Media

"You have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him," writes Roy Greenslade. "How else can we explain the extraordinary unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?" Murdoch publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and none "has dared to croon the anti-war tune.

As the so-called general strike against Venezuelean President Hugo Chavez comes to an end, Venezuelan television will begin broadcasting advertising again. For the two months of the strike, "the only commercials on Venezuelan TV were the opposition's relentless barrage of powerful and often witty

"Readers have a right to assume that what they read on the letters page is not canned public relations material," Boston Globe Editorial Page Editor Renee Loth said. Responding to unknowingly running GOP "astroturf" form letters, the Globe is instituting a new policy to "confirm original authorship on any letter that could be part of an organized campaign." Globe Ombudsman Christine Chinlund writes that while readers may find the fake grassroots letters-to-the-editor offensive, in political campaigning circles, there is bipartisan support.

The Columbia Journalism Review's Neil Hickey ponders the impact that cable TV is having on news coverage. "The big story in cable news is the effect that supercharged competition is having on the quality of the prime time cable news schedule. All three networks are battling with the same weapons: talk, opinion, punditry, debate - not to mention the psychedelic, color-saturated graphics, a rataplan of computer-generated sound and screens so crowded with info-bits, including a traveling zipper of text across the bottom, that they look like pinball machines in a penny arcade. ...