Tagged: The Coast
Supine press gallery goes after the leaker who did their job
Earlier today I criticized several Nova Scotia media outlets — The Chronicle-Herald, The CBC, AllNovaScotia.com — for ignoring The Coast’s breathtaking scoop about Mayor Peter Kelly’s mishandled duties as executor of a friend’s estate. The omission makes them look small.
That’s nothing compared to the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s competition to out @vikileaks30, the anonymous tweeter who exposed details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ messy divorce. It’s increasingly clear that many of the same reporters who are now hellbent to expose @vikileaks30 knew Toews had fathered a child after cheating on his wife for years, but helped him keep that secret.
They will of course protest that divorce is a private matter, and reporting such messy details is unseemly, if not downright un-Canadian.
No it’s not. Not when the public figure has cloaked himself in family values, fought to deny other Canadians the right to marry their loved ones, and compared gay wedding ceremonies to Satanic rituals.
When @vikileaks30 finally did expose Toews’s hypocrisy, did the press gallery lapdogs journalists finally do their job and get on that story? No. They responded instead by going after the leaker, thus moving the story away from Toews’ Christianist deceit. Their helpful work paved the way for Toews to spin the story further with demands for a Parliamentary investigation of @vikileaks30′s alleged use of a House of Commons computer connection.
As Georgia Strait blogger Charlie Smith has reminded us, there is one journalist who had the integrity to expose Toews two years ago. In March, 2010, US sex advice columnist Dan Savage, and the originator of the “It Gets Better” campaign, wrote the following:
[A] better example of conservative batshittery would be Vic Toews. Canada’s unofficial “Minister of Family Values,” member of parliament Toews—surprise!—doesn’t like the gays because we’re a threat to the family and the institution of marriage. Toews has described gay marriage ceremonies as satanic “Black Masses” and insisted that adding gays and lesbians to existing Canadian civil rights statutes would bring the “jackboot of fascism [down] on the necks of our people.”
You know where this is going, right?
It turned out that Toews—who once warned that gay marriage could lead to polygamy—was cheating on his wife of 25 years. After getting a much younger woman pregnant, Toews wound up getting divorced. Another marriage destroyed not by gays stomping around in fabulous jackboots, but by another straight “Christian” shitfuck politician slamming his dick into someone who isn’t his wife.
Toews’s affair became public two years ago, but the scandal didn’t destroy him—he became minister of public safety this January—because the Canadian press sniffed that Toews’s affair and divorce were private.
Excuse me, Canadian-press pansies, but a politician who scares up votes attacking the private lives of others, a politician who insists that other people are out to destroy his marriage, can’t be allowed to hide behind “my private business!” when it turns out that the only threat to the politician’s marriage was the politician’s own greasy cock.
Here’s hoping that all straight folks everywhere one day realize that anti-gay ravers come in just two flavors: assholes who are externalizing their own internal struggles against homosexual desires (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Charlie Crist, Joseph Ratzinger, et al.) and assholes who are attempting to compensate for and/or draw attention away from their own moral shortcomings (David Vitter, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Vic Toews, et al.).
Canadian-press pansies, please take note.
Welcome Mayor Savage — The Coast deals Kelly a fatal blow
[See update/correction below] The Coast, a Halifax weekly paper, has produced a devastating account of Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly’s mishandling of the estate of a family friend who had named him as executor and sole trustee of her modest fortune.
In a prodigious piece of reporting, News Editor Tim Bousquet lays out the complex story in relentless detail, layering fact upon devastating fact through 5,000 words, illustrated with cancelled cheques and sketchy legal and financial filings. It’s too complicated to summarize here, but please read it yourself, especially if you are a resident or voter in HRM.
Bousquet’s work sometimes suffers from his habit of wearing his heart on his sleeve, but this time he wisely eschews umbrage and lets the facts of the late Mary Thibeault’s seven-year probate debacle speak for themselves. The accumulated evidence, Kelly’s refusal to comment, and his apparent effort to enlist wronged benefactors in a secrecy pact add up to an indictment of the scandal-plagued mayor. It’s impossible to imagine Kelly surviving an election in light of The Coast’s revelations.
