In 1994, at 28 years old, Jim Rankin got his big career break and joined the Toronto Star’s city section as a reporter and photographer. He quickly discovered the newspaper was also the region’s unofficial police complaints bureau. A significant number of Black Torontonians told him they’d been stopped by police engaging in “racial profiling,” the targeting of people based simply on the colour of their skin. Still, Rankin would hear only a small fraction of these stories that haunted the city for decades, terrifying one segment of the population as another denied that they could be real.

There was the teacher who counted down from 10, waiting for the inevitable flashing lights, every time he saw a police cruiser pull up beside him; the law student stopped so often he began to feel South African-style apartheid was alive and well in Toronto; the young journalist approached by officers for walking down streets he “didn’t belong” on, in a city he had come to call home.

Rankin was struck by the fear and anger associated with these stories. So, he spent years trying to understand why the relationship between cops and Black citizens was so clearly troubled. After many interviews with police representatives and members of Black communities, he’d gathered hundreds of anecdotes and countless accusations from both sides. But he didn’t have enough data to comprehensively report on the sense of injustice.

That began to change early in 1999, his fifth year at the Star. Rankin was at his desk, looking through a run-of-the-mill press release from the Toronto Police Service (TPS) about a male robbery suspect.

As he read it, he noticed a bizarre reference, just one word, an adjective that would prove crucial to understanding the tense relationship between Black Torontonians and the city’s cops. That word was “yellow.” Rankin wondered: how could a suspect be described as yellow? Did he have jaundice?

The surprising answer led to more than a decade of groundbreaking reporting that has exposed “carding,” the nationwide police practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people, even without suspicion of criminal offence. Many believe it is racial profiling.

The Star’s coverage of carding has been the result of a combination of persistent reporters, committed editors and supportive publishers willing to take on serious financial risks. Together, they make a strong case for how a healthy newspaper industry can amplify the voices of marginalized populations that democracies haven’t done nearly enough to serve.

One of the voices the paper helped magnify was that of Chris Williams, an academic and activist. “Investigative journalism, from the standpoint of a lot of people, is dying, primarily for fiscal reasons. This series,” he says, referring to the Star’s carding coverage, “shows how indispensable such journalism is for public education, for holding public institutions accountable and for fostering critical consciousness generally.”

The hunt for the meaning of “yellow” began when Rankin and then-colleague John Duncanson, who died in 2009, embarked on a year-long process of piecing together snippets of information from trusted police sources they’d built up throughout their careers. The first major breakthrough was the discovery of a fingerprinting program, the Repository for Integrated Criminalistic Imaging (RICI). One of the database’s headings, “colour,” allowed users to choose from white, brown, black, red or yellow when identifying suspects. These colour codes were converted into ethnicities before appearing in press releases. “Yellow” should have appeared as “Oriental” in the release—though police now use “Asian”—but a clerk at police headquarters had forgotten to make the change.

The journalists pressed police contacts to discover what else the force was tracking. “John Duncanson was a terrific cop reporter and could get almost anyone to talk and say things that they really shouldn’t be talking about with a reporter,” Rankin says. Digging deep through police contacts eventually yielded more gold, as Rankin acquired the name of two additional databases. After filing a Freedom of Information (FOI) request through the TPS, he learned that both contained race fields. This was the first hard evidence that Toronto cops were recording racial characteristics. These steps were crucial to putting together the information required for a specific enough FOI request to get the databases, which Rankin submitted in March 2000 after consulting his editors.

For two years, the Star negotiated with the police through the municipal FOI act. They reached a compromise in the summer of 2002: the TPS gave the Star access to the Criminal Information Processing System (CIPS), which allowed analysts to search for racial disparities in the way police treat people after arrests. “We knew more about what was in CIPS, and we had ideas about what we could look for in terms of differences that might speak to potential racial bias,” Rankin says. “We also had to be pragmatic. Police had never before had a request like this, and we knew it was eating up their resources—and ours.”

The Star’s “Race and Crime” series in October 2002 found that in cases of simple drug possession, Black people were taken into police stations more often than white people, and they were held overnight for a bail hearing at twice the rate. “The Toronto crime data also shows a disproportionate number of black motorists are ticketed for violations that only surface following a traffic stop,” wrote Rankin. “This difference, say civil libertarians, community leaders and criminologists, suggests police use racial profiling in deciding whom to pull over.”

The series had a huge impact according to Frances Henry, a retired York University professor and leading racism expert: “The fact that the Star and all those very good journalists they had at the time decided to do that piece of research and that series was a milestone, I would say, in journalism on race and racism in this country.” Henry and co-author Carol Tator, an instructor and consultant who has worked in the anti-racism movement for decades, cited “Race and Crime” in Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging The Myth of “a Few Bad Apples,” their 2006 book. “The series in the Star provoked a discursive crisis that continues to reverberate,” they write. “The concept of a ‘discursive crisis’ refers to a set of conditions that has a profound impact upon society and, more specifically, the state of minority/majority relations.”

But cops weren’t as impressed with “Race and Crime.” The Toronto Police Association (TPA), the union representing the city’s law enforcement, launched a lawsuit against the Star in January 2003, alleging the series labelled every officer in the force as racist. The TPA sought $2.7 billion in damages ($375,000 for each of its 7,200 members). “It’s cartoonish, the amount they were seeking,” says Rankin. “It’s hard to take it seriously, but at the same time, you go to bed at night and you think, what if we didn’t do it right? We all lost a lot of sleep.” Throwing out the case in June 2003, the judge concluded, “The allegedly defamatory comments and innuendoes in the articles cannot reasonably be understood as intended to apply to every officer in the TPS.”

“Race and Crime” was a success, and the Star had dodged a massive lawsuit. But Rankin wasn’t satisfied. As the years went on, he kept in touch with his police contacts to develop a better understanding of the database the paper had failed to acquire with the 2000 FOI request. He desperately wanted access to the Master Name Index (Manix). The information on hundreds of thousands of people in the database included their race, which officers marked on a contact card after stopping them. He filed another FOI request, but the TPS quickly denied it.

After the drama of “Race and Crime,” Rankin wasn’t surprised by the rejection. But he wasn’t about to back down. He went to his editors, and despite the likely challenges ahead, they were willing to take the TPS to court for information contained in the carding database. He was thrilled, remembering exactly why he loved working at the Star. Knowing that his colleagues, all the way up to the publisher, were committed to the story gave him the confidence to slug through a seven-year legal battle while continuing to report on allegations of police brutality and racial profiling.

In early 2009, the Star won the case, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered the TPS to reimburse the newspaper’s legal fees. Rankin taped a copy of the $40,000 cheque, along with another for $35,319.49 from the TPA’s earlier failed class action lawsuit, to the side of his desk. They were souvenirs of the battles he fought in the name of good journalism.

