Due diligence?
It was an explosive story: A Canadian Liberal member of Parliament was accused of being a willing pawn of Chinese foreign influence, so much so that he supposedly advocated for the continued detention of two Canadian businessmen held for two years in Beijing.
In the wake of the story by Global News, Han Dong resigned from the Liberal caucus and launched a $15 million libel suit for defamation against the network and some of its employees, including reporter Sam Cooper.
The story was quickly criticized for relying solely on anonymous sources. Dong, the elected member for Don Mills North, strongly denied it and the Prime Minister’s office said it had reviewed the transcript of a telephone call Dong had made with the Chinese consul-general in Toronto and concluded that there was no "actionable evidence” that Dong asked the Chinese government to keep the two Canadians in prison for political reasons.
Even more troublesome for Global News, David Johnston, the former governor-general who was tasked by the Prime Minister to report on foreign influence in Canada’s elections, said he had determined that the allegations against Dong were false.
Global News’ reaction? Its editor-in-chief, Sonia Verma, stood by the original story and said that “Global News is governed by a rigorous set of journalistic principles and practices, and we are very mindful of the public interest and legal responsibility of this important accountability reporting." It reported Johnston's finding but did not retract orcorrect its story or apologize to Dong.
If this case proceeds to trial, the television network will find itself challenged to either prove the truth of the allegations it published—an almost impossible task—or else argue that it was “diligent” in checking out its sources and what they were saying, presumably following its “rigorous” set of journalistic principles.
That’s when Global News might find it has a serious problem.
Cooper’s March 22, 2023, story attributed all its information about Dong to “two separate national security sources” who were not named. That is a vague description that most ethical guidelines discourage news organizations from using.
Global’s Ethical Code of Professional Conduct is silent about how its reporters should describe such sources. It merely states that it will “use confidential sources only when there is an overriding public interest and when sources legitimately require their identities be concealed When we do grant anonymity, we will disclose to the audience why we have done so.”
That is indeed what it did. Global News said in Cooper’s story that it “has granted anonymity to sources on the Dong investigation because they face possible prosecution for sharing information on China’s allegedly vast subversion of Canada’s democracy, including clandestine interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.”
But that leaves a lot of questions. Were those sources working for the country’s official spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) or were they private security experts? Did they have first-hand access to the Dong file, or was their information second- or third-hand? Were they junior officials or senior officials? Was any attempt made to get them to speak on the record or provide documentation for their allegations? Why were they not questioned about obvious contradictions in the information they provided?
Compare Global’s ethical guidelines on using anonymous sources with the widely used Canadian Association of Journalists ethical guidelines: “When we do use unnamed sources, we identify them as accurately as possible by affiliation or status. (For example, a “senior military source” must be both senior and in the military.) Any vested interest or potential bias on the part of a source must be revealed. We independently corroborate facts if we get them from a source we do not name. We do not allow anonymous sources to take cheap shots at individuals or organizations.”
So Gobal’s claim that it follows “a rigorous set of journalistic principles and practices” is certainly open to challenge.
Cooper’s story did not say whether he had independently checked out the allegations against Dong or the credibility of his two anonymous sources—claims Global News made in its statement of defence filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice more than three months later. That omission might have led some readers of the original story to believe that the allegations were fact and not subject to independent verification.
The statement of defence further muddied waters by saying that Cooper had a third anonymous source, one not mentioned in the story, and that each anonymous source’s allegation was checked with another anonymous source. That is a far cry from saying something like “Global News has not verified the allegation and it's not immediately clear how the Conservative Party specifically would have benefited from the detainees' release.”
The anonymous allegations against Dong should have raised red flags or at least required further examination. The accounts of the two or three anonymous sources did not add up. One alleged that Dong, in his February 2021 conversation with Han Tao, the Chinese consul general in Toronto, said the release of “the two Michaels” would benefit the opposition Conservatives. Another suggested the opposite, that progress in easing the plight of the two detained Canadian businessmen would benefit the Liberal government.
The government at the time was pushing for the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who had been arrested in Beijing in 2018 in apparent retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. They were not released until September, 2021, ending a 1,020-day nightmare imprisonment.
Any defamation trial will scrutinize Global’s ethical code for other steps its newsroom should take when handling a potentially defamatory story. As an expert in journalism standards who has offered testimony at the request of both plaintiffs and news organizations in libel cases, I have studied dozens of other journalistic codes and have cited them in evidence in more than 15 cases. I was also author of the first newsroom standards used by the Toronto Star and was instrumental in saving and rewriting the statement of principles still used by the Canadian newspaper industry. In my opinion, Global’s is one of the weaker and less comprehensive codes. It is silent on such things as the obligation to give people under attack a fair chance to respond before publication; it lacks cautions about when to publish damaging allegations that have been credibly challenged; and it does not stress the importance of documentary evidence.
It turned out that Global wasn’t the first news organization to hear about anonymous security concerns about Dong. Globe and Mail reporters Robert Fife and Steven Chase received the same anonymous tips weeks before but decided not to publish them because they were not able to verify them by obtaining a transcript of the call.
Their inquiries prompted the Prime Minister’s office to ask CSIS for that transcript, and undoubtedly it would have been translated when Global News made its inquiries, but Global either did not ask for it or else decided to go ahead with the story without documented proof. It’s a crucial point because Dong said his conversation with consul-general Han Tao was conducted in Mandarin and might be open to misinterpretation.
The Globe and Mail’s reporting also included a fact Global News did not have in its story: The Prime Minister’s Office had reviewed the transcript and concluded that there was no "actionable evidence" of impropriety. Global’s story quoted the Prime Minister’s office but only to deny a question about whether Dong was calling the Chinese consul-general at the request of the government.
Global’s statement of defence claimed that its story was the result of an eight-month investigation. Information from the confidential sources, it said, was "tested," "scrutinized" and "critically evaluated." Yet it did not report Dong’s previous harsh criticism of China’s human rights record or its response to COVID—facts which might call into question just how much under the influence of the Chinese government he was.
To its credit, Global’s March 22 story did include Dong’s vigorous denial of the anonymous allegations although they appeared six paragraphs deep in the story. Global says its journalists “provided the plaintiff with ample opportunity to provide his views and information,” although it did not say how much time it gave him to do that or whether it considered holding off on the story until it could determine who was telling the truth.
The story of foreign influence in Canada’s affairs was undoubtedly newsworthy and in the public interest but there seemed to be no urgency to publish that particular day. Holding a contentious story for more details is common in most newsrooms. Other codes of newsroom ethics even include cautions to do so if facts are in doubt. So is contacting the subject of a damaging investigative story early in the reporting process. The Toronto Star, for instance, says “The essence of fairness demands that before publication every effort must be made to present subjects with all allegations — the sooner the better, and the more detailed the better.” That means if it actually was an eight-month investigation, a judge would be interested if Dong was only offered a chance to comment at the last moment.
Finally, the first promise in the Global News Ethical Code of Professional Conduct says this: “To be right before being first.”
It looks like it will be up to a judge to determine whether that promise was kept.