By now, every reporter and editor in the province has likely gotten into at least one good, rip-roaring debate about journalistic ethics - all stemming from the now-infamous Huffington Post blog post by Carol Todd.
Todd, the mother of Amanda, took the opportunity to thank the Vancouver Sun reporting team (and in particular Gillian Shaw) for their handling of her daughter's suicide last fall and to congratulate them on their Webster award win for said coverage.
No one has argued that the coverage of the 15-year-old's suicide - which sparked a huge and much-needed discussion about cyberbullying and online sexual exploitation - was anything less than stellar.
What has been thrust into the forefront is the behaviour of the reporters in getting the story - and whether they crossed ethical lines to do it.
For those who missed the debate, the issue arose from the original blog post (which was later amended and then removed entirely from the Huffington Post site, at Todd's request). Todd mentions the reporters engaging in certain behaviours that many journalists found distasteful - centring around the fact that the journalists (in Todd's eyes, at least) became Todd's friends in all the time they spent at her home in the days following Amanda's suicide. Todd thanked them for being there to help her grieve, to help screen her phone calls, to do her dishes and to allow her to be involved in vetting the final story product (among other behaviour that might be seen as kind in a human being but questionable in a journalist).
It was meant to be a genuine thank-you.
It blew up into a firestorm of outrage from journalists on social media, taking down the Sun reporters for crossing lines all over the place. (Who does a source's dishes? Why on earth would they think it appropriate to keep other media away from Todd? How dare they let her see the final copy?)
I've found myself playing devil's advocate so often in this debate that I felt compelled to write my own blog post about it.
Let me say up front that I do not know Carol Todd. I do not know Gillian Shaw or the other Sun journalists involved. I have no inside knowledge of how they arrived at their stories.
I write this blog post with no qualifications other than the following two facts: I am a journalist, and I am a human being. (I have been the former for 21 years and the latter for 43, for what those facts are worth.)
And, in a nutshell, here's my message to all the outraged journalists out there:
Chill.
I mean no disrespect to those who are raising genuine ethical questions about this. I get that there are huge, serious questions about crossing ethical lines when journalists become too close to their sources.
What I also believe, however, is that the whole thing isn't as black-and-white as it's being made out to be - and if there's ever a story that calls for fifty shades of journalistic grey, this is the one.
No, I didn't miss Journalism 100 class, and I've heard it all before.
I heard Langara instructor Ross Howard's impassioned defence of journalistic integrity on CBC and the need for a reporter to approach stories with a "professional set of eyes that isn't swayed by someone else's tears."
I agree.
Except for the fact that this isn't just another story.
I do understand the need to be compassionate but objective; to maintain professional distance while still offering empathy to our sources when covering tough stories.
But let's be real.
Unless you are a robot, a Vulcan or Dr. Sheldon Cooper, how on earth could you have walked into this story treating Carol Todd as "just another source"?
I have spoken to people who have come through many difficult circumstances. Parents who've lost children. A rape victim. Survivors of abuse. A schizophrenic mother fighting to regain custody of her child. A man trying to make amends for killing another human being. A mother waiting for her missing son to be found.
But never, never, have I sat in the home of a parent who has lost a child to suicide, in the raw, immediate aftermath of that death.
And unless you have, I urge you not to throw too many rocks at the Sun team for how they acted.
You have no idea what Carol Todd needed right then. And, frankly, you have no idea what Gillian Shaw and the Sun team did for her, either.
We've read what Carol Todd remembers. But are we to believe that, despite the immediacy of her grief and the attendant confusion that comes along with grief, she remembers it the same way an objective outsider would?
And are we to believe that somehow, the Sun team should have done a better job explaining to her (as I've heard many journalists argue that they should have) that they were not her friends, they were simply doing their job.
I agree in principle that, yes, that's the message we should always give our sources, whatever the story is.
I'm just suggesting that, in that particular home in that particular moment, it's a message that would have been virtually impossible to deliver to Carol Todd.
Later, when the world had come into focus again, when she'd had time to process the initial loss, she would have been able to have that kind of conversation.
But in that moment - in the thick of it all, when the events were fresh and raw, when the emotional wounds were still so huge and gaping that she was probably at the stage of barely making it out of bed every day - she likely couldn't have begun to make that distinction, no matter what the Sun team had told her.
Anyone who has experienced grief knows something about the confusion. The haze. The way you feel like you're watching the world from some strange, muffled place where everyone else is far away. The sheer visceral response of your body to it all - the chills and the throwing up and the night sweats and the uncontrollable shaking. The moments in which all you can manage to do is curl up on the floor in the fetal position and whimper until someone picks you up and sets you going again.
What you reach out for in those moments is someone. Anyone. The nearest person who can help keep you breathing, sitting up and putting one foot in front of the other so you can function like a human being even though you don't feel like one.
The someone who can bring you a cup of tea and make sure you eat something and, yes, wash your dishes and answer your phone.
