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The article reports on the initiatives taken by Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, in transforming Israeli press. It informs that Netanyahu had sidelined his communications minister and annexed the role for himself an unheard of move for an Israeli prime minister. It presents information regarding Netanyahu's role as communications minister had seemed to cement his power.

The article discusses how a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) became a tool for powerful people and organizations to hinder journalists from informing importance news to the public. Topics include rise in sexual misconduct allegations or scandals, history of NDAs or contracts of silence, and importance of confidentiality in journalism.

The article talks about the condition of press and media in the U.S., and discusses problems faced by it. Topics include requirement of transparency and truth in journalism; ongoing conflict between media and politics including U.S. president Donald Trump; and need of providing freedom and respect to press for its functioning.

This article discusses the future of traditional newspapers as they compete with the increasingly popular and widely used Internet. A scenario is presented where the mainstream press makes money from the Internet while adhering to traditional journalistic integrity and maintaining professionalism. The diehard defenders of print media insist that nothing on the web can match the reporting talent, professionalism, and public mission of newspapers. A 2006 State of the News Media Report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism claimed that only 5% of blog postings would be considered journalistic reporting.

The article focuses on the role of cameramen in covering news around the world. Cameramen come in all creeds and colors, as well as all levels of proficiency and competence. They usually have made judgments on which of the correspondents they like personally and respect professionally and those they do not, and they can reward and punish accordingly with their best effort or perhaps just a little something less. There are liberals, conservatives and intellectuals among them, and despite their distinct idiosyncrasies, cameramen know they are absolutely essential. Individually, they are very much like the seasoned platoon sergeant who knows that although the lieutenant is ostensibly in charge, he is indispensable. It is his skill and his experience that will see the unit through the tough times.

This article discusses the author's experience of getting involved in a controversy surrounding the confidential information disclosed by Valerie Plame, an undercover agent at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who works on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to columnist Robert Novak. He was asked by Patrick Fitzgerald, the one appointed to investigate the controversy, to name his sources on the alleged leak of confidential information. Fitzgerald intimated that he might have a waiver from one or more of his sources. These exploratory conversations between a prosecutor and news organization usually involve quite a bit of shadow boxing. Neither side wants to give too much away, so things tend to be discussed in theoretical terms.

This article focuses on the issue concerning the inefficiency of real journalism. Journalistic writing desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing. The best writing, literary or journalistic, occurs under the loneliest of circumstances, when a writer encounters the evidence firsthand without anyone of his social, economic or professional group nearby to help him filter it. Officially, journalism encourages such independence of thought and experience. But while travel writing demands both a horizontal journey to another geographical space and a vertical journey outside of one's own subculture of some duration, working journalists, having evolved into a professional caste, are subtly expected to the opposite.

This article provides information on the state of journalism in Lebanon, as of January 2006. Many journalists in Lebanon feel proud of the mass media's role in what is come to be known as Beirut spring. Despite some government interference, and an arguable amount of self-censorship, Lebanese journalists described the pre-withdrawal past with something approaching nostalgia. In Lebanon, whatever the original political pedigree, there is a far more freewheeling media environment. Moreover, with free-speech protections guaranteed by law, the relatively independent Lebanese press managed to span the political spectrum, even under Syrian domination, making it the envy of the region.

This article focuses on the controversy surrounding the termination of Jim DeFede, a star columnist at the "Miami Herald," for secretly recording an off-the-record phone conversation with local politician Art Teele, who committed suicide in the lobby of the Herald building. Teele appears to have been interested in something beyond being remembered as just one more controversial figure crucified by the mass media. He seemed to look upon the press as a kind of free-floating court system that could grant final justice. But his suicide was also an intensely personal rebuke, a final swipe at a newspaper that had become an obsession.

Emphasizes that the press must help the U.S. on the way through economic recovery following Hurricane Katrina. Problems brought by the hurricane to the country; Importance of an extensive media coverage for the rebuilding of New Orleans, Louisiana; Need for a journalism that is grounded on solid reporting.

This article examines the coverage of issues related to Palestine-Israeli conflict by the Israeli press in 2005. Despite a year and a half of fierce opposition from the determined and media-savvy pro-settler movement and from a few influential heavies of the right-wing political establishment, Israel's three major dailies—Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, and Maariv—provided almost unequivocal support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan, both in their editorials and through their coverage. They prepared the public for it and helped to insure the steady 60 percent of support it garnered. Israelis are news-obsessed. One study, from 1998, had 82 percent of the public reading a newspaper more than twice a week, 86 percent watching TV news regularly.

