Canwest SLAPPing Mordecai Briemberg

Unionist: "That makes you ignorant as well as racist. It's hard to find such a blatant combination outside a university."

That should be in the babble hall of fame.

Here's a link for someone like me who's new to the story. [url=http://www.straight.com/article-144790/emfrankem-challenges-canwest]Link...

Thanks for the Straight article link, FP.
It leads to another linked article which puts CanWest's delicate sensitivity to "copyright infringement" in context:[url=http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=1&STORY_ID=4852&PUB_TE... copies xtra.ca article-full story[/url]

"MEDIA / Ironic, given CanWest's recent copyright disputes
Brent Creelman / Xtra.ca / Tuesday, June 03, 2008

"CanWest has made a reputation for crying foul over copyright infringement. So an observer could be forgiven for being confused to learn that Canada's largest media conglomerate has re-printed an xtra.ca story without permission.

GlobalTV.com has lifted content from xtra.ca word-for-word and without compensation or credit to the freelancer who wrote it.
...

"It's this mentality of 'I'm big enough to do anything I want and you're small enough to be pushed around,'" he says.

The BC Civil Liberties Association is calling on CanWest to drop the lawsuit against Briemberg and the printing press.

"Whether successful or not, the case works against the principles of press freedom that support CanWest's media operations across Canada," says BCCLA spokesperson Tom Sandborn. "Too often, the mere threat of court action is enough to stifle public debate or satirical expression.""

Oh No.
What will happen to competition and choice with only one national paper left to endorse Harper?

What does this mean:

quote:

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“Conventional television remains under secular pressure in our view as do major market daily newspapers.

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Thank you contrarianna, makes much more sense now.

It's wonderful that Canwest has dropped their lawsuit against Mordecai Briemberg. I only wish I'd hear about this when it happened. That's what I get for not checking this thread when it showed back up on the TAT on November 9th.

Canwest can do whatever it wants because it is backed 100% by our current federal government.

Stephen Harper risks his career if he gives away the farm to Canwest

 http://www.straight.com/article-207275/stephen-harper-risks-his-career-if-he-gives-away-farm-canwest?#

Quote:

Nobody should be surprised that the Harper government will pull whatever levers it can to ensure the Asper family retains control over Canwest.

It's an important ally of Prime Minister Stephen Harper because it owns Global TV, the Vancouver Sun, the Province, the National Post, the Vancouver Courier, the North Shore News, the Delta Optimist, the Now papers, the Richmond News, and the Royal City Record as well as daily papers in several other Canadian markets.

The Aspers and Harper have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Harper ensured that the family patriarch Izzy Asper’s dream of a human-rights museum would come to fruition in Winnipeg, courtesy of massive sums of public funding.

And the Aspers helped ensure that Harper would remain prime minister when Canwest newspapers provided supportive editorials before the 2008 election and then hammered the idea of a Liberal-NDP coalition government supported by the Bloc Quebecois.

Don’t be surprised if Harper returns the favour by providing generous tax breaks to the private broadcasters, including Canwest.

It might not be enough to ensure the Aspers remain in control. After all, the corporation is struggling with a $3.7-billion debt.

But not to worry. If things are on the verge of falling apart, Harper can make regulatory changes to allow a foreign media giant to come to the rescue by purchasing a big share of Canwest.

Here’s my conspiracy theory for James Moore to chew on: the prime minister is trying to figure out how to save the Aspers’ asses without angering the boys in charge of CTVglobemedia, Quebecor, and Rogers Communications.

The only way to do that is to open the floodgates to all the broadcasters with massive tax breaks and regulatory changes, while at the same time refusing to offer one iota of help to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

It might buy Canwest some time. But it’s not going to guarantee the Conservatives will get reelected.

In the Internet age, people are no longer so reliant on broadcasters. Word will filter out that Harper has put the media giants at the front of the soup line.

As the bailouts and sweetheart deals in the United States have revealed, this sharply elevates the risk that average citizens will exact their revenge at the ballot box.

I'm guessing that by this time next year, our prime minister's surname is probably going to be Ignatieff and not Harper--in part because Harper will have misread how the public would react to a bunch of legislative changes designed to benefit private broadcasters.

What the hell? Did we just turn into a banana republic? This kind of blatant attempt at manipulating the media is what a dictatorship does, not a democracy.