CHINA	INDIA	RUSSIA	AFRICA	ASIA	MIDDLE EAST
SOUTH AMERICA	ARGENTINA	BOLIVIA	BRAZIL	CHILE	COLUMBIA
CUBA	ECUADOR	GUATEMALA	NICARAGUa	PERU	PARAGUAY
VENEZUELA	• for other countries see the following article below

Fair hearing for Rather's lawsuit?

Dan Rather may be the mainstream media-haters' favorite piñata, but that doesn't mean he gets any respect from the mainstream media.

Take the recent developments in the lawsuit the long-time CBS News anchor brought against his ex-employer for squeezing him out after a hotly disputed 2004 report on President Bush's military service. Rather claims his career was sacrificed to CBS' groveling to placate its Republican critics.

Earlier this month his attorneys turned over some tasty documents they got from CBS concerning the outside review panel the network created to evaluate the broadcast. MORE

Can the social media community defend itself?

The amalgamation of social media produces a living, breathing, interlinked media ecosystem. The question in my mind is, will this ecosystem defend itself when the open Internet is threatened?

Canada has a remarkably vibrant social media community. According to Michael Geist, we have the second highest per capita usage of Facebook in the world. Our cities are also stacked with revered social media innovators and well-followed media and technology commentators. Many of these organizations and personalities reach thousands or more with the stroke of a key. MORE

The Dangers of Internet Censorship

A key principle of our democracy is that unfettered information flows bring public enlightenment. The Internet is the greatest information conduit ever invented. We should not dim its light to protect ourselves from what it may reveal. MORE

Challenging a Democratic Government's Secrecy

‘Of particular concern to journalists is the lack of support some owners of Canadian news organizations have given as they've tried to contest these policies.’

By Russell Mills

In Canada, only a few major media companies exist, with a resulting high concentration of ownership. As a consequence, relationships that develop between media owners and government leaders sometimes impede the flow of information to the public, a situation that often requires moral courage to be shown by journalists, if they are going to do their jobs.

Since his election in January, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is the leader of the Conservative Party, has attempted to control news coverage of his government in extraordinary ways. This has led to conflict with the Parliamentary Press Gallery (PPG), the association of journalists who are responsible for covering the federal government. In spite of meetings between press gallery officers and the aides in the prime minister's office, restrictive policies remain in place.

Among these policies is one that requires ministers in Harper's government to seek approval from the prime minister's office before meeting with journalists and to have all interview topics and statements cleared with the prime minister's officials. This is a much more restrictive policy than followed by previous governments. A recent interview with the environment minister was cancelled at the last minute when it was learned that the journalist planned to ask her about the Kyoto Protocol on the limitation of greenhouse gases, an agreement that Canada has signed but done almost nothing to implement. Ministers are only free to speak in glowing language about the government's top five electoral priorities. Ironically, one of these is improving the accountability of government. Communicating about any other topic is verboten.

Nor are journalists informed when Cabinet meetings are held; this is an attempt to be certain that reporters won't try to question ministers when they leave the room. Secret Cabinet meetings had not been held for decades. The prime minister has also had his aides decide which journalists can ask him questions at press conferences, as they also try to control the subject of their questions.

The Conservative government's extreme crackdown is surprising since in its campaign the party promised openness and transparency. But it quickly assumed the label as the most secretive government in Canadians' memory. Perhaps the most controversial news ban imposed by this government has been coverage of the return of bodies of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Many Canadians view this as the prime minister merely following the lead of President Bush's administration, with its adherence to the policy of a news blackout of the return of bodies of soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The PPG strongly resists this control, but little they've been able to say or do has made much difference. Of particular concern to journalists is the lack of support some owners of Canadian news organizations have given as they've tried to contest these policies. An editorial in the National Post, which is the voice of CanWest Global Communications Corporation, Canada's largest media company, labeled journalists "whiners" for complaining about the ban on coverage of the bodies of soldiers coming home and other secretive policies. In an extraordinary attack on the PPG's battle against secrecy, CanWest's national newspaper said: "Get over it guys: the world does not revolve around your need to file 800 words for tomorrow's edition."

Staying on the good side of this government, regardless of its policies towards journalism and journalists, appears to be a major objective of Canada's largest media company, even when doing so is clearly not in the public interest. And this means that there are pressures placed on journalists working for the company. If reporters or editors try to work against government secrecy, as journalists should do in the public interest, they are not only viewed as acting against the prime minister but they must act without the support of their publication's ownership.

This circumstance might not require physical courage of the kind needed in a war zone or when reporting in countries ruled by brutal regimes, but there is no doubt that standing up to both a government and your boss at the same time requires more moral courage than should be required by journalists in a country such as Canada.

Text source: Nieman Reports Russell Mills, a 2003 Nieman Fellow, is executive dean of the faculty of arts, media and design at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He was fired as publisher of the Ottawa Citizen in 2002 following publication of criticism of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

How to Use Simply Advanced Google Search to locate news from other locations:

Most people don't realize that when you use Google Simply Advanced Search tool, you get totally different results depending on the geographic location where you start your search. By selecting a country in the Simply Advanced Google Search select box, you determine to which country the results are geotargeted.

Google allows you to search for words that only appear in the title of a page, or in the URL, or in the links towards a page. These are the real power search functions you should be using more often when you’re researching. Once you do, you’ll find that searching becomes easier and more effective.

