Staffing cuts and declining circulation are hitting leading newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune. "If newspapers take the shortsighted, short-term approach to tighter budgets by whittling away at investigative reporting, others outside the industry - such as blogs and radio - likely will take up the slack, and newspapers' decline will accelerate," writes Editor and Publisher editor Steve Outing. Newsrooms "have become the morgues they so closely resemble, filled with ghosts of the departed and those who await the next ax to fall," writes Kathleen Parker. "But to those in the trenches, cutting staff is exactly the wrong solution, more like a self-inflicted wound trending toward suicide than a remedy. By cutting newsroom staffs, the corporate suits are reducing the likelihood that papers can do what makes them necessary."

The British Government has warned media outlets against publishing further details of a leaked memo of an April 16, 2004 meeting at which George W. Bush allegedly told Tony Blair he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. The Mirror quoted an anonymous source who stated that Bush "made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem." At the time US forces were attacking the Iraqi town of Fallujah. "The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over U.S. claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors," The Mirror reported. Following the original report, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith warned news outlets that publication of any further details from the memo would be treated as a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

In Denver, Sacramento, Atlanta and Cleveland, radio stations owned by the Gannett media conglomerate have adopted "advertainment" - a new programming format that consists of "hybrid shows, which mix entertainment with commercial content (in addition to regular commercial breaks)." In Minneapolis, Gannett affiliate KARE plans this spring to "revamp its chatty mid-morning talk show 'Today,' and put much of that happy talk up for sale," writes Deborah Caulfield Rybak. "Advertisers will pay $2,000 to $2,500 for 5-minute segments on the show. ... 'I am aghast,' said University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley, who at first thought a reporter was kidding about the new format. 'This is the logical extension of the whole pernicious practice of infomercials. If viewers are accustomed to getting [talk show] programming in a very different way, to suddenly change the rules on them isn't fair.'"

Technologically, the news media are vastly more advanced than it was during the Vietnam war, but commercial and political factors have "kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media," write Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner. A study done during the Vietnam war found that CBS devoted 91 minutes per month to reporting on Vietnam, whereas U.S. networks this year gave Iraq only 55 minutes per month. Other gaps in reporting include the following:

• "Dead troops are invisible. ... Over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran 'almost no pictures' of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners."
• "Major newspapers have cut back on the size of their Baghdad bureaus, with some closing them or allowing them to go unstaffed for stretches."
• "Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned to single units."
• "Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks."

Brussels, home to the European Commission, has also become home to "over 15,000 lobbyists (more than one for every European Commission official) but just 10 per cent of these represent environmental and social groups," according to a recently-released report. "A massive industry of corporate lobbying has grown up in Brussels with overwhelming influence on European trade policy. Yet the relationship between the European Commission and the corporate lobby is almost entirely unregulated, unaccountable and conducted behind closed doors," says Dave Timms of the UK-based World Development Movement, one of the groups that produced the report.