Politically, His Worship is a dead duck.
It will take a lot of work for other Metro news organizations to catch up with Bousquet’s reportage, but I was surprised to see most of them ignore the story in their Friday editions. The ethical thing would have been to run a short creditor piece — “The Coast weekly reported Thursday that…” with comment from the Mayor and Savage — and the get their top reporters on the job in earnest Friday.
They chose instead to pretend Bousquet’s shocking revelations did not exist. The free tabloid Metro was an exception, as was were the Rick Howe Show and CTV-Atlantic, both of which interviewed Bousquet.
No doubt these news organizations are embarrassed that The Coast, known mainly as a free circulation entertainment paper and a vehicle for syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, scooped them so badly on a story that was already in the public domain. But ignoring their competitor’s accomplishment, and their mayor’s shenanigans, only makes them look small. (Yes Caroline, Andrew, Sarah, and Steve, I’m looking at you.)
[Update/Correction] Contrary to my initial post, CTV-Atlantic did cover the story by running an interview with Bousquet. Apologies for the mistake, and thanks to Greg Beaulieu for the correction.
Kansas finds a bed
At the Valley Motel, somewhere east of Manistique, on Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, the peripatetic Jane Kansas talked Dave, the proprietor, into a cut rate of $30 for this beauty. Later, Dave and his twin daughters showed up with a dinner of steak, real fries, shrimp, rice, cheese, and olives.
“We thought on your walk you might not get many home cooked meals,” Dave explained.
Before bedtime, the girls returned with a banana and a doughnut for dessert.
To the people Jane encounters on her epic walk across the American Midwest, she must seem the oddest of strangers: a short, sunburned woman in late middle age, pushing her travelling gear in a wheeled cart across half a dozen US states – big ones, smack in the heartland. By any normal standard, it’s a cockamamie venture.
And yet, again and again, as Jane documents in her blog at The Coast’s website, people you might expect to have nothing whatever in common with a wandering eccentric respond with a combination of curiosity, concern, and kindness that quickly morphs into friendship. They give her meals, rides, beds, advice, lore, places to camp. She responds with her trademark witty banter and the sort of genuine interest in her hosts’ lives that cannot be faked.
Jane is on the Northern Peninsula in quixotic hopes of catching a ferry to Drummond Island, and then caging a lift across North Channel and the Canada-US border to Manitoulin Island, where her sister has a summer cottage.
The guy at the fish store assures her this is impossible. The guys on the ferry share his opinion.
But an elderly couple in a golf cart direct her to a guy named Tom, whose boat isn’t in the water, but who suggests she try the Thomases or the Zelnicks, just down the road. Tom also gives her a place to camp for the night. At the Zelnicks, next morning, she meets Helen, who invites her in for coffee, and husband Dave. They send her next door to see Jim, and before you can say, “Homeland Security,” Jim, Jane, Helen, and Dave are in Jim’s powerboat, gunkholing along the bays and islands of northeastern Michigan en route to Richard’s Landing, Ontario, and a brunch of eggs over easy, home fries, bacon, and toast. Simple as that. Simple and astounding.
Kansas travelog
The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia’s most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned.
Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to the Dear Halifax section of The Coast website. From Friday’s entry:
Just out of Turtle Lake [North Dakota] I see the McClusky Canal and its Maintenance Roads on either side. It’s a beautiful day and I take the canal. The walking is good. In the canal are ducks which take flight at my approach and scare the big brown carp who twitch their tails on the surface and glide into the depths. Turtles plop off their sunny rocks into the water. A dear hightails it into some scrub. Handsome gold-headed birds hang out with the red-winged blackbirds. I think about the way to do things—experiencing the days moment by moment, one step at a time. Taking it as it comes—all the T-shirt wisdom that is so simple and brilliant and easily forgotten. I delight in my delightedness that life and this trip is a series of problem-solving exercises and decisions. Just what I wanted! To practice solving problems. I’m as happy as a lark. Is this trip my life or just something I’m doing? I trundle along, calling to cows I see, stopping to admire birds in marshes. I’m a one-woman life-is-what-you-make-it songbird.
