I am 23. I have worked in the press in the city of Vladivostok for seven years. I live in Vladimir Putin’s Age. Sometimes I ask myself: “What will I tell my grandkids about these times?” I will tell them that in 2006, when I had just turned 18, the famous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in full daylight. And her death sent a clear message to all independent media in Russia. “Stop writing for newspapers. Find another job. Journalists are being killed in Russia.” That’s what my relatives and friends who remember life in the former Soviet Union and what it was like to criticize the authorities often tell me.

The Pentagon’s defiant pledge to stick with the Rush Limbaugh show, no matter what, bumps up against a few hard and insulting realities. The Armed Forces Network that carries the Limbaugh show is not a private business that can do whatever it pleases with its money, personnel and policy. Every penny of the armed forces’ bloated budget comes from taxpayers. And since the military is not a democracy, and decisions are made top down, there was never any chance that taxpayers would have any say about the use of their money to subsidize the blatant bias of one radio jock.

Should yoga come with a warning? Practicing yoga can be injurious to health. The New York Times seems to think so. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class,” says yoga guru Glenn Black in a five-page magazine story How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body by its science writer William Broad. It has unleashed such a storm of protests, the site had to stop accepting comments on the story.

In the last decade, a string of corporate-owned as well as smaller, independent publications have closed their doors, a phenomenon that has jolted Spanish-language media publishers and editors to embrace more bilingual and bicultural content.

Bloggers in Oregon, watch out. That’s because this month an Oregon court ruled that bloggers do not have same protection as the “media.” This ruling emerged when Crystal Cox, a blogger, was accused of defaming Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick on her blog. Padrick sued and the court found that Cox was not protected under the state’s media shield law. This decision has implications for bloggers around the country.

In the wake of the end of the Iraq war, U.S. ethnic media are taking a sober look at the last nine years of American military intervention in Iraq, and the meaning of the war in each of their communities. The Iraq war will be remembered as "an incomprehensible war whose repercussions will continue for a long time," according an editorial in Los Angeles-based Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, looking back at the eight-and-a-half years of U.S. military intervention in Iraq that ended last week.

It is by no means a novel endeavor to denounce conservative media outlets for their often sinister operating practices and wanton dissemination of agenda-driven, sensationalist propaganda, which they distribute rather brazenly under the guise of “factual news.” The rather less-than-ideal qualities of institutions such as Fox News Channel, the cable news channel owned by the Murdoch media leviathan, News Corporation, seem almost so obvious as to make writing about them largely redundant. Yet Fox News Channel has managed to eclipse other cable news networks in popularity for the better part of a decade. 

Before the  conservative Tea Party made a pun out of American politics, emptying out histories of collective struggle and liquidating the American social safety net in one jubilant protest (because chucking valuable resources into the Boston Harbor is mythical and fun), there was Sally Quinn. The Washington Post  moderator and writer for the “On Faith” site and “The Party” column (which the Post killed in print in February 2010) and wife of the Post’s former Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee, Sally Quinn has always felt comfortable occupying that blurry nether-zone between serious journalism and social entertainment, between party politics and festive gatherings involving large numbers of influential politicians. 

Edward R. Murrow’s famed “Good Night, and Good Luck” broadcast—a scathing éxpose of Senator Joseph McCarthy capped with Shakespearean verse—is the archetype for media-based confrontation and virtually unimaginable when viewed through the lens of today’s complex media landscape. The event stood so fatefully on the precipice of history that Murrow, who was torn over using his hallowed news program for editorial purposes, nearly collapsed after he signed off the air.

The continued popularity of "fake" news.