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It was all just scurrilous bulls— lies

Hana Callaghan, the director of government ethics for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the public generally expects politicians to hold a high standard of conduct while in office. That conduct extends to not making election campaigns personal.

California’s voluntary “Code of Fair Campaign Practices” expects candidates to “not use or permit the use of character defamation, whispering campaigns, libel, slander, or scurrilous attacks on any candidate or his or her personal or family life.”

But Wexler said that kind of rule is unenforceable on the wild west of the Internet.

“You really are dancing on two tectonic plates, and one is moving quite fast and the other quite slow. I think the newspaper as an institution has a higher responsibility to the norms of privacy and a mature recognition that it is possible to separate the private from the public. However, social media largely has no impulse control and consequently it gets there much more quickly, but usually and typically unreliably.

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“The public cares about all forms of rumour, gossip and innuendo, and the more licentious the topic (the better). The problem is the more famous you are the more likely you are to be subject to rumour.”

Several members of the local mainstream media that cover City Hall, including The Vancouver Sun, were told off the record of the Robertsons’ separation about a month ago, but no stories were written because there were assurances that the marital problems were private in nature and did not involve third parties or affect the mayor’s job.

However, Wexler said the mayor made a tactical error in not going public at the time, and instead is now the subject of unfounded rumours.

“His problem is that he tried to take control of it in the mainstream media, but he did not try to take control of it in the social media. If he had, he may have been unsuccessful, but he would have fared better than he’s going to,” he said.