High River and the Times: An Alberta Community and Its Weekly Newspaper (review)

From the pages of the High River Times, Paul Voisey argues, it is possible to 'probe the nature of the rural weekly and unravel its purpose' (xx). As reflected in the pages of its weekly newspaper, the self-image of newspaper and community were effectively one and the same.

Appropriately, the story of the Times follows the chronological development of High River and district from the earliest ranching days through the settlement period, the agonies of the Depression, the prosperous but in other ways uncertain post–Second World War years, and finally the transformation of the town into a virtual bedroom community of Calgary. Voisey provides useful insights into how the rural press operated as a business – advertising problems, labour requirements, the impact of technology, and of course questions of profitability. Much of High River's experience chronicled in the paper's pages – its encounter with 'boosterism,' for instance – parallels that of most Prairie communities. On the other hand, some of the material is quite new, such as the intriguing account of the town's largely unsuccessful struggles to develop tourism from the 1930s onward.

Generally, the book portrays weekly rural newspapers to be as bland as city dailies complained they were. As the author argues, the Times saw its role as defending the community, its people, and their values – neither informing nor educating its readers so much as confirming their views and sense of themselves. In this, the Times steadfastly reflected the ideological perspectives of its readership of small businessmen and farmers, so that it was 'read in its entirety and with pleasure by those who already know what it is likely to say' (211).

Central to the overall story that Voisey spins are the Clarks – the grandfather and father of a future prime minister – who owned and edited the paper from the earliest days until it finally passed out of family hands in the 1960s. By offering virtually no criticism of the community, the paper and its editors abdicated the generally accepted responsibilities of journalism. As the author points out, real divisions existed in High River based on class, gender, ethnicity, race, political ideology, and religion, though you wouldn't have known it from reading the Times. One is left to conclude that the Clarks, embracing their own small-c conservative values, followed this course of printing only what united readers and made them feel good willingly, and not just from any recognition of economic self-interest. Under their stewardship, the Times clearly painted and defended a 'fraudulent' portrait of the community and its changing identities. Voisey is not uncritical of the Clarks or their newspaper's failings. Its reliable non-partisanship, shaken only when confronted by the Aberhart government's efforts at press control, was self-serving, while the invisibility of Natives and ongoing attacks on Hutterites, the latter neatly masked in the guise of maintaining 'community values,' confirm that the Times indulged in all the prejudices of its readership. All this said, Voisey correctly argues that the rural newspaper's daily bread was news about 'the folks we know.' While it is easy to ridicule the rural press in this regard, poignant letters from local boys serving overseas in the Second World War, claiming that the 'news' they read in their home town newspaper reminded them what they were fighting for, prove that this kind of journalism satisfied a deep need in rural areas.

To a considerable degree, Voisey's account succeeds in its twin goals of examining the rural weekly and revealing a changing human landscape. It certainly provides us with a strong sense of what the identity of most citizens of High River was, how accurately it reflected their reality, and how it changed over time. To his credit, he doesn't portray the lives of the community as pitiful and stunted, but instead hopeful, narrow, warm, and naïve in equal measure. In the...