2005-2014

After the carnage of this past weekend, they would seem to fade almost into insignificance – and that's understandable, but they bear noting. The Israeli destruction of TV transmission towers in Lebanon and an attack on a media convoy in south Lebanon are emblematic of a grim fact: the media have become targets – and weapons – of war. The pen may be "mightier than the sword," but in recent years...

In a country widely referred to as the world’s largest democracy, the Indian government has succumbed to mounting Israeli pressure and ordered a nationwide ban on the broadcast of Arab television channels. The Indian government’s ban on Arab television stations is in complete contrast to the friendship that Arab countries imagine exists with their neighbor across the Arabian Sea. It seems the ban...

JERUSALEM - In a land of divided faiths and loyalties, people have been separated at times by walls, by checkpoints and now, in time of war, by sound bites. Every hour on the hour, Israeli Jews in this ancient city tune their radios to government-run broadcasts about the battle against Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim group, in Lebanon. At night they turn to three Hebrew-language television...

SAFED, Israel -- The air-raid alarm sounded just as I turned into Safed. An ancient city high in the hills of the Galilee region, Safed has been known since the Spanish Inquisition as a refuge of Jewish mystics, but more recently as a prime target of Hezbollah rockets. It has been hit repeatedly, and broad black circles where the rockets exploded and burned have scarred the hillsides. I drove into...

Indonesia is far from unique in being a country in which journalists are routinely influenced by their sources or the subjects of their stories. Everywhere in the world, people have a vested interest in seeing that stories are reported in a particular way, or even reported at all. Everywhere in the world, writers and editors are susceptible to persuasion, whether it is overt or subtle. A shopping...

When Nokia Corp. released its camera smartphone last fall, the marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones. The tactic paid off, as word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter. "So many...

French journalist was found dead on August 2 in the apartment he was renting in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, the Radio Liberty reported quoting the country’s Foreign Ministry statement. Spokesman Ilyas Omarov said the reporter, whom he identified as Gregoire Debourgues, was working for a media consultancy group and preparing a report on Kazakhstan for the U.S. “Foreign Affairs”...

MUMBAI, AUGUST 4: Media firms face proposed changes to broadcasting rules that could limit cross-holdings and crimp consolidation in the world's third-largest cable TV market. The bill, likely to be delayed as broadcasters lobby the government for changes, would set limits on scale and expansion and bring the $3.6 billion television industry under one regulator responsible for controlling content...

Google has agreed to pay the Associated Press for use of its news stories and pictures, according to a statement released by the two companies on Wednesday. The deal settles a dispute between Google and the AP and has implications for a lawsuit Google is facing from the Paris-based Agence France Presse news agency, which sued the search powerhouse last year for allegedly infringing its copyrights...

The government is considering expanding media law to regulate Internet companies publishing news stories on their Web sites, officials at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said. There has been a lengthy debate among Internet companies and print media over the boundaries of Web-based journalism, with the offline news outlets demanding their online rivals should be bound by the same legal...