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As part of the Press Freedom in Canada conference held last week at Ryerson University, Tony Burman gave a luncheon address on his experience working for Al Jazeera English, the importance of war reporting and its implications for freedom of the press. Rhiannon Russell was there, and reports on Burman's speech. 

Linden MacIntyre calls it courthouse culture, but it’s not limited to courthouses. It’s the kind of thinking that 30 years ago led a court clerk in Nova Scotia, when MacIntyre asked to see the affidavits supporting a search warrant, to say no.MacIntyre fought that "no" all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and won. His victory helped, but court culture is alive and well.

McIntyre and fellow panellists discussed the problem and what can be done about it at a Ryerson University conference on press freedom March 9.

By the end of the Second World War, Canadian press censors themselves had come to believe censorship did not work, according to Mark Bourrie, author of The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in World War Two.

Though the top wartime censors, all former journalists, were not big believers in suppressing information in the first place, they concluded that if information control were necessary again, the best way would be not to tell the media what to report but to control what information got out in the first place, with stiff penalties for anyone leaking information.

And something very like that is happening today, Bourrie said in a discussion entitled Censored Then & Now, sponsored by the Book and Periodical Council following presentation of the BPC’s annual Freedom to Read Award to Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes.

Lara Logan, CBS chief foreign correspondent, appeared on CBS This Morning to speak about Marie Colvin, a foreign reporter for the Sunday Times who was killed yesterday in Syria, and about the challenges foreign reporters face in cases of extreme civil unrest.