Newsworthiness

Many Korean scientists appeared relieved yesterday as the dispute between Hwang Woo-suk's stem cell research team and MBC-TV was showing signs of subsiding after the TV station made an official apology on Sunday. They were critical of the TV station as its staff attempted to verify the authenticity of the world-renowned cloning expert's scientific achievements. They were united in the belief that...

Now more than ever -- when outmoded notions of "he said/she said" fairness, avaricious owners and new media all threaten newspapers' primacy -- narrative journalism has the chance and the vital mission of bringing context and emotion to reporting. Amid tips on leads, endings and everything between, that message highlighted the annual Nieman Narrative Journalism conference in Boston. More than 950...

The New York Times has one female columnist out of seven, the Washington Post, one out of five. On any given day of the week, women are excluded from the most important opinion-shaping pages of mainstream print media. Sadly, these media monoliths are the standard rather than the exception. Journalism continues to be a field dominated by men. Considering women make up 51 percent of the population...

PARIS (Reuters) - A French doctor has described some of the media coverage of the world's first partial face transplant as "odious" and said it could have a bad effect on the 38-year-old patient. Jean-Michel Dubernard, one of the surgeons who carried out the operation in northern France on November 27, said in remarks published by Le Monde newspaper on Monday that the woman was recovering well...

Even the best newspapers sometimes have difficulty covering themselves with the same high-quality journalism they offer readers on other topics. Newspapers such as The New York Times could better serve readers by seeking innovative ways to cope with the complicated problems and perceived problems involved in covering themselves. And I have some thoughts on that. Two caveats are in order, because...

Here are the latest trends in news, and they aren't looking good. First, and possibly most frightening, is that we are seeing the rise of ideological, not fair and accurate, programming. Most obvious is the FOX network, owned and run by arch conservatives, and shown by many media critics, like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, as having a corresponding conservative agenda. Some analysts predict...

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...

The biases of the New York Times surface in one or another fashion on a daily basis, but while sometimes awfully crude, these manifestations of bias are often sufficiently subtle and self-assured, with facts galore thrown in, that it is easy to get fooled by them. Analyzing them is still a useful enterprise to keep us alert to the paper’s ideological premises and numerous crimes of omission...

Reports have recently come out in the mainstream press about the use of white phosphorus by troops in Iraq. These reports aren’t new – just over a year ago they were coming out from human rights organisations and medics and journalists that white phosphorus, napalm and other agents were being used. But it was not reported in the mainstream because the mainstream, to put it politely, are beholden...

More than 70 per cent of newspapers in the United States accept classified advertisements for all guns from unlicensed sellers � rifles, shotguns, and handguns. Less than 20 per cent newspapers do not take classified ads for guns from unlicensed sellers, according to a report by the Campaign to Close the Newspaper Loophole. Between April-November 2005, the Campaign to Close the Newspaper Loophole...