TV News LIES

Today the world recognizes World Press Freedom Day. Instituted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), its purpose is to “celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom, to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on [its] independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.”

The issues of quality reporting, media independence and the safety of journalists are as relevant today as ever – especially in the United States.

The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for an examination of the deadly toll of domestic violence, while The New York Times collected three awards and the Los Angeles Times two.

The Seattle Times staff took the breaking news award for its coverage of a mudslide that killed 43 people and its exploration of whether the disaster could have been prevented.

It’s okay that the New York Times reporter got Iraq wrong—the trouble with her new memoir is she still won’t admit she actually did.

Judith Miller has returned to center stage with an autobiography, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. The Story traces Miller’s many stations of the journalistic cross—as an affirmative action hire and clueless rookie at the New York Times, as the Times Cairo bureau chief, Times Paris correspondent, Times Washington reporter, book author and, most famously, as a national security reporter whose work for the Times before and after the Iraq war drew hot fire from detractors who accused her of relying on dubious sources, and worse.

A former CIA officer was convicted Monday of leaking classified details of an operation to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions to a New York Times reporter.

Jurors convicted 47-year-old Jeffrey Sterling of O'Fallon, Missouri, of all nine counts he faced in federal court. On the third day of deliberations, the jurors told the judge that they could not reach a unanimous verdict. However, they delivered guilty verdicts later in the afternoon after the judge urged them to keep talking.

The British intelligence organization GCHQ instigated a test exercise in 2008 that captured the emails of journalists and editors from Reuters, the New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, NBC, the Washington Post and others, according to recently released files from Edward Snowden.

As a result of the test, the content of the emails was shared on the organization's internal servers where anyone in the organization could read them. GCHQ was tapping fiber-optic cables in November of 2008 when they intercepted over 70,000 emails, including emails from the mentioned news companies, according to The Guardian.

The horrific deaths of James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria brought worldwide attention to the dangers journalists face in war zones. The beheadings reflected an alarming trend in 2014 in which international journalists were increasingly targeted and killed.

There were at least 60 journalists killed globally in connection to their work in 2014, according to an annual report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization that advocates for press freedom around the world. The latest death was Afghan cameraman Zubair Hatami, who died Saturday from injuries he sustained in a Taliban attack.