Category / Commentary

Author Taslima Nasreen, whose writing about women’s lives so offends conservative Muslims there’s a bounty (fatwa) on her head and she’s banished in her native Bangladesh, is reportedly charged in India with the crime of “hurting Muslim feelings.” Reported CBC…

“The real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove,” argues Jay Rosen in Press Think. My question: Is savviness related to sophistry, and our culture’s…

Will the Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest newspaper, be in play on the stock market? The Globe and Mail’s Grant Robertson and Gordon Pitts examine that question in a piece about how some of the heirs of the family trust —…

The latest Pew Research Center study on how Americans regard their news media will be a downer for many professional journalism: distrust, division and the emergence of media tribes. I suspect a similar Canadian study would have similar results. An…

A report by the CBC  says two journalists killed in Somalia today had lived in Ottawa before returning to Somalia in 1999 to help build an independent press. There are numerous reports that Mahad Ahmed Elmi and Ali Iman Sharmarke…

Busted by a 13-year old. Ouch. After a boy in Finland noticed pictures carried by Reuters looked like subs in the movie Titanic, the news agency was forced to admit the provenance of the images. Reported the Guardian: “footage it…

A website is a website is a website, argues Steve Safran in this column: The more tools we keep giving journalism, the more journalists keep arguing over the tools. What they don’t see is the toolbox …. News isn’t about…

Former Radio-Canada journalist Michel Morin was appointed this week as commissioner with the Canadian radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. Morin retired from Radio-Canada two years ago, after 34 years as a journalist, including as the chief editor of TV news for…

A couple of interesting items this week about corporate control of public information: A major U.S. telco censored two lines in a telecast of the band Pearl Jam. The lines were critical of U.S. president George W. Bush. From the…

The behaviour of Yahoo and Google in China has long been controversial, because of allegations that the companies comply with Chinese censorship. Now Yahoo is on the hot seat before a U.S. congressional committee.  An excerpt of a story in …