UNFORGETTABLE
Julie Payette and the perils of perfect digital memory.
Political scandal in the digital age works a bit like that old saying about fickle climate conditions — if you don’t like the weather right now, wait five minutes. Justin Trudeau has had some recent experience with the rapidly shifting storms of controversy: one week the prime minister was forced to defend a $10.5-million settlement to Omar Khadr; the next week he was being asked how much he knew about the colourful past of Julie Payette, his pick to be the new governor general.
U.S. President Donald Trump has somehow managed to make the scandal cycle swirl even faster in the U.S., with several controversies popping up and down within a day.
Politicians and their crisis-communications strategists can benefit from here-today, gone-tomorrow headlines. Whenever they find themselves in trouble, they can simply hunker down and, well, wait five minutes for the political weather to change. “Hey, look over there! Isn’t that Trudeau on the cover of Rolling Stone?”
But what happens to political accountability when controversy comes and goes so quickly? Will there be such a thing as long-term, institutional memory in the future?
The Payette story actually provides a good occasion to sit back and reflect on a whole range of questions about the nature of memory in the digital age. Issues around what “sticks” these days — in the public mind and in the official record — are at the heart of that controversy.
For those with really short attention spans, Payette is the former astronaut who has been chosen by Trudeau to succeed Gov. Gen. David Johnston when his term ends in September.
The initial announcement was met with many favourable reviews, though some wondered why Trudeau hadn’t used the chance to appoint Canada’s first Indigenous governor general. Others wondered what happened to the idea of the GG being chosen by a selection committee — as Johnston was during Stephen Harper’s time in power. Then again, however, did anyone even remember that this selection process was supposed to be permanent? That’s so seven years ago.
Days after the announcement of Payette’s new job, iPolitics reported that a background check on her had turned up a 2011 charge of assault, laid by Maryland police at the home Payette shared with her then-husband, Billie Flynn. The charge had been withdrawn and the record officially “expunged,” but it was still pretty easy to dredge up the charge against Payette in the huge digital universe. That same background check by iPolitics also turned up a lengthy legal battle surrounding custody and the end of that marriage — a dispute settled only in late June of this year.
A couple of days later, the Star published another unfortunate incident from Payette’s past — a fatal one, which also took place in 2011. Payette was behind the wheel when her SUV hit 55-year-old Theresa Potts at an intersection in Leonardtown, Md. Potts didn’t survive the collision. Payette wasn’t charged, but the history of the fatal accident lives on in the record books.
Much has since been written about how and whether these incidents are relevant to Payette’s new job. But there’s been less talk about whether it is a good idea — or even possible — to try to scrub or “expunge” events from the official (or unofficial) record.
And that conversation is tied to the ongoing debate — very much alive at this newspaper — about “deindexing,” “unpublishing,” or, as it’s sometimes called, “the right to be forgotten.”
John Fraser, president of the National NewsMedia Council, circulated a thoughtful column on the subject in a newsletter this week, calling this a serious conundrum for journalists.
“At the root are two seemingly incompatible issues,” Fraser wrote, “the crucial responsibility of the news media to report and retain the public record, set against a growing public sense in the digital age that innocent people caught out either by legal proceedings or a particular political situation need a means to recover their good names.”
The pervasiveness of digital memory — or at least its power of endurance — means that it’s difficult to get beyond one’s past, whether you want to or not. You don’t have to be a public figure or have a police record for this to be a personal concern either. Thanks to Facebook, for instance, it’s a lot harder to cut all ties to your past and the person you were back in another time.
A lot of people have been complaining this summer about the unpredictability of the weather — forecasts changing every five minutes. The same seems to be true of public memory: there’s just no telling what gets remembered and what gets forgotten in the digital universe. Some stories last forever; others are gone in five minutes. sdelacourt@bell.net