In March 2005, kidnapped Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was on her way to Baghdad airport after her captors freed her. At a U.S. checkpoint, soldiers opened fire, wounding her and killing Italian secret service agent Nicola Capilari.

Italy charged Mario Lozano in absentia after the Bush administration refused to turn him over. An Italian court has dropped the charges, saying it had no jurisdiction. Sgrena plans to appeal that decision.

From the Tyee:

Journalism faces a crisis around the world and unless it's fixed, society is in big trouble, American scholar and media activist Robert McChesney says.

"The market's not going to solve the problem.... The technology's not going to rescue us."

Great journalism requires resources, institutional support, well-paid journalists and competition, McChesney told an audience at the Simon Fraser University downtown campus Saturday.

Creating institutions that can produce great journalism is going to take "enlightened, engaged, creative policy-making," he said.

"Short of that, we'll never be a free society."

He walked out of a CBS 60 Minutes interview on Sunday after host Leslie Stahl asked him about his wife Cecilia.

It's useful to know the interview was conducted before their divorce became public on Oct. 18.

The recently departed press secretary from the Bush White House spoke at the American Magazine Conference. Here are some observations recorded by Jim Bercovici of Portolio.com's Mixed Media blog: (h/t to Romenesko)

On the newspaper business: "The newspapers have to realize that they are a niche market and the one thing they can do better than anyone else is analysis. As a guy who spent the majority of his career in print media and loves writing, it scares me that newspapers are in the state they're in."

On the effects of the 24-hour-news cycle on journalism: "There are structural problems right now that make it very difficult to cover the White House the way it should be covered....People are trying to keep up with the electronic media. So what happens is you end up thinking, what can I do quickly and what can I do that people are going to watch? ....If you're doing it in real time, you can get real stupid." ...

On his alma mater, Fox News: "There's perceived bias on the part of Fox because they don't treat conservatives as knuckle-dragging morons....I think the rap on Fox having a bias is an unfair one. My sense is rather than grousing with a winning formula, people ought to learn from them."

Maybe. Heck, maybe even probably (do I hear an 'undoubtedly'?). Their track record on being skeptical of U.S. government claims about adversaries does not inspire optimism, writes Lawrence Martin.

The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson on the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's antipathy towards the news media and its roots in the Conservative mindset.

Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon had this exchange with a reader over the watchdog role of newspapers during an online chat about the new features in the Saturday paper: