Take This Reporting Job and Shove It

Did Kai Nagata make a principled stand in leaving CTV, or did he just give up?

Until last week, Kai Nagata was a 24-year-old CTV bureau chief at Quebec's National Assembly, a plum job for any reporter under the age of 40. But he quit suddenly on Friday, and, in a lengthy screed on his blog, explained that he was fed up with the corporate influence on the network's editorial choices, such as wall-to-wall coverage of the Royal visit, and that he was stifled from sharing his opinions on, for example, the Conservative government's supposed war on science. Nagata's sign-off from the TV news world, though, has perhaps raised more scorn from his former peers than anything else.

National Post reporter Jessica Hume, for example, figures “Nagata’s post exposes little about journalism in Canada, and an uncomfortable lot about his own ignorance of the industry.” Hume says that there is about as little interference in news delivery in Canada as there possibly could be while still remaining profitable. And as far as kowtowing to the supposedly philistinian tastes of viewers instead of delivering unflinching reportage, Hume has news for Nagata: “I’m pretty sure if viewers had their way, it’d be hockey and Will and Kate all the time, and we’d keep up with the Kardashians on Sundays.” Natch. If you think of CBC's coverage of the Royal visit as a way to drum up advertising dollars to support The Fifth Estate, it becomes a lot more palatable.

Sandra Thomas, a staff writer with the Vancouver Courier, basically calls Nagata a quitter for “[driving] away into the sunset” instead of doing the hard, and often unnoticed, work that goes into most reporting. As for Nagata's claim that there's too much pressure on TV reporters to look like models, Thomas deadpans that “the pressure for Rex Murphy, Terry Milewski and Peter Mansbridge to remain national sex symbols must be fierce, so I’m with Nagata on that one.”

Columnist/Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella tells the Toronto Star that, “although I understand his cynicism and disaffection, the very people he is opposing are counting on him remaining disaffected and withdrawn from the process ... I just hope that his self-removal from the public debate isn’t permanent,” because otherwise, the Toryists have won, or something like that.

What we can't figure out is: If he's so frustrated with the image-obsessed, corporate nature of TV news, why doesn't he just become a good ol' fashioned print reporter? Trust us, good looks are hardly required to get ahead in most newsrooms, and the commitment to that whole “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” thing that Nagata feels is lacking at CTV and CBC would be more than welcome at any newspaper in the country. Plus, he's obviously a capable writer, as he coughed up 3,000 words on why he quit his job (which is why newspapers have editors). Either way, we hear CTV's hiring. A thousand, young, hungry, underemployed journalists would kill for that gig.