By January 2010, he was looking over a breakdown of carding stops in Toronto from 2003 to 2008. The data he had used in “Race and Crime” was complex, but Manix was straightforward. “Within a day or two of looking at the carding database, we could see a pattern,” Rankin says. There was a shocking racial disparity: Black people made up 8.4 percent of Toronto’s population at the time, but a staggering 22.6 percent of contact cards. He recruited help from the Star’s investigative reporters, as most of his original team from “Race and Crime” had moved on. Over the next month, they put together a new series.

“Race Matters,” published in February 2010, reported that Black people were three times more likely to be stopped than white people; Black males aged 15 to 24 were carded 2.5 more times than white males of the same age; and Black people were carded at significantly higher rates than their overall census population in each of the city’s 74 police patrol zones. The series included interviews with Rohan Robinson, a teacher who became the first face of carding. He described being stopped by police 30 times since 2001 without being ticketed.

Black communities in Toronto already suspected they were disproportionately stopped by police and had discussed it for decades, according to Anthony Morgan, a policy and research lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic. “Unfortunately, that’s part of the Black experience,” he says. Yet data confirming the systemic nature of carding, and its extent, was new. “It helped me recognize this isn’t just a feeling that something is wrong with these interactions,” Morgan says. “These things were actually wrong, and I was being targeted. Up until then, it was difficult to feel comfortable saying that.”

John Sewell, coordinator of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition and former mayor, says the story made his group realize this wasn’t happening randomly or from an individual officer. “This was a real strategy of the police force, and was something that was requiring all police officers to stop random people and record data about them.”

Despite interest from civil liberty groups, Rankin was underwhelmed by the public’s reaction to the series. He expected outrage from Torontonians. Instead, he says, it didn’t spark the city-wide conversation on carding that he’d hoped would occur. Rankin and the other reporters had taken only a month to put together the story, eager to publicize the racial disparity in carding stops, especially after waiting seven years for the data. The rush to release the series meant there wasn’t enough in-depth analysis. “What I didn’t think of at the time was other comparisons we could have done there,” Rankin says. Those included breaking the analysis down to a neighbourhood level and comparing the results. “We didn’t frame some of the questions the right way.” He believes they could have exposed the racial disparity in a more provocative manner.

The series also lacked the sort of wide-ranging personal experiences that would have conveyed the pain of being disproportionately carded. This was a significant flaw since many supporters of the practice saw it as a relatively harmless way of gathering information. The people who typically came to the Star to discuss encounters with police were often involved in legal disputes with the TPS. But the carding sources were everyday people affected by the practice and scared of the potential backlash of stepping into the spotlight, according to Patty Winsa, a general assignment reporter who worked on the series. “It was very difficult to get people to speak out,” she says. “So we didn’t personalize it enough.”

Eager to tackle the story with a new angle, Rankin filed another FOI request in 2011 to acquire updated carding data, as “Race Matters” included data only up until 2008. The March 2012 “Known to Police” series that came out of this FOI request finally brought carding the attention Rankin felt it deserved and forced politicians and police to address the practice. Rankin, Winsa and several multimedia journalists used the new information to present a provocative question: was it possible every young Black man in Toronto had been carded?

“A Star analysis of Toronto police stop data from 2008 to mid-2011 shows that the number of young black and brown males aged 15 to 24 documented in each of the city’s 72 patrol zones is greater than the actual number of young men of colour living in those areas,” the series noted. The ratio of Black men who were carded increased in predominantly white, affluent zones.

Rankin and Winsa also explored what carding meant to people in patrol zone 121, located in the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, an impoverished area of Toronto with a particularly high rate of carding. The series included interviews with Black youth and community workers from this area, immersing Star readers in the grim realities of carding, something Rankin felt past series had failed to do.

One of the officials he’d hoped would consider his reporting was Alok Mukherjee, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) from 2005 to 2015. After the 2010 series, Mukherjee told Rankin, “I can’t explain to you why you see the pattern you see today, but come back to me in two years, and if we have not seen a change, then there will be some questions that we will need to answer.” Mukherjee was shocked to hear the disparity had increased and began pressing the TPS for change.

The Star, meanwhile, continued pushing carding as a story, although the most important addition to the next series came from two men outside of the publication. Williams filed an FOI request for his own carding data in June 2012. After receiving the data, he contacted his friend Knia Singh, a student at Osgoode Hall Law School, and urged him to do the same

Singh filed his request in December 2012, and then the two men contacted the Star. Williams believed working with the paper would be “beneficial to the community because the experiences of me and Knia intersect with the experiences of hundreds of thousands of other people.”

“Known to Police 2013,” published in September, told their stories and included powerful video interviews. The series stressed that both men are young, Black, without criminal records and active in their communities, and they still had been carded. Singh says the reaction to their front-page photos illustrates how important their stories were for shattering stereotypes about carding. “It looked like Chris and I were suspects in a crime, because you usually don’t see two Black people on the front cover unless they’ve committed a crime, right?” He adds, “Some friends of mine thought I had either committed a crime or was a victim of a crime until they read it.”

Just under a month later, the TPS released the Police And Community Engagement Review (PACER) report, suggesting substantive methods to work toward bias-free policing. Many of these suggestions were incorporated into a progressive carding policy reform the police board voted for in April 2014, and the number of contact cards issued had begun to drop the year before. A few months later, Rankin asked TPA president Mike McCormack what had caused the reduction. The union head responded, “There’s definitely a sense out there amongst my members that they don’t want to be the one that’s, quite frankly, on the cover of the Toronto Star.”

Civil rights organizations used the Star’s data analysis as ammunition to put pressure on the police. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor in criminal justice at Indiana University who’s studying the views of Toronto police officers on race, says the Star had done a good job of reporting on anti-Black racism for years. Yet he also notes personal stories, common in the paper’s reporting before it obtained the databases, were typically ignored by police officials. “This type of data is often dismissed as being anecdotal because it’s individuals relaying their experiences.” But the databases provided quantitative evidence that was more difficult to dismiss, says Owusu-Bempah. “If it weren’t for the work of journalists, we would be much further behind in what we know now than we do.”

Shadya Yasin, a coordinator with the York Youth Coalition who works in the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, believes the reporting helped transform attitudes toward carding. “When the Black community speaks about carding, it’s just like, ‘Oh, look at those people, it’s just their issue,’” Yasin says. “But when the Star’s reporting came out, it actually gave proof and made it real to other people who think it’s always just Black people complaining about race issues.” Singh adds, “The reality is, if the journalists didn’t cover it, it would be a dead issue. It would be very easy for the police to just trample our rights, and we’d never have any recourse.”

These investigative series also opened the door for Black journalists, personally affected by carding, to vigorously report on the practice with the aid of quantitative evidence. The Star’s Royson James has tackled carding in his columns, especially starting in 2014, and helped put pressure on politicians to address the problem. In April 2014, the TPSB passed what many believed to be a progressive policy. A year later, the TPSB reversed many of these changes when it passed a new carding policy.

