Free Republic

The Republican who will lead an investigation of the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic quarters in Benghazi was known for courtroom theatrics in his time as a prosecutor, portending dramatic hearings on an issue that already has strained partisan civility in Washington. Republicans hope to gain political traction before congressional elections in November by accusing the White House of muddying the facts to protect President Barack Obama after the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed in the attacks by Islamic militants. Democrats have not said whether they will take any seats on the Republican-majority...

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into the leadership at the New York Times on Friday morning for what he characterized as a misleading self-defense over the reasons for the firing of former Executive Editor Jill Abramson. He observed that the Times admitted that the pay discrepancy issue was a factor even after they denied it at first. The appearance of a cover-up on this issue led Scarborough’s co-hosts to predict a backlash against the paper and even a wave of cancelled subscriptions from female subscribers. Reading from the latest piece in the New Yorker, Scarborough noted that the Times...

CNN has discovered multiple instances of plagiarism by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, a former CNN news editor. She wrote frequently about international news, writing and reporting about Africa, Europe, and the Middle East from our London bureau. An unpublished story flagged last week during our editing process led to an internal investigation that uncovered other examples in about 50 published stories, and our investigation is ongoing. We've terminated Gumuchian's employment with CNN, and have removed the instances of plagiarism found in her pieces. In some cases, we've chosen to delete an entire article. Trust, integrity and simply giving credit where it's due...

Liberals often say they’re big on tolerance, but apparently tolerance must flow only one way – toward liberals and their favored identity groups. So says MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart. Appearing as a guest on Monday’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Capehart rebuffed the idea ... [T]olerance, no, is not – it should not be a two-way street. It's a one-way street. ... That’s the perfect encapsulation of liberalism – they will make you to understand that you are wrong and they are right. You will tolerate whoever they like, but as for you – tough luck. If you don’t...

The estimated cost of the initial segment of California's bullet train, Golden State Governor Jerry Brown's pet project, has (excuse the pun) just shot up from $6.19 billion to $7.13 billion. If this is the only overrun encountered in this opening phase, which would be atypical, and if the California High Speed Rail Authority has similar experiences on the remainder of the project, assuming it's ever completed, its cost will rise from a currently estimated $68 billion to about $78 billion. Obviously a big cost overrun is news. But normally, evidence of an attempted government coverup of such an overrun...

This administration enjoys an advantage afforded no other: a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute. When Jay Carney was grilled at length by Jonathan Karl of ABC News over an email outlining administration talking points in the wake of the 2012 Benghazi attack, it was not, by the reckoning of many observers, the White House press secretary's finest hour. Carney was alternately defensive and dismissive, arguably fueling a bonfire he was trying to tamp down. But Carney needn't have worried. He had plenty of backup. He had The New Republic's Brian Beutler dismissing Benghazi as "nonsense." He had Slate's...

As the 2014 midterm elections ramp up, liberal media have are pinning the death of a Florida woman on Republicans.Literally."Democrats Need to Start Blaming the GOP for the Death of Charlene Dill" is the title of a recent piece by Brian Beutler at the New Republic, and others are agreeing with him.

Michael Isikoff, the left-wing journalist most famous for getting scooped on The Story of the Decade by Matt Drudge, is exiting NBC News ... It was during his time with Newsweek that Isikoff became yet-another icon of a mainstream media more interested in protecting power than holding power accountable. In 1998, Isikoff had uncovered the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and a young intern named Monica Lewinski. Newsweek, however, refused to publish the story. So Drudge did -- not the story but the news that Newsweek was refusing to explode its own bombshell... -- and an era in New Media...

Democratic members of Congress and the Obama administration have extensive ties to Comcast and Time-Warner, the two cable giants currently awaiting approval from the Federal Communications Commission on a $45 billion merger. One that has gone mostly overlooked: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D., Nev.) chief of staff, David Krone, is Comcast’s former senior vice president for corporate affairs. Krone moved from Comcast to Reid’s office in 2011 under ethically questionable circumstances,

Comcast, which employs more than 100 lobbyists, spent almost $19 million last year on lobbying activities. Its president and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a golf buddy of President Obama’s, and a Democratic donor who has contributed thousands of dollars not only to the president’s campaigns, but also to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, and to Steny Hoyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bob Casey. Roberts’ executive vice president, David Cohen, is a former aide to Democratic bigwig Ed Rendell. Cohen skirts lobbying regulations through loopholes, has raised more than $2 million for...

