Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (30 page)

IN 1985, THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER,
a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, DC, began measuring how Americans
feel about the country’s news outlets. In the inaugural poll, 55 percent trusted the media to get the facts right, and 34 percent thought journalists were fair to all sides. Those numbers have been in steady decline ever since. As of July 2013, just 26 percent of Americans believe news reports are accurate, and only 19 percent think reporters treat both sides fairly.

Drill further into the numbers and the news gets even more disheartening for journalists. According to Pew’s 2013 data, 71 percent of Americans think the press tries to hide its mistakes, and 58 percent think news outlets are politically biased. Conservatives tend to have a harsher view of the media. Three-quarters of Democrats feel news organizations are highly professional. Only half of Republicans feel the same. Republicans are also more likely to think news stories are inaccurate.

It’s a similar story north of the border. A 2013 survey from Ipsos Reid revealed that only 29 percent of Canadians trust journalists. (Local municipal politicians come in at 17 percent.)

In the United Kingdom, an ongoing poll by market research firm YouGov has shown that public trust in journalists has plummeted in every medium, from TV to broadsheet newspapers to tabloids. Between 2003 and November 2012, confidence in the BBC has fallen from 81 percent to 44 percent, and confidence in “upmarket” newspapers such as
The Guardian
and
The Telegraph
dropped from 65 percent to 38 percent.

So what gives?

Carroll Doherty is the associate director of Pew Research. He points out that even in the mid-1980s, a supposed golden age of journalism, nearly half of the public had misgivings about the media. Confidence in the press has been steadily eroding
since the 1990s, and partway through the George W. Bush presidency it fell into a full-blown tailspin.

“There was a growing sense in that period that news organizations were biased and not being fair to the president.… In the Obama era it’s just continued,” he says.

Doherty’s assessment seems to be supported by Gallup, a global research consulting firm. Gallup has been tracking public trust in mass media since 1997. Its figures indicate significant declines in 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq.

At least in the United States, polls show a correlation between declining trust in media and growing partisanship. A major study from Pew in 2012 found that American values were more divided along partisan lines than at any other time in the twenty-five years they had been keeping score. The gap first widened in 2002, then remained steady until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when it started to widen again.

The New York Times
—one of the most respected newspapers in the world—has taken one of the biggest hits. According to a 2012 poll from Pew, only 49 percent of Americans trust the newspaper—down 9 points from two years earlier. The
Times
is tied with Fox News and
USA Today
as the least trustworthy of America’s major news organizations. And the partisan divide is stark. Two-thirds of liberals believe the paper, compared to little more than one-third of conservatives.

Doherty suspects the numbers are fuelled by perception rather than by any editorial change. “Most of these people probably don’t regularly read
The New York Times
, but it’s reputational. I think there’s a sense that
The New York Times
is seen as somewhat liberal,” he says.

In Canada, partisanship is actually on the decline, but it
could still be playing a role in how Canadians feel about their news, says Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto who has followed the Ford phenomenon closely.

Wiseman blames television. Specifically, American television.

“We are awash in American coverage,” he says. “I think there are significant differences between the US and Canada, but I’ll add that the United States shows Canada its future in so many ways.”

This influence is especially apparent in federal politics, he says. Just look at how the New Democratic Party has mimicked—with some success—Obama’s campaign model. Or how the Conservatives have adopted a Karl Rove political strategy of running down their opponents with negative ads to keep the attention off themselves.

“Now you’re seeing that American influence with the media,” he says.

In April 2011, the Sun Media chain launched a cable news channel that some have dubbed “Fox News North.” Sun News Network styles itself as “Canada’s Home for Hard News and Straight Talk.” It broadcasts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Its flashy graphics, good-looking hosts, controversial personalities, and conservative slant screams USA.

But they weren’t the first.

Talk radio stations have been targeting this ultra-right niche market for years. And while Canadian networks aren’t nearly as outlandish as some of the stations south of the border, at least in Toronto talk radio has increasingly veered in that direction since Rob Ford became mayor.

The best example came in February 2010, when Newstalk 1010 launched
The Jerry Agar Show
. Agar is a Canadian-born
radio personality who rose to prominence on US airwaves in Kansas City, New York, and Chicago. Agar is a Tea Party defender. He opposes same-sex marriage, has questions about the science of global warming, and believes Canada should move to a privatized health care system. His hiring signalled a significant, and obviously conscious, shuffle to the right for this already conservative-leaning station. The swing right continued in February 2012, when Newstalk decided to axe their Sunday afternoon host Josh Matlow, a mild-mannered city councillor who liked to talk about upcoming city events and getting along. They gave the slot to the Ford brothers.

In October 2012, I met Agar for dinner at a restaurant across the street from the Sun News studio, where he’s often an on-air guest. We talked about the impact talk radio was having on the Toronto electorate. An Ipsos Reid poll for the Canadian Journalism Foundation released that month found that nearly half of Canadians consulted talk radio stations for their news. Only 43 percent looked to a daily newspaper. This scared me. Talk radio is entertaining, but not always careful with the facts. By its nature, these programs are conversations happening on the fly. Hosts don’t have the luxury of time, unlike newspaper reporters, to look up every fact. This means incorrect statements are rarely corrected—whether it’s Rob Ford claiming to have saved taxpayers “a billion dollars” or a random caller talking about how a
Star
reporter was caught sneaking around the mayor’s backyard. I wanted to know how Agar felt about his industry’s role in shaping public opinion.

Agar looks exactly like how you would picture an outspoken talk radio host. He keeps a few shirt buttons open at the collar and his white hair is swept straight back like
Michael Douglas’s. When he talks, his dark eyebrows move around just as much as his lips.

