Manitoba Press Council

A Senate Report on Media, released in 2006, gave the opinion that Press Councils are an important element of Canada’s news and information system and that they can make a significant contribution to the quality of journalism in Canada.

They also stated that, since Press Councils are not affiliated with a particular newspaper and where council members include representatives of the public, a citizen is more likely to feel that a complaint was judged impartially.

A previous Senate Committee report on media in 1970 suggested that Canada needed Press Councils and that government should have nothing to do with their organization and powers. It also felt that regional Press Councils could meet Canada’s diverse needs.

Many media observers have pointed out that provincial Press Councils are designed to be more receptive to community standards and to be less cumbersome than a government regulatory body with its slow process and change.

It has also been noted that it is appropriate that an industry that sees itself as the eyes and ears of the public should be examined by a council that includes well-informed and independent members of the public.

Self-regulation works because the newspaper industry, for the most part, is committed to it. Although funded by newspaper members, councils are independent bodies with their own objectives and by-laws. In a way, self-regulation is a moral force and it depends on an industry with the
maturity to sign up to independent and reasonable scrutiny by its peers and members of the public.

It costs nothing to complain to a Press Council. You do not need a lawyer or anyone else to represent you. And it means there is no burden on the taxpayer.

–John Cochrane

UNESCO has launched a website for World Press Freedom Day, which will be celebrated May 3 in Medellin, Colombia. About 150 people are expected to take part in a two-day conference. The UNESCO/Guillermo Cano Press Freedom Prize will be awarded at the celebration. Newspaper editor Guillermo Cano Isaza was killed Dec. 17, 1986 in Bogota for attacks on drug trafficking mafias. His killers have not yet been brought to justice.

Media junkies should check out the Australian Press Council’s State of the News Print Media in Australia Report 2006. The study was assembled by Australian J-school academics and industry members of the press council.

Newspapers in Australia, like Canada, are changing rapidly.

The report noted five major trends in Australia:

1. Newspaper companies are rapidly transforming into multi-media companies.
2. There are major changes in the role and expectation of journalists
3. There is a blurring of fact and opinion
4. Proposed changes in media ownership laws will not establish or preserve diversity of ownership of Australian newspapers
5. The capacity of the press to inform the public is being eroded through administrative and legal curbs

Does any of this sound familiar?

On the issue of press credibility, the report notes “the majority of Australians do not trust newspaper journalists (63 per cent), talk-back radio hosts (57 per cent) and TV reporters (53 per cent) to tell the truth.” To read the report in detail, go to:

http://www.presscouncil.org.au/snpma/snpma_index.html

News executives across North America are divided over the decision by NBC News to air clips it received from 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, who shot 32 people to death before committing suicide on the Virginia Tech campus this week.

The airing of the video, strictly speaking, isn’t a print media issue with which the press council deals, but it is a pointed example of the sorts of ethical challenges that confront print and broadcast news executives daily. As the print media rapidly expand their online operations, they, too, have the ability to make these sorts of videos available to the public, and face the same ethical challenges as television stations.

CTV News and Global TV aired the video Wednesday night. CBC decided against airing it.

Robert Hurst, president of CTV News told the Canadian Press this week: “At CTV News, we believed that censorship is a last resort. It’s not our job to make a judgment whether it …might be bad or it might be good. Our job is to present Canadians with newsworthy materials.”

Tony Burman, editor in chief of CBC News, told Canadian Press the CBC decided not to air the video and avoid any coverage that could be interpreted as glorifying the act. “As I watched them last night…I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people,” Burman wrote in a letter posted on the network’s website. “I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts.”

Troy Reeb, vice-president of news operations at Global TV, which also posted the video online, told CP: “Looking at the reality…millions of young people are no doubt going to be seeing this monstrous message either online or on television.” The network decided “it’s important that because the message is going to be out there that we need to contextualize and hae coverage that leads viewers tohope and not horror,” Troy said.

CBC’s Burman told CP he saw the issue differently. “There’s a responsibility for us not only as professional journalists, but as parents and adults to create a society that protects our young people.”

Two forums are coming up soon on access to information. The first takes place Oct. 2, from noon to 1 p.m. in Portage Place at the Edmonton Court. Moderator Tom Brodbeck will be joined by panelists Irene Hamilton, the Manitoba Ombudsman, Steve Lambert from Canadian Press and others. On Oct. 4, John Reid, the former federal Information Commissioner, will be speaking at the University of Winnipeg on the topic: Twenty years later. The increasing importance of access to information. Reid’s talk is set to run from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Theatre B (Room 447) Manitoba Hall.
An exhaustive annual report released recently by the Canadian Newspaper Association found the federal government among the worst in Canada at responding to access requests, The Canadian Press reports.
In a CP story out of Ottawa last week, the head of the CNA says the Conservative government is thwarting Canadians’ right to know how federal business is being conducted.

See CNA news conference here.
But Anne Kothawala says roadblocks faced by reporters using the access-to-information system are not a partisan issue unique to the current government, which was elected on a platform of accountability and transparency.
The practice of “red-flagging” access requests that come from reporters continues under the Tories as it did under the Liberals, Kothawala contends. She said that results in information being sat upon by federal departments to the point that it is no longer newsworthy.
It’s an old government practice, first revealed in 2003. It was denounced by Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he was in opposition.

Journalists’ demands for access to information frequently are in collision with privacy rights, which various levels of bureaucracy cite as a reason for withholdling information.

Where do individual Canadians and media fit into this ongoing tug-of-war between privacy and access?

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada recently launched a blog, written by staffers, dealing with an assortment of privacy issues and problems. In its mission statement, the commissioner’s office says “this blog will make a special effort to identify and highlight information and advice that may help Canadians understand their rights under Canada’s privacy legislation. We will be making a special effort to identify and explain material that will help owners, managers and employees of small and medium-sized enterprises to understand their rights and responsibilities under Canada’s privacy legislation.”