What Nova Scotia journalist writes this well? Harry Thurston, maybe? Silver Donald Cameron on his best days? Harry Bruce? None of these have Jane’s knack for quirky insights combined with raw self-exposure.
Longtime Kansas fans will be relieved to know that the idyllic frolic along the McClusky Canal ends badly. A lightning storm soaks her tent and scant worldly possessions, and Jane ends up back in Turtle Lake, arriving in the rear seat of a police cruiser — not her first experience with this mode of conveyance.
Anonymous, ’til we decide to out you
Lindsay Brown doesn’t like anonymous posting:
The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary.
First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters.
Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They’ll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware.
The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic way the contradiction tolerated by media who encourage online “anonymity”. We know that the Herald is an ethical news organization, so it follows that the paper regards anonymous commentary as ethical. But the story on the premier’s chief of staff is predicated on the idea that it was UNethical for him to post anonymously. So, either posting anonymously was unethical, or the newspaper acted unethically when it identified the poster. The Herald can’t have it both ways. Media outrage across the country at the anonymous postings from Helena Guergis’s staff in March shows our local paper has plenty of company — they are all wallowing together in a frothy hot-tub of contradiction.
They can defend themselves by arguing that anonymous commentary is the special domain the elusive “ordinary citizen”, and that the public has a right to know when someone with a vested interest or bias has trespassed. That leaves online media with two options: they can check every anonymous post to ensure that its author is in fact ordinary; or they can require posters to sign their work and allow readers to determine for themselves how much credibility the writer deserves. The latter continues to work well on letters-to-the-editor pages.
A commenter on the Herald website called LilacLover also sees the contradiction:
So let me get this straight. The Chronicle Herald facilitates a public web forum, where readers can post comments with relative anonymity. However, if those comments call into question the Chronicle Herald’s objectivity on a particular story, then that reader can expect to be tracked down, repeatedly contacted, and exposed on the front page? If so, then I think Dan O’Connor’s comparison to Frank magazine may in fact be legitimate. I just registered today, to make this comment, and nowhere did I see a location to even enter my real name or did I see a Terms of Use* clause, informing me of this seemingly witch-hunt practice.
*The Herald does have a Terms of Use clause.
The Coast and Justice Robertson were both wrong
An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast’s craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson.
The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper’s website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation.
Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them to the judicial wolves. The paper deleted the comments and published a grovelling apology, effectively inoculating itself from any exposure to a libel suit. It also declined to contest the request for a disclosure order, which Robertson granted to sanctimonious applause from several practitioners of the fourth estate, many of whom allow anonymous (and often scurrilous) posting on their own websites.
Unlike Robertson, the Ontario Court had the benefit of hearing both sides of this argument, and found, as Paul Schneidereit reports in yesterday’s Chronicle-Herald:
[T]hat the value of freedom of expression is so fundamental that defamation lawsuits against anonymous Net commenters are not entitled to automatically obtain information that could lead to their identities being unmasked…
[The decision] raises fresh questions about how quickly a Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice last month ordered the Coast and Google to cough up information that may identify several individuals who anonymously posted, and emailed, allegedly defamatory messages about senior members of the Halifax Fire Department in 2009.
The Ontario Court did not establish an unlimited right to post comments anonymously. Rather, it found that the posters’ Charter rights of free expression and privacy must be balanced against the the public interest in promoting the administration of justice.
Before ordering disclosure, the court ruled, a judge must consider whether the anonymous posters had a reasonable expectation of anonymity; whether the would-be plaintiff has established a prima facie case of libel; whether the plaintiff is acting in good faith; and whether the public interests favouring disclosure outweigh the posters’ legitimate interests of freedom of expression and right to privacy.
The good faith issue could be significant in the Nova Scotia case if it turns out the officers’ real reason for seeking disclosure was not to facilitate a libel suit but to identify members of the fire service who could be disciplined or fired.
Contrarian has not read the comments, and has no opinion as to their veracity or fairness. But let’s assume, hypothetically, that they included accusations of racism. Racism is a critical public issue in Nova Scotia. It is also an issue fraught with emotion, and anyone accused of racism is likely to feel defamed. In such a circumstance, courts should give the broadest possible scope to free debate on an issue of vital public importance, and not restrict that debate out of concern for the tender feelings of public officials who may be swept up in it.
