News

Google built an empire delivering advertisements across the Internet, and now it plans to distribute content from media companies just as aggressively. Google is working with Dow Jones & Company, Condé Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and other large content companies to syndicate their video content on other Web sites. The videos appear inside Google ad boxes on sites that are relevant to the...

The Andhra Pradesh government is now looking for scapegoats after its controversial gag media order came in for trenchant criticism from all quarters. YSR Reddy was quick to announce an “inquiry” into the incident by chief secretary J Harinarayana. Sources told the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) that axe was likely to fall on a couple of officials in the general administration department by Monday...

Mumbai, Feb 25: In perhaps the first-of-its-kind, a journalist has sued popular internet search engine "Google" for hosting three blogs, which carry content allegedly defaming him, in the Bombay High Court. Gurbir Singh, a journalist, has filed the case against Google over three blogs: mediamamu.Blogspot.Com, mediamalice.Blogspot.Com and indianmediareview.Blogspot.Com. Creators of these blogs and...

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - Bill Donovan laughs when he describes the four times he was fired from the Navajo Times for writing stories critical of tribal government. The joking stops when he tells of the day 20 years ago when the newspaper was shut down. On Feb. 19, 1987, under then-Chairman Peter MacDonald Sr., the tribe closed the only daily newspaper in Indian country at the time, citing an audit of...

ROME, Italy, February 23 (UNHCR) – Stung by the Italian media's demonising of a Tunisian linked to a recent gruesome murder case, UNHCR is working with the industry to draw up a code of conduct for coverage of refugee and immigration issues. In response to a proposal last month by the refugee agency, interested parties gathered on February 1 at the Rome headquarters of the Italian National Press...

WASHINGTON -- Erick Erickson has been running the popular blog Redstate.com long enough to know what his readers' postings sound like: red-meat conservative rhetoric served up with a little dash of populist anger. So when postings from an unknown writer on the site showed up praising Senator John McCain -- one of the site's least-popular Republicans for his deviations from hard-core conservative...

(MISA/IFEX) - The Namibian chapter MISA strongly condemns the attacks on the media by some members of Parliament during the First Session of the Fourth Parliament at National Assembly in Windhoek on 21 February 2007. Members of the ruling South West African People's Organisation (Swapo) party have accused the opposition and independent media of being "disrespectful" towards some Swapo leaders...

KABUL (AFP) - Television stations are trying to introduce some kind of modernity into conservative and mostly illiterate Afghanistan but their efforts are being threatened by planned changes to media laws. Parliament, dominated by former mujahedin -- commanders of the jihad or holy war to resist the Soviet invasion -- is due in the coming weeks to amend the media law decreed two years ago by...

(MFWA/IFEX) - On 21 February 2007, for the first time during the eight-month disappearance of Chief Ebrima Manneh, a reporter of the pro-government Banjul-based newspaper "Daily Observer", the Gambia Police Force officially denied ever arresting him. Reacting to MFWA's continuous demands for the release of Manneh, the most recent of which was published in "The Point", the only remaining...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders was shocked to learn that two men walked up to journalist Maria Nikolayeva's office, in the offices of the weekly "Politika" on 9 February 2007 and threatened to throw acid in her face if she continued to write about a real estate development project in Strandzha national park, Bulgaria's largest protected area. A story by Nikolayeva and Burgas-based...