IYAQ, Lebanon, April 26-The last of Syria's troops formally left Lebanon today, ending Syria's 29-year domination of Lebanon's political and economic life with a bittersweet farewell ceremony just miles from the Syrian border.

But as the soldiers crossed back into Syria, Lebanese politicians and analysts began facing the dramatic challenges left behind by Syria's departure, including a lack of trust in Lebanon's central government, fractious politics and a hobbled democracy that may take years to mend.

...

"Brothers in arms, thank you for your sacrifices," said Gen. Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army. "Together we shall always remain brothers in arms in the face of the Israeli enemy."

Prominently seated in the audience was Syria's top intelligence chief in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Rustom Ghazali, who is widely considered to have held the reins of Lebanese politics for years. General Ghazali's base in the town of Anjar was abandoned on Monday, quickly taken over by Lebanese troops.

Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab peacekeeping force shortly after the Lebanese civil war broke out. Over the years, the Syrians held pitched battles with Israeli forces and various Lebanese factions, and lost thousands of soldiers throughout the conflict. At its peak, Syria had more than 30,000 soldiers in Lebanon, and during peacetime, it gained almost exclusive control of Lebanon's politics and economy.

Dear Media Reformer,

Your efforts have paid off. The Federal Communications Commission and Congress are now taking steps to stop news fraud.

Last night, the FCC instructed all newscasters to fully disclose the origin of "video news releases" (VNRs) aired on their programs. The FCC took this action as a direct response to the more than 40,000 Free Press activists who signed our petition last month.

This morning, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) announced that he will call a Senate hearing next week on VNRs. Also, Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) announced their intention to introduce legislation to stop the government from putting out VNRs without clearly displaying their source.

The actions of Free Press activists prove -- once again -- that we can stop the spread of government- and corporate-sponsored propaganda, investigate payola pundits, block media consolidation and create a more democratic media system for generations to come. None of this would have happened without your help.

If you have not added your name to the "stop news fraud" petition, please do so now and help keep this issue in the headlines: www.freepress.net/action/fakenews

Free Press and the Center for Media and Democracy are now working to identify local stations that use VNRs without full disclosure. We're collaborating with local groups to establish "citizen agreements" under which local broadcasters pledge not to use pre-packaged, government- or corporate-sponsored propaganda without prominently identifying the source.

To learn more about the FCC action, visit our "Stop News Fraud" pages.

We'll keep you posted on the next steps happening both on the national level and in your community. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to reclaim our media.

Onward,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press

By LORNE MANLY 

ust a blink after the newly emergent titans of
radio - Clear Channel Communications, Infinity Broadcasting and the like - were
being accused of scrubbing diversity from radio and drowning listeners in
wall-to-wall commercials, the new medium of satellite radio is fast emerging as
an alternative. And broadcasters are fighting back.

The announcement on Friday by XM Satellite Radio - the bigger of the two
satellite radio companies - that it added more than 540,000 subscribers from
January through March pushed the industry's customer total past five million
after fewer than three and a half years of operation. Analysts call that
remarkable growth for companies charging more than $100 annually for a product
that has been free for 80 years.

Total subscribers at XM and its competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, will
probably surpass eight million by the end of year, making satellite radio one of
the fastest-growing technologies ever - faster, for example, than cellphones.

To keep that growth soaring, XM and Sirius are furiously signing up carmakers
to offer satellite radio as a factory-installed option and are paying tens of
millions of dollars for exclusive programming. On Sunday, XM began offering
every locally broadcast regular-season and playoff Major League Baseball game to
a national audience, having acquired the rights in a deal that could be worth up
to $650 million over 11 years. And Howard Stern is getting $500 million over
five years to leave Infinity and join Sirius next January. Each company offers
120 or more channels of music, news, sports and talk.

Though satellite radio is still an unprofitable blip in the radio universe,
it is pushing commercial radio to change its sound. Broadcasters are cutting
commercials, adding hundreds of songs to once-rigid playlists, introducing new
formats and beefing up their Internet offerings. A long-awaited move to digital
radio could give existing stations as many as five signals each, with which they
could introduce their own subscription services - but with a local flavor that
satellite is hard pressed to match. 

