Canadian journalists have moved the goalposts in pursuit of alleged Rob Ford crack scandal
Christie Blatchford
13/05/24
So distressing do I find the Rob Ford spectacle that covering a terrible murder trial in Ottawa, as I did for a couple of days this week and last, came almost as a reprieve, a step out of the gutter.
It is diminishing even to watch the daily unfolding of the story, the latest installment of which late Friday saw the Toronto Mayor belatedly deny that he uses or is addicted to crack cocaine.
As for the cellphone video at the bloody heart of the whole business, Mr. Ford said merely, “I can’t comment on a video that I’ve never seen or does not exist.”
In this at least, the Mayor isn’t alone.
At this writing, aside from the Rexdale drug dealers who are reportedly shopping about the video of Mr. Ford allegedly smoking crack and grunting disgraceful slurs, only three people — an editor with the U.S. gossip site Gawker and two reporters at the Toronto Star — can even claim to have seen it.
Yet here I am, having another go at the subject. I do it for two reasons.
The first was illustrated by Toronto’s deputy mayor, Doug Holyday, who came before the press pack at City Hall before the Mayor did and pulled off the impossible — he managed to address the issue in a straightforward manner, but the compassion he felt for Rob Ford the man was palpable.
Mr. Holyday did all the right things.
He urged the Mayor to address the public, and to judge by Mr. Ford’s thanks a few hours later, his opinion carried some real weight.
Mr. Holyday reassured the public, not that the public ought to have needed it because bureaucracies are after all self-sustaining, that things are still running tickety-boo. Water still comes out of the tap; you can still check out a book at the library; police and fire are still on the job and, oh yes, council has met this week (to kibosh the casino) and so has the executive committee.
He refused to get in the muck. He wouldn’t call the situation a crisis. He wouldn’t play pop psychologist, saying only, “If he [the Mayor] has problems, he should do something about it.”
But mostly, in his evident concern for Mr. Ford’s welfare — “I just think it’s a lot of pressure on him” — Mr. Holyday injected a note of kindness that has been almost entirely absent, eight days into the saga.
He is such an adult, and such a decent, nice one.
Whatever else, the city has been witnessing the destruction — self-destruction, if you prefer — of a fellow human being.
It ought not to be a joyous occasion, whatever your politics, to watch a man being humiliated in public, dogged by reporters at every turn, and lose the thing that seemed to matter to him as much as anything else in the world, and to bring him joy — his volunteer job as the coach of the Don Bosco football team.
Neither should it be a source of glee, and gleeful does describe the Gawker crowdfunding efforts (at $145,000 as of 5 p.m. Friday) to raise $200,000 for the entrepreneurial drugsters.
But the thing that is troubling to me, and which has gone largely unnoticed or unremarked-upon, is how the ground has shifted in the practice of journalism in this country.
This coalesced in my head mid-week, when I got a smart email from a reader in Quebec named Charles Bogue, and who has given me the green light to quote from it.
Mr. Bogue wrote after I had last typed on this topic, defending both the Star and in particular its fine reporters, Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle, who saw the video in question. Mr. Bogue was heartened by what I’d written, he said, though still retained a concern about the story.
“My understanding,” he wrote, “is that one of the most fundamental rules of good journalism is to always — always — obtain a corroborating source for any material allegation before a story is published.
“Furthermore, when someone’s personal reputation is at stake, simple human decency if not journalistic professionalism, ought to dictate particular care in sourcing any allegations, since informants may have many and diverse motives other than a pristine dedication to the truth for feeding a juicy story to a journalist.
“The Star has very conspicuously run, without any form of corroboration, a story it obtained from a couple of professional criminals, and unless I am missing something, I find it appalling that such a practice can be passed off as good journalism.”
Mr. Bogue is correct about much and maybe all of that, I think.
Traditional practice is that reporters do seek corroborating sources (the corroboration here, I suppose, came from the reputable reporters who watched the video, three times, from the back seat of a parked car) and certainly in years past, Canadian newspapers are unlikely to have gone to town on the say-so of people as dubious as drug dealers.
As Mr. Bogue points out, these folks “have an obvious motive for concocting a real whopper, to wit: The market value of a video that purportedly shows Rob Ford smoking crack will be considerably higher than that of a video showing him smoking some less noxious substance; and the market value of a video determined to be fraudulent will be zero…
“The Star is acting a bit like the person who buys ‘an authentic Rolex’ from some guy who sells it out of the trunk of his car for $500.
“ ‘Nice chap; didn’t quite catch his name, but he assured me himself that the watch is authentic.’ ”
Add to that a couple of other facts: Gawker said this week it has lost contact with the video seller, who has apparently gone to ground, and in an interview Thursday with 680 News, Mr. Donovan also said his paper is “certainly considering” buying the video, though he called the asking price “outlandish.” Not paying for stories has heretofore been a badge of pride for Canadian journalists.
It’s inarguable, I think, that with this story, the goalposts of the newspaper business in this country have been moved. They won’t be moved backwards.
Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com
OTUS is some pretty serious stuff, that requires serious thought and discussion and being able to truly evaluate the big picture consequences of these incidents, which mainstream media has all but proven they are completely incapable of doing.
