AIB publishes FIFA World Cup 2026 safety briefing for media organisations

11 May 2026

AIB publishes FIFA World Cup 2026 safety briefing for media organisations

The Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) has published a new safety briefing for member organisations ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026, which will take place across the USA, Mexico and Canada.

The briefing has been developed to support broadcasters, production companies and media organisations deploying staff to the tournament, with a particular focus on operational, legal and digital security risks that may affect media personnel working in and around the event.

While the World Cup is one of the world’s largest sporting occasions, the AIB notes that the operating environment for media organisations has become significantly more complex in recent years. The guidance highlights issues including enhanced border scrutiny in the USA, device inspection and digital security concerns, civil unrest and crowd safety considerations, as well as location-specific security risks in parts of Mexico.

Importantly, the briefing is not aimed solely at reporters and correspondents. The AIB stresses that production staff, engineering teams, technical crews, producers, digital teams and operational personnel may face the same risk profile as journalists, particularly when entering the USA or operating in fast-moving public situations.

The publication forms part of the AIB’s wider work supporting member organisations with strategic intelligence, operational awareness and risk mitigation across the international media sector.

The AIB is also working closely with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on safety issues surrounding the World Cup. Together, the organisations are developing a series of webinars and practical briefings for media organisations and their staff in the run-up to the tournament.

The first webinar is scheduled to take place on 25 May, with registration details to be circulated to AIB members shortly.

Simon Spanswick, chief executive of the AIB, said:

“Risk for media organisations is no longer confined to traditional hostile environments. Increasingly, operational risk begins at the border and extends through digital exposure, legal considerations and rapidly changing public situations.

We felt it was important to provide practical guidance that can support not only journalists, but everyone involved in the deployment of media operations around the World Cup.”

The FIFA World Cup 2026 safety briefing is available exclusively to AIB members.

Media organisations that are not currently members of the AIB and would like to discuss access to the briefing, AIB membership and the range of intelligence reports, strategic briefings, working groups and industry support provided by the Association are invited to contact the AIB Secretariat.

Further information about the AIB is available at: AIB official website

France 24 joins Rogers TV offer in Canada

31 October 2025

France 24 joins Rogers TV offer in Canada

Through to a new distribution agreement with ROGERS, a leading Canadian communications and entertainment company, France 24 continues its expansion in North America with a significant increase in its distribution in Canada.

France 24 in English is now available in the ‘Total TV’, ‘Popular’, ‘Ultimate’, and ‘International News’ packages of ROGERS, Canada’s leading pay-TV operator.

France 24 in French is also strengthening its presence in the Canadian market through ROGERS’ French-language offer, available on cable and OTT.

Thanks to this new agreement, France 24 is now accessible in 1.1 million Canadian pay-TV households, reaching 980,000 households for the English-language channel and 140,000 households for the French channel.

CBC/Radio-Canada to play a leading role in greening the Canadian media industry

16 June 2021

CBC/Radio-Canada to play a leading role in greening the Canadian media industry

As part of Canadian Environment Week, CBC/Radio-Canada has unveiled its new 2021–2026 environmental strategy, Greening Our Story. The five-year plan will see the public broadcaster take a leading role in advancing sustainable production practices in the country’s media industry. The objective is to create content in ways that actively eliminate waste and carbon emissions from production workflows.

CBC/Radio-Canada is committing to:

Measuring the carbon footprint of 100% of its in-house productions using albert, a tool that calculates the carbon emissions of productions;
Ensuring that 25% of its in-house productions are “albert-certified” as sustainable;
Measuring the carbon footprint of 50% of external productions using albert and collaborating with independent producers to reach the Corporation’s sustainability goals.

For more than 10 years, CBC/Radio-Canada has been reporting on its efforts to reduce its environmental impact, via its environmental performance reports. Now, we are intensifying our efforts and setting even more ambitious targets.

Catherine Tait, President and CEO, CBC/Radio-Canada, said: “Greening our Story is an opportunity to transform CBC/Radio-Canada into a world-class, sustainable public service media company. This new strategy builds on our environmental work to date and takes our aspirations to the next level. It accelerates our commitments and encompasses everything we do, from how we produce our content and operate our business, to how we make the choices to avoid waste, reduce our energy consumption and limit our carbon footprint.”

Photo: Leduc Field/Flickr/CreativeCommons licence

Defend Media Freedom – key conference in London

3 July 2019

The UK/Canada hosted Global Conference on Media Freedom will open in London on 10 July, with over 70 international government delegations, intergovernmental organisations, broadcasters and NGOs taking part. The focus of the Conference is spreading understanding of the need for media freedom, and gaining global consensus on how media freedom can be achieved, leading to greater prosperity, transparency and democracy.

The AIB will be at the event, along with a range of our Members from around the world. You can demonstrate your support for media freedom – tweet about it, share on social platforms, and talk about it to friends, family and colleagues.

And do contact us for more information on the work that the AIB is doing in this vitally important area.

Climate change cop-out or pragmatic approach?

15 May 2010

The Hartwell paper was published this week by a group of 14 academics from USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Finland and Japan. It proposes that the failure of the UN Copenhagen summit (COP15) to enforce meaningful targets and the lack of noticeable progress from the global agreements and targets on reducing carbon emissions actually provide an opportunity to address concerns on climate change in different ways.

The authors argue for the expansion of measures that are popular and pragmatic, offering energy security and also aiding human dignity by providing the poorest with safe, available energy. They point out that a majority of human activity that forces climate change is not due to carbon emissions but other causes, such as the loss of tropical forests, black carbon and the emission of other greenhouse gases. These causes can be addressed in ways that do not generate the controversy of capping carbon emissions.

The proposed approach suggests incentives for investing in alternative energy sources, which speaks to the desires of many nations to increase their energy security, and for helping underdeveloped countries to use more effective energy – for example by providing more efficient stoves for the poorest to dramatically reduce the 1.5 million annual premature deaths due to soot which is addition would cut the effect of “black carbon” on warming and on the melting of glaciers. The BBC’s “Costing the Earth” programme this week looks at this in some detail and examines the practicalities of such approaches.

The report switches the focus from CO2 emission targets and this has been criticised by other leading figures in the field such as Bill Hare, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, as reported in Nature’s Climate Feedback blog.

In discussing how to put their proposals into practice, the authors suggest funding via an hypothecated carbon tax, which they claim will be low. But it is not clear how low this would be and any tax would seem to counter their argument that their approach would be more popular than the current emission caps and carbon trading.

Whether practical or not, the paper opens up other strategies for changing the damaging by-products of humanity’s energy usage. The question is whether these are useful additions or alternatives to current approaches or whether they would mainly damage the efforts to focus on carbon reduction. The proposals are likely to prove additional distractions to such efforts as the American Power Act, as noted in Discovery’s article on this bill by US Senators Kerry and Liebermann