The Charlatan’s Aishu Ravishankar spoke to Chris Waddell, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication about the Toronto mayor’s rocky relationship with the media.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The Charlatan (TC): Rob Ford finally admitted Nov. 5 to smoking crack cocaine within the past year—five months after the video scandal erupted. Why has his admission come in so late?
Chris Waddell (CW): I think it was pretty clear from the start that the Toronto Star wouldn’t have run the story if they hadn’t seen the video. They had two different reporters who sat together and saw the video. There was also Gawker, an online publication in the United States, who saw the video too. [Gawker] and the people from the Star independently wrote stories saying what they’d seen in the video, so I think it was pretty clear that the video was actually true and the video actually existed, but I guess Mr. Ford was hoping that somehow, people would be successful at deleting the video or getting rid of the video so he would never have to actually admit that it actually existed.
When it emerged that the police had actually found a copy of the video on a computer hard drive, at that point it was clear that he could no longer deny that the video existed. So I guess he felt he had to actually tell the truth five months after he’d been lying.
TC: When Ford finally admitted that he had smoked crack, he said that he hadn’t admitted it sooner because the media “didn’t ask the right questions.”
CW: That’s a ridiculous statement by Mr. Ford, one of many ridiculous statements he’s made over the last while. He had lots of opportunity, beginning the morning the Star story ran, where he could have confronted the issue and said what he wanted to say. His first response was to say the story was ridiculous. What’s ridiculous has been Mr. Ford’s unwillingness to comment on it and unwillingness to talk about it . . . he’s refused to actually be interviewed by the police about this. I think the problem lies with Mr. Ford.
TC: Do you think the media have covered Ford fairly in the past few weeks?
CW: Yes, I think the media have covered Ford fairly. They’ve pursued Mr. Ford to try and get Mr. Ford to comment on a lot of issues. Mr. Ford could deal with all this if he’d organized a news conference where people stood up and asked questions, [if] he stood at a microphone and podium and answered the questions, and [if] the news conference went on for a half an hour, an hour or however long it took . . . the Toronto Star, over the last couple of years, has done a series of stories about Mr. Ford. Every time they do a story about Mr. Ford, he accuses them of being wrong and being inaccurate, yet they’ve been accurate every time so far.
TC: How do you think his image has been impacted over his term, with his treatment of the media?
CW: Well, it’s an interesting question in that there are lots of people now saying that the behaviour Mr. Ford’s exhibiting as mayor, in fact, is very similar to the behaviour that he exhibited as a councillor, prior to becoming a mayor . . . I would say that in fact, what he’s doing as mayor is not that much different from what he was doing as a councillor, and people maybe didn’t pay close enough attention to what his character was really like.
TC: Is it possible, though, that media might be biased against politicians who aren’t media-friendly?
CW: I don’t think it’s a question of whether you’re media-friendly or not friendly. I think the issue is that sometimes, under some circumstances, public officials need to be accountable, and public officials need to be accountable by having the media ask them questions. If they won’t answer questions, if they won’t make themselves available, then that’s a problem. That’s not the media’s problem, that’s the politicians’ problem.
TC: Almost all major newspapers, in their editorials, have called for Ford to step down as mayor. Is that something he should do?
CW: Much of the attention has been focused of whether he smoked crack cocaine or not. Frankly, smoking crack cocaine is a small part of this story. I think the much more important story is, who are the people he’s hanging around with? Who are the people he spends his spare time with? The evidence, based from the police investigation and other things, seems to suggest they’re not particularly savoury characters. Some of them appear to be people who’ve committed criminal offences. Some of them may be drug dealers. These aren’t the people that you want your public officials hanging around with, simply because—if nothing else—first of all, they’re breaking the law, so he may be breaking the law as well. But beyond that, by making these people your friends, you leave yourself open to extortion, you leave yourself open to blackmail, you leave yourself open to a lot of different things you don’t want to be open to, as a politician.
There’s the old adage that says you’re judged by the friends you keep, in some extent. If we’re judging Mayor Ford on the basis of the friends he keeps, he shouldn’t be in the position of mayor. Simple as that. Public officials shouldn’t make criminals and people in the drug business their best friends.
TC: Do you think the police should release the crack video?
CW: I’m not really sure what the mayor thinks releasing the video is supposed to prove. If the video is as described by the Star and by Gawker, it will show the mayor smoking crack cocaine, which he now acknowledges he did. It will also show the mayor making homophobic remarks—calling Justin Trudeau a fag— and making remarks against some other people he coached at his high school.
TC: Is there anything else noteworthy about how Ford has been dealing with the media?
CW: I think the only thing that’s noteworthy is that there doesn’t appear to be any sort of plan or any sort of strategy. It’s kind of responding at this minute and that minute to whatever happens at the moment. The broader part though, is the unwillingness, certainly the degree to which he has denigrated and attacked anyone who has raised any questions about what he was doing, whether it was calling the reporters maggots, or doing other sorts of things. It’s kind of been demonstrated that in fact the reporters were accurate. The reporters did their job. The news organizations did check the material out.
Much of his strategy of denying everything maybe works if you can be sure that the material that is the subject of the articles is never going to come out. In other words, if they knew the videos had disappeared, and somebody was clearly making an attempt to try to get the videos back so they could get rid of them—that’s a strategy that’s not particularly smart. It’s likely that the video is going to show up somewhere.
TC: Do you think Ford should take a step back from the media and think about what he’s saying and regroup?
CW: Well, the editorials in the newspapers have suggested that Mr. Ford shouldn’t be the mayor anymore, based on his activities and based on the people he associates with. That seems to me to be a pretty fair assessment—I would agree with that.
