Kirk LaPointe is the mayoralty candidate for the Non-Partisan Association, Vancouver’s oldest municipal political party.
In the past 24 hours, arising from the publication of an unsigned article on the Broadbent Institute’s online publication Press Progress — the article titled Does Vancouver’s conservative mayoral candidate still find picture of gay men kissing distasteful? — a visceral and destructive online controversy was created, the tenets of which was captured by The Straight editor Charlie Smith, in a commentary he published online on Friday afternoon.
In the past, VanRamblings has written about the tendency to viciousness of the Vision Vancouver campaign team, and their penchant (and, seemingly to date, winning strategy) for engaging in the politics of personal destruction, which in 2014 with the emergence of an articulate, relatively charismatic opposition candidate in the form of Kirk LaPointe, bodes ill for those of us who would much prefer that the upcoming Vancouver municipal electoral campaign would be focused on policy over personality.
If wishes were horses, one supposes.
At any rate, please find below Kirk LaPointe’s well-reasoned and thoughtful response to the online provocation of the Broadbent Institute.
Kirk LaPointe | The Vancouver I Want | When context is everything
A campaign is usually nasty. I’ve watched a few dozen of them as a journalist and now I get to experience one from a different place.
I have taught journalism for a decade, where we emphasize that context is everything: when you use a quote, it needs to be fair-minded within wider information and reflective of the overall tone.
I was sideswiped Friday by a story and social media that would have garnered a failing grade in my class.
The Broadbent Institute started the ball rolling with a story based on a 1999 column I wrote as editor of The Hamilton Spectator that branded me a “conservative” mayoralty candidate who might have been and still might be queasy about seeing two men kiss. It raised questions about my commitment to inclusiveness and equality. It pretty well called me a homophobe, and if it didn’t, then the Vision Vancouver clan followed up with Tweets that did.
Before we get any further, let me reproduce the salient part of the weekly column on newsroom decisions so you can understand what was torqued:
“An analysis of what a newsroom covers would show about 30 per cent of it is staged for us: news conferences, photo opportunities, seminars, and other sessions to introduce arguments, ideas, and products.
Another 60 per cent involves events to which we must respond: disasters, breakthroughs, games, reports, and the like.
Only about 10 per cent involves material of our own creation and initiative: the ideas our journalists bring to the job or come upon in the course of their work. They decide there’s a story there and begin to pursue it.
I’m not pleased with this balance, but we’re not alone. That percentage — give or take five points — would hold for every newsroom I know. We are investing heavily in original work and encouraging our reporters to explore. But we spend way too much time covering and not enough time uncovering.
What’s more, we can’t cover nearly as many things as many people and organizations in our communities would like.
Trouble is, what we cover is so often designed purely to appeal to our basic needs for a photo. Stories are helped immensely by illustrations.
A couple of tricky cases this week involved one we decided to publish and one we didn’t.
The new Web site from the Interbrew beer company, appropriately titledbeer.com, staged a media photo opportunity and news conference at SkyDome in Toronto by arranging a zillion beer caps into the shape of its logo on the field.
We went for the bait. Made for a neat photo. Got a reasonable story. But we were used. A novelty photo opportunity lured us into providing valuable space.
Score one for them.
A picture we chose not to publish arose Thursday at a “kiss-in” organized at McMaster University as part of Gay Pride Week.
As it turns out, only one couple kissed for the cameras. We took a few photos of the two men but didn’t run one.
In this case, we determined the event was a basic stunt, and not a significantly attended one. The image itself would be offensive to a number of our readers.
If we are going to risk offending readers — as we have to do from time to time — it should be for exceptional events. On pure news value, this wasn’t one of them.
Our new columnist, Susan Clairmont, wrote extensively on the Mac event. Her words were descriptive enough to help readers understand what happened.
We do not take a hostile view to homosexuality. Our editorial policy has been sensitive, and our portrayal of gays and lesbians has aimed to be informed. But this was a provocative gesture. We were, in effect, dared to not cover the kiss. We decided no.”
So, there you have some context.
There is no sense, as some of the trolls suggest, that I would have found the image distasteful. That is a manufactured word, and anyone without access to the original article would have been easily misled.
