Had Peter Kent not made these comments on an editorial aired by CanWest’s Global, the obligatory grain o’salt might not be needed… Even (Lord) Conrad Black, ex-owner of CanWest’s papers, seems to disagree with the Asper’s heavy-handed editorial policy:

“Media proprietors should have opinions,” Lord Black [told The Wall Street Journal], “and they have a perfect right to engage editors and contributors whom they believe will substantially agree with them, provided they maintain the balance between reporting and comment and allow reasonable access for differing opinions.” [My emphasis.]

(Perhaps it’s a result of living in Canada, with a political party called the Bloc Quebecois, but I always mistype the blockquote element as blocquote.)

Meanwhile Russell Mills is launching a libel suit against CanWest and Guerilla Media has a clever parody of the Vancouver Sun site.

Some good news about press freedom for a change: the RCMP lifted its ban on one of the journalists who wanted official access to cover the G8. Dan Rubenstein, the news editor of Edmonton’s Vue, however, is still unable to find out why he was considered a security risk.

As the summit begins, six other journalists remain banned.

Nevertheless, it might not make a difference, as The Globe and Mail’s Paul Knox writes in his online-only look at the G8 summit.

For the CSS geeks in the audience: Brett Merkley has made a clever check-list for “visited links” (only works in IE 5+ for Windows).

Worth watching: PAID: the economics of content is a new blog covering the struggle to make profits with online content.

I realize these entries are starting to run quite long, so I will make an effort to trim them a bit…unless there are cries of protest.