In June 2015, James argued that the dismantling of the 2014 reform was “beyond disturbing.” Noting citizens’ lack of trust in the political system, James wrote, “They do not want to hear from Mayor Tory on the issue. He symbolizes the problem.”

Singh says James’s reputation played a role in mobilizing Black Torontonians against carding. Williams agrees the columnist’s attacks on carding were crucial. “Royson James plays an important role in terms of conveying the deep-seated sentiments of large segments of the Black population in particular and marginalized populations more generally.”

Few other columnists discuss carding on a routine basis, according to James, who says, “He who feels it, knows it.” He believed he was the only one able to give Black communities in Toronto a voice they lacked in Canadian journalism. “I decided I was going to have to be that voice,” James says, noting a sense of personal responsibility.

James’s writing over the years inspired Desmond Cole, a freelance journalist who began reporting on carding after reading “Known to Police.” His personal essay in the May 2015 edition of Toronto Life left a mark on the city. Cole believes his piece was especially influential because of the magazine’s audience. “This was really not in their mode, so it really, really grabbed people’s attention,” he says. “It was sent into the homes of people who aren’t used to reading about these kinds of issues on a regular basis, or maybe never have.”

Cole’s view on the lack of public knowledge of carding, which others share, raises a serious question: stories about biased policing have existed for decades, so why did it take so long for mainstream journalists to cover the issue?

Owusu-Bempah doesn’t blame the Star for the delay, claiming the fault lies with police since they don’t regularly release carding data. And that information was of the utmost importance, according to Sewell: “It was that data that just blew things apart.” The Star’s coverage is invaluable, says Williams. “Any time you have journalistic work that disrupts the privilege of such a powerful public institution, I think that’s vitally important.”

Public discussion about carding reached new levels last October, when the province of Ontario proposed draft regulations to regulate carding and, many hope, to eventually ban random stops. Rankin is eager to see what will come of these regulations, though he believes systemic bias in policing will continue and, therefore, the reporting will as well.

Despite these concerns, the announcement marked the beginning of a happy few days for Rankin. Current and former colleagues emailed and called to congratulate him for his dedication to reporting on carding throughout the years. “It took a lot of Star resources and a really dogged team of journalists, editors, data gurus and bosses to keep on this issue,” Rankin says. “Because I am the only one still on it from our 2002 series, it feels extra special to be able to see it through to where we are today.”

One message particularly stood out. Rankin left work the day after the announcement, walked his dog and came home to a phone call. It was Scott Simmie, one of five journalists who worked on “Race and Crime.” Simmie told his former colleague that his reporting was a legacy. “It hadn’t hit me until that,” Rankin says. “You’re lucky in this job if you can look back and say there’s something that we did that made a difference. That’s definitely one of them.”

As they chatted, people around Toronto picked up copies of the Star with a front page filled with an article from Rankin, a photo of Singh and a column from Cole. The headline blazed across the page in large, capitalized print and announced just how significant their work had been: “Random Carding: The End.”

Nicholas Keung’s shirt was soaked in sweat. His phone intermittently buzzed with emails from his editors—but nothing from the woman he was waiting to interview about her brother’s mysterious death six days earlier at a Peterborough, Ontario, hospital while in the custody of immigration authorities. The Toronto Star reporter had been outside the woman’s high-rise apartment building on that hot mid-June morning since their scheduled interview time at 9:30. He called once, twice, half a dozen times. No one answered. He left voice messages. “I’m still downstairs.” At 10:45 a.m., she called. “We still need more time,” she said. “I’ll call you again when we’re ready.” Her mother had forbidden any contact with journalists because she was concerned about the stigma the family might face if someone reported that her son lived with bipolar disorder and diabetes. “We’re very private,” said the sister.

Two hours passed as Keung waited in the parking lot with his car windows down. He contacted the lawyer who had tipped him off about the family. At 11:30 a.m., the woman cancelled. “We can’t talk to you.”

Back at his office, Keung kept trying to convince her to go on the record. Perhaps, the detainee’s sister suggested, her mother—who didn’t speak English—didn’t have to know?

Six hours after their original appointment, she spoke with Keung for an hour. As an immigration reporter for the Star, he is familiar with this will-they-or-won’t-they-give-an-interview scenario. It makes producing nuanced coverage harder for journalists who must overcome language and cultural differences, as well as systemic restrictions.

Keung identifies as Canada’s longest-serving immigration reporter in an industry struggling to cover the 20 percent of the national population that is often overlooked in the news—at least in terms of immigration-specific issues and policies. He’s working against a legacy of stories that merely hint at the layers of complexities in the lives of Canadian immigrants and refugees.

Keung, who’s originally from Hong Kong, has been holding the lonely mantle of “immigration reporter” since 2003, when the Star made it an official beat. Before that, immigration coverage mostly meant stories about cultural festivals or personal success stories of integration and adaptation. But these individual narratives lacked context. In the 1990s, much of the reporting was shallow (the Star’s “Immigrant loses in marriage quiz,” for example, describes an immigrant couple’s ordeal with “a scary version of The Newlywed Game”) or simple, such as Q & A stories with titles like “Immigrant uneasy about parents must still wait in line for passport.” These stories merely scratched the surface. “Parades and costumes,” says John Ferri, a former Star reporter and editor. “The coverage in the ’90s was blinded by this filter that was well-intentioned, but not enough.”

Journalists celebrated diversity without deeply covering the nuances of multiculturalism. Haroon Siddiqui, former editorial page editor at the Star, recalls how budget-day coverage was always about how the changes would affect a white family. He also remembers an article about how Markham, a city in Toronto’s suburbs, didn’t look like Markham anymore due to its growing population of visible minorities, at 72.3 percent in 2011.

Both Siddiqui and Ferri were part of an internal Star committee that produced a 1995 report recommending changes to the editorial process to include more cross-cultural journalism. “There was a realization that we needed to cover the city the way it is,” says Siddiqui. “Those of us who don’t understand should stand in front of Union Station at eight in the morning and five in the evening and just see the human tide that wasn’t being reflected in the paper.”

Over the course of the ’90s, coverage increased as more people immigrated to Canada. “People didn’t realize this was an extraordinary beat,” says Siddiqui. Now, the reporting is more likely to be based on statistics or policy: how many new applications will be accepted, how many people are still stuck in the backlog, how many foreign workers will be deported and, lately, how many refugees the country can and will accommodate.

But there is no one universal immigrant experience. Stories about immigration provide a human-level window into everything from wars to gender inequality. “In many ways, diverse voices are being heard louder than before,” says Judy Trinh, a CBC reporter who came to Canada as a refugee from Vietnam. She says this shift is thanks to social media. “The concern is, are we covering those voices well?”

