Free Republic

The powerful sway that Bill and Hillary Clinton hold over the American media has been illustrated by their successful attempt to "kill" a negative magazine story about Mrs Clinton's presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton 'could cost Democrats dear' Full coverage: US Elections 2008 According to the Politico newspaper, GQ magazine was planning to publish an article by writer Josh Green, who had previously angered the Clinton campaign by writing that the New York senator "offers no big ideas, no crusading causes" and had "plenty to talk about, but she doesn't have much to say". The planned article included details of in-fighting...

Budgets are trimmed, coverage is more perilous—and ratings are falling In late June, a suicide bomber breached security at the Baghdad hotel where the CBS News bureau is housed. The bomber’s target: Sunni sheiks meeting in the lobby. The bomb decimated the lobby and tore through the first floor. The bomber and 12 others were killed; many more were injured, including a CBS employee. Lara Logan, CBS News’ chief foreign correspondent, was on the second floor of the hotel at the time. The bomb, she recalls, "blew up underneath me." It also blew a hole in the psyche of the...

The MSM is trying out, and unfortunately succeeding with - even here at FR and in the blogosphere, a propoganda trick of burying their real lie amidst 'chaff' when trying to destroy conservative candidacies, policies and unity. The two examples I give here relate to Fred Thompson only because, as a federalist, I have been following his trek a little more closely. However, I am sure that others can give examples for all MSM targets. The first example was the "lobbying" for abortion charge. They built so much 'chaff' into that story that everyone seems to have missed their real...

July 14, 2007No party label for Democrat scandalsThomas Lifson One the most comic aspects of liberal media bias is the well-established pattern of identifying politicians caught up in scandal by party only when they are Republicans. Democrats rarely if ever are identified by party. The past week supplies a good example courtesy of the New York Times and AP, arguably the two organizations which do the most to shape national political coverage. In a Times editorial today on the outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds by Newark's former mayor Democrat Sharpe James, his political affiliation is nowhere mentioned. Sharpe James, the...

The city's mayor, riding a wave of unprecedented popularity, suddenly was hit with one of the oldest indescretions in politics. His long marriage was in trouble. Worse, the faithful wife had filed for divorce. Worse still, there was another woman.

Piolín in the morning He is the unquestionable leader the mornings. His success does not come alone, but is based on the work and the effort of his team. Piolín, is known as "big-eyed, cheeky and short", broadcasts Monday through Friday from 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and the Saturday from 6:00 a.m to 11:00 a.m. by New the 101.9. You can write a to him: elshowdepiolin@univision.com or also you can participate in its forum where you will have the opportunity to make more friends. Here Piolín tells you what other things he likes to do away from radio and...

A strong majority of Americans — including nearly two-thirds of Republicans — favors allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found. That is a striking show of support for the central tenet of legislation that has stalled in the Senate amid vocal opposition from conservatives to provisions allowing such a path to citizenship. Only 23% of adults surveyed opposed allowing immigrants to become legal. That bolsters the view, shared by President Bush, that the bill's opponents represent a vocal minority, whereas most people are...

The Last Straw at the Los Angeles Times by Arlene Peck The worst so-called "journalism." For years, I've been a working member of the press. There was a time when I looked with pride at my life's accomplishments. Of course, those were the days when such men as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow were the role models. In recent years, I've become increasingly alarmed with the trend that I've seen among those who consider themselves 'reporters,' as well as those talking heads on the television's nightly news programs. We listen to dumbed-down, usually attractive, post-puberty 'experts' who can only...

