On November 28, we had a moment to breathe. The month-long frenzy around Mayor Rob Ford’s Tasmanian Devil whirlwind had begun to subside, and there was an opportunity to reflect.
Web start-up Newsana hosted a panel discussion called Toronto’s Watergate? The Inside Scoop On How The Media Exposed Rob Ford, and on it sat Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, Star reporter Robyn Doolittle (who co-authored the paper’s key stories on the mayor), Globe reporter Greg McArthur (who co-authored their exposé on the adolescent Fords) and Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne.
Coyne was the odd one out: as a marquee national pundit for a proudly conservative newspaper chain, his critical examination of Ford was limited to the fairly recent past.
But when a member of the audience asked if maybe people doubted the crack video because the Star had previously been on the mayor for so many little things, Coyne knew what to say.
“In the run-up to the [2010] election,” Coyne explained, “the Star ran a series of very critical stories dealing with aspects of the mayor’s misbehaviour on various fronts. And I remember reading them and not being as shocked as the Star was.”
He’d rationalized it all: the story about Ford being aggressive with one of his football players described conduct that was inappropriate – but the important takeaway was that he coached kids’ football the story about offering to buy OxyContin for a man who phoned him was an example of Ford’s compassion and generosity.
“So if you look at that in isolation,” Coyne said, “you would say, ‘Yeah, the Star cried wolf'” and he was therefore able to later get away with worse. “But if you look at it really, though, in hindsight you say, ‘The Star was right and I was wrong.’ The Star was on to him early. The Star knew the context. The Star knew the bread crumbs. The Star knew that these were not just stories in isolation, that the guy was a walking train wreck.
“And we all should not have said, ‘Aw, he’s just a good ol’ boy with a few rough edges.’ We should have said right then and there, ‘This needs to be investigated further.'”
For me, it started with a tweet saying Rob Ford was seen “wasted and sweating” at a bar the previous night.
My job at the time, a regular gig for another publication, was to reverse-engineer Ford’s weekly itinerary: since he refused to release any schedule of appearances, my responsibility was to figure out where he had already been – to pinpoint his physical presence as frequently as possible. Twitter consistently provided my most fruitful supply of leads, and I would spend every Monday searching particular combinations of words in the hope of discovering new sightings.
The “wasted and sweating” tweet, posted just after St. Patrick’s Day 2012, was a good one but not by itself earth-shaking. After nearly a year of doing these searches, I had already inferred Ford’s enthusiasm for alcohol.
But as I went back and forth with this person about what her friend had seen, the allegations became more serious: that he was kicked out of the Bier Markt’s Esplanade location for being drunk, and that he may have been doing (powdered) cocaine in a private room. No hard evidence, but it was simple enough to find other tweets and photos that placed him in the area at the time.
That evening, I visited the Bier Markt for dinner, figuring that asking questions of my server would be the gentlest way to raise the issue. And indeed, she’d dealt with Mayor Ford a couple of nights earlier and was happy to talk to a self-identified reporter.
As I later wrote to my editor, however, “she was quick to dispel the rumours of his being kicked out and/or doing drugs, and I have no reason to believe she wasn’t being honest. She was pretty helpful in offering other details until, it seems, a co-worker advised her that maybe she shouldn’t be dishing on customers to journalists.”
I wrote a tame summary of Ford’s St. Patrick’s Day, based on the little I’d been able to confirm by deadline, and that was that.
Until minutes after it was posted, when a comment appeared under my story that repeated the rumours I’d heard and more. It was promptly deleted for legal reasons, and I found myself unable to track down the person who had left it.
For me, that’s how it started.
In the next few weeks, it became apparent that every newsroom in the city had heard some version of the mayor’s St. Patrick’s Day outing and had devoted various levels of resources to pursuing it. No one, though, got quite far enough. To report serious accusations against a public figure, the bar for evidence is pretty high.
