It was wrong to rein him in after rebellious move
Sometimes, social change occurs so slowly you could spend a lifetime and not notice it. At other times, it can rush through with the swiftness of a whirlwind, leaving you dazed in its wake.
One such disruptive force hit the Toronto Star recently, bringing the old order up against a confrontational, anti-establishment millennial wave of activism. In my view, the establishment came up short. On May 4, columnist Desmond Cole, also a noted black activist, gave up his bi-weekly freelance writing gig at the Star in a very public fashion — in a blog and then a tweet that directed his considerable following to the blog. Then he sat back and watched. The Twitter post elicited a reaction ranging from solidarity to outrage. It sparked a debate among Toronto’s decidedly non-black journalistic circles about whether a journalist could also be an activist.
Was Cole’s particular brand of activism incompatible with column writing in the Star? Public editor Kathy English quickly wrote up an explanation of the Star’s policy, and her own unease with Cole’s actions — and the fury spilled over.
For Cole’s readers, the policy wasn’t the point — they saw its application as inconsistent.
This was not an academic discussion about journalism and policy but about the implementation of that policy in the messy and viscerally emotional context of race and racism.
Quick recap: On April 20, Cole who is noted for his opposition to carding — the police system of stopping, questioning and documenting information of mostly black and brown-skinned citizens, even if they are not suspected of criminal activity — went to a Toronto Police Services Board meeting and refused to leave the speaker’s chair until the board agreed to destroy the carding data. The board cancelled the meeting. A photograph of Cole with his fist raised in a Black Power salute flashed across news sites including the Star.
Did his act of resistance and rebellion — that his readers saw as naming the perpetrators of their injustice — cross a journalistic line? Some in the Star thought so, and editorial page editor Andrew Phillips, who oversees Cole’s work, called him in to tell him about a policy that states, “It is not appropriate for Star journalists to play the roles of both actor and critic.”
In Cole’s place, I, too, would have taken that pointing out of a policy to mean, “Don’t do it again.”
Cole opted out. “If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community,” he wrote in his blog, “I choose activism in the service of Black liberation.”
Adding fat to the fire, Cole wrote: “In April of 2016, John Honderich, the chair of Torstar Corp., who was also serving as the Star’s acting publisher at that time, asked to meet with me. Honderich suggested I was writing about race too often, and advised me to diversify my topics.”
When I put that to Honderich, he denied it, saying he had instead asked Cole to diversify from writing solely about carding.
“He was writing about carding all the time. So the idea was in a constructive way to say broaden the palette. It wasn’t race,” Honderich said. He saw it as journalistic guidance.
“I think for any columnist to be successful, you can’t be predictable. You can’t always be writing on the same subject.”
Both Honderich and Phillips say a previous cutting of Cole’s column from weekly to biweekly — something that Cole and his readers viewed as a clipping of wings — was part of a general shuffle at the time.
What about an uneven application of policy?
“Remember all we said to him was here is our policy,” Honderich said. “Advocacy, absolutely. Activism in terms of becoming the story yourself — that is against our policy.”
“Was that the line in the sand?” I asked.
“That was the line in the sand,” he said.
We took a deeper dive into journalism and policy, and how the actor and critic rule had been applied to various columnists at the Star.
The Star’s legendary women’s rights activist/columnist Michele Landsberg? “She was a ferocious and great advocate. She never became the story,” Honderich said.
Naomi Klein? David Frum? “If they contribute, we’ll run them.” Wait, what? A distilled version of our discussion revealed this: A columnist — but not a reporter — can be an advocate.
There are three kinds of columnists at the Star: a staff columnist working in the newsroom, like I am, a regular columnist, like Cole, whose work appeared on the opinion pages, was; and an occasional op-ed columnist or contributor. The last two are freelance, but the policy on not mixing activism and writing applies only to the first two.
A regular columnist ends up representing the Star, Honderich says, and so the policies apply.
Asking a regular freelance columnist — one who gets paid per column and is not on salary — to behave as a staff columnist does not make sense to me. Is someone who is paid two days a month really expected to live by the Star’s rules for the other 28 days?
It also bothers me that Cole was called in and shown the policy not for what he wrote in the Star (he did not write about his protest) but for what he did outside it.
“The question here was that he took that action and it was public,” Honderich says.
He has since discovered that Cole had disrupted other meetings. “There were other cases where he acted out. For example at the York (Region District School) Board where he started yelling. And I got a note about that.
“The report there was that there was considerable unease there among the people on the board and the people around as to exactly what role was Desmond playing.” If the public needed clarification on his position — or if the Star needed to create a little distance from his activism — a tagline at the end of each column could have sufficed. “Desmond Cole is a freelance contributor who writes bi-weekly” would establish to readers that he is not a representative of the organization.
I’m not convinced, though, that the public was confused about Cole’s role.
He is a known activist, and readers look to him to lead the discussion on anti-black racism, particularly with regard to policing.
Honderich himself recruited Cole because, “Like others, I was dazzled by his Toronto Life column on carding. He was an incredibly effective voice. Young, attractive, good writer, well-spoken. This would be a great voice for the Toronto Star to have.”
Cole’s rejection of the Star strikes at the heart of establishment liberalism.
“The Star’s opinion pages are by far the most “diverse” in the country in terms of who writes,” Phillips wrote in his email.
“Surveys of other comparable pages have shown that and our own periodic counts confirm it. The Star is the leader in this area and will continue to be.”
If the Star, which has seriously invested in investigating and exposing the shortcomings of carding, and also espousing its termination, can appear to be rattled by black activism, how will other media fare?
The fight for equality is changing its tone and without adequate representation in their newsrooms, traditional media are not keeping up.
Digital platforms created change, giving voice to the marginalized. Insecurity fuelled by Donald Trump’s election in the U.S. just accelerated the desire for that change.
Where the liberal establishment offers limited advances, the new wave of activists want fundamental transformation.
Where their predecessors tried to effect change from within the system, these advocates are done with the politics of respectability. They are done waiting for equality on someone else’s timeline.
Carding is a crusade for social justice at the Star, but for thousands of others, it’s a daily indignity that they don’t have the privilege of escaping at the end of a work day. Civil disobedience has long been a tool in the fight for social justice. By showing its discomfort with it, the Star came across as intolerant of black activism.
Asking a regular freelance columnist — one who gets paid per column and is not on salary — to behave as a staff columnist does not make sense to me I’m not convinced that the public was confused about Cole’s role. He is a known activist, and readers look to him to lead the discussion on anti-black racism, particularly with regard to policing