Ethics and Freedom

A French court Thursday cleared satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in a case brought by Muslims who were angered by its publication of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. The court’s decision is being seen as a major victory for free speech in France. Philippe Val, chief editor of the French satirical weekly "Charlie Hebdo", speaks with the media in Paris March 22, 2007. A French court ruled in...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed the creation of a new Soviet-style agency to regulate the media and the Internet. This has sparked fears among many Russian journalists of a bid to extend tight publishing controls to the relatively free Web. A customer looks at TV screens in a shop in Moscow during the broadcasting of Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual address to Russian and...

The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague has dismissed the appeal of a Croatian journalist and found him guilty of contempt for revealing closed transcripts and part of a witness statement. The former editor-in-chief of Croatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija, Josip Jovic, has been ordered to pay a fine of €20,000 (£13,720) within the next 30 days, news agency Hina...

The Turkish military has been classifying journalists by their perceived attitude toward the military and using that classification to grant or deny press accreditations. Leaked reports published in the Turkish press last week show that the news media is classified according to support for government policies and that the procedures for issuing press accreditation are used to undermine critical...

Prosecutors have demanded that a Jakarta court punish the editor of Playboy Indonesia with a two-year jail term for distributing indecent pictures to the public and making money from them, Reuters has reported. The magazine's first edition sparked protests in Indonesia April 2006 although it had no nudity and less flesh visible in the issue than many other magazines on sale in the world's most...

Just when US journalists are debeating the issue of protection of sources, a chequebook journalism scandal — the concept of paying sources — is going to make matters worse. The New York Times acknowledged Tuesday that a reporter who wrote an award-winning article in 2005 about a teenage Internet pornographer helped gain the boy's trust by sending him a $2,000 cheque. Former New York Times reporter...

Blogger Colleen Caldwell rants and riffs about whatever strikes her fancy — a run-in with her child's school principal, the rising price of Girl Scout thin mints, an upcoming movie that caught her eye. "Has anyone out there read a book called 'The Ultimate Gift'? I just heard that a movie is being made of the book (which sold 4 million copies)," she wrote in a recent post on her site, Simple Kind...

The CIA leak trial and I Lewis Libby’s conviction has not been good news for US journalists. There is widespread apprehension that reporters and their editors must now more than ever balance their pursuit of news with an increased risk of landing in court. Journalist Matthew Cooper, right, and his attorney, Richard Sauber leave federal court in Washington, in this Jan. 31, 2007 file photo. Ten out...

A new French law criminalises the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of websites publishing the images, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) warned Wednesday. The French the law came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the mistreatment of Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Haj of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera by the US authorities at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre after he began a hunger strike on 7 January on completing his fifth year in US custody without trial. “Al-Haj has been held by the Americans for five years without being charged, in disgraceful conditions and...