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Pathway :: Home
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Written by dave mitchell
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Thursday, 21 September 2006 |
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Are people following this story? Scary stuff. I reprint this from Maisonneuve Magazine's MediaScout, an excellent daily summary of the day's top stories with critical commentary on how they are being covered by the nation's major media.
--Dave TORIES TAKING NAMES
by Ceri Au
September 21, 2006 Journalistic careers come in all shapes and sizes. There are the adrenaline-junkie war correspondents, constantly globe-trotting to the hot spot du jour. There are fashion reporters who skulk about the red carpet and meditate on the meaning of “worst dressed.” And then there are the reporters who do the somewhat unglamorous work of sifting through stacks of government documents, scouring department memos and briefing notes in search of news. These journalists take elected officials and their staffs to task by demanding evidentiary proof that the government is operating by the book. Through Access to Information request forms, the inner-workings of government are available for public consumption. Furthermore, under the Privacy Act, the details of all such queries are confidential. Yet this week, the name of a prominent journalist—the Canadian Press’s Jim Bronskill—entered the public domain in connection with an access to information request he filed. Beyond the portend of a political scandal that could ensnare members of Harper’s inner-sanctum, the Bronskill affair points to a more sinister trend in political communications—media control.
Bronskill, who covers intelligence issues regularly for CP, filed a request last March for information related to CIA planes landing in Canada. The request was flagged by bureaucrats and then allegedly fed to Harper’s staff during a nineteen-person conference call. Liberal MP Stephen Owen told the House during Question Period yesterday that Sandra Buckler, Harper’s director of communications, was among those provided with the information, an act Owen said was “not only improper, it is against the law.” According to The National, Treasury Board President John Baird is set to meet with Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart later this week to discuss the incident, although it has yet to be referred to as a full-blown investigation. Alas, this is not the first time government officials have taken flak for revealing the names of people who file access requests. As the Star and CTV News report, in 1999 the Defense Department was scolded by the information commissioner for passing along names of access requesters to the office of then minister Art Eggleton. Obtaining names of journalists who request information is a dangerous strategy for a democratic government. Journalists who are perceived as threats risk having their access to officials limited, and their capacity to ask tough questions diminished. MediaScout hopes that the media in Canada will not let another such breech of the Privacy Act fade from the headlines too quickly. MediaScout also hopes that the Canadian public will become cognizant that their right to ask questions of their government is more fragile than they think.|
Resource
Written by Guest on 2006-09-21 14:12:08
Alisdair Roberts wrote a great paper about how the federal government has an 'orange alert' system that alerts ministers to information requests, and allows them to see the contents of an Access to Information request before the person asking sees it. Makes those media scrums a little easier. If they still had scrums.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 21 September 2006 )
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