By Graeme Bayliss

Chrystia Freeland walks as though she can’t keep pace with her own excitement. Dressed in Grit red, she sashays down the aisle of a Toronto Reference Library auditorium, the last candidate to arrive, flanked by hundreds of supporters and watched by dozens of journalists. On this September afternoon, the author and former senior editor at Thomson Reuters is vying for the Liberal nomination ahead of November’s federal by-election in Toronto Centre. She tells the audience this is the biggest job interview she’s ever faced—but she knows a bigger one lies ahead. There are 90,000 electors in the riding, and Freeland is ready to face them.

A few hours later and a few blocks south, in an overheated hall at the downtown YMCA, Freeland’s likely opponent is roaring through her own speech. Linda McQuaig, author and freelance political columnist, is seeking the NDP nomination. Her booming voice and the din from the audience send shudders through the floor. She inveighs against income inequality and social-spending cuts, and soon the crowd begins to chant her name: “Lin-da! Lin-da! Lin-da!”

That evening, Freeland and McQuaig receive their nominations and become the latest aspirants to carry on a long tradition in Canada of journalists making the leap into politics—of the watchdogs becoming the watched. Their path to Parliament will be different from that taken by Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, ex-journalists (and now suspended senators) who were appointed, not elected to their posts. But Freeland and McQuaig will come up against the same flashing recorders and the same scratching pens Duffy and Wallin faced amid scandal—and soon they’ll find out what it takes to handle the kinds of questions they spent their careers asking, and become the stories they once told.

***

Before the media scrutiny, and before the lessons learned through door-knocking and debating and winning and losing, there’s the decision to run. It’s a decision few journalists make lightly, although motives vary from one potential candidate to another.

Some make the leap out of a genuine desire to do good. (“It sounds corny, but I wanted to make a difference,” says Chris Tindal, once a Toronto municipal candidate, twice a federal Green Party candidate and currently Postmedia’s director of project development.)

Others start to believe they can do a better job than the politicians they write about. (“I’ve spent 15 years covering city hall and Queen’s Park,” says Toronto Sun journalist and former provincial Progressive Conservative candidate Sue-Ann Levy, “and I often looked at that cast of characters and thought, ‘Oh my god, I could do this with my eyes closed.’”)

Freeland says she wants to put her economics expertise to work in Parliament. She’s written about finance and the global economy throughout her career, including for theFinancial Times, The Atlantic and The Globe and Mail, where she was deputy editor from 1999 to 2001. In 2012, she wrote the critically lauded Plutocrats, a bestseller about rising income inequality around the world. Now, income inequality and the middle-class squeeze are part of Freeland’s political agenda.

Sitting at the back of her campaign office weeks after her nomination, Freeland looks on confidently as a team of volunteers prepares for a canvassing sortie. The ringing phones and ceaseless chatter call to mind a newsroom, and the sense of continuity this provides illustrates Freeland’s belief that entering politics is a natural step in the evolution of her career. “It wasn’t a rejection of journalism,” she says. “Journalism, and the ideas that I care about—the things I’ve learned in my reporting—brought me here.”

Like Freeland, McQuaig has written extensively about income inequality—most notably in The Trouble with Billionaires, the 2010 book she co-authored—and she, too, believes running for office is a logical next step. In her nomination speech, McQuaig proclaimed, “I’m now ready to move from advocacy to action.” The phrase became one of her campaign slogans, and it encapsulates the reason so many journalists enter partisan politics: they want to bring about change in government, and seek more effective means than journalism to do so.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s journalism program, says it’s understandable that political reporters—so close to the mechanisms of government and yet unable to manipulate them—want to use their knowledge of the political system to become active participants in it. “I’ve known a number of them who have become frustrated with the limitations of journalism,” he says. “Journalism is often an insufficient response to reality.”

***

Those limitations led Jennifer Hollett to run against McQuaig for the NDP nomination. Hollett, formerly of CBC and MuchMusic, wanted to be a journalist so she could cast light on social problems and, perhaps, help to correct them. But the job couldn’t fulfill that desire. “In television, you have about a minute, a minute and a half, to do that in a story, and then you’re on to the next story,” she says. “So I wanted to do more, and I wanted to move from asking questions to finding answers.”

