News

NMouakchott, Mauritania, 01/08 - Mauritania has set up a consultative National Commission for the Reform of the Electronic and Print Press made up of 60 members from public authorities, the private press, political parties and the civil society. Led by Imam Cheikh, the Prime Minister`s communications adviser, the new body aims at establishing a complete diagnosis of the media situation, and make...

PARIS: The competition stares dead straight into Ulysse Gosset's eyes every moment he sits at his cluttered desk at temporary headquarters near the glassy Seine. Before him flickers a television tuned to Atlanta-based CNN, which 25 years ago created a powerful genre with a 24-hour all-news network that now reaches more than two billion people. For other countries, such global power is as...

The mainstream media are under pressure, their future cloudy as people turn to a wider and more diverse variety of sources for their news. But from his perch on the third floor of CBS's San Francisco offices, news veteran Larry Kramer isn't worried. As the recently named president of CBS Digital Media, the network's Internet division, Kramer is quickly reshaping CBS' news and entertainment...

COPENHAGEN - When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one in which he is shown wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, it expected a strong reaction in this country of 5.4 million people. But the paper was unprepared for the global furor that ensued, including demonstrations in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, death...

BEIRUT, 8 January (IRIN) - The Lebanese Press Federation announced it would press murder charges against those involved in the killing of journalist and Member of Parliament Gebran Tueini, who died in a car-bomb attack on 12 December 2005 in the capital, Beirut. According to a statement, federation president Mohammad Baalbaki commissioned has lawyers to "file a lawsuit against everyone which the...

NEW YORK When word mistakenly spread early Wednesday that 12 trapped miners in West Virginia had been found safe, the frenzy of rumor, hope, and unconfirmed reports swept through parts of the tight-knit area of Sago, W.V., within minutes. Meanwhile, at the command center monitoring the rescue attempt--inside a trailer-sized unit just 100 yards from the church where miner families had been...

A total of eight Tribune readers called me to comment on the problem that challenged and vexed newspapers across the country this week: false reports of 12 survivors in the Sago Coal Mine explosion instead of the one man who actually survived the disaster. Of the readers who called, six were amazed that The Tribune had the correct number of survivors and two were curious about the process that put...

THE Houston Chronicle's headline read: "Bells ring out for 12 rescued miners." It was an appropriately triumphant tout that 12 of the 13 men who had been trapped for 41 hours in a West Virginia coal mine would soon be going home to their worried families. Unfortunately, the headline and The New York Times story we published Wednesday on Page One were wrong, as we and other news media outlets...

For a few hours this week, it seemed the new year had started with a wondrous story. " 'They're alive,' " a headline Wednesday in one edition of the Rocky Mountain News trumpeted of the trapped West Virginia coal miners, reflecting the moving pictures on the cable networks late Tuesday night. The nation's heart had been with the men and their families. We were uplifted - and then crushed. Forget...

A few readers continue to take us to task this week for the erroneous front page story and headline that ran in some editions of Wednesday's newspaper proclaiming a miraculous rescue of 12 coal miners trapped underground in West Virginia. Why didn't The Atlanta Journal-Constitution go to greater lengths to confirm reports from family members and politicians that the miners had been found alive...