Most people think the Nielson ratings only apply to primetime programming; however, this is a complete fallacy. Network news plays a frequently forgotten but always important roll itself. A few days ago the final May Sweep totals were announced, and let’s just say it wasn’t pretty for ‘CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.’ According to Variety, the perky anchorwoman managed an average of just 6.1 million viewers. That’s the lowest Tiffany network total since they began tracking the news in 1991! ABC’s ‘World News With Charlie Gibson’ led the way with 7.95 Million, while NBC’s ‘Nightly News With Brian Williams’...

magine an American reporter tipping off the enemy of an imminent offensive during World War II. Imagine a U.S. news company jeopardizing the secrecy of an impending operation against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Imagine a major media outlet aiding a nation sworn to the destruction of the U.S. and Western civilization. Sadly, tragically, shamefully, we really don't have to imagine such a scenario any longer. Something like this scenario just happened when ABC News aired a broadcast by reporter Brian Ross announcing the president has approved a covert operation to destabilize the Iranian government, attributing the discovery to anonymous...

The catch: They continue their I-shall-not-dignify-that-with-a-response attitude towards charges of bias coming from the right. They react rather vigorously to such charges from the left, of course. By way of background, part one: Right-leaning bloggers have been critiquing the media -- not just in terms of opinion, but in baldly mistating easily-verified facts, for years. By way of background, part two: Left-leaning bloggers began doing this fairly recently in order to "work the refs" a bit and push reporters back towards their natural left-leaning state. By way of background, part three: Recently the left-leaning Radar Online quoted Thomas Edsall as...

NEW YORK, (AP) -- The Associated Press will freeze its basic rates for newspaper and broadcast members for a second year in a row in 2008 and is proposing changes that would allow them to customize the news services they receive, the CEO of the news cooperative said Monday. Tom Curley said the AP is "keenly aware of the challenges facing members," referring to the sluggish advertising and circulation trends at newspapers as readers turn in greater numbers to the Internet. With that in mind, Curley said the news cooperative's board has agreed to continue a freeze of basic assessments...

AS I conclude my tour of duty as the second public editor of The New York Times, here are some final thoughts and concerns about the paper and its journalism that flow from what I’ve observed over the past two years from my perch outside the newsroom.

In Dec. 2001, federal law enforcement officers were preparing to raid the offices and seize the assets of the Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Association - two Islamic "charities" with links terrorist organizations. Two New York Times reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, acting on confidential information from a source inside a federal grand jury telephoned officials of the two foundations and asked them questions that had the effect of tipping them off to the impending investigation. A convincing argument can be made that in ferreting out secret information from a grand jury, and in placing telephone calls to...

The timing couldn't be better for the four-part "Frontline" series "News War" premiering tonight on PBS. Not only does tonight's first episode explain why non-journalists should care about the Valerie Wilson leak investigation trial unfolding in a Washington, D.C., courtroom -- it uses the probing, contextualized "Frontline" style to answer a question on a lot of lips: What's wrong with the American media? Readers didn't need a week of front-page stories about diaper-wearing astronauts and the alleged cultural significance of Anna Nicole Smith to tell them that the Fourth Estate is having an identity crisis. There's also last week's Pentagon...

A BAN ON 'VICTORY' February 4, 2007 -- Question: When is a U.S. military victory not a victory? Answer: When it's reported by The New York Times. Read the account from Baghdad in the Jan. 30 Times about a battle the previous weekend in the city of Najaf - one of the biggest engagements of the war - and you'd think that U.S. and Iraqi forces had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of what was described as "an obscure renegade militia." "Iraqi forces were surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the ferocity" of the fighters arrayed against them, read...

The New York Times dynasty is pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of Morgan Stanley in response to a fund manager's move, Tim Arango reports in a Fortune exclusive. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Arthur Sulzberger Jr. survived the Jayson Blair scandal and Judith Miller's jailing, but as proxy season beckons, the publisher and chairman of The New York Times faces a new challenge. This one is from Hassan Elmasry, a London- based managing director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management who has been trying to incite a shareholder revolt against Sulzberger. Unfortunately for Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Elmasry's campaign...

