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Some people in Shanghai – especially the foreigners — think the city's new Pudong section of town is dull, without character and profoundly unfashionable.

Twenty years ago, Pudong was mostly farms and warehouses. Today, it's home to those sleek glass-and-steel skyscrapers that have come to define the city's skyline in movies like Skyfall and Mission Impossible 3.

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The Two-Way

Clues Connect Global Hacking To Chinese Government, Security Firm Says

These should be good times for Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez.

New Jersey voters re-elected him last fall in a landslide, and he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee a few weeks ago. But along the way, Menendez has come under scrutiny by the Senate Ethics Committee and perhaps other government investigators – and certainly the media — for his connections to a long-time friend and generous campaign donor.

In July, Menendez called two Obama administration officials to his Foreign Relations subcommittee to explain to him why Washington wasn't sticking up for U.S. business interests in Latin America.

Menendez cited several examples, including a couple involving the Dominican Republic. He said one company, which he didn't name, had American investors and a contract with the Dominican Republic government to provide port security. But officials there wanted to start their own port security operation and "they don't want to live by that contract either," the senator said.

He declared that the U.S. needed to side with the company, not the government. "You know what? If those countries can get away with that, they will," Menendez said.

What he didn't say was that the company was partly owned by a wealthy Florida eye doctor named Salomon Melgen.

Here's how Menendez described Melgen during a recent press conference in New Jersey: "Someone who I've known for 20 years, someone who has been a friend, someone who has been a supporter."

Melgen in fact has been a longtime and generous supporter. Last year, his medical practice gave $700,000 to a Democratic superPAC, which spent nearly $600,000 to help Menendez in the November election.

Ken Boehm is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group that has investigated Menendez. He says the senator knew what he was doing.

"[Menendez] knew he was carrying water for one specific donor at the very time the donor was writing very large checks to benefit the senator," Boehm says.

And there are other connections. Twice since 2009, Menendez went to Medicare on Melgen's behalf after health care officials alleged the doctor had overbilled by nearly $9 million. Last month, agents from the FBI and Health and Human Services raided Melgen's office in West Palm Beach, Fla., hauling away boxes of documents.

Menendez has also admitted that he failed to disclose two trips on Melgen's private jet — flights to a Dominican Republic resort community where Melgen has a house.

"I welcome any review, but I have no intention of having the smears try to deviate me from the work that I have been doing and will continue to do," Menendez told reporters in New Jersey.

Menendez is one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, with a net worth in 2012 that was as little as $200,000, according to his Senate disclosure. He reimbursed Melgen last month for the flights — $58,500 in all.

The Senate Ethics Committee is looking into the case.

At the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Melanie Sloan says the subject of doing favors for donors is a touchy one. "I think many members will be hesitant to take Menendez on for that," she says, "given that they can't afford to have their own campaign donations examined too closely."

There's also another complication: because the port-security matter was discussed at that subcommittee hearing, it could be considered an official debate — and constitutionally off limits for prosecutors.

Menendez has come under scrutiny before but has never been charged. He even had a reputation as the clean guy in one of the state's most corrupt county organizations.

"In fact, he testified in his younger days in a bulletproof vest in a federal corruption trial against his mentor," says Tom Moran, a columnist with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.

And a poll released last week showed that so far, none of these new allegations seems to matter much to New Jersey voters.

Three years of spiraling economic crisis in Greece have devastated every sector of the economy. The Greek media are among the hardest hit. Many newspapers and TV outlets have closed or are on the verge, and some 4,000 journalists have lost their jobs.

Many people believe the country's news media have failed to cover the crisis — and lost credibility along the way. And many Greek journalists acknowledge that a massive conflict of interest sooner or later had to explode.

Nikos Xydakis, a columnist with the daily newspaper Kathimerini, says the big media conglomerates never bother to analyze what's going on in society.

"A big part of the media is controlled by construction moguls and oligarchs," he says. "They reproduce the talk, talk, talk of politicians. This is not journalism, it is everyday propaganda."

Cozy Relationships

Freelance journalist Nikolas Leontopoulos says Greek media owners are too close to political and financial centers of power. "They didn't care so much to earn money out of their media businesses, they cared more about winning state contracts," he says.

This exchange of favors — news outlets that won't criticize the government or the banks in return for public works contracts and loans – contributed to one of the most inflated media sectors in Europe. In 2009, there were 39 national dailies, 23 national Sunday papers, 14 national weekly papers and dozens of TV and radio stations for a population of 11 million.

Some papers had a circulation of just 100 copies but survived thanks to ads by state-owned businesses

Now the country's economic crisis has wiped out both public works and advertising. Circulation is plummeting, media outlets are closing, and many media owners are no longer able to pay back the loans from their crony bankers.

Opinion polls show the media's credibility has plunged. And many reporters who still have jobs have seen their salaries slashed up to 40 percent.

Leontopoulos says worse is to come: "Recently there was a prediction that in the following year, in 2013, almost 50 percent of journalists that used to work for the media will have lost their jobs."

A Push For Transparency

But the crisis in the media is also producing some new, independent initiatives, especially online.

One such startup is the brainchild of a group of techies who used the profits they made creating web sites to form a site called The Press Project to fill the Greek information vacuum. It started as an aggregator of foreign media articles on the Greek and eurozone crises and has only grown.

"Eight months now, we have a full news portal for Greece, we have a newsroom with breaking news, we have some investigative reporters," says director Kostas Efimeros.

The 11 staff members and 10 paid freelancers have taken advantage of a new government web site that Efimeros calls anything but transparent. In fact, he says it was created and designed "with the only goal that you can't find anything."

But Press Project's journalists have found plenty. They've decoded and indexed every single official decision and details of every public works contract and tenders — and in the process uncovered numerous questionable transactions.

Efimeros and his colleagues are also working on a glossary of economic crisis lingo that is incomprehensible for the average Greek, terms such as "spread," "credit default swaps," "haircuts" and many more.

Press Project journalist Pandelis Panteloglu explains the site's purpose this way: "We haven't actually seen serious public dialogue in Greece for decades now. Well, it was about time."

Online media is increasingly popular, especially with young Greeks. But even alternative outlets are threatened by the reality of the crisis — more and more newly-poor Greeks are being forced to give up Internet access to pay for their minimum daily needs.