It’s not just “parades and costumes” anymore, but there are great challenges in reporting on a system riddled with complexities, nuances and a diversity of languages, cultures and experiences. “In an ideal world where all these issues were important enough, we would have more reporters,” says Andrew Griffith, author of the book Multiculturalism in Canada. General assignment reporters continue to handle most of the coverage, writing one-off stories on policy changes or profiles of cases they learned about in press releases.

When Jason Kenney, former immigration minister, said refugees get “gold-plated” health care, reporters “became his handmaiden” and repeated the phrase without analysis, says Peter Showler, a former chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. The “subliminal consequence” of such reporting is that coverage becomes unwittingly negative, says George Abraham, founder of New Canadian Media, a website dedicated to presenting an immigrant point of view for all Canadians. Journalists should instead be reporting the lived experiences that give context to the official narrative of immigration policy.

Last year ended with two big stories: by-the-numbers coverage of the federal Liberal government’s refugee plan and triumphant stories about an Ottawa couple winning a three-year struggle to bring their four-year-old son to Canada from India. Journalists cover immigration in two extremes: “It’ll all be hearts and flowers and violins on individual coverage,” says Showler, or mundane, meaningless facts and numbers in policy coverage.

Douglas Todd, a migration, diversity and spirituality writer for the Vancouver Sun, says reporters and editors are afraid to go deeper because of cultural sensitivities. “They don’t want to touch it, they don’t want to make a mistake and they don’t want to offend anyone,” he says. Yet 44 percent of Vancouverites are foreign-born, and the news isn’t covering their stories. “So how can that not be a gigantic issue?” says Todd. Three-fifths of his interview subjects are from minority groups, whereas he thinks the proportion is much smaller for other journalists.

Last June, Todd wrote a three-part series about Richmond, the fourth-largest city in British Columbia, where 60 percent of the residents are immigrants. This has physically changed the city—according to Todd’s article, there are more than 50 Asian malls and outlets in an area where, 30 years ago, there was a cluster of forgotten one-storey commercial buildings and parking lots. “Get beyond clichés,” says Todd. “Go for depth, context, background, census data, fairness, polling data, balance, realism and in-depth profiles.”

Yet, part of the problem is that readers don’t have the same level of shared knowledge about immigration as crime, education or public transit. Sometimes, by the time Keung has explained how the system works, he has used up 200 words, leaving little space for the actual story.

Four words in a press release about a dead detainee made Keung wait in that parking lot for over two hours: “On June 11, 2015, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) was notified by the Peterborough Regional Health Centre that an adult male detainee who was receiving care, passed away in hospital.”

The four words: Canada Border Services Agency.

A flow chart of questions appeared in Keung’s head. If a regular inmate had died, it wouldn’t have been a CBSA press release. That meant the detainee must have violated immigration law. Why was he receiving medical care, though? Was there a confrontation? What caused his death? What was his name? Keung knew this was a serious and complex case. He picked up the phone.

From an earlier press release from the Special Investigation Unit (SIU)—an agency that investigates incidents involving police where there has been death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault—he knew the “adult male detainee” was 39 years old. Keung says the CBSA declined to give him any more information: “The man’s identity will not be released at this time.” He learned that there were two officers on the detainee’s detail, and that the man had become agitated and had to be restrained by officers and health professionals. No name.

In the ’90s, any hard news about immigration was often about floodgates and fraud: there were too many coming in, and they were coming in illegally. “This was always a false issue to a very, very large degree,” says Showler. “The media was very complicit in that and quick to buy into it.” As time passed, “bogus refugee” became a common term for people claiming asylum upon arrival without proper paperwork. This perpetuated a fear-inducing narrative that all refugees were fraudulent, as did restrictive refugee health care laws passed by the Harper government in 2012. Op-eds by doctors, students, professors and lawyers specializing in refugee issues—rarely by journalists—countered this narrative. And, of course, after 9/11, the focus of immigration coverage had also changed, from multiculturalism to national security.

The arrival of Syrian refugees in 2015 is, according to Showler, “a tale of two stories.” The photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach is the first; the ISIS attacks on Paris is the second. “The two opposing stories appear alongside one another every day in the media and across dinner tables,” wrote Showler in an op-ed for the Star. In the first, Canadians are sympathetic and eager to help desperate refugees. In the second, sympathy becomes suspicion, and people believe extreme caution should be exercised in vetting the 25,000 Syrian refugees the Liberal government vowed to bring to Canada by this spring. The same two narratives existed in the news about “bogus refugees.” Showler says that pattern started to change when Syrian refugees began to arrive last December.

To move past these two extremes, Joe Friesen, demographics reporter at The Globe and Mail, suggests immigration should be covered in the business pages, in court coverage and in local politics news, not just by immigration reporters. “Immigrant issues are part of a lens through which a journalist sees every story, to look at everything in the way it affects different demographics,” he says. Changes to citizenship laws, for example, affect immigrants especially, but also citizens with dual nationalities. So do you let them be covered by an immigration reporter or a national affairs reporter? “I think when the day comes when we don’t even need this beat, it will be the ideal,” says Keung. He believes there will always be a need for someone to cover policy, but newsrooms shouldn’t need a special reporter for other aspects of immigrants’ lives. When that distinction no longer exists, he says, that’s when immigrant issues will become everyone’s issues.

“This is the dead man whose name nobody wanted you to know,” reads the lead of Keung’s story, published exactly a week after the official announcement of Hassan’s death. The same day, another of Keung’s articles came out, about a University of Toronto study that called the immigration detention system “a legal black hole.” According to the research, Canada was in breach of international human rights for routinely, and sometimes indefinitely, holding migrants with mental health issues in maximum-security jails.

In 2013, several news outlets reported that Lucia Vega Jimenez, an immigrant from Mexico, took his own life while imprisoned in Vancouver. Almost a month after his story on Hassan, Keung wrote about a United Nations report that condemned the indefinite length of immigration-related sentences in Canada. Eighty- eight inmates at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, where Hassan had been held, also signed an open letter demanding a public inquest into his death. “We still don’t know what happened on that day,” says Keung about Hassan’s death.

According to some of the inmates, events moved quickly, and it was all over in 24 hours—something Keung could not verify.

Anonymous sources, he says, are the biggest challenge facing anyone writing about immigration. Vancouver Sun reporter Tara Carman, who often writes about immigrants and refugees, says her subjects’ wishes to remain anonymous have prevented her from reporting a lot of their stories. “Some people have a lack of status,” she says, “or a lack of media knowledge or just a fear of speaking out.”

