Vikileaks and the death of the journalist as news gatekeeper

I was in Las Vegas for a work trip and tuned-out of all news from back in Canada, so it was only Friday that I returned and caught myself up on the “Vikileaks” drama, and it was fascinating to read some of the commentary and follow the tweets on the topic, particularly those from hill journalists and political sorts.

I won’t pass judgment on whether or not the information about Vic Toews should have been published or not, except to say it’s not how I would chose to do politics. Which I guess is passing judgment, so there you go. This sort of thing is par the course in modern politics though, and for the Conservatives, who have taken it to new levels, to now wring their hands is silly. And, for the record, it is only an ethical question, and we are talking about publicly available information and documents.

What really interests me though is the reaction of the proverbial “main-stream media” to the Vikileaks story, with an Ottawa Citizen piece attempting to trace the IP address of the “@Vikileaks30 leaker” spurring endless speculation and demands to identify the person or persons responsible. It should be noted that had @Vikileaks30 given their documents to a journalist who chose to publish a story based on them, then the media would be reminding us how important it is to protect the confidentiality of their sources. Even competing outlets wouldn’t try to unmask another journalist’s confidential source. That’s just not cricket, old boy.

What the media reaction to @Vikileaks30 really shows though is how angry, and perhaps frightened, they are about losing their traditional role as the gatekeepers of news, the people that get to decide what we, the unwashed masses, need to know and what we don’t need to know. Journalists are used to being in the know, to having the inside details, the scoop. It helps make up for the low pay, long hours and heavy drinking.

Journalists made judgment calls every day on what is news and what isn’t, what people have a right to know, and what isn’t relevant. It's part of the job in one sense; there's always more news than column inches or air time. And they see it as a public service. But no one elected them as the arbiters of good taste. They’re accountable to no one but their publisher and the shareholders. It’s a lot of trust, and a lot of responsibility.

The internet, blogging and social media are changing all that however. Now you no longer need a printing press or a television or radio station to publish information to the masses. Anyone with an Internet connection can publish anything they want, and potentially find an audience. And the market will, in a way, make its own judgment on its news worthiness. If people find it relevant, they’ll share or re-tweet it and the news finds a wider audience; if they deem it inappropriate it will wither and fade away, perhaps after first being soundly condemned.

What it means, though, is that the role of the traditional media as gatekeeper is drying, if it’s not already dead. With their breadth of reach and size of audience, the regular media is still the fastest way for news to be disseminated to the wider public. But thanks to social media, even if the press deems something “un-newsworthy,” if it gets enough traction online they eventually have no choice but to cover it anyway.

Whether or not you think publishing details of Vic Toews’ divorce as a form of protest against privacy-invading Internet snooping legislation is appropriate, what this drama shows about the eroding power of the media gatekeeper is very much a positive, in my opinion.

But back to the moral media tut-tutting around this story. Here’s the National Post editorial board weighing-in, for example, with a reflex attack on the always handy partisan scarecrow:

… their partisan opponents wouldn’t care. Rightly or wrongly, to embrace, promote or even acknowledge Vilikeaks — as a remarkable number of opposition MPs have done — is to accept yet further debasement of the Canadian political conversation. There is no way around it. The ends may justify the means in some people’s minds, but all politicians’ private lives are less private today than they were on Monday.

The media’s role in this is more tricky. The content of the Vikileaks tweets has been widely known in Ottawa since the events occurred. Yet not a word of it was breathed in the mainstream press, in accordance with the basic Canadian understanding described above.
But now it is all over the news — if not the particulars of Mr. Toews’ situation, then the fact that someone is publishing those particulars at a Twitter account called @Vikileaks30.

Attacking evil partisans is always easy for journalists, or in this case anonymous editorial writers, but the fact is the Post’s statement that “not a word of it was breathed in the mainstream press” is easily and demonstrably wrong, as a simple search of any newspaper archive service shows.

* May 17, 2008, Mia Rabson in Winnipeg Free Press

Sources suggest Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants Toews to step down because of concerns about issues in his personal life -- he's currently in the midst of a divorce. An appointment to the bench makes sense because of Toews' background as a former Crown prosecutor in Brandon and lawyer for the Manitoba government.

