When the U.S. Treasury Department announced in February that economic sanctions would be imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Iran’s state-owned broadcaster, it cited human rights violations as justification for the unusual move. “We will also target those in Iran who are responsible for human right abuses, especially those who deny the Iranian people their basic freedoms of expression, assembly and speech,” Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said in unveiling the restrictions, which also applied to Iranian Cyber Police and other institutions involved in monitoring the...

When the New York Times revealed in late January that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its digital network, including reporters’ email accounts, reaction exploded on Twitter and other social media sites. People speculated that this was yet another example of China’s rising power in the world. But then there was this tweet from writer and reporter Charlie Custer, who manages the translation website ChinaGeeks.com. On the one hand, NYT hacking is a big story. On the other hand, is it? Isn’t this happening to most foreign correspondents constantly? — Charlie Custer (@ChinaGeeks) February 1, 2013 That reminded Howard French, the...

  James Foley was supposed to arrive by 4. It was Thanksgiving, and Foley, a freelance journalist covering the war in Syria for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, was going to meet his friend Nicole Tung, another journalist, in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli to catch up and rest for a couple days. But Foley never showed. “I was starting to worry after 6, 7 p.m., when things were very quiet,” Tung said. “By 10, 11, I knew that something had definitely gone wrong.” When she was finally able to get in touch with someone in Syria who had seen Foley (the witness’s identity is being withheld), Tung learned her friend had been...

Many loyal Al Jazeera English viewers worldwide are drawn to the television network because of its insightful coverage of last year’s Arab Spring uprisings – and its in-depth reporting from the developing world. Since its creation in 2006, the Qatari-based English-language channel has deployed its resources around the world to fulfill a goal of being “the voice of the global south,” though it has done so with a distinctive Western style. The tagline “This is Al Jazeera” echoes James Earl Jones’ signature “This is CNN.” One of its flagship shows, “Inside Story,” analyzes the news of the day by presenting the kind of...

A small group of men armed with AK47s and hand-grenades attacks a government held checkpoint on a road that leads into the Syrian city of Homs.  One of their charges, a 23-year-old mechanic named Fouad Khashan, is shot and rushed to hospital. He dies en route. This story and the accompanying video came from a report by CBS’s Clarissa Ward in early February. Such images have been playing a critical role in influencing American public opinion about the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. So what then of the commensurate reports in Russia? Since Russia’s veto of the U.N. resolution to declare the al-Assad regime illegitimate,...