Fourteen years ago, I stood up to Canada's top editors and media lawyers and single-handedly saved the newspaper industry's Statement of Principles.
What's ironic about that is today those same editors and lawyers are rejoicing that the Supreme Court of Canada has reformed the country's libel laws and given them an added defence -- of "responsible communication on matters of public interest. ...
Spare a tender thought for my old paper, the Toronto Star, which was once able to send Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Allen to cover wars, Nathan Cohen to cover the arts, Peter C. Newman to cover politics, Milt Dunnell to cover sports, and Gordon Sinclair, Pierre Berton and Duncan Macpherson to cover life.
Like all newspapers, the Star is struggling with declining advertising and readership and ...
Richard Moon is a wise and independent man.
The professor of constitutional freedoms at the University of
Windsor is a prominent critic of Section 13 of the Canadian Human
Rights Act, which prohibits repeated communication, by phone or
internet, of any messages that are likely to expose identifiable
groups to hatred or contempt.
This has made him an unlikely hero to the right-wing blogosph ...
Leonard Asper, who is now being protected from his creditors, once complained to my boss that I was hurting his business.
Answering a fund-raising letter sent on behalf of Ryerson's School of Journalism, Leonard wrote back with a question: "Why should I give money to a school that allows one of its professors, John Miller, to criticize my company?"
My dean showed me the letter, along with a ...
The media demonization of Darcy Allan Sheppard knows no bounds.
If it has a low point, it was in two columns -- one by George Jonas in the National Post (Sept. 9), the other by Jim Coyle in the Star (Sept. 11). Both implied the bicycle courier was the author of his own death, absolving the man whose car ran him down, former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant.
Here's what Jonas wrote in ...
One of the most stunningly hypocritical comments of recent memory was made by blogger Catherine McMillan in today's Globe and Mail. Who does she think she is kidding?
The topic was anonymous blogging. She said: "I figured if my views were worth sharing, it's worth attaching my identity to them. It's also a way to self-police. If you know your writing can be attached to you, you make more tha ...
You know you've taught too long when a former student asks you to comment on a story she's working on about another former student who was fired for printing a story written by a third former student.
That happened to me in the wake of the so-called "Wafergate scandal," which involved the bogus story about Prime Minister Stephen Harper pocketing a communion wafer at the Roman Catholic funera ...
Allowing private broadcasters a free hand to police themselves is a bad idea in the best of times.
In today's era of media concentration -- in Toronto alone, three daily newspapers have owners that also operate television stations -- it's a recipe for the shrinkage and homogenization of news.
That's why journalists should strongly challenge an application by CanWest Global to get the CRTC t ...
What were the editors of the Toronto Star thinking when they ran a restaurant review that potentially alienated 250,000 readers?
That's how many people in the GTA identify themselves as Italian heritage. The review, by Corey Mintz (Wining and dining like a mayor, Dec. 16), went out of its way to stereotype Basilico Ristorante, an Italian eatery in Vaughan, as a threatening and misogynistic d ...
For the last month, I have been trying to get Mark Steyn to verify a quotation he uses to characterize the threat that he feels Muslims pose to western civilization.
Now he has finally done that. What can I say? Congratulations. It's a start. It's progress.
At issue was the veracity of the quotation he picked up from Oriana Fallaci and used in a review he wrote in Maclean's magazine of her ...