News

Two employees and a security personnel of Tamil newspaper Dinakaran were killed Wednesday after supporters of DMK leader MK Azhagiri, elder son of Chief Minister K Karunanidhi, attacked the daily’s office in Madurai and set it afire. The supporters, who hurled petrol bombs and stones at the building, went on a rampage protesting against the survey published by the Maran family-owned newspaper on...

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is entering the Indian newspaper space in association with Chennai-based Kalanithi Maran, owner of the Sun group. The Sun, the flagship publication of Murdoch’s News Corporation, is in talks with Maran’s Sun group to launch an English tabloid in the country. Sources close to the development said the tabloid was likely to be titled Sun and would be introduced in south...

(FOPEA /IFEX) - On May 8 2007, freelance photographer Juan Bolaños was assaulted by security forces while covering a protest against the provincial government in Rio Gallegos, a city in Santa Cruz province in Argentina's southern Patagonian region. In a separate incident, in the midst of an increasingly tense political situation at the national level, on 25 April supporters of a candidate for...

(MEAA/IFEX) - The Media Alliance has written to the federal government protesting a decision to ban online politics and media commentary site http://www.crikey.com.au from the annual budget lockup. This is the third year Crikey, which has a subscription base of 45,000, has been barred from the handing down of the federal budget. Crikey has an accredited journalist within the federal press gallery...

(WiPC/IFEX) - The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN is delighted by the 8 May 2007 news that journalist and human rights defender, Umida Niyazova, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on 1 May 2007, has had her sentence reduced to a suspended term by an appeal court. According to a report on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she has been released. On 1 May, Sergely District...

Since the death of Anna Politkovskaya, indictments of the Kremlin's attitudes to press freedom have proved increasingly uncomfortable for the authorities. Maria Yulikova of the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. Freedom House’s annual report Freedom of the Press, released last month, caused an outcry over the state of local media in Russia. Freedom House, a leading American civil rights...

LAHORE: There has been a major escalation in the incidents of attacks on media in general, including government attempts to muzzle the media, in Pakistan during May 3, 2006, to May 3, 2007, but the broadcast media in particular wrote a chapter in defiance by asserting itself despite the rising intimidation it faced, according to the Annual State of Pakistan Media Report 2006-07 released by...

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Leading media executives took a combative tone against Internet companies on Tuesday, suggesting that Big Media increasingly considers new content distributors like Google Inc. to be more foe than friend. At a panel discussion on the second day of the 56th annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference, top executives said talk of the demise of traditional...

KABUL: Afghanistan’s government, competing with the Taliban for public support and trying to fend off accusations that it is corrupt and ineffective, is moving to curb one of its own most impressive achievements: the country’s flourishing independent news media. Under President Hamid Karzai, a 1960s media law was updated and has been considered the most liberal in the region. Six independent...

LONDON - Thomson may have done extensive homework before revealing its $18 billion takeover bid for Reuters Group on Tuesday, but even that may not be enough to ensure that a tie-up between the world's second- and third-largest providers of financial data gets past the regulators. Analysts say competition concerns will be the deal's main stumbling block. "A move to a global duopoly in market data...