VANCOUVER'S GRITTY CLOSE-UP

Working with students from UBC's Graduate School of Journalism, former
CBS anchor Dan Rather takes an unflinching look at the drug-riddled
Downtown Eastside for his newsmagazine show

VANCOUVER -- When Dan Rather arrived in Vancouver last fall to do a
story about the notoriously troubled Downtown Eastside, he was armed
with piles of research provided by journalism students at the
University of British Columbia.

"This was not a case where the school lent its name to it and we did
most of the work," Rather said during an interview last week from New
York. "[The students] did a lot of the work."

The result of that collaboration, A Safe Place to Shoot Up, profiles
the not-so-photogenic side of Vancouver with visuals you won't see in
any tourism brochure or Olympic marketing campaign. Rather greets
viewers at the show's opening, "Good evening from beautiful Vancouver,
Canada," but the initial shots of scenic English Bay, the North Shore
mountains and sandy beaches quickly give way to scenes from the
streets and alleyways of the Downtown Eastside, where syringes litter
sidewalks, sex workers await customers and drug addicts shoot up in
broad daylight.

Rather calls it "a city of contrasts" in his report, describing "a landscape
studded with snow-capped mountains and multimillion-dollar condos cradling a
downtown that's home to one of the worst urban blights in North America." He
cites stunning statistics from the United Nations: One in three residents of
the Downtown Eastside is HIV-positive, and the rate of hepatitis C infection
is 70 per cent.

The plight of the Downtown Eastside is not exactly news to
Vancouverites. The area, in fact, is often a first stop for
journalists - or journalism students - new to the city, and looking
for a good story to tell.

But this time, the story is being fronted by a celebrity journalist
and will get international airplay on HDNet, a television network
based in Dallas, which also streams already-aired stories online. So
Vancouver's reputation as the most livable city in the world (a title,
the story notes, the city has earned repeatedly) may be in for a
little tarnishing.

Rather, 76, is a veteran journalist who has covered events ranging
from wars and elections to the John F. Kennedy assassination. He
joined HDNet in 2006, a year after his bitter departure from long-time
employer CBS.

Rather is now suing CBS, arguing the network and its executives made
him a scapegoat for a questionable story that aired about President
George W. Bush's military service. He is expecting a ruling to be made
soon - possibly this week - in CBS's move to have the case dismissed.
At the same time, the legal discovery process is continuing.

"I have no illusions about this," Rather says. "I knew going into it
that it would be a long, hard, expensive road [with] odds against."

Rather said he's focusing not on the lawsuit but on his new show,
which launched on HDNet three months ago.

The idea for A Safe Place to Shoot Up came from the advanced TV class
at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. Hoping to introduce his
second-year masters students to the real world of working journalism,
associate professor (and long-time 60 Minutes producer) Peter Klein
developed a course in which students would spend a semester producing
an item for Dan Rather Reports. The students were each asked to come
up with a story idea for the show.

Ten pitches were whittled down to three, and those were presented to
Rather and his producers. They chose to tell the story of Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside. The students then got to work - doing research,
lining up interviews, writing questions for Rather to ask.

"A number of them have said it was the highlight of their journalism
education experience," says Klein. "I think initially there was that
star quality, anticipating working with a star journalist ... [but]
there was a wonderful rapport between them and I think they lost that
sort of starry-eyed thing really quickly."

To the students, "Mr. Rather" became "Dan" and eventually they felt
comfortable making suggestions to the highly experienced reporter. "He
was really like the farthest from a prima donna - really easy going,"
Klein says.

The half-hour of television focuses heavily on the safe-injection site
for drug addicts, but also touches on homelessness, a plan by sex
workers to open a prostitute-run brothel, the trial of mass-murderer
Robert Pickton and the proposal being touted by Vancouver Mayor Sam
Sullivan known as CAST (Chronic Addiction Substitute Treatment) that
would see addicts get their drugs from pharmacies rather than on the
street. Lurking in the background is the spectre of the Winter
Olympics, two years away.

Before shooting this story, Rather had been to Vancouver many times.
But he had never before walked the streets of the Downtown Eastside.
When he did last November, even after extensive research, he was still
surprised by what he saw - in particular how far the squalid
neighbourhood stretches.

"It's impossible to spend time [in the Downtown Eastside] and not
wonder to oneself how such a crime-ridden, poverty-devastated area
could exist side by side and literally right in the midst of what is
clearly a wealthy community," Rather says. "Very few places in the
world would ... have those contrasts, literally cheek by jowl."

He was impressed, though, with the thinking-outside-the-box attempts
at solutions, and by the idealism displayed by those trying to clean
up the city's problems - from the volunteers at the safe injection
site all the way up to the mayor's office.

"As a journalist, I try hard not to be cynical, but part of my job is
to be skeptical.... Do I think the problems can be addressed in the
main and overall and substantially between now and Olympic time? I
have my doubts," he says. "I'd love to be proven wrong."