News

t is difficult to imagine Iraq ever having had independent media. Under the state-controlled Iraqi News Agency, set up in 1959, journalists had to toe the government line or face dire consequences. Now insurgent activity and US air strikes make moving around the country - or even asking the wrong questions - a very hazardous activity indeed. But there was a time when newspapers thrived in Iraq and...

Eleven Pakistani media personnel were killed and seventeen others injured in the October 8 quake. Two hundred and forty-two persons working for the media suffered personal or property losses �69 family members of media personnel were killed and 15 others injured. These findings have been revealed in a just-published preliminary report based on the first phase of an assessment mission of the...

For all the really bad news about US newspaper circulation figures – down 1.2 million in the past six months – there was one piece of good news: the numbers show undeniably that newspaper web sites are the most frequently visited for news and information. So now the trick is to convince advertisers that when looking at newspaper circulation numbers they should also be including the newspaper’s web...

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - The Internet has given rise to profitable companies such as Yahoo Inc., Google Inc., eBay Inc. and others, but the industry is still in the early days and will be further fueled as even faster Internet access proliferates through the United States and other countries, executives said on Wednesday. "We are seeing the beginning of things," said Reed Hastings, chief...

Member countries of the Non- Aligned Movement (NAM) should stand up strongly against the bias given by Western media, Cuban Ambassador to Malaysia Pedro Monzon Barata said in KUALA LUMPUR. Cuba and the Cuban people have always been portrayed by the Western press in a negative light while foreign visitors, when setting foot on this land, will find a different picture and expose those lies, Monzon...

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 19 (Bernama) -- Malaysia's effort to set up the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) News Network (NNN) is close to reality after receiving unanimous support from senior officials preparing for the Sixth Conference of the Ministers of Information of Non-Aligned Countries (COMINAC VI) here. Information Ministry Secretary-General Datuk Siti Balkish Mohamed Shariff said there were no...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has warned governments that plans for an information society based on democratic values would fail if they did not put media and free expression rights at the heart of policy-making. NO ENTRY: Robert Menard, head of the French press freedom organisation Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF), is interviewed by media upon his return at Roissy airport...

The revelation that acclaimed journalist Bob Woodward sat on information in the CIA leak case for two years is difficult to defend even by "mainstream" journalists who have admired his work for more than three decades. Woodward testified to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on Monday that a senior Bush administration official told him in mid-June 2003 about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA. She...

More than 60 former journalists of the Knight Ridder group have volunteered to nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board to reassert John Knight’s creed. In a widely-circulated "Open Letter from Knight Ridder Alumni", they said they would not remain silent anymore, and would support and counsel only corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the resources to do excellent...

Communication Rights (CR) as a broad over-arching concept featured variously, at times controversially, at the Tunis World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Ironically, it is yet to find a mention in the Summit declaration. Communication rights is an all-encompassing notion. Activists gathered in this north African city have cited it to campaign on a diverse range of issues – from gender...