Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  A few days later, the Star dropped another bombshell. According to numerous sources, the morning after the video story went online the mayor told his senior staff not to worry, because he knew where the video was. Ford mentioned two apartment units on the seventeenth floor of 320 Dixon: 1701 and 1703. (Four days after the mayor said this to his staff, the shooting took place outside 1701.) The story, written by the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief, Robert Benzie, as well as Kevin Donovan, detailed a conversation between Price and Mark Towhey.

  “Hypothetically,” Price asked Towhey, if someone had told him where the video was, “what would we do?”

  The straitlaced former military man told Price that nobody should do anything other than contact police.

  At one point, according to an account of the conversation, Towhey was heard to remark, “We’re not getting the f---ing thing!”

  After two more long-time staffers quit, Ford held a press conference to stress that “things are fine” in his office. As soon as he finished his speech, Ford was asked about the Star story. The exchange gave birth to a new catchphrase at City Hall.

  Q: “Have you done any illegal drugs since you’ve been mayor?”

  A: “Anything else?”

  Q: “Have you tried to obtain the video, sir?”

  A: “Anything else?”

  Q: “Are you upset that the deputy mayor says he believes there’s a tape? Does that upset you?”

  A: “Anything else?”

  Q: “The premier suggests she’s ready to step in if needed.”

  A: “I think the premier should take care of the problems that she has at Queen’s Park right now.”

  Q: “Did you mention an address to David Price?”

  A: “Anything else?”

  Q: “How did you know Anthony Smith, sir?”

  A: “Anything else?”

  Q: “Why are people leaving? What’s going on in your office?”

  A: “There’s nothing going on in my office, obviously. I’m bringing in new staff, and if people have a better opportunity, I encourage them to move on.”

  Video or no video, as I watched the story develop from inside my little journalism bubble, I thought we were faring well. The evidence was on our side: Ford’s staff was leaving in droves, the mayor was still refusing to answer any questions or talk about the allegations in any detail. He was refusing to discuss the photo with Anthony Smith or answer questions about the mysterious shooting in one of the Dixon towers. The Globe’s investigation had laid out a pattern of drug involvement. Other news outlets—organizations that had been sympathetic to Ford through the Garrison Ball controversy—were hammering the mayor every day for not coming clean. People had to believe us, I thought.

  My bubble was about to burst.

  THIRTEEN

  VIDEO,

  SCHMIDEO

  It was hard to accept. On June 1, Ipsos Reid released a poll showing that almost half the city said they believed the mayor’s claim that he did not smoke crack cocaine. People living in Etobicoke were more likely to believe him (61 percent) than those in the downtown (40 percent). And a third of those polled said they would re-elect Ford if a vote were held the next day. That was down just 9 points from his 2010 numbers.

  But here was the kicker: of those surveyed, 45 percent— practically half the population of Canada’s largest city—said they thought the video was “a hoax and part of a conspiracy to discredit the mayor.”

  THE ROB FORD CRACK COCAINE scandal didn’t just set off a firestorm of public debate. The fallout prompted a serious discussion, even some soul-searching, in the journalism community. Several high-profile media critics and commentators criticized the Star for publishing the story without possessing the video and/or for “trusting” drug dealers.

  When the chatter was at its peak, the chair of Ryerson University’s journalism program, Ivor Shapiro, waded in with an article for J-Source, the Canadian Journalism Project’s website.

  When did the accepted standard for reporters’ verification become that raw evidence must be seen by the audience to be believed?

  If a reporter sees with her own eyes a document, witnesses with his eyes an event taking place, or hears with her own ears a statement being made, is this not good enough as the basis for reporting?

  Must I now record every interview and hyperlink to the tape when I write a damaging story?

  If I don’t have a camera rolling when I witness a cop beating a citizen, must I then hold my tongue, at least until I find another (named) witness? Nope. I came. I saw. I report. No verification required.

  In September, the National Post’s Christie Blatchford said something similar at an Empire Club of Canada panel discussion with Kevin Donovan. She said she absolutely believed the Star, but following the story had been difficult. Yes, journalists had always gone out, seen things, and reported back. She talked about being in Afghanistan and witnessing a firefight, then writing about it. She was essentially asking her readers to take her word for it, based on her record. With the crack video story, she was “asking my readers to trust me, because I trust [the Star].”

  And that’s asking a lot when nearly half the public doesn’t believe the original source.

  Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, is an author, journalist, and one of the leading media critics in North America. Rosenstiel says that public trust in journalists has been eroding for decades. And it’s not just the media that people have a problem with. Faith in all institutions, government, hospitals, the court system, is on the decline. But Rosenstiel believes that in the case of journalism a number of special circumstances are driving that growing skepticism.

  “People have more sources of information. The minute the press shifted from being a homogenized group of gatekeepers, who all had similar standards, to a more diverse group of information providers, they began distinguishing themselves by dumping on each other,” he says.

  This was the norm before the Second World War, when every city had several different dailies. Newspapers attacked their rivals, often on the front page, Rosenstiel says. With the advent of TV, the number of newspapers shrank. And everyone started to be more polite to each other. That changed again in the 1990s, most notably with the arrival of Fox News.

  “They decided to distinguish themselves by saying, ‘We’ll do what talk radio did. [We’ll say,] We don’t have the bias that other media has.’” A few years later, this continued with the blogs, says Rosenstiel. “The ideological wars that we see in politics are playing out in these new media spaces.”

  Moaning about how it was better in the old days won’t do much good, he says. Through Twitter and YouTube, readers have become used to seeing news with their own eyes. Whether it’s a mass shooting or a natural disaster, live images and video are circulating online well before the mainstream press has written a word. In this climate, when that proof is not available, journalists need to be more transparent about what they do and how they do it.

  “The old era of media, when we were the only source, was the ‘trust me’ media era,” he says. The media could say, “‘I saw it. Take my word for it.’ Now we live in the ‘show me’ era of media. Show me why I should believe you. That does not mean that you have to have courtroom-worthy evidence. But it does mean that you have to show what evidence you’ve got and explain why you believe it.”

  In 1964, The New York Times’s David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Vietnam War. Halberstam’s reporting called into question whether the United States would be able to defeat the Communist guerrilla forces and the North Vietnamese Army. President John F. Kennedy famously called the Times and urged the publisher to pull Halberstam out of Vietnam. “If you go back and look at that reporting, it’s all anonymous sources,” says Rosenstiel. “It’s all filtered through him. What he’s seen. You couldn’t write it that way today.”

  Today, journalists need to take great pains to lay out the evidence for readers. Quoting an anonymous
source isn’t good enough. News outlets need to explain why that person can be trusted, what efforts it took to verify their information, and why they can’t be named. Reporters need to say what they know and what they don’t know.

  “This is the world we live in,” says Rosenstiel. “There’s no point in looking back. The question is: Is it better or worse? Yes, there are some things about this that are much better, and some things about this that are much more difficult.”

  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 t
ry 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.