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David Barboza tells the story of Tan Guocheng in a continuation of exceptional journalism following workers like Yuan Yangdong on a production line at Foxconn and now Guocheng on a production line at Honda. Young migrant workers caught up in the first wave of urbanization in China and in the middle of sweeping change. Guocheng stops a production line and leads a strike at a Honda plant in China which is followed by Honda increasing wages by 32%.

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U.S. president Obama is critical of the role played by the media in the 2016 election campaign in a keynote speech at a journalism dinner for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. Obama said lately " I spend a lot of time reflecting on how this system- how this crazy system of self-government works. How we can make it work. And this is as important to making it work as anything. People getting information they can trust and that has substance and truth and facts behind it." He added that "what we are seeing right now does corrode our democracy and our society. When our elected officials and political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn't matter what is true or not, that makes it impossible for us to make decisions on behalf of future generations." On the way Donald Trump's campaign has lowered the level of public debate Obama had this to say- referring indirectly to the NYT report of over $1.9 billion of free television coverage given to Donald Trump by the media- the country, "would be better servedif billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability, especially when the politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can't keep.. and there are reporters here who know they can't keep them." The wall between the U.S. and Mexico to be built with Mexico's financing, the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, the 45% tariff on imports from China, reducing support for NATO, are some of the campaign themes used to appeal to disaffected voters by Mr. Trump in the election, which are some of the puzzling ways in which the election campaign for 2016 has evolved- without proper media scrutiny, and what some critics say panders to ratings at a time of shrinking television staffs and budgets. ...

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Three young labor activists outside the UAW union helped UAW leader Shawn Fain orchestrate the strategy of selective walkouts, putting the worker demands in the public consciousness, and influencing public opinion. one has helped organize workers at VW plants, another is a lawyer who has put questions to Mr. Trump, and and the third is a journalist who has covered the strike and advised the UAW. These strategies presented the facts that labor was suffering low wages during a cost of living crisis. Today about 146,000 workers in the US are covered by UAW out of one million employed in automobile plants, a small fraction.

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Ted Koppel, managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" news program from 1980 to 2005, says it brings sadness to see the television networks drowning viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their entrenched biases. Its good financially for the networks, he says, but not good for the American republic. He acknowledges the realities of today's journalism- scores of media options, a million or more clusters of consumers, who are harvesting as he puts it, information and news from like-minded providers. That is the way news and information is served up nowadays. And as he points out the shift of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. At the same time talk is cheap, and the tendency for strongly held but unsubstantiated views is very prevalent. And yet the need for clear unobjective reporting is greater today than ever before. Covering news in other countries is now more needed than before, but foreign bureaus are expensive and such news harder to collect. As a result many foreign bureaus have seen severe cuts or were closed. Koppel cites Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."...

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There was a time during the Apartheid days in South Africa when diplomats and other visitors took great risks to help South Africans. Haigh is one of the Australians who did his best to help those who were fighting Apartheid and its segregation of black people. He was a junior diplomat at the Australian mission in Pretoria when he arrived in 1976 with riots in Soweto, outside Johannesburg. He helped Steve Woods, the journalist in "Cry Freedom," a British dissident flee the country.

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A Fox News journalist, Heather Nauert, is selected as the next UN ambassador by president Trump. She succeeds Nikki Haley. Nauert was State Department spokesman, and is one of many Fox News personalities selected by president Trump.

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Trump at 77 has serious issues of age for the US presidency says Frank Bruni, professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University. Age is a very personal journey, says one expert, and it depends on how good you are taking care of yourself. On this score Trump has serious drawbacks. Nutrition matters, exercise matters. Bruni says Trump's diet is garbage, and he is overweight. Biden is only 3 years older than Trump, and he is known for healthy eating habits and regular exercise. This is a serious difference that the press has paid little attention to. Another factor in aging is doing something for a purpose in life that extends beyond one's self. Trump's obsessive attention to himself means there is a lack of purpose beyond one's own egoistic pursuit of office which acts as a negative factor in aging.

