motivated such hatred."

Journalists may feel their actions inadvertently trigger tragic events. David Studer recalls the time, just before Christmas in 1992, when the fifth estate had evidence that a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been on the take, accepting bribes from a Montreal gangster. The day before the show was scheduled to air, the RCMP officer shot himself in his office.

Not surprisingly, a shocked Studer and producer Julian Sher wondered whether the fifth's investigation was responsible for driving the man to his death, and had to make a quick decision how to handle it. "It's horrible that it happened," says Studer. "You have to think of his family. But we decided we needed to find out more information." What they learned was that the Mountie had killed himself shortly before he was to go to an appointment with officers conducting an internal investigation into the same charge, which was most likely what drove him to suicide. "Every Christmas for years after that I thought about his kids," says Julian Sher.

Reporting on the RCMP officer's death

"Our stories affect people's lives," says Studer. "I remember asking myself, if I was the target of this show, how would I be feeling? But at the same time, it was important that a criminal had suborned a member of the RCMP. So we told the story, although we tried to be respectful and we updated what had happened at the end of the program. But it really does bring home that you're dealing with human beings. Even if they've done something wrong, they're still just human beings.

How We Work

Shooting any story for television is typically filled with dramatic highs and lows. For every great scene that will be used on the air, there are often interviews that fell through, events missed because of delayed flights or luggage. The team may go into the field with a plan, but life unfolds in ways that no amount of pre-planning can take into account. The best stories often take shape when producers and hosts put down their clipboards and carefully watch and listen to what is unfolding around them. Carefully mapped-out plans often end up as crumpled pieces of paper at the bottom of a suitcase.

After shooting a story in the field, producers and hosts return to the fifth estate with dozens of 20 or 30 minute tapes. These contain formal sit-down interviews with a story's subjects, sequences showing subjects in action, "scenics" of the places visited to add context to the piece, and other visuals. Usually the producer sits with a tape editor to go through the footage, making the first attempt to shape all of the material contained on the tapes.

"As a producer, you have to constantly think about how you will translate all that you have learned into a coherent story on the screen," explains former senior producer Jim Williamson. "It means many late nights going over the tapes again and again, writing down key words and images, developing a rough structure for your piece."

And even when a documentary is coming together in the edit suite, it is never really finished until the day it goes to air. New information may come in, or events may change the context. Old scenes can fall away as a new focus emerges.

"Television is a harsh mistress, and it demands a powerful, unwavering storyline," says contributing producer Julian Sher. Sher was the producer of "His Word against History" the story of Stephen Truscott who, on the strength of tainted evidence, was convicted and nearly sent to the gallows for murder at the age of 14.

Truscott talks about his case.

Though his first documentary on Stephen Truscott ran on the fifth estate in the spring of 2000, it has since been rebroadcast with some new elements. Even so, Sher could not begin to fit all that he had learned into a tightly focused documentary, and so has turned his findings into a book entitled; Until you are Dead.

Sometimes in the screening room, where field tapes are carefully scrutinized, the true essence and magic of a story is revealed. In 1993, award-winning producer Neil Docherty wanted to shoot a parenting course to document the progress troubled families would make over time.

His plan: to place sound and motion-activated cameras in the houses of several families and follow them through a period of several months. In recognition of how sensitive the process might be, the families would have the power to turn off the camera or withhold the tapes if they wished.

Unable to get enough volunteers from the parenting course, Docherty extended the offer to several families on the waiting list. One couple, Karen and Mike Desjardins, wanted help and thought that by cooperating they would get it sooner. When the tapes started coming in, everyone involved knew that the Desjardins ' story was so powerfully dramatic that it would illustrate all of the issues they wanted to explore. Theresa Burke was hired to help out on the project when Docherty became overwhelmed by the hours of material arriving each week. Those tapes were showing a young Evan silently enduring the taunts and threats of his parents.

A scene from the in-home video camera

"The material was riveting," says Burke. "Sometimes, late at night, you got the feeling you were in someone 's house. There wasn't a sound in the office, just you and whatever was happening onscreen."

Burke remembers long discussions about the effects the story might have on the family, especially whether eleven-year-old Evan would understand the irony implicit in the title - that much of Evan's trouble was Karen and Mike's lack of parenting skills. "There was always a recognition that this wasn't just a story, but people's lives. This wasn't just like watching those reality-based web channels we're so familiar with today. The show was going to be more meaningful than just saying, 'here's a shabby family from Hamilton not treating their son very well.' It was going to make a statement about an aspect of our society that really matters."