This article focuses on the development of objective journalism in the U.S. in 2005. Objective journalism is nurtured by the assumption of shared values. It was the common burdens of depression and war in the last century that reinforced the idea of an objective press, a high-minded model adopted in response to excesses of the earlier yellow journalism. That societal consensus was put to the test, needless to say, during the Vietnam and Watergate eras. Since then, the notion of consensus itself has come under increasing pressure both in and out of journalism and many of those who have tried to stay in the middle of the road have gotten squashed. The separation of the polity into two evenly divided camps has left precious little room for moderation in any walk of public life and the press is among the institutions feeling the ideological squeeze. Hence, from the founding, the U.S. press was meant to be oppositional. This stance puts journalists directly in the cross hairs of any ruling cadre, which is just where they should be. It is no coincidence that the two institutions most reliably opposed to entrenched power in the last century. Thus, journalism and the judiciary sectors are today under tandem assault.

This article presents the comments of the author on the content of the newspaper "Mesabi Daily News." What sold the author on Bill Hanna, what made him believe that he had finally found the small-town newspaper of his romantic heart's desire, what drew him to Virginia, an otherwise unremarkable town in the heart of Minnesota's vast Iron Range, was not the story of Mary Peliska's sacking after seventeen years as director of the town animal shelter but rather Bill Hanna's letter to his 10,000 readers reminding them why his paper was telling the story in its familiarly relentless way. They stop to talk to him at Popper's, one of the sixteen remaining bars on Virginia's main street, or at the rebuilt Sawmill, a big, airy bar near the freight rail tracks on Route 53, or at the Whispering Bird, the spectacularly out-of-place Jamaican restaurant in nearby Gilbert where Hanna sometimes takes his dinners at the bar, the better to let people come by and tell him how much they love or hate the paper. It reflected Bill Hanna's personality, or rather a refinement of the personality that Hanna brought with him after years of journalistic wandering deposited him in a tiny newsroom in the middle of the Iron Range.

This article offers a look at the state of the elite press in India. Most English-language dailies in Indian cities include a separate city section that seems reserved exclusively for pin-ups. In the December 6, 2004 edition of The Times of India, for example, the city section of the paper known as Delhi Times had seven large pictures on the front page alone. The women in these pictures were not naked, strictly speaking, but the parade of models and starlets was unending. The Hindustan Times, the other market leader among Delhi's English-language papers with a national circulation just over one million, was the same, and its was no different in other cities. The pin-up phenomenon is only one aspect of the makeover of India's English-language press. None of the publications mentioned above are tabloids; most of them have long histories as serious newspapers, conservative in political sensibility and taste, while the language they work in restricts their audience to the upper and middle classes living in urban centers. The number of English-speakers in India is probably no more than 4 percent or 5 percent of the billion-plus population, but they are at the top of the heap, an affluent enclave of largely upper-caste Hindus.

Some of the same journalists who brought down a dictator in Peru are in danger of toppling a democracy. I was in Lima's colonial Plaza de Armas to meet Enrique Zileri, the director of Caretas, Peru's leading newsmagazine and godfather to three generations of Lima's top journalists. Zileri was trying to explain the fate of Perus' President Alejandro Toledo, who has risen from shoeshine boy to Stanford economist, from opposition leader to Peru's first president of indigenous background. I thought Zileri's observation might also help explain the crisis that was gripping the Peruvian press. There was a debate on whether different standards should apply to journalists under a dictatorship and a democracy. During the 1990s, Peru witnessed the creation of one of the most extensive state-run networks of corruption in Latin American history, known here universally as the mafia. The don of that mafia was Fujimori's Svengali-like national security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos. It was near total repression of the mainstream press that fostered some of Latin America's best investigative reporting.

