Israel-Hamas war is deadliest conflict on record for reporters, says watchdog

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has produced the deadliest month for journalists since statistics began more than three decades ago, and created a news blackout in the embattled territory, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said.

The reporters’ watchdog has recorded the deaths of 48 reporters since Hamas embarked on a murderous killing spree in Israel on 7 October, triggering a concerted Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in response.

‘Government by photo op’: How Stephen Harper froze out Ottawa’s press corps

Touring the Vimy Ridge battlefield in France one day, Stephen Harper went down into one of the First World War trenches that have been preserved to give visitors a sense of what it was like there in 1917. Coming out later, the prime minister glanced at two TV photographers with their cameras pointing at him and quipped, “In those days, the enemy had guns.”

Sometimes Harper’s disdain for the Ottawa-based media — which he saw as part of the eastern establishment that had at one time helped solidify a Liberal stranglehold on Canadian politics — seemed half-serious, somewhat in the vein of the partisan posturing on display daily in the House of Commons. But for the most part, it was clear Harper saw the national reporting corps as self-important upstarts who amounted to little more than an obstacle to the Conservatives’ all-encompassing effort to shape and frame public attitudes toward their government.

Bourrie accuses Press Gallery of taking ‘easy out,’ allows Chinese news agency to keep Hill membership; Xinhua accuses Bourrie of ‘Cold War’ ideology

The Parliamentary Press Gallery executive has chosen “an easy out” by dropping an investigation into whether Chinese news agency Xinhua on the Hill is improperly using its gallery membership, says a veteran Hill freelance journalist who brought the issue to the gallery’s attention.

“They’ve chosen what they thought was an easy out and I think it’s going to come back to haunt them,” said journalist and press gallery member Mark Bourrie, who had a contract with Xinhua, but quit because he said he was concerned the agency was taking advantage of his Parliamentary press pass to gain access to events and spy on Chinese dissidents in Canada. He made his experience public in an article in a September edition of Ottawa Magazine.