"At the end of the day, people want to hear what's going on in their local
market," said Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive of Infinity
Broadcasting, owned by Viacom and the country's second-largest broadcaster
behind Clear Channel. "People are emotionally involved with local radio."

That emotional connection - to music, personalities, information - has always
translated into strong feelings about radio. Twenty-seven years ago, in "Radio,
Radio," the singer Elvis Costello ranted about the medium's programming choices,
singing that "the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools, tryin' to
anesthetize the way that you feel." 

But such criticism pales beside the complaining unleashed by Washington's
deregulation of radio, beginning in 1996. The loosening of ownership
restrictions set off a frenzy of acquisitions, transforming what was essentially
a mom-and-pop business into an industry dominated by a handful of giant
broadcasters. 

To satisfy Wall Street, station owners cut costs by combining station
operations in a given market and pumping up the number of advertisements per
hour; meanwhile, programming formats became narrower and more uniform. All these
moves nearly doubled the industry's revenue in five years, but they also gave
satellite radio its opening.

"In many cases, radio almost killed the golden goose by getting it to lay too
many eggs," said Sean Butson, an analyst with Legg Mason. "If you're going to
have a third of an hour of commercials, you're going to turn a lot of people
off, and they're going to look for an alternative." (Legg Mason owns stock in
XM.)

Founded in the early 1990's, XM and Sirius endured tough financial times
while waiting for the Federal Communications Commission to divide up the
satellite bandwidth and while preparing to launch their satellites. XM finally
began offering its subscription service in late 2001, Sirius in mid-2002. 

Car owners - the companies' prime targets - have clamored for the service
once they have been introduced to it.

Joseph O'Neal of Royal Palm Beach, Fla., is a self-proclaimed Elvishead who
laments that his local stations do not play enough of the King. So Mr. O'Neal, a
44-year-old drywall contractor, is a zealous convert to Sirius, the home of
Elvis Radio. 

Mr. O'Neal installed the service in his truck in January. Between Elvis,
blues and Sirius's six country music channels, he said, "I haven't listened to
regular radio since - not once." 

That kind of devotion was eye-opening for Mel Karmazin, a longtime radio
executive hired last year as chief executive of Sirius after he stepped down as
president and chief operating officer of Viacom. "The thing that surprised me
the most was the passion the subscribers had for the product," Mr. Karmazin
said. 

Both companies offer stations devoted to the most popular songs, but it is
their national reach and dual revenue streams - subscriptions and advertising
sales on nonmusic channels - that allow them to offer niche programming. Genres
that receive little exposure on commercial radio, like bluegrass, reggae or talk
devoted to African-American affairs, get their own channels on satellite
services. Individual ratings matter little; listener satisfaction counts for
much more, because it determines how long subscribers will keep paying $12.95 a
month. 

Indeed, formats ignored by commercial radio or relegated to its wee hours
have emerged as some of the most popular. 

For instance, XM Comedy, a channel that features the often raunchy stylings
of Chris Rock and others, is among the company's 10 most-listened-to. 

"Comedy - who knew?" said Hugh Panero, XM's chief executive.

A glimpse of how these channels are programmed highlights the differences
between satellite and commercial radio. Even satellite radio executives say that
tales of corporate automatons determining every record played on local radio are
overblown, but a level of autonomy exists at XM and Sirius that would rarely be
tolerated by broadcasters. 

Michael Marrone, who programs the Loft, XM's channel focusing on
singer-songwriters, finds it difficult to define precisely why Elton John's
"Your Song" makes the cut while Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" does not. "I'd
rather lose an arm than play it again," he said of "Margaritaville," chatting in
a control room in the company's Washington headquarters. (He quickly added that
he likes and plays many other tracks by Mr. Buffett.)

Ultimately, Mr. Marrone's tastes determine his selections. He also enjoys
inserting connective tissue between songs. Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" segues
into a Grateful Dead song because Mr. Henley sings about "a Deadhead sticker on
a Cadillac." 