The article examines the reasons of interviewees for evading certain questions of reporters. Recently, television guests tiptoe around questions while interviewers either lose control or throw out softballs aimed at making sure their subjects will want to come back. Media training, a competitive and growing industry, teaches people all the fancy steps they need to answer the questions they want to answer, not those of an inquisitive reporter. In too many cases, interviews become excuses to practice public relations and instead of shedding light, they cloud public discourse. For $4,000 to $10,000 a day, trainers who are as ethically and intellectually diverse as journalists themselves teach the art of performing for the press. As journalism has morphed into a cog in a public relations machine, the fundamental relationship between journalists and their subjects has changed, turning the craft of the interview on its head. One of the first rules of media training is to seize control of the interview and skillful guests can do it from the beginning. Some media trainers counsel clients not to answer the question that is asked but instead to give a response that fits with the message they plan to deliver. It is no secret that journalism has a credibility gap. The gap is widening, stretched by media trainers who become more and more sophisticated and by journalists who try less and less to close it.

States what journalism will obviously have to become to meet the challenge of filling the public's urgent need for information. Traditional medium that was looking precarious before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that might also earn respect in a reshaped media business; What George Bernard Shaw remarked long ago about journalists.

This article presents a narrative of the author's experience in his recent series of dispatches from Iraq, as of March 2006. Just days before I met Salih in Iraq this past January, he became a wanted man. The story, like so much else that has gone wrong in Iraq, has its roots in what was supposed to be a sign of progress. Jabara, who had a history with Salih from an earlier story, was not pleased. One evening, while we sat in the living room of Yousif's employer's guarded compound, he told of the time he bumped into a friend at Baghdad University while he was there with an American reporter.

The article presents the views of the author concerning the approach used by journalists to writing depressing stories. Depressing stories are often framed as dramatic narratives in an attempt to make them more palatable to readers. Journalists stressed the importance of moving beyond the mere presentation of injustice to construct narratives that emphasize unpredictable details and complex characters. In other words, journalists must report and write sad stories in such a way that they resist our readers' expectations and avoid falling back on caricature.

This article highlights the issues concerning the stand of U.S. President George W. Bush on nuclear weapons that the press ignored. It is stated that Bush did in fact request the assessment, or nuclear-posture review, and received it in early 2002. Soon thereafter, Bush reversed the course he had set as a candidate, accepting upon entering the White House the very risks he had found unacceptable while campaigning. Bush and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin signed the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions. The press was silent about the silence on the thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert.

Presents the color photograph of the newsroom of the "Arizona Daily Star" in Tuscon, by Sean Hemmerle.

This article discusses why the press was so late in covering the death and destruction in Darfur region in Sudan which began in 2003. Modern tyrants understand how to control the media, and Omar al Bashir, the president of Sudan, is a master. His government's efforts to prevent widespread coverage of the Darfur crisis succeeded for months. By the time major U.S. news coverage began, as many as 30,000 people had died and more than a million had been displaced by a government-backed militia called the Janjaweed. In what appears to be an act of ethnic cleansing, the Arab-dominated group attacked black African tribes. The Sudanese air force also bombed some villages. Bashir understands that people respond to tragedies they see unfolding on TV. So when the first international television coverage of the Darfur crisis aired, his government closed the network's Khartoum bureau, confiscated its equipment, and arrested the reporter. Sudanese authorities rapidly erected an obstacle course for gaining access to Darfur. It can take more than six weeks to get a visa for Sudan, and sometimes the government won't grant them at all. Journalists from Europe, where the public has more interest in Africa, got around the red tape by sneaking into Darfur from Chad. The earliest U.S. coverage of note came in late 2003 when The World, a public radio program, ran a story with UN officials discussing the Sudan crisis. In Darfur, thousands of people died before the world took notice. Some of them might be alive today if the press had found ways to move more quickly.

This article presents the authors' response to a review of their motion picture, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which concerned the state of media reporting in Venezuela, as of May 2004.

The article examines the co-dependence of boxer Mike Tyson and the press. Attempts to write off Tyson over the years, through his rape conviction, prison sentence and numerous other bizarre and violent episodes proved premature. In 1994 Pete Hamill visited Tyson in the Indiana prison where he served three years on a rape conviction and wrote convincingly in "Esquire" that he has converted to Islam and had spent his incarceration in fervent pursuit of knowledge. Within a year of his release, on March 25, 1995, Tyson had a reported $65 million for bouts against Peter McNeeley, Buster Mathis Jr. and Frank Bruno. The media's co-dependent relationship with Tyson has not gone unnoticed. Tyson's legal troubles and psychopathology are primarily known. But his offense of late, the June 21, 2003 brawl in Brooklyn, New York, his filing for bankruptcy in August 2003, the assault on promoter Don King's bodyguard on May 3, 2003, are not among his worst. In January 2002, the Las Vegas, Nevada police were investigating two separate rape allegations against Tyson. The discrepancy in press coverage suggests that our growing intolerance for Tyson may be linked more than we realize to his chances for a professional comeback.