Similarly, when former Globe journalist Michael Valpy ran for the federal NDP in the Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina in 2000, he hoped to correct a social problem: “I wanted to run in a student riding; I wanted to demonstrate to young Canadians that parliamentary politics was still valid.”

Valpy had an interest in street politics and, inspired by the so-called Battle of Seattle, in which tens of thousands of activists staged demonstrations outside a World Trade Organization meeting in autumn 1999, he pitched a story to the now-defunct Elm Street magazine about a similarly themed protest that took place the following summer, when the Organization of American States met in Windsor, Ontario. In his reporting, Valpy spoke to many young activists. He was impressed by their political acuity, but disturbed by their disillusionment. “They had no faith whatsoever in institutional politics—nothing’s changed, eh?—but this really struck me, and I thought so deeply about it that I decided to run.”

Valpy says most people supported his decision, but not all. “I got a much more negative response from my fellow journalists than I did from any other group,” he says. That negativity stems from a belief that reporters who enter partisan politics forfeit the integrity of their work—past, present and future.

In a 2010 paper, the Canadian Association of Journalists attempted to address the ethical issues that arise in seeking public office: “Journalists are not expected or required to take some vow of political chastity when they take up the profession,” the paper states, but it also notes that they “bear the burden of a higher public expectation that they submit personal bias and political view to the demands and disciplines of their work. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be.”

Peter Kent, who spent more than 40 years in journalism before becoming a Conservative member of Parliament, believes the CAJ’s perspective hearkens back to a time when the demarcation between opinion journalism and news reporting was clearer. Kent encourages journalists to run for office, and notes that many have done so over the years. “But I’m surprised that more don’t,” he says, “simply because every day of a journalist’s life—every story a journalist does—deals with public policy in some form or another.”

Valpy, too, believes reporters and editors should be encouraged to run. “The thought that somehow, because we’re journalists, we should insulate ourselves completely from the formal political life of the country is silly.”

***

It’s late October and Freeland is bouncing like a pinball door-to-door down the 17th-floor hallway of a downtown apartment building. She stops in front of one door and, as she does every time, prepares a smile before knocking. Satisfied that no answer is forthcoming, she slips an information card between the door and its frame. Suddenly, an elderly man emerges from the apartment. “Don’t do that!” he shouts with a jowly wobble as the card falls to the floor. “I’m sorry,” Freeland replies, impishly imitating his voice. But this only makes him angrier. “Get out of here!” he shouts, bending over to push the card away. “Get out of here and take your garbage with you!” It was a small blunder, and Freeland doesn’t have time to be embarrassed—she canvasses the entire building in just over 40 minutes, before moving on to the next. She says door-knocking techniques are like “variations on a recipe,” and she’s still working out her measurements.

The journey from byline to ballot box is full of lessons in electioneering. It teaches journalists what to say and how to say it, when to canvass and how best to position lawn signs. More importantly, the campaign trail forces journalists to adapt to new ways of thinking and behaving, and shows them what of themselves they’ll have to lose if they want a shot at winning.

Valpy received little formal instruction during his campaign (apart from a single elocution lesson from an actress, aimed at correcting his slight sibilance). Most of his training occurred on the doorstep of a sometimes irascible electorate. He says the repetitiveness of door-to-door canvassing compelled him to try out new opening gambits—some more waggish than others.

“Good evening,” he said to one resident. “Vote for me or I’ll have your name taken off the voters list.”

Valpy believed he was talking to an NDP supporter—or at least a voter with a sense of humour—but he was wrong, and he knew it as soon as he saw the man’s jaw drop. It took him five minutes to explain that he was joking.

Later that evening, Valpy consulted his campaign manager, who told him plainly, “No more jokes.”

For much of his campaign, though, he struggled to keep his tongue away from his cheek. (During one doorstep exchange, having run out of things to say, he asked a voter if his dog would be interested in the NDP’s healthcare policy. “As I recall,” Valpy says, “the guy shook his head very seriously and said, ‘No, the dog wouldn’t be.’”) His quirky wit is part of his personality—but such idiosyncrasies are often the first casualties of politicking.

