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Our first post in an ongoing series exploring the transformation of journalism and what that means for democracy. Journalist and media critic Anne Elizabeth Moore describes the forces that are inadvertently silencing political speech in the United States. Sometimes, accidental policy can do a lot of damage. In the spring of 2006, Time-Warner, the largest…

In what we would describe as an old fashioned case of narrow legal analysis getting in the way of common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court has today seen fit to overturn several longstanding controls over the amount of money that large corporate interests and unions can spend to influence elections. Because it’s not like campaign…

The pervasive influence of drug cartels in Mexico is, by now, a fixture in the media and public imagination. Since the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s tenure as President of Mexico, his administration has taken a more aggressive stance against the Mexican drug cartels. During Calderón’s presidency there has been increased violence especially in the cities…

Contrary to what its name may imply, “flexians” — the subject of the anthropologist and public policy scholar Janine Wedel’s stimulating new book Shadow Elite— are not alien beings from an episode of Star Trek. Rather, they are a relatively new, distinctly terrestrial constellation of actors who are remolding the landscape of global governance. Emblematic…

Whether the global snapshot provided in Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World assessment characterizes the 2010 results as a “declining trend” or a “stagnation” in global democracy, the report’s outlook is certainly bleak. Good news was hard to find in Freedom of the World 2010. Arch Puddington, Freedom House’s director of research, spoke Tuesday…

In the South Pacific, I found a case study in modern censorship, as Fiji’s three-year-old military government collides with a once free local press, an emerging blogging culture and an ambivalent international community. Some basic facts are contested, but it is clear that free expression in Fiji is under intense pressure, in a sharp departure…