Focuses on the Arab media in Saudi Arabia. Effect of the Iraq war on media; Dismissal of Jamal Khashoggi as editor of "al Watan"; Details of the freedom of the press needed in the Arab media.

Presents several letters to the editor in response to the articles published in the "Columbia Journal Reviews." Reason behind the distrust of the public in the media; Way of reforming the U.S. media; Attitude of the media toward war heroes in Iraq.

A letter to the editor is presented about local journalism, national journalism, and the role of online platforms in journalism, in response to the article "Failing Geometry," written by Clay Shirky, published in the September/October 2012 issue.

The article discusses the author's experience of unbalanced journalism. In November 2005, his own son was arrested, and a reporter from a local newspaper called the house to confirm his employment and ask if he had any comment. The report in the newspaper the next day highlights an accurate account of the arrest and allegations facing his son, but it included too much by half. The author was dismayed to see his name and place of work, and stunned to read his wife's name and occupation in the report.

This article presents an interview with columnist Philip J. Milano of the "Florida Times-Union" regarding his column "Dare to Ask," launched in January 2005. The purpose of his column is to change the ground rules for how people talk about race, religion and cultural differences in the U.S. He draws the line between what is offensive and healthy in the edges of hate and hostility.

This article focuses on the issue concerning the perception that the Rwandan genocide was fueled by the mass media to impose legal restrictions on the press in their own countries. The practice of casting the suppression of critical media as a legitimate effort to fight hate speech and incitement is distressingly common, so much so that it has become a major impediment to independent journalism in many countries in Africa. In fact, the misuse of hate speech laws by repressive African governments may well be a greater threat than hate speech itself.

This article deals with the loopholes of the journalism ethics code in the U.S. Journalism ethics codes are filled with advice to be accurate and to tell the truth, but no official code obligates the press to tell the truth about the exaggerations and outright falsehoods it quotes. For years, the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) Association rejected that view. The ethics code in place at least since 1974 declared that the newspaper should background with the facts, public statements that it knows to be inaccurate or misleading. The passage was dropped when APME rewrote the code in 1994 to make it. Given that hoodwinking has become virtually a way of public life, something like the defunct APME language deserves to be dusted off, copied widely, and conscientiously applied. Unless news organizations develop the competence and will to correct the record, the press will continue to be hornswoggled by the politicians.

This article comments on the media coverage given to the legal and political debate over media ownership in the U.S. as of march 2005. The ownership debate was poorly covered, yet an impressive number of Americans tuned in and decided that big media—so much in their face already—was big enough, thanks. All that individual journalists can do, as we all think through these challenges, is rededicate ourselves to journalism's central mission and find ways of explaining that mission to the public. If we want people on our side, in other words, we have to do work that actually benefits them. And we have to explain ourselves. Thus we applaud the coalition of organizations behind Sunshine Week, who are making an effort between March 13 and 19 to promote access to public records. More such efforts are in order. More to the point, we salute those journalists who are quietly fighting to stay on mission--the editor who talks his publisher into another education correspondent, the station manager who gives a reporter more time, the columnist who remains intellectually honest, the features editor who rolls the dice on something deep. The quality of our press and our democracy really are linked. This new day for journalism requires an old-fashioned faith.

Presents an outlook on reports of public journalism's demise in the U.S. Motivation of public journalists; Evidence of the enduring presence of public journalism in U.S. society; Financial resources of public journalism.

Deals with NewsProNet, a company in Atlanta, Georgia that produces generic news reports and investigations which are offered to broadcast outlets across the U.S. Number of broadcast stations that signed up for the canned news of NewsProNet; Obstacle facing broadcast stations in producing quality news; Efforts of Sinclair Broadcasting, Gannett and Prism Broadcasting to commodify the news.

Offers views on the benefits of media convergence. Definition of media convergence; Ways in which convergence can harness the benefits of online, broadcast and print in providing news to people; Discussion on the unfulfilled potential of media convergence.

Describes the growth of community-based newspapers in the U.S. Gratification in serving a community; Complaints of journalists in community newspapers; Economic performance of community journalism.

Discusses the so-called new journalism. Individuals whose works are the basis of the new journalism; Variety of new journalism; Description on the new journalists of the 1960s.