Chris Turner is a journalist and author who, in November 2012, represented the federal Green Party in a Calgary Centre by-election. He anticipated that his personality would be ill-suited to campaigning. “My day job for the last 15 years had been sitting by myself in a room,” he says, “and there’s a reason for that: I’m not an extroverted guy. The glad-handing, schmoozing stuff is not something that comes naturally to me.” Nor does it come naturally to many reporters. “In my experience,” he says, “journalists are, if not introverted, at least very unconventional personalities.” Turner adjusted to being a political participant, rather than an observer—but the change took some getting used to. “I think it’s one of those things where you have no idea how you’re going to handle it until you’re in the middle of it.”

Former BBC correspondent and ex-federal Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff says that, to be a successful politician, “you need to fit a new filter between your brain and your mouth—or you should.” In the 2011 federal election, Ignatieff led the Liberals to their worst-ever showing and failed to win his own riding, but not because he was introverted or given to flippancy. Rather, he was gaffe-prone, which, in politics, simply means he was prone to speaking his mind.

Some journalists, like Turner, say media experience can be a campaign asset. “I know what this reporter’s looking for,” he says. “I know the 30 seconds that they need to fill their spot, and so I know better than to go on and on.” But according to Warren Kinsella, who advised Ignatieff politically from late 2008 to early 2009 (and in 1997 unsuccessfully ran for office himself, in the federal riding of North Vancouver), not all journalists who seek election are so adept at using the media to their advantage. Kinsella has observed politics through many different lenses, as a lawyer, author, political chief of staff and bass player in a punk band called Shit from Hell. He studied journalism at Carleton University before attending law school, and today he writes for the Toronto Sun and The Hill Times. He says journalist-politicians like his former boss have trouble speaking in 10-second sound bites. “It’s like, yeah, sure, I know you want to get all 700 words in there so people can fully appreciate the depth and breadth of your brilliance,” Kinsella says, “but that’s just not how it fucking works.” He rejects Freeland’s and McQuaig’s claims about the naturalness of the transition from journalism to politics. “I think they’re both full of shit,” he says. “This is not a natural evolution; it is totally, totally different.”

Tindal says talking to the media is like standing at a gap, with reality under your feet and a snappy sound bite on the other side. “You know what people want to hear,” he says, “and you know what your truth is, and you have to find that sweet spot in the middle where you can tell them what you want to say in a way that they’ll be receptive to.”

Levy echoes Kinsella’s opinion of Freeland’s and McQuaig’s evolution: “They are full of shit,” she says. She found her 2009 provincial by-election run difficult, often having to keep her controversial opinions to herself. “I think I had a lot of ruts on my tongue by the end of the 35 days.”

By the end of a televised all-candidates debate, it’s hard to imagine McQuaig has any ruts on hers. She looks frustrated and frequently interrupts her opponents. During a disagreement over Quebec sovereignty, McQuaig finds herself sparring with Freeland (who until recently lived in New York) and struggling to make herself heard. “Listen,” she bristles, even as moderator Steve Paikin tries to rein her in, “I’m not going to take lecturing from someone who hasn’t even been in the country, to talk to me about how important it is to keep a country together.”

Before the campaign had begun in earnest, McQuaig was emphatic: “I didn’t get into politics to become namby-pamby and middle-of-the-road and filter out everything interesting and important.” But on this occasion, she gave her opponents the opportunity to appear scandalized, and Freeland evidence to back her claim that the NDP was running a negative campaign.

Valpy rarely felt the sting of a bitten tongue during his campaign—but he soon came to fear the sting of the party whip. It’s a concept fundamental to the Westminster system of governance, and fundamentally in conflict with Valpy’s journalistic instincts. It was something he hadn’t considered before running for office, but as his campaign forged onward, he began to realize that some of his political ideas weren’t in line with NDP ideology. “There were things that were party policy that I could see myself having difficulty with,” he says. Valpy is a staunch supporter of the monarchy, for example, while the NDP is not.

