These are the stories we’re watching this week. Here is your Weekly Wire:
- Reporters for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, BBC, CNN, and Politico—aka the “opposition party”—were barred from a White House press briefing on Friday. The maneuver is just of the latest salvos in U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with reporters, which have included that bizarre 75-minute tangent-as-press conference and his spurning of the White House correspondents’ dinner. (The latter hasn’t happened since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan declined—he’d taken a bullet to the chest a few weeks before.) “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties.” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said in a statement. “Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”
- The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to scuttle transparency requirements that small and medium-sized Internet Service Providers disclose prices, speeds, and fees to consumers. Ajit Pai, the FCC’s commissioner and a former Verizon attorney, said last week in a Medium post that the move addresses a disparity in Internet access between well-connected cities and shut-out rural areas. Despite the limited scope of the rollback, critics aren’t convinced, and see it as the beginning of an attack on net neutrality, a long-kept standard preventing ISPs from privileging certain content, like, for example, “news” over actual news. The move might affect net neutrality in Canada, which the CRTC enforces, but recently held hearings on.
- Conservative Party leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary may have been dropped by Bell Media networks BNN and CTV when he announced his bid to take over the Tories, but the self-described Mr. Wonderful is still a paid pundit south of the border. O’Leary has made the business-focused CNBC his platform of choice for promoting his candidacy, sniping at Trudeau, and boosting his own business credentials. O’Leary was also featured on the American shopping channel QVC hawking his namesake wines.
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This is a joint byline for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. All content is produced by students in their final year of the graduate or undergraduate program at the Ryerson School of Journalism.