Media and Issues

The Guardian has launched a new section on its website dedicated to the reporting on global development. The new site will be jointly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Guardian News and Media. "The site will provide a new space for discussion and interaction on the biggest challenges affecting the lives of billions of people across the developing world, including poverty...

Muslims and low social economic standing groups are portrayed too negatively in the US media, pluralities of Americans feel. Negative coverage of the black and Hispanic communities trail closely behind, a new study has revealed. When asked about coverage of Muslims in the news, 40 per cent of the younger generations and 24 per cent of those 65 years and older believed it was too negative. The...

The BBC's news coverage of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland has almost doubled in the last two years, a report released by the BBC Trust has said. The broadcaster, however, was also found to still show a bias in favour of stories about England in some areas including health and education, where only eight out of 112 stories related to the three other countries. The latest research, which was...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) is setting up a centre of operations for Haitian journalists in Port-au-Prince in order to enable them to cover the earthquake situation and thereby assist the process of providing assistance to the population. Due to be operational by the start of next week, the centre will be equipped with laptops, mobile phones and generators provided by the leading Canadian...

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Wednesday announced an ambitious strategic partnership to advance media development and press freedom worldwide. The agreement, which represents Sida’s first major partnership with a private sector organisation, will take advantage of WAN-IFRA’s unique position...

This set of documents has been put together in the hope that they will help inform the ongoing (if sporadic) public debate on media regulation in India, with particular reference to the broadcast sector. This set includes a backgrounder on media regulation (or the lack thereof), a backgrounder on broadcast legislation, summaries of case law relating to different aspects of media practice, and a...

A Belarusian journalist who is frequently detained and subjected to all-night interrogations by police, a Cameroonian radio journalist whose broadcasts on human rights and press freedom have put her life at risk and an Iranian journalist whose reports about sensitive social and political issues have led to multiple arrests are recipients of this year’s International Women’s Media Foundation’s...

A murderer and sex offender has won a permanent ban against his picture appearing in the media in a landmark press freedom case in Northern Ireland, the Independent has reported. The High Court in Belfast ruled the Belfast Sunday Life, a sister paper of the Independent, could not publish unpixelated photos of Kenneth Callaghan. The paper had argued publishing the pictures would help the public...

Media coverage of car crashes may harm rather than help public health. The media tends to obscure the bigger picture of motor-vehicles crashes as a leading cause of injury and death—and the number-one killer of young adults—by presenting car crashes as episodic, human interest stories. This type of coverage, according to two new studies published in the US-based National Safety Council's 'Journal

The Press Council of India has issued a new set of guidelines for reporting within India on people suffering from HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), revising a set of guidelines issued last in 1993. The guidelines, developed in association with UNAIDS, were released on Sunday, and emphasise on factual accuracies and ask journalists to report a story...