With an explosion in the number of Arab satellite channels dedicated to Islam, a new breed of preacher has emerged. New York Times reporter Robert Worth says these so-called "Satellite Shieiks" tend to be young, moderate, and entertaining to watch. One of Saudi Arabia's most popular,

For several years, Shibley Telhami has been conducting public opinion polls in six Arabic countries, asking people about their views of, among other things, American diplomatic efforts and policies toward the Middle East. He then presented the results to White House officials shortly before Obama's speech. ...

Civilian casualties have always been a PR problem for American military and intelligence forces, but outrage in Pakistan and Afghanistan from recent death tolls threatens to further destabilize the region. Amid criticism of air strikes, reporters are getting unprecedented access to one of the more controversial weapons in ...

The Obama Administration announced this week that it would not release photos documenting the abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, fearing that doing so would jeopardize the safety of U.S. troops. Jane Mayer, New Yorker writer and author of The Dark Side, says the ...

With no armistice, surrender or fanfare a war may have quietly come to an end this week. The 'War on Terror' is being replaced rhetorically by the Pentagon and the president with 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' Political Communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson looks back at our most ...

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 ...

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.

As the last of the Israeli Defense Forces left the Gaza Strip this week, we wondered how coverage by Al Jazeera might look through the eyes of a Westerner. Eric Calderwood, a Harvard graduate student living in Syria, wrote in the Boston Globe recently that, as an American, ...

The Palestinian point of view has long been a staple of Al Jazeera English’s coverage, as with its larger, Arabic-language parent. But there’s a wrinkle this time around. As one of the few news organizations inside of Gaza, AJE’s reporting is a major source of information for the ...

In what the Foreign Press Association has called an “unprecedented restriction of press freedom,” the Israeli military has barred foreign correspondents from entering the Gaza Strip and thereby covering the war close-up. New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner says that in order to understand the current ...

Throughout this week’s flying shoe coverage, the comedic details of the debacle dominated headlines. But humor couldn’t dominate the essential moral. Bob ruminates on what the hurling of the footwear revealed about the extent of Iraqi discontent and of President Bush’s denial of the same.

Freelance photographer Zoriah Miller was disembedded from the Marine Corps this summer after taking photographs of dead US Marines and posting them to his blog. Miller says despite following every rule of embedded journalists, the Marine Corps leadership sought to ban him from being an embed for life.

New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris spent two years investigating the motivations of the soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos for a documentary and book, both called Standard Operating Procedure. Gourevitch explains that the “bad apples” rationale doesn’t hold water.

In last week’s clashes in Beirut, Hezbollah targeted the headquarters of the Al Mustaqbal television station and newspaper. But this wasn’t a simple case of media suppression. Rami Khouri, editor at large at the Daily Star in Lebanon, explains the political significance of the attacks.

As reported in The New York Times last weekend, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and others have turned, again and again, to military analysts – retired members of the armed forces hired by broadcast and cable networks – for their supposed expertise on the war. Only, it turns out, the ...

AP photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by U.S. authorities for two years on allegations that he had ties to Iraqi insurgents. This week, an Iraqi committee ordered Hussein to be freed, though U.S. authorities still haven't announced their plans for him. In the meantime, Bob asks

From Al Jazeera to soldier bloggers to home-grown Iraqi journalists, powerful voices emerged from the rubble of the Iraq War and captured the attention of the world.

From Colin Powell’s U.N. address in 2003 to the faked rescue of Private Jessica Lynch to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square, the past five years of war have seen many attempts at stagecraft. Bob looks back at a few of those moments and weighs in on ...

More than a quarter million American soldiers were deployed at the start of the Iraq War, but they weren't alone. Nearly 800 reporters, prepped for the battlefield and assigned to military units, embedded with the military. NPR's John Burnett was one of them.

On the 5th anniversary of the Iraq War, the death toll for U.S. soldiers approaches 4,000 and the cost moves past a half-trillion dollars. Press coverage, however, is at an all-time low.

::: :: : OTM'S IRAQ WAR TIMELINE : :: :::

OTM takes a look ...