Media

At first glance, the new rule approved last month by the Federal Communications Commission requiring local television broadcasters to make public their records on political ad spending might seem revelatory. But in reality, it represents a very modest change to longstanding policy.

A global struggle for control of the internet is under way. At stake is nothing less than civil liberties, privacy and democracy itself. Electronic censorship and surveillance are on the rise -- not only in dictatorships but also in democracies. Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the internet through "like" buttons and universal logins -- giving them huge power over our online identities and activities. Companies are clashing with governments over how far the law should extend into private networks, platforms and devices.

Last Thursday, in Surrey, England, shortly after sunrise, British police arrested a fifty-seven-year-old retired Scotland Yard detective. He was the twenty-seventh person arrested in a bribery investigation known as Operation Elveden, which is the most opaque but arguably the most important of the multiple investigations of journalism and crime at News Corporation, the media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. has its headquarters in the United States and is the parent company of Fox News, among other properties.

When Chen Guangcheng departed the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Wednesday with apparent guarantees that he would lead a safe and productive life in his native land, it seemed that a major international crisis had been averted. In a startlingly short period of time, American and Chinese officials had hammered out an agreement that seemed to protect Chen, while preserving the bilateral relationship.

The "Shawshank Redemption" has nothing to do with China, but that hasn't kept social media censors from blocking the movie's title from searches on the country's most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.

Every news organization needs a social media strategy. Even China's government-controlled Xinhua News Agency now "tweets" news bulletins through Twitter-like microblogs called weibo -- through which more than 300 million users share details of their daily lives, jokes, gossip, and news.

This newspaper's parent company sold last week for $55 million, a staggering $460 million less than what it fetched in 2006. The plight of the company, which also owns the Daily News and Philly.com, reflects trends afflicting newspapers across the country, which continue to bleed revenue and jobs as readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. It seems that advertising-fueled newspapers, nearly the last institutional bastion of journalism, are not sustainable.

Can technology be autonomous? Does it lead a life of its own and operate independently of human guidance? From the French theologian Jacques Ellul to the Unabomber, this used to be widely accepted. Today, however, most historians and sociologists of technology dismiss it as naive and inaccurate.

Yet the world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.