Ethics and Freedom

The establishment of a Code of Practice for Jamaican journalists and media organisations as well as a Complaints Commission to adjudicate on complaints against journalists, as in other countries including the United Kingdom which has a Code of Practice and Complaints Commission, is now being considered. The Press Association of Jamaica, the national organisation of journalists, already has a Code...

Police arrested three photographers who were covering a white supremacist demonstration and counter-demonstration in Toledo, Ohio, on Saturday. The photographers say they were arrested without warning, held for several hours along with the handful of demonstrators who were arrested, charged and released. One of the photographers says when police returned his camera, the memory card had been either...

The idea that reporters have a duty to protect their sources has an honored place in journalistic lore. It goes without saying that Woodward and Bernstein would never have burned Deep Throat. In The Insider, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman is tormented by the possibility that the tobacco industry whistle-blower he tried to shield might be harmed. And now, one of the more troublesome issues in...

When Carsten Juste decided to publish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten in September, he could not have imagined the fallout that would drag on almost to the year-end. A Pakistani fundamentalist party has announced a bounty for murdering the Danish cartoonists. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) made an issue of it at its recent summit. Srinagar downed shutters...

More than anyone else in the media universe, author and Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Detroit Free-Press sports columnist Mitch Albom and Newsweek magazine had a year to forget. Woodward and Miller were Pulitzer recipients. Albom is an award-winning sportswriter and a best-selling author to boot. Newsweek won the magazine industry's coveted...

(December 11, 2005) -- Where will it end, and when will reporters pay with their jobs? First we learn that Bob Woodward failed to tell his editor for years about his role in the Plame/CIA leak case. Today, we find out that Time reporter Viveca Novak not only kept her editors in the dark about her own involvement, but even had a two-hour chat with the special prosecutor about it well before telling...

WATERBURY -- About 40 people, mostly Hispanic, protested in front of the Republican-American on Saturday over what they said were biased editorials and articles. Several people held placards and small flags of Puerto Rico during the nearly hourlong showing. "We demand an apology for racist comments in editorials and commentary," said Jeffrey Rodriguez, his voice amplified through a bull horn...

A Beijing-based correspondent for the respected German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was detained for five hours Friday near so-called cancer villages along a severely polluted river in central China. Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from the hotel room where he was being held in Shenqiu, Henan province, and was accused of conducting 'illegal interviews'. He was cross-examined until he was...

LOS ANGELES -- An explosive article in January's Vanity Fair details the sundry adventures of Judith Miller and the New York Times surrounding the controversial reporter’s decision to be jailed for refusing to identify her source to a grand jury investigating the case of who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The magazine is out on newsstands in Los Angeles. The story, by Seth Mnookin, splashes...

VISAKHAPATNAM: A gag order served by the Visakhapatnam district administration on two Telugu dailies seeking to screen before publication news reports pertaining to public servants created a furore in the media on Thursday. Journalist unions described it as an attempt to curtail the freedom of the press. On learning about the implications of the order, the Government intervened and got the order...