I was two days into a pleasant Baltic Sea vacation when the request from RT arrived in my inbox. Formerly “Russia Today,” RT is Moscow’s multilingual, global cable news network. RT is not your babushka’s Soviet-style propaganda; it broadcasts sophisticated conspiracy theories and “anti-establishment” attitudes to push a virulently anti-American and illiberal agenda. The network relies on a pool of talking heads, including “9/11 Truthers,” anti-Semites and other assorted extremists, who espouse the sort of views found where the far left and the far right converge.

At some point, the post-revolutionary Arab states will emerge from the self-destructive madness that has them so tightly in its grip. While Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Tunisia deal with varying degrees of instability, the future should be kept in sight. The key to an improved future in the region is less political than it is economic. Democracy is a worthy goal, but it will be reached only slowly. The shriveled economies of many Arab states (they are not all oil-rich) were the most significant factors behind the uprisings of 2011.

Al-Jazeera and America, two name brands often at odds since 9/11, were wed as one on Tuesday (Aug. 20) when the Qatar-based media network began broadcasting its U.S. news channel Al-Jazeera America from New York. This is not the first time Al-Jazeera has tried to find a home on American TV. Al-Jazeera English debuted with an international focus in 2006 but was never picked up in major media markets outside the Northeast.

Foreign journalists are under attack in Egypt - they are accused of bias and of ignoring facts, and many of them have been detained, attacked and some even killed. Egypt's State Information Service released a statement to journalists on Saturday, detailing what it sees as media bias. "Media coverage has steered away from objectivity and neutrality" which has led to "a distorted image that is very far from the facts," the statement said.

You have to give Al Jazeera America major points for chutzpah. In the face of fears that its parent company is essentially anti-America, it launched its new network with a tear-down of the American television news media. Its Tuesday premiere on the network formally known as Current TV opened with an hour dedicated to Al Jazeera America's mission statement: Offer an intelligent, unbiased, wide-reaching alternative to the broken and pitted mess that is currently in place.

Neither Al Jazeera English nor the Arabic network have a full-time ombudsperson, such as the CBC’s standards editor or the New York Times’s public editor Margaret Sullivan. For its part, Al Jazeera America has made copious public announcements about glitzy hires but has hired no full-time audience advocate. Al Jazeera America needn’t feel sheepish; Fox and MSNBC have no ombuds listed among their editorial staffs, and neither responded to calls and emails as of this writing.

Gary Knell, who has headed NPR for less than two years, is departing to become president of the National Geographic Society...That leaves the nation's flagship public radio syndicate without a chief executive for the second time in two years. Knell's predecessor, Vivian Schiller, was forced to resign in the spring of 2011 after a series of damning allegations about NPR's liberal bias, which she had seemingly fueled with injudicious statements and decisions, including the firing of Juan Williams.

Ecuador’s combative president is threatening to try to force the country’s newspapers to go all-digital as a way to save paper. Rafael Correa has long had a prickly relationship with Ecuador’s opposition-owned newspapers, and his Twitter statement Monday is a jab at papers backing a proposed referendum to block oil exploration in the pristine Yasuni national park.