An editorial in the New York Times urges the American Senate to support legislation to prevent American courts from enforcing libel judgments obtained in foreign countries if those countries provide less free speech protection than the United States does. Excerpts: “The bill on “libel tourism” strikes an important blow for free expression. American law imposes…
You cannot, in Canada, link a U.S. vice-presidential candidate with the phrases “white trash” and “porn-actress look” and get away with it, as columnist Heather Mallick found out this week when the CBC pulled her column.
A bilingual newspaper has been established on the Dutch-German border. Reports Der Spiegel: “The first issue of Buren (Neighbors) has just landed on the doormats of 400,000 residents in the region around Enschede on the Dutch-German border. The special collector’s item, as the paper’s editorial identifies itself, is a combined effort by the Dutch regional…
News organizations are hoping for a landmark ruling, after the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear a case involving the confidentiality of journalistic sources. The case involves a supposed conflict between police criminal investigations and freedom of the press. The dispute focuses on a brown envelope sent to National Post reporter Andrew McIntosh in…
An Afghan journalist held in a U.S. military prison for nearly one year was reunited with his family in Kandahar City Wednesday. Excerpts from a CTV story: “U.S. officials released Jawed Yazamy, in his early 20s, Sunday after holding him for 11 months at a base in Bagram, near Kabul. “Yazamy, who was working for…
The latest report of the Canadian Internet Project seems to defy the conventional wisdom that the Internet is killing journalism. An excerpt…
Notes from the newest Statistics Canada figures on radio listening: Last year Canadians listened to radio for 18.3 hours a week on average, continuing a trend that has seen a two-hour decline in weekly listening in the past decade. The most popular radio overall was adult contemporary music. CBC/Radio-Canada was the first choice among seniors,…
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released two backgrounder reports on ways to regulate new media, commissioned before a public hearing on new media. “The CRTC commissioned the reports but did not in any way mandate the outcomes,” said its press release. The CRTC is not bound by the report’s findings, noted an online report…
Freelance journalist Guy-André Kieffer disappeared in 2004 in Abidjan, where he was investigating a story about corruption in the cocoa trade. Kieffer spent some time in Canada, where he fathered a son, and he has dual Canadian-French citizenship. His case has been the subject of an intense investigation by France. Is the Canadian government doing…
Reported the Globe’s Report on Business: “The struggling stock of CanWest Global Communications Corp. [CGS-T] is poised to suffer another blow – deletion from Canada’s benchmark stock index.” The Globe noted that Standard & Poor will soon announce quarterly revisions to the S&P/TSX composite index, and “CanWest’s market capitalization as of the end of August appears…