Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Mary Ann Turcke leaves Bell Media, former music exec replaces her

Bell Media is once again juggling its executives as president Mary Ann Turcke departs for a job with the National Football League and Randy Lennox, who spent three decades at Universal Music Canada, steps into her role, the Globe's Christine Dobby reports.
Ms. Turcke is relocating to Los Angeles to become president of digital media and the NFL Network and Bell said Monday that Mr. Lennox, the long-time music executive who joined the company as president of broadcasting and content in September, 2015, is taking over her role immediately.
The NFL and Bell Media, a division of Montreal-based telecommunications giant BCE Inc., have worked closely together in recent months to fight a regulatory ruling that barred Bell from substituting its own television signal and Canadian ads over the U.S. signal during this year’s Super Bowl.
Ms. Turcke, an engineer by background who has been with BCE for 12 years, assumed the top job at Bell Media in April, 2015, following Kevin Crull’s dismissal after he intervened in news coverage at the company’s television stations.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Ottawa Press Gallery opposes fingeprinting, criminal background checks

The Parliamentary Press Gallery is opposing a plan to fingerprint and conduct criminal background checks on journalists who cover Parliament Hill.
The gallery announced its formal opposition on Friday during its annual meeting.
Press gallery president Tonda MacCharles, who covers Ottawa for The Toronto Star, said the 150-year-old organization already has a process to accredit journalists “based on the need for access to the Commons and committee venues.”
“No one has shown us any historical case where a journalist has posed a risk to security, nor any threat assessment that shows this is a problem,” she told CTV News in a statement. “On principle, the gallery opposes the idea that parliamentary journalists should be vetted by the RCMP. We don't know why this is necessary, nor how in practice it would work, and we believe it has the potential to breach our freedom to report, a violation of our constitutional right to do so.”
More

Saturday, February 25, 2017

No Trump at White House Correspondents Dinner

President Donald Trump will not attend the White House correspondents’ dinner this year. the Washington Post reports.
Trump announced his decision on Twitter late Saturday afternoon. The dinner is scheduled for April 29.
He tweeted: I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Sunday, February 19, 2017

The story of mobilizing 100,000 National Guardsmen to deport immigrants not so fake

David A. Graham writing in the Atlantic, analyzes the origin of the story that Trump's spokesman denied (well, sort of). Excerpt:
"Friday morning, the Associated Press dropped a bombshell report: “Trump administration considers mobilizing as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants,” the new agency’s Twitter account announced.
"The hubbub that followed, as the White House denied the report, is a case study in the strange dance between the press and the Trump administration, and the complicated environment of information asymmetry, and misinformation, that characterizes the current moment in American politics. "And it shows how the Trump administration deflects genuine reporting by caricaturing it, sometimes clumsily, as 'fake news.'. .
". . . the memo was in fact real. The full text was available online within about 90 minutes of the original AP tweet. It is hardly a skimpy document—it’s full of bullet points, legal citations, and footnotes. And it also offered some clarity. . ."
The full story

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