Guess which Toronto newspaper….
Not-a-lot-of-skill-testing question: which “local newspaper” does the Toronto Star mean when it reports:
“Two and a half hours earlier, Ford was hosting a news conference to
explain why it appeared he had not told the truth to a local newspaper
about being charged with drug possession.”
Very Big Clue: why, it’s the same unnameable organ that the Globe and Mail refers to when it reports:
“Mr. Ford’s bad Thursday began when he called a 9 a.m. news conference to
explain a story in a local newspaper that said the candidate had
forgotten until reminded of it that he beat a charge of possessing a
marijuana cigarette.”
The answer, for those who don’t want to read every newpaper every day, comes from the National Post, which gives credit where credit’s due, and steers true to the mission of plain old-fashioned clarity about plain facts:
“At a hastily called news conference, Mr. Ford addressed his past after
the Toronto Sun confronted him
with evidence he was charged with marijuana possession in Florida in
1999; that charge was later dropped.” (Complete with the hyperlink, mind.)
Now the real question: what justifies the traditional coyness that news organizations so often have with naming other news organizations? To the ordinary reader, especially in the Age of Google, it surely looks rather infantile.
Not-a-lot-of-skill-testing question: which “local newspaper” does the Toronto Star mean when it reports:
“Two and a half hours earlier, Ford was hosting a news conference to
explain why it appeared he had not told the truth to a local newspaper
about being charged with drug possession.”
Very Big Clue: why, it’s the same unnameable organ that the Globe and Mail refers to when it reports:
“Mr. Ford’s bad Thursday began when he called a 9 a.m. news conference to
explain a story in a local newspaper that said the candidate had
forgotten until reminded of it that he beat a charge of possessing a
marijuana cigarette.”
The answer, for those who don’t want to read every newpaper every day, comes from the National Post, which gives credit where credit’s due, and steers true to the mission of plain old-fashioned clarity about plain facts:
“At a hastily called news conference, Mr. Ford addressed his past after
the Toronto Sun confronted him
with evidence he was charged with marijuana possession in Florida in
1999; that charge was later dropped.” (Complete with the hyperlink, mind.)
Now the real question: what justifies the traditional coyness that news organizations so often have with naming other news organizations? To the ordinary reader, especially in the Age of Google, it surely looks rather infantile.
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Ivor Shapiro, the founding editor of J-Source, is emeritus professor and former chair of the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he is now a senior fellow at the Centre for Free Expression. His research is in the professional practice and attitudes of journalists, and he has taught feature reporting and media ethics. As a magazine journalist, he was a contributing editor of Saturday Night magazine and managing editor of Chatelaine. A former chair of the ethics committee of the Canadian Association of Journalists, his latest book is The Disputed Freedoms of A Disrupted Press (Routledge, 2024).