Getting rid of CBC News: Is it still Conservative policy?
When he was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer said he’d get rid of CBC’s public affairs department. For many years, people in the rank and file of the Conservatives, and its predecessor parties, the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives, had been advocating for big cuts to the public broadcaster. At most, many
More media bloodletting as Globe announces buyouts, CTV cuts newsroom, TVO budget cut
The Globe and Mail has offered buyouts to staffers to try to cut $10 million a year from its payroll. A big buyout, in 2013, saw the paper lose some of its best newsroom talent. Kirk Makin, Canada’s premier justice and legal reporter, left the paper, along with several top investigative reporters like Stan Oziewicz, feature writer Tim Appleby, regional
We get letters — Re: Jesse Brown and WE
From a senior school administrator in Ontario: Thank you for your recent article concerning the journalism of Canadaland, especially as it related to its articles about and against Free the Children and WE. I am particularly concerned by what seems to be a blatant and biased attack on the organization and on its co-founders by Canadaland. I had had the
Today in CRazy
When you’re so abhorrent that Rebel Media fires you and big social media outlets know you by name — in a very bad way — it’s time to rethink your thought processes. I could analyze this, but it’s just flat-out ill. What I will say is that the hard right — Trump, Ford, Scheer — use these screwballs as stalking
Jesse Brown hits The Rock
Self-professed Shame Wizard Jesse Brown fired another shot into his own foot last week. Then, as he usually does, reloaded and shot the other one. On the May 2 edition of Canadaland Short Cuts, Brown smears Newfoundlanders for taking offence at being labeled ‘Newfies’, calling them overly-sensitive white people, and claiming they “want Newfoundland to be an ethno state”. Brown went
Ontario’s SLAPP law is headed to the Supreme Court of Canada
Pointes Protection, the key Ontario Court of Appeal case on Ontario’s Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation law (discussed in an earlier post) is headed to Canada’s top court. Anyone who wants to understand the core of the SLAPP law should read the ONCA’s decision on Pointes, not just for its take on the law itself, but for the history and
Is this the new Canadian political reality?
This is from the introduction of my 2015 book Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, published by HarperCollins. I’m posting it for Press Freedom weekend. How much of it fits today’s political climate? The Harper government has set out to kill many messengers. The media is obviously one of them. And, while Harper’s war
The Globe and Mail’s David Walmsley on Press Freedom
I’m proud of the work I did as a journalist. I spent almost 40 years in that trade and had articles published in pretty much every major newspaper in the country, along with some magazines. Some of my books were journalism. I wrote the definitive book on domestic press censorship in Canada in the Second World War, a collection of
The making of modern journalism – when a friendly stranger comes to call
This is a case study of a media hatchet job. It’s from England’s conservative Spectator, and that bias is apparent. Still, it’s a warning of what can happen when you let a journalist into your home and decide to have a friendly chat. A phrase gets picked up here, another there, and very soon the journalist is able to craft
Choking off the terrorism propaganda pipeline should be the world’s duty
When suicide bombers attacked several Christian churches and some of the country’s best hotels on Easter Sunday, the Sri Lankan government swiftly reacted by shutting down social media. The Sri Lankan regime was concerned about video propaganda from the attacks. It also wanted to close off the messaging functions of Facebook and Twitter, and it pulled the plug on WhatsApp.