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American journalist Bob Schieffer spent 46 years with CBS. He was host of the news show on CBS "Face the Nation" for 24 years. Schieffer says he made the biggest impression on the American public only in the last 12 years since turning 65. During these 12 years he moderated several presidential debates, put CBS at the highest level of viewership as other leading journalists retired, and published a best selling memoir, "This Just In." Things were not expected to turn out this way. In 2003 Mr. Schieffer found out he had bladder cancer, and he says ever since he saw things differently- everything appeared as a temporary assignment. In 2005 he announced he would retire in 2007, when he was 70. Each year after that CBS persuaded him to stay. He replaced Dan Rather for "CBS Evening News" in 2005, and gave it solid ratings till he stepped down in 2007. Schieffer is the same person he was many years ago for people who remember him from CBS since 1982, as the chief Washington correspondent. It is this power of experience, of being always there, that attracts viewers who want to hear about what Bob Schieffer finds important, with an authentic voice asking the right questions....

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For a long time CNN struggled with how it could avoid the peaks and valleys of viewer attention for its news programs- with a jump in viewers when a big news event happens and then a fall in viewers when not much is happening. Programs like Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown," have helped CNN tackle this problem. At first in 2012 and early 2013 when Bourdain's name came up in discussions at CNN for such a show, there was much disagreement about it, as some did not see the merits of bringing in someone who is not a journalist. By 2012 Bourdain had achieved prominence with his program on food "no Reservations," on Travel Channel. CNN's approach was to have a non-journalist take people around the world and tell stories about life and culture of the country and its people, in unique restaurant settings. By having a doumentary travel series CNN hoped to use the flexibility to delay a show if a news event broke out. Many viewers take tips on travel from the show. It has an enthusiastic following, thanks partly to Bourdain's style which is informal, relaxed, and jovial. Especially how he doesn't take himself seriously, and not thinking too much about Obama's guest appearance on the show at a small restaurant in Vietnam, where Bourdain picks up the tab of $6. That has won him over 800,000 viewers consistently from the 1st to the seventh season of the show. ...

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Patrick Kingsley of the NYT provides this report from Turkey. He talks to the wife of a journalist jailed in the recent crackdown on media by president Erdogan. He also talks to a loyalist of Erdogan, a muhtar, who says he resisted army troops during a coup attempt. Beyond the different perspectives on events is a different conception of Turkey, one that sees Turkey in the sense of a liberal democracy with European values, and the other of a Islamic society with nationalist views. Views that coexisted in Turkey's subconscious mind upto this time, but are now in conflict. 

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A look back through Lyrarc at how rainforest deforestation was taking place in 2007 and amazing UN pictures of maps of Borneo island for 2000, 2005, 2020 showing how deforestation was taking out most of Borneo's rainforest by 2020. This is a call to action from Lyrarc after the pledge of Brazil, Russia, China, India, US, Indonesia to stop deforestation at the COP26 Glasgow.  This report from Surabaya, Indonesia, by Tom Wright, in the July 3, 2007, Wall Street Journal WSJ shows how this was extensive deforestation of one of the few remaining rainforests on the planet earth was taking place and is a must read for everyone. The links show work by a British ecologist journalist who fought hard to prevent continued deforestation in Sarawak, Malaysia, where she grew up as a child when her father was a colonial period police officer in that region. She could see the disappearing canopy in the rainforest and her protests were carried out from the outside.  ...

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This story by Fiona Macdonald of BBC is from the BBC Britain series to be found on the Britain homepage.  It has some remarkable poems that help one deal with the fears of everyday life, how to cross these barriers that one comes across with different feelings of both hope and despair, how to bend with them and come out healing and growing. It shows how poetry can help bring a calmer soother element into our busy and sometimes frantic lives. Poetry that is read for its deeper subtle meaning with pauses and time to reflect on the words, each word gently,and let it gradually sink into our subconscious minds. The results can be amazing if it is read the right way, slowly, and not the way we read journalism, news reports, prose or essays. It is well worth reading the poems given here by Fiona Macdonald, even reading one can be soothing and calming in its effect.