This is a bad time to be head of a publicly held media company, and it's an especially bad time to be head of the publicly held New York Times Co. The stock has been staggering for the last five years. Morgan Stanley is pushing a shareholder resolution aimed at ending the company's dual-class stock structure, which allows the Sulzberger family to control the Times despite owning only a small portion of the stock. (According to the most recent proxy, Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. owns about 5.3 percent of the company's stock.) Sulzberger has been derided everywhere for weak leadership,...

For more than a century and a half, men and women of The Associated Press have had the privilege of bringing truth to the world. They have gone to great lengths, overcome great obstacles – and, too often, made great and horrific sacrifices – to ensure that the news was reported quickly, accurately and honestly. Our efforts have been rewarded with trust: More people in more places get their news from the AP than from any other source. In the 21st century, that news is transmitted in more ways than ever before – in print, on the air and on...

The Star Tribune is being sold to a private equity firm for $530 million, the companies involved announced in a press release today. The sale to Avista Capital Partners comes eight years after The McClatchy Company purchased the Star Tribune from Cowles Media Company for $1.2 billion. The text of the press release follows. The Star Tribune is being sold by The McClatchy Company to private equity firm Avista Capital Partners, McClatchy and Avista announced today. The companies say they have a definitive agreement to sell the Star Tribune for $530 million to Avista, which has offices in New York...

Beset by calls for reform from angry shareholders and a dismal stock price on Wall Street, the beleaguered New York Times Company began to fight back last week, saying it had 'no intention' of dismantling an ownership system that gives the Ochs-Sulzberger family absolute power over the media giant.For the past century, the family has controlled the company but sharks are circling as the paper struggles to adjust to the internet and achieve market value commensurate with its place as one the world's most influential newspapers.

The so-called "drive-by media" demonstrated their power in the election results. Demoralized by negative coverage of the war in Iraq, voters brought to power a Democratic Party that will pressure the Bush Administration to leave Iraq before victory is achieved. Those who remember how a Democratic Congress paved the way for a disastrous American withdrawal from Vietnam understand that it is not too early to talk about the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq and what it will mean for U.S. national security. The so-called "dinosaur media" that played such a prominent role in the Vietnam debacle, when they...

As everyone who has closely followed this election cycle knows, the bias towards the Democrats in the so-called MSM is at all time lows. IMO, it is ten times as bad as it has ever been. That's why I'm posting this vanity, and asking all my FReeper friends, in fact every Republican, to henceforth call the "media" what they really are: "The Democrat Media." I think if we do it will stick. Truth has a way of doing that...

Grant K. HolcombOctober 17, 2006 On Monday October 9, 2006, I walked into my home to see my wife and son watching CBS Evening News just as Ms. Couric was introducing Ms. vanden Heuvel's "freeSpeech" segment. As a combat veteran I was devastated to hear such an intentional misrepresentation of the Iraq war. Because of what I heard, I was ashamed to be an American for the first time in my life. Truth, ethics, integrity, honor, professionalism, and patriotism have meaning to the vast majority of U.S. Citizens. These values are part of our nation's foundation and need to be...

Part two in a series. As Election Day rolls near, and we battle fanatical Islamic terrorists who want to annihilate us with any weapons they can lay their hands on, there are some facts we all should recognize and remember. Our national journalists play the lead role in selecting the news, issues and points of view that will be repeated almost daily. They also determine what relevant news and views are de-emphasized or suppressed. In other words, your news is managed, interpreted and slanted. Most liberals deny the media are loaded with liberals or that liberal bias enters into their...

A posting of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has apparently exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser... ABC RELEASED TRANSCRIPT OF ONE CHAT BETWEEN FOLEY AND A MAN WHO WAS 18 AT THE TIME OF THE INSTANT MESSAGE EXCHANGE.... NETWORK STATED THE MESSAGE WAS TO 'UNDER AGE' TEEN... DEVELOPING... ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER; FEATURED IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD

Routine betrayal of our country's secrets: the new CIA report - Sunday, September 24, 2006 7:01 PM The betrayal of our country's secrets has become so routine that even the FoxNewsChannel doesn't notice them -- or at least Chris Wallace and the team failed to notice them on Sunday's weekly report. And of course none of the anti-war radicals in the Democratic Party or to the left of the Democratic Party who claim to be concerned about the Constitution so that they can make life easier for our terrorist enemies have shown the slightest concern that rogue professionals in our...

