The muddy river of Canadian journalists’ rights and responsibilities just got a whole lot murkier with the arrest of Toronto Star journalist Alex Consiglio on June 2, 2013.

Consiglio is charged with the horrible crime of actually doing his job, in this case, photographing an unfolding news event at a Toronto GO transit station where police and transit officials were dealing with a transit officer who’d been injured.

To understand how we’ve come to this sorry state in our efforts to do our jobs, it helps to unravel what goes through the brains of the spin-makers who now project the faces of just about every corporate and public institution in North America.

You are not hearing from the transit board chairman or anyone else who actually is charged with making decisions of the kind mentioned here. Instead, you are hearing the voice of a media relations manager, a publicist, a public relations officer – or whatever other title they dream up for the individual who is the human shield between their organization and the media.
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