I know all about the theories of media manipulation; the people who constructed this were rank amateurs, as were the folks who commissioned it.
By the way, the Broadbent Institute has some meaning in my life. Most probably unlike the anonymous author of the piece about me, I happen to have known Ed Broadbent.
I covered him as a reporter and news editor in his years as NDP leader and beyond. I interviewed him dozens of times and was a friend of many of his MPs, too. He always had a grounded point when he rose in the Commons, he was a figure of integrity, and I cannot recall ever calling him out on slipshod information. I think he’d find disgraceful what his institute produced Friday. (In his highly understandable French, he would have cried: “Je suis outré!”)
Of course, there is much more behind the production of this. As the Georgia Straight reported, the Vancouver-based director of strategic partnerships for the Broadbent Institute is an integral Vision advisor. This piece didn’t happen by chance. It was orchestrated as a tandem job. The institute was merely the vehicle.
That the piece arrived during Pride Week was no coincidence, either. I know enough of the media bag of tricks to realize it was manufactured to scare people and distort my character at a critically newsworthy time as the city learns about me and demonstrates its inclusiveness.
Fear, as those in the LGBT community know, is a remarkable motivator.
The Tweets that followed were intriguing, in that some came from youth executive members of a political party I have long respected for its inclusiveness. The father of its current leader is without doubt the most iconic politician I covered, and I doubt the leader would believe that his ranks should be indulging in such graceless attacks. If I get a chance to see him in town this weekend, I would like to ask him if he condones something like this.
I am not naive about campaigns. All involved have much power and resources to gain and lose from the result, so I will concede people aren’t always at their finest in fighting for the victory. And quite interestingly, I am learning that politicians often don’t do the bidding themselves but conscript others to enter the line of fire. Third-party clamour, particularly in the social media age, is extensive.
I will Tweet and blog in this campaign, but I suspect I will be the only one doing so.
These are early campaign days, but I am starting to experience that form of personal attack that I sought to quell at the outset, and it’s increasingly apparent my opponents have little intention of civil discussion, inquiry or reflection. They have an army of helpers who spread a form of hate. They’re known in the business as trolls.
I feel sorrow and some compassion for these people, because I doubt in their hearts they really believe what they say. They are paid to do it or they are volunteers with hopes of one day entering the inner circle. I don’t suspect they construct their lives with such hostility. I hope they don’t see the world in such black-and-white frames. I give them the benefit of those doubts.
And I recognize it sounds naive, too, when I call for some civility. Our NPA campaign is an uphill battle against a very powerful, well-resourced machinery that spends a lot of money and time constructing a compelling front end in part to disguise what is behind the curtain.
For instance, I would like my opponents to sign a code of conduct to avoid personal attacks. Haven’t heard anything from them on it.
Instead, the response is that smears have started. And, to create plausible deniability, not one political figure has commented in three weeks of campaigning. Only the hired hands and trolls are doing the dirty work.
Let’s be entirely clear: We do not permit intolerance in our association. We are resolute about it.
When our association expelled two elected officials for their assertions on a school board LGBT policy, it sent a clear signal of our way forward. When I criticized Vision Vancouver for expelling one of its candidates for her expression on sexuality, it also sent a clear signal that her candidacy would be welcomed with us.
We were maligned for a private email that Vision chose to made public. I was unhappy about that email and made it quite clear it would not be countenanced as I moved into the mayoralty campaign.
I grew up with bullies all around, so I am used to the attacks and have compassion for those who experience discrimination, anger, shame and exclusion. Those who know me know my heart and mind are open.
Let me also be clear for those (like councillor Tim Stevenson, it seems) who missed the Tweet on Monday: I missed, with regret, the proclamation ceremony Monday for Pride Week. I didn’t have information about it, wasn’t happy I didn’t have that information, and let people around me know so. As a newcomer, in an organization that doesn’t have party status or vast machinery, I’m not privy to every last bit of information out there. We are still assembling our team. So I was sorry I didn’t get there. Didn’t “skip” it, didn’t “choose” not to go, as the Tweeps charged. “Missed” it and regret so. If you think there is a community event I should attend, my email is
