The Listening Post

We examine why the US media are struggling to objectively cover the issues around Obama's Affordable Care Act. Also on Listening Post, the role of the media onmbudsman.

A look at Israel's English language news channel, its mission and its prospects of finding an audience.

How Iran's new media-savvy president tried to use the UN General Assembly gathering to reshape the country's image.

Light years away from letters to the editor, user-generated content is changing the face of news.

On the Listening Post: More than a decade after the war in Iraq, have global media outlets learnt to look beyond the spin? Presidents, propaganda and channelling the media to get the message out - a look at the similarities and differences between Syria in 2013 and Iraq 10 years ago. Plus, Afghanistan's changing media landscape.

Chile has just marked the 40th anniversary of the military coup that ousted the democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, replacing him with Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who would rule the country for the next 18 years. Over the decades, the anniversary has come and gone with little mention in Chile's media but this year was different.Mainstream news outlets unleashed a deluge of memory, breaking through the previously self-imposed limits of what television channels would say and show about the Pinochet era and their apparent complicity in his dictatorship. Also on Listening Post: Norway's new, slow, reality TV fad. The Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro went to Oslo to find out why Norwegians are tuning in to Slow TV.

Weapons inspectors, WMDs and calls for intervention - have journalists already forgotten the lessons from Iraq? Plus, journalism reinvented: the challenges of covering the Syrian war from afar.

This past year, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world how our lives online are now available to any agency with the technology and the temptation to tap into them. This revelation has come decades after one thinker theorised about the way that technology would penetrate our daily existence in ways that few could have predicted. You may have never heard of Marshall McLuhan, but you have probably heard his most widely quoted dictum: "The medium is the message."

On August 21, Bradley Manning, the US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison having been convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. This is one of the latest developments in the ongoing story of secrecy and surveillance in Barack Obama's America. When we first took an extended look at the White House's war on whistleblowers a year ago, little did we know that there was another figure waiting in the wings, about to make political history. Edward Snowden took the stage in June 2013, revealing the sweeping extent of the NSA's surveillance programme. He has gone down as one of US' most important whistleblowers of all time, becoming the seventh person to be charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, more than double the number of prosecutions of all previous presidential administrations combined. For the most part, coverage of this story by the US mainstream media has been interesting, to say the least.

This week we are running a film that first aired on Al Jazeera English six months ago, on another one of Al Jazeera English programmes, Witness. It is the story of two Russian bloggers, Sergei Mukhamedov and Irina Gundareva, who use their blogs to expose corruption and challenge the established order in the different areas in which they live. Mukhamedov is based in Moscow and says he set up his LiveJournal blog to skirt the restrictions on freedom of expression put in place by President Vladimir Putin. Usually one step ahead on a story than mainstream journalists, his blog has been credited with raising issues that matter to ordinary Russian citizens. Irina Gundareva is an investigative journalist based in Siberia and when editors at her newspaper refuse to run her pieces on corruption and injustice, she takes to her blog to get her story out there.

Caught in the crosshairs of conflict, what challenges do journalists working in the Middle East and North Africa face?

As presidential elections were held in the African nation, an intense political battle played out across the country's airwaves. Also on Listening Post: We have been tracking the media story in Turkey for some time now and this week we take an even closer look with a long-form interview with one of the country's most critical journalists Yavuz Bayder.

We examine the global media's swing from impending death in South Africa to anticipated birth in the UK. We speak to CBC Foreign Correspondent Susan Ormiston; Catherine Mayer, Europe editor for Time Magazine; NOS (Netherlands) correspondent Arjen Van Der Horst; and Stefano Radaelli, senior researcher for Media Tenor (South Africa). In our feature: Sixty years ago this week North and South Korea called a truce to end their war but uneasy peace has left not only a demilitarised zone but an information blockade. The Listening Post's Gouri Sharma investigates citizen journalist defectors who help shed light on a shuttered nation.

Why has the Egyptian media landscape become increasingly polarised after Morsi's ouster? This week, our News Divide explores the media aftermath of the Egyptian coup. Our weekly feature takes us as close as the media can get to the infamous military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay – a place where inmates are held not only in legal limbo, but also in media quarantine. The Listening Post's Nic Muirhead examines how far the US government will go to keep Guantanamo invisible and its inmates faceless, even while journalists and campaigners fight to bring their stories to light.

Examining Mohamed Morsi's relationship with the media and the state of journalism under Muslim Brotherhood rule.