Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui believes the Canadian news media should come under scrutiny and engage in some self-examination for how it covered the cases of the threeArab-Canadians mentioned in the Iacobucci report on Canada's role in their being tortured abroad, plus Maher Arar.
There's another guilty party in all this. The media were also complicit in destroying the lives of these four Canadians. Reporters and editors who recycled tainted information supplied by unnamed sources should be publicly recanting and debating how not to repeat such mistakes ever again.
Groups such as Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the Canadian Journalism Foundation, PEN Canada, the Ontario Press Council , as well as schools of journalism should be organizing public debates.
Media credibility was no less tattered by these episodes than that of the security establishment and other federal bureaucracies.
The latter were put under the microscope by two eminent judges, commissioned by the government under public pressure. Only the media continue to escape detailed public scrutiny.
Journalist Andrew Mitrovica took an aggressive look at how the media reported on the Maher Arar affair in an article published in the December 2006-January 2007 issue of the Walrus.
Here's a related June 7, 2006 posting: Mitrovica on the media and the 'terrorists'
TVO's The Agenda interviewed Mitrovica on Dec. 8, 2006. There's a podcast available.
Former CBC News supremo Tony said the following in a Dec. 19, 2006 blog posting:
There are a multitude of media issues related to this case, but perhaps the most challenging is the question of confidential sources. Protection of the confidentiality of these sources is a central principle of modern journalism.
But what happens if these sources are lying? What is the media's responsibility?
Triggered by the results of the Arar case, a debate has begun over whether the media should expose these sources if they are found to be lying.
This issue was part of a discussion last week on CBC’s The Current, which included The Globe and Mail’s Jeff Sallot, one of Canada’s top investigative reporters. He described the dilemma well:
“When we have been party to a smear, we have to do everything we can to correct that impression … In the Arar case, it means fully reporting and vigorously reporting the evidence that he was innocent. In terms of naming sources, now that’s a tough one. I didn’t tell sources I would ever ‘out’ them. It was implied or explicit that they would be protected forever. Now I’ve learnt a lesson. I’m not going to grant that kind of anonymity so easily. I’m going to press sources to go on the record.”Reflecting back on the Arar story, I personally think that the media should expose confidential sources if we discover they have deliberately lied. I can understand the contrary view, but I agree with Andrew Mitrovica that Canada’s media owe it to Maher Arar — and to our audiences — to engage in this debate now.
Perhaps someone could refresh my memory as to what debate took place in the nation's newsrooms and what new policies were enacted to ensure that security officials can't hurl dung from the shadows and be forever protected by source confidentiality conventions when the future "Arars" happen.
Those debates did happen, right?
As an aside, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression held a discussion on March 8, 2007 that featured Mitrovica, then-Walrus editor Ken Alexander, journalist Marci McDonald, media lawyer Brian MacLeod Rogers and Ryerson j-school chair Paul Knox.
My memory of the event was that McDonald -- a friend of Juliet O'Neill, the Ottawa Citizen reporter whose story about Arar triggered an RCMP raid of her home in a search for leaked materials -- and Knox essentially defended the status quo.
I don't know if there's an audio tape of the event kicking around somewhere.
Addendum
A related post that complements this one is 'The road to torture.'