We are the news.

I don't mean "we" as in the public. I'm talking about journalists.

Last week, CNN's Matthew Chance and some 30 of his colleagues were set free after Libyan gunmen held them inside Tripoli's Rixos...

Lunauna

I'm one call away from a phone hacker.

Most journalists who have a reasonable source list also either know someone or they know someone who knows someone they could contact if they wanted to hack into...

Donald Trump and Glenn Beck are socialists.

So are the Kardashians. All of them. And probably Anthony Weiner.

In fact, they may be "entrenched" everywhere, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy once said about communists, "no longer [just] a creeping threat...but a racing doom."

Don't take...

Next time you've got mail, you better check it carefully. And not just if you're one of Anthony Weiner's sexting partners.

Could someone with access to your private account consider its contents obscene? Lewd? Too sexually descriptive? And decide to take it down?

Yes.

The digital taste police are...

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard...

OldMaison Flickr

"Passion was a quality she never lost," CBS' Harley Carnes said today about Elizabeth Taylor.

No kidding. I got a glimpse of that in action.

I'd seen Ms. Taylor a few times at...

Mediabistro

They kissed us in Tahrir Square but did they really mean it?

Since you can't smooch Facebook or Twitter, which also got a lot of the English-language placard credit from the Egyptian citizens who...

A despot, secure for many years in the brutal exercise of his power through repression, tainted elections and close association with the United States, suddenly finds himself barely clinging to office. A populist momentum has arisen in the streets in one of those human waves of emotion that seems to...

Dr. Harvey Purtz had to bury his son, Chris, last June. Then he tried to bury an unpleasant moment of Chris' past. But a free press and the permanence of stories on the internet have overwhelmed the Fresno podiatrist in a sad debate where principal and compassion clash.

"I was...

"We are transparency activists," says WikiLeaks' elegantly rumpled Julian Assange.

Except about the still-mysterious WikiLeaks, and perhaps the social personality quirks of its leader, who may or may not be the Silvio Berlusconi of whistle-blowing.

Reading the copious WikiLeaks press, I get the sense that lots of...

flattop341

Cowering under my jeep on a side road in San Salvador, caught in a vicious crossfire between guerrillas and Salvadoran soldiers, I was thinking survival, not historical context.

A bullet ricocheted off the pavement...

bobster855

When you open the cultural door to possibilities, you can't have a bouncer there...

Tony Buser

Is Obama heading for a wreck?

Here's what we've come to: more people would rather share their home with a ghost in exchange for free rent than support Barack Obama's policies.

OK, it's...

It's no surprise that we've come to this: there's a family for sale on the Internet.

No, these aren't hostages held by Somali pirates or advertised on a Craigslist adult S&M posting. I'm...

United Nations Development Programme Flickr

"On my way to the hospital with a girl whose tongue was bitten off when she was raped."

"She was choked so hard that all the blood vessels in her...

Flickr

I won't Iditarod my way into the spectacle of Sarah Palin appropriating feminism as her very own dogma. But it's just one recent example of women having what can be most diplomatically described as...

Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times' often heroic international journalist, has stuck his inquisitive snout into dangerous situations throughout his career.

But admitting that there's a white reporter's burden in writing about...

Wednesday was Social Media Day (distinct from an anti-social day). But one of the bigger meet-ups in San Francisco happened IRL (in real life), not in some digital chat room or hashtag hang-out.

So...

Remember that "one world" harmony and tolerance wave that washed over 53 percent of Americans when Barack Obama was elected? Lately it seems to have become particularly polluted.

Walking the alleyways of Chinatown, you can hear the clacking sounds of gambling tiles coming out of back windows. It's a pleasurable little sensory experience of the neighborhood...