Rory O'Connor

"Some time ago, in the last century and in what now seems like a personal universe that is far, far away," veteran newsman Danny Schechter writes in the foreword to his newest book, "I was dubbed "The News Dissector." The "Nom de Media Guerre," as Schechter puts it, gave his...

Excerpted from Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media.

Social media now accounts for nearly one quarter of all the time Americans spend online--the leading category by far, compared with less than ten percent for online games...

"Imagine... that you knew which sites -- or what news stories -- people you trust found useful and which they disliked," David Kirkpatrick wrote in the June 11, 2007 issue of Fortune magazine. "This isn't fantasy. Facebook might make it possible, and soon. Yes, the social-networking site college...

Google co-founder Larry Page is paranoid -- and justifiably so...

As the Associated Press reported this week, Page "has a Facebook fixation... When he replaced his mentor Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO last April, Page insisted that the company had to be more aggressive about countering the threat...

Rick Santorum went bowling again this week. When right-wing Rick dropped in to Pla-Mor Lanes in Chilton, it marked the fourth pre-primary visit to a Wisconsin bowling alley by a man who actually took Bowling 101 for credit while matriculating at Penn State.

In an interview about his...

One year ago, a revolution began in Egypt that still reverberates there -- as well as among other repressive rulers and regimes in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and beyond, including thousands of miles away in New York City, where "Occupy Wall Street" protests in turn took root and then...

I first met Jose Antonio Vargas in the fall of 2008, in the midst of the historic Obama campaign for the presidency. At the time, I was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of...

Over the past few years, the annual Personal Democracy Forum has emerged as one of the few truly essential gatherings of its type, and the recently concluded eighth PDF gathering was no exception.

Each year I go into the conference excited about one or more items on its crowded agenda,...

German theologian Martin Niemoller was a staunch anti-Communist who supported Hitler's rise to power -- at first. He later became disillusioned, however, and led a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 Niemoller was arrested for the crime of "not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement" and...

A unique husband and wife team, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have reported for decades on the issues and conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the spring of 1981 they received the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew and produced an exclusive news story for...

I often go to media conferences - such as this week's National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, where I'll finally have an opportunity to speak out about hate speech in the media, after years of proposing such a panel - but few media chatfests are...

By Rory O'Connor and Richard Bell

Tsunami is a Japanese word -- one sign of the island nation's intimate relationship with the destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds it. Despite the fact that the word is one of the few from the Japanese language to attain universal use, "tsunami"...

George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable -- such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. In Orwell's 1984, each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary had fewer words than the previous one, making it harder and harder...

For the second week in a row, a top executive of one of the leading international newspapers that recently collaborated with WikiLeaks recounted what it was like to work with the group's controversial founder Julian Assange.

Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian, detailed his experiences "on the hazards of...

What do Richard Nixon, Liu Xiaobo and Julian Assange have in common?

As lawyers for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Assange began preparing for a possible indictment by US authorities, two recent, unrelated but highly relevant news items caught my attention. The first involves the gift that keeps on giving...

A decade ago, I was in India, directing a documentary film about global poverty.

While shooting there, I met a mischievous, roly-poly researcher named Sugata Mitra, who was then working for NIIT, a billion-dollar Indian high tech firm with headquarters in New Delhi.

"So, you're...

Mr. President,

As the world waits to see just how badly we fare in Election 2010, it's not too early to look ahead to that all-important contest just around the corner -- Election 2012.

Here's my considered assessment: as Jon Stewart might put it, dude -...

We all know Bill O'Reilly is a good Catholic boy. After all, the top-rated Fox News (sic) Channel host took the title of his best selling A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity from Sister Mary Lurana, his third grade teacher at Saint Brigid's parochial school. Speaking as a schoolmate of...

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich...

On August 29, 2008, just prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, presidential candidate John McCain announced he had chosen Alaskan governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The surprising choice of the then little-known Palin captured the nation's attention; her status as just the second woman...