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In Toronto this week, news broke once again about the city’s mayor, Rob Ford. There was a new video, and one of the biggest papers in Canada had paid a drug dealer for evidence it existed. It was one of three stories that emerged that night, and along with it, the hint of a shift in the Canadian journalism landscape.
Combined, the stories attained (as Twitter users dubbed it) #peakbatshit, but the most eye-popping of all was the news Ford had been videotaped again. The new video was allegedly recorded Saturday night, and Ford was reportedly seen in it “taking a drag from a long copper-coloured pipe, exhaling a cloud of smoke and then frantically shaking his right hand”. Ford issued a statement that said he would step out of his role to seek help. He admitted he has “a problem with alcohol” and the choices he makes while under its influence. Thursday morning, he left.
As the city absorbed his paper’s story, the Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief, David Walmsley, explained why the paper chose to publish still photos of the new video. Equally importantly, he also repeated the Globe had paid an admitted drug dealer $10,000 to get them. “This is not our normal practice,” he wrote. Canadian media would, generally speaking, never do what US site Gawker did, when it raised $200,000 in an attempt to buy the first Ford crack video. Still, it’s now the second time a Toronto paper has paid smaller sums for Rob Ford images.
Traditionally, Canada’s journalists have been reluctant to publish the private details of public lives until a point where it is clear the former either unduly influences the latter, or when a hypocrisy is revealed by their juxtaposition. And usually information is not considered for sale. Rob Ford’s situation offered a challenge in both cases. In the first case, Walmsley reminded readers, details of Ford’s private life are now a matter of public interest. “He is supposed to be the guardian of our city,” he wrote. The money is trickier.
The Globe had a precedent for paying, thanks to its rival city paper. Though the Toronto Star refused to pay $100,000 for the original Ford video it reported last year, it paid $5,000 in November to obtain video of Ford in a drunken rant. At the time, the paper’s editor, Michael Cooke, also cited the “huge public interest both in Toronto and worldwide”. Cooke contended the Star wasn’t paying for information (something its code of ethics expressly prohibits), but rather for “a video, something newspapers and TV stations do every day”.
Chris Waddell, director of Carleton University’s school of journalism and communication, says both Cooke and Walmsley’s decisions were generally consistent with Canadian journalism tradition. “Public figures can’t leave themselves open to blackmail and extortion,” he said.
Still, something has changed: the burden of proof.
Only about 33% of Canadians trust journalists and newspapers. The figure is similar in Britain, where trust in journalists has plummeted in the last decade. (In the US, about 60% of people don't trust the media, according to a Gallup poll.) Why? Bombarded by endlessly equated information online, news readers are increasingly skeptical of a single version of events – even if it is from a trained reporter – and particularly if it’s just words. For a web-savvy public, it’s "pic or it didn’t happen".
Ford and his team exploited this to the point that his first three years in office were defined by his war with the media. “The Fords’ claims … were so at odds with reported facts that the public was being asked repeatedly to choose whose version of reality to accept,” Ivor Tossell wrote for the Walrus. Seen this way in retrospect, Ford’s initial denial of the first video’s existence last March was telling. “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist,” he said. It presented a false dichotomy in which the video’s very existence was predicated on Ford having seen it. His challenge for the media? Show it or shut it.
“I think there’s … been some reaction in the media at the lack of reaction there’s been to the stories they’ve done about Mr Ford,” Waddell said. That, he said, “may have driven the idea of: ‘We want to demonstrate that it’s absolutely definitive, and if we have to pay money to do it, we’re prepared to pay money to do it.’”
Welcome to the new reality in Canadian journalism in which, as Ford himself repeated, “actions speak louder than words.”
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