Someone in Globeland dug up the piece I referred to earlier on the Ice Storm (thank you very much!). The story ran on Jan. 10, 1998 and was written by Andre Picard, who is currently the paper's public health reporter.

Some excerpts:

IT'S Hell, La Presse said.

"A war zone," CKAC radio said.

Reality check: A war zone is where you walk into a church and are greeted by 300 putrefying bodies that have been hacked to death with machetes. A war zone is where people are starving but afraid to go into the fields because of land mines. A war zone is where mortar shells rain down and disease ravages a huge swath of the population.

What is happening in Quebec this week is troublesome, bothersome, costly even. But it's not hell.

It's barely heck.

Picard quoted Pierre Martel, a Montreal director of Quebec's Civil Protection Office, as asking the media to cool the rhetoric and that the storm was less destructive than the Saguenay floods. Picard then noted that one forecaster had called the storm an inconvenience.

He then wrote the following:

The challenge in covering the ice storm has been to convey the seriousness of the situation -- and in our comfortable lives, it is relatively serious -- without falling prey to the lure of hyperbole.

People have been cold, but it's not critical, except for a certain few. In fact, what the story has done for me is underline the tragedy of abandonment of the elderly.

Of the eight people who have died to date*, six were 82 years old or more. They all died alone in their homes. The shelters are disproportionately populated by the elderly.

* According to a Jan. 4, 2009 CP story, a total of 46 deaths were directly linked to the ice storm.

That is a tragedy. A bunch of broken hydro poles is not.

Can't disagree with that. And it cuts into my "empathy" remark in my earlier post.

Here's where Picard explained the tone of the Globe's coverage -- and where he raised some hackles:

Some would say The Globe's coverage has been dull, too dry.

I like to think of it as relatively levelheaded. The principal reason is that the reporters on the story have the benefit of perspective: Tu Thanh Ha recently returned from Vietnam, a police state that was battered by a typhoon that killed hundreds. In her time in China, Jan Wong saw disasters of immense proportions, including floods and earthquakes and the political repression of the Tiananmen massacre. Jeff Sallot is a veteran of the brutal war in Afghanistan. Personally, I covered the genocide in Rwanda and the crushing disease and poverty of Haiti.

This doesn't make us better prepared than other reporters to deal with the lack of heat in our homes, rotting food in the fridge and treacherous conditions on the roads. But it does allow us to look at the ice storm from a different point of view.

Our coverage isn't better than that of the local media -- they're catering to the tremendous appetite for information from the people affected -- but as reporters for a national publication we can afford to step back a bit.

Some of us have seen war close up, have had little glimpses of hell.

This week was a little colder, but what the heck.

I'll try to get down to the Toronto Reference Library and dig up letters to the editor written after that bit of contextualization from Mr. Picard. I believe the sentiments he expressed rankled some readers.*

* Update: My recollections are wrong. If Picard's article did rankle some readers, no letters to the editor were published. Ice Storm-related letters from Jan. 12-15 that reacted to Globe coverage mainly thumped Jan Wong for her portrayal of some Westmounters and how they got through the storm

I should say that in January 1998, I was living in the winter paradise of Edmonton, Alta. My cousin was living in Montreal, and I remember her as saying the situation sucked big-time.

Mr. Picard -- who is an excellent journalist; I have no quarrel with the vast majority of his work -- would have been correct in writing that the Ice Storm wasn't Rwanda or Afghanistan.

However, he may have been well advised to stay away from the "Hey, man: We've been to war!" stuff. Ten years later, that's what stuck in my mind. For one thing, if you lived in the affected area, what does it matter to you if Rwanda or Afghanistan were much worse?

Actually, that's pretty close to what I wrote at the time. Here's the relevant portions of a post I made to CAJ-L, a listserv for journalists, on Jan. 10, 1998:

To my mind, the ice storm was a pretty interesting of nature's wrath.

I would agree with Andre Picard that compared to Rwanda, Haiti, Algeria or Chechnya, this event isn't "hell."

But the "we're-so-worldly-and-we've-seen-so-much,-that's-why-we-can-put-it-into-proper-context" tone of the piece made my eyes roll ever so slightly.

Unfortunately, working an evening shift makes it difficult to catch the major newscasts, but had I watched almost an entire newscast of this, I suspect I would vote for overkill.

CBC has a two-segment newscast. If you have a huge story that day, give it reasonable play, but then cut into the magazine rather than killing off other valid stories.