So many people in media and political circles were aware of the whisperings that there was a sharper distinction than ever between what different classes of people knew, or thought they knew, about Rob Ford. There was a cleavage of consciousness dividing the public at large, the city’s media and both groups within themselves. And Ford proved a master at exploiting it.
If you had some inkling of the Bier Markt stuff, for example, you viewed the Daniel Dale incident very differently. The Star reporter visited the public park adjacent to Ford’s house because the mayor was making an unusual request to buy part of the land, and Dale felt he needed to see it for himself to understand the geography and other details about the parcel. Ford and his staff, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to discredit the paper in the midst of its reporting. Below the duelling public accounts of the Star and the Fords were additional layers concerning who thought whom was really up to what. I debated a public relations professional on the radio the next day, and he refused to believe that Dale was actually there to look at the land. (He was.)
Of course, the privileged-knowledge gap didn’t begin with the Bier Markt, nor were its delineations all that clear. Elements of the Ford family history are firmly established in Etobicoke lore, and a great many people hold pieces of the puzzle. You didn’t have to know the Globe was working on – and at one point had suddenly stopped working on – an account of the young Doug Ford to be aware of what the story might report.
In March 2013, the Star finally shared parts of the Bier Markt episode in the context of an article about the mayor’s behaviour at the Garrison Ball and his staff’s discomfort with what they considered to be his unaddressed alcohol problem. (The story made no mention of drugs but referred to substance abuse.) On CP24, Star editor Cooke defended the report against a skeptical Stephen LeDrew. “The story of the mayor’s drinking has been around this town for a year, year and a half, two years,” he said. “Every journalist in town has heard this story. Maybe they’re getting it off Twitter. All the Toronto elite have been talking about little else for a year and a half.”
And now, at long last, he said, the Star did a proper piece and put it out there. “I think that citizens of Toronto want to know.”
At least as far back as the 2010 election, a crucial component of Ford’s political brilliance was his active discrediting of the press by dismissing it as a collection of self-interested parties invested in a status quo that he threatened to disrupt. Don’t believe what you read, he intoned.
On one level, there was some truth to this: all media warrant critical scrutiny, and the mainstream media do generally function as instruments of the elite. But reducing the whole enterprise to only that rather misses the point.
Ford fed off this gulf between the keepers of secrets and the public at large. The more journalists knew, the more driven they became while at the same time drifting farther from the public’s understanding of his persona. The quest for the truth had the effect of alienating those who undertook it and reinforcing the mayor’s narrative of the little guy against the elites.
Efforts to collapse that discrepancy (as Cooke framed it) were met with ever-fiercer resistance from Ford and those who stood by him. In a tremendous bit of projection, Ford responded to the initial allegations of his alcoholism by calling the Star “pathological liars.”
In the conventional view of things, the media are the professional truth-tellers who hold sometimes dishonest politicians to account. But Ford successfully shifted the debate to one of relative trust: in whom do you put more faith?
In that same interview, LeDrew was on Cooke’s case about using anonymous sources. And Cooke took for granted the trust traditionally placed in his institution: “Don’t have to name names. This is true. We know who they are. And we trust them.”
An Ipsos Reid poll conducted in late May, roughly two weeks after the crack scandal broke, concluded that 45 per cent of Torontonians believed “the video is a hoax and part of a conspiracy to discredit the mayor.”
On Halloween, the truth about Rob Ford ceased to be a chimeric abstract requiring a degree of faith.
“I have been advised,” Police Chief Bill Blair announced, “that we are now in possession of a recovered digital video file… and that file contains video images which appear to be, uh, those images which were previously reported in the press….”
It was as though Blair had declared that the Ark of the Covenant was real, that his “top men” had completed their analysis of it and that the deity contained therein matched portrayals found in the Scriptures.
With the concurrent release of police documents summarizing an investigation of the mayor, the gap at last narrowed between the knowledge of the few and the knowledge of the many.
jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie
