On Institutional Assassination

My most vindictive writing is always saved for the media. I place sensational reporting just above ambulance-chasing and arm-chair columnising.

One of the latest examples of egregious sensationalism is Macleans' recent attempt to portray the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as an institution in disarray. The pattern is quite predictable. The journalist finds a number of stories of people unhappy with their employer within an institution that cannot defend itself against those people (most respectable institutions won't discuss individual cases in public to guard the privacy of the people involved). Link the stories by dressing a portrait of institutional patterns, using no methodology and casting aspersions by inference. Find disenfranchised members of the institution willing to talk "off the record" and use their quotations for institutional character assassination.

This method of sensationalist journalism always achieves the goal. The reporter makes a name for themselves for exposing institutional incompetence. Macleans has done this before. Ten years ago, in the wake of the Somalia inquiry, it was a series of sordid tales about the Canadian Forces and how the institution was in disarray.

It is irresponsible to paint an entire institution as dysfunctional, based on the revelation of unrelated and isolated problems. It is this type of reporting that tends to fuel calls for systemic reform in the wake of individual discontent, like applying a hammer against a bevy of fruit flies. In general, the problems within the RCMP are more like scratches and bruises than a major disease. By diagnosing surgery, sensationalist editors are condemning a fine institution to unnecessary trauma .

All public institutions must be responsive to calls for reform. I simply wish that journalists would hold themselves to the same standard of fairness that Canadian public institutions regularly uphold.