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The Washington Post this summer created a bulletin board for staffers to post critiques of the day’s newspaper. On Aug. 26, several days before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, this bit of revisionism popped up on the board: "Mr. Weather would have liked to see a fuller story on the hurricane further forward in the paper, maybe even A-3, with a front page key; it’s the story people woke up to...

For the first 120 hours after Hurricane Katrina, TV journalists were let off their leashes by their mogul owners, the result of a rare conjoining of flawless timing (summer’s biggest vacation week) and foulest tragedy (America’s worst natural disaster). No one could have anticipated that, suddenly, TV’s two prettiest-boy anchors would be boldly and tearfully (CNN’s Anderson Cooper and FNC’s Shep...

Media people like to believe they were put on Earth to think big thoughts about great global issues, a la Walter Lippmann. But in our hearts, we're really just storm chasers. As the last two weeks have shown, natural disasters speak to us in a way that no G-8 summit ever could. We're in that tiny club of oddballs who are at their best in the absolute worst of human circumstances. All that pain and...

At this weblog, we were very admirative of the work done by newspapers in Louisiana, especially the New Orleans Times-Picayune. For instance the "missing persons list" was launched very quickly by the newspaper and it is a remarkable initiative. But I think to two other consequences: 1) If the goal of newspapers is not only to provide news, but to serve their communities, why have we seen so many...

For the past six weeks the American public has been treated to news reporting of two totally different kinds: five weeks of calculated, controlled lies wrapped in sympathy for modern day saintly "Settlers" being evicted from their homes in their land of Judea, and an open, honest, gut reactive reporting resulting from the uncontrolled mayhem wrought by Katrina. What's to be learned from these...

NEW YORK As Hurricane Katrina's deadly gale-force winds bore down on New Orleans last Monday, dumping water that would later engulf the city, NOLA.com editor Jon Donley was hunkered down in the Times-Picayune's "Hurricane Bunker," listening to the police scanner and posting updates using the site's blogging software. Before its offices were literally swamped with water, the Times-Picayune was...

Natural disasters, whether in the form of storms or tsunamis, make no distinction between developed and developing countries. However, in the face of Hurricane Katrina, the world's richest and most powerful nation was expected to put all the resources at its command to protect its people. Tragically, this did not happen in New Orleans where thousands are reported dead. Despite the early warning...

Former MSNBC and CNN war correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites found himself on the other side of the headlines last fall, when he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting and killing an injured, unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. That wasn’t the first time Sites had been at the pounding heart of the action; earlier in the war Iraqi fedayeen soldiers ambushed his Tikrit-bound car and held...

The role of the US Internet firm Yahoo in helping Chinese security officials to finger a journalist sentenced to 10 years for e-mailing "state secrets" is filtering into mainland China. The revelation reinforces a conviction among many Chinese "netizens" that there is no place security forces can't find them. Yet if netizen reaction in China is resignation, the story of Yahoo's complicity in the...

Yahoo! Inc co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company legally had no choice but to provide Chinese authorities with information used to prosecute and jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. Yang said that the company had a very clear-cut set of privacy rules and that in every country that it operates when it provides information to governments it must be supported by legal rules and...