Most people didn't comment on that part of Picard's story. The discussion mainly focused on whether the ice storm was overcovered or not. For background, the ice storm began on Jan. 5 and ended on Jan. 10, although the effects were felt long after. One story that gets chatted about was the appointment of Ian Binnie to the Supreme Court of Canada, which didn't make the national TV newscasts that night because of the amount of time given to the ice storm. At the time, CBC had The National, which was the newscast, and The Magazine, which featured longer-form stuff. It's now just The National -- or as I sometimes call it, The Peter Mansbridge Show, with CBC News. :)

Anyway, if you're interested in the historical record, read on! If you're not, thanks for stopping by. :)

Jan George Frajkor, a Carleton University j-prof, wrote the following (in response to New Brunswick journalist Jacques Poitras):

I direct your attention to Andre Picard's column on page 2 of the
> Globe today (Saturday).
>
> I agree: The coverage of this weather event has gone overboard.
> Weather makes a great story, certainly, and I think the supper-hour
> shows in Montreal were justified in devoting their full hour to this
> major local story. But I found it hard to swallow that The National
> devoted all but a couple of minutes of its Thursday show to the story.

Much as I respect Andre Picard, a former student of mine, I do not think the story was exagerrated.

> (I won't get into the apocalyptic writing at the top of the show, or
> the expense of flying in (CBC's Peter) Mansbridge, (Hana) Gartner and all the support
> staff, other than to mention it here.)

Gartner has never been worth it at any time, but other than that I think the story deserved its treatment.

> Let me try to Schachterize this by posing some questions: 

> * Does a weather story affecting one area of the country merit a full
> hour on a national news show?

If that area is Ottawa, the National Capital, and Montreal, the largest or second-largest city in the nation (depending on your definition) it is clear to me that it deserves that treatment. As one who is sitting here without electric power or hot water, I can sympathize with those in Montreal who don't have water at all. It is a symptom of our modern society that we have come to rely so much on technology that we can no longer function when it fails us.

> * Didn't the appointment of a new Supreme Court judge (as well as some
> of the other news that happened that day) deserve more than a few
> seconds at the tail-end of the show?

No. The appointment of any lawyer to a high position is an occasion for mourning, or better yet just ignore it.

> * Would this have received the same treatment if the storm had
> affected a patch of territory the same size but stretching from, say,
> Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Dauphin, Manitoba?

No. Dauphin is not the seat of the government nor important national institutions (like Carleton University) and Medicine Hat is not the seat of the most important separatist struggle in Canada.

Kirk LaPointe, then the editor-in-chief of  the Hamilton Spectator, wrote the following:

For any national media, the ice storm ranks as a mandate story of first order.

While it may not have been as messy and threatening to life as, say, the Saguenay or Manitoban floods, its impact on millions of lives places it in a category practically of its own. And it will for weeks to come. I commend CBC for going big on the story. It is the only story nationally that everyone could discuss. It was also a huge public policy story within the sheer weather story---Quebec Hydro's early hesistance to bring in outside help, Ottawa's lassitude in recognizing that troops were necessary to dig people out, Chretien not understanding early on that this was no time to shake hands in Latin America, and the displacement of families and commerce made for dozens of interesting stories. Even if it was a so-called eastern story, practically everyone in the West can either identify with it or has a relative or close friend in those cities or regions affected by it. Sending Mansbridge and Gartner to Montreal is something that can be done on about six hours' notice, so I don't think their presence there made CBC give over the show. The story did. They leave Toronto four to six times a year, and it doesn't necessarily mean a full-show treatment of the story (as evidenced by Manitoba, Diana's funeral, the federal budget). Yeah, it would have been nice to have an item on Ian Binnie or on the rest of the world's news that one night. But when millions of Canadians are directly affected by a story---a story, oddly enough, that they can't consume on The National, because they haven't got any damned electricity---well, that kind of news doesn't come around many times in a lifetime. If anything, I think all of us have to ask ourselves if we really set people up adequately to understand the potential in what we agreed would be one weird winter of weather. All of those stories seemed to be the upbeat, won't-have-to-shovel-much-snow category. Instead, we'll see drought next summer, many farms will face more collapse, insurance premiums will likely rise, and whole neighbourhoods in two of Canada's most beautiful cities will be awfully tree-spare. And that's just the Canadian story.