* May 17, 2008, Don Martin in Calgary Herald

But the 55-year-old Toews' public face of self-righteous morality is now clashing with his troubled private life. An MP dubbed the "minister of family values" by Liberals is embroiled in a messy divorce after fathering a child last fall with a much younger woman.

That's his business, frankly, yet it might explain why Mr. Toews was demoted to the Treasury Board and immediately cloaked by invisibility, stewing in question period silence while his junior parliamentary secretary juggles tough questions on election financing irregularities.

* May 23, 2008, Joan Bryden in Waterloo Region Record

As well, Tories have been whispering that Treasury Board President Vic Toews, embroiled in a messy divorce, has fallen into disfavour with Harper.

In June of 2009, Vancouver Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe even wrote a column headlined “U.S. 'affairs' so much more interesting.”

And last year, then-Justice Minister Vic Toews split with his wife of 33 years after having fathered a child with a political staffer. A Winnipeg newspaper called it "messy personal stuff.

Toews since has been re-elected and appointed Treasury Board president. His website features nothing personal beyond "Vic enjoys roller blading and jogging. He resides in Steinbach.

In fact, here’s a May 21, 2008 story from the National Post with Toews reacting to a story about his divorce proceedings, in, you guessed it, the National Post (I guess the op/ed writers missed this one):

Mr. Toews, appearing at a news conference for a joint federal-provincial program for aboriginal youth sport, was also asked about a report in Saturday's National Post indicating he is currently involved in a messy divorce after fathering a child last fall with a much younger woman.

"I don't talk about my personal life," Mr. Toews replied.

Perhaps Vic, but the media sure does an awful lot. It seems obvious that the media tut-tutting has nothing to do with publishing such personal details; it’s just the feeble protests of the dying news gatekeepers.


UPDATE: An earlier post along these lines that has relevance to this one: On Adam Giambrone, morality vs. privacy, and the media as gatekeeper.

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More stupid on crime policy from the Conservatives

I've written regularly on the Conservative government's stupid on crime policies, and the unwillingness of all parties to risk the wrath of public opinion by calling BS on so-called "tough on crime" policies that are expensive, ineffective, and designed only to score headlines.

Well, we saw more dumb on crime policy from the government this morning:

The Harper government wants a four-fold increase in the cost of applying for a pardon in Canada.

Saying it will not subsidize criminals, the government is proposing to charge $631 to study a pardon application, up from the current fee of $150.

Sounds great in theory, right? Who wants to subsidize criminals? And with public outrage over the Graham James pardon, the Conservatives are eager to jump on that bandwagon and been seen to respond toughly.

When you look deeper though, this is just more Conservative dumb on crime policy. So, you hike the fee from $150 to $631. Who will suffer from this? For your corporate fraudster, your retirement fund charlatan, an extra $500 is peanuts. They'll get their name cleared and their slate whipped clean.

But what about the single Mom on the poverty line who shoplifted to feed her family, or passed bad cheques to keep a roof over their head? She won't be able to come up with another $500. So she'll continue to be burdened with a criminal record, making it harder to get a job and support her family, while the wealthy mutual fund shyster gets a second chance.

And it's also worth noting that those eligible for the pardon program have already served their sentences, so unlike the Conservative soundbite, these people have been held accountable.

Look, if you want to reform the pardon program, and make them harder to get, that's a legitimate debate. Tighten regulations about who can qualify, the time periods, what crimes aren't eligible, and so on.

But just raising fees and pretending you're being tough is neither tough nor smart on crime. It's just stupid.

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More pretend Conservative action on the gun registry

I'm down in Orlando covering EMC World for my day job so my blogging will likely be limited over the next few days. I did want to mention though that once again the Conservatives seem to be trying to placate their base by pretending to take action on the infamous gun registry while in reality continuing to do nothing serious to get rid of it, just as they have for years. Once wonders if their base is really this gullible.

Here's the latest, from the story the other day about their again extending the amnesty for long-gun owners that haven't registered yet.

Treasury Board President Vic Toews said the Conservatives still intend to do away with the registry the Liberals created, which he argues does nothing to reduce gun crime.

