Thank goodness Canada has no "Press Ombudsperson"

Unlike Sweden (via Celestial Junk):

Yrsa Stenius, the Swedish press Ombudsmann, wants to press charges against certain bloggers. She is worried about developments on the Internet, where anybody can just write anything they want. She says this has gone too far. She fears this trend could even spread to the mainstream media, unless something is done and a legal precedent is established to rein in unruly bloggers.

[...]

Yrsa Stenius is originally from Helsinki, Finland, from the country's Swedish-speaking minority. She has been associated with Aftonbladet since 1979, and was even their political editor-in-chief in the mid-80s, and was a columnist for them as late as 2007. In 2006, she severely criticized the publishing of the Muhammad cartoons by newspaper Jyllands-Posten in Denmark as hateful misuse of free speech. When it was announced in 2007 that she would become press Ombudsman, the conservative blogger Dick Erixon, one of Sweden's most famous political bloggers, wrote the post "A press Ombudsman against free speech," where he quoted her criticism of the Muhammad cartoons, which she made while working as a columnist for the newspaper Aftonbladet...

We just have our human rights commissions.

Mark C.

Damian adds: Mark, please don't give Barbara Hall any ideas...

In a wide-ranging interview this week about the upcoming changes to her commission's mandate, she stood firmly by her position that media have a responsibility to put their writings through a "human rights filter" before publication, and said the commission is keen to call out those who do not, jurisdiction be damned.

Posted by markc at April 21, 2008 12:26 PM