He began to wonder what would happen if the subject came up in caucus. “Could I shut up, or would I have to publicly disagree with my party? Would I have to publicly disagree with my leader?” he asks. “I mean, those things sat on my mind.”

McQuaig faces a similar challenge. For years, she’s advocated higher taxes for the wealthy. In The Trouble with Billionaires, she proposes overhauling income taxes to introduce “a new rate of 60 percent to be applied to income above $500,000, and a new top rate of 70 percent for income above $2.5 million.” But personal tax increases are not part of the NDP’s platform.

As recently as her nomination speech, McQuaig railed against “tax cuts for the rich,” yet she insists she fully supports the NDP’s policies. When speaking with constituents about income inequality, she mentions that she’s written on the topic, but without providing specifics; she says the NDP is committed to addressing the problem, but never quite explains how. When pressed on the matter during a debate, she could only express her support for a more progressive tax system.

***

Although journalist-politicians learn much from the campaign, some discoveries can be made only after the ballots have been counted. On election night, November 27, 2000, Valpy sat in his office with campaign worker Bob Gallagher—just the two of them, he recalls, like a scene from The Candidate. About 30 minutes after the polls closed, the phone rang. Gallagher took the call. He listened silently, replaced the receiver, made a few calculations and turned to Valpy: “We’re not going to make it.”

They sat for a moment, looking eye-to-eye, and then shrugged. In the end, Valpy was relieved not to win. “I was uncomfortable with the idea of sitting in a caucus,” he says. “I’m just too independent.”

Kent has had no difficulty submitting to the party whip since he was elected in 2008; he says it’s just what good politicians do. “Everybody has to toe the line on common expressions of policy,” he contends. “That is the reality, and the most disciplined parties are the most effective parties.”

But party discipline has led Kent to contradict his own journalistic work. In a 1984 documentary called The Greenhouse Effect and Planet Earth, produced for CBC’s The Journal, Kent said, “The greenhouse gas effect must be considered as the world’s greatest environmental concern.” Yet, as minister of the environment (a job he held from 2011 to 2013) he vociferously supported the development of Alberta’s oil sands—one of the Conservative government’s economic priorities—in spite of its demonstrable contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Party discipline is something nearly all journalist-politicians must face, especially if they are elected. But there are lessons to be learned in losing, too. Turner says people who disagree with his politics sometimes invoke his former candidacy as a means of impugning his journalistic integrity. “The people who come at me now,” he says, “and try to dismiss me as ‘just that Green guy’ are doing that to dismiss the facts I’m reporting.”

Partisan politics gave him a fuller understanding not just of how campaigns are run, but also of Canadian democracy itself. It’s an understanding he may never have achieved as a journalist. “You have a much clearer sense of why elections go the way they do, what leads voters to vote one way or the other,” he says. Talking to so many people on the campaign trail gave him a better read on the electorate: “Where are they at? What are their concerns? How do they think about politics?”

Valpy, too, says his brief political foray gave him a closer look at politics, and from a new perspective. “It was a different world out there. Encountering people as me, as Michael Valpy, as opposed to encountering people as a Globe and Mail journalist—it was a very different experience,” he explains. “And that part was exhilarating.”

Looking back, he says his five-week campaign was life-changing. “I’d had a taste of a different persona, of me as a different person,” he says. The change was refreshing: “I realized that I was getting tired of the old person—of the person who’d been a journalist for more than 30 years.”

***

On election night, November 25, 2013, hundreds of Liberal supporters gather at a restaurant in downtown Toronto. They watch as the NDP’s early lead disappears; they cheer as McQuaig concedes defeat. They chant as their new MP enters the room: “Free-land! Free-land! Free-land!”

She’s sworn in to Parliament on December 9; her transition from journalist to elected official is complete. But a month later, she tells me she’s determined to adapt her journalistic skills to the House of Commons. “What I found to be at the core of journalism—which is the learning and the asking questions,” she says, “that’s something I’m going to keep on reminding myself to continue to do.”

As I begin to ask my last question, though, Freeland cuts me off—something Justin Trudeau advised her to do should an interview with a reporter run long. “He said, ‘You’re a journalist and you love journalists, so you’ll always say, okay, one more question.’ But he said it’s always a mistake, so answer the last question and say, ‘Thank you very much’—and I will say that.”

