Newsworthiness

Congressional leaders are all atwitter over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' new satellite television station, Telesur, which has begun broadcasting four hours a day, financed by its host country and also Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba. Telesur hopes to be accepted regionally, and promises news through Latino eyes, produced by professional journalists from the region. Telesur is likened to Al...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Half of Americans say they trust the mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly, according to Gallup's annual Governance survey. Trust and confidence in the news media is up significantly since last year, but it is still slightly lower than what Gallup has found in recent years. The most common view of the political leanings of the news media is...

It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more perfunctory back-page articles...

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday. But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that...

Fewer villages in Darfur are left to be destroyed,butthe killing -- and the use of rape as a weapon by the Sudan government's Janjaweed and soldiers -- continues. As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the BBC on July 3: "We have learned nothing from Rwanda," an atrocity which we were told would never happen again. Eric Reeves of Smith College in Massachusetts, the principal historian of the...

CHANDIGARH, SEPTEMBER 24: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today lashed out at the media–the financial media in particular–saying the time had come for journalists to do some soul-searching on how competition had affected quality. He underlined the lack of accountability in journalism, pointing out how it took just one mistake for an airline pilot or railway man to lose his job. ‘‘How many mistakes...

NEW YORK: Who are the greatest editorial writers of all time? Michael Gartner, who won a Pulitzer for editorial wiring in 1997, names his top four as Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, William Allen White, and Vermont Royster, in a book due out next month that he co-produced with the Newseum. The lavishly-illustrated book is titled "Outrage, Passion and Uncommon Sense: How Editorial Writes Have...

Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity. And a government-backed genocide is unfolding in the Darfur region of the Sudan. As the horror in Darfur continues, America's major television news networks are largely missing in action. During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they...

Politicians who deliberately leak confidential information to the press get away with it most of the time, a study has revealed. Researchers at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands spoke to journalists and editors at 50 Dutch daily newspapers and found that not one believed using leaked information posed a moral problem. According to the survey, leaked information was generally published...

NEW YORK (AFP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has complained privately to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina carried an anti-American bias, Murdoch said at a conference here. Murdoch, chairman of the media conglomerate News Corporation, recounted a conversation with the British leader at a panel discussion late Friday hosted by former president Bill...