2005-2014

Former MSNBC and CNN war correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites found himself on the other side of the headlines last fall, when he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting and killing an injured, unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. That wasn’t the first time Sites had been at the pounding heart of the action; earlier in the war Iraqi fedayeen soldiers ambushed his Tikrit-bound car and held...

The role of the US Internet firm Yahoo in helping Chinese security officials to finger a journalist sentenced to 10 years for e-mailing "state secrets" is filtering into mainland China. The revelation reinforces a conviction among many Chinese "netizens" that there is no place security forces can't find them. Yet if netizen reaction in China is resignation, the story of Yahoo's complicity in the...

Yahoo! Inc co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company legally had no choice but to provide Chinese authorities with information used to prosecute and jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. Yang said that the company had a very clear-cut set of privacy rules and that in every country that it operates when it provides information to governments it must be supported by legal rules and...

As U.S. technology companies pour investments into China, the one thing they’re not exporting is good old-fashioned American values of individual freedom. French media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo Inc. "a Chinese police informant" earlier this week after it gave information about a journalist's personal email account to the Beijing government, which has imprisoned him for...

This week's revelations involving a Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets indicates the weaknesses of human rights and corporate behavior in the virtual world. Media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders in Paris issued a scathing indictment of Yahoo! China for its IP address information sharing that contributed to the arrest and conviction of Shi Tao, a...

In the deluge of reporting surrounding Hurricane Katrina, I got stuck on a rather quirky piece – about bread, and how it has highlighted the stark contrasts between two nations struck by the same tragedy. "In New Orleans there was shooting and looting when the floods came last week. When a similar inundation struck India's financial capital Mumbai in month earlier, there was no violence, just free...

NEW DELHI–Even as the United States struggles to come to terms with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that has destroyed New Orleans, there is a sense of shock in India. Pictures of victims begging for food, reports of looting, rapes, racist attacks, an ineffective disaster management routine has revealed the innards of America that many believed never existed. After all, making it to America...

Americans, usually critical of the media, have given the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina a thumbs up, and major outlets are pledging to stay on the story to find out what went wrong with the response to the disaster. "We haven't had this many people committed to a story since I don't know when," says CBS News executive Marcy McGinnis, who estimates that the network has 200 staffers on the story...

One of the most noted trends in the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina has been the aggressive and critical tone some journalists have adopted towards the White House and Bush administration officials. A headline at the online magazine Slate read, "The Rebellion of the Talking Heads" (9/2/05). "Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media" is how USA Today put it (9/6/05)--implying, of course, that an...

For Campbell Brown, the anger peaked when she reached the New Orleans Convention Center. In the area for days covering the landfall and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for NBC News, Brown had seen plenty of devastation. But the sight of 20,000 people trucked to the facility amid promises of provisions and comfortable shelter, only to find nothing, made the reporter's blood boil. "Watching the power...