How the Star’s editorial board works
Known for taking progressive positions, members must tackle a variety of topics
This story is part of the Star’s trust initiative, where, every week, we take readers behind the scenes of our journalism. This week, we focus on how the Star’s editorial board chooses its topics.
Avital part of the Toronto Star is its editorial board — a team of writers and editors, who are separate from the newsroom and weigh in on issues with positions that reflect the media organization’s values and opinions.
The editorial board, led by editorial page editor Andrew Phillips, is also responsible for publishing letters to the editor, editorial cartoons, columns and opinion pieces by guest writers. The board operates independently from the newsroom: Its members do not report to the editorin-chief and the board has its own workspace down the hall; it is entirely separate from news reporting.
The team’s editorials — unsigned, to represent the views of the Star — are thoughtful arguments that push decision makers to take action on public issues through arguments grounded in fact and reason.
The Star is well known for taking progressive positions that are in line with the Atkinson Principles put in place by founder Joseph Atkinson — but that’s just the starting point, Phillips says.
“While we are guided by certain principles, we’re not prisoners of them.”
That’s where trust comes into play. Over time, the body of work the editorial board publishes has helped form a consistent reputation for the Star — so that readers can seek insight and different viewpoints through arguments grounded in fact and reason.
Each morning, the editorial board’s members — Phillips, along with deputy editorial page editor Jordan Himelfarb and writer Dianne Rinehart — meet and discuss what to tackle. Editorial board members are well versed in the issues of the day and nimble enough to write on a vast variety of topics. One minute they might be taking a position whether the TTC should receive an award, for example, and the next day writing on Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy.
“We have lively debates every day and we disagree on things every day,” Phillips says. “We disagree on what’s important because we can highlight only one or two things a day.”
Many editorials issue a call to action that can help spur decision makers to make change. But not every piece takes the same approach.
Phillips draws on a recent example involving the slow pace of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The inquiry last month announced that, after holding its first few days of hearings, it would disband until the fall. Some members of the board wanted to write an editorial calling for a complete leadership change, he says. “Ultimately, we decided we shouldn’t call for that because it would put things back.”
This week, Phillips himself tackled the controversial news that the federal government would apologize and pay some $10 million to Omar Khadr for its role in the former child soldier’s mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay. It was a logical choice, he explains, because the editorial board has long taken positions on Khadr’s predicament, including suggesting as recently as March that Ottawa apologize and settle with Khadr.
“As soon as the news came out, there was a lot of criticism, mainly from the right wing, about this,” Phillips said. “So the idea here was to argue that the settlement was, generally speaking, the right way to go for reasons that the Star editorial board had already laid out, to put it into the legal and historical context in which various governments had made all kinds of mistakes over the years, and to counter some of the criticism of this deal.”
This Khadr editorial, which was printed Wednesday, under the headline “Omar Khadr: Rights apply to everyone,” was among the week’s top reads on thestar.com. With files from Scott Wheeler. Email your questions to trust@thestar.ca.