In its debut on the political stage, Hamas swept to a landslide in this week's Palestinian elections. But the group best-known in the West for its suicide bombings didn't campaign on its long-standing goal of eradicating Israel, but rather under the slogan "Reform and Change." Brooke takes a closer look ...

Video images of a kidnapped reporter in Iraq were a fixture in the news this week. News of Jill Carroll’s abduction was first reported on the day she went missing, but her identity wasn’t reported until two days later. Not because the press didn’t know her name, but because they’d ...

A news photo is sometimes worth more than 1,000 words. The image of a napalm-burned Vietnamese child fleeing in terror, for example, resonates decades later in ways that millions of words never quite did. So what if such images were produced not by journalists but by the military itself? In ...

Al-Jazeera correspondent Taysir Allouni covered the U.S. war against the Taliban and the Coalition invasion of Iraq, and even secured an interview with Osama Bin Laden shortly after the 9/11 attacks. But did he get too close to his sources? A Spanish court convicted Allouni this week of collaborating with ...

In an interview last year on WNYC, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was optimistic about the democratizing effects on Turkey of a possible entry into the European Union. Until last month, that is, when Pamuk was arrested for speaking about his country's role in the Armenian genocide and its struggle with ...

Veteran reporter Chris Hedges tells Brooke about his addiction to the drug he calls war. In his 15 years of reporting, Hedges was imprisoned in Sudan, expelled from Libya, ambushed in Central America, and shot at in Kosovo. His book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, explores how ...

Despite a relatively high casualty number among Iraq-based journalists, major U.S. news outlets feel compelled to remain in the region. Loren Jenkins, senior editor for NPR's foreign desk, tells Brooke that he's never seen a situation quite this dangerous for the media. And former ABC News correspondent Richard Gizbert talks ...

If the Israeli press focused mostly on the plight of the evicted settlers and the future of their State, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Arab press had cast its attention elsewhere. Bob speaks with Michael Young of the Beirut-based Daily Star about the Arab press’ reaction to ...

In November of 1967, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The “recent conflict” was a six-day war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the UN resolution asserted that Israel - in ...

This week, grieving mother Cindy Sheehan’s protest outside the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas became the news media’s late summer blockbuster of choice. Demonized, sanctified, and punditized, she made headlines all week long. Brilliant media strategy? Clearly. Unprecedented? Not by a long shot. Brooke speaks with Professor Jean Elshtain of ...

U.S. military officials recently found themselves in the awkward position of having to explain why two news releases, about two separate insurgent attacks in Iraq, included virtually the same quotation from an unidentified Iraqi. An Army spokesman called it an "administrative error," but we weren't so sure. And so we ...

The true story of any conflict, from Gettysburg to Fallujah, is mostly lost forever, left behind on the battlefield. What remains is the stuff of history books - the letters and recollections of survivors. It is this material that seven Army historians are racing to preserve in Iraq. Judging the ...

A few weeks ago, Time Magazine ran a cover story entitled "Inside the Mind of an Iraqi Suicide Bomber." It features a rare interview with a young insurgent-in-training. Baghdad correspondent Aparisim Ghosh wrote the story, and joins Bob to reflect on the experience of sitting down to chat with a ...

Suicide bombings have become an almost daily feature of the war in Iraq. But with the so-called "insurgency" composed of such disparate elements, and nobody officially speaking for any of them, it's always hard to know who did what for what reason. Now, that could be changing - two insurgent ...

The recent election of hard-line conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's new president left observers in the Western media scratching their heads. For weeks, their coverage had focused on reformist candidates Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mustafa Moin, who many expected would be the first- and second-place finishers. Brooke speaks with blogger ...

The Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal of reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, the defiant duo who have resisted court orders to reveal their government sources. Miller appears headed for prison, a martyr to the end. But Cooper may still walk free. On Thursday, his bosses at ...

After the FCC cracked down on a pirate radio station in Philadelphia several years back, the pirates decided to become players. They reinvented themselves as the Prometheus Radio Project to lobby for the rights of community broadcasters around the country. Seven years later, Prometheus is still at work in Washington, ...

For every military official we see interviewed about the war in Iraq, there are tens of thousands of unseen soldiers carrying out that official's decisions. Especially absent from mainstream coverage have been the men and women wounded in action. Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin, one of very few reporters following ...

Pending congressional approval, the U.S. will soon expand its Farsi-language satellite transmissions into Iran. The U.S. has been using media to win foreign hearts and minds for many years. But the timing of this latest move has some people alarmed. Bob speaks with Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the government agency ...

Plenty of observers on the political Right think they know who's responsible for the recent outburst of democracy in the Middle East - President Bush. Observers in the region give credit to opposition movements closer to home. But some see the catalyst of freedom as close as their own living ...