Nobody here cooked up a crack video of Mayor Rob Ford.

Nobody here illegally tapped a phone.

Nobody here hacked into private emails.

Nobody here invented a source or fabricated a quote or manufactured a shred of evidence.

Nobody here reported anything other than the truth as we believed — and still believe — it to be.

“It was true then, it’s true now.”

That was Toronto Star editor Michael Cooke, scrummed by journalists outside a hearing room on Monday morning, confronted with questioning a lot more vigorous than the weirdly soft lobs delivered inside the hearing room.

Related:

· Rob Ford offered 14 chances to comment on crack story

· Star statement to press council

· Original Rob Ford video story

· More on Mayor Rob Ford

No reporting crimes or misdemeanours, no breach of ethics, have been committed by the Star in our coverage of our mayor. Indeed, no violations of sound journalistic practice has even been alleged inside this particular Star Chamber.

So what, exactly, was the purpose of that public mini-inquiry convened by the Ontario Press Council?

Because: 41 complaints were received by the council about a May 17 front-page story written by Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan that detailed attempts to sell that now-notorious video of the mayor smoking what appears to be crack cocaine to the Star. Thirty of those complaints were anonymous. Only six out of 41 were in writing.

I get more than 41 snipes over a column on any given day, before even brushing my teeth.

Because: The council, by its own admission, gets only 100 or so complaints every year, so this signified a veritable deluge of griping.

Because: In the wake of the Leveson Inquiry in Britain, into the “culture, practices and ethics” of the press — which did expose appallingly shady conduct and criminal activity, primarily by the sleazy Brit tabloids — a constituency of harpies seems to think all media are duplicitous, dishonourable and bullying, and should have their talons clipped.

Because: The council is desperate to prove its relevance.

Because: One (1) woman, ostensibly representative of all the rest (6), from among a circulation of about 1 million, just didn’t like the Star story.

As Darylle Donley wrote in her complaint: “I would be curious to know just how far a TV or radio reporter or newspaper person, has to go before they are sanctioned or curtailed?

“The Ford brothers are being lied about, innuendos and allegations are being made against them. The news should be concrete and proven truth.”

“I am curious to know what your criteria is regarding mistruths and allegations in the Ontario newspapers.”

Well, allegations are the common stuff of reportage. If only proven truth were ever published, you would be reading the Star on a matchbook cover.

But lies and mistruths? The Star has published none of one and nil of the other in relation to Rob and Doug Ford — or either would surely have sued by now, which they haven’t done.

Here’s another slander, which Donley — who did not speak with reporters afterwards — delivered, pointing to the blow-up of an infamous photo that Cooke had brought as a visual aid for his presentation. The photo depicts Ford, standing outside a home described by neighbours as a crack house, in the jolly arm-around company of three males: One since murdered, one injured in the same shooting and later arrested in Project Traveller, and a third also arrested in Traveller, the massive police drugs and guns raids four months ago.

“The persons in the story, were they connected with the Don Bosco football team?” Donley asked the three council members.

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I’ll answer that question. No, they weren’t and that allegation has never been made.

Donley continued, regrettably: “Around the Don Bosco football team, there were a lot of unsavory characters.”

It was a nasty remark, pungent with stereotypes.

I don’t want to beat up on Donley. She may have been a somewhat reluctant complainant in this public forum, picked from the six-pack. The experience of speaking publicly can be daunting and Donley said little. She wasn’t dragged to the hearing, though. “She was not coerced to come,” panel chair George Thomson, a former provincial court judge and government bureaucrat, told the Star afterward.

I would like to have known whether Donley has any personal connection to the Fords but that information is not available. “We do not investigate the people who drop a complaint on our desk,” said council executive director Don McCurdy.

Neither Rob nor Doug Ford attended the hearing, though they were both invited.

For the record, this is what Rob Ford said about the crack video back in May, and nothing else since: “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.”

A more expansive complainant on the undercard Monday was Connie Harrison, who had objected to a Globe and Mail story about Doug Ford allegedly dealing hashish as a young man. Harrison took particular issue with the plethora of unidentified sources in the Globe article and spoke sharply to it.

There will be no comment here about the Globe story.

The Star story, however, stands on its merits as clearly a matter of public interest — as have been all the articles published in recent months. That many people in Ford Nation simply don’t want to read it, hear it, see it, is their prerogative. But to slime the reportage as unfair and blithely injurious is flimsy rationale for Ontario Press Council review.

Cooke made the case effectively before the panel, claiming the Star welcomed the opportunity to explain “at great length about how we do our job.”

Two experienced reporters watched that video three times, in which Ford made disparaging remarks about minorities and homosexuals to boot. The photo we ran was taken in front of a house targeted in one of the Project Traveller search warrants. “In our respectful opinion, connections between drug dealers, gun dealers, a notorious crack house and the chief magistrate of Canada’s largest city fit the definition of something that can and should be explored in the public interest.”

The Star made 14 attempts to get a comment from Ford the night that story went to bed, two weeks after Doolittle and Donovan watched the video. The mayor did not respond.

Further, as Cooke told reporters afterward when asked about the vendetta some Ford devotees insist we are pursuing: “There is no vendetta. I don’t know how more emphatically I can say it. Demonstrate the vendetta to us. There isn’t one.”

An easygoing and loquacious fellow, Cooke may have, as he said, quite enjoyed explaining the ins and outs of daily newspaperin’ to the press council — though you MIGHT THINK A PRESS COUNCIL WOULD ALREADY KNOW THIS. The panel is now deliberating on the complaints, with a ruling perhaps by month’s end. In Press Council World, deadlines don’t exist.

I have long advocated dropping out of the council, despite the fact the Star was crucial in its establishment. I disapprove of professional spanky outfits, especially when they’ve demonstrated such a poor grasp of said profession. And I say that not merely because the council rendered a cuckoo decision against me a decade ago. I’m not bitter. I am contemptuous.

We have editors, an endless roster of editors, who make decisions of judgment. Readers are judges too. If I displease either, with frequency, I won’t have a job. If we betray public trust, we’re out of business.

What I don’t need is a cadre, a senate of stiffs, pandering to partisan whiners because they need to justify their existence.

And if the Ontario Press Council doesn’t like what I’ve written here, they can . . . take me to the Ontario Press Council.