Robertson considered none of these factors. Instead, she assumed the posters had libelled the officers, and declared, peremptorily, that “the court does not condone the conduct of anonymous internet users who make defamatory comments and they like other people have to be accountable for their actions.”
Pretty shoddy all around.
The Coast caves – feedback
Two readers see The Coast’s failure to lift a finger in defense of its reader-posters not as an unwelcome blow to free expression but as an overdue comeuppance for the well-known excesses of anonymous Internet posting.
Bill Turpin writes:
The Coast’s greatest failure to its readers was in allowing anonymous posts in the first place. It’s The Coast, not Samizdat, and this is Canada, not the former Soviet Union. You’re free to write what you want in this country, subject to defamation laws which, while imperfect, are not odious. There is no need to hide behind an alias. But when you do, you don’t have to think about what you’re saying, you don’t have to ask yourself where your “facts” originate, you don’t have to consider the reputation of the people you’re writing about, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’ve succeeded in communicating something. The resulting discussion rarely rises above eight-year-olds debating whether girls should be allowed in their tree-house. It’s a poor excuse for what Parker calls “free expression.” By publishing anonymous posts, online media have squandered an opportunity to enhance public discourse and chosen to debase it instead.
It’s interesting to see that The Coast promptly and fulsomely apologized for the comments at issue, which all but eliminates its own legal liability. This sends an additional message to anonymous commentators, i.e., not only is your anonymity illusory, but when you choose anonymity, you’re solely responsible for what you write. For this, The Coast deserves our gratitude.
Defamation suits are expensive for all concerned, even thought most don’t make it to court. This creates an unfair advantage for those who can afford them and it would be nice to see the law changed to level the playing field. Meanwhile, though, it would be wonderfully ironic if a defamation suit finally managed to let the sun shine on the subterranean world of online “commentary”
Dana Phillip Doiron agrees:
I don’t believe that individuals or groups should be allowed to use anonymous posting to slander someone with impunity. The “comment” facility is akin to letters from the editor or op ed commentary in a printed news medium and, the “name withheld” feature encourages comment from sources (employees, relatives, neighbours, etc.) who would not participate were their name published. It isn’t a license to slander. It is the policy of most media to accept commentary as long as they have the contact information of the source. Readers should have the level of confidence in the information that goes with the possibility of identification and accountability in court and the subject of commentary should have that recourse.
I share Bill and Dana’s distaste for the un-moderated, anonymous newspaper comment sections; they are havens for ignorant bile. That’s why comments on Contrarian are closely moderated (though sometimes anonymous). But the legal and ethical issues around anonymous Internet posting are more complicated than Bill and Dana let on, and you don’t have to be a fan of anonymous posts to believe The Coast shirked its responsibilities here.
The Coast has long encouraged anonymous posting, in the newspaper and on line. (True, as co-founder, editor, and part-owner Kyle Shaw argued in an email to me, the paper does require online posters to create a profile that includes a working email address, but this profile may have scant connection to their real life identities.)
If The Coast “deserves our gratitude” for having chilled anonymous expression, it certainly chose a sneaky route to that end. Having lured their readers down the garden path of anonymity, the paper owed them an ethical obligation to at least ensure that the judge in the case had the benefit of hearing both sides of the anonymity debate.
When an Ottawa judge ordered a conservative website to cough up identifying information about eight “John Does” who had posted allegedly defamatory comments on the site, the website appealed, and was joined by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
Both argued that a court should issue such an order only after a plaintiff has demonstrated a prima facie case for defamation, not merely leveled an accusation. Even then, the groups argued, a court should order disclosure only after determining, on the merits, that the public interest in disclosure outweighs concern for freedom of expression and privacy. As the Ottawa Citizen’s Don Butler reported:
In its factum, the CCLA argues anonymous expression on the Internet “fosters a veritable ‘marketplace of ideas’ online.
“Anonymity reduces the possibility of identification and fear of reprisal and encourages individuals to engage in legitimate, even unpopular, expression,” the civil liberties group says.
