Angry in the Great White North

The editor of The Telegraph-Journal is Shawna Richer, formerly a reporter for The Globe and Mail.

As an editor, Richer has a very activist view of the role of a newspaper, which she described during a controversy that erupted in January of this year, when the mayor of Saint John banned the paper from his offices, accusing the paper of bias.  Richer explained that there is, in fact, a sort of bias:

Richer said the criticism of Court and other city decisions has nothing to do with the fact the newspaper endorsed one of the mayor's rivals during the 2008 municipal election. She said the only thing the newspaper is opposed to is the existing management at the city, high taxes and the sub par services offered in Saint John.

"This isn't personal," she said.

"This is, you know, our job is to advocate for the people . for the taxpayers and their residents. And any good newspaper would take exactly the same position," she said.

The job of a newspaper is to advocate for the people?  I thought it was to report the news.  And if it is to advocate for the people, then which people?  The people who pay the taxes?  The people who consume the taxes?  The people who collect and then spend the taxes?

So with that sense that a newspaper is on a mission (without clearly explaining what that mission is), instead of just reporting on the facts, we have the case of the fabricated communion story:

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, the Telegraph-Journal published a story about the funeral mass celebrating the life of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc that was inaccurate and should not have been published. We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case.

The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister's Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call 'the host' into his jacket pocket".

There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now. Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.

The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the Prime Minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused. We also apologize to reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras and to our readers for our failure to meet our own standards of responsible journalism and accuracy in reporting.

So who got fired for this?  As Stephen Taylor points out so brilliantly, if you take out the bit about the communion wafer being pocketed as a bald-faced lie, then remove everything that flowed from that lie, the story reduces to "Stephen Harper attended the funeral before leaving to attend the G8 summit".

Should someone be fired?  Yes, and that is not my opinion.  It is the precedent set by Shawna Richer:

Matt McCann wasn't supposed to spend his summer working for St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

For the second year in a row, McCann, a journalism student at St. Thomas, had landed a summer internship at the Telegraph-Journal. But that ended abruptly in May when he was fired a day after the paper published a story of his on the front page.

McCann's article reported that roughly 100 faculty and staff from the University of New Brunswick had signed a letter protesting the school's decision to award Premier Shawn Graham an honorary degree. After it was published, representatives from the university called the paper's publisher and editor to talk about the article.

"We were really looking to elaborate our position," UNB communications manager Dan Tanaka told the Toronto Star. "We felt we were given a minor mention at the bottom of the story."

Apart from that gripe, the story contained three factual errors. McCann misspelled a person's last name ("Stropel" instead of "Strople") and title ("university secretary for UNB Fredericton" instead of "university secretary for UNB"). He also reported that the premier has an education degree from UNB-when, in fact, he has a physical education degree.

The errors were easily preventable and should not have appeared in the story. As far as them being a firing offense, however, I've never heard of anyone being let go for mistakes of this nature.

But McCann was fired for (1) misspelling a name, (2) mistyping a work title, and (3) confusing an education degree with a physical education degree.

Imagine if McCann had accused someone of gravely offending the Catholic Church!  What would Richer have done to him then?  Richer defended her decision to fire McCann against criticism that it was too severe a punishment:

Shawna Richer, the paper's editor, has faced criticism for her decision to fire McCann. She insists the factual mistakes combined with the one-sided nature of the story to make it a deal breaker. Yet even the university spokesman told the Star that he was "surprised" to hear McCann was let go. In spite of their concerns, they didn't ask for him to lose his job.

Richer says the call was hers alone and no one pressured her. The paper has also acknowledged that McCann's story was, obviously, reviewed by editors. After all, they deemed it good enough to warrant major front page placement. Those editors have all kept their jobs.

By the way, McCann's story remains uncorrected on the website for The Telegraph-Journal.

So what is up with Richer?  The sheer national impact of this massive mistake suggests that someone ought to be McCann-ed at The Telegraph-Journal.

Why has no one lost their job?  Perhaps the reason is hidden in the apology itself:

In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.

The editing process?  Does that mean the editor?  Does that mean Shawna Richer?

If the editor won't fire herself, maybe we need to go over her head.

The publisher of The Telegraph-Journal is Jamie Irving.  You can email him at irving.jamie@telegraphjournal.com.  Ask him how the newspaper can reconcile these two wildly different responses to factual misreporting.  A few factual errors in what amounts to a local story and a reporter is fired.  A massive fabrication at the heart of a story that went national is attributed to "the editing process", and the editor remains at her post.

That's the real story.

Great minds thinking alike: Looks like the folks at the National Post were thinking along exactly the same lines as I was.  Check out their story that covers all the same bases.  It also appears as if publisher Jamie Irving and editor Shawna Richer are hoping to ride out the storm by hiding under their desks:

Both the names of the newspaper's editor, Shawna Richer, and the publisher, Jamie Irving, do not appear on the masthead of Tuesday's edition.

Messages left with the editorial department at the Telegraph-Journal and the J.D. Irving Ltd. headquarters, the owners of the newspaper, about this were unreturned Tuesday.

I'm not sure I'm going to be satisfied with a "No comment" response.  I might just keep on this one for a while until I get some satisfaction.

The nice thing about taking a long break is that you come back with your batteries recharged.

Update: Events continue to unfold.  Editor Shawna Richer has been fired, and publisher Jamie Irving has been suspended for 30 days.  Meanwhile, there is a shocking allegation that people within the Liberal Party concocted the wafer story, then delivered it to Jamie Irving, who delivered it to Shawna Richer, who rewrote the story by Rob Linke and Adam Huras.