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Karen Elliott House, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and expert reporting from Saudi Arabia, in 2007. You can follow her reports in the Elliott House group and link.

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Tsuneo Kita, is the leader of Japan's largest business daily newspaper, the Nikkei. Kita had stated his dream of buying the Financial Times, Britain's largest business newspaper, many years back. He made the best offer of $1.32 billion in cash for the paper to complete the acquisition. Because of ties between the two newspapers and reporting by FT carried in the Nikkei newspaper, FT Group decided to give Nikkei Inc first rights to bid for the paper. The Nikkei is not publicly listed, and a large part of its shares owned by employees. Print still works in Japan and the morning edition has 3 million subscribers. Kita moved to build the digital business early along with efforts at the FT and the Wall Street Journal. A paid website was started in 2010 for the Nikkei and it has 430,000 online subscribers. Kita is a journalist who joined Nikkei Inc. straight out of Keio University in 1971. He was senior editor in New York and Tokyo. Nikkei Inc. was able to make the acquisiton because of its financial strength. It has $830 million in cash on hand and a similiar amount of liquid assets. Profits are modest- 10 billion yen in profit on 301 billion yen revenue in 2014. Kita says he will keep the FT Bureaus intact and not merge them with Nikkei Inc. bureaus. He wants to preserve the editorial independence of the Financial Times, and sees the paper as part of a publishing group covering a broader region of Europe, the U.S. and Asia....

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WSJ report on how the much awaited debate went with Harris in words and body language defining Trump, and the moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis doing something that had not happened before by correcting misstatement of facts on the spot. Misstatement of facts in a society that bases itself on science and scientific observation may be the defining feature of this lost decade, when little was done by the educated reporters and the journalism community about it- till now. Yet this is only the beginning in a long road back for America.

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This story in the WP on the anonymous source of the Panama Papers and his initial contacts with Bastian Obermayer of the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, complements a story in the NYT about the source.

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Bill Keller describes the diversity of news sources available today from the BBC and Guardian websites to Al Jazeera and websites of other foreign news organizations. Radio stations are another source. Yet this diversity exists with one troubling factor- the decline in foreign news bureaus and experienced journalists covering events in distant locations. As a result many of the important foreign events are now covered by free lance journalists who take many risks and are still underpaid. Without experienced journalists it becomes more difficult to sort out the good information from the bad or poorly researched, and the average reader facing a glut of information or misinformation is faced with the prospect of being as uninformed as before or worse misinformed. Keller gives the example of NYT's journalist C. J. Chivers who carefully researched information from a UN report- compass bearings for two chemical rockets- to show that the chemical weapons attack in Syria originated with the Assad military forces in Damascus. This was after much of the media went with the stories spread by different sources that there were doubts about who was responsible. Unusual and cause for concern is that many governments around the world may have found the ambiguity useful by taking off some of the moral pressure for action, of having to intervene so soon after the Bush invasion of Iraq....

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Armin Laschet is an affable journalist from Aachen, Germany. He is premier in North Rhine Westphalia in a coalition with the FDP. He is seen as a likable person who can win over others. Support from the Greens or the FDP in a future coalition is seen as one way to form a government. He was part of the Pizza Connection, a group of Christian Democrats and Greens who met in the wine cellar of an Italian restaurant in Bonn, to pull together people in areas that they agree. He has the dual qualities of being on Merkel's side in the crises she faced and also having a nuanced approach to tough issues to bring together different people.

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Pulitzer prize winning journalist reporting on the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, Karen Elliott House, describes the changes in Saudi society and politics against the backdrop of the changes in the Middle East. Her exceptional reporting and insights provide a look into the Middle East at a time when young people make up the largest demographic and are looking for jobs and economic opportunity, with political structures lagging far behind in meeting the growing aspirations. The larger backdrop of the region extends into South Asia, with large Muslim populations unable to make the right choices for freedom and economic progress because of internal divisions, widespread illiteracy and lack of education of the rural population, and poor leadership. The lag affects western society in different ways, including the threat of terrorism, sporadic involvement in the region's conflicts, and a sense of not being able to do the right thing by its own ideals.