The BBC World Service has announced plans to close ten of its foreign language services, almost all of them in Eastern Europe, in order to start an Arabic TV service in the Middle East. Is the move purely a response to marketplace considerations? Or are there other factors at work ...

After September 11th, The New York Times created "Portraits of Grief," biographical sketches containing personal anecdotes supplied by the victim's family. The full accounting of casualties from Hurricane Katrina will likely be months away, but for writers of the New Orleans Times-Picayune the process of reckoning with the dead has ...

Throughout the last few weeks of hotly-contested presidential debates, a quieter debate has centered on the media's role in covering the stage shows. Slowly but surely, journalists have started checking the candidates' claims against the facts. But are all misrepresentations born equal? A recent internal memo at ABC News urged ...

Bush and Kerry spent most of the week preparing for their first big showdown, leaving the campaign press with little to do but spin their wheels in anticipation. “Spin” being the operative word. The net effect of a week’s worth of prognosticating pundits and campaign talking points was an overall ...

Fighting in the Iraqi city of Najaf appeared to be reaching a resolution on Friday, after a tense standoff between U.S. forces and followers of the Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. But two week's worth of headline coverage hardly made a dent in the prevailing image of Al-Sadr here at home ...

The security situation in Iraq has deteriorated to such an extent that many European news bureaus are packing up and heading home. American news outlets have yet to follow their lead, but reporters mostly stay holed up in hotels, relying on freelancers. What's the effect of bunker journalism on the ...

The metaphor of the week was "last piece in the puzzle." The piece in question was Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, newly anointed contender for vice president. And "the pick" was the news that kept on giving. From Tuesday morning, when Senator Kerry made his choice known, through this ...

Americans awoke this past Monday to learn that the much-anticipated "handover" of sovereignty to Iraqi officials, scheduled for later in the week, had already happened. If the Coalition Provisional Authority was trying to avoid a violent attack during the ceremony, the strategy seemed to have worked. But after weeks of ...

When the so-called handover of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority takes place in Iraq on Wednesday, the Iraqi Media Network will be one of the institutions that changes hands. Network officials say it will form the backbone of a new public broadcasting service in Iraq, but critics counter that ...

In a closed session with the 9/11 Commission, a former FBI translator named Sibel Edmonds reportedly made an explosive charge. She described documents that crossed her desk in the summer of 2001, detailing plans for an Al Qaeda attack on U.S. skyscrapers with hijacked airplanes. Her allegations were picked up ...