Rob Ford the exception to Canadian media’s reluctance to resort to chequebook journalism

Chequebook journalism, as practised in Britain, is very rare in Canada. But there seems to be some sort of "Rob Ford Exception."

The journalism ethics experts no doubt will be weighing in soon, but there's been little initial backlash to the Globe and Mail's decision to buy a series of frame grabs from the latest Rob Ford crack video.

(As I write that line I marvel at how normal the term "latest Rob Ford crack video" now seems.)

It's alleged Toronto's chronically dysfunctional mayor was recorded last Saturday smoking crack in his sister's basement. The clandestine videographer wasted no time shopping the recording around to media outlets, either personally or through an intermediary.

Interested parties included Gawker, which along with the Toronto Star tried to buy the first crack video offered last year, and the Globe.

Both apparently balked at the drug dealer's $100,000 asking price but the Globe negotiated a deal to view the video and pay $10,000 for still images from it that show the mayor handling the pipe alleged to have contained crack.

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Gawker also published the stills, which it had received separately during its negotiation with the dealer's go-between. Editor Max Read wrote Gawker was leery of this offer after being burned on the first video, which vanished after the gossip site raised more than the $150,000 asking price via crowd sourcing.

Read said Gawker put an offer on the table based on the photos, and was waiting to hear back when it learned the Globe had bought the stills.

Globe editor-in-chief David Walmsley justified purchasing the video from an apparent criminal as being in the public interest.

"It gives The Globe and Mail no pleasure to revisit once again the troubling social behaviour of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford," he wrote in an editor's note on Thursday.

"But part of our job is ensuring the electorate has all the facts about who is running Canada’s largest city, especially in the middle of a mayoralty campaign."

Buying the images from "an admitted drug dealer" is not the paper's normal practice, Walmsley said.

"But in this instance, the Globe felt it was a matter of public interest, and that readers needed to see what our reporters watched and reported on," he said.

"We paid $10,000 for a series of photographs. Toronto is the financial capital of this G8 country and the sixth-biggest government in Canada. Paralysis in Toronto is bad for the country. The mayor is supposed to be the guardian of his city. The photographs we published are a price worth paying."

The Globe was not the first to pay for dirt on Ford, of course. The Toronto Star, spent $5,000 last fall for a video of an intoxicated Ford in the midst of a violent rant.

Star public editor Kathy English defended the purchase at the time, arguing it was in the public interest and did not violate the paper's policy against paying for news because the Star routinely buys newsworthy photos and videos.

After some hand-wringing over the fact money changed hands when a more public-spirited citizen perhaps should have offered it for free. English said the Star concluded the crisis at Toronto City Hall justified the purchase, given Ford and his posse reflexively deny revelations when there's no physical evidence and attack the media as liars.

When word of the original crack video surfaced last spring, CBC News editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire admitted candidly her organization would love to get its hands on the recording "but we would not buy it in a bidding process."

While CBC News does pay for freelance material and nominal amounts for "authenticated content," such as citizen video of a dramatic event, McGuire said it wasn't interested in a bidding war for an exclusive on Ford's crack smoking.

"At CBC News, we are all about exclusives – we just don't buy them," she sniffed.

Of course Ford shrugged off the Star's rant video and other revelations that would have felled most other politicians. There was no smoking crack pipe, as it were.

Does Rob Ford's status as a unique figure in Canadian public life create a special exemption from our aversion to chequebook journalism? Or has this become a precedent for dealing with other material proffered for sale if an editor decides the public interest trumps an outlet's policy against buying information?

"In an era of citizen journalism and everything that flows from that, maybe we're going to get into more of that," Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communications, told Yahoo! News in an interview.

Waddell said the implication that the money in this case appears to be going into a criminal's hands should raise an ethical concern.

Echoing the Star's Kathy English, Waddell said the impetus to buy this stuff is in part driven by the consistent denials coming out of the Ford camp about the existence of the first crack video. Ford and his brother Doug accused the Star and other media of carrying out a vendetta against them.

"It took a very long time for the truth to actually emerge and it only did emerge when the police indicated they'd seen the video," Waddell said.

"Maybe the Globe felt that in this case, when the mayor's caught lying again, in order to to actually prevent that long discussion about is the media out to get him, etc., you can prove to people right away that you actually have what you say you have."

There's no "Rob Ford Exception" as such, Waddell argued. But we may be looking at an approach the media will feel forced to take with the type of story where governments stonewall allegations instead of dealing with them.

"You vociferously say it's not true, continue saying it's not true and you send out your acolytes to try to distract people to try to change things," he said. "You're more successful at doing that if the people making the allegations can't produce hard evidence to substantiate it."

Government's increasing obsession with information control perhaps is forcing news organizations to take more dramatic steps to get an increasingly jaded public's attention, Waddell suggested.

Waddell doubts the Ford case means Canadian media are headed down into the muck where its British counterparts dwelled for years, paying huge sums to buy dirty laundry about the famous and powerful. British media have emerged somewhat chastened after the phone-hacking scandal, he noted.

But the media's handling of material being offered by sometimes unsavoury people should serve as a warning to those in public life that we live in an environment where a lot of our fellow citizens are willing to record our transgressions surreptitiously and either sell them or simply post them online.

The public has become more jaded about the foibles of its leaders, said Waddell, with Ford as a prime example.

"Maybe a news organization feels it has to up its involvement on one level in order to prove these sorts of things in order to prove to people what's really going on," he said.

It comes back to the question, is Rob Ford the exception? Would Canadians tolerate similar revelations about B.C. Premier Christy Clark or Prime Minister Stephen Harper? Probably not.

But Ford has become almost a surreal figure, a character on a reality show, even though until recently he exercised real power and influence. The rules governing public outrage seem to have been suspended when it comes to him.

Perhaps we have ourselves to blame because a lot of us treat the Ford story as an entertaining spectacle rather than a nasty abscess on the Canadian body politic that it is, and one that needs to be drained quickly.