“The stakes are very high,” says David P. Ball, a reporter with The Tyee who covers several social issue beats including immigration. “If you screw it up, you could get someone deported.” In 2014, he wrote a story about undocumented immigrants in British Columbia. It was one of the first times the issue had been covered in that province, though Keung had previously written about it in the Star. Ball found a father of two from Mexico who was working illegally in Vancouver’s construction industry. He lived in a building that was about to be demolished and taught his kids English when he wasn’t at work—the children were denied access to school after their parents could not provide proof of citizenship. “It was really powerful to meet him,” says Ball, “and really challenging to verify any part of the story.”

As Keung says, sometimes finding and talking to someone on the record who can illustrate specific immigration issues can feel like searching for “a one-eyed, lesbian, Muslim, hijab-wearing, immigrant woman”—seemingly impossible.

Reporting on refugees and immigrants means facing complex legal and systemic roadblocks. Lawyers have to get approval from their clients before they can talk. And the lawyers must factor in the sway that news coverage may have on the case and how it may result in deportation. That’s only in the cases that lawyers choose to take to the press. The authorities overseeing refugee cases, for instance, are opaque institutions, hiding behind a veil of vague press releases. In these cases, everything is confidential, but most of it is also accessible by those willing to go through onerous application processes. Some cases go on to federal court, where the information becomes public, for those journalists inclined to go beyond press releases.

Under Stephen Harper’s government, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) made it more difficult to find useful information. Statistics, like where immigrants are coming from, that used to be presented by country became vast regional break-downs—not much help when the three biggest countries that B.C. immigrants come from all fall under “Asia.” Getting more useful data required an Access to Information request, which meant more red tape. “These are not exactly state secrets,” Carman wrote in an op-ed. “It’s hard to see how having that information in the public domain, as it has been for years, compromises security or privacy.” Under the new government, Carman got the information at no cost. But under Harper, the CIC informed her that the cost to access the information would have been $1,600 per hour of research time.

In the days after Hassan’s story ran, Keung kept following up on the investigation into the case. These were weekly conversations. Then every two weeks. “It was a fishing mission,” he says. To illustrate a systemic failure, you have to show a trend. To show a trend, you need to have concrete examples of people affected. To get names that haven’t been in the news before, you have to cut through a lot of red tape.

Starting in July, Keung spent five to six weeks looking for immigration detention cases involving a former or current detainee that exposed systemic issues. A lawyer came forward with two cases, both with clients who struggled with mental health. One had a guardian who wouldn’t provide consent and couldn’t be written about. Another lawyer, from Ottawa, had been trying for a long time to help a family and called Keung as a last resort. A different case about an immigrant detainee being held in a solitary cell came through the friend of yet another lawyer.

After Keung submitted one of the stories in the series, his main source—who faced a 62-month detention—withdrew consent. While Keung could have still used the story, he chose to shift the focus, looking at the efforts of his source’s lawyer instead. Eventually, the man relented.

Between August and the end of 2015, the immigration detention series and six more Keung stories sat on file, unpublished. The six pieces ranged from articles about temporary foreign workers to a profile of a Colombian immigrant painter who works out of his basement (which ran on January 14). But it was a busy time for news: a federal election was underway, Rob Ford started chemotherapy and the Blue Jays were in the playoffs. So, Keung’s immigration stories stayed put. “It’s frustrating because I have to keep updating the stories,” says Keung. He has to answer phone calls from sources asking when pieces will run or providing new information that he needs to add.

One of the featured images for the immigration detention series was a photo of advocates from the End Immigration Detention Network protesting outside the Lindsay prison where Hassan had been held. It’s a summer day in the picture. But summer turned into fall, and winter was coming.

The series, titled “Prisoners in Purgatory” online, finally appeared in print on December 4, 2015, in the GTA section of the Star. “Immigration detention is a world shrouded in secrecy, where people Canada doesn’t want are locked away, sometimes for years,” read the subhead of one story.

There’s an old, slightly blurry picture of a smiling Hassan. “His lengthy detention—and death—has sparked a debate over Canada’s immigration detention system, which involves a myriad of government jurisdictions in what critics call ‘a legal black hole,’ with little transparency and accountability,” wrote Keung. When it appeared, the series was one of the most read on the website. And less than two weeks later, a Somali man was ordered released after 67 months in immigrant detention “in an extraordinary and significant decision,” according to Keung’s story on him. “Media attention possibly helped,” the reporter said later. “It makes them nervous.”

On December 9, 2015, Keung received the Mary Deanne Shears Award for Outstanding Reporting at the Star. “In one of the worst refugee years in modern history, Nicholas has relentlessly kept on top of the challenges for refugees and immigrants to Canada,” wrote managing editor Jane Davenport in an email to staff, “and the government bungles (or deliberate misrepresentations) that have resulted in deportation and discrimination for too many.”

A testament to Keung’s relentless coverage of immigration issues is the number of stories he files. One article, published in November 2015, was about eight foreign workers stuck in an application backlog for permanent residency. Some were forced to return to their home countries after their visas expired because of the wait. The headline Keung used in his draft, bolded in big, black type, read, “We feel we’ve been forgotten.”

March 28, 2016: A previous version of this story failed to give David P. Ball’s full name and place of employment. The Review regrets the error.

Politics is about perception (and always has been). Official messages are carefully constructed to paint a specific type of picture. It’s the journalist’s job, theoretically at least, to find the flaws and the hidden distortions in that image.

But what if the picture is perfect and makes everyone happy? A hot prime minister meets a cool president, and they become instant BFFs. Their wives become new-found “soulmates.” It’s all jokes and smiles, glitz and glamour, flowers and champagne.

I get it–such coverage is the charm of a state dinner. It’s a story journalists have to write because it’s a change of pace from all the phobias and deaths front pages are too often filled with. And readers love it, as proven by the most popular lists on Canadian news outlets yesterday and today. It makes them happy. It makes me happy, for a little while at least.

The problem, though, is that such clickbait political coverage always gets taken too far. Newsrooms forget that even state dinners have foreign policy implications, which, if not obvious, need to be deciphered. While some of that was talked about, it was brief. Something about methane and the environment. A rumor about border control policies. Some announcement about Arctic goals.

Instead, in true BuzzFeed fashion, the Toronto Star gave us a play-by-play of how Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau saved new “soulmate” Michelle Obama from a nasty tumble off of the stage, seconds-apart pictures included. “Who needs the Secret Service with friends like this?” read the opening line of the article that would have worked better with GIFs. 

Maclean’s decided a special photo gallery was needed to document the youngest Trudeau child’s visit. “Hadrien goes to Washington,” it was called in Hollywood-movie fashion.  In fact, only 30 percent of the articles posted under a special heading on the Maclean’s website actually talked about policy discussion. The rest were photo galleries, fashion and decor coverage and transcribed speeches (see screenshot below), similar categories as coverage be the Star and others.

The problem isn’t new. This is what news dictated by clicks looks like, for the most part. It doesn’t have to be, and has been proven not to be, but it’s the easiest method of coverage, and difficult not to do when words like “bromance” are involved.

