Four BBC journalists were arrested at the weekend by Irish police monitoring the Real IRA, the dissident group responsible for intermittent violence in Northern Ireland. The four were among 11 men arrested and held for questioning by Gardai in three separate police stations in the border county of Donegal. It is believed the journalists were working for the BBC's Panorama and BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight investigative programmes. Seven of the arrests were ...

Former Eli Lilly Rep Says He Wined and Dined Doctors to Make a Sale To sell their drugs, pharmaceutical companies hire former cheerleaders and ex-models to wine and dine doctors, exaggerate the drug's benefits and underplay their side-effects, a former sales rep told a Congressional committee this morning. Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zypraxa for Eli Lily, told a Senate Aging Committee chaired by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., ...

Only 28 percent know that nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday. The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People ...

Israel will boycott Al-Jazeera over what it calls the channel's 'biased coverage' of the regime's military operation in Gaza. The regime's foreign ministry has held discussions on the matter and decided to impose an official embargo on the Qatar-based station in the coming days, deputy foreign minister Majali Wahbe told Army Radio on Wednesday. The ministry claimed that Al-Jazeera, in cooperation with Hamas, is inciting the ...

By Nicholas Christian PRINCE Harry's tour of duty in Afghanistan was a "PR stunt" that has not fooled the British public, publicist Max Clifford has claimed. The Royal's 10-week deployment at the front was "virtual reality" because Army chiefs would have kept him away from any actual danger of being hurt, the PR guru added. He said the plan could backfire as the public would soon turn ...

Case that riled privacy advocates turns on unrelated technicalities By Jaikumar Vijayan In a move sure to be welcomed by privacy and civil rights advocates, a California District Court judge on Friday lifted a previous permanent injunction that he had issued two weeks ago to disable the controversial Wikileaks.org whistleblower Web site. Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San ...

Zogby Poll - 67% View Traditional Journalism as "Out of Touch" Internet is the top source of news for nearly half of Americans; Survey finds two-thirds dissatisfied with the quality of journalism Two thirds of Americans - 67% - believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows. The survey also found that while most Americans (70%) think ...

No surprise that the complaint was not upheld, The finding is a joke as you would imagine. For example, the BBC's idea of 'investigation' regarding Mayor Willie Brown not flying on 911 is to phone his office and ask if the reports of a tip off were true! The entire results below: FINDING BY THE EDITORIAL STANDARDS COMMITTEE 9/11: The Conspiracy Files, BBC Two, 18 February 2007 Summary ...

By Sarah Lagan Journalists, anti war activists and religious groups held a protest outside the Daily Express offices today against a series of stories and headlines in the paper which they say encourage "racist stereotyping and contempt". Around forty protesters and journalists turned up to the event organised by Media Workers Against War and the Stop the War Coalition. They waved banners saying "stop media attacks on Muslims" while chanting ...

An award winning documentary exploring the role of the mass media during the War on 'Terror' & Economic trade. Consider a wide range of viewpoints from mainstream news editors, computer hackers, journalists and media activists. Discover how new technology, such as the Internet and camcorders, are challenging the role of the traditional news gatherer. This film contains graphic violence by Italian Police ...

JONATHAN WERVE Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well. Starting in 2007, ...

WRH  "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation ...

By Stephen Lendman RINF Alternative News For Big Media, truth is a scare commodity and in times of war it's the first casualty, or as esteemed journalist John Pilger noted: "Journalism (not truth) is the first casualty (of war). Not only that: it('s)....a weapon of war (by its) virulent censorship....by omission (and its) power....can mean....life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq." Famed journalist George Seldes put ...

By Sharon Weinberger "The strategic communication problem is to make good news as entertaining as bad news," says a new report by the Defense Science Board, a senior-level Pentagon advisory panel that normally looks at science and technology issues. Though the panel has done other reports on strategic communication, this one is significant in that the panel reaches beyond the Pentagon ...

Statements made in the media can surreptitiously plant distortions in the minds of millions. Learning to recognize two commonly used fallacies can help you separate fact from fiction By Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse In 2003 nearly half of all Americans falsely assumed that the U.S. government had found solid evidence for a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. What is more, almost a quarter of us believed that investigators had all but ...