Journalism

In an interview with Foreign Policy, former Newsweek Baghdad bureau chief Rod Nordland said the situation in Iraq is "a lot worse ... than is reported. The administration does a great job of managing the news." He added, "The military has started censored many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously.

"Next time you see an 'exclusive' tag on a story about state politics, stop and have a closer look. The chances are that the story, far from being a feat of journalistic endeavor, is what we call in the trade 'a drop,'" writes Anne Davies in the Sydney Morning Herald. "You'll be able to tell it's a drop because it's likely to quote one side of politics only. This is often a condition of the drop." Drops, especially those in Sunday papers, help politicians influence the week's media agenda.

Archived internal BBC documents from the 1980's, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph under Freedom of Information legislation, reveal that the British spy service, MI5, was used to vet existing and potential staff at the public broadcaster. The paper reported that the documents revealed that "at one stage it [MI5] was responsible for vetting 6300 BBC posts - almost a third of the total workforce." The BBC adopted "categorical denial" as its "defensive strategy" to deflect questions about the practice by unions.