News

An assistant professor of journalism at Western Washington University, whose reporting on a Chicago murder case helped free a man convicted as a teenager of the 1993 crime, does not have to turn over her notes to the police officers accused of framing him, a federal judge in Seattle has ruled, according to Seattle Times. The details: [ Link] U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman also ruled that the...

A photo journalist of a language newspaper published from Punjab allegedly instigated a 20-year-old uneducated girl to immolate herself outside the deputy commissioner's office in Amritsar on Monday. The journalist, it is suspected, wanted to buy the girl's disputed property. Twenty-year-old Manpreet Kaur reached the DC office in the courts complex with a bottle of kerosene and match sticks on...

Muslims and low social economic standing groups are portrayed too negatively in the US media, pluralities of Americans feel. Negative coverage of the black and Hispanic communities trail closely behind, a new study has revealed. When asked about coverage of Muslims in the news, 40 per cent of the younger generations and 24 per cent of those 65 years and older believed it was too negative. The...

Venezuelan authorities Friday hastily quashed a ban on newspapers printing violent images after a firestorm of criticism from media outlets, rights groups and UN officials who branded it censorship, according to news reports. The announcement, made overnight to the state news agency AVN by the legal director of the public defender's office, Larry Davoe, reversed a court order this week imposing a...

The Bangladesh supreme court has imposed a six-month jail sentence on Mahmudur Rahman, the acting editor of the opposition daily Amar Desh, and a one-month jail sentence on Oliullah Noman, one of his reporters, for contempt of court, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Headed by Chief Justice Mohammad Fazlul Karim, the supreme court panel on Thursday found...

Chad's national assembly has passed a media bill that the government resubmitted at the start of the month. Adopted on Thursday by 82 votes for, 2 against and 11 abstentions, the new law suppresses its predecessor's provisions for prison sentences for insults and defamation and the crime of insulting the president, but it introduces sentences of 6 to 12 months in prison, fines of 100,000 to 1...

A new online tool has been released in the US that tries to add political context to news stories. Poligraft, released by the Sunlight Foundation, scans news articles for the names of donors, corporations, lobbyists and politicians and shows how they are connected by contributions. The tool is easy to use: Just submit the URL or text of a news article, and Poligraft creates a sidebar containing...

A Manila court has acquitted the alleged gunmen in the 2004 killing of a broadcaster in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte, the Centre for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) has reported. Ilocos Norte is a province 399 km north of Manila. Branch 54 of the Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC) cleared former Senior Police Officer Apolonio Medrano and Basilio Yadao of charges for the murder of Ilocos Norte...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has appealed to M Karunanidhi, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, to have all the charges against AS Mani, the publisher and editor of the Tamil-language magazine Naveena Netrikkan, withdrawn after a court in Chennai rejected a petition for his release on bail on August 10. Arrested on the orders of Police Commissioner SR Jangid on...

Vasyl Klymentyev, chief editor and reporter for the Kharkiv-based weekly newspaper Novyi Stil (New Style) has been missing for a week, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. According to local news reports, on August 11, Klymentyev was seen leaving his home in the city of Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, with an unknown man in a BMW. The reports did not...