On May 12, the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal published a story written by Matt McCann, a St. Thomas University journalism student. The story was about a group of UNB professors who were circulating a letter objecting to the university’s decision to award an honorary degree to Premier Shawn Graham. After the story was published, Mr. McCann was fired. In recent days, his firing has become a public issue. Mr. McCann did interviews with CBC, and the Telegraph-Journal responded publicly, stating in its weekend edition that the CBC story had “no regard for facts or truth.” Shawna Richer, the Telegraph-Journal editor, said that Mr. McCann was fired for “performance reasons.”
Until the Telegraph-Journal story appeared on the weekend, I had no intention of saying anything publicly about this matter even though I wasn’t happy about what had happened to my student. I spoke with the publisher, Jamie Irving, and the editor, and told them that I hold Mr. McCann in high regard. I also respect their right to run their newspaper as they see fit, and so I felt I had done all I could. However, now that Mr. McCann has been accused in public of writing a story that “contained a number of factual errors” and was unbalanced, and that his performance on this story constituted grounds for dismissal, I feel I must defend him. For if I had been held to the same standard, I never would have had a career in journalism.
On a spring morning a couple of decades ago, I wrote my first story for the Evening Times-Globe in Saint John, which was then the sister newspaper of the Telegraph-Journal. When I arrived back in my hometown, I was kind of a hot shot, at least in my own mind. I had come from Newfoundland where I had been winning journalism awards at a muckraking weekly called The Sunday Express. But that paper had stopped publishing and I was on the City Hall beat in Saint John and not all that happy about being there. I wanted to be breaking big stories. Instead, I was toiling in the trenches. I can’t remember exactly what my first story was about, but I do remember interviewing and quoting in the story a woman that I called “Linda Collerin,” who was one of the operators of the Cherry Brook Zoo.
The newspaper went to press about noon and hit the streets and later that afternoon the city editor, a veteran newsman named Bruce Peters stopped by my desk to tell me I had gotten a couple of things wrong in the story, including the spelling of Linda Collerin’s name. Bruce shook his head sadly and said in his soft voice (I don’t ever remember him raising his voice). “both names.” I felt the blood rush to my head. I frantically checked the clippings file on the zoo, and there she was: Lynda Collrin. Damn. Mr. Peters walked back to his desk, and I learned the first of many lessons in a daily newsroom. But I still had a job and Mr. Peters never mentioned it again.
(Shawna Richer was working in that newsroom also, on that very day. We go back a long way in this business and I know she understands that my disagreement with her on this matter is just that, and nothing personal. It’s never a pleasant task to have to disagree with friends in a public space. But sometimes, we have to do what we have to do.)
When Mr. McCann submitted his story about the professors who were objecting to Premier Shawn Graham being awarded an honorary degree, the editors at the newspaper put the story on the front page, and made it the top story of the day. It was accompanied by a photograph of a member of the UNB history department sitting in a chair with a stern look on his face. That photograph was the largest piece of art on the page. The editors, not Mr. McCann, made the story a big deal in that edition of the newspaper.
On May 13, Mr. McCann was fired. Last week, he spoke to reporters at the CBC about what happened, and the subsequent CBC stories didn’t explicitly state as fact, but suggested by inference, that that Mr. McCann’s story had made the premier look bad and therefore he had been fired.
On Saturday, the Telegraph-Journal published its version of the story of Mr. McCann’s firing in which editor Shawna Richer said the UNB story contained a number of factual errors, including the misspelling of a name, failing to report a person’s proper title, and misreporting the premier’s university degrees. That sounds like a nasty list of errors, until we look at the specifics.
Here are the errors:
• Error #1: Stephen Strople’s name was spelled Stropel.
• Error #2: Mr. Strople’s title is “university secretary for UNB”, not “university secretary for UNB Fredericton,” as Mr. McCann reported.
• Error #3: Shawn Graham’s degree from UNB is in phys ed, not education, as Mr. McCann reported. The premier received an education degree from STU.
Ms. Richer also said the story “did not adequately portray both sides of the story.” In other words, the story was unbalanced. I recognize that this is a judgment call, but in my view the story was balanced. It was a story about the letter of protest circulating on campus. It was not a story about whether Shawn Graham deserved the honour or whether he had done right or wrong with regard to post secondary education. That kind of story could have been assigned. But it wasn’t. Mr. McCann filed a story about the letter and protest, therefore the protestors voices were more prominent in the story. He did include comments from Mr. Strople.
The question of balance, and the question of the play the story received in the newspaper (overplayed by a country mile in my view) would be fodder for a good old-fashioned newsroom argument. The wonderful managing editor character in the television series The Wire remarks that newsroom arguments are an essential part of making a good newspaper.
“You know what a healthy newsroom is? Gus asks. “It’s a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time.”
It’s also a place where reporters make factual errors all the time. With this much deadline driven writing and the frailties of being human, mistakes appear in newspapers. That’s why the New York Times runs a list of corrections in every edition. Here are some recent corrections from just one edition of the Times:
• An article on May 30 about the fight over affirmative action in the context of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court misidentified a case involving New Haven firefighters on which she and two other appellate judges ruled. The name of the case, now before the Supreme Court, is Ricci v. DeStefano, not Ricci v. New Haven.
• An article last Saturday about the sentencing of a New Jersey man who leaked classified United States military documents to an Israeli agent in the 1980s misspelled, at one point, the surname of the federal judge who imposed the sentence. As noted elsewhere in the article, he is William H. Pauley III, not Pawley.
• An obituary last Saturday about Franklin H. Littell, a father of academic studies of the Holocaust, misstated the given name of his second wife, who survives him. She is Marcia Sachs Littell, not Maria. The obituary also described incompletely the outcome of a libel suit against Dr. Littell by the political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. A court did decide that Mr. Buckley had been libeled when Dr. Littell described him in a book as a “fellow traveler” of fascism. But an appeals court held that that comment was nondefamatory, constitutionally protected opinion.
As you can see, the correct spelling of all names plagues even the New York Times. I would bet my house that none of these errors resulted in firings at the Times. I would suggest Jamie Irving (who worked with me when he was an intern himself) and Shawna Richer also had the good fortune not to be fired when they made errors during their reporting careers, especially when they were starting out.
There is a famous moment in the Watergate story when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein make a terrible error in fact that was published on page one of the Washington Post. The White House communications team launched a verbal assault on the Post and especially editor Ben Bradlee, calling him a blatant supporter of the Democrats who was making up news to harm President Richard Nixon. Bradlee’s response? He sat down to write a correction, then wrote simply that the Post stands by the story and said something like, “Fuck it, let’s stand by our boys.”
In the news business, we are always under fire. Someone, somewhere, takes issue with something in almost every story. So that’s why we need to stand by each other when the going gets tough.
The Telegraph-Journal story this weekend said that it “stands by its decision to fire Matt McCann for the performance reasons outlined.”
The newspaper has the right to set its own standards, and stand by who it wants to stand by.
In this case, I disagree. And so, for what it’s worth, I’m standing by our boy.
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Philip Lee 