And she did.

Jonathan Goldsbie is a Toronto civic geek. He bikes everywhere, drinks ethically sourced coffee and likes talking about local indie music in Kensington Market. And, of course, he tweets. Constantly. Over his two-and-a-half years on Twitter, he’s averaged about 35 tweets per day. But somehow, this seemingly harmless dude landed himself in one of the city’s most talked-about Twitter brawls of 2011. Goldsbie is such a prolific tweeter that early this year, many of his followers banded together through the hashtag #goldsbiephone to raise funds and update his “Flintstonian pterodactyl” to a fancy new Android. Armed with a new smartphone, he continues to take joy in calling people out. The Globe and Mail deemed him “loyal to few, loved and loathed in equal parts by many.”

Toronto Sun columnist Sue Ann Levy seems to be a member of the loathing contingent. She made it clear in her columns leading up to Pride 2011 that she wanted the city to stop funding Pride if Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was to march in the parade. So in March, Levy, who is Jewish, wrote to several Jewish community leaders, urging them to contact councillors and strip Pride Toronto of city money. The letter quickly leaked and, before long, Andrea Houston wrote a story about it for Xtra!, a gay and lesbian newspaper. She quoted city councillor Adam Vaughan: “[Sue Ann Levy] has an agenda. She is on the Ford team. She is doing work for the mayor… Take everything she says in light of that.” The pro-Palestinian organization bowed out of the parade after city hall threatened to pull Pride’s funding.

When Goldsbie heard about the letter, he was shocked: “I couldn’t believe the email had her Sun signature on it.” So he tweeted, “It can’t be kosher for a full-time newspaper columnist to be campaigning for councillors’ votes on an item about which she often writes.” Levy bantered back and forth with Goldsbie and name-calling eventually ensued, culminating with Levy tweeting, “Thx to Adm Vaughan for calling me influential int Xtra trash piece…and thx to leftist blowhard for showing his true anti-semetic colours.” Goldsbie responded: “You know, I’m pretty sure labelling a public figure anti-Semitic is defamatory, even if you misspell it.” The Sunremoved Levy from the Pride beat and while councillors slugged it out over Pride Toronto funding at city hall, she took a trip. She returned and wrote in her column , “I was glad to be in Mexico that week.”

Levy isn’t the only journalist to cause a stir on Twitter. In August 2011, Dave Naylor from the Calgary Sun came under attack for tweeting, “Maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s just stiff and needs a good massage,” after Jack Layton’s death. He was referencing a story that broke during the last federal election about the late NDP leader being found in a massage parlour 15 years earlier. Michael Coren, a Sun News television host, tweeted, “Still world hunger. More prayers to Jack please!” Despite many angry responses, Naylor and Coren managed to hold on to their jobs.

Damian Goddard, an on-air host from Rogers Sportsnet, was not so fortunate. The network fired him the day after he tweeted his unenthusiastic opinions about gay marriage in May 2011. (He said he supported “the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage.”) And Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, experienced a similar fate. She tweeted in July 2010, “Sad to hear of the passing of [spiritual leader] Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah…One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Although Nasr tried to explain, saying she respects Fadlallah because he was a proponent of women’s rights, it was of little use. CNN fired her three days later.

Unfortunately for journalists, nuances can’t be explained in 140 characters, which is why news organizations are nervous about Twitter. They would prefer that journalistic bickering, activism and stupid jokes stay private, confined perhaps to the smoky press clubs of yore.

In an effort to get their way, major news outlets have released social media guidelines. But many insiders criticize these documents for being too restrictive and ignoring the fact that journalists are people too. Twitter is a great way for reporters to find stories, locate sources and gain a bigger audience—but the let-it-all-hang-out transparency also calls into question the myth of objectivity that underpins the entire profession.