Having said that, caution needs to be advised and heeded. Pictures can be perfect, but politics isn’t. Canadian journalists need to get over how hot their new prime minister and his family are. Trudeau hugging pandas doesn’t warrant asking “Are the Trudeaus the cuddliest Canadian family of all time?” And do we really need additional widespread coverage of his attendance at the pride parade five months before it’s due to take place, when it was already announced at the end of last year? Maclean’s 60-second interviews were fun to watch, but where are the investigations on fiscal policy, or follow-ups on MMIW and other campaign announcements?

At some point the celebration of our picture-perfect prime minister and his government needs to end, and journalists have to go back to basics. Make us happy, but keep us informed.

Russell Wangersky peeled away the cling wrap encasing the chicken, thinking of it sizzling on a barbecue. When he turned the bird over, he saw “a great honking fistful of still attached skin and fat” tucked in where the ribs should have been. Over six months, he investigated the meat-to-fat ratio of Newfoundland Farm Products chickens. Wangersky made several trips to the grocery store. Almost every purchase was “larded up” to increase the weight—and the price—of the chicken.

He shared his findings in a St. John’s The Telegram column in April 2009, and the comments confirmed that his readers had also been duped. But “Penney” wrote, “I can’t believe someone was paid to write this useless waste of an article…A true indicator of the abysmal state of journalism in this province.”

Wangersky, who also moderated comments at the paper, has seen much worse. He’d sift through close to 100 comments per day (a small fraction of what larger publications receive) and kill about 20 percent of them based on their racist or libelous nature. “I don’t know what it adds in the end,” he says. “Unless what you’re looking for is to establish that out there, among us, there are truly objectionable people.”

His is one of many voices in the growing call to remove online comment sections. But commenters and tech experts say it’s a short-term solution to a lack of accountability and engagement from both sides of the computer screen.

In December, the Toronto Star shut down its comment section, joining publications such as Popular Science and the Toronto Sun. The Star will now curate “the most thoughtful, insightful and provocative comments from readers” that it finds through social media, and letters and emails to the editor. “My fear is that they are just going to cherry–pick a few comments that they like and highlight those,” says Mathew Ingram, former communities editor for The Globe and Mail and now a senior writer at Fortune. He says the move will “reflect all kinds of inherent biases” and, in selecting individual comments, publications “will be more likely to avoid the topics or viewpoints that don’t fit with those biases.”

Popular Science axed its comment section in September 2013, stating that comments don’t belong within the realms of a science-based publication. That same month, Huffington Post did away with anonymous comments. Former managing editor Jimmy Soni cited the “online toxicity” of anonymity as an explanation. In 2014, Reuters closed comments on news stories but kept them open for opinion and blog pieces. It has no incentive to engage in criticism because its stories are “straight news,” says digital executive editor Dan Colarusso.

Last September, the Sun eliminated the comment sections from most of its online stories. It says the move is only temporary, until the paper finds a “better and more accountable way” for readers to interact with the publication and each other. Comment sections “are a big part of our history and our culture at the paper,” says vice president of editorial James Wallace. “But we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t serving the interests of our readers and that there wasn’t a good or easy way to fix it while we figure out the best solution that will allow signed commenting.”

In November, CBC closed comments on all stories about indigenous issues. In a statement on its website, it said that while providing a “democratic space” for readers is important, there had been an influx of “hate speech and personal attacks.” Claiming it didn’t want a small minority of commenters to ruin the experience for everyone, CBC will be “taking a pause” until it finds the best way to proceed.

People who participate in debate to deliberately offend others are called “trolls.” Though they make up a small minority of the commenting community, trolls are the biggest catalyst of the comment section downfall. People who read negative comments below an article are more likely to view the information as less trustworthy, according to a 2013 study co-authored by Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, “The ‘Nasty Effect’: Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” used a fake blog post to gauge the change in reader perception after exposure to negative comments. Several news outlets, including Popular Science, have used Scheufele’s study as justification for eliminating comment sections.

Others, including Reuters and the Star, point out that reader discussion is happening on social media. Ingram says both of these reasons are simply excuses for laziness. “It requires more work to moderate, but at least the paper is exposed to points of view it might otherwise not want to listen to,” he says, adding that comment sections are a large part of building an online community, because they give readers a voice and make them feel engaged with a topic. Taking that away removes the conversation between author and audience.

Leaving comments to social media isn’t any better, though. When publications hand over the conversation, they’re taking traffic away from their own articles. And, according to a Pew Research study, trolling exists regardless of the platform.

So, what’s the solution? De Correspondent, a crowdfunded news site in the Netherlands, is expanding with a focus on writer-to-reader engagement. The founders, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth, say their goal is engagement through in-depth digital storytelling. The member-based subscription publication allows only members to comment (or “contribute,” as De Correspondent calls it). It also holds live events where readers and writers can speak face-to-face. This creates a sense of real engagement and accountability.

Accountability, according to the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), is what’s needed to make comment sections work. In a 2014 report, the organization’s Ethics Advisory Committee concluded that it’s the responsibility of journalists to “set the tone for the conversation” by contributing to the comment sections themselves. The report also pointed out that readers are “likely to be more engaged if they see other commenters and journalists responding constructively.”

While Wangersky and others would love to see comment sections—in their current form—disappear completely, it doesn’t seem likely. People will always have opinions, and providing a public space to air them is an integral part of a transparent news organization. Both Scheufele and Ingram agree that the trick to making it work is to be vigilant, ensure accountability and, above all, to engage. Because no matter what new form comment sections take, there will always be a Penney waiting to fan the flames of uncivil discussion.

The former hierarchies of the journalism industry have crumbled by the weight of the digital realm, to be replaced by blurry parallel relations between journalists and readers.

The result is evident in the record 10,600 readers who participated in the Toronto Star‘s annual “You be the editor” survey. Administered by the Star’s public editor, Kathy English, the “highly unscientific, overly simplistic survey” served to provide insight into readers’ perspectives on the judgments made on to-publish-or-not-to-publish over the past year.

For example, 60 percent of readers voted that a cartoon presenting Toronto Mayor John Tory in bare-butt pants should have been published, which English now also agrees with. Fifty-five percent of the readers would have also made the decision to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed. English disagrees: “it would be offensive and hurtful to Muslims in this community.”

Online journalism, in its many forms, has created a system of interaction that enables and encourages collaboration between reader and editor to discover, distribute and discuss the elements that create the best possible version of a news story. Today, the function of readers has surpassed that of being an audience, with technology fuelling their willingness to be heard and their capacity to be listened to, even on core matters of journalism ethics that the industry continues to debate.

These include the examples English collated in her survey, especially those about issues relating to mental health stories, as shown in the image below.

