Will Mayor Rob Ford’s bid for re-election become the place where political journalism goes to die?

This question has been buzzing around in my mind ever since the week from hell, when our crack-smoking, drunk-driving, soft-on-(his own)-crime mayor kept popping up on network television, repeating fabrications as brazen —pun intended — as any I’ve heard in my career.

Several Toronto media organizations, which have worked heroically to unearth details of Ford’s shameful conduct, chimed in with dutiful and meticulous fact-checking: No, the $1 billion savings figure is not accurate. No, the City was not going into receivership in 2010. No, the recovery is not specifically attributable to him. No, the most recent tax increases are not the lowest on record, etc.

And while all this journalistic due diligence is unquestionably necessary, I find myself wondering if it will be sufficient in terms of informing a deeply polarized public about the non-fiction version of the mayor’s legislative record.

Ford, clearly, doesn’t care. As with Stephen Harper, the mayor’s messaging is always far more important than the content, to the point where the factual underpinnings become incidental and eventually disposable.

This insidious uncoupling of the political rhetoric and the empirical foundation poses a huge credibility problem that ends up backfiring on the media.

In my experience, politicians and governments display a wide range of stances towards the “truth.” Most spin and exaggerate their own records, and many commit sins of omission. Certain politicians have such a command of the arguments and the data that they can persuade voters to doubt their own beliefs. Some lie, and a subset of those lie all the time, often about things that they don’t need to lie about.

Exhibit A: Ford last week claimed he’d been held up by well-wishers in a restaurant for four hours while he was trying to leave with his family. A bald-faced lie. Yes, I can see a longish delay on the way to the door. But four hours? The content of the claim is not important. But the mindset behind it suggests someone utterly indifferent to the relationship between word and deed.*

If the speaker was goofy old Uncle Rob, who tends to have a few too many when he comes over for dinner, we’d all exchange vaguely embarrassed glances, and then change the topic before he goes off on some other awkward tangent.

But the speaker is (i) an elected official (still); and (ii) someone with a very large megaphone. How do I know about the four-hour remark? It was on TV.

Many commentators noted that Ford made numerous unchallenged nose-stretchers during his interviews with Fox, CNN, and even Peter Mansbridge. Those commentators subsequently inventoried the false claims, and now we have those corrections in the public realm to aid us in our understanding. But what if that kind of reporting doesn’t take?

To illustrate, try this thought experiment: pretend that Ford had said, on CNN, Fox, and the CBC, that Toronto’s economic recovery is due to all those “Orientals” who “work like dogs.” Or, more darkly, that welfare payments to “Pakis” — a phrase attributed to Ford (in the Lisi court documents) who directed it at a taxi driver on the infamous St. Patrick’s Day party night — had caused the city’s budget to swell.

He hasn’t done any of these things, but I raise the question to make a point about what the media will and will not repeat. At a certain point, news organizations must make editorial choices — obviously not in concert, but nonetheless responding to the same events — about when they cross the line from critical reporting to the mere amplification of problematic statements.

Years ago, for example, a Toronto neo-Nazi named Ernst Zundel successfully manipulated a complaint that forced the media into broadcasting his views on the Holocaust during a sensational and deeply regrettable trial in which he had been charged with knowingly disseminating false information. He left court each day with a broad grin, reveling in the attention he would otherwise never have received.

Ford, of course, is not a hate-monger, but he and his brother certainly do understand how to manipulate the media to broadcast false or outrageous claims.

I’m guessing some TV news organizations have had internal discussions about endlessly re-airing the mayor’s abusive remarks about his former staffer and wife for precisely these reasons. Why, I wonder, should the ceaseless repetition of patently false campaign-style claims be treated differently?

I’m not a prude: politicians and governments always want to cast their records in the best possible light, and often that means over-interpreting the available data or ignoring inconvenient details. Journalists are paid to challenge and counter political claims, and that’s as it should be, most of the time.

But Ford is uninterested in tethering his accomplishments to an even vaguely plausible fact base. He’d like voters to accompany him to that parallel, consequence-free universe where rolling apologies make all problems go away, and where black is white and white is black.

John Barber, writing in The Star on the weekend, provided a scathing “I-told-you-so” directed mainly at voters who, he argues, knowingly put Ford in office despite much available evidence to suggest he was uniquely unsuited for the job.

As the city stumbles towards the official 2014 campaign start date, in early January, there is obviously an enormous amount of debate about how to prevent lightning from striking twice.

Notwithstanding the exceptional investigative reporting of the past year, it seems to me that we in the media must look in the mirror and ask ourselves if or how we’ve been knowing or unwitting accomplices — enablers — to the dissemination of countless serial falsehoods that have had an expressly damaging impact on the City’s business and public discourse about local government.

So should the media choose to stop broadcasting Ford’s dissembling about his record until he begins to observe at least some truth-in-advertising principles?

As a journalist, I find that solution to be practically and philosophically troubling. The media plays a critical role in ensuring his statements – from the confessions to the vulgarities to the outright lies – are part of the public record, and therefore available to citizens and political opponents to cite and critique.

But Leslie Scrivener, writing in The Star yesterday, points out that the sort of “shunning” that took place after he made crude on-air remarks about a former staffer could be an effective tool for behaviour modification. “Turning one’s back is a classic way of showing disapproval,” she observes.

“Should media mikes be turned off for a while?” Scrivener wonders.

It’s a question worth asking. After all, Ford has always flatly refused to operate within the broadly accepted norms of political engagement and discourse.

If he’s using a different playbook, perhaps we in the media need to as well.

photo by Sam Javanrouh; illustration by Matthew Blackett

* Doug Ford’s dissembling runs to groundless political attacks on his rivals and claims about his own conduct. Soon after he was elected, he bragged that he incurred no office expenses of any sort, a politically unnecessary contention I debunked in The Globe and Mail with an access to information request that revealed the lie.