As far back as 1898, The New York Evening Post believed impartial reporting would make more money because partisan papers couldn’t sell as much advertising space. Since then, impartiality has taken on a new meaning. In their 2007 book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write, “In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction or art.” It is the discipline of journalism—not the reporter—that is objective. The goal, according to this view, is to record what happened correctly, regardless of personal views about Hezbollah, gay marriage or left-wing politicians. (And if this happens to sell more ads, even better.)

But social media have exposed the messy, complicated and opinionated side of journalists. It turns out reporters aren’t just objective information-gathering machines—they’re people too. Hence the new guidelines that many organizations have created to try to avoid the next Twitter meltdown. The rules range from gentle reminders to stern warnings: the National Post points out that a source can Google reporters before an interview and the Sun tells its journalists that “the same legal implications of the newspaper apply to social media broadcasts, as regards libel and defamation.” (Calling someone anti-Semitic apparently has the okay, though.)

All of the guidelines have one thing in common: play your role. Headstrong columnists are going to have more leeway with their tweets than political reporters. And editors, for their part, shouldn’t blurt out rash responses, which is why Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Washington Post, had to email his staff some guidelines after an employee responded to critical tweets on the paper’s Twitter account over a column about gay teen suicide. Dozens of websites reposted Narisetti’s email, which said, “No branded Post accounts should be used to answer critics and speak on behalf of the Post.” But a personal account still allows journalists to voice their opinions—be it shamelessly or naively.

Rules can’t define what proper composure is for every journalist. The Toronto Star released a new social media policy in April 2011. Part of it reads: “Never post information on social media that could undermine your credibility with the public or damage the Star’s reputation in any way, including as an impartial source of news. Such postings could be construed by readers as evidence that the Star’s news coverage is biased.”

But the paper has no intention of taping the mouths of its reporters. “My role is not to censor people,” says public editor Kathy English. “But making personal comments against or for any of the candidates in the election would put a reporter who was covering the election in a tricky spot.” English, who has held her position since 2007, hears from hundreds of readers every year and she knows they still expect impartiality. She truly believes, “You can show personality without expressing strong opinions on issues.”

In defending the paper’s policy, English points to Susan Delacourt, who shows plenty of personality through her Twitter account. The Parliament Hill reporter, who has collected over 12,000 followers since she started tweeting two years ago, doesn’t have a problem showing any strong points of view because she devotes criticism to the government as a whole: “The government is the one that holds power and it’s our job to keep that power in check.”

Delacourt thinks there’s a disturbing tendency to call critical journalists biased. “I strongly disagree with that. Journalists need to abide by openness and honesty.” Still, she admits that her Twitter account isn’t policed by the Star much. “Twitter doesn’t make money,” she notes, “and my bosses aren’t interested in things that don’t make money.”

Rosemary Barton, a CBC national reporter on the Hill, uses Twitter for things she might not necessarily say on television. “There’s more room for humour, more room for my personality,” she says. But when it comes to showing any political biases, she agrees with Delacourt: “I actually don’t have any political views. I’m equally tough on everybody.”

She thinks CBC’s social media guidelines leave plenty of room for her personality even though they say, “The expression of personal opinions on controversial subjects or politics can undermine the credibility of CBC journalism and erode the trust of our audience.” But Barton knows that if she wasn’t using Twitter she would be missing out on a lot of inside access to ministers on the Hill. Like journalists, politicians make announcements on Twitter, and they certainly follow what reporters are saying about them. Barton has more than 14,000 followers and has tweeted more than 25,000 times. She says politicians “see me up in the foyer where I’m doing my main job and crack jokes with me about references I’ve made on Twitter.” For her, that interaction is invaluable.

But the policies don’t sit well with everyone. GigaOm’s senior writer Mathew Ingram (formerly the communities editor at the Globe) is an outspoken critic of these guidelines. He believes the best way to make social media work is to allow reporters and editors “to be human” and engage with readers through Twitter, Facebook, story comments and blogs. Strict social media rules encourage fear and paranoia. “Sure, the best way to avoid skin cancer is to never go outside,” Ingram says. “You might not get skin cancer, but you have a really shitty life and you die unhappy.”

