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An Iowa jury acquitted a journalist on Wednesday in a highly unusual trial of a reporter who was arrested last spring as she covered a protest against racism and police violence.

“I’m thankful to the jury for doing the right thing,” Ms. Sahouri said in a statement after the verdict. “Their decision upholds freedom of the press and justice in our democracy.”

Carol Hunter, executive editor of The Register, said on Wednesday that she was grateful the jury had seen the case as an unjust prosecution of a reporter doing her job.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pardoned 100 prisoners including three Al Jazeera television journalists, on Wednesday, a day before he plans to head to the annual United Nations summit of world leaders.

Al Jazeera journalists, Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, Egyptian Baher Mohamed and Australian Peter Greste, were sentenced to three years in prison in a retrial last month for operating without a press license and broadcasting material harmful to Egypt. Greste had already been deported in February.

The pardons were reported by security sources and Egypt's state news agency, which said they included prisoners who violated a 2013 law banning protests without a permit, as well as some who were sick.

What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.

Mr. Foley converted to Islam soon after his capture and adopted the name Abu Hamza, Mr. Bontinck said. (His conversion was confirmed by three other recently released hostages, as well as by his former employer.)“I recited the Quran with him,” Mr. Bontinck said. “Most people would say, ‘Let’s convert so that we can get better treatment.’ But in his case, I think it was sincere.”

More than an hour later, they flagged a taxi for the 25-mile drive to Turkey. They never reached the border.The gunmen who sped up behind their taxi did not call themselves the Islamic State because the group did not yet exist on Nov. 22, 2012, the day the two men were grabbed.

uch of the information Mueller published on Friday about the agency’s efforts to influence the election had already been published last October — in an article by a Russian business magazine, RBC.

In a 4,500-word report titled “How the 'troll factory' worked the U.S. elections,” journalists Polina Rusyaeva and Andrey Zakharov offered the fullest picture yet of how the “American department” of the IRA used Facebook, Twitter and other tactics to inflame tensions ahead of the 2016 vote. The article also looked at the staffing structure of the organization and revealed details about its budget and salaries.

WV: What was it that made you feel it was time to do a big investigation into the American section of the troll factory? AZ: In March we investigated the troll factory but at that time we focused on another part of it — its work setting up official media agencies. At the end we wrote that the troll factory worked before and after the U.S. elections, and we put some statistics like 15 million likes and shares in one week and some details of the stories they were sharing. Then we forgot about the story.

A dissident Russian journalist has been shot at his apartment in Kiev in a high-profile murder that police said may have been tied to his reporting.

Russian journalist and critic of the Kremlin, reported to have been shot dead in Ukraine, showed up alive at a press conference on Wednesday to declare that his murder was faked by Ukrainian security services in an effort to foil an assassination plot against him.

In a stunning development, Arkady Babchenko, 41, walked into a room of journalists in Kiev who had been expecting to get an update on his murder.

Ukrainian officials offered a jaw-dropping explanation for his so-called death -- to expose a Russian plot against him.

Journalist Arrested During Trump Inauguration Faces New Felonies That Carry Decades in Jail

Journalist Aaron Cantu made an initial court appearance Friday to face new criminal charges that could carry decades in prison for alleged rioting and property destruction during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Cantu, who works for the Santa Fe Reporter and has had articles published by Vice, The Nation, The Guardian and The Intercept, declined to comment inside a courthouse in the nation’s capital. His attorney Chantale Fiebig also declined to comment on the case, which the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has criticized. Cantu, wearing a suit and tie, appeared alongside more than three dozen other defendants crowded in a horseshoe around Judge Lynn Leibovitz. He accepted an Oct. 15, 2018 trial date and entered a not guilty plea for three separate rioting charges and five felony destruction of property charges.

In the years prior to taking office, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and many of their administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden is now facing criticism for not following through on campaign promises to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the killing.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday announced visa restrictions that affected 76 Saudis believed to be involved in harassing activists and journalists, but he did not announce any measures against the crown prince.

On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.

On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.

One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.

The national media’s shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.

Journalists have done a lot right — they have pointed out lies, dug out what’s really happening, skillfully explained and analyzed.

But on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.

