Journalists

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

In the summer of 1966, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady threw down the gauntlet to a trusted coterie of fellow journalists: Produce a novel so poorly written and relentlessly focused on sex that it would fly off bookstore shelves. Two dozen colleagues, including past and future Pulitzer Prize winners, accepted the challenge. Hoping to rival Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, the reigning masters of the steamy potboiler, McGrady and his collaborators hid behind the pseudonym Penelope Ashe and in 1969 published "Naked Came the Stranger," about a housewife who seeks revenge on her cheating husband by bedding as many men as possible.

A new word has been written into the lexicon of Mexico's drug war: narco-censorship. It's when reporters and editors, out of fear or caution, are forced to write what the traffickers want them to write, or to simply refrain from publishing the whole truth in a country where members of the press have been intimidated, kidnapped and killed. That big shootout the other day near a Reynosa shopping mall? Convoys of gunmen whizzed through the streets and fired on each other for hours, paralyzing the city.

After filing 400 stories from China, reporter Melissa Chan never thought she'd wind up in the headlines herself. Chan returned to Southern California last week as the first accredited foreign correspondent to be expelled from China in 14 years, an act that sparked a flurry of news reports and expressions of solidarity from fellow journalists. Chan, who was the sole Al Jazeera English correspondent in China, said she knew she was on shaky ground for most of this year. She had been working on month-by-month credentials since January, when the government refused a routine visa-renewal request.

It takes guts to write a satire about terrorism - and Lionel Shriver has guts. She has already published biting novels about the failings of the U.S. healthcare system ("So Much for That") and a school shooter ("We Need to Talk About Kevin"). Terrorism? Why not? In "The New Republic," the problem is in Barba, a Portuguese peninsula with a legitimate yet tiny political movement seeking independence, and an unaffiliated - so they say - terrorist arm that has taken up international violence.

Sure, journalists can be pushy louts, too hurried or self-important to worry who gets in their way. But movies and pop culture tend to fixate on the reporter as loud, conniving or politically sold-out, at the expense of images that are much more subtle and true.

  The all-suite, all-balcony Regent Seven Seas Mariner is the venue for four NPR and PBS journalists —Scott Simon, Gwen Ifill, Joseph Rosendo and Mark Samels — who will be presenters and panelists for onboard lectures and discussions about politics and culture. The journalists will also host private dinners and receptions. Itinerary: Venice to Split and Dubrovnik, Croatia; Valetta, Malta; Sicily, Florence and Pisa, Italy; Monte Carlo, Monaco and Rome. Dates: Nov. 10-20 Price: Starting at $5,799, double occupancy, including round-trip airfare from select U.S. cities, onboard meals and alcoholic beverages, shipboard gratuities, 24-hour room service and all airline fees, surcharges and taxes.

The case for a federal media "shield" law is simple: Reporters must be protected so they can give citizens the information they need, particularly information that powerful interests would rather keep secret. Whistle-blowers and other insiders -- without a meaningful promise of confidentiality from journalists -- would be less willing to expose wrongdoing, both in and out of government. The ability of journalists to protect their sources is, simply put, a fundamental pillar of our democracy and liberty.

Nine months after a military-led coup plunged Honduras into political turmoil, human rights groups are denouncing what they see as an alarming spate of attacks on journalists, including the killings of five in March alone. No one has been arrested in the slayings, and speculation on motives has run the gamut. The violence illustrates the depth to which Honduras remains unsettled and on edge, even after a new president was elected in November and installed in January amid promises to heal national divisions.

State regulators determined that a Redding hospital owned by Prime Healthcare Services Inc. violated patient confidentiality by sharing a woman's medical files with journalists and sending an email about her treatment to 785 hospital workers. In a report issued this week, the California Department of Public Health found that Shasta Regional Medical Center had five deficiencies related to the unauthorized disclosure of medical information on a diabetes patient treated there in 2010.

It wasn't the words of Shakespeare that sprang to mind Monday night as I found myself sitting onstage at the $240-million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, surrounded by members of the Pacific Symphony, my trusty clarinet in my lap, the score to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet music laid out before me and music director Carl St.Clair wielding his baton in front of us. No, it was the immortal question posed by Talking...

NEW YORK - Who was Joseph Alsop? This question, this mystery drives "The Columnist," a new drama by David Auburn,Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Proof," about a star journalist who was as clear cut in his political views as he was opaque in his private life. The play, which opened Wednesday at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway in a production expertly directed by Daniel Sullivan, is more engrossing as creative biography than drama. (Factual events are fictionally processed and supplemented.)

Jesse Linares, a journalist who helped launch the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy Los Angeles, died Saturday at Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center. He was 49 and had cancer. Linares worked at Hoy Los Angeles since its founding in 2004 and helped shape its coverage as he rose to the position of deputy editor. "Jesse was a fundamental part of Hoy. His love of journalism not only impacted our coverage, but the work of his co-workers," said Reynaldo Mena, Hoy's editor.

Now hold on: There's a vast left-wing media conspiracy against Mitt Romney, and no one told me? What am I, chopped-liver journalist? In case you missed it , Romney said in an interview with Breitbart.com's Larry O'Connor: “There will be an effort by the, quote, vast left-wing conspiracy to work together to put out a message and to attack me. " COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012 He also responded to...

WASHINGTON - President Obama shifted sharply toward his reelection campaign Tuesday, criticizing Republicans for trying to "impose a radical vision on our country" that would reward the very rich while slashing programs that benefit the middle class. For months, Obama and his top advisors have been laying the groundwork for a campaign that would seek to tie the eventual GOP nominee to congressional Republicans, who have become deeply unpopular with a majority of voters, according to repeated polls.

We at the Voice of America could not agree more with Mihajlo Mihajlov's commentary (May 13) that, as Bosnian elections approach, the role of the media will grow in importance in that troubled land. VOA--through our international media training center--is doing something to help the media in Bosnia. This spring, we are training three groups of Bosnian journalists on election coverage in the U.S. Through the training we have learned a few things ourselves: Nearly 80% of the journalists remaining in Bosnia today are under age 26. They are long on dedication and education, but, as noted by Mihajlov, desperately short on equipment.

When we last checked in on Patch.com , the fastest-growing news outfit in America was staffing up and making the most robust media foray into suburbia in years. Patch this week opened its 600th hyper-local website, in the Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead. The sites, which provide basic news coverage and ask readers to bolster reportage on their towns, have opened in 105 California communities, with more launching every day. The remarkable thing about Patch, besides its explosive growth in recent weeks (it had 565 sites just one week ago)

MOSCOW - The only thing missing from the scene was one of those heroic images of Lenin peering from a shop window, or perhaps a glimpse of the Soviet hammer and sickle fluttering over the nearby Kremlin. When the new U.S. ambassador to Russia arrived this week for a private meeting with a prominent human rights activist, he was confronted by a crew from a Kremlin-controlled television station that blocked his path and peppered him with questions. Uniformed men, tall wool military hats on their heads, were there too. And a burly civilian held up a sign with a pointed question for Ambassador Michael McFaul's host: "What is the price of the motherland today?"

It takes guts to write a satire about terrorism - and Lionel Shriver has guts. She has already published biting novels about the failings of the U.S. healthcare system ("So Much for That") and a school shooter ("We Need to Talk About Kevin"). Terrorism? Why not? In "The New Republic," the problem is in Barba, a Portuguese peninsula with a legitimate yet tiny political movement seeking independence, and an unaffiliated - so they say - terrorist arm that has taken up international violence.