On Friday, the Chinese government announced it was dropping its case against jailed New York Times researcher, Zhao Yan. His imprisonment points to the essential conflict of Chinese journalism: communist leaders trying to navigate global free markets without surrendering to the free market of ideas. Bob talks to David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project.
Knight Ridder, publisher of 32 papers across the country, was bought this week by the McClatchy Company – an outfit roughly half its size. McClatchy plans to keep only 20 of its newly-purchased properties and put the rest up for sale. Buzz Merritt was a Knight-Ridder employee for more then 40 years and is the author of Knightfall. Merritt joins Bob to explain why the newspaper industry might not go gently into that good night.
Caught in the anxious middle of the Knight Ridder deal are employees of the twelve newspapers scattered around the country, which have just changed ownership and will be changing hands again sometime soon. David Hanners, general assignment reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, joins Bob to discuss daily journalism when you’re being bought and sold and bought again.
The Newspaper Guild represents the interests of some 34,000 journalists and they’re preparing to bid on the 12 newspapers that McClatchy is selling. If their offer is successful the purchase will create an unprecedented chain in which employees own the majority of the stock and thus the papers themselves. Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, discusses the deal with Bob.
Sometimes it's hard to get a grasp of what's going on in the current war, but history can be remarkably instructive. In the book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker, Philip Knightley gives an expansive review of this history, and the place of journalists in it. He talks with Brooke about the lives and tales of war reporters
Highlights from Past Shows
According to the Washington Post, Iraq's majority Shiite party has ordered the Health Ministry to stop counting execution-style shootings, and tally only deaths by bombing and other insurgent attacks. If true, it explains why the Post's recent numbers diverge so dramatically with those of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari. Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer tells Bob she was less surprised by the disparity in the death toll, than by the failure of other journalists to check it out.
The cable news crawl has raised the question; is Iraq on the brink of civil war? Members of the Bush administration say no. The Iraqi Defense Minister has said that if civil war breaks out, it will never end. The Washington Post cited a body count of 1,300 directly related to sectarian violence in Iraq - but stopped short of drawing linguistic conclusions. So, who really gets to make the call? Bob explores the question with some of the experts.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
