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After years of debate, President Bush signed a warrantless wiretapping bill on Thursday. It allows foreigners outside the U.S. to be wiretapped without court oversight, grants immunity to the telecoms who made wiretapping possible and invalidates dozens of legal challenges. Tim Starks of Congressional Quarterly explains how the bill became a law.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has served as counsel in a variety of national security cases. He says the new FISA law puts extra pressure on media outlets because they're the only form of oversight left when it comes to wiretapping.
Users of YouTube, which is owned by Google, are screaming mad because a judge has ruled that Google should hand over information about who is watching what to Viacom. Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider looks into the case.
What happens when a single company becomes the gateway to the Internet? Critics are raising concerns about Google, where over 60 percent of all internet searches in the U.S. originate. Boston Globe reporter Drake Bennett investigated the Google juggernaut.
In a recently-settled obscenity lawsuit the defense lawyer planned to deploy Google Trends as a tool. By showing what locals were looking for on the web, he could prove that his client's website was in line with community standards, and therefore not technically obscene. Slate's William Saletan analyzed the suit.
The new editor of The Washington Times John Solomon talks about his plans for the future of the paper, which he sees as an important part of the capital's media landscape. But writer John Gorenfeld, author of Bad Moon Rising, argues that the Times can't escape its origins in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.
Last week Fox News aired doctored photos of a New York Times reporter and editor in retaliation for a story Fox didn't like. The New York Times' David Carr wrote about the incident and exposed the unusually aggressive tactics the Fox News public relations team sometimes uses against reporters.
Highlights from Past Shows
Zimbabwe is no longer, as The New York Times put it back in 1999, “sliding into tyranny.” It has long since arrived. Freelance correspondent Joshua Hammer, who traveled to the country earlier this year, says it’s still possible to do journalism, that is if you pose as a tourist.
When comedian George Carlin died last Sunday, most remembrances focused on his infamous “Seven Dirty Words” routine, which ran afoul of the FCC and engendered a landmark Supreme Court case. Miami Herald television critic Glenn Garvin says America is divided over indecency and past guests weigh in on the debate over broadcast obscenities.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
