In his new book Fighting For The Press, author James Goodale, former chief counsel for The New York Times during the Pentagon Papers trial, looks back on the occasion of the trial's 40th anniversary at the press freedom issues that still exist in the US today.

In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Goodale blasts the Obama Administration, calling it the worst for press freedom in history. He compares the Pentagon papers trial to the current Wikileaks battle, saying:

“The biggest challenge today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks… [Assange will] go to jail for doing what every journalist does.” 

Julian Assange was charged with leaking national documents along with Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of having leaked a massive number of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Goodale argues that if Assange is indicted for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Obama would be violating the First Amendment.

In the Q&A that followed a lecture by the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger at the Sciences Po School of Journalism in Paris earlier this month, a student seated near the back of the intimate lecture theatre posed an inevitable question. To paraphrase: what would it take to get a job in your newsroom?

Rusbridger prefaced his response by congratulating the 40-odd assembled students for possessing enough grit to be pursuing a journalism education under present circumstances. He then conjured the image of a candidate who is excited about the challenges and opportunities inherent in this period of upheaval; a journalist who lives and breathes digital, has a head filled with inventive ideas, and ideally, is something of a data whisperer.

It seems as if these are exactly the kinds of graduates who will be turned out by the new Guardian News & Media/Cardiff University Masters in Journalism with Digital Media, which was announced in a press release on the Guardian’s website yesterday. The yearlong, London-based post-graduate programme has yet to receive official validation, but aims to convene its first class of students in September 2013.

A cache of leaked documents obtained by the Guardian appears to show that Televisa, Mexico’s largest television company, which has recently been at the centre of a protest movement against media bias in the lead-up to the July 1 presidential elections, has a history of selling its editorial line to political interests.

The documents, presumed to be several years old, include outlines of fees that the television network apparently charged in exchange for giving favourable coverage to former Mexico state governor Enrique Peña Nieto on its news and entertainment programmes. The cache also includes a PowerPoint presentation with the stated aim of ensuring that leftwing candidate Manuel López Obrador did not win the 2006 elections, wrote the Guardian’s Jo Tuckman in an article published on Thursday. Peña Nieto is presently the frontrunner – by a wide but shrinking margin – in Mexico’s presidential race. López Obrador, who lost the elections in 2006, is his closest rival.

This week, The Guardian launches a seven-day series examining different aspects of Internet censorship around the world, journalism.co.uk reports. What makes this series so interesting, apart from its illuminating coverage of the intricacies of Internet control? The site also offers online versions of the articles translated into Chinese, Russian, and Estonian for non-English speaking readers whose home countries may be facing concerns about the open Internet, or even total online censorship. 

 “The Guardian is taking stock of the new battlegrounds for the Internet,” the website says. “From states stifling dissent to the new cyberwar front line, we look at the challenges facing the dream of an open Internet.”

The first day of the series, titled, “Day one: the new cold war,” features stories about microbloggers battling the online firewall in China, the possibility of government control of the Internet in Russia, and the widespread role of the Internet in Estonia, including issues of cyber attacks, according to The Guardian’s website. Each of the three articles is available in both English and an additional language, depending on the subject of the article.