2005-2014

The preparation of a draft Broadcast Services Regulation Bill, 2006, should occasion no surprise. It has been a long time coming. Broadcasting in India has been subject to executive guidelines rather than any comprehensive statutory regulations ever since cable and satellite television were permitted in the early 1990s. A Supreme Court judgment in 1995 formally decreed that the airwaves were...

New Delhi, July. 9 (PTI): Trial by media has come under the scrutiny of an official committee drafting the proposed broadcasting code and guidelines which recommends that broadcast service providers (BSPs) "should avoid" such activism since "a man is innocent till proven guilty by law". The guidelines, drafted by a sub-committee under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, feels that "news...

Reaction was fast and furious to last Sunday's column in which I praised The New York Times for publishing information about the Bush administration's secret monitoring of a vast database of international financial transactions. In the column, I was critical of the president and his supporters for "declaring war" on The Times and the media in general, and I stated that this was one war that Bush...

When The New York Times published a story about a secret government program to find terrorists by monitoring financial transactions, conservatives responded as if the paper had given Osama bin Laden the keys to a missile silo. The story, asserted President Bush, "does great harm to the United States of America." Vice President Dick Cheney said the Times and other newspapers "have made the job of...

When President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several members of Congress recently fired broadsides at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and, to a degree, The Wall Street Journal for publishing detailed accounts of a somewhat secret counterterrorism program, it was the mightiest political salvo at the press since Maryland's Spiro T. Agnew threatened the big three television networks...

Sometimes lies should be called what they are. "Since publishing a highly controversial story about a secret U.S. program that monitors financial transactions as a tool to fight terrorism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller... has admitted that the liberal press is not 'neutral' in this war on terror. "Indeed, the track record proves the New York Times and Bill Keller are not 'neutral'...

Mike, if you're still reading the paper, the United States hasn't found the weapons of mass destruction that were the reason the country went to war in Iraq. I would have called and told you the news personally, but you were so angry at The Bee, you hung up before giving me your last name and phone number. The last thing you said was that you were canceling your subscription. Mike was one of...

Since the early 1980s, the mutual fund industry has gained extreme popularity. Before then, investors who wanted to invest outside of traditional banking products usually turned to a full-service broker. But at that time, the brokerage industry was an expensive investment choice. Mutual funds numbered about 400; now there are more than 8,000 funds holding several trillion dollars. The amount of...

When Russian journalists describe Vladimir Putin as the country's chief newsmaker, they're not exaggerating. It's not just that he's the president and attracts the expected attention--he also rules a Kremlin bureaucracy able to decide what is news. Under Putin, Russia has experienced a dramatic rollback of media freedom, a sensitive issue as his fellow leaders of the Group of Eight major...

CAIRO, 9 July (IRIN) - The ongoing battle over local press freedom came to a head Sunday when some 300 opposition journalists and their supporters gathered in front the parliament building in Cairo to protest a new press law, expected to be ratified Sunday. In solidarity with the journalists, 28 opposition and independent newspapers refused to publish their Sunday editions, saying the new law...