The Manitoba Press Council is sponsoring a debate for journalism students at Red River College on Nov. 1 on the issue of legislative protection for journalists and their sources. Veteran Winnipeg lawyer and newspaper columnist Harold Buchwald and Chair of the Manitoba Press Council, John Cochrane, will present the pros and cons of the issue.

Here’s a bit of background on the current debate.

Generally, such legislative protection is known as a shield law. The proposal which prompted the current debate came from Serge Menard, a Quebec MP, who presented to the last Parliament a private member’s resolution, which, if it had passed, would have amended the Canada Evidence Act. His action has the strong support of the Quebec Press Council and journalists in Quebec .

Backers of the proposal argue that it balances two fundamental rights in Canada - the free movement of information and the right to a fair and eqitable trial.

The bill sought to establish the principle that journalists cannot be forced to disclose in court unpublished notes from a story unless they are “of a decisive importance” for the resolution of litigation, and only if there is no other means of providing the evidence. The decision on this would be made by a judge, not the police or Crown prosecutors.

The bill would also have provided protection for confidential sources. Disclosing these sources also would be up to a judge, who would first need to ascertain that such disclosure would be in the public interest by taking into account a variety of factors including the conclusion of litigation and the consequencdes to the source of his or her identity being disclosed.

Finally, the bill would have put additional constraints on police searches of the homes of media members.

Add your views on this matter to our blog.

Some chilling statistics have come out of a meeting of the Inter American Press Association in Miami this weekend.

At least 13 employees of media organizations were killed and two have disappeared in the past six months in the Western Hemisphere.

The Associated Press covered the IAPA meeting. What follows is based on its report.

The Inter American Press Association said media freedom is increasingly under attack in the Western Hemisphere, especially in countries such as Venezuela and Colombia.

And Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the hemisphere for journalists, said Gonzalo Marroquin, head of IAPA’s committee on press freedom, during the group’s 63rd General Assembly in Miami.

“The situation is not improving in general. We are seeing that in some countries it is becoming considerably worse,” Marroquin said.

The group saw some advances. In the U.S., the House and Senate Judiciary committees have approved laws that would shield reporters from being forced to reveal their sources in federal court. And Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled a local government could not withdraw advertising form newspapers simply because of its critical coverage. The Mexican senate decriminalized libel and defamation on a federal level.

Yet in Mexico, three journalists and three delivery workers were killed, the IAPA reported. Two other reporters disappeared. Journalists in Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Paraguay, Peru and the United States also were killed.

At the meeting, U.S. newspapers cited concern over a federal judge’s order that five journalists identify government sources who told them a scientists was a suspect in a series of 2001 anthrax attacks. And they reported the continued detention of Associated Press photographer Bilal Husein, who has been held in Iraq by the U.S . military since 2006 but has never been charged.

The longest and most passionate discussion focused on Venezuela, where, representatives said, the government of Hugo Chavez is slowly muzzling any media outlet critical of the government.

Venezuelan newspapers reported nearly 30 incidents of politically motivated attacks or lawsuits against journalists there in the pst six months.

Jose Ocanto, editor of the daily El Impulso, told the AP he is still battling legal and civil defamation cases stemming from a four-year-old story on public corruption. After a court initially ruled in his favour, Ocanto was chased through the courthouse by protesters and his car set on fire, he said. In December, a military official threatened to kill him if he did not reveal the name of a photographer who ook a picture of the official’s daughter carrying his weapon, Ocanto said.

In Cuba, at least 27 independent reporters are in jail.

And in the case of Colombia, Humberto Castello, the executive editor of The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, denounced President Alvaro Uribe for accusing the paper’s stringer of reporting lies. Journalist Gonzalo Guillen was already receiving death threats before Uribe’s statement. Following the president’s accusation, which the paper maintains is unfounded, Colombian authorities rescinded protection of Guillen, and he was forced to flee the country.

A story in today’s Los Angeles Times says five Iraqi journalists were killed in separate attacks on Sunday, marking one of the deadliest days for reporters covering the war-torn country in nearly a year.

The Times report said four reporters for Iraqi media organizations were reported shot to death in ambushes near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. Previously reported was the death of Salih Saif Aldin, a correspondent for the Washington Post, who apparently was shot to death Sunday while on assignment in the dangerous Sadiyah neighbourhoud of southwest Baghdad.

Western media organizations rely on Iraqi journalists for street reporting, going where foreign correspondents often cannot go because of the dangers to Westerners, the Times noted. Although they speak the language and blend in more easily, the Iraqi reporters often face equal threats: Iraqis discovered working for Western media organizations are treated as enemy collaborators.

“Two years ago, murder became the leading cause of journalists deaths in Iraq, overtaking cross fire,” Joel Campana, the Middle East Project Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told the Times. “That is a trend that has continued to this day, and the overwhelming number of victims are Iraqi journalists, for international news organizations and local Iraqi media.”

Before Sunday, the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists had tallied 118 reporter deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Of those, roughly 85 per cent were Iraqis. In recent months, several major news organizations, including ABC, Reuters, The New York Times and CBS have lost Iraqi correspondents.

The Associated Press reports that the manager of a radio station critical of both the Somali government and the Islamic extremists who have been trying to overthrow it was killed outside his home in Mogadishu on Friday.

Radio Shabelle’s Bashir Nor Gedi was the eighth journalist slain in the country this year.

The Associated Press said that more than a dozen staffers remained inside the station after the shooting, afraid to return to their homes.

The station was shut down for 15 days earlier this month after government soldiers threatened to pound it with missiles and machine-gun rounds.