2005-2014

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security. The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the...

KABUL, 26 December (IRIN) - Regional warlords, coupled with low government presence, continue to threaten freedom of expression in Afghanistan, the country's leading media association warned on Monday in the capital, Kabul. "Journalists are still not considered entirely free. They face pressure and intimidation and violence from warlords in regions still not under the full control of the central...

Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country -- something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that output in your local paper or scanning the links on your favorite blog. From that mass, the work of the country's Big Five dailies is usually more than enough to keep us occupied in our pursuit of lively, helpful and quick media criticism. At...

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- A Turkish prosecutor has opened a new case against one of the country's leading Turkish-Armenians for comments he made about an earlier prosecution. Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was convicted in October of "insulting Turkishness" and received a six-month suspended sentence. The case became one of several prominent prosecutions over speech...

Four executives have resigned from two Taiwanese television stations to show support for a government plan to relinquish its control of the media, as the government failed to meet its Monday deadline for the reforms. The government had planned to sell its 47 percent of shares in Taiwan Television and 75 percent in Chinese Television by Monday, as part of President Chen Shui-bian's 2000 election...

It is a sad day. Indian media from Mumbai and the Southern India made jokes in their editorials on Saurav, West Bengal (Indian State) residents and the Indian communists. They call Saurav’s attitude "Dadagiri" – popularly known as a self-proclaimed leader. They allowed their borrowed Australian coach to show middle finger at all Kolkata residents because they support Saurav. They made jokes of the...

THE possibility of a dangerous conflict between Islamabad and the small provinces over the Kalabagh dam is very real. The swords are out. General Pervez Musharraf’s lobbying efforts in Sindh are met by counter moves by a united opposition. They are holding rallies protesting against the proposed dam and the Musharraf government. Protests in NWFP have also been organised. Many Sindhi and the...

As with lots of pressing issues people grapple with, complaints about the media invite a partisan clash: liberal vs. conservative; Democrat vs. Republican. Or some other "us" against a readily targeted "them." But maybe there’s a more useful, even unifying mind-set: to see the media delivery system for news, entertainment and other programming as being skewed in a cross-the-board, nondoctrinaire...

NY1 News, the local news channel for the cable customers of Time Warner in New York, boasts on its Web site that its all-digital newsroom is "one of the most advanced newsgathering operations in the world." But last week the site was not much of a showcase for the channel's technological prowess. Visitors to NY1.com seeking news about the city's transit strike found a stark black-and-white page...

After 4.6 billion years of planetary history, we may become the first species to monitor our own extinction. In impressive detail, humankind is amassing evidence of devastating changes in the atmosphere, oceans, ice cover, land and biodiversity. And yet mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not really...