News

As U.S. technology companies pour investments into China, the one thing they’re not exporting is good old-fashioned American values of individual freedom. French media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo Inc. "a Chinese police informant" earlier this week after it gave information about a journalist's personal email account to the Beijing government, which has imprisoned him for...

This week's revelations involving a Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets indicates the weaknesses of human rights and corporate behavior in the virtual world. Media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders in Paris issued a scathing indictment of Yahoo! China for its IP address information sharing that contributed to the arrest and conviction of Shi Tao, a...

In the deluge of reporting surrounding Hurricane Katrina, I got stuck on a rather quirky piece – about bread, and how it has highlighted the stark contrasts between two nations struck by the same tragedy. "In New Orleans there was shooting and looting when the floods came last week. When a similar inundation struck India's financial capital Mumbai in month earlier, there was no violence, just free...

NEW DELHI–Even as the United States struggles to come to terms with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that has destroyed New Orleans, there is a sense of shock in India. Pictures of victims begging for food, reports of looting, rapes, racist attacks, an ineffective disaster management routine has revealed the innards of America that many believed never existed. After all, making it to America...

Americans, usually critical of the media, have given the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina a thumbs up, and major outlets are pledging to stay on the story to find out what went wrong with the response to the disaster. "We haven't had this many people committed to a story since I don't know when," says CBS News executive Marcy McGinnis, who estimates that the network has 200 staffers on the story...

One of the most noted trends in the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina has been the aggressive and critical tone some journalists have adopted towards the White House and Bush administration officials. A headline at the online magazine Slate read, "The Rebellion of the Talking Heads" (9/2/05). "Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media" is how USA Today put it (9/6/05)--implying, of course, that an...

For Campbell Brown, the anger peaked when she reached the New Orleans Convention Center. In the area for days covering the landfall and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for NBC News, Brown had seen plenty of devastation. But the sight of 20,000 people trucked to the facility amid promises of provisions and comfortable shelter, only to find nothing, made the reporter's blood boil. "Watching the power...

NEW YORK: Forced to defend what some critics consider its slow response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from New Orleans. FEMA, which is leading the rescue efforts, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out...

NEW DELHI, September 8: A new report has provided compelling evidence of a link between media consolidation and broadcast indecency in the US. As leading broadcasters such as Clear Channel Communications and Viacom Inc’s Infinity Broadcasting have bought more stations, they have frequently replaced local programming with shock jocks such as Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge, which are prone...

NEW DLEHI, September 8: The days of bookselling are not history as yet. Books, in fact, are making history and are are the among the hottest selling items online. A recent survey by the Internet & Online Association of India (IOAI) and Cross Tab Marketing Services has found that books was the most popular category among online shoppers. Unlike apparel or jewellery, books are not something buyers...