The grizzled editor squinted at me through a haze of gray smoke from the omnipresent cigarette protruding from his thin lips. He glared at me with a mixture of chagrin and condescension after my suggestion that some day I would like to write books. The Pall Mall bobbed as he …

Reprinted with permission of the International Herald Tribune. The victims have not been exclusively of one nationality or religion, but indeed are representative of humanity itself: British, South Korean, Egyptian and American, among others; Catholic, Jewish and Muslim. As more people continue to be taken hostage and brutally murdered in Iraq, …

The recent profusion of graphic televised footage of dead bodies, sometimes charred or disfigured, has raised difficult ethical and journalistic decisions for news editors, whether at CNN or the Hizbullah-backed Lebanese channel Al-Manar. In a series of interviews, news editors talk about their decision-making policies on screening disturbing images.  The …

As news of kidnappings and beheadings flowed out of Iraq this summer, it was easy to assume that Iraq had fallen into a state of primordial chaos. The brutal forces of tribalism and barbarity appeared to be triumphing, and the modern appeared to be giving way to the medieval. Such …

Compiled by the editors May 2004 Abu Dhabi TV announces "a modest but varied" programming season to parallel that of other satellite channels. News programming is tapped to take a back seat compared to variety shows. The absence of "arts" programming is explained by the station by reference to its …

This paper was presented at the Broadcast Education Association's annual convention in April 2004, where the author participated in a panel organized by the association's International Division. The dark desert night is alight with streaks of blue and red streaming across the sky. A mosque is the symbol-laden backdrop for …

This paper was presented at a conference organized by The Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge on "Arab Satellite Broadcasting in the Age of Globalization" held 1-3 November 2002 and is reproduced with the permission of The Cambridge Arab Media Project. This version has …

This article first appeared in The New York Times. All of life seems to be about denial--the denial of death, the denial of reality, the denial of everything that is convenient for us to deny. Photography, because of its causal relationship to the world, seems to give us the truth or …

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, renewed fears about the threat of "Islamic Fundamentalism" conjured images of bearded and turbaned zealots spoiling for holy war against the West. More than three years later, such stereotypes seem confirmed in the grim reality of the morning's headlines, as …

Streaming video--the transfer of video files on the Internet--can be accessed by any computer connected to the Internet at high speed or via broadband. With the increased availability of such connections, which allow the transmission of larger amounts of data, including larger pictures at higher resolution, and improved audio, to …