Yesterday evening, I received a call from my column syndicate, Creators Syndicate. The Associated Press had phoned my editor to inform her that it would be sending a response to my column yesterday about detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. (Funny how quickly they respond now. Where have they been the past five months? Oh, right: Busy covering up the news about Hussein's April 12 capture by the military at a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache.) The AP last night asked my editor to supply its corporate communications office with my newspaper client list...

The Fitzpatrick Plame investigation has spurred the New York Times into examining how their reporters conduct themselves. Apparently, the Gray Lady wants her staff to act more like terrorists and drug dealers. Reporters are being told to delete emails, destroy notes, and use disposable cell phones in order to stymie future investigations.

Air America Radio, the liberal talk-show network, is fighting off bankruptcy, the face of the network, Al Franken, told The New York Sun yesterday. The comedian and liberal author said the financial situation is dire enough that he has not been paid recently. "We have a cash flow problem. That's what I know," Mr. Franken told the Sun. "No cash has been flowing to me. That's the first inkling I got of a cash flow problem." Mr. Franken reportedly earns a base salary of about $2 million a year from the radio network. He said he found out he was...

Document ISGQ-2005-00026108.pdf dated July 25 2000 is a report from an Iraqi Intelligence officer to different Iraqi Intelligence Directorates talking about information provided to them from a trusted source that works in the Associated Press (AP). The information is about the formation a newly formed UN weapons inspectors team called UNMOVIC. Translation of page 4 and 5 of ISGQ-2005-00026108.pdf Republic of Iraq The Presidency of the Republic The Intelligence Service Date: 25/7/2000 Number: 6146 Secret To: 5th / 4th / 13th Directorates We were informed from one of our sources (the degree of trust in him is good) who works...

Captured document:: AP employee spied for Saddam     Document ISGQ-2005-00026108.pdf dated July 25 2000 is a report from an Iraqi Intelligence officer to different Iraqi Intelligence Directorates talking about information provided to them from a trusted source that works in the Associated Press (AP). The information is about the formation a newly formed UN weapons inspectors team called UNMOVIC. Translation of page 4 and 5 of ISGQ-2005-00026108.pdf Republic of Iraq The Presidency of the Republic The Intelligence Service Date: 25/7/2000 Number: 6146 Secret To: 5th / 4th / 13th Directorates We were informed from one of our sources...

The BBC’s World Service makes the New York Times seem fair and balanced. The BBC’s World Service is by far the world’s largest broadcaster, with some 150 million people tuning in every week in 43 languages. It already partners with 1,500 FM outlets in the U.S. and around the world. Now it seeks an even wider American presence by romancing NPR outlets. What better for Galena, Alaska, and Lyman, Wyoming (both now receiving the BBC’s service), than full coverage of cricket, rugby, gardening—and hard-core anti-American left-wing politics!Unlike NPR, the World Service needn’t worry about fund-raising. It takes in over $400...

.....The media's war against America The reputation of the news media continues to sink to new lows, and the media have only themselves to blame. It's hard to feel too much pity for journalists these days, for the standards of journalism have almost entirely been thrown out the window. It was only a few weeks ago that the news media was showing its horrendous bias in the war on terrorism when many journalists painted the terrorist organization Hezbollah in a positive light while going on the attack against the state of Israel. There was dramatic evidence of photograph alteration and...

It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband. WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

International journalists discuss Lebanon war coverage; NYT bureau chief: Israel 'not interested in Lebanese deaths' A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war. The panel of journalists, largely from the international media, convened to discuss their coverage of the war, at a conference arranged by the Media Line agency's Mideast Press Club. "Journalists' access to the battlefield is controlled exclusively by the IDF," said Simon McGregor-Wood, Chairman of the Foreign Press Association, and Bureau Chief of ABC...

