Apparently, it's by putting the wrong information into a story about the prime minister and communion wafers.
And as a result, Shawna Richer is no longer the editor of the St. John Telegraph-Journal and Jamie Irving (yes, of those Irvings) is no longer the publisher.
For background, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in New Brunswick to attend the July 3 funeral of former governor-general Romeo LeBlanc. TV footage shows him receiving a communion wafer, but doesn't show him consuming it (Harper is an evangelical Protestant).
On July 8, the newspaper ran a story claiming Harper had sliped the wafer into his pocket and quoted a priest as demanding to know what Harper did with the wafer, considered to represent the body of Christ in the Catholic faith.
Well, on Tuesday, the paper's readers got to see this:
On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, the Telegraph-Journal published a story about the funeral mass celebrating the life of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc that was inaccurate and should not have been published. We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case.
The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister's Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call 'the host' into his jacket pocket".
There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now. Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.
The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the Prime Minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused. We also apologize to reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras and to our readers for our failure to meet our own standards of responsible journalism and accuracy in reporting.
CBC News has confirmed that editor Shawna Richer has been fired and that Jamie Irving is no longer the publisher of the paper. Earlier, their names had been removed from the paper's list of senior staff.
There are some related links attached to this Globe and Mail story.
Robert Fife, CTV's Ottawa bureau chief, said Tuesday night that he's been told the Liberals fed the story to Jamie Irving, who then passed it on to Richer. She put it in the paper without checking it out.
As a result, she's gone and Irving gets a 30-day suspension (it pays to be the boss's kid).
All I know is this: Why gamble with your career by publishing something that you know will blow up in your face like an Iraqi insurgent car bomb if it's wrong?
It almost defies explanation to me. I really don't get why or how this happened.
What goes around comes around
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Richer fired intern Matt McCann almost 10 weeks ago over a story that dealt with criticisms some University of New Brunswick professors had about granting Premier Shawn Graham an honourary degree. From the June 17 Toronto Star:
Speculation spread rapidly that someone with clout put pressure on the paper to fire McCann for causing embarrassment. It wouldn't be the first time an Irving paper put its relationship with the powerful ahead of its journalism, critics suggested.
"There was no pressure put on anybody," editor Shawna Richer, who fired McCann, told the Star. "It was a decision based strictly on performance issues. And speculation is just speculation."
But the Star has learned that the university did complain to the newspaper's publisher, Jamie Irving, and to Richer, about the story.
McCann did make some errors in the piece. Craig Silverman of Regret The Error fame opined on the case in a June 24 posting on the Columbia Journalism Review site:
McCann misspelled a person’s last name (“Stropel” instead of “Strople”) and title (“university secretary for UNB Fredericton” instead of “university secretary for UNB”). He also reported that the premier has an education degree from UNB—when, in fact, he has a physical education degree.
The errors were easily preventable and should not have appeared in the story. As far as them being a firing offense, however, I’ve never heard of anyone being let go for mistakes of this nature. Far more experienced journalists have repeatedly made worse mistakes and kept their jobs. Certainly that’s nothing to be proud of, but the Telegraph-Journal held McCann to a standard that other staffers can’t possibly meet.
So, yes, the errors guy is sticking up for someone who admittedly made three sloppy mistakes. Almost no one should be fired for making three factual errors. We all make them. What matters is that you learn from them, correct them, and work to prevent them in the future. Firing someone doesn’t teach him how to be more accurate. It could also create a culture of fear in the newsroom.
I liked this juicy observation:
The story of McCann’s firing eventually made its way to local radio in Saint John. During the report, a former editor of the paper in question suggested that the publisher, Jamie Irving, made McCann the scapegoat in order to maintain good relations with the governing party. That suggestion caused the Telegraph-Journal to respond with a story headlined, “CBC runs baseless story with no regard for facts or truth.”
From the story, which doesn’t match the aggressive tone of the headline:
“These kinds of errors of fact and judgment don’t constitute acceptable journalism at the Telegraph-Journal. We must cover stories with integrity, clarity and absolute accuracy,” Shawna Richer, the newspaper’s editor, said. In a conversation that day with Richer, McCann acknowledged the errors but “did not seem to fully grasp the seriousness of them,” Richer said. “He was not a first-year intern. He worked here last summer. We expected more of him.”
Silverman noted that no editor lost their job, despite signing off on McCann's piece -- and that it ran on the front page.
But it does beg the question how Richer, who thunders about covering stories with "integrity, clarity and absolute accuracy" would then get involved in Wafergate.