Free Republic

The New York Times is declaring that disgraced private equity mogul Steven Rattner has gotten his reputation back in the Manhattan lunch circles that matter. This was probably only a matter of time given that it was the Times itself that played a leading role in his rehabilitation. It’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, naturally, who pronounces the cleansing complete, even wondering aloud if Rattner could be a Treasury secretary someday. This about a guy who just two years ago paid $16 million to settle SEC and New York lawsuits against him for taking part in a kickback scheme with public officials...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kim Davis' lawyer stood onstage in a Washington D.C. hotel and pointed to a photo on the screen. It showed 100,000 people packed into a Peruvian soccer stadium, Mat Staver told the crowd, all there to pray for the Kentucky clerk battling against gay marriage. The crowd erupted. It wasn't true.

26 year-old gunman Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on the campus on Thursday, killing nine people and wounding seven. Mercer reportedly singled out Christians for death by asking the religion of potential victims before firing on them. Mercer was then shot and killed by law enforcement. In a series of tweets on October 2, Woods argued that because the victims were Christian, both resident Obama and the media would lose interest in the story. "NY Times writes a front page story about a hate massacre targeting Christians without using the word 'Christians,'" Woods tweeted, linking to story in the New...

A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that an all-time low of 7 percent of Americans say that they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the media. At the other end of the spectrum, a record high of 24 percent said their trust and confidence in the media is “none.” The combined 60 percent who say they have either no trust in the media (24 percent) or not very much trust (36 percent) also matched an all-time high. […] Democrats were far more likely than Republicans or Independents to have trust and confidence in the media, according to...

Sophie Cruz's brief encounter with Pope Francis during his parade in Washington this week appeared to be the kind of spontaneous moment that is so endearing about this pope: an initially hesitant young child wrapping an arm around his neck as he offers a kiss and a blessing. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the moment unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. They had been preparing for nearly a year for the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about...

It's De Blasio Time. Radical leftist pro-crime mayor who decided to wage war on cops. Radical leftist pro-crime president who decided to wage war on cops. Radical leftist pro-crime media which decided to wage war on cops. Now murders are mysteriously rising for reasons they can't explain. It must be Global Warming. Or car insurance rates. Or maybe squirrels. I bet it's the squirrels causing all the murders. Now let's run another #BlackLivesMatter puff piece and more pro-crime propaganda about freeing drug dealers. Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few...

Istanbul (AFP) - A photograph of a toddler's lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach after a migrant boat sank swept across Europe on Wednesday, in a poignant image of the refugee crisis...

The Washington Post published a column Thursday night by David Ignatius that purports to clear leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in exclusively using a home brew server kept in her home that held top secret classified information during her four year tenure as secretary of state. The column is entitled The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t. Ignatius’ lead defense witness for Clinton is one Jeffrey Smith who is given four paragraphs of quotes defending Clinton. Ignatius identifies Smith as “a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents...

Two days ago, ABC News reported that Vester Flanagan, the murderer of two WDBJ employees, sent a 23-page faxed manifesto to ABC News. ABC reported bits and pieces of the manifesto. Yet we still haven’t seen the full document. ABC hasn’t made it available. Why? John Nolte and others have been busy hammering away at the racial hypocrisy of many in the media after treating Flanagan’s crimes very differently from Dylann Roof’s. Unquestionably, they were both racially motivated. But you’d never know that from reading the headlines in the Washington Post or other mouthpieces that enable the (one way) racial...

The reporting on why U.S. Army personnel stationed at recruiting centers aren’t allowed to be armed has to make anyone who knows a little about guns, and the gun issues, wonder if those news outlets are aware of what they’re not reporting? Do they understand why some Americans feel compelled to stand outside Army recruiting centers with guns? Any curious person might then wonder if ignorance or bias is the central reason why the mainstream media so often ignores studies and facts that are inconvenient to the anti-gun-rights point of view? There are, after all, over 100 million gun owners...

