J-Topics

For the third straight year, the federal government received failing grades from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in a report card on freedom of expression in Canada. The report card, included in the annual Review of Free Expression in Canada, highlights how access to information at the federal level is marred by secrecy and delays.

In his documentary Bananas!, Swedish independent filmmaker Fredrik Gertten chronicles a lawsuit brought against the Dole Food Company in Los Angeles and the subsequent trial in which Nicaraguan plantation workers claim the banned chemical had made them sterile. When the film was set to premiere, in 2009, at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole unleashed a relentless media campaign to quash the film and destroy the reputation of its creators. Big Boys Gone Bananas! is an exposé of Gertten’s David and Goliath battle with the world’s largest fruit and vegetable producing company.

Quebec provincial police raided the home of a Montreal reporter Thursday morning, seizing his computer, files and some of his clothes, after he wrote about lax security in Montreal-area hospitals. Eric-Yvan Lemay of Le Journal de Montreal reported in February that Montreal-area hospitals had left patient files unattended in their corridors. Police raided his home at 6:45 Thursday morning.

Two days, two summaries and a whole lot of reasons that you should care about freedom of the press.  Belinda Alzner and Rhiannon Russell have rounded up their coverage of a conference discussing the state of press freedom in Canada on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, held last week at Ryerson University. Assumptions about press and society were challenged in panels addressing media and the courts, international reporting, Twitter’s role in news and why the public just doesn’t seem to care.