The Québécois block
Much as it might wish otherwise, the Quebec Press Council has no authority over journalists’ Twitter activities
The Quebec Press Council, whose mandate is to “defend the right of the public to quality reporting,” has embarked on an unprecedented new mission. For the first time in its 30-year history, the Council has pledged to take on the plight of the humble tweeter — the little guy — who was callously blocked on Twitter by two members of Quebec’s media.
Quebec’s council has ruled on Twitter complaints before: once, in 2012, for supposedly hateful comments columnist Éric Duhaime made about student protesters wearing read squares, and another time, in 2013, over an allegedly discriminatory tweet made by Robert Plouffe of TVA Nouvelles Québec. This time, however, it’s not about what a journalist tweeted, but rather, about tweets that two La Presse journalists prohibited a single reader from seeing.
The Council appears unconcerned with the nature of the tweets from which Luc Archambault, the reader who issued the complaint, was blocked. On April 22, Patrick Lagacé, one of the journalists under investigation, tweeted a picture of his cat. On March 12, Marc Cassivi, the other journalist being investigated, retweeted a Dilbert cartoon. They both tweet liberally about hockey and Don Cherry. Neither journalist says he can recall what prompted him to block Archambault, though the Council says it will proceed with the investigation anyhow, noting that its scope includes “all media organizations that publish or broadcast in Quebec, whether they belong to the print or electronic media.”
Legacé and Cassivi certainly belong to Quebec’s media landscape, but unlike the Twitter account belonging to La Presse, the journalists’ social media feeds do not constitute electronic media organizations. They’re simply personal venues through which a couple of hockey fans can complain about cheap goals and maybe toss in a link or two to a recent column. Demanding their social media feeds be open to everyone by virtue of the fact that they happen to be run by journalists is simply bizarre. By that notion one might wonder if it would violate Quebec Press Council rules if a journalist shared a Google Drive shopping list with his wife and blocked readers from seeing he planned to purchase — gasp — Ontario cheese. Quelle horreur.
What’s more, the Quebec Press Council has no real authority, no disciplinary power and no external oversight. And with frivolous investigations such as this one, the Council is rapidly losing any credibility it had left. If council members don’t want to accept the notion that journalists are free to block whomever they please on social media, they can opt for a very simple solution: block it out.