• As Papers Struggle, News Is Cut and the Focus Turns Local - NYTimes.com
  Pew study shows major cuts in foreign news
  (tags: USA news journalism global pew NYT)
• Pew Research Center: The Changing Newsroom: Gains and Losses in Today's Papers
  (tags: pew journalism news future USA)

The respected US TV News analyst Andrew Tyndall says Iraq is disappearing from US screens.

It started last September, when Gen David Petraeus testified to Congress that the so-called surge, the US troop reinforcement, had been accompanied by a moderation in Iraq's sectarian violence. President George Bush declared the build-up a success and announced a timetable for the surge to be reversed.

That was when that light was switched off. In the nine months since Petraeus testified, the three networks' nightly newscasts combined have devoted a total of 249 minutes to the Iraq War. That is an average of six minutes a week, in contrast to a 26 minute average for the entire previous five year period.

• FT.com / - The new tsars of Russian TV
  The production may look western but the political influence is as strong as ever
  (tags: russai TV news journalism FoE)
• FT.com - Communications is key in disaster relief
  (tags: bbc crisis FT communication)

(Hmmmm. You remember where we started three days ago....)

In 2006, the EBU held a conference in Budapest called "From Secret Service to Public Service" - again in support of the state broadcaster struggling to free itself of political influence.
Today MTV (Magyar TV) is about to move - from the old stock exchange building close to Parliament, across the Danube to a new digital HQ. The geographical symbolism however may be stronger than the reality. Funding is still short and there is no agreement on who the next President of the broadcaster should be.

Leading a public broadcaster can be a perilous occupation, as we know. Take France for example. At the start of 2008 President Sarkozy decided there should be no advertising on French public television. (For British readers, it's common for public broadcasters to take advertising as well as public funds in other parts of the world). This would obviously leave a big funding gap for France Television to fill. There have been promises of staged funding and special grants to help bridge the problem - but no agreement.

Then on Monday Sarkozy criticised the broadcaster saying he could see no difference between what they did and what the commercial channels did (by implication - questioning the value of the public funding). This follows increasingly tense relations between France Television and the government. Sarkozy recently said in future he would personally appoint the President of the Public Broadcaster - in the past it was left to the independent regulator.

So today the Director General Patrick de Carolis hit back. In an article in Le Figaro he said: "When someone says that there are no differences between public and private programming, I find that false, stupid and ... profoundly unjust. In the last three years we have tried hard to make respectable television and I know that we are respected.'' And he suggested if the funding needed wasn't agreed by September he would resign.

He may not be given the choice. Calling the President "stupid" is not usually career enhancing.

Two themes here: the independence of public broadcasting under attack by politicians who do not respect it (acknowledging of course that all PSB's need to reform and need to be accountable).

And a wider battle about the right balance in the future of the media between the market and public intervention. In the UK, it's played out through OfCom reviews which are gentlemanly in comparison with other countries. Just across the channel, it's an altogether tougher game.

(Disclosure: I sit on the Executive Board of the EBU with Patrick de Carolis)