Free Republic

Critics charge that the Macquarie purchase of American Consolidated Media is designed to silence critics of a Texas toll road project. Australian toll road giant Macquarie agreed Wednesday to purchase forty local newspapers, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma, for $80 million. Macquarie Bank is Australia's largest capital raising firm and has invested billions in purchasing roads in the US, Canada and UK. Most recently the company joined with Cintra Concesiones of Spain in a controversial 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road. Sal Costello, the leading opponent of toll road projects as head of the Texas Toll Party, says...

BEIJING, July 13 (Reuters) - China has moved for the second time this year to limit outside involvement in its electronic media, banning city and provincial broadcasters from even cooperating with foreign firms. One Chinese television company, Qinghai TV, said such regulations had caused it to cancel plans to work with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the China News Service and the People's Daily Online reported.

Guest columnistAmerican media should be more like the BBCBy Margaret T. GordonSpecial to The TimesIt is late July, 2003. American troops in Baghdad are said to have killed two sons of the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and many Iraqis ? as well as many Americans ? don't know whether to believe it, despite graphic photographs. Revelations over the past spring and early summer indicate that President Bush, knowingly or not ? and there is some question about which ? used information from faulty intelligence when he claimed in his State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium...