Dear Diary: Not the busiest week in Bureau of Accuracy annals. But a few readers sure had issues, as teenagers say.
Issues of privacy, bias and fairness floated (not always gently) in breezes buffeting the complaints office.
Some notes:
Privacy. “What are you people doing, putting the picture of a sweet little boy on your front page, calling him nobody’s child?” asked a caller. “He’s God’s child.”
She was referring to last Saturday’s Page A1 photo of Brian, a toddler who lives in foster care, waiting to be adopted.
Another crown ward, Daniel, 8, smiled shyly in a photo on Page A25, with a series of articles probing the chaotic state of adoption in Ontario. I, too, had qualms about the photos. Had The Star invaded the privacy of two vulnerable kids, notably Daniel, who might face schoolyard taunts?
Reporter Tanya Talaga, who worked on the Nobody’s Children series with Leslie Papp and Jim Rankin, had a ready explanation.
It took months, she said, to find a children’s aid society willing to let The Star profile kids in care and take their pictures. “We felt the public needed to see these children so they weren’t thought of as just numbers.”
Luckily, Roy Walsh, executive director of the Halton Children’s Aid Society, agreed to help tell Brian and Daniel’s stories. The posed photos were shot with the agency’s blessings, and participation.
So far, no ill effects. And countless calls from people wanting to adopt the kids. Hard to see harm here.
Bias. Two phone calls about news coverage of the latest Palestinian-Israeli cycle of violence nicely bracketed the spectrum of reader opinion.
Call One: “I’m exasperated, frustrated and upset with The Star’s position on Israel. I’d like to think you practise balanced reporting. But you’re so pro-Palestinian it’s unbelievable. Shame on what you’re doing to the Jewish community who have contributed in all fields: medicine, culture, government. You’re really hurting us.”
Call Two: “Why is it that when two Israelis are killed, it’s in big bold letters with photo? There have been many Palestinians killed this week … but you don’t cover it like this. You’re a bunch of Jew-lovers.”
In all a dozen callers, nearly all detecting a pro-Palestinian news slant.
None praised the paper for even-handed coverage, which was what the ombud thought he saw in a succession of news stories Tuesday through Thursday about suffering and death among Israelis and Palestinians.
(And while editorial stands are outside a news ombud’s purview, I couldn’t help but notice an editorial Thursday that said if Yasser Arafat can’t “police his turf,” Israelis “will have no confidence that a Palestinian state created next to them will not be a threat to their security.”)
Fairness. Why, a newsroom denizen asked Wednesday, would The Star slap a pejorative label on one of two parents in a nasty mixed-race child-custody case that was decided in the mother’s favour?
In one story, the mother, Kimberly Van de Perre, was described “a 27-year-old white former sports-bar `groupie.’” The father, Theodore (Blue) Edwards, was “her black millionaire ex-lover and NBA (National Basketball Association) star.”
The labels were used, I am told, “because that was what, by their admissions, they were.”
Sorry, but isn’t this a double standard? Edwards, a wealthy married man, had a fling with Van de Perre, a single woman of modest means. To label one a millionaire and the other a groupie seems judgmental, sexist. Hardly fair.
Yours truly, etc.
