If its Wild West economics shutter traditional newsrooms, that’s on publishers who hew to unsustainable business models. Under this rubric, laws such as this year’s Online News Act seem, at best, a waste of time and money that inevitably earned the ire of tech giants and led to Meta throttling access to independent Canadian news.įrom this perspective, the entire internet is now “the press,” whose freedom should be guaranteed, not constrained, by the state. Campaigners for an unfettered social information web-including some journalists themselves-see state funding of newsrooms as an offence against the principle of press freedom. As one judge noted, the Toronto Star lists social change as part of its core mission.Īt face value, the idea of legally privileging journalism is anachronistic in the digital age. ![]() Both times, the Federal Court of Canada overruled the commission, seeing no inherent contradiction between advocacy and the privileges of a free press. In February 2022, the Canada Revenue Agency denied the overtly-right-wing Rebel News site tax status as a qualified journalism organization after an expert panel found the site’s content to be “largely opinion-based and focused on the promotion of one particular perspective.” For similar reasons, the federal commission that runs party leaders’ election debates has twice denied press accreditation to Rebel News. Theoretically, anyone can disseminate information on matters of public interest, in some cases with legal “press” status, which allows them to keep the secrets of confidential sources, to gain access, in some cases, to reserved spaces, and to benefit from taxpayer-funded subsidies. “As an army’s safety rests in its sentinels,” Germaine de Staël Holstein wrote in her classic reflection on the French Revolution, “all rights depend on the freedom of the press.” Later years brought controversy over that freedom’s limits, but nowadays, digital disruption and the perils of disinformation have brought into focus a new question: Who exactly is “the press”? The right to promote unpopular opinions has been front and centre in fights against censorship for hundreds of years. Until agreeing to a settlement in April for $787.5 million (US), Fox argued that the contested statements were “mixed opinion” and said it was fighting the case as part of a mission “to fiercely protect the free press.” Fox’s lawyers claimed that Sean Hannity and other prime-time hosts should benefit from legal protections available to US journalists. ![]() ![]() Dominion Voting Systems had sued Fox News over false allegations in Fox broadcasts and social media that Dominion had helped to steal the 2020 US presidential election from Donald Trump. The same question lay near the core of a lawsuit in the United States that settled in April this year. ![]() Do We Really Need a Taylor Swift Reporter?īracken’s website describes her as interested in “the intersection of photography, journalism and public service” and representing Indigenous people’s empowerment and struggle for justice, which she seeks to “represent and foster.” So was she in the Tiny House that day as a journalist or as an advocate?.Last Publisher Left Standing: Why Books Are Facing a Bleak Future.All the Exciting Media Outlets Are Dying.In court filings this fall, Bracken and The Narwhal stated that she was at the blockade “to document and observe the newsworthy events as they evolved.” The police responded that her “actions went beyond her role as a journalist.” Bracken and The Narwhal, which had assigned her to cover the pipeline blockade, are now suing for wrongful arrest, arbitrary detention, and breach of the constitutionally protected freedom of the press. At issue: What was acclaimed photographer Amber Bracken doing in the Tiny House, a barricaded cabin on Wet’suwet’en territory, when police forced their way inside on Friday, November 19, 2021? They arrested Bracken, along with protesters and a documentary filmmaker, and held them all in custody for a weekend on charges of violating an injunction order that restricted access to a gas pipeline worksite.
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