Journalism

Al-Jazeera reporter Tayseer Allouni has been ordered out of Baghdad by the Iraqi government, which is unhappy with his reporting. In response, the Arabic satellite network has suspended reporting from the country until it gets an explanation. The action comes at a time when, according to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, U.S. journalists are "pumped" by reports of a POW rescue and news of fresh U.S. military advances.

There is no single explanation for the holes in U.S. news coverage of the Bush Administration, but Brent Cunningham argues that journalists' devotion to what they call "objectivity" played a role by making them "passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it." Moreover, he notes, the concept itself is unclear: "Ask ten journalists what objectivity means and you'll get ten different answers."

"The current war has been called the best-covered war in history, and certainly the visuals and reports from 'embedded' reporters have been spectacular, bringing war into our living rooms like never before," Katie Delahaye Paine writes in her PR firm's publication The Measurement Standard. "[T]he embedded reporter tactic is sheer genius. ... The sagacity of the tactic is that it is based on the basic tenet of public relations: It's all about relationships.

"Sir Ray Tindle, the editor in chief of over 100 weekly newspapers across
Britain has informed all his editors that they can no longer report any
anti-war stories in their newspapers," reports Andy Rowell. Jeremy Dear of the UK's National Union of Journalists, condemned the move: " So much for the right to know, free speech and all those other rights which our forefathers fought to establish and which Sir Ray Tindle seeks to demolish at the stroke of a pen," Dear stated.