Toronto vs. The Columnists: The Correction Wars Heat Up
Posted: August 22, 2007, 2:34 PM by Kelly Grant
The City of Toronto's communications team just fired off another media advisory correcting mistakes in a newspaper column on city finances. Today's misguided and erroneous scribe? Former budget Chief David Soknacki. Mr. Soknacki pens a regular column for Toronto Community News, the chain that publishes the Scarborough Mirror, York Guardian, and Etobicoke Guardian, among other august neighbourhood papers. In a recent column headlined Apocalyptic Visions: It doesn't have to be this way, the respected ex-councillor essentially argued the city's plan to hack front-line services was more dog-and-pony show than sensible budget fix. "One gets the impression that these reductions are presented more for pain than for a willingness to offer savings to preserve other City programs," Mr. Soknacki wrote. The city's communications folks say the problem with the column is that it doesn't clearly distinguish between capital and operating expenses. The column "incorrectly asserts that the proposed new Land Transfer Tax and Personal Vehicle Registration fee will be used to pay for capital budget expenditures," the media advisory reads.
Mr. Soknacki is having a good chuckle about the whole thing. Several old friends from inside the Clamshell had already forwarded him the correction by the time I reached him. When I asked how he felt about the communications team's tactics, he laughed, then paused: “I don’t want to go there because it doesn’t give me an opportunity for a charitable response. Let’s just say I re-read my column twice looking for individual ways to validate the press release. I can only say that I stand by what I’ve written."
Kevin Sack, the director of the city's strategic communications division, said he felt he had to put out the advisory in part to make sure Mr. Soknacki's alleged errors about capital vs. operating costs weren't picked up by other reporters. “If people are relying on previously published erroneous information, it’s incumbent on us to try to create a tactic, a tool, where the correct information is out there,” he told me.
Today's media advisory is the third of its kind the city has sent to reporters in the last week. Mr. Sack laughed off my suggestion that he and his team have set up a war room, and he said nobody from the political side has asked him to get more aggressive with columnists. In the interest of full disclosure, the first of Mr. Sack's media advisories accused one of our columnists, John Turley-Ewart, of making two mistakes in his Aug. 15 op-ed piece, "Don't let David Miller soak the suburbs." The disputed lines, in reference to the budget cuts announced Aug. 10, were these: "Old ladies won't have their sidewalks shovelled in winter, kids will be locked out of libraries on Sundays." Mr. Sack and his team claimed this was incorrect because only 16 libraries, not all libraries, will be closed on Sundays, and the city's special snow clearing services for seniors and the disabled will continue. But SOME seniors (those who don't request the special service) will not get their walks shovelled in some parts of the city when less than 15 cm of snow falls and SOME kids will be locked out of their local libraries. The communications team is going to be swamped if its keeps trying to split hairs this thinly.