“Neither of th[e]se references is in line with media best practices for writing about mental health,” writes English, “and, to my mind, neither should have been published in the Star.” I agree.

In fairness, English does recognize that “newsroom debate about what to publish is always deeper and more wide-ranging than what this light exercise in journalistic decision-making can depict.”

Yet in the digital age of journalism, what is considered good, thorough and balanced journalistic practice is often at odds with reader perceptions and expectations. That’s okay if journalists are aware that, while the hierarchy may have crumbled, they still make the final call on how to best tell the story to the reader, who can only play the role of editor. Survey results show that readers were aligned with the newsroom’s judgments in 12 of the 18 matters in question. I’m unsure what to conclude from that.

A day before the survey results were published, Mitch Potter, the Star’s foreign affairs writer, wrote how the decision to publish certain images of Syrian kids in conflict zones is important in defining whether the reader will perceive them with empathy or as furthering propaganda. “You, friends, are now the filter, every bit—if not more so—than those of us who used to be,” concludes Potter.

That’s a scary thought. The power of the reader is strong. The force of journalism needs to find a way to stay in line with, if not above, that.

I don’t know who’s telling the truth about the Liberal refugee plan.

On the one hand, there’s Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed‘s political editor, who published an article on November 25, 2015, titled “Someone Gave The Media A Bunch Of False Info About Canada’s Syrian Refugee Plan.” McLeod takes issue with a CBC report by Rosemary Barton that, days before the Liberals revealed their official refugee plan, stated “unaccompanied men seeking asylum will not be part of the (refugee) program.”

McLeod quotes an anonymous senior Liberal member who “said they don’t know where the information came from, but they suspect it was from someone who did not have their best interests at heart. In other words, someone trying to screw them.”

There’s one word being interpreted and responded to differently in the Liberal government’s Syrian refugee plan: “prioritize.”

Other reports also counter the CBC reports on the claim to exclude single male Syrian refugees. As a Vice article states:

Initial reports had suggested that the government would not be allowing in any unattached single men in under the program, unless they are a sexual minority.

Government officials confirmed Tuesday that wouldn’t be the case. While the government will “prioritize” families, women at risk, LGBTQ minorities, and those who are accompanying elderly parents, it will not be disqualifying any would-be refugee on the basis of gender.

The Toronto Star also made this clear: “Officials say [the plan] does not preclude men — including gay men and single men accompanying their parents — from admission.”

It’s been nearly a month since the federal election, and journalists are still feuding over editorial endorsements. To recap, Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey forced all of the chain’s papers to endorse the Conservative Party of Canada. Former National Post editorials and comment editor Andrew Coyne wrote a column endorsing another party and resigned from his position as an editor after he was barred from publishing the article.

On November 9, Torstar chair John Honderich wrote an article in the Toronto Star arguing that “Postmedia let down readers by dictating election endorsements.” Honderich responded to an earlier claim from Godfrey stating, “Since God made babies, I think [endorsement editorials] were always made that way” by arguing, “No one can dispute the tradition of an individual publisher or owner calling the election shots for their local paper. Godfrey did that regularly when he was publisher of the Toronto Sun. But to dictate the choice across an entire chain–and nation. That is an entirely different tale.”

Honderich writes:

“The firestorm of criticism on social media, the rumours of discontent in Postmedia newsrooms and even a damning story in Britain’s Guardian newspaper all reflect a pervasive discontent [regarding Godfrey’s decision]. Even more worrisome is the negative impact this affair is having on the newspaper industry in general. At a time when the relevance and impact of newspapers are under attack, this doesn’t help.”

The ongoing feud continued today with an article by Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran calling for the Star to “step off its high horse.” Corcoran starts his column by complaining that the Star doesn’t have the same bias as the Post. After accusing the Star of flirting with “Stalinist Russia” over the years, Corcoran gets to his main point, which is to accuse Honderich of hypocrisy.

Corcoran argues that Honderich’s argument against Godfrey’s forced endorsement is hypocritical because Honderich supports owners determining editorial endorsements for their local paper. Corcoran does have a point, as an owner determining the content of their paper limits autonomy of editors and other staff regardless of whether it is done at a local or national level.

At the same time, imposing your will on one newspaper does significantly less damage than imposing it on 16 newspapers scattered throughout the country. As such, while Honderich is wrong to say that Godfrey’s decision was “entirely different” from his own, he is right to point out the varying implications of each decision.

Although the columns from both Corcoran and Honderich are relatively self-serving, they are useful because they will spark discourse on the way newspapers in Canada are operated. The fact that these debates are being conducted in public, for readers to digest, is especially important and a trend that should continue.

The events of the Paris attacks last night are still unfolding–“still” being the operative word. Much journalistic attention has been given to the situation in Paris, and rightly so. At the time of writing, CBC reports stated that at least 150 people had been killed after six separate attacks in public places like a music venue in central Paris, two restaurants and outside a stadium.

It’s difficult, however, to avoid comparing the coverage of the Paris attacks to the coverage of the suicide bombs in Beirut on Thursday. The events were equally historical in their own right, as the Tweets below demonstrate, for they marked a drastic shift in the safety and security of the people of each respective capital city. Both, however, were not covered equally.

Day of mourning in Lebanon after 43 people killed in two suicide bombings in Beirut yesterday. Worst incident since civil ended war in 1990.

— CBC World Report (@CBCWorldReport) November 13, 2015

A city-wide curfew is now in place in #Paris for the first time since 1944.

— CP24 (@CP24) November 13, 2015

The Paris attacks have been extensively reported on a minute-by-minute basis as reporters took to the ground to find the facts and share them in an efficient manner. All the main journalism organizations in Canada had updated versions of their articles, a timeline of the events, a map of where the attacks were happening as they unfolded, an article with pictures and videos and a social media reaction article. News outlet reports were also supplemented by the individual coverage shared, reported and commented on by Canadian journalists on Twitter.

Comparatively, when the Beirut attacks unfolded on Thursday, the same journalism organizations carried an Associated Press article supplemented by Reuters images and video. Little else was seen on Twitter in terms of additional reporting or coverage.

While understanding that logistical and resource-based strains limit the coverage of international reporting in an industry continuously tightening its belt, there are questions to be asked about the decision to cover some events extensively while leaving the coverage of others lacking. There are rationales to consider, of course. France is a country more historically and culturally tied to Canada’s population than Beirut, thus perhaps justifying more in-depth coverage.

This, however, conflicts with the journalistic practice of fair and objective reporting that the industry is founded on. If journalism is meant to bring to attention the realities of such events and the impacts they have, what deems one attack more worthy of attention than the other?

In the face of the Paris attacks, journalism organizations seem to have forgotten about Beirut. It’s yesterday’s news, except that it’s also news that wasn’t properly covered when it happened. As my fellow blog editor, Davide Mastracci, noted in his previous post, several headlines on the Beirut attack incorrectly illustrated the conflict on the ground.

