Ethics and Freedom

The Press Council of India wants "more teeth in press laws" to control and curb unethical journalism. The PCI chairman GN Ray said in Kolkata on Monday that there was a trend towards the "trivialisation, marginalisation and extreme commercialisation" of news and the PCI should have additional powers to achieve the desired control. Speaking on the occasion of the launch of a magazine, Krishi Udyog...

It was a moment both remarkable and uncomfortable. There, on the night of November 21, was Bob Woodward looking nervous and dry-mouthed, trying to defend his hard-earned legacy to – of all people – a suddenly aggressive and sharp-elbowed Larry King. "So it’s quid pro quo," said the cable schmooze-meister to his old pal Woodward, snappily summing up the reporter’s symbiotic relationships with his...

Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the corporate media of the United States (US) is covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church, media research organisation Project Censored has said. According to Prof Peter Phillips, director, Project Censored, a press release on these...

Bob Woodward probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum of an uproar that suddenly confronted him midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC's "Meet the Press," a question about the famed Washington Post reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation. "I think none of us can really understand Bob's silence for two years about his own role...

BRUSSELS .– While attempting to exploit the international information conference in Tunis for its own benefit and against Cuba, the organization Reporters sans frontiers (RSF) was charged in Paris with refusing to give any help whatsoever to a respected Iraqi journalist kidnapped by the CIA in Baghdad. In an interview with Granma International, Iraqi labor leader Subi Thoma, currently exiled in...

LONDON (Reuters) - British journalist and think-tank fellow Anatol Lieven wrote his book "America Right or Wrong" as a wake-up call for the United States to curb its nationalism or face the consequences. For his trouble, Lieven received hate mail, was derided on Internet blogs and, in possibly the cruelest cut of all, was labeled "anti-American" in a review in the New York Times. "It was actively...

PHILADELPHIA - The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a suit filed against a Pennsylvania newspaper that identified a 15-year-old rape suspect. The suspect, who was charged with raping a 7-year-old girl, had appealed a federal appellate court's dismissal of his 2003 suit against the Herald Standard of Uniontown. "I'm disappointed that they chose not to hear it," said the suspect's...

Early on in Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward’s surprisingly useful if analytically inane account of the inner machinations behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, Mr. Woodward supplies a little forensic digression on the White House, message discipline and the meaning of the phrase "senior administration officials." "A news story with that attribution," he wrote, "often carries a...

It was a cinematic image that lured thousands of young people into journalism, Robert Redford coaxing information out of Hal Holbrook in a dimly lit parking garage. And since, in real life, Bob Woodward fiercely protected Deep Throat's identity, what lingered was the mystique of a dogged journalist, plying his trade in the shadows. Three decades older and millions of dollars richer, Woodward still...

If only Bob Woodward had used his inside sources for good instead of evil. Of course, he did just that in exposing the evils of the Nixon administration, but the revelation that the Washington Post journalist had concealed for 17 months the fact that a White House official had leaked former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to him has dulled the luster of this icon of investigative reporting...