Ethics and Freedom

The continuing conflict between press rights and privacy rights will flare up early in the year when a federal court considers a strange and extended legal skirmish over a secretly taped 1996 phone conversation that was leaked to the press. The tape's speakers were Newt Gingrich and other prominent Republicans. The leaker was a congressman from Washington state, Jim McDermott, the top Democrat on...

Shortly before 10 a.m. on August 22, a man jumped from the top of the New York Times' 15-story building in Times Square. Allen Myerson, 47, was a staffer at the paper, an assistant business and financial editor, and he landed on the roof of a parking garage next door. That's where police found him. Dead--an apparent suicide. The next day's obits ranged from a respectful one in the Times--declaring...

In 1905 oil baron John D. Rockefeller sensed that the attacks he had suffered from muckraking reporters and crusading journals like Joseph Pulitzer's New York World were about to subside. As newspapers became more and more profitable, Rockefeller reasoned, their proprietors would be less inclined to focus on corporate misdeeds and more likely to play by the same rules as the other captains of...

The preamble to the Constitution says one of its purposes is to "provide for the common defense." Its First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. Those goals are not contradictory, but there are times – especially times of war – when they tug in opposite directions. This is an instructive point for evaluating whether journalists have enjoyed sufficient access to the war on terrorism. The...

In a letter sent to the Indian Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders - RSF) asked for the real reasons for the arrest of Burmese journalist Soe Myint, managing editor of the Mizzima press agency. "We are justified in asking whether the arrest of this journalist, reputed for his reporting on human rights violations in Burma, has a direct...

On a muggy day in mid-April 1997, Houston police discovered Doris Angleton's bullet-riddled body inside her two-story, red-brick Tudor home. She lay in an upstairs hallway in a pool of blood, shot 12 times in the head and chest. The homicide would reverberate through the higher echelons of Houston's old-money society. But the effects of Angleton's death would be felt beyond the gilded confines of...

On 29 December 2001, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the regulatory body for cable television operators, issued directions to cable television operators to stop the transmission of Indian channels. The PTA said the decision was taken in view of the one-sided, poisonous Indian propaganda by that country's channels aimed at tarnishing Pakistan's image. According to a PTA announcement...

As the Indian parliament examines the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), RSF has sent a letter to Federal Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, in which the organisation expresses its concerns about the bill's potential consequences for press freedom. "Sentencing a journalist to five years' imprisonment because he is suspected of not transmitting information about a 'terrorist' to the...

October 2001–Last March, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gushed that Qatar's wildly popular 24-hour news satellite channel Al-Jazeera [ www.al-jazeera.net] is "not only the biggest media phenomenon to hit the Arab world since the advent of television, it also is the biggest political phenomenon." Commentators continued to heap praise on the Arabic-language news channel, which has managed...

The success of any investigative story or series rides or falls on how early the editor becomes a collaborator in the process. By editor, I mean the lucky soul who will be doing the manuscript editing at the tail end of the process. There are four points at which he or she can become involved: 1. At the initiation of the story itself; 2. During the reporting; 3. After the reporting but before the...