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There is in Venezuela, as people of all shades of opinion broadly agree, freedom of expression. You have only to open an opposition newspaper, or turn on the TV, to realise that criticising the government is not merely permitted but exercised in full. That, however, is where the consensus ends. From the government's perspective, the opposition media are abusing this freedom to spread lies in a bid...

LONDON: Global media baron Rupert Murdoch is to launch a free London evening newspaper, to be called thelondonpaper, on September 18, his News International publishing group announced on Monday. The paper will break the monopoly on London evening titles held since 1980 by the Evening Standard, published by Associated Newspapers, the British press group that also owns the mass-circulation Daily...

Readers of some of the most prominent US newspapers will soon be greeted with an unusual sight over their morning coffee: advertisements on the front page and on the front of other sections. In an industry where entrenched journalistic values and mounting commercial pressure have increasingly been on a collision course, the arrival of advertising on such hallowed editorial ground signals a...

According to recent statistics from blog-tracking site Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled every six months for the last three years. That's 175,000 new blogs per day worldwide. Technorati added its 50 millionth blog on July 31, 2006. The site's State of the Blogosphere report is released every three months by Technorati CEO Dave Sifry. Sifry has been tracking the blogosphere since 2002, and...

LONDON, Aug. 6 — When Metro International, a publisher of free newspapers, moved into France in 2002, established competitors cried foul, and some of their workers took to the streets. Four years later, Metro and other free papers are fixtures of the French cityscape, accounting for one in five papers read in France, and publishers of paid-for dailies are considering free editions of their own...

LONDON: When Metro International, a publisher of free newspapers, moved into France in 2002, established competitors cried foul, and some of their workers took to the streets. Four years later, Metro and other freesheets are fixtures of the French cityscape, accounting for one in five papers read in France, and publishers of paid-for dailies are considering free editions of their own. The about...

After the carnage of this past weekend, they would seem to fade almost into insignificance – and that's understandable, but they bear noting. The Israeli destruction of TV transmission towers in Lebanon and an attack on a media convoy in south Lebanon are emblematic of a grim fact: the media have become targets – and weapons – of war. The pen may be "mightier than the sword," but in recent years...

In a country widely referred to as the world’s largest democracy, the Indian government has succumbed to mounting Israeli pressure and ordered a nationwide ban on the broadcast of Arab television channels. The Indian government’s ban on Arab television stations is in complete contrast to the friendship that Arab countries imagine exists with their neighbor across the Arabian Sea. It seems the ban...

JERUSALEM - In a land of divided faiths and loyalties, people have been separated at times by walls, by checkpoints and now, in time of war, by sound bites. Every hour on the hour, Israeli Jews in this ancient city tune their radios to government-run broadcasts about the battle against Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim group, in Lebanon. At night they turn to three Hebrew-language television...

SAFED, Israel -- The air-raid alarm sounded just as I turned into Safed. An ancient city high in the hills of the Galilee region, Safed has been known since the Spanish Inquisition as a refuge of Jewish mystics, but more recently as a prime target of Hezbollah rockets. It has been hit repeatedly, and broad black circles where the rockets exploded and burned have scarred the hillsides. I drove into...