A high-ranking staff member at a public institution has done something stupid. Caught in the eye of the storm, the organization has dropped the cone of silence. The offending employee's comments have been scrubbed clean, and the company has enacted a policy of silence. The company will say nothing, in the hopes this will all just disappear.
The problem here is the organization in question is the Globe and Mail. But this is the paradox: a newspaper that routinely demands public officials be accountable for their decisions has decided these standards do not apply to themselves.
I'm writing, of course, about boobghazi. In the pages of Canada's Most Important Newspaper, Leah McLean wrote a truly bizarre column about a party where she decided it might be fun to have someone else's baby give her a quick suckle, without bothering to maybe ask the kid's parents if that would be okay. The baby daddy was Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong, who has confirmed the whole "odd" incident.
Anyway, if you've read this column, you probably won't have read it on the Globe's own website. Just as people started to notice the immense weirdness of the story, poof it vanished. Now if you head to the link you get an error message. Unfortunately for the newspaper, the Internet Archive exists, so the column is still easily accessible.
So this leaves us with the question: if McLaren's column is true, why was it unpublished?
It's a question still waiting to be answered. A number of stories have been written about the column, by outlets both foreign and domestic. None of them, from the National Post to the Washington Post, received any response from the paper.
The Globe owes the public and its readers an answer. When a newspaper makes a mistake or has to remove a story, they post a notice saying, "This is what we've done, and this is why we've done it." It's a way of being transparent with readers so they know what's going on in their newspaper.
In absence of actual information, absurdity fills the void.
Living as we are in the Age of Bullshit, where lies and spin have been focused grouped into shiny perfection, newspapers are looking to burnish their image as truth-tellers. The Globe is no exception. In an open letter to readers earlier this year, Globe editor-in-chief David Walmsley writes how important journalism is in a democratic society, and how seriously the newspaper takes its responsibility.
"The values of a strong and independent press are clear. Journalism is driven by a commitment to curiosity, a fidelity to the facts and a determination to discover the unknown," he writes. "Our commitment is to provide the truth, to offer a safe harbour for the exchange of ideas that is central to a fair and just society."
It's interesting though, when it comes to the truth of the paper's handling of McLaren's column, Walmsley has provided nothing. For kicks, I emailed him to ask why McLaren's column was removed, and why there was no retraction notice posted. I've not heard back.
One of the remarkable things I've found in my time doing media reporting is how much like their public relations rivals reporters really are. Rare is it for a journalist to reply to direct questions about their work, or the work of their staff. Most of the time, an email to an editor or producer will get forwarded on to the communications department, who will issue an anodyne reply.
Theoretically, this is the bailiwick of the Globe's public editor, Sylvia Stead. Her position was designed there to stand between the newspaper's staff and the public to sort out this kind of mess.
The trouble is Stead is bad at her job. Whenever she's faced with a controversy of any weight and consequence, her wagon gets circled with all the rest of Globe's management.
Take, for example, the sortied tale of Margaret Wente. One of the Globe's star columnists, Wente has a nasty habit of stealing the work of others and passing it off as her own. This is, in theory, the kind of situation where a public editor could really hold their paper to account. Instead, the public editor has been less an advocate for the readers and more a sanitized conduit for the paper's management.
Confronted with Wente's plagrarism, Stead recapped the allegations, quoted from the Globe's ethics handbook, and got a quote from Walmsley. She told readers how the corrections would read in the paper, and what notes would be added to the columns. She did not offer analysis of what happened or pronounce on whether Wente's behaviour was appropriate.
In other words, she issued a press release, dressed up as a public editor column.
So far, Stead hasn't written anything about McLaren's column. I emailed her to ask if she would be tackling the issue, and received no reply. But even if she did write on it, I have little hope her column would be of consequence.
If the Globe was really committed to the truth, it would be straight with its readers. Until then, the high-minded rhetoric about truth, justice, and democracy are just words — worth little more than the paper they're printed on.
Photo Credit: National Post
