Picture this scenario:

A pro-life columnist attends a city hall meeting where the subject under discussion is a proposal to fund abortion clinics.

The columnist stands up and disrupts the meeting, shouting: “Fetuses are babies and all abortions kill babies! Stop the murder of the innocent! Stop the funding or I won’t leave!”

Now, it’s unlikely that the Star would be publishing, as a regular freelance contributor, an anti-choice columnist. But this is an imagining, to make a point about where the radical intersects with the professional.

I’m certain this newsroom would be appalled and many would be clamouring for the columnist to be ditched.

Read more: It was wrong to rein in Desmond Cole: Paradkar

Activism is usually supported and defended only when that particular value is shared. When we vehemently disagree, it’s deplored.

I would have fired this fictitious columnist.

The Star did not fire Desmond Cole.

As Cole made clear in his own blog he was merely called in by the editorial page editor and reminded about the paper’s policy, which states: “It is not appropriate for Star journalists to play the roles of both actor and critic.”

This is a fundamental journalistic divide. Cross it at your peril.

You can’t make the news and cover the news, not with aforethought and deliberate intent. Because sometimes reporters do become the news, such as a war correspondent friend of mine who was three times abducted in combat zones, on one of those occasions rescued in a Royal Marines operations that resulted in the deaths of a soldier and interpreter.

Cole, who has passionately advocated for the complete abandonment by police of carding — the stopping, questioning and documenting of individuals when no specific offense is being investigated, a practice which inordinately targets black civilians — brought a police board hearing to a halt last month after he took the speaker’s chair and demanded that all information which had been collected in this matter be destroyed.

There is no disagreement between the Star and Cole on this point. No media in Toronto has been more muscular in denouncement of carding than this newspaper, both in its editorials and in the investigative series which contributed to the Toronto Police Services recalibrating its policy — albeit not to the extent that either Cole or the Star would like.

So far, no problem.

But Cole, by taking the police board meeting hostage, went well beyond activism and into the realm of compromised crusading. That’s fine for a self-described activist; it’s not fine for a journalist. Because even columnists must adhere to basic tenets of arms-length involvement.

Real journalism matters. Stunts, as this was, matter less and are not journalism. True civil disobedience is vital for social justice and has changed the world. But it’s not journalism.

Cole subsequently wrote in his blog: “If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community, I choose activism in the service of Black liberation.”

His editor, as Cole made clear, did not directly instruct him to cease and desist in the future. There was no disciplining. And it was Cole’s choice to vacate his freelance gig, although not without (in the blog) a preening and pious departing shot: “I doubt any freelance columnist in the recent (or even not so recent) history of the Star has consistently generated more interest and readership, and consequently more revenue, than I have. Few of the Star’s full-time columnists cannot (sic) claim the following I have built as a freelancer and, with the very notable exception of Washington correspondent Daniel Dale, no regular Star columnist or reporter can match my success in aggressively marketing my work on social media.”

Well, there’s a rub right there. Most of us aren’t, or shouldn’t be, in the business of self-promotion. As for the validity of Cole’s claims, I’ve no way of knowing and neither does he.

From my four-decades plus as a journalist, two-decades plus as a columnist, the one thing I know as intrinsic truth is that you can’t suck and blow at the same time. Can’t observe, deduce and explain whilst participating in the story unfolding.

Many years back, I attended a rally for Dr. Henry Morgentaler, not in a professional capacity but as a ‘civilian’. When an editor learned of it, he tore a strip off me. I could no longer, he declared, report on Morgentaler, who was at the time embroiled in judicial battles over his freestanding abortion clinics.

I took the rebuke deeply to heart, to the extent that I will not even vote in any election, at any level of government, because that would be tacitly aligning myself with a political party.

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Read more:

Activist’s protest against practice of ‘carding’ derails Toronto police board meeting

Journalist’s shouldn’t become the news: Public Editor

Journalistic advocacy, with the intent of changing political policy and social attitudes, is a crucial underpinning of media that leads instead of follows, from the intrepid Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to a lunatic asylum in the 1880s and then revealed her shocking expose (Ten Days in a Madhouse) for New York City’s The World, to the Star’s recent investigative series on indefinite immigration detention.

It can be, I will concede, a fine distinction. There have been times when I’ve shuddered at what passes for news and is palpably (to my mind) partisan crusading. The Star, steered by its Atkinson principles — the pursuit of social, economic and political reforms as a progressive newspaper — holds these values to be essentially true.

Columnists, particularly, have wide latitude to express opinion, even when they’re diametrically in conflict with the paper’s position. That makes for robust debate.

But you can’t generate the news and comment on it. Just as I, charged last summer with assault, did not for a moment even consider writing about the incident (and, by the way, would slug that person again if the same situation arose because children must always be protected.)

I loathe identity politics, which have made a mess of our institutions and governance. Even more so, I loathe identity journalism in a new age media world where just about everybody is allowed to write with a columnist bent, which is an earned privilege. And I know from personal experience — when columns have been spiked — that it’s a privilege with boundaries.

Sometimes we fall in love with our words, our own perceived integrity, our ardently held convictions. A mass circulation newspaper is a big tent operation. But you can’t — shouldn’t —function as ringmaster and audience simultaneously.

And you don’t get a pass because you’re black or racialized (an invented word) or female or transgendered or — by all outward measurement — part of a marginalized group.

The best journalists have empathy, try to walk in another person’s shoes, tell compelling stories. The columnists I admire have a strong sense of outrage.

But we have to step back, if only a prudent half-pace. Or give up the conflict and run for political office, align publicly with a social cause, raise a placard or a fist.

I’m dismayed this even needs saying. I’m dismayed any journalist would say different.