When using this tool, choose which country you want to search from, choose a language for your results, and select an item in the Occurence list: as in this example:

To obtain news results, it is a two-step process.

First, open the Simply Advanced Google Search. Enter where you want the search to start, the language for the results and enter the search terms (eg. "China, climate change").

Second, on the page of search results, click one of the News search links to complete the search as in the example.

Networks Sleep While Democracy Burns

The "Big Three" television networks are keeping their convention coverage limited to prime time, highlighting the sad reality of a corporate media that prefer laugh-tracks and the bottom line to political discourse. more

Rather: Fear Shouldn't Be in a Journalist's DNA

At Time Warner's Politics 2008 Summit, former CBS anchor Dan Rather complained about the creeping timidity he sees in journalism -- and discussed how it's affecting the events we are calling presidential debates. more

Alisa Miller: Why we know less than ever about the world

Alisa Miller

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why—though we want to know more about the world than ever—the U.S. media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. These should alert Canadians about the danger of media concentration and the growth of secrecy in this country. MORE

Project Censored examines the coverage of news and information important to the maintenance of a healthy and functioning democracy. Modern Censorship is the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets.

On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth.

Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).

Concentration of media ownership: Canada

Wikipedia

Radio and television ownership in Canada is governed by the CRTC. The CRTC does not regulate ownership of newspapers or Internet media, although ownership in those media may be taken into consideration in decisions pertaining to a licensee's broadcasting operations.

Apart from the public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and community broadcasters, media in Canada are primarily owned by a small number of companies, including CTVglobemedia, Canwest Global, Rogers, Shaw, Astral, Newcap and Quebecor. Each of these companies holds a diverse mix of television, cable television, radio, newspaper, magazine and/or internet operations. Some smaller media companies also exist. In 2007, CTVglobemedia, Astral Media, Quebecor, Canwest Global and Rogers all expanded significantly, through the acquisitions of CHUM Limited, Standard Broadcasting, Osprey Media, Alliance Atlantis and Citytv, respectively.

Due to Canada's smaller population, some types of media consolidation have always been allowed. In small markets where the population could not adequately support multiple television stations competing for advertising revenue, the CRTC began permitting twinstick operations, in which the same company operated both CBC and CTV affiliates in the same market, in 1967. This model of television ownership was restricted to smaller markets until the mid-1990s, when the CRTC began to allow companies to own multiple television stations in large markets such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

As of 2007, almost all Canadian television stations are owned by national media conglomerates. Most, in fact, are directly owned and operated by their associated networks, although even private affiliate stations are mostly owned by non-network conglomerates rather than local companies. These acquisitions have been controversial; stations in smaller markets have frequently had their local news programming cut back or even eliminated. For instance, CTV's stations in Northern Ontario and in Atlantic Canada are served by a single regional newscast for each region, with only brief local news inserts for headlines of purely local interest. This, in turn, has contributed to the rise of independent local webmedia such as SooToday.com, The Tyee and rabble.ca.

Many, though not all, Canadian newspapers are also owned by the same media conglomerates which own the television networks. Companies which own both television and newspaper assets have strict controls on the extent to which they can merge the operations. The issue of newspaper ownership has been particularly controversial in Canada, especially in the mid-1990s when Conrad Black's Hollinger acquired the Southam chain. Black's 1999 sale of the Hollinger papers resulted in an increase in the diversity of newspaper ownership, with new ownership groups such as Osprey Media entering the business, but was even more controversial because the CRTC, waiving its former rules against broadcasting companies acquiring newspaper assets, permitted Canwest Global to purchase many of the Hollinger papers. The Toronto Star is a partial exception to this — it is owned by an independent company, but is itself a part owner of CTVglobemedia.

In radio, a company is normally restricted to owning no more than three stations in a single market, of which only two can be on the same broadcast band. (That is, a company may own two FM stations and an AM station, or two AMs and one FM, but may not own three FMs.) Under certain circumstances, local marketing agreements may be implemented, or the ownership rule may be waived entirely. For example, in Windsor, Ontario, CTVglobemedia owns all of the city's commercial broadcast outlets, due to the city's unique circumstances — being in the immediate environs of the Metro Detroit market in the United States, Windsor has historically been a difficult market for commercial broadcasters, so the CRTC waived its usual ownership restrictions to help protect the Windsor stations' financial viability.

When licensing a new broadcast outlet, the CRTC has a general (but not strict) tendency to favour new and local broadcasters. However, in the modern media context such broadcasters often struggle for financial viability, and are often subsequently acquired by larger companies. The CRTC rarely denies the acquisition applications. Canada also has strict laws around non-Canadian ownership of cultural industries; a media company in Canada may not be more than 20 per cent foreign-owned.

Under new rules announced in 2008, the CRTC limited companies to two types of media in a given market — a company may, for example, own television and radio assets in one city, or radio and newspaper, or television and newspaper, but may not own all three simultaneously. As well, with the ownership of cable specialty channels increasingly consolidating under the same few media conglomerates that own most of the country's conventional television stations, the CRTC also imposed a market share cap: no company can own broadcasting assets holding more than 45 per cent of the country's total television viewership ^[1].

¹ "CRTC puts new restrictions on media ownership", The Globe and Mail, January 15, 2008.

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