Bill C-58 is in its final stages. What happens to the public’s right-to-know if it passes? Continue Reading Trudeau’s government continues to fall short on media’s access to information
A five-point plan for mainstream media to cover fewer royal babies and more of our unfolding catastrophe Continue Reading Dear Journalists of Canada: Start Reporting Climate Change as an Emergency
The New York Times came under fire after a political cartoon appeared in print on April 25, 2019. Continue Reading Political cartoonists are out of touch – it’s time to make way for memes
The Ontario city of Thunder Bay is in the headlines these days for all the wrong reasons. Canada’s highest rates of murder and violent crime. The highest number of hate crimes per capita. Systemic racism embedded in shoddy police investigations. The deaths — many unexplained — of Indigenous students who come to the city for…
In the wake of a series of coordinated attacks that claimed more than 250 lives on April 21, the government of Sri Lanka shut off its residents’ access to social media and online messaging systems, including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat and Viber. The official government concern was that “false news reports were spreading through social…
Coverage of mass violence against women still leaves out the basics Continue Reading The pedestrian misogyny behind the van attack
By Kathy Kiely, University of Missouri-Columbia and Laurel Leff, Northeastern University These days, anybody with an internet connection can be a publisher. That doesn’t make everybody a journalist. This distinction has become more important than ever in light of two recent events. One was the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The other was a…
We shouldn’t need a Super Bowl commercial costing around $10 million to remind us that information is supposed to matter in a democracy. Yet the Washington Post thought we did, so it told 111 million Americans watching the Super Bowl that “knowing empowers us, knowing helps us decide, knowing keeps us free.” It was another…
The federal budget has finally answered some of the questions about the Liberal government’s plans to subsidize the news business, which were first floated late last year. But the details revealed by Finance Minister Bill Morneau raises many more questions about Ottawa’s reasons for supporting journalism. There will be a 25-per-cent refundable tax credit (up…
By Heather Rollwagen, Ryerson University and Ivor Shapiro, Ryerson University Ottawa has finally announced the details of how it will offer financial assistance to the country’s struggling news media industry — a controversial policy that will lead to suggestions that journalistic independence is compromised by government funding. Under a heading called Support for Journalism, Finance…