2005-2014

Rupert Murdoch is facing a government review of his UK media assets, after ministers decided to intervene in last year's acquisition by BSkyB, the satellite group he chairs, of a stake in ITV, the country's largest commercial broadcaster. Alastair Darling, the UK trade and industry secretary, called yesterday for a review of whether the £940m ($1.84bn, €1.4bn) investment, "raises public interest...

The proliferation of people posting their views on the internet has caused Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, to rethink opening up its FT.com website. Chief executive Dame Marjorie Scardino, announcing a strong 19% rise in annual profits to £502m, admitted that FT.com is likely to continue to rely on subscriptions, retaining its so-called "chargewall". "As debate online has become more...

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has rapped the security services on the knuckles for searching the offices of a political magazine to identify who leaked a confidential police report. In what media are hailing as a significant reaffirmation of press freedom in Germany, the court ruled that the search had breached the constitution which enshrines the right of journalists to protect their...

Reporters Without Borders has voiced outrage at the pressure applied by the Australian federal government so that three hearings in a coroner's enquiry into the death of Brian Peters and four others journalists in East Timor in 1975 are held in camera. "The secrecy now surrounding the hearings is the result of disquiet within the government about the increasingly serious allegations of lying by...

At least three people were killed and more than 100 people were injured Monday as a fire tore through a Dhaka office building housing private television stations NTV and RTV and Bangla language newspaper Amar Desh. The cause of the fire was unclear. Two members of a television crew cry as their office burns in Dhaka February 26,2007. At least three people died and dozens were injured on Monday in...

British broadcaster ITV News has been censured by watchdog Ofcom over a report about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The report, broadcast in March last year, had reported that the Prime Minister had said his belief in God played an important part in deciding to go to war, the Independent reported. ITV News host Michael Parkinson (back to camera) listens to Blair. Based...

CHICAGO: Paddock Publications Inc., publisher of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, on Monday became the 10th charter member of the national consortium between newspaper companies and Yahoo. The Daily Herald began uploading its local jobs to the HotJobs.com online platform. The Yahoo site has 1.1 million registered job seekers in Illinois, Paddock said. Yahoo reaches an audience of 4.9 million...

(IAPA/IFEX) - ASUNCION, Paraguay (February 23, 2007) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) stated today that freedom of the press will remain uncertain in Paraguay until the disappearance of a local journalist is solved and as long as impunity surrounds murder cases, disproportionate punishment is dispensed against journalists and news media in libel cases, and there is no law on free...

(CJES/IFEX) - Andrei Mikhailov, founder of "Khronograf Togliatti", the only independent publication in Togliatti, a city in the Samara region, has reported that serious pressure is being exerted on the newspaper. Mikhailov told CJES a defamation lawsuit was filed against the newspaper with the Togliatti Central District Court by Vladimir Avetisyan, managing director of the Russian holding company...

(RSF/IFEX) - Hussein Al Zubaydi, a journalist with the weekly "al-Ahali", was killed by gunmen in unclear circumstances in Baghdad on 19 February 2007, while the bullet-riddled body of Abderrazak Hashim Al-Khakani, a journalist with radio Jumhuriyat Al Iraq, was discovered in a Baghdad morgue on 20 February. He had been kidnapped a week earlier in the east Baghdad neighbourhood of al-Jihad...