There's a story in the Toronto Star today that reminds us that freedom of the press is sometimes just a phrase. It seems that the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal has given the boot to Matt McCann, a student journalist who was writing for the paper as a summer assignment.
The University of New Brunswick is granting an honorary degree to the province's premier, but that didn't go over so well with a group of professors, who sent a letter of objection to the university's board of directors. McCann got wind of it and wrote a story, which the editors of the Telegraph-Journal deemed important enough to put on the front page. That's quite a feather in a summer student's cap.
But the following day, McCann was fired. His editor, Shawna Richer, said she fired him because of "performance issues," and not because, as the Toronto Star discovered, the university complained about the story.
Richer said the story was "unbalanced," even though McCann outlined the award's criteria and quoted a university official who was in favour of the honorary degree.
McCann also made two errors: he misspelled someone's name (Stropel instead of Strople) and wrote that the premier had an education degree, instead of a physical education degree.
But when a critic pointed out that an editor must have vetted this seemingly unbalanced story, Richer said that the editor didn't make the mistakes, and that "The number-one thing the kid did, he spelled a proper name wrong, and that was the tipping point."
I will use the term "male bovine manure" at this point.
I have been writing for newspapers for some 26 years now. I have spelled names wrong. I have made errors. I shouldn't have made them, and each one tears my insides to shreds, but it occasionally happens. If this whole tempest was strictly over -el rather than -le, as Richer says, then she should have done what just about every other newspaper on the planet does: call the writer in and point out the error, explain the severity of the transgression, and then, in the next day's issue, include a correction and apology.
Richer did not do that, which leads me to believe that the "tipping point" was a university taking offense to the story and demanding its pound of flesh. And you better believe that, compared to a misspelled name, that's a very scary situation, not just for the Telegraph-Journal, but for newspapers everywhere.
