News

Congressional leaders are all atwitter over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' new satellite television station, Telesur, which has begun broadcasting four hours a day, financed by its host country and also Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba. Telesur hopes to be accepted regionally, and promises news through Latino eyes, produced by professional journalists from the region. Telesur is likened to Al...

The general in charge of Louisiana's hurricane relief has admonished reporters not to confuse questions with answers, and urged them to give the public facts -- not exaggerations and rumors that several media organizations now say corrupted coverage of Hurricane Katrina. "Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters," Lt. Gen. Russel Honore first told them last week. "We are moving forward. And don't...

An Aljazeera cameraman, held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, has been promised release if he spies on his colleagues at the channel, Britain's The Guardian newspaper reports. The Guardian reported on Monday that the US military told Sami Muhyi al-Din al-Hajj that he would be released as long as he agreed to spy on journalists at Aljazeera. In documents seen by the Guardian newspaper, al-Hajj...

Internet advertising revenues continue to rise sharply as new media outlets profit at the expense of traditional rivals. Online advertising revenues in America increased by 26 per cent in the second quarter of 2005, compared with the same period last year, according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The pace of growth matched that for the first...

NEW YORK - Nearly all people spend a third of their day using two or more media at the one time, often without even realising that they are doing so, a new report has found. The Middletown Media Studies II report revealed that people spent an average of nine hours a day consuming media, including watching TV and radio, as well as spending time on their computers, reading books and using the...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Half of Americans say they trust the mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly, according to Gallup's annual Governance survey. Trust and confidence in the news media is up significantly since last year, but it is still slightly lower than what Gallup has found in recent years. The most common view of the political leanings of the news media is...

DOHA/MADRID: Al Jazeera channel and international media groups yesterday denounced the sentencing of the channel’s correspondent in Spain yesterday to seven years in jail on terrorism charges. Tayseer Allouni was found guilty by Spain’s High Court of collaborating with a terrorist group but acquitted of being a member of Al Qaeda. He was among 18 people sentenced at the trial, the biggest of...

It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more perfunctory back-page articles...

Analysts said that search leader Google is quietly moving to add classified ads to its index. Google has been contacting publishers of Web-based classified advertising sites, requesting a direct feed of listings, according to Classified Intelligence, a research firm focused on the industry. Recruitment site CareerBuilder is in discussions with Google, analyst John Zappe wrote in a research note on...

BATON ROUGE, La. – Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane. The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first...