Goldsbie, because he’s a freelancer, has freedom when writing under his Twitter persona. He’s also on good terms with many city councillors, mostly lefties, which means he’s able to get exclusive information from them. Goldsbie was a political activist and blogger before reporting at city hall and his opinions are a big part of what landed him a gig as a regular on the National Post’s Posted Toronto Political Panel. He believes objectivity is an inherently difficult concept: “I established myself as a personality first and then got journalism work because of it,” he says. Despite (or because of) his obvious left-wing biases, Goldsbie has amassed 4,300 followers. As a self-defined guerrilla advocacy journalist, he is comfortable with Twitter because it helps define him.

Duncan Clark, the Post’s vice president of digital media, explains that columnists have particular knowledge in an area. “Goldsbie is a columnist and with that there’s a different expectation,” he says. On the other hand, if reporters on a beat are expressing opinions on Twitter, “it compromises their ability to report on that story.”

It’s okay for Levy or Goldsbie to express whatever opinions they want—within reason—because that’s their job. It gets trickier when Barton or Evan Solomon, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, decides to tweet because there appears to be no middle ground between the messy freedom that Ingram encourages and the bloodless objectivity that CBC expects.

Not that Solomon has a problem with the corporation’s social media policy. He thinks journalists are capable of doing their jobs without letting their personal opinions leak in. “I think that’s what separates good reporting from shit reporting,” he says. With a two hour Monday to Friday political show, he can’t afford to appear biased. “If I’m perceived to be promoting one political view over another, then I’m not serving my audience in a way that I’m supposed to,” he says. He likes to compare the impartiality of journalism to that of a judge. He asks, “Do you think a judge, who has all sorts of views, is capable of applying the law in an unbiased way?” For Solomon, this is a much better question than, “Does a judge have biases?”

Solomon isn’t the only person to compare the concept of journalistic objectivity to that of a judge. Tim Currie, who helped write the social media guidelines published by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2011, says, “Although we all have opinions and we all have biases, we also know judges have biases but we hope that they’ll put them aside and apply the law as best they can.”

But judges and journalists have two very different occupations. Journalists pursue their own evidence and often their own cases, whether that’s hard-hitting investigative reporting or reviewing an album. Bert Bruser, a media lawyer, believes news outlets are right to be concerned about Twitter. He’s wary of journalists tweeting about their social causes. Although transparency makes good journalism, he notes, “What’s at stake is the credibility of the news organization—and that’s a big problem people are grappling with.” Bruser, who has a permanent legal office at the Star, thinks journalists often say things they regret on Twitter and it leads to trouble for both them and their bosses.

One of the biggest shortcomings of these new social media guidelines is they serve to illustrate that the problem isn’t that journalists are human, but that some reporters are allowed to reveal more of themselves than others. From Barton’s Twitter account, no one can tell if she’s married or has kids, but Goldsbie has no problem tweeting his insecurities about a T-shirt decision.

Sun Media’s social media manager, William Wolfe-Wylie, says the best approach is “understanding yourself, your audience and how those two players can interact.” This explains why Levy—the Sun’s Toronto columnist—can start political brawls: she does the exact same thing in her columns. Goddard couldn’t bash gay marriage because he was a sports anchor.

These policies, in the end, are more for the news outlets than they are for the journalists they employ: they legally ensure that a journalist can be fired for tweeting something offensive or stupid. The Star, the Sun and CBC are simply covering their asses. Most, if not all, of the social media policies can be condensed into one simple rule: if you wouldn’t like it up on a 30-foot billboard, don’t post it. Save it for the bartender at the dusty old press club.

For now, we’ve got a bunch of reporters tweeting, and not talking about their feelings. But there are some personalities who refuse to be defined by social media guidelines, and they are best followed with a bag of popcorn. The Post and the Sun have long moved on since the Pride debacle between Levy and Goldsbie. In fact, so have the two combatants. In July, Goldsbie tweeted, “Saw @SueAnnLevy’s post-Pride column blowing in the wind along the sidewalk. Picked it up; read it. Was actually moved.” Levy was quick to respond: “At least you didn’t find the column in a bird cage. Thanks for the vote of support!”

And a month later, almost to the day, they were back at it, fighting over library funding. #SomeThingsNeverChange.