The Ontario Press Council has approved the following criteria for defining "identifiable groups" for the purpose of adjudicating complaints.

A rule of thumb is that an identifiable group constitutes people who were born to a group or are part of a group although not necessarily by choice. For example, it would include members of visible minorities, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and people who are mentally or physically challenged or have a particular sexual orientation.

Ruling on complaints about a column that focused on teachers, the Press Council said it did not find the article objectionable in the same way as an attack on groups for their religion, race or ethnicity.

Another ruling, involving a column that used insulting, made-up terms, was upheld on grounds that it went beyond acceptable discourse in insulting the francophone community.

The two rulings pose the question of where to draw the line in defining identifiable groups that may claim to have been the object of unnecessarily hurtful comment in editorials and columns.

If teachers cannot claim to have been personally slandered by a column attacking some of their colleagues, then the Council sees it as reasonable to suggest that people in a profession or calling, such as lawyers, doctors, politicians, union members, journalists and the like are in the same category.

A nation may be properly defined as an identifiable group when an opinion article crosses the line from hard-hitting, reasoned criticism to insult and sarcasm. This would apply to members of a particular religious, racial or ethnic group.

But a columnist who merely cites personal experience in commenting on his or her own religion, nationality, race or ethnicity cannot necessarily be seen to be slandering the whole religious, national, racial or ethnic body.

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