Newsworthiness

Public interest in natural disasters, sports and political scandals in the United States (US) has fallen in the last two decades, the first quite precipitously, a Pew Research Centre survey has found. Three categories of news shifted downwards, and two of those changes could conceivably be regarded as symbolic of greater seriousness. Interest in natural disasters fell precipitously from an index...

Another cartoon row seems to be brewing up in – this time in Sweden where a newspaper has published a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a dog. Iran summoned Sweden's charge d'affaires on Monday to protest against the publication of the “disrespectful" drawing of the prophet. Leading figures in Sweden's media industry have backed newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, which has published the cartoon...

MONTPELIER, Vt. - Condemning the Fox News Channel as a warmonger that's agitating for a U.S. attack on Iran, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced an "online viral video campaign" Wednesday calling on television news organizations "not to follow Fox down the road to war again." Greenwald, the director behind "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on...

The US media's reporting of the war in Iraq fell sharply in the second quarter of 2007, largely due to a drop in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, a study released Monday said. Taken together, the war's three major story lines — the US policy debate, events in Iraq and their impact on the US homefront — slipped roughly a third, to 15 per cent of an index of total news coverage, down...

NEW YORK: An op-ed raising troubling questions about the U.S. effort in Iraq -- and off-kilter press coverage -- is nothing new. But this one, in The New York Times today, was different, and will possibly be more influential than nearly all that came before. For one thing, consider the authors' blurbs at the end of the article: "Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a...

The people who run journalism and mass communication (JMC) schools in the United States (US) are overwhelmingly white, and two-thirds of them are male — even though about two-thirds of the students today are female. Those findings come from a new survey of administrators by Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Kunkel is the new president of...

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Readers of the The Sun, a British tabloid best known for its bare-breasted Page Three girls, opened their newspapers to see a young woman named Keeley Hazell wearing only green paint. Ms. Hazell is the face - well, not just the face - of the paper's campaign against global warming. When subscribers to the British satellite TV provider BSkyB order new set-top boxes, some...

WASHINGTON: The bad news is India hasn't made the cover of major international publications on its 60th birthday. That may well be the good news too. A decade after the world media celebrated India's 50th Independence anniversary milestone in a blaze of colour, the country isn't a novelty anymore. It is now an ongoing story, a work in progress. In fact, there may have been more India covers in the...

The American public continues to fault news organisations for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticising them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes. Some of the harshest indictments of the press now come from the growing segment that relies on the Internet as its main source for national and international news. The Internet news audience –...

Most newspaper stories during the 2o06 Israel-Hezbollah war used Israeli sources more often for quotes and attributions, a new study has found. The overall coverage of the fighting sides (Israel and Hezbollah) was highly critical of both, although Israel received more sympathetic coverage than Hezbollah. An overwhelming majority of articles (55 per cent) explicitly blamed Hezbollah for starting or...