Canadian media have consistently given priority to covering the deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan; today’s Globe and Mail top-front page piece about the death of Simon Longtin of the Vandoos is an example. In the U.S., however, a weariness with carnage seems to have set in, and there’s apparently lessening appetite in the media…
Is Russia cracking down on foreign media? The BBC was effectively kicked out of the country today. From a story in the Guardian:The BBC World Service has lost its last FM radio outlet in Russia today, adding further substance to claims of a clampdown on foreign media by the country’s authorities.Russian station Bolshoye Radio today…
Dean Starkman offers some strong opinions on the sell-out of the WSJ in the Columbia Journalism Review, and a warning for the NY Times. An excerpt:And so Dow Jones & Co., once the proud lion of financial news, goes down instead like a jackrabbit shot while sprinting across a field, tumbling just long enough to…
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 charges come after Nasreen was attacked at a publication party because of opposition to…
“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 truly odd dedication to “sophistication?” Hat tip to Janet Tate’s press notes at the SPJ
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 Thalls — plan to sell. Earlier, the TorStar had a (remarkably) small story about…
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 excerpt from the study: The American public continues to fault news organizations for a number…
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 were the targets of deliberate attacks in Mogadishu on Saturday. They operated Horn Afrik Media…
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 released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually…
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 our internecine squabbles over how to present it. We’re killing each other over methods. We’re…