Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver

ship sailing south from Alaska. Out on deck one night I saw a lovely young woman alone at the railing, blonde hair blowing in the breeze. I hastened to introduce myself to the lady, who was an American. When I told her I was a Canadian, she had only one question: “Do you know Henry Champ?”
    In 1972, when the Soviets and the West were still in the grip of the Cold War, we sent Champ to Moscow for the famous Canada-Russia hockey series. After his return, I received a call from a member of the RCMP security service who was eager to interrogate Champ about a relationship he had struck up with a Russian woman. It seemed his companion was a KGB spy. Using such agents to compromise and later blackmail unwary Western men was a common KGB trick. “Hell,” Champ declared, “I was just screwing her—not revealing any of the nation’s secrets.”
    Champ was a famously hard worker, but he had a habit of disappearing on assignments, which always worried the news management. After one AWOL episode, Cameron ordered me to fire Champ. Reluctant to do so, I summoned him to a meeting with Cameron and me, at which Champ offered an unexpected alibi: He had never left the office. He was at the table of a week-long poker game in the cavernous basement of the CTV headquarters at CFTO and had been available to the assignment desk at a moment’s notice. Cameron docked Champ a week’s pay and told him he did not want to see him in his office again. “At these prices, I can’t afford to be here,” Champ declared, sweeping out the door.
    We were far more seriously concerned, however, when we lost touch with Champ in the chaos surrounding the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Until a few days before North Vietnamese forces had overrun the city, Champ was filing regularly. His sudden silence was ominous; we knew many had died in the final American retreat. There was relief when Associated Press sent out a wire photo of a desperate crowd of Vietnamese trying to board a U.S. embassy bus to the airport. At the door of the bus, struggling to keep the mob at bay, were Henry Champ and a U.S. marine. Champ was fending off a crush of people attempting to climb aboard and likely topple the overloaded vehicle; the scene was frenzied and no doubt dangerous. We had every expectation that Champ had made it.

    The critics of commercial television always fear that sponsors will interfere with news coverage or attempt to influence it in some way. In all my years at the private network, I experienced only one attempt to do so, and it happened early in my tenure as assistant director of the news service.
    One of my responsibilities was the public affairs show W-5 . In mid-1973, OPEC imposed an international oil embargo and energy prices escalated alarmingly. North American oil suppliers were accused of taking advantage of the shortages by jacking up prices more than necessary. To improve their image with a skeptical public, the oil companies launched a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign of which CTV was a major benefactor. The Big Oil ads presented a series of so-called facts in defence of their pricing practices. At the same time, W-5 produced a carefully researched documentary laying bare the many falsehoods at the core of the slick campaign.
    Before the item could be broadcast, management, in the person of Tom Gould, killed it on the grounds that it was libellous. I protested, going so far as to obtain a written opinion from the network’s own lawyers that the story was acceptable for broadcast. No dice; again, a few senior executives refused to let the item run while the W-5 writers cried foul. I found myself caught between intransigent management and a staff in revolt. I had either to lead or to step aside—the latter course ensuring that I’d be forever branded an ethical coward. I refused to axe the piece and asked for a meeting with Murray Chercover, the network president. My immediate boss, Cameron,