To understand how the fifth estate works, it's important to recognize the ability of its hosts. They become highly skilled at reading faces and body language, at the art of human psychology. "Sometimes the truth is revealed by the flicker of a muscle in the cheek," says former host Trish Wood. "Or sweat over a lip, and you know it's not the TV lights because you're not hot."

Hana Gartner, who, despite her warm, open manner can be a steely, indomitable interviewer, says about some of her famous subjects: "There's something about a movement, an action, that suddenly convinces the audience of who they are." While interviewing Donald Lavoie, a Montreal hit man-turned-informer, Gartner probed for a entry point into the man's psyche. Having told her that he 'd killed 15 men not for money but for power and respect, Gartner asked: "Well, how did it all end up? You wanted respect, you wanted power. Now you are a man in jail, afraid of being killed. You are a stool pigeon. What respect do you have?"

"Well I was…" Pausing, Lavoie looked away. "A stool pigeon? I'm not a stool pigeon first of all, okay?"

Sensing an opportunity, Gartner pressed on. "Was it difficult? Was it difficult for you to go to talk to the police, to tell them what you know?"

Shifting uncomfortably in his chair, Lavoie said: "Madam, I know you are trying to, you're skating away from that. Now let me think about it." Turning to stare directly into the camera with an icy look that may have been the last thing some of his victims saw, Lavoie pointed and said: "Cut it."

Hanna Gartner interviews Donald Lavoie

Former host Adrienne Clarkson has her own formula for coaxing the reluctant witness to talk; it's all a matter or persistence she says.

Interviewing the former Shah of Iran

Of course, asking the difficult question can be hazardous to a host's health. In 1982, the fifth estate investigated whether the many nature documentaries interfered with nature for dramatic purposes. Bob McKeown reported how a Disney documentary showing the phenomenon of lemmings plunging to their death over cliffs had in fact been the same film footage spliced together to give the appearance of mass suicide. When McKeown interviewed zoologist Marlin Perkins, host of Wild Kingdom about truth and fiction on wildlife programmes, he clearly hit a raw nerve. The octogenarian Perkins firmly asked for the camera to be turned off, then punched a shocked McKeown in the face.

Marlin Perkins gets defensive

The late Eric Malling was a host with a reputation for pulling no punches. Kelly Crichton, a former executive producer who worked with Malling in the field in the late `70s and early `80s, says: "He was a very interesting person to work with, to say the least. He pushed the envelope wherever he went, almost always to good effect."

Crichton recalls a story on Nicaragua in which she and Malling spent time with the country's brutal dictator, Anastasio Somoza Garcia. They were shown through Somoza's underground offices, where the regime's political torture chambers were located. In the course of their inquiry, they met Somoza's son, the dictator-in-waiting. He was, according to Crichton, a coarse, dislikable man given to braggadocio. "Eric led him along, in wonderfully glorious Eric fashion, getting out of him all sorts of details about his training in U.S. camps and his accomplishments as a warrior fighter. I was somewhat appalled by Eric's ability to cozy up to this creature, but he was getting marvelous film."

"We're not supposed to have opinions in our reports," continues Crichton, "but there was always a little chit-chat among the hosts at the end of the show, adding a colourful anecdote or two about the stories.

Co-host Adrienne Clarkson couldn't resist asking Malling what it was like to meet Somoza, and he said: 'You can imagine him coming back from a hard day dropping peasants from helicopters and going for a Big Mac.' That was a typical Malling remark, and it captured the whole scene perfectly."

Eric Malling describes Somoza

Sometimes the decisive moment is as basic - yet delicate - as a skillful host enticing a subject to do something very simple. For a story on the involvement of the Jehovah's Witness in the kidnapping of a young Toronto girl, Victor Malarek had convincing circumstantial evidence of the organization's role, but lacked concrete proof.

Waiting for a key interview with a Jehovah's Witness official at the organization's headquarters, Malarek saw a file that contained a letter referring to the girl from an official with the congregation in Santiago, Chile, dated four years before the girl was found there. Realizing it belonged to his subject, Malarek put it down but during the interview wanted the official to open the file and produce the letter himself. Casually asking whether national headquarters had any correspondence from the congregation in Santiago referring to the girl, the man replied: "Not that I know of."

"Your files wouldn't indicate anything?" Malarek asked.

"Not the files that I have."

"Could we see the files?"

Leaning forward, Malarek said: "This is from Santiago."

Victor Malarek uncovers the letter.

Without being overly aggressive, Malarek orchestrated a perfect example of the kind of confrontational journalism that has earned the fifth estate the nickname, "the gotcha gang."

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