Saskatoon journalist Vern Clemence wrote:

C'mon, the ice storm wasn't a weather story, it was a people story, and a damn big one. When that many lives are on the line for any reason in this country, it's worth an hour of TV time. The CBC made the right call. If there's a complaint to be made, it is that another 30 minutes wasn't tacked on to the broadcast to do the other stuff. I did want to know something of the pedigree of the new guy on the Supreme Court that night. I probably could have found it online if I'd bothered to look, of course, and I did get it the next morning in the paper. It was no big deal.

Canadian journalist Erick Ko, writing from Hong Kong, said:

Andre Picard's column is a good example of reporting that turns people away from newspapers. Yes, the ice storm is not the hell of Rwanda, but to just call it a great inconvenience minimalizes the storm's impact. The last report I read said 11 people are dead and hundreds are injured. The economic cost of the storm, according to the Globe, will exceed $1 billion.

Picard quotes a provincial civil protection official as saying people "are not in danger. It's uncomfortable, but that's all." That would explain the dead bodies.

The rest of the Globe coverage didn't seem like overkill or off the mark. I particularly liked Jeff Sallot's lead that "At times yesterday Ottawa seemed like an icy capital city cut off from its country." Sounds like the situation is normal.

On Jan. 12, Montreal journalist Mario Grenier wrote:

My posting isn't about discussing if the CBC did the right thing when they decided to fly Mansbridge and Gartner to Montreal or if they made the right decision to cover the outcomes of the ice storm in extenso at the expense of other newsworthy issue such as the nomination of Ian Binnie or the latest Algeria massacre.

I'm interrested in the day to day job of those who covered disasters, specially at home. I am a newscaster for CKAC-Radiomedia, a private radio network in Montreal. In the past years, our major newscasts (7h45, 11h45, 15h45, 16h45 and 22h45) airtime droppped from thirteen to six minutes. The number of journalists fell accordingly.

Since the ice storm begin we are back to the good old days. 15 minutes newscast every hour, the staff has doubled, the news vs talk show hosts ranting has been reversed. The employer's accountant, who usually shows reluctance about paying overtime, had to cave in.

Beside that, and foremost shall I had, we feel our work is of help to people. We are part of a public effort to explain what's going on, what to and not to do, ask to the authorities (Hydro, Public security, Environment Canada,etc) questions or commentaries sometimes coming from the public. The phone lines are busier then ever, specially in the news room.

The radio station itself, located downtown, and most of the news staff's home are powerless, which give us a feel of belonging we usually don't feel about news we cover on a everday basis. When I anchor the news I can picture someone, my mom and dad as a matter of fact, in their home, with a battery radio (no electricity no TV; sorry TV folks it is our revenge) listening to what is happening.

Kingston journalist Harvey Schachter wrote the following on Jan. 14:

On Friday night, bored at being without power and the CAJ list for two days, we turned to the CBC radio news, hoping to get away from the stream of storm news on our local radio station. Naturally, the first item was about the storm and I felt disappointed. I wanted to hear about something else. Even pseudo-news -- maybe something on Saddam Hussein, or lingering coverage on Allan Eagleson, would be appealing.

Much of the newscast -- but not all of it -- was on the storm. It seemed to me appropriate, actually, although I am not someone who pays much attention to disaster coverage normally (it all seems the same) and even this time was finding my interest somewhat limited.

I did not have the luxury of seeing the television coverage that Jacques highlighted. But I wonder if there is something in the nature of television, as opposed to radio and newspapers, that encourages devoting all the airtime to things like the storm, rather than recognizing the world goes on and there is other news. I assume -- I'll break the rule on not assuming and invite others to correct me -- that the Montreal papers didn't on any day devote every single column inch to the storm.

Obviously, television captures this stuff in more compelling fashion. Television, because of ratings, also understands better than newspapers that it is in the entertainment business as well as the information business and presumably the ratings suggest this is good television. (I'm not sure about radio, but much of its actuality makes me giggle it's so silly.)

Are there other factors? It's easier for television to fill a whole newscast with its own staff than for a newspaper -- but I imagine CBC radio, like CBC television, could have filled the entire newscast if it wanted. Is the mindset of the producers different in television? Are there greater psychological rewards for going big on a story?

The discussion that I read after the fact on this list seemed to simply discuss overkill without distinguishing between the various media. Indeed, it may not even be a case of TV being different. I didn't see any reference to CTV in the discussion. Did it report on Ian Binnie?