TV News LIES

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism picked up the Digital Media prize for it’s dedicated website www.iraqwarlogs.com at the 2011 Amnesty Media Awards on Tuesday.

The Iraq War Logs, a specialist website exploring the records of US forces’ actions in Iraq, obtained by Wikileaks, exposes human rights abuses by coalition and Iraqi troops during the conflict.

Yesterday on Fox Business, host Neil Cavuto interviewed Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder of Fox News-parent company News Corp, to discuss a wide variety of current events.

Before the interview, Cavuto correctly issued a disclaimer, noting for his audience that Bin Talal “holds nearly seven percent equity stake in News Corp.” But today on his Fox News show (which commands a far larger audience than Fox Business), Cavuto re-aired parts of yesterday’s interview and offered no such disclaimer.

Reporters Without Borders is saddened to learn that Anton Hammerl, a well-known photographer with South African and Austrian dual nationality who had been missing in Libya for more than six weeks, was killed shortly after disappearing in the east of the country on 4 April.

It had been assumed that Hammerl was alive and was being held by pro-Gaddafi forces. "The civil war in Libya has been particularly deadly for photographers," the press freedom organization said. "It is time this stopped. Reporters have been paying too high a price in this war. The authorities in Tripoli and those in Benghazi should give their troops clear directives to respect the work of journalists."

The changes cascading through the news media have made the old models of news delivery – like, say, an anchor reading the news at an appointed time – seem archaic.

And it is about more than just TV – newspapers, magazines, radio, all the "legacy" media are feeling the earth move beneath them. Journalists look out and see thousands of empty campus TV lounges and newsprint-less recycling bins and millions of iPads and smart phones and they wonder what's coming next.

We knew that members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill -- which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter -- but we never expected it to be this atrocious.  Last year's bill has been renamed the "PROTECT IP" Act and it is far worse than its predecessor.  A summary of it is posted below.

Senators Leahy and Hatch pretended to weigh free speech concerns as they revised the bill.  Instead, the new legislation would institute a China-like censorship regime in the United States, whereby the Department of Justice could force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users' access to websites, and scrub the American Internet clean of any trace of their existence.

Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.

Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports.