The Media

     CIIS is keenly interested in the media, which are our main source of information about international affairs. We regularly call attention to the World Press Review, which does a splendid job of giving us different views on world developments as culled from the international press. We follow the activities of the International Press Institute, which defends press freedom in the many countries where honest reporters are threatened or even killed.
     There is good news. The James L. Knight Foundation has made generous grants to the International Center for Journalists to enable correspondents and editors to go the ex-Soviet Union and to Latin America; to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism; to the Robert C.Maynard Institute for Journalism Education; to the American Political Science Association; to the World Press Institute of St. Paul, MN; to the Independent Journalism Foundation, and to the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism.
     The Knight-Ridder Corporation owns DIALOG, which for twenty years (1970-90) put on line CIIS's old World Affairs Report (WAR), which analyzed the Soviet worldview and activities. The file has been transferred to Stanford's Green Library. We will soon give instructions on the way to download it.
     Ex oriente lux: light from the east, and more precisely from Qatar, the tiny state in the Persian Gulf where CIIS Fellow Paul Rich served for many years as education adviser. Tensions have risen seriously in Arab countries as the result of the military ties which have been etablished between Turkey and Israel with strong support from the Zionist lobby in the United States. The whole area needs a free exchange of information, and that is now being promoted by satellite TV station al-Jezira , which from Qatar can cover virtually all the Arab world. This is a most encouraging development, and we wish it every success.

Ronald Hilton - 09/26/98