The Real Issue in the John Furlong Trial

By John Miller
Rabble
June 25, 2015

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/john-miller/2015/06/delete-this-please

For two months after a damaging story about him appeared in the Georgia Straight, John Furlong made no move to sue anyone.

Not the eight former students named in the story who claimed that he beat and racially taunted them when he was a missionary-teacher in northern British Columbia in 1969 and 1970, a period of time that he strangely left out of his autobiography.

Not the weekly newspaper that dared to print the story.

Not even the CBC, which broadcast more serious allegations against him, including evidence of sexual assault.

At a press conference on Sept. 27, 2012, the day the Georgia Straight article appeared, Furlong issued a blanket denial and accused Laura Robinson, the reporter, of a "shocking lack of diligence in researching the article." He added that "this feels very much like a personal vendetta." He threatened to sue for defamation.

Instead, the man who organized the Vancouver Olympics resorted to the court of public opinion. He mounted a public relations campaign against her, accusing her of having "open contempt for the Olympic Games and male authority figures in sport." He also disparaged her long career exposing wrongdoing in amateur sport as "a two-decade long pattern of inaccuracy." She was an activist, he said, not a journalist. ...

Robinson expects the fight for her reputation and to defend herself from Furlong`s abandoned lawsuit will cost her and her husband up to $500,000, but feels it is necessary. Perhaps she feels she is also fighting for the right of other journalists to investigate public figures who happen to have wealthy and influential friends and who choose to defend themselves by blaming the messenger. The tactics of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford come to mind.

Her case should be all about journalistic standards, and whether her story met them. Was there any evidence she was out to get Furlong and took shortcuts in verifying the information she was given? Did she make a genuine effort to get his side of the story? Did she use questionable journalistic techniques? Is there any evidence she had a personal interest in damaging his reputation? Were any facts or details fabricated? Was she an advocate for a certain cause or was she acting as an ethical and diligent journalist?

I examined her reporting and the story as an independent expert witness and gave testimony on the opening day of the trial. I found no evidence that what Furlong said about her was factual. Rather the opposite: I measured her reporting techniques against accepted journalistic standards (mainly those of the Canadian Association of Journalists) and found that she'd met the test. Her sources were all named, each had sworn an affidavit, and she'd approached Furlong five times over four months to give his side of the story. Each time he refused to answer her questions.