What is the state of journalism?

To my memory, unreliable as it is, I’ve never met Desmond Cole. We both work part-time for Newstalk 1010, a Toronto radio station, he as the host of a weekly show, me as a regular on a couple of daily panels, but as I toil from home, we haven’t run into one another at the studios.

And of course, I once worked for the Toronto Star, and now, he can say the same thing.

Cole quit his bi-monthly column at the paper this week in dramatic modern fashion, which is to say, on Twitter.

He’d been called in for a chat about the paper’s rules separating journalism from activism and told, by the mild-mannered and lovely man who is the Star’s editorial page editor, Andrew Philips, that his recent disruption of a Toronto Police Services Board meeting, complete with the old black power salute, had violated the paper’s policy.

Philips didn’t discipline Cole or attempt to rein him in; he just gave him the lay of the land and in fact said he hoped he’d continue writing.

That wasn’t good enough for Cole, who wrote in his blog, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m not going to accept it. If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community, I choose activism in the service of black liberation.”

It isn’t clear to me from Cole’s own account that anyone, least of all Philips, told him he “must choose” between the two.

A day or so later, the Star’s public editor, Kathy English, explained in a very good column the paper’s policies, reiterated that Philips was simply explaining these to Cole (who allowed in his piece no one had done that before) and defended them as proper.

The rules, English said, give columnists a little more latitude, to which as a Star reader I would say, duh.

At times, Star columnists have been frothing-at-themouth activists (Michele Landsberg is one who comes to mind) and the paper has been indulgent and sometimes over-the-moon proud of them. The line is certainly fuzzier with opinion writers than it is with pure reporters.

Anyway, none of that is what I find interesting and revealing of the times.

To me, it is Cole’s “I choose activism for black liberation” column on his blog. It says so much, both about the state of journalism and the world, that it is downright depressing.

Cole first sprang to broad public attention in 2015 with a piece he wrote for Toronto Life, in which he claimed to have been stopped by police more than 50 times because of his race. (In subsequent interviews, Cole qualified the number, once telling the National Post that 50 was an estimate that included times he says police followed him in his car but never stopped him, and TVO host Steve Paikin that he’s been carded, or stopped and asked for information, “maybe 12, 15 times.”)

He’s also written for the Torontoist website, The Walrus and perhaps others I don’t know about.

In other words, Cole, who is now 35, is a relatively young journalist, if a journalist he is, both in terms of age and experience.

This is what he said in his blog column. He complained that eight months after he started to write for the Star, “my space was cut in half … with almost no explanation.”

To this, and I say it as someone who has been writing columns mostly full time since 1972 (I am nothing if not old), I can’t count the number of times my space and the space of my fellow columnists has been arbitrarily cut, and that’s in a travelling tour of all four Toronto dailies.

Say, 50 times? Or Whatever. A lot.

Number of explanations? Zero.

My friend Rosie DiManno, the single best columnist at the Star and the most productive and the most versatile and arguably the best-read, in the decades I’ve known her, has had her space cut at least a halfdozen times and columns outright killed and has been suspended.

(DiManno has herself written about all of these events, or else I wouldn’t.)

Cole wrote: “I doubt any freelance columnist in the recent (or even not so recent) history of the Star has consistently generated more interest and readership, and consequently more revenue, than I have. Few of the Star’s full-time columnists cannot claim the following I have built as a freelancer and, with the very notable exception of Washington correspondent Daniel Dale, no regular Star columnist or reporter can match my success in aggressively marketing my work on social media.”

To this I would say, if there’s a relationship between aggressive self-marketing and quality of work, I haven’t noticed.

Besides, aggressive selfregard is the hallmark only of … aggressive self-regard. I cannot tell you how dispiriting it is that so many journalists devoutly tweet their own work, retweet it, and then tweet their old stuff from a year earlier to remind the reader how very right or clever they were.

Cole wrote: “My contributions to the Star are in sharp contrast with the lack of tenure, exposure, support and compensation I have received in return.”

There probably isn’t a working man and woman in the world who doesn’t feel exactly the same way. That does not make it so. 12?