Manufactured impressions: A case of a journalism malfunction

PERSPECTIVE | By DAN HODDINOTT

Journalism took it on the chin last Wednesday when the CBC and the Toronto Star each decided to publish, without having validated, assertions by two high-profile Vaughan activists that cast aspersions on the integrity of incumbent MP Julian Fantino and created the false impression that resignations were occurring in the local Conservative riding association as a result.

No evidence to support the controversy implied in the headline “Conservatives quit over health-care money” was provided in the story it published online, but the CBC pushed the premise that Conservatives were resigning due to moral outrage about Fantino’s handling of federal funds — $10 million earmarked for a local health care project — all the way up to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

The “Baghdad Bob moment” of the current federal election cycle would follow, when Ignatieff, who they caught up with on the campaign trail in Quebec, chimed in confidently about a situation in Vaughan that simply did not exist.

“I think the Julian Fantino story speaks for itself,” Ignatieff said, referring to the Wednesday story in which über-activists Richard Lorello and Tracey Kent had been given carte blanche to claim that nepotism was in play in Fantino’s handling of the federal funds. “And the fact that someone resigned from his inner campaign circle indicates, you know, real doubts within the Conservative camp as to the appropriateness of this bit of government largesse to help a Conservative candidate.

“It doesn’t sit well, it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right and Conservatives themselves are embarrassed by it.”

There never was a controversy in Vaughan involving any combination of Fantino, the local Conservative riding association or the hospital funding project, for which Fantino had announced on March 16 the federal government would be providing the $10 million to go toward infrastructure. No stories of “embarrassed” Vaughan Conservatives had surfaced in any quarter, and no one from Fantino’s “inner campaign circle” had resigned because of concerns about funding.

Kent had earlier departed the Fantino campaign team, but in her “open letter” of resignation, which she had been promoting on Twitter more than a week before this story broke, she said it was because she was unhappy with Fantino having embraced former Liberal rival Tony Genco’s recent endorsement. The letter made no mention of funding concerns.

The controversy that did arise was actually created by CBC online writers John Nicol and Dave Seglins themselves. They advanced the musings of Lorello and, to a lesser extent Kent, as legitimate news, without identifying their sources as activists who are widely known on the Vaughan political scene. Readers were also not told that Lorello has been very public in voicing reservations about the role of the Vaughan Health Campus of Care (the expected recipient of the federal funds) in the process of bringing a hospital to the city. Nicol and Seglins made no apparent effort to verify the claims the activists made, in spite of a glaring absence of awareness of any controversy indicated in quotes from Fantino political foes and from York Central Hospital president Altaf Stationawala.

The Toronto Star was not far behind, with reporter Allison Cross soon after publishing what looked to be a rewrite of either the CBC story or the same press release.

Lorello and Kent were the only sources quoted in either of the two stories to indicate they perceived anything controversial in how Fantino handled the VHCC funding. They are also the only Conservatives identified as having resigned from the local riding association — and only Lorello cited the funding issue as being a factor at the time he made his decision.

Lorello’s complaint was, indeed, that the federal funding earmarked for Vaughan’s multi-layered, rather complex and very contentious hospital project is to go to the VHCC (an array of medical-purpose buildings surrounding the hospital) and not the hospital itself, and he questioned the “optics” of two men who had worked on Fantino’s byelection campaign in November having connections to the VHCC.

The optics don’t look good, Lorello complained to the CBC on April 13. Therefore, he said, he had resigned from the Vaughan Conservative riding association — but would remain a Conservative. His resignation took place April 4.

The Toronto Star story curiously had the same two sources making the same assertions — and the same absence of outrage by Fantino’s political rivals. Like the CBC writers before her, Cross did not mention that Fantino had made it clear at the time of the announcement just where the money will be going, did not identify Lorello and Kent as activists (much less that the hospital project has been their most recent projet du jour), did not pick up on Lorello’s displeasure with the VHCC, and did not explain how the paradoxical maneuver of abandoning the local riding association but remaining a Conservative related either to moral outrage directed at Fantino or to the Star headline, “Vaughan Conservatives quit over $10 million grant”.

