media

Don’t Let Canwest SLAPP* Mordecai Briemberg and YOU !

By the Seriously Free Speech Committee
Via the Canadian Dimension blog

Imagine you go to a public meeting on the Middle East; you see a humorous parody of the local daily, pick up a few copies and hand them out. Six months later you are served with a writ of summons that charges you with producing the parody, that threatens to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, that takes up hundreds of hours of your time and aims to prevent you from expressing your opinions in future. Impossible? A Kafkaesque fantasy? This is what is happening to Mordecai Briemberg in Vancouver today and we need your help to stop it.

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Canadian Press
November 11, 2007

TORONTO - Tensions are running high in CanWest newsrooms from Montreal to Vancouver in the wake of recent layoffs at the company’s television stations and fears that more cuts are ahead amid an apparent push to centralize editorial operations.

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“There’s a time and a place for the media,” explained a plainclothes RCMP officer as he and his colleagues unceremoniously ushered journalists out of Charlottetown’s Delta Hotel. Evidently that time was not yesterday and that place was not the Conservatives’ annual summer caucus meeting. Read the rest of this entry »

In the face of rampant media consolidation, Canadians are finally beginning to get organized and fight back under the banner of the recently formed Canadians for Democratic Media. This grassroots network recently organized a major initiative to lobby the CRTC against further media consolidation, and surely has more campaigns in the works to keep the pressure on.

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Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

1. Is CBC’s new populism perverted?
Why youth fans like me are tuning out
By Elaine Corden
The Tyee
June 21, 2007

Ideally, user participation makes an outlet like the CBC more democratic. But as we all know, the ideals of a democracy can be easily subverted, and an organized and vocal minority can quickly become the most powerful voice in a debate.

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/06/21/CBC/

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[In light of our latest issue's partial focus on media in war zones, this article serves as an important reminder of the many ways that reporters can be silenced. -D.O.M.]

By Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review
June 7, 2007

The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her clothes and baying for sex. They ripped the buttons off her shirt and set to work on her trousers.

“My first thought was my cameras,” recalls the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be raped.’ ” With her faced pressed into the soil, she couldn’t shout for help, and no one would have heard her anyway above the mob’s taunts. Suddenly a Good Samaritan in the crowd pulled the photographer by the camera straps several yards to the feet of some policemen who had been watching the scene without intervening. They sneered at her exposed chest but escorted her to safety.

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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been getting a lot of flak in the North American press for refusing to renew the license of a major private broadcaster, but there’s much more to the story than meets the eye.

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