2005-2014

The fall of Howell Raines was riveting to cover but hard to watch. And with a little distance, some aspects of the story become clearer. Among them is the realization that Jayson Blair was just a supporting player. Exactly five weeks passed between the resignations of Blair and Raines, but the discovery of the reporter's deceptions wasn't the first act in the drama. In retrospect, it was the...

Linda Greenhouse got it right, I thought. In an interview in May about the Jayson Blair disaster that was quoted in The Wall Street Journal on June 6, the day after Howell Raines resigned as executive editor of The New York Times, she observed: "There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top...

Journalism – unlike literature, theater, art, music, film, or situation comedy – has never had much of a canon, a reasonably well-accepted collection of great works. This is lamentable. It leaves us, as we read the latest dispatch from Washington or a war zone, without models that might help us understand what such a dispatch might be. It allows us to mistake an interesting feature in the Times...

Jayson Blair may have used his color as a shield against the radar at The New York Times. But blaming diversity when personnel problems go terribly awry, as they did in this instance, is like blaming expensive and delicate machinery for malfunctioning when the workers don't have operating manuals. The drive for diversity is a business imperative. According to the U.S. government's Minority...

On 20 March 2003, RSF called on police and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to step up their investigation of a bomb attack near the premises of the Nepalese-language newspaper "Sunchari Samachar", in Siliguri (in West Bengal state's Darjeeling district). RSF said it feared local journalists would be tempted to censor themselves when reporting on sensitive subjects since no clues...

The first thing that greets you when you step into the office of TV Live India (on the sixth floor of the Kanchanjunga building in New Delhi's Cannaught Place) is a steady stream of people flowing in and out of the office. The place is brimming with life. We found managing director Nalini Singh - who still evokes images of her firebrand style of journalism - seated next to her table, strewn with...

Chris Hedges was sprinting down a road in the Gaza Strip, just ahead of some young Palestinians carrying Molotov cocktails whom he had been interviewing, dodging bullets fired by Israeli soldiers, when he concluded that he could no longer be a war correspondent. It was at this moment, in the fall of 2000, after twenty years of being shot at, shelled, bombed, ambushed, and taken prisoner, that...

Police in Tamil Nadu state (south-eastern India) have been attempting, by every possible means, to arrest R. R. Gopal, editor of the Tamil-language twice-weekly magazine "Nakkheeran", because of his alleged ties with the wanted bandit Veerappan. RSF has asked Tamil Nadu state police and government officials to stop harassing "Nakkheeran"'s editorial staff. The organisation believes that the...

The English-language private daily "Kashmir Observer", published in Srinagar, north-western India, has been experiencing serious financial difficulties ever since the Jammu and Kashmir state government decided to stop purchasing advertising space in the publication's pages. RSF is concerned about the consequences of the new provincial government's discriminatory policies, which could have grave...

In a 5 February 2003 letter to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, CPJ condemned the murder of journalist Parvaz Mohammed Sultan, editor of an independent wire service based in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir State. On the evening of 31 January, Sultan, editor of the News and Feature Alliance (NAFA), was shot dead by an unidentified gunman. Two men entered Sultan's office...