Both news outlets found Liberal figures — Vaughan MPP Greg Sorbara (by both) and Fantino’s opponent in the current election, Mario Ferri (by the Star) — to comment on the federal funding for the hospital, but the remarks were benign, amounting to predictable political commentary. No one mentioned seeing impropriety in how Fantino has handled the funds, nor about the structural makeup of the VHCC itself.

The problem for journalism, then, is that we are witnessing either a complete meltdown of judgment or a case of purposeful malice, at the national level. It is one of those scenarios. Which one invites the heaviest public wrath is open to debate.

The story, and especially the headlines, went farther than simply lackluster reporting: all the way to suggesting active resignations were taking place due to possible malfeasance by a high-profile candidate in a closely-watched race in the middle of a national election campaign. The premise was manufactured, and it would have taken purpose to thrust a half-baked local story such as this one into the mix as a talking point at the highest level of the national campaign.

We at Vaughan Today have no quarrel with Richard Lorello or Tracey Kent putting forward their views. They are activists. Activists, by definition, have an agenda to promote and an axe to grind. Activists seek publicity for their causes, and will speak their platform whenever the opportunity is afforded them, without feeling particularly burdened to provide context. Journalists everywhere recognize activists as valuable contributors to the public discussion, but understand our duty is to distinguish between activist zeal and the real deal, and to provide context for any claims made.

What are the implications, then, when news organizations of the stature of the CBC and the Toronto Star allow such sources to hold sway in a story where reputations — of persons, communities or public interests (political or otherwise) — are put on the line? To fail to call on independent sources to verify the credibility of both the claimant and the claim, and to fail to place the accusation in context, is to run the risk of being perceived as having taken up the claimant’s cause.

That is precisely what the CBC did in adopting Lorello’s argument and advancing it as a story big enough to present to Ignatieff for comment.

The Toronto Star’s contribution to the debacle is more due to its echoing, and its role in keeping a morally wrong and factually unsupportable story in the public eye. By Friday, a mutation of it  — stating that resignations had taken place on Wednesday, and linking them to Fantino — had appeared in the Toronto daily commuter paper, Metro, a Torstar publication. And now Web bloggers and commentators, few of whom would have any way of knowing the characters or the genesis of the story, have been having a field day at Fantino’s and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s expense ever since.

Neither Vaughan Today nor the Vaughan Citizen (the local Metroland semi-weekly), went near it as a news story. Knowing the sources as the very prominent activists they are, knowing that there were no Conservatives “committing suicide on the walls of Baghdad” (to quote the real Baghdad Bob), and understanding the context of the VHCC funding in the wider picture of acquiring a long-desired hospital for the city, there was no story to pursue.

We called out the CBC in VaughanToday.ca’s election blog for what we believe to be a gross abuse of the fourth estate.

Lorello and Kent are not impartial witnesses, we pointed out. Anyone with a Twitter account and a #vaughan hash tag — or a Vaughan driveway that receives weekly Metroland drops — would have known that those sources have vested interests.

Their failure to consider their sources aside, the perspective missing from both the CBC and Star stories is this: There is nothing inherently wrong with Fantino having had a previous relationship with persons connected to the VHCC. What you see happening with the federal funding in Vaughan is simply the way the process works — here and everywhere else — regardless of the riding, regardless of who the Member of Parliament may be and regardless of which party happens to be in power.

Politicians attract government funding all the time for projects in their ridings, and it would grind the process to a halt if we were to demand that there must never have been a relationship between the politician and anyone connected to the recipient project. It’s only when money begins to vanish, and when projects fail to materialize, that you have occasion to blow the proverbial whistle.

It’s a sad day for journalism in Canada, though, when reporters gather around the water cooler in a metropolitan newsroom and wonder aloud whether Julian Fantino’s name being invoked in last week’s televised leadership debates might have been a contributing factor in the decisions by the CBC and Toronto Star that have given our profession a black eye.