Globe and Mail rapped for Olympic cheerleading

It has been a busy and “strangely wonderful” few weeks for The Globe and Mail and its Vancouver Olympic torchbearers.

   It all started last month when the newspaper published a special Olympic section that listed among the company’s torch carriers publisher Phillip Crawley, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse, and three of the paper’s columnists, Gary Mason, Roy MacGregor and Stephen Brunt.

   The Globe led off its torch coverage with a first-person account by Mason on his eight minutes of glory with the flame. The headline above his Oct.30 column read: “The torch lit an Olympic spark in me.” Mason wrote, “As I started running with the torch, it felt, well, strangely wonderful. Around me were Canadians of every description: babies in strollers, teenagers in early Halloween garb, seniors draped in flags. Their cheers were deafening.”

  Randy Starkman, who covers amateur sport for The Toronto Star, described the coverage as “fawning,” which was a well chosen word.

  But, the fundamental issue, as Starkman pointed out in an earlier piece, wasn’t the cheerleading, but the Globe’s decision to buy so deeply into the Olympic hype as to actually have its people participate in the torch relay.

  The relay is, after all, an IOC marketing initiative. And the three Globe columnists, with Stackhouse overseeing the coverage, will be in Vancouver in February, covering the Games. Just how independent and objective will they be after joining the IOC promotional machine?

   Journalists are supposed to keep their distance, to be separate from the issues and events they cover, but the torch relay isn’t in any way separate from the Games. It’s part of the Olympic package.

    “It’s one big promotional event that starts the drum roll toward the Olympics,” Robert Thompson, a media critic and professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said this week.

 “There’s a big marketing and advertising dimension to it.”

   But, maybe we’re over-reacting. Perhaps the Toronto Star’s editorial board had it wrong when it rapped the Globe and also CTV for their torch relay participation, as were the Toronto Sun and several columnists. So, we asked some experts.

  Thompson’s reaction to the Globe’s involvement was to call it “a little bit odd.”

   “It’s kind of like a journalist who’s covering the World Series throwing out the first pitch,” he said.

  He said the Globe has a small amount of wriggle room only because the torch relay can be interpreted as a sort of ritual and national event, in addition to being a marketing campaign.

  “But, if I were the boss of such an operation, I would probably say, we shouldn’t do it. Cover it and talk about it, but, despite the fact it is both a ritual and an act of advertising, I would have said no.”

   I asked Thompson if he could imagine the publisher and executive editor of The New York Times lacing up their runners and carrying the torch for an Olympics in the United States.

 “No, I cannot picture that,” he said. “I don’t think that would happen.”

   Brian Williams, CTV’s prime time Olympic host, also will carry the torch when it’s in Western Canada.

  Could Thompson imagine Williams’ counterpart in the United States, Bob Costas of NBC, carrying the torch?

  “My guess would be that Bob Costas wouldn’t do it,” Thompson said. “Knowing his very high standards, he wouldn’t do it.”

  Paul Benedetti, a lecturer at University of Western Ontario’s journalism program and a former investigative reporter, said he was “shocked,” when he learned that Williams, who will help shape CTV’s prime time Olympic coverage, will be carrying the torch.

  I emailed Tom Jolly, the sports editor of the New York Times, to ask him if he could imagine Times journalists being allowed to carry the torch.

   “I don’t believe we’ve ever had anyone participate in a torch relay and I can’t imagine that we would,” he wrote. “Certainly, we’d never permit a news reporter or columnist to do so.”

   Brunt’s response to the criticism was to say, Get over it, that’s the way things are in the corporate world of the Olympics and the media.

  “Look, I hate to break people’s hearts and tell them there’s no Santa Clause,” he told Bob McCown of the Fan590 radio station in Toronto a few weeks ago. “But this is a commercial endeavor. The torch relay, God love it, which is going to make people tear up and is a lovely thing, and a way of including people in the Olympic process, is sponsored. And it is corporate and underwritten. And spots were sold as part of the sponsorship package. . . .  This is all part of the machinery of the Olympic Games.”

   According to Brunt, the pretext for the three columnists carrying the torch was to file a story about the experience, thus giving it a degree of journalistic credibility. We’ve seen Mason’s contribution, but there’s been nothing so far from Brunt and MacGregor, both of whom were in Newfoundland last weekend for their run.  As for the ethical issue, Brunt said, there wasn’t one, at least as it pertained to him.  But, Benedetti said it’s not good enough for a journalist to assert he’s above the ethics issue.

  “What about the perception of it?” he said. “I would probably agree that it might not taint his objectivity to some extent, but what about the perception that people will have of it, and the perception with Roy MacGregor?

 “Here’s a guy (Brunt) who’s a critic whether it’s on the radio or his own column, but then he’s really sort of a cheerleader for the event itself. I think it puts those guys in very difficult territory. I’m not questioning their ethics, but it puts them in a tough spot, without a doubt.”

   Benedetti said the Globe’s torch relay assignments “clearly contravene the notion of maintaining a distance from those we cover. It clouds that in a way that I think is pretty difficult to disentangle.”

   I’ll end with this: Many years ago, a radio reporter in Toronto made a habit of standing outside the Toronto Maple Leaf dressing room after a game and giving each player a pat on the back as he walked into the room.

   Finally, the Globe’s sports columnist at the time, Allen Abel, went over to him and said, “You know, when you do that, you make us all look bad.”

   The same could be said about the Globe and its involvement in the Olympic torch relay. The newspaper has embarrassed itself and the rest of us.

 Milestones this week

  Baseball Hall of Famer Tom Seaver turned 65; media mogul Ted Turner, 71; future Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr., 39; and troubadour Gordon Lightfoot celebrated his 71^st on Tuesday. Lightfoot was in his home town of Orillia, Ont., a few days ago for a charity performance and is appearing this week at Toronto’s Massey Hall. This is from 1969, with Johnny Cash.