2005-2014

I was all ears when a man named Tony Conrad sat down next to me at a recent dinner party and introduced himself as the founder of a new blog search engine called Sphere. Oh, how I long for such a thing. With nearly 50 million blogs online, slogging through their gazillion entries makes me feel like one of the minions at the National Security Agency assigned to monitor billions of phone calls...

New York, July 26, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the murder of Yevgeny Gerasimenko, a correspondent for the independent weekly Saratovsky Rasklad, who was found dead this morning in his apartment in Saratov in southeastern Russia, according to local press reports. Saratov Department of Interior Spokesman Denis Zheltov said forensic evidence indicated that Gerasimenko had...

A female TV anchor's participation in this year's Miss Universe competition has triggered a debate over the role of anchors. Kim Joo-hee, a SBS anchor and Miss Korea 2005, took part in the pageant that opened in Los Angeles last week. Although she failed to make it to the final 20, her participation attracted great attention in Korea with photos of her in a bikini displayed on the Internet...

PRAGUE, July 26, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Haci Mammadov, former head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry, confessed on July 25 to having murdered opposition journalist Elmar Huseynov last year at the behest of then Economic Development Minister Farhad Aliyev. Huseynov, editor of the journal "Monitor" that systematically investigated alleged corruption, was gunned...

The 300 feet of magazine shelves at Liberty Books & News offers more than a few odd titles. The bimonthly Fire Apparatus Journal is dedicated to all things fire-related. Cook’s Illustrated, a print spinoff of the PBS series America’s Test Kitchen, focuses on cooking techniques. And the do-it-yourself Make targets the techie set. "We cannot seem to keep enough copies in stock," said John Gaylord...

The wall-to-wall coverage of the dramatic rescue of five-year-old Prince from a 60-ft deep pit in Haryana’s Kurukshetra town has taken television coverage to a new and disturbing low. Sure, it was a poignant story that merited coverage with the boy falling into a shaft and lying trapped there for 50 hours with soldiers from an engineering regiment working overnight, scooping out drums of mud and...

The controversial Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill 2006 will not be tabled in the ongoing Parliament session after all. The Union ministry of parliamentary affairs has listed ten Bills for introduction during the sesion; the Broadcast Bill is not among them. The government's decision to pull the Bill off the list comes in the wake of the representations made by media owners to the information...

NEW DELHI, Jul 24 (IPS) - Across South Asia, ruling establishments have introduced or are attempting to introduce laws that curb the working of independent media, while claiming to uphold democratic values. India's federal information and broadcasting ministry has put out the draft of a proposed ‘Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006' which ostensibly seeks to regulate ‘objectionable'...

You could be forgiven for thinking the television images in the experiment were from 2006. They were really from 1982: Israeli forces were clashing with Arab militants in Lebanon. The world was watching, charges were flying, and the air was thick with grievance, hurt and outrage. There was only one thing on which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences agreed. Both were certain that media coverage in...

Opponents of The McClatchy Co.'s sale of a group of Northern California newspapers asked a federal judge Monday for a temporary restraining order to block the deal. Sacramento-based McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) planned to sell the newspapers as part of its divestiture of assets from the acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. Four newspapers -- three of them in the Bay area -- would have wound up in the hands...