Which appears to be where Gillian Shaw came in for Carol Todd.
Was that appropriate? Should not Todd have relied on someone else, as some have argued - shouldn't she have turned to her family, her friends, for that kind of support?
I do not know Todd and her personal circumstances, so I couldn't say.
But what I can say is that I'm not surprised that Gillian Shaw should have become a support to her.
For Todd, just then, an empathetic ear would have meant everything. And the fact that Shaw was a stranger probably even made it easier, in some way. Sometimes it's less risky to unburden your soul to someone who doesn't know you. Who won't judge you. Who may not be around tomorrow to remember how you humiliated yourself by revealing secrets you've never told anyone.
Was it wise to choose a journalist to be that person?
Maybe not. But I'm not going to criticize a grieving mother for talking to a compassionate and empathetic person about something so enormous, so life-changing, so world-ending.
Instead, I'm going to give kudos to the reporter in question for being that person - and proving to Carol Todd, and to the public at large, that journalists are in fact human beings.
(As to the side issue of whether Shaw and her cohorts screened other media calls; again, we don't know if that happened. But I have to say, aside from questions of humanity, there's a part of me, as a journalist, that says, "Well, good on them." After all, they were the ones who did the legwork and tracked down Todd and spent the time with her to build her trust. That Todd didn't feel comfortable confiding in other journalists may just mean that the Sun team did their jobs better and got there first. Did they have an ethical or moral obligation to allow other media outlets, who hadn't put in the same time and legwork, to ride their coattails to a good story? Just asking.)
But back to the question of journalist as human being.
In my mind, the big moral danger in a story like this is not that Shaw and her colleagues would have become too close and too supportive of Todd - but that they could easily have moved in, seen a chance to mine a vulnerable woman for information and (knowingly or otherwise) exploited her situation in a quest for the scoop.
That they didn't do that is worthy of note. Whatever they did, they evidently treated Todd with respect.
Did they allow Todd to read their copy before it went to the editors? We don't know. We weren't there.
I know some people will say that's one of the black-and-whites; that there are no circumstances in which it would be okay to allow a source to vet anything at all.
I'm going to go out on a journalistic limb here and say this: I disagree.
In these circumstances, giving a mother some control over protecting the memory of her child is not at all like, say, giving the mayor the chance to vet city council coverage or the CEO of a corporation to read over a business profile before it's printed.
I would never do that. For that matter, I would never even allow the subject of a human interest feature to read over a happy, fluffy, non-controversial piece before it got to print.
I get the need to protect our journalistic integrity.
What I also get is that, from Carol Todd's point of view, she was going to need some reassurance.
In her shoes, would I not have wanted to know that nothing I said was going to be misconstrued? That my precious daughter wasn't going to be painted as some kind of sexually precocious little vixen? That I wasn't going to come across as an irresponsible mother? Would I not want to know that both my daughter and I were going to be allowed to keep our dignity intact?
Damn straight I would.
And I wouldn't be likely to speak to any reporter that couldn't offer me a promise that would happen.
To get the kind of story they got, Shaw and her colleagues had to find a way to reassure Todd that they would protect Amanda's memory.
That doesn't mean lying or manipulating the truth. But if it meant that a mother wanted to know what was being written in advance of it being printed - well, I've gotta tell you that I don't see that as the huge crime against integrity that some are painting it as.
In this very rare, very exceptional case, it may be that allowing a source closer-than-usual access to the story was in fact the more ethical route to take, given the sensitivity of the issues concerned.
We don't, of course, know whether Todd did indeed vet copy, whether she was perhaps given a chance to read over quotes, or whether she was just offered reassurance about what was or was not going to appear in print.
What we do know is that, whatever the Sun team did for her, they managed to tell her daughter's story in a sensitive and respectful way - and to bring an issue to light that started an important public discussion.
Which, after all, is what we're on a quest to do as journalists, isn't it?
I've read many calls on social media for someone to step up and answer to this.
Should Todd or Shaw respond to the furor?
As to Todd, no. She's a grieving mom who probably thought she was doing a nice thing by thanking the Sun team for their work. She had no idea she was setting off a bomb. Leave her out of it.
I'd love to hear what Shaw has to say, but at this moment I can hardly blame her for not engaging with what has become a bit of a lynch mob of self-righteous journalists (none of whom, including me, have probably ever been in that same situation and can't say how they would have behaved if they were).
Probably, in Shaw's shoes, I would take some time to think about it, step away, gather my thoughts and write a blog post, eventually - on my own time, and not because anyone else told me to - to clear the air and to help continue the discussion in a sensible and even-handed way.
But I don't think Shaw "owes" us anything, either.
That we, as journalists, are all so riled up about this is great. It says a lot about us as reporters and editors that we care enough about our profession (or is that our craft or our trade?) to leap into these debates with passion.
But let's just all take a step back and quit baying for the blood of one of our own, shall we?
(If you'd like to bay for my blood instead, feel free. I welcome comments and discussion below.)
