In any free society, the idea of the government passing judgment on the work of journalists is repellant. Canada is certainly a free society; thus, it came as a shock to the country's journalistic community when, late last year, the Senate held unprecedented hearings that scrutinized a series of docudramas, called The Valour and The Horror, about the role Canada's armed forces played in World War II. The films, made by independent producers Brian and Terence McKenna, had been shown early last year on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's public television network.

The most controversial episode focused on the air war against Germany. It portrayed the British commanders of the units in which Canadian fliers served as secretly and deliberately bombing civilian targets in order to kill as many civilians as possible and break Germany's morale. According to the film, the commanders who ordered these raids knew that many of the planes and their crews would be lost.

The format itself was controversial: the filmmakers used interviews with Canadian veterans and other participants in the war, but mixed them freely with dramatic scenes in which actors represented real people. Fierce protests by veterans groups triggered not only the investigation by the Senate's subcommittee on veterans' affairs but also one by the CBC's ombudsman, an office the publicly owned network created to deal with public complaints about programming.

Ombudsman William Morgan made his thirteen-page report public in November. The series, he found, "fails to measure up to the CBC's demanding policies and standards. . . . The problem is that the case against the leadership is for the most part not proven. The secrecy was either understandable in the context of the time or not evident to others than the program-makers. And much of what the narrator claims to be revealing has been known for some time."

The ombudsman also took issue with the use of dramatizations: "Even if one takes the position that, because a number of the people the producers considered necessary for the audience to hear from are dead, the use of drama segments to present their words may be justified, one cannot avoid the fact that the use of drama in these programs had the effect of helping to create other serious problems and distortions."

The McKenna's, who declined to appear before the senators, reacted angrily to the ombudsman's report, calling it "a clear example of why no one person should sit in judgment and decide whether complex programs are 'right' or 'wrong.'" The furor over the film soon became a national issue, covered extensively in the media.

The Globe and Mail, a paper with a nationwide readership, fiercely attacked government interference in a November 12 editorial. "That a Senate committee should be conducting a formal investigation of a work of journalism is shameful enough," it said. "Senators are, of course, free to hold whatever opinon they like, and express it in the same way as any other citizen. But to compel witnesses to come before public hearings to answer their 'charges' is another thing entirely. This is no innocent encounter . . . and its sole design is intimidation. It would be an abuse of their position if the subject were an article in The Globe and Mail; it is doubly so when the institution in question is a creature of government, nominally independent but beholden to it for almost $ 1 billion annually."

Not all journalists agreed. George Bain, a former columnist at The Globe and Mail, wrote in his Media Watch column in Maclean's, "If public inquiry into anything put in the public domain by the media is censorship, intimidation, an invasion of freedom of the press; if the CBC's ombudsman, a recent acquisition, constitutes a kangaroo court and an unwarranted restraint on freedom of expression; if the media as a whole holds the idea that freedom of the press exists only to serve the press, we arrive at a situation in which the free, vigorous debate, for which freedom of the press is supposed to exist, precludes debate on where freedom of the press becomes an abuse."

CBC President Gerard Veilleux, for his part, also criticized the Senate's involvement, but defended the ombudsman's assignment. "From the very beginning we have refused to take part in those [parliamentary] hearings, and from the beginning we have said publicly that we did not feel it was appropriate for the Senate to be conducting the hearings.

"At the same time," he said, "we must ensure that any program we broadcast is fully defensible in terms of its adherence to the corporation's journalistic policies and practices. In so doing, we strengthen our journalistic independence and credibility."

Next, a government agency with regulatory power over television stations got into the act. But the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications commission, something like the American FCC, came out in defense of The Valour and The Horror. Responding to the more than 100 complaints it had received about the documentary, the CRTC ruled it acceptable under the terms of Canada's Broadcasting Act, and found that the filmmakers "appear to have reasonable grounds for the assertions made in the series." Filmmaker Brian Mckenna, while noting that he does not believe "any government agency should be judging any television program's content," nonetheless found the CRTC's ruling "satisfying."

The Valour and The Horror, meanwhile, is to be rebroadcast; a date has yet to be set.

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