You would think that Reuters learned its lesson about publishing to the world photos doctored to create a false image. After all, they were caught with multiple false photos from Lebanon, and had to take down more than 900 images from one stringer. Reuters promised it would have "experienced editors" look at all such photos in the future.

Fauxtography Defender's Faux News Turns out that Greg Mitchell, the Editor & Publisher editor who has been attacking the blogosphere like a rabid ferret for pointing out the bogus news from the Middle East, has first-hand experience with staging news. (Hat tip: Confederate Yankee.) Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts,...

All Your Fakes Are Belong to Us A jawa video spoof on Beirut Fauxtography.

The newsmakers of today are full of it. They are obsessed with the "distrust" people have in the President. These Hippies fail to take note that according a July poll; the public has more trust in the President, than in their trash. (See more results at polling Report.com).

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both." By David D. Perlmutter (August 18, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks...

It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography." Reuters on Sunday withdrew an image of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut on...

The first Photoshop war Lebanon war's doctored photos could be harbinger of photojournalism crisis Gal Mor The photo of an apparently new Mickey Mouse doll, resting on a ruined street in the Lebanese town of Tyre following an Israeli Air Force attack, took me back to a British TV show called "Drop the Dead Monkey," which aired in Israel about 15 years ago. One of the journalists in Channel 4's satirical show used to hang around battle zones with a teddy bear in his trunk and place it at disaster zones a short time before cameras began shooting, in order...

Many of the mainstream media apologists have conceded – and they had little choice but to do so – that many of the photographs of the Israelis’ response to Hez b’Allah’s act of war, were staged. The evidence of staging and Photoshopping is too public. The media allowed itself to be used to defame Israel, stir up sympathy for Lebanon and halt the advance into Lebanon. But the concessions of wrongdoing stop short with digital alterations. Media spokesmen are still in denial about the biggest media fraud of all: the dramatic dead baby display at Qana. EUreferendum has not given...

When Reuters was forced to sever ties with free-lance photographer Adnan Hajj and remove more than 900 of his photos from its database earlier this month, long-whispered questions about the reliability of Arab stringers and freelancers came to the forefront. But while the widespread use of Arab locals in covering the Middle East raises many legitimate concerns, the Palestinian propaganda machine has enjoyed tremendous success over the years hoodwinking supposedly sophisticated Western journalists. And Hezbollah appears to have done the same over the past month. In short, almost nothing that is purported to happen in the Arab world can automatically...

It has finally happened. The left is beginning to turn against New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., known far and wide as “Pinch.” It is simple to understand why: the New York Times is becoming a failing business under his stewardship, and the Left needs the NYT. Faithful readers of The American Thinker have known this for over two years, as we have chronicled the journalistic and economic decline of the New York Times Company. We started warning investors that their money was at risk before the common stock lost half its value. We slogged through to SEC...

Thanks to some intrepid digging from commenters Lancelot and Harris at EU Referendum, another video of the events at Qana has been found. This is one that I have never seen before and really shows what was going on that day. It is truly a must see for anyone that believes that the photos at Qana were staged. It completely debunks the "our photographers do not set up photos" and "the rescuers were not holding up the children for photos" claims. Believe it or not, it is a link from Wikipedia of all places. Here's the direct link to the...

Lebanese rescuer 'Green Helmet' injured A civil defense worker who has drawn controversy for holding up the bodies of children killed in Lebanon said Tuesday he was lightly injured fighting a weekend fire sparked by an Israeli bomb. Salam Daher, dubbed the Green Helmet for the color of his civil defense headgear, said he was hit by debris Sunday when a bomb or missile fell on a building while he was helping to battle a fire at a gas station in the port city of Tyre. "I fell over when the bomb hit, and I got some scratches from debris...