CONFLICT: POWERFUL MEN NOT GETTING BASIC PRINCIPLES
Jim Coyle
A recent TVO documentary on the Toronto Star, as the newspaper tried to navigate COVID-19 coverage under unprecedented circumstances during the early days of controversial new ownership, contained what in retrospect was an intriguing moment.
Star editor Anne Marie Owens sat at a boardroom table with chairman David Peterson, a former premier of Ontario, and then co-proprietors Jordan Bitove and Paul Rivett.
Owens was briefing her bosses on news developments, including updates on the plan by the Ontario government to build Highway 413 through farmland north of Toronto.
Peterson noted that the newspaper had made clear its view that the highway was an inappropriate use of billions of dollars in public money.
Then, Rivett leaned in. “We’re not all in agreement on that,” he said. “I happen to think that we should be developing.”
Apparently so. Flash forward to this month.
Bitove and Rivett have parted ways in an acrimonious split, the division of assets overseen by a judicial arbitrator. Bitove now runs the Star. Rivett has taken over a few of TorStar’s other media holdings. One of these is iPolitics, which published Queen’s Park Briefing – both online news platforms.
In recent months, staff at Queen’s Park Briefing were doing what good journalists do. Paying attention. Hearing things. Looking into them.
A recurring theme of Premier Doug Ford’s time in government has been cronyism, and cozy ties to developers.
Before being elected, he had told them privately he was in favour of opening the Greenbelt. But when that news broke, he retreated, declaring it sacrosanct. Re-elected in 2022 to a second majority, Ford was again doing his impression of a man trapped in a revolving door.
Now, he would pursue a land swap that opened some previously protected Greenbelt lands to development.
At QP Briefing, reporter Charlie Pinkerton was working on a story. He’d heard about a fundraising Stag-and-Doe party for Ford’s daughter last year that had an interesting guest list.
Apparently, a number of developers were in attendance, cheerfully ponying up to help the Ford daughter and fiancé cover wedding costs.
On the face of it, this raised obvious questions about the premier’s mixing of public and private interests and the influence potentially available to those with entrée into the more intimate spaces of Fordland.
After some research and due diligence, QP Briefing had a story ready to go this month. Until the new ownership presided over by Paul Rivett stepped in to kill it.
Jessica Smith Cross, editor of Queen’s Park Briefing, and Pinkerton, a reporter and editor, resigned in protest about the quashing of news they saw as plainly in the public interest. “I can’t work for an organization where ownership interferes in the journalism,” Smith Cross said. “Quitting is the only tool we have.”
Pinkerton said “the interference we’re currently experiencing puts in question how we can operate. . . Without our integrity and the ability to report the truth unimpeded, our work as journalists is nothing.”
The two journalists were exactly right.
The potential for the premier’s conflict of interest was exactly the kind of story on which journalists should fulfil their core function as monitors of power and watchdogs of the public interest. The story plainly qualified.
Unifor, which represents Star staff, expressed extreme concern about the spiking of the work by Queen’s Park Briefing. “These are serious allegations that undermine the integrity necessary for independent, fact-based journalism,” the union said.
As it happens, however, the ownership intervention on Pinkerton’s story was both shocking and perhaps unsurprising. Shocking, because most reporters work their entire careers without experiencing such dispiriting internal censorship. Unsurprising, because both Bitove and Rivett – as the media greenhorns they were - had been known at the Star to meddle in newsroom affairs, trying to steer coverage, arranging op-ed and column space for business acquaintances, in ways not typically done from the ownership suite. Their naïveté in journalism convention was sizeable.
In the documentary, Bitove seemed, by his own account, astonished to discover that the Star’s work on the public’s behalf made it “way bigger” than just a business.
Both men had something to learn about what the public interest demanded. And while Bitove seemed to catch the passion, so to speak, Rivett remained a stranger in an unfamiliar land.
In any event, the story about the Stag-and-Doe was followed up and published by other media outlets.
Pinkerton eventually reported it as a freelancer to the Toronto Star. And he did not stop working.
On Friday, he and Star reporters Noor Javed and Rachel Mendleson reported that, seating plans show, guests at the September wedding of Ford’s daughter included a lobbyist, prominent developers and recent provincial appointees. The lobbyist reportedly worked for a developer pushing the province to redesignate Greenbelt land to build homes.
Ford has insisted the guests were personal friends, invited to a family function and that his family was “separate from the political process” and should be immune to queries from an impertinent media.
Begging to differ, NDP Leader Marit Stiles has filed a complaint with the province’s integrity commissioner about the premier’s conduct.
In all, Ontarians are left with examples of powerful men simply not getting basic principles. The indignant blunderbuss that is Doug Ford fails to acknowledge the problem his blurry sense of propriety creates.
For their part, staffers at the Toronto Star must be exceedingly grateful it was Bitove who emerged with control of the paper.
In any event, some journalism organization should strike a reporting award in the names of Jessica Smith Cross and Charlie Pinkerton. Their integrity and courage marked a shining moment in the news biz in Ontario.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jim Coyle - Jim Coyle spent 40 years in journalism with The Canadian Press, the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star. Over his career, Coyle covered breaking news, wrote columns, features, editorials and sports. He was nominated for National Newspaper Awards in four different categories. He has filed from every province and territory in Canada and has covered papal and royal tours, murder trials and judicial inquiries, the Grey Cup and the Calgary Olympics, and more elections and leadership conventions than he cares to recall. After retiring from the Star in 2018, Coyle taught journalism at Humber College. His proudest accomplishments are getting sober almost 30 years ago and, with his wife Andrea Gordon, also a former Star reporter, raising four sons.
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