“It permits participation in public debate by those who would otherwise remain silent out of fear of persecution, loss of status or ostracism.”
Unlike Madame Justice Heather Robertson, who rushed to judgment having heard only one side of the argument, a three-judge panel of the Ontario Sessional Court has reserved its decision.
Although the lawyer for the two Halifax fire officials who sought disclosure said the identities were needed so they could commence a libel action, I am skeptical. It seems at least possible that the real purpose is one of command and control: to unmask any Halifax firefighters among the anonymous posters and take disciplinary action against them. If so, the application was an abuse of court processes. One consequence of The Coast’s failure to contest the application is that this possibility was never considered or tested by the court.
The issue before Justice Robertson might better have been, “Should accusations of racism against public figures, however intemperate, be a firing offense? And if so, how can minority employees combat what they genuinely believe to be racism in a public organization?”
This smells like a classic SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation—with taxpayers footing the bill, and The Coast acquiescing. It makes the paper’s left-wing editorial stance look more like a marketing ploy than anything borne of conviction.
I want to stress again that I have no knowledge of, or opinions about, the inner workings of the Halifax Fire Department; I have not read the comments at issue in this application; I have no opinion about their merits, about the merits of the Halifax Fire Service, or about its officials.
The Coast caves
The former idealists who built The Coast into a substantial Halifax institution let down their readers and their craft today by failing to contest an order to help identify people who posted controversial opinions on their website.
Madam Justice Heather Robertson granted an application by HRM Fire Chief Bill Mosher and Deputy Chief Stephen Thurber, who say the posters made allegations of racism, cronyism and incompetence against them.
I want to stress that Contrarian has not read the comments in question, or the article that provoked them, and I have no opinion as to the merits of the dispute. But I think the Coast’s failure to stand up for their readers, and for free expression, stinks.
Mosher and Thurber are presumed to be in the early stages of a defamation action against the posters, but a reasonable person could be forgiven for suspecting their real goal is to identify any department employees among the posters, for the avowed purpose of imposing “consequences,” as they put it. I take this to mean any firefighters in the group should not count on a long career.
In my contrary opinion, that’s an abuse of the court process.
Coast editor Kyle Shaw says the newspaper will comply with the order. No problem there. Everyone has to comply with legal court orders. What’s shocking and disappointing is the Coast’s failure to contest the granting of order. It made no representations to the court. The paper didn’t lift a finger to protect the reader-posters it has encouraged to post anonymously.
Coast news editor on anonymous sources
Tim Bousquet’s rules for using anonymous sources:
- The information gained through granting anonymity is not otherwise available. Or, put another way, granting anonymity is not a shortcut to doing the hard work of gathering solid information and good reporting.
- The anonymous source must have something to lose, should anonymity not be given: loss of a job, etc.
- Using an anonymous source must result in some positive public good. “Spinning” someone’s view is not a positive public good.
Bousquet adds:
When I was a reporter at a daily in the states, I had a publisher who wouldn’t allow me to use anonymous sources at all. At the time, I felt that policy unduly constrained me, but I soon discovered it made me a better reporter: I couldn’t just put any old shit out there, I had to document everything, peg every assertion to a named source or document, etc. Mostly, as anonymity is used today by much of the press, it’s an excuse for lazy reporting.
Contrarian reader Stan Jones also weighs in on Ibbitson’s practice of letting Harper operatives issue dubious and partisan talking points without identifying themselves:
I have always thought Ibbitson’s main role was to transcribe whatever was the day’s conservative talking point into grammatical English. So I never read him, preferring to go directly to the source for my daily dose of nonsense.
Green Shambhala breakdown
The late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (left) and modern day acolyte Ryan Watson, outgoing leader of Nova Scotia's Green Party
Coast News Editor Tim Bousquet has stirred things up with his report of a festering schism within Halifax’s Shambhala Buddhist community, and Green Party gadfly Mike Marshall claims the same breach underlies bizarre behaviour by outgoing party leader Ryan Watson and his executive.
Bousquet reports that dissidents, including Mark Szpakowski, Ed Michalik, and Andrew Safer, have set up RadioFreeShambhala, a website to foster discussion they say mainstream Shambhala leadership discourages.