Was talk radio news or entertainment? I asked him. “I’m not a journalist.

I’m a guy with an opinion. I have to make my show entertaining, the same way you have to make your articles interesting to read,” the fifty-seven-year-old said.

That’s fine, I said, except studies showed that a good chunk of Torontonians get their news from talk radio—a source that to me does not seem overly concerned about accuracy. He cut me off.

“We’re no different in that regard than you guys. Mistakes are constant [in newspapers],” he said. If a guest or a caller says something that isn’t true, Agar said he’d correct the record if he noticed the mistake—but there isn’t time to fact-check everything. In other cases, he might just not care.

As for talk radio bias, he said, at least they’re more honest about it. “Look, you can try as hard as you want to be an objective reporter, and I’m sure you do try real hard, but good, honest, decent people who are doing the best job they can as a reporter still have their view of how the world works.”

THE ATRIUM AT RYERSON UNIVERSITY
, my alma mater, was set up like a courtroom, with rows of folding chairs arranged for the audience and three tables at the front—one for the accused, another for the accuser, and a third for the panel of judges.

Each table was outfitted with a set of cordless microphones and glasses of water. The room itself felt like an outdoor courtyard, with beige and white walls that looked like stone and a soaring glass ceiling that flooded the space with natural light. At
least one hundred people—not including the TV crews—had shown up for the hearing.

I was in the front row behind the
Toronto Star
’s table, at which Michael Cooke and Kevin Donovan prepared to argue our case. They sat shoulder to shoulder in dark suits and white shirts, a stack of notes in front of them. On the other side of the room was a middle-aged woman named Darylle Donley. Donley seemed overwhelmed by the attention. She sat stone still, hands clasped, and looked straight ahead at the three adjudicators. Her thick shoulder-length red hair was held in place by chunky sunglasses she had pushed on top of her head. Donley was one of the reasons we were all here.

It was September 9, 2013, nearly four months since we had printed our story about the Ford video. Donley was a Ford supporter living downtown on the east side. After reading our story, she had written to the Ontario Press Council to accuse the
Star
of shoddy ethics and fabrication. “I would be curious to know just how far a TV or radio reporter or newspaper person has to go before they are sanctioned and curtailed? The Ford brothers are being lied about, innuendos and allegations are being made against them,” she wrote.

Hers was one of forty-one similar grievances received by the press council. A dozen had arrived right after the
Star
’s “crack video” story appeared. A few dozen more arrived a week later, when
The Globe and Mail
ran its investigation about Doug Ford’s years as an alleged high school drug dealer. Now, both papers had been hauled in front of the province’s media ethics watchdog to explain themselves.

It was a remarkable moment. The press council, an independent agency established in 1972 and funded by
newspapers, was created to investigate accusations of unsavoury journalistic practices and ethics. About one hundred complaints are received each year, and only a handful make it to the public hearing stage. The threshold is supposed to be high. Cases that get adjudicated typically involve allegations of plagiarism, established factual errors, or contentious editorial positions—such as the 2001 case in which a national newspaper, according to the ruling, “appeared to suggest every person living in Germany during the Second World War was an active agent in Hitler’s genocide.”

The story Donovan and I had written, while a huge news event in Toronto, was actually quite basic: two journalists had seen something and then written about it. That was the job stripped down to its simplest form. We went out, observed, asked questions, tried to get answers, and reported back. That the press council had decided to adjudicate Donley’s complaint seemed to lend credence to the notion that this was no longer good enough.

The stakes were high. Despite the amount of evidence in our favour, the
Star
was suffering in the court of public opinion. The attacks came from every angle—letters, email, phone, Twitter, texts, Facebook, talk radio, and conservative columnists. Four months later, and they were still coming. Donovan and I were getting death threats and harassing calls at all hours of the night. The paper was under siege with complaints.

But for me the most upsetting thing was the June poll that showed nearly half of the city thought we were lying. Seeing those numbers knocked the wind out of me. On more than one occasion that summer, I had been out at a bar or restaurant around the city and heard people talking. Many just couldn’t
believe Rob Ford might be smoking crack. Which meant that nothing the
Star
said about it could be true.

Had journalists made things up before? Yes. We’ve all heard about
The New York Times
’s Jayson Blair,
USA Today
’s Jack Kelley, and
The New Republic
’s Stephen Glass. Canadian publications, including the
National Post
,
The Globe and Mail
, and, yes, the
Toronto Star
, have also dealt with fabrication and plagiarism scandals. But these were cases of lone individuals bent on deceiving their colleagues, not an entire newsroom conspiring to deceive the public. Because if Kevin Donovan and I had made up the story, a dozen senior people in the newsroom—including the publisher, the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the city editor, and our lawyer—had to have been in on it. We’d told our editors about the video footage two weeks before Gawker’s story ran. Were all those people at the
Toronto Star
, Canada’s largest newspaper, lying?

Half of Toronto seemed to think this was possible. It was very clear that many did not understand what we do, how we do it, and the rigorous checks in place to keep us accountable. This press council hearing was our chance to enlighten.

Shortly after 10
A.M.
, panel chair George Thomson—a former provincial court judge, law professor, and provincial deputy minister—called the meeting to order. The press council, Thomson explained, was an independent agency with fifteen council members, the majority of whom were professionals not affiliated with news media. On this day, the council would be looking at three questions concerning the
Star
’s story. Did the
Star
article deal with a matter that was in the public interest? Were adequate efforts made to verify allegations? And was the mayor given a reasonable opportunity to respond and
had the paper printed that response? Thomson turned to the complainant first to see if she had an opening statement. Darylle Donley softly shook her head.

Now it was our turn. Michael Cooke leaned in to the microphone.