"The government believes that gun control should target criminals, not law-abiding citizens," Toews said in Winnipeg. "It should save lives, not waste money. And it should promote safety on our streets, not frustrate hunters in the bush or farmers on their land."

(snip)

The Tories moved toward dismantling the registry Friday in Ottawa when Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner introduced a private member's bill that would abolish the requirement for Canadians to register their non-restricted firearms.

"It's a clear bill that would eliminate the long-gun registry," Hoeppner said. "I'm really hoping to build consensus and bring the opposition on board. We're a minority Parliament. We can't do it on our own."

Come on Vic, are you really serious here? We've been down this road before, now haven't we? And another private members bill? Gary Berkuitz has had one going for years that hasn't gone anywhere. If Vic were really serious, he'd introduce a government bill rather than offering support for a bill from an obscure backbencher.

In their last big pretend splash on the gun registry, the Conservatives did introduce a government bill ... in the Senate. That house of unelected unaccountables they so routinely mock. And then to no one's surprise, after the initial media flurry passed you announced the Senate bill was dead in the water, to no one's surprise and after no real effort on your part.

Frankly, the Conservatives have yet to convince me they want to do anything more than half-hearted pandering on this issue. They've yet to make a real, serious push on what supposedly is a deeply philosophical issue for them.

I think that's for two reasons. One: they don't want to do too much to piss off the urban women they need to grow their seat count, and nearly won over last election. Two: they like having the gun registry issue as a political stick, a fundraising tool, a rallying cry, falsely blaming those dammed Liberals for their inaction on the issue.

If they were serious, we'd see a government-sponsored bill narrowly focused on long guns, and we'd see a real, genuine effort at building support for it by the CPC from members of the Liberal and NDP caucus. That could be an interesting vote, if they handled it right. But they'd rather have the issue, so we get half-hearted private members bills and lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Pardon my French but this Toews story is dumb

The Globe’s Lawrence Martin saves me from having to blog too much about this tempest in a Toewspot by publishing a column today I can just post a link to and say I largely agree with:

Just when we thought we were well beyond the age of angst over French on cereal boxes and the like, in steps Vic Toews with the heavy linguistic lumber.

In a fit of pique - uggh, that's a French word - the President of the Treasury Board charged that the Liberals view unilingual Canadians as second-class citizens. "It's clear," he harrumphed, "that the Liberal Party considers those of us who speak one official language to be less Canadian."

The truculent Mr. Toews is responsible for language policy in the federal public service. He blew his anglophone gasket - Quebeckers will not be overjoyed - in a committee hearing on the Official Languages Act when Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez had the audacity to ask whether, given his duties, the minister should be bilingual.

His skin growing thinner by the millisecond, Mr. Toews shot back: "I should feel free to be able to speak the language of my choice, and for you to even ask that question is an insult."

Let me say that I don’t care too much if Toews can speak French or not. I can’t, but then I won’t be responsible for implementing official bilingualism in the public service anytime soon. Nevertheless, its not a biggie for me.

Nevertheless, it was a perfectly legitimate question for Pablo to ask, given the specific nature of Vic’s ministerial responsibilities, which includes responsibility for the civil service's official bilingualism policy. If Vic was, say, agriculture minister, it would have been less relevant. And it would have been perfectly fine for Vic to reply his inability to speak French has absolutely no bearing on his job, and to calmly explain why. And point out Liberals in his job haven't always been bilingual. All legitimate debate.

But this feigned outrage and insult by Toews is absolutely ridiculous, as is the piling-on by the Cons and their Web supporters. Particularly as this is the party that make so much of Stephane Dion’s accented English.

It was Vic Toews’ party that ran a smear campaign against Dion, mocking his language ability, saying his accented English made him unsuitable to be Prime Minister. They were nasty and personal. It was an organized, multimedia smear campaign ran by the Conservative Party based on Stephane’s language ability, saying it disqualified him from being a national leader.

So, I’m sorry Vic, but your feigned outrage over a measured question in a committee hearing is absolutely asinine. Maybe if you kept better company I’d be more sympathetic, but when your party was smearing Mr. Dion and his language ability I don’t recall you uttering a peep.

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