"Ninety-five percent of the audience won't get it," Mr. Marrone said. "The
other 5 percent will never change the channel."

Steven Van Zandt, who plays in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and is in
the cast of "The Sopranos," programs two music channels for Sirius. He supplies
a slightly more detailed explanation of his programming philosophy. On
"Underground Garage," which borrows the name and concept of Mr. Van Zandt's
syndicated show on commercial radio, the idea is to juxtapose tracks and styles
from 50 years of guitar-driven rock 'n' roll, never playing two songs of the
same genre (like punk) in a row. A recent morning, Iggy Pop coexisted nicely
with the Monkees, the Mooney Suzuki and the Byrds. 

"In the end, I don't pretend," Mr. Van Zandt said. "It's my opinion. And it's
good to be the king." 

Satellite radio has ridden that unconventional thinking to its current size,
and both XM and Sirius expect to begin making money in the next two years. How
big the market can become remains debatable. By 2010, analysts estimate,
subscriber levels will hover anywhere from 30 million to 45 million. Some think
the totals could eventually rival or surpass the 90 million people who pay for
cable and satellite television. 

Still, satellite radio is also unlikely to inflict fatal damage on commercial
radio, which has about 230 million listeners, according to Arbitron, the radio
ratings provider. Profit margins for stations in big markets can surpass 50
percent. 

But commercial radio has begun to change. Radio stations in the Top 10
markets played, on average, 11 minutes of commercials an hour during daytime
broadcasts in February, down from 11.7 in October, when Leland Westerfield, a
media analyst at Harris Nesbitt, began tracking spots. 

Strict formats have also loosened a bit. Infinity, like a number of radio
chains, has changed some of its stations to the "Jack" format, a Canadian import
that broadens the play list across rock genres. Instead of 300 or so songs,
these stations' program directors are allowed more leeway in choosing from more
than 1,200 songs. 

Commercial radio, which also is combating the growth of digital music players
like iPods, is making investments in technologies like Internet and digital
radio as well as podcasts, audio programs that can be downloaded to computers or
portable devices. 

But satellite radio is rushing to innovate, too. It is planning, for example,
video services that would beam cartoons and music videos to children and
teenagers watching television in the back seats of cars.

All this technological and corporate ferment promises that the battle between
commercial and satellite radio will only intensify.

"This book won't be written for another 10 years," Mr. Hollander of Infinity
said.

"I had a box of Ritz crackers and on the back of the box of Ritz crackers it had all these suggestions as to what to put on top of the Ritz. It said 'Try it with turkey and cheese.' 'Try it with peanut butter.' Oh, c'mon man, they're crackers. That's why I got 'em — I like crackers. There ain't no suggestion: 'Put a Ritz on top of a Ritz.' I didn't buy 'em 'cuz they're little edible plates."

Pope John Paul II, the Polish pontiff who led the Roman Catholic Church for more than a quarter century and became history's most-travelled pope, has died at 84, the Vatican announced tonight.

"The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private apartment. All the procedures outlined in the apostolic Constitution 'Universi Dominici Gregis' that was written by John Paul II on Feb. 22, 1996, have been put in motion."

The announcement came from papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls and was distributed to journalists via e-mail.

The pope died after suffering heart and kidney failure following two hospitalizations in as many months. Just a few hours earlier, the Vatican has said he was in "very serious" condition but had responded to members of the papal household.

Since his surprise election in 1978, John Paul travelled the world frequently, staunchly opposing communism in his native Poland and across the Soviet bloc, but also preaching against rampant consumerism, contraception and abortion.

John Paul was a robust 58-year-old when the cardinals stunned the world and elected the cardinal from Krakow, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.

In his later years, however, John Paul was the picture of frailty, weighed down by ailments that included Parkinson's disease. Although he kept up his travels, he was too weak to kiss the ground any more. A fierce enemy of communism, he set off the sparks that helped bring down communism in Poland, from where a virtual revolution spread across the Soviet bloc. No less an authority than former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said much of the credit went to John Paul.

At the same time, John Paul was no friend of Western lifestyles, warning against rampant consumerism and casual sex.