Free Republic

A reader passes along a July 2006 article from U.S. News & World Report about the Russian media. "Given the current Obama administration attacks on Fox News," he writes, "I thought it was somewhat topical. And fun." Excerpt: Before Putin took over in 2000, opposition voices were often heard on the three dominant television networks, particularly on the then privately owned NTV channel. There were hostile interviews with officials, merciless political satire shows, and investigations of what human-rights groups call Russia's dirty war in Chechnya. Today, NTV is owned by the state-run natural gas behemoth Gazprom, and its output differs...

Guest AuthorMichael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a nuclear scientist and a science and energy resource for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org ************SNIP********** What is remarkable is that a society of Journalists, allegedly...

Loganville police are looking for three suspects in a brutal Thursday afternoon robbery that left an elderly Walton County couple hospitalized. The attack happened about 1 p.m. in the couple’s home on Covington Street. Metro and state news Loganville police Chief Mike McHugh told WSB-TV that two black men approached C.F. Ewing and his wife, posing as potential buyers of Ewing’s pickup truck. Once inside the couple’s home, the suspects severely beat Ewing and his wife and stole his wallet before fleeing in a late-model dark blue or black Chevrolet or Oldsmobile sedan driven by a third suspect. Ewing was...

Some of these quotes minimizing Chicago corruption are jaw-dropping. Especially given the media's conniptions about the so-called "Republican Culture of Corruption." (And bear in mind -- Republicans have institutional corruption; Democrats merely have a few bad apples who strayed from the One True Faith.) Here's David Gregory, urging us all to take chill-pill about government corruption, and stop being such babies about it: "(A)t the heart of all politics is pay to play. Yes. There's a thin line between expectations and shakedown. But do any of us really believe that the people who raise huge sums of money for a...

Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared with the Virginian Pilot ...let’s show two stories in today’s Virginian Pilot, one on McCain and the other on Obama. The first story is about a McCain proposal: McCain urges end to ban on offshore drilling. It turns out that, according the David Espo, the AP writer: The current ban on offshore drilling covers an estimated 80 percent of U.S. coastal waters. It would seem unexceptional that more oil would reduce the price of gasoline. Why would we be asking the Saudis to increase production if not to reduce...

No, No, no, not the written content which most people agree deserves the appellation of mental compost for midgets. I’m talking about the actual physical paper product you touch with your hands. Now, I’m no more squeamish than the next guy, but I was reminded of the the deadly hazards that can be found in paper when I picked this morning’s paper up in my gloved hands and noticed this headline: “Researchers: AP’s Sludge Story Sloppy, Unfair” As is typically the case with stories found in the Virginian Pilot, this one was not written by one of the few writers...

Would you trust a Hurricane Katrina report datelined “direct from Detroit”? Or coverage of the World Trade Center attack from Chicago? Why then should we believe a Time Magazine investigation of the Haditha killings that was reported not from Haditha but from Baghdad? Or a Los Angeles Times article on a purported Fallujah-like attack on Ramadi reported by four journalists in Baghdad and one in Washington? Yet we do, essentially because we have no choice. A war in a country the size of California is essentially covered from a single city. Plug the name of Iraqi cities other than Baghdad...

"Introduction Welcome to the Media Research Center’s annual awards issue, a compilation of the most outrageous and/or humorous news media quotes from 2005 (December 2004 through November 2005)..."

NEW ORLEANS - More than 100 of them drowned. Sixteen died trapped in attics. More than 40 died of heart failure or respiratory problems, including running out of oxygen. At least 65 died because help - shelter, water or a simple dose of insulin - came too late. A study by The New York Times of more than 260 Louisianans who died during Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath found almost all survived the height of the storm but died in the chaos and flooding that followed. Of those who failed to heed evacuation orders, many were offered a ride or...

The U.S. Government is now openly supporting the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian resistance movement designated as terrorist organization by the US State Department. On June 20th of this year, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq held a conference at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which is where many foreign journalists stay and is under the full protection of the U.S. Army. I was in the area of the hotel that day, and saw at least 10 U.S. tanks heading in the direction of the hotel to provide additional security. I knew of the conference in advance, because of a report issued to all NGO's working...

Rove's lawyer says that there has been no wrongdoing, and that the prosecutor has told him that Rove is not a "target" of the probe. But this isn't just about the Facts, it's about what Rove's foes regard as a higher Truth: that he is a one-man epicenter of a narrative of Evil. (snip) Under a 1982 law, it's a felony to intentionally disclose the name of a "covered" agent with the intent to harm national security. Under another, older statute, it could also be a felony to willfully disclose information from a classified document—which the State Department memo and,...

It was déjà vu all over again when the government released the April employment report on Friday. The latest figures show that the economy added 274,000 jobs last month, some 100,000 more than had been expected, and that 93,000 more jobs were created in February and March than had originally been reported. The numbers are surprisingly upbeat and entirely welcome. But we should remember that a year ago, in the spring of 2004, the story was much the same. Back then, after more than two years of relentlessly subpar job creation, there was a three-month surge in job gains. Then,...

Mar. 6, 2003 Foreign Ministry fumes over BBC report By THE JERUSALEM POST INTERNET STAFF Foreign Ministry officials were furious with the British Broadcasting Corporation after a BBC report cast doubt on the authenticity of an Israeli statement that said the suicide bomber in Wednesday's attack carried a letter linking the attack to the September 11 attacks. Foreign Ministry officials said it was unthinkable that the BBC should attribute ulterior motives to the Israeli and question their integrity when the BBC "routinely accepts Palestinian lies." A BBC spokesman said the news agency had failed to receive proper conformation of the...

Ozone Good News is Bad News The United Nations recently completed a major report on the current status of stratospheric ozone, ozone depletion, and the ozone "holes." Why haven't you heard about it? The reason is simple: The report is chock full of good news. The rate of ozone decline is slowing...the Antarctic ozone hole is not enveloping the midlatitudes...penguins are not getting more sunburn. That hardly merits major media attention with so many environmental "crises" looming. Apparently by some miracle, we all managed to survive the worst of the ozone depletion. Global levels of ozone in the stratosphere should...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Scientists have overestimated the potential of trees and shrubs to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new study. The reassessment casts doubt on whether planting trees is always a positive step in the fight against global warming, as President Bush and others have suggested. In the study, published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, Duke University scientists say trees and shrubs growing in areas of abundant rainfall are less effective storehouses for carbon than native grasslands they have steadily replaced across much of the western United States. Vegetation stores carbon that...

Part 1: The Real Issue Behind the Scandals in U.S. According to Gladys Sweeney of Institute for the Psychological Sciences ARLINGTON, Virginia, JUNE 6, 2002 (Zenit.org).- The key problem involving scandals with priests in the United States isn't what the media generally lead us to believe, says a Catholic psychologist. Dr. Gladys Sweeney, president and dean of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, gave her insights into what lies behind the scandals that have rocked the Church in America. Sweeney formerly held a faculty appointment at the Division of Child Psychiatry and Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School....