Beirut and Paris weren’t very different. Both were attacks on capital cities that affected innocent residents in public places. Both saw the city come to a standstill and a shutdown. Yet in examining the news coverage, there is a glaring imbalance that doesn’t make this similarity very obvious. In a country like Canada that prides itself on its multiculturalism and continues to be home to communities from places across the world, including Beirut, Paris, Baghdad and Japan–the four places that faced some sort of serious devastation yesterday–balanced all-around coverage seems all the more pertinent.

This inherent, perhaps implicit, perhaps natural bias is something journalists need to recognize in the mirror and deal with. If journalism frames the narrative about these events, the onus is on journalists to do so responsibly and fairly.

Not all stories are equal, but perhaps they should be.

At least 43 people were killed by a double suicide bombing in a residential area of Beirut yesterday, an attack for which ISIL has since claimed responsibility.

The New York Times initially reported the story with this headline, causing an uproar on Twitter. Reuters also ran with a similar headline.

ISIS blows up crowd of civilians in Beirut and this is the headline pic.twitter.com/mbxYAo43uk

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) November 12, 2015

The headline came under fire because it implied all the people in the residential area were somehow associated with Hezbollah, therefore implying that they may have been militants instead of civilians.

Roqayah Chamseddine, a Lebanese-American journalist, says the use of the phrase “[Hezbollah] stronghold” creates a “fabricated picture of what exists on the ground.”

“That language is meant to show that what is in essence a simply poor neighborhood is some sort of military compound,” Chamseddine says. “While there are many [Hezbollah] supporters in the southern district of Beirut, the idea that it is a [Hezbollah] bastion is an outright lie.”

Many others argued the headline was inappropriate.

The NYT term “Hezbollah stronghold” shows dehumanizing & flawed facts–NYT needs "mindset" reset, not headline reset

— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) November 13, 2015

.@rulajebreal I wonder if @nytimes will start saying "Stabbing attack in Zionist stronghold" or "Attempted stabbing in Likud stronghold"

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 13, 2015

The New York Times has since changed the headline on the article to “ISIS Claims Responsibility for Deadly Blasts in Southern Beirut.” The journalist behind the article also admitted the error and apologized.

.@snarwani you are correct. The characterization is not meant to diminish civilian casualties. I've corrected it. Thanks.

— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) November 12, 2015

Several major Canadian publications, however, were still using a headline that dehumanizes the victims of the blast as of 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, including The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

The RRJ contacted editors at both papers via email at 7:50 p.m. Thursday evening asking why they chose the headline, and if they’re willing to change it to something more accurate. The Globe and Mail editors altered their headline at 8:36 p.m., but have not yet responded to the email request.

The Toronto Star editors have not yet altered their headline or responded to the email. Any responses received will be added to this post.

Richard Brennan has never called a premier by anything other than his first name.

Keith Leslie, long-time Canadian Press reporter covering Ontario politics and the Statler to Brennan’s Waldorf at Queen’s Park, remembers coming back to Toronto from Ottawa the morning after former Premier Dalton McGuinty won the election in 2003.  They got on a bus at the island airport, and moments later Leslie remembers Brennan calling out to McGuinty from the back of the bus.

“Dalton, Dalton, Dalton!” said Brennan, more commonly known as Badger.

“What, Badger?” said McGuinty.

“When are you going to resign?” said Brennan.

“It was just the morning after,” says Leslie. He remembers the conversation repeating itself a couple of minutes later.

“Dalton, Dalton, Dalton!” said Brennan.

“What, Badger?” said McGuinty.

“You know I’m never going to call you premier,” said Brennan.

That’s the kind of journalist Brennan will be remembered as: a tough but fair, no-nonsense, persistent political reporter who has been covering provincial elections since the 1990s. Robert Benzie, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, calls Brennan the “antithesis” of the “puffed-up egomaniacs, bullshit artists, pseudo-intellectuals and pompous assholes” you find in political journalism.

In a testament to his motto of “true but fair” journalism, five premiers came to Brennan’s retirement party at Queen’s Park on October 27. “I gave them a hard time and they gave it back,” he says.

Brennan’s colleagues all remark on his ability to be a grounded journalist, aware of his duty to both politicians and the public, for whom no story is not worth pursuing and who never stopped hammering (read: badgering) the government to get his work done.

His four-decades long career from typewriter to Twitter started with a paper delivery route when he was 12 or 13 years old where he got hooked on the Toronto Star. Since then, his personal career highlights have been offering himself as a hostage to a bank robber in 1978; walking into a mob meeting in a black suit and long trench coat with the collars turned up; travelling with the prime minister to places like Uganda, Kandahar and Europe; and, being president of a press gallery when “even rock stations had people here.”

“I’m running out of words. I’ve covered everything you can imagine. I’ve covered rich and poor and everything in between,” says Brennan.

His parting advice to incoming journalists is to to work hard, ask for help if you need it and, most importantly, “open your eyes and shut your mouth.”

“News reporting isn’t for everyone, but it’s been bloody good to me,” says Brennan, who plans to spend time with his wife of 41 years, his two kids and three grandchildren, and eventually start a media training company.

As for the Badger’s legacy, Leslie recalls former Foreign Minister John Baird telling him about a press meeting at Queen’s Park when Baird was an MPP. The media handler had put a barrier like those in a bank line to keep the press back. “And Baird looked at me and said, you and Badger just took them away,” says Leslie.

“That’s Badger’s legacy: removing the bar. And I hope, at least, a little bit of that hangs around here,” he says.

Here are tweets documenting the last days at Queen’s Park of a man who, in Benzie’s words, “is 66 years old and still gives a fuck.”

Mayor @JohnTory stops by the @TorontoStar QP bureau with a retirement plaque for @rjbrennan. Nice! #topoli #onpoli pic.twitter.com/fHFfZkdZLj

— Rob Ferguson (@robferguson1) October 27, 2015

Last question period for @rjbrennan. The Badger retires tomorrow. #onpoli #journalism pic.twitter.com/40vqDcUoBC

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) October 29, 2015

"Do it for Badger," @brownbarrie asks @SousaCharles of stopping the sale of @HydroOne. #onpoli

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) October 29, 2015

Badger was as emotional as he ever gets — which is to say not at all — as MPPs applauded him. #onpoli pic.twitter.com/idfvJpicG5

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) October 29, 2015

.@rjbrennan in his last scrum asks @SousaCharles: "Just once, why can't I cover a deal you didn't screw up?" #onpoli pic.twitter.com/MMjfPGoHwy

— Adrian Morrow (@AdrianMorrow) October 29, 2015

Black line for Badger in Canada's largest circulation newspaper on the day he retires. #onpoli pic.twitter.com/T6ZOtqWZWX

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) October 30, 2015