Nonetheless, some of the reporting has raised eyebrows, not to say qualms, pushing boundaries that might not have been pushed in the past. The Star’s story on a video of the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, purportedly smoking a crack pipe, was dismissed in many quarters, since the paper was unable or unwilling to obtain the video itself, but relied on reporters’ accounts of it.
The Globe’s report on Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother, and his alleged involvement in the drug trade as a young man was also widely criticized, not only for being based almost exclusively on unnamed sources, but on grounds of relevance: was it really in the public interest to poke about in what he might or might not have done 30 years ago, long before he was in public life?
The stories, in short, raise two questions: 1. What do we know? How much certainty does a paper need before going to press with a story, and how much weight should readers attach to it? And 2. What should we know? When is it justified for the press to report on the private behaviour of public figures, past or present?
I happen to believe the two stories passed these tests. But I can’t imagine it was an easy decision for either paper — not only because they were pushing boundaries, but because it’s not obvious where the boundaries are. You never have perfect certainty with any story. Nor is the line between private and public so hard and fast as some would have it. It’s a judgment call in either case.
Let’s take the second question first. Often people will assert a public figure’s private life is never relevant. Even the payment of $90,000 to Mike Duffy by the prime minister’s chief of staff was ruled off-limits by some critics: “What Nigel Wright does with his own money is his business.” That’s plainly absurd — a payment by one serving public official to another is hardly a private matter.
But neither should we accept the other extreme, that everything is fair game. The test, it seems to me, is whether the behaviour is something a fair-minded reader would find relevant in assessing a person’s fitness for public office. Again, there’s no simple rule book we can consult for this: it requires us to exercise judgment.
If, for example, the behaviour is so common as to be trivial — if a politician drank as a teenager, say — everyone recognizes it’s not worth reporting. Even here, though, standards change over time. Once, it might have been considered newsworthy that a politician was homosexual. Nowadays it would, rightfully, bring scorn down on any paper that published it. We seem to be arriving at the same understanding with regard to pot use, at least as a “youthful indiscretion.”
But the allegations were not that Doug Ford used drugs, but that he dealt them: indeed, that he was a fairly major supplier of hashish, the dealer to other dealers, and for some years. This raises a number of questions: who, in that alleged scenario, would his suppliers have been? Can you really just cut off all ties with those sorts of people? And wouldn’t a history of family involvement in the drug trade be relevant to the mayor’s alleged drug use?
So no, I don’t think we can just shrug, “it’s his private life,” or “it was long ago.” If the alleged misdeed is serious enough, it may indeed be relevant. And if the matter is in doubt? Publish, and trust the people’s judgment. There’s a tendency to see the question in stark, binary terms, as if the mere reporting of some private matter meant automatic disqualification from public life. But time and again the public disproves that. The American people knew Bill Clinton cheated on his wife: they elected him anyway, twice.
But even if relevant, were the stories reliable? Can we believe a story based on anonymous sources, or unverified videos? Skepticism is certainly in order. But there’s a point at which an obstinate refusal to draw reasonable inferences from the evidence — to exercise judgment — crosses from skepticism into denial.
We are not dealing with some rumour on an internet comment board here. The Globe story cited 10 sources; it was run through layers of editors, and lawyers after them. The Star’s story was based on the reporters’ first-hand observations, the same as if they had witnessed a fire. To discount their story, you either have to believe they made it all up, or they had the wrong man, or the video was faked. (An impossibility, according to people who know the technology.)
That doesn’t prove either story is true. It does suggest we should not simply dismiss them out of hand. The allegations are so grave that both papers would have known they were betting the franchise if they were found to be in error. Is it plausible they would do so without having serious and substantial grounds to believe they were true — not absolute certainty, perhaps, but something near to it? Put it this way: which requires the more elaborate and unlikely set of conditions to hold — that the stories are true, or that they are false?
Everyone is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. But the presumption of innocence does not require us to believe in fairy tales.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Andrew Coyne
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