Saudi cleric to sue the Guardian

For those who care to interpret the murky motivations of mosque and state in Saudia Arabia, it may be of note that a prominent cleric is going to sue the Guardian newspaper. Sheikh Saad Bin Naser al-Shethri, who was fired by King Abdullah from the Gulf country’s high council of scholars last year, said the article written by the Guardian’s reporter Jason Burke on Friday is incorrect on the grounds that he did not refer during the interview to the Monarch’s reform programmes.

TV sage says kill simultaneous substitution

Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa has weighed in with recommendations to reform broadcasting. Notably he says the policy of simultaneous substitution should be abolished. "Injecting competition into this environment would include establishing a pick-and-pay option for consumers that would allow them to pay only for those channels they actually want and removing the simultaneous substitution policy that grants Canadian broadcasters the lucrative ability to substitute their feed (commercials included) over the same U.S. feed. Dropping simultaneous substitution, which has turned some Canadian private broadcasters into little more than U.S. affiliates, would force the broadcasters to compete with their own original content and help to ensure that Canadian content is made to be watched, not just made to comply with regulatory requirements." Toronto Star

'Page One' dramatizes NYT struggles

90-minute television documentary covers the well known assaults on the old ways of doing things.

Newsweek photo-shops Diana with Kate

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They say desperate times require desperate measures. Newsweek was worth so little recently that someone was able to buy it for $1 (U.S. at that). The editor Tina Brown has to be given credit for guts. As Kate and William fly into Canada, Kate is shown on the cover of the magazine with her dead mother-in-law. Here is an excerpt from a TV interview in which Brown says essentially that any publicity is good publicity.

Police chief furious at publication of dying cop's SOS call; wants apology

Publishing the words of a dying police officer as he lay trapped under an overturned minivan was an appalling breach of ethics and trust and could jeopardize the investigation into the death, the officer's chief said Thursday.

In a letter of complaint, York Regional Police Chief Eric Jolliffe called on media outlets to apologize to Const. Garrett Styles' family and remove the radio transmissions from their websites.

"The transmissions depict Const. Styles in obvious pain and distress," Jolliffe writes in his letter to the Ontario Press Council and Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.

"I am, quite frankly, appalled that the media would post these audio recordings in such a callous fashion."

Just before dawn on Tuesday, police say Styles was dragged 300 metres before being pinned under a minivan he had stopped.

Several media outlets, including The Canadian Press, published or broadcast parts of Styles' call over his police radio.

In the transmission, the married father of two young children pleads for someone to get the minivan off him, while the dispatcher urges him to keep talking and tells him help is on the way.

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