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Late last month, former National Security Agency analyst turned whistleblower Russell Tice said definitively that the NSA monitored domestic communications of American journalists. Reporter Lawrence Wright, who has long believed he was a target, says he's not surprised by the allegation.
On his very first day in office, President Obama signaled a commitment to transparency. But what good is opening access to documents if many of them are never preserved in the first place? Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains that an analog government is archiving a digital world.
The newspaper will soon be dead. Or maybe it just seems that way, because the media only report the bad news. So says a new website called the Newspaper Project, started by a handful of media executives, including the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Brian Tierney. The full story, says Tierney, is not getting out.
Local governments are obligated to inform the citizenry about new speed bumps, traffic lights, and even recycling schedules via legal notices published in the local paper. But in South Dakota and Arizona, cost-cutting legislators intend to put the notices online. The proposed bills would deprive papers of ad revenue but it would also be a loss for government transparency says Le Templar, opinion page editor of the East Valley Tribune.
What if the ads you're watching are watching you back? A company called Quividi designs software that allows advertisers to guess your age and gender using tiny cameras inserted into billboards and video displays. Quividi's chief scientific officer Paolo Prandoni explains how the ads work.
The Islamic Republic of Iran turned 30 this week. Journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni has spent years living and reporting there. In her new book, Honeymoon in Tehran, she writes about the many difficulties journalists face in Iran. Chief among them: the government minder, who Moaveni calls "Mr.X" in her memoir.
In 1965, Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An went to work for Time. A tireless writer, with an unerring sense for facts amid the fog of war, An became an invaluable source of information for American readers. But he was also a spy for the North Vietnamese. In 2006, Thomas Bass profiled An in The New Yorker -- he joins us again to explain his subsequent reporting and the resulting book.
Highlights from Past Shows
This week, President Obama gave his first formal interview as commander in chief to Al Arabiya's Washington bureau chief, Hisham Melham, and the Muslim world watched. Melham says the massive outpouring of reaction to the interview surprised even him.
When President Obama won his fight on Thursday to keep his beloved Blackberry, White House communications leapt headlong into the 21st century. But technology and open-government expert Ari Schwartz says that with technological progress comes great responsibility.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