This afternoon, in an unbylined item headlined "US BUSINESS HIRING FINALLY TOPS RECESSION LOSSES," the Associated Press showed that it deserves the nickname "Administration's Press." The story embarrassingly described the job market's return to its previous January 2008 employment peak as a "pivotal moment." Get real. Given over six additional years of growth in the adult population, that's hardly the case. To his credit, the AP's Christopher Rugaber, in a separate later submission, tamped down the enthusiasm, noting that "the economy is still millions of jobs short of where it should be by now." That's for sure. But whoever wrote...

Well, now we know why the Washington Post did not want to invest in Ezra Klein’s “explanatory journalism” nonsense. Turns out it is just a left-wing propaganda tool trying to spin instead of explain. Let us turn our attention to Matthew Yglesias, the Executive Editor of Ezra Klein’s new site. As my friend Pejman Yousefzadeh has well documented, Yglesias is just not that bright. He thinks Joe Lieberman is a dumb Jewish politician; was shocked to discover Senators represent the states as opposed to populations; was unaware of a black conservative tradition; couldn’t understand why Miami didn’t expand westward (hint:...

This is the story of MSNBC in a nutshell: It rose to prominence on its criticism of George W. Bush, peaked during Barack Obama's historic 2008 campaign, and, by criticizing Republicans and championing liberal causes, sustained its viewership in the years that followed. Until now. MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Prime-time viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained...

 Which is it? Are the Koch brothers the largest land owner in Canada’s oil sands or not? The two reporters who worked on the same article don’t seem to agree. In fact, the original article was such a mess, the Washington Post today ran a follow-up piece headlined, “Why we wrote about the Koch Industries and its leases in Canada’s oil sands.”Credit for that critical second look goes to John Hinderaker of Powerline, who thoroughly debunked the Post’s original piece, concluding that the Post “relied uncritically on a goofball far-left report” provided by the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist group the...

Responding to comments regarding a Phoenix television reporter yesterday who initially claimed that the White House pre-screens questions from reporters, Attkisson said, “I wouldn’t surprised if sometimes there is that level of cooperation with some questions. If I need something answered from the White House and they won’t tell me, I’ll call our White House Correspondent. They’re friendlier with the White House Correspondents in general. So the White House Correspondent may ask Jay Carney or one of his folks about an issue and they will be told ‘ask that at the briefing and we’ll answer it.’ They want to answer...

Bias: How much abuse will the mainstream media take before they stand up for themselves? When the abuse comes from the Obama administration, their tolerance appears to be unlimited. This week, for example, two things happened that should have sent reporters into a frenzy of outrage.

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract, bringing an end to months of hard-fought negotiations, sources familiar with her departure told POLITICO on Monday. Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her packages on television. At the...

Vladimir Putin, tired of being labeled as a "bully" by media left and right, held a press conference in the Kremlin earlier today, offering a completely new angle to his case for the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and the possible invasion of Ukraine: the presence of a Tea Party element at the Maidan in Kiev. Vladimir Putin, tired of being labeled as a "bully" by media left and right, held a press conference in the Kremlin earlier today, offering a completely new angle to his case for the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and the possible invasion of Ukraine:...

Like certain other TV networks, CNN likes gun control supporters. For more than a year, it allowed Piers Morgan to relentlessly and viciously attack the Second Amendment and anyone who supports it, until Morgan’s perennially low-rated show had cost the network so much in lost advertising revenue that keeping him on the air was no longer financially sustainable.As noted in the previous Alert story, CNN recently made the decision to cut “Piers Morgan Live” from its lineup. However, from the network’s perspective, the problem was the messenger, not the message.So, this week, with Morgan on the way out, CNN teamed with another anti-gun messenger—Sarah Brady, chairwoman...