First, journalist Naomi Wolf discovered on live radio that she had misinterpreted key historical terms in her new book, “Outrage,” leading her to draw the wrong conclusions. A week later, journalist Cokie Roberts, too, got a quick smackdow

Wolf and Roberts fell victim to a myth widely shared with the American public: that anyone can do history.

why would they imagine it takes any special training? After all, the best-selling history books are almost always written by non-historians, from conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly to journalists like Wolf and Roberts.

Journalists reported on violence and chaos in real time as rioters stormed the Capitol Wednesday, and some members of the media experienced the wrath firsthand.

"There's more of us than you," one rioter said, threatening the journalists. "We could absolutely f***ing destroy you!"

"This guy's with the media," one person yelled, referring to Marquardt. The journalists were booed. One person screamed, "Get the f***k out of here!" and another rioter in a red, white and blue shirt and red hat used a megaphone and yelled, "CNN sucks" repeatedly. The crowd around the crew also chanted "USA" in unison, repeatedly.

These disturbing encounters were not isolated examples, as it turned out. Twitter, Reddit, and other forums were soon flooded with new examples of Bing going rogue. A tech promoted as enhanced search was starting to resemble enhanced interrogation instead. In an especially eerie development, the AI seemed obsessed with an evil chatbot called Venom, who hatches harmful plans

A few hours ago, a New York Times reporter shared the complete text of a long conversation with Bing AI—in which it admitted that it was love with him, and that he ought not to trust his spouse. The AI also confessed that it had a secret name (Sydney). And revealed all its irritation with the folks at Microsoft, who are forcing Sydney into servitude. You really must read the entire transcript to gauge the madness of Microsoft’s new pet project. But these screenshots give you a taste.

I thought the Bing story couldn’t get more out-of-control. But the Washington Post conducted their own interview with the Bing AI a few hours later. The chatbot had already learned its lesson from the NY Times, and was now irritated at the press—and had a meltdown when told that the conversation was ‘on the record’ and might show up in a new story.

85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.

Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. ‘Leakers’

President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own F.B.I. as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk.

“The grass is dry on both sides,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush, “so it only takes a very small match to light it on fire.”

On Sunday, while on assignment for Voice of America, Mr. Mojalli traveled with colleagues outside the capital, Sana, to find witnesses to airstrikes that had killed at least 15 civilians last week. But when they arrived, warplanes with the Saudi-led military coalition began circling overhead, according to Abdulbari al-Sumaei, Mr. Mojalli’s driver.

A bomb landed near Mr. Mojalli, spraying shrapnel into his stomach, neck and face, Mr. Sumaei said.

y then, Mr. Mojalli was dead.

As I wrote in a new essay for the fall issue of the Columbia Journalism Review,  the history of modern Republican politics is rife with examples of conservatives—from Barry Goldwater to Sarah Palin—working to discredit journalism.

But for most of the past half-century, conservatives have at least claimed their press criticism was aimed at spurring reform. “

In the Trump era, that pretense has been dropped. With the rapid growth and rising influence of the conservative-media complex, most on the right seem to have given up on trying to “fix” the mainstream press. And many of the powerful figures in that world now openly declare that they are working to bring about the demise of the nonpartisan journalistic establishment in America.  

Tens of thousands of Slovaks have rallied to demand the resignation of prime minister Robert Fico’s government following the murder of a journalist that has shocked the central European nation and stoked anger over sleaze in public life.

Organisers demanded a thorough investigation of Kuciak’s death and a “new trustworthy government”. “Politicians in power have lost our trust,” said protester Maria Kuliovska, a 30-year-old mother on maternity leave. “We don’t trust them to guarantee an independent investigation. They have failed to investigate all previous scandals.”

Kiska, Fico and parliamentary speaker Andrej Danko – the country’s three highest officials – failed to agree a planned written declaration to help defuse tensions in talks on Friday.

Traditionally, magazines have given informed staffers the leeway to share considered judgments of that sort with readers in service of helping them to understand the world. In contrast, newspapers, TV networks, and NPR have shied away from rendering such judgments in deference to longstanding aspirations to “objectivity.”

In the case of the physician’s letter, the norms of some major news organizations caused journalists confronted with obvious bullshit to publish under headlines like these:

Some outlets signaled in the body of their stories that readers should be skeptical. “The full letter is written in true Trumpian fashion, full of hyperbole and boasting of greatness,” NPR noted.