Ethics and Freedom

Recent opinion polls show declining respect for the news media and a growing belief among many Americans that reporters have little regard for ethics. High-profile journalism scandals involving ethical lapses at CBS News, The New York Times, USA TODAY and other media outlets have fed the public's distrust of reporters. Just this week, a survey of 112,000 high school students found that 36% say...

Jonathan Harr, the author of A Civil Action, spent eight harrowing years plowing through a stack of legal documents as high as a three-story building, and nearly went broke in the process. Posing what he calls "the dumbest questions in the world," Richard Ben Cramer conducted more than 1,000 interviews to research What It Takes: The Way to the White House. For Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble...

This is the month that Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, limps off into the sunset, leaving behind a lot of large, disappointed media companies. It’s not how the movie was supposed to end. Back in June 2003 Powell proposed loosening the rules of ownership so that big media could get even bigger, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit sent him back to the drawing board. Then, this...

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia...

Taysir Alluni could never have suspected that the 9/11 attacks and the US war against Afghanistan in its hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders would dramatically change his life. Alluni, who began his career as an Arabic translator for a news agency in Granada, Spain, is credited as being the only journalist based in Afghanistan in October 2001 to show the world what the US war machine was doing...

Some rights reserved. That's the watchword of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to building an alternative framework for copyright protection. A Creative Commons license, which allows the creator of original work to specify how it can be used, is both more faithful to the purpose of copyright than current law and better suited to the realities of a digital age. Creative Commons...

The re-arrest of correspondent Taysir Alluni has once again highlighted the issue of press freedom, in particular the hostile treatment of Aljazeera's journalists. In the past three years alone, Aljazeera has come under repeated pressure for its uncompromising reporting. This has ranged from physical - sometimes fatal - attacks, intolerable working conditions, and accusations of irresponsible and...

The journalist Taysir Alluni is possibly best known for securing an exclusive interview with Usama bin Ladin after the 9/11 attacks on America. Sadly this success possibly lead to the second cause of his recognition. Alluni is now known the world over as the Aljazeera journalist arrested by Spanish authorities on alleged links to terrorism. Below is a brief outline of the life of Alluni. Born in...

The Right to Information Act is showing results in Maharashtra. So far, 32 officers in various departments have been fined aggregating to Rs 1.43 lakh for not providing information to the public or for giving incorrect or false information. In an instance, 19 officers attached to the Thane Municipal Corporation have been fined Rs 60,500 for violating the provisions of the Act, while five officers...

The Delhi High Court on Thursday allowed an appeal by the Indian Express challenging a trial court order restoring a criminal defamation complaint filed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan leader, Medha Patkar, against the daily in 2000. Justice B.D. Ahmed dismissed the order passed by the Metropolitan Magistrate, Bimla Kumari, in April 2003, restoring the complaint after dismissing it earlier due to...