This is some of what’s caught my atten­tion in the past hours:

• Express man who duped Hitler | Sunday Express — The charm­ing world of psy-ops: “If this ‘black’ broad­cast­ing was to deceive effi­ciently then the prin­cipal speaker had to be totally con­vin­cing – and Der Chef was ideal. He had to sound like a Right-wing, pat­ri­otic Ger­man who was out­raged at the incom­pet­ence of many in the Nazi hier­archy who were profit­ing at home from the massive sac­ri­fices of the decent Ger­man sol­dier fight­ing abroad.

  Der Chef fre­quently used the type of lan­guage used by ordin­ary sol­diers. In his very first broad­cast, the Prime Min­is­ter was called “That flat– footed bas­tard of a drunk old Jew Churchill.” It was designed to add to the over­all effect of a genu­ine Ger­man speak­ing his mind.”

• The National Enquirer: Ur-Text of the Tabloid Age | New­s­week Cul­ture | Newsweek.com — The Enquirer doesn’t com­pete with news­pa­pers like The New York Times or new­s­weeklies like Time or NEWSWEEK, but with celebrity magazines like People, Us Weekly and OK! It uses meth­ods scorned by the main­stream media—rifling through trash cans, stalk­ing sub­jects and, most of all, pay­ing for information.
• Under­stand­ing the fin­an­cial crisis for non-finance majors | Mohamed Nanabhay — “This Amer­ican Life and NPR News pro­duced The Giant Pool of Money. It’s an hour long radio show that tells the story of the morgage crisis from the guy tak­ing a loan all the way up the chain to the Chinese bankers. This is one of the best pieces of eco­nom­ics report­ing that I’ve ever come across.”
• It takes a flight to UK to read the other ver­sion of the news­pa­per and exam­ine the eth­ics of media | Palestine Think Tank — An unhappy Tele­graph blog­ger writes…
• Elec­tion­eer­ing Com­mu­nic­a­tions Bro­chure — Each state­ment dis­clos­ing elec­tion­eer­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions must include:

  The iden­ti­fic­a­tion of the per­son who made the dis­burse­ment, or who executed a con­tract to make a dis­burse­ment, and the person’s prin­cipal place of busi­ness if the per­son is not an indi­vidual;
  The iden­ti­fic­a­tion of any per­son shar­ing or exer­cising dir­ec­tion or con­trol over the activ­it­ies of the per­son who made the dis­burse­ment or executed the con­tract;
  The iden­ti­fic­a­tion of the cus­todian of books and accounts from which the dis­burse­ments were made;
  The amount of each dis­burse­ment or amount oblig­ated in excess of $200 dur­ing the period covered by the state­ment, the date of the dis­burse­ment, or the date the con­tract was executed, and the per­son who received the funds;
  All clearly-identified can­did­ates referred to in the elec­tion­eer­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion and the elec­tions in which they are can­did­ates;
  The dis­clos­ure date, as defined by 104.20(a)(1); and
  The name and address of each donor…

• India relaxes restric­tions on for­eign media | FT.com — The move to lib­er­al­ise the media mar­ket means magazines such as New­s­week, Busi­nes­s­Week and The Eco­nom­ist can launch Indian edi­tions sup­por­ted by local advert­ising without restric­tion on con­tent. But curbs on own­er­ship remain, with for­eign media com­pan­ies lim­ited to stakes of no more than 26 per cent in Indian pub­lish­ing ventures.