SOROS NAILED: Liberal Sugar Daddy George Soros May Face A ‘Monster’ Named, “Tax Evasion.” Which will Eat Away his Political Power. [ Full title]. George Soros is one of the left’s most powerful money men. In January of this year, Western Journalism reported on the millions of dollars that liberal billionaire George Soros and his politically involved foundations gave to help various groups of Ferguson protesters. “Buses of activists from a litany of organizations — all funded in part by Mr. Soros” showed up in the Missouri city scorched by riots related to the police-involved death of Michael Brown. Soros,...

An image many call provocative, if not offensive, has caused an uproar on social media platforms since last week. The photo, taken by gay artist Ed Freeman of young men holding up a rainbow flag, replicates the iconic picture of Marines and a Navy Corpsman raising the American flag at Iwo Jima in 1945. The Washington Post decided to highlight the controversy July 1 and let the artist defend himself. Freeman told the Post that the image originally for a cover of the gay magazine, Frontiers, was taken over ten years ago. After the Supreme Court ruling last week, someone...

As the mainstream media takes a boisterous victory lap over the Supreme Court’s declaration of nationwide same-sex marriage, the Washington Post took the extra step of invoking the divine. Wonkblog’s Ana Swanson wrote: Senior White House official Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, captured what looked like a sign from the heavens on Friday at 11 a.m. Stevenson snapped a photo of a rainbow that had appeared over the White House.

A search of APImages.com for “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)93% ” no longer yields a handful of photos from photojournalist Charlie Neibergall wherein the barrel of a gun on a poster points to the U.S. Senator and presidential candidate’s head.(snip) UPDATE: AP Vice President and Director of Media Relations Paul Colford confirms that the news organization has decided to prevent future licensing of the photos showing guns pointed at Cruz. Breitbart News asked whether AP had encountered any outside pressure from politicians to remove the photos. Colford replied, “this was entirely an in-house decision.”

Most curators hope to get glowing reviews and popular acclaim when they mount an exhibit. Michael Kamber, on the other hand, is expecting some blowback for his latest show, “Altered Images: 150 Years of Posed and Manipulated Documentary Photography,” which opens this weekend at the Bronx Documentary Center. And he’s perfectly O.K. with that. “I think there will be some unhappy people,” said Mr. Kamber, a photojournalist and founder of the center. “That’s good. If people would stop faking photos, then they wouldn’t have to be worried about being called out.” The exhibit, a selection of well-known images that have...

<p>You don’t see any sort of problem with this photo you ran of 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz? Any at all?</p>

As journalists the most important thing we have is our credibility and integrity. We maintain that, in part, through transparency with our audience, our colleagues and our critics. That is why I am disclosing that my daughter, Paola, has accepted a position working with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. [blather snipped] Like many reporters who have parents, siblings or other family members that are active in politics, this will not change how I approach my duty as a journalist. I will continue to report with complete independence and ask the tough questions, the same way I have done for the last...

The former head of Al Jazeera America's documentary unit announced a lawsuit against her former employer on Thursday, charging the American branch of the Qatar-based news network with a vitriolic bias against Israel, as well as discrimination against non-Arabs and women. Shannon High-Bassalik, who formerly worked with CNN, NBC and MSNBC, sued the company for discrimination after being fired in February only half way through her three-year contract, reports The Guardian. She charged the company with showing a blatant pro-Arab bias both in terms of employment and news coverage, with the most intense bias coming out against Israel. High-Bassalik said...

A Syrian Christian fighter has beheaded an Islamic State group (IS) militant to avenge people "executed" by the jihadists in northeastern Syria, a monitor said on Friday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the incident took place on Thursday in Hasakeh province, where IS holds large areas of the countryside. According to the monitor, the Christian fighter, a member of the minority Assyrian community, found the jihadist in the local village of Tal Shamiram. "He took him prisoner and when he found out he was a member of IS, the Assyrian fighter beheaded him in revenge for abuses committed...

it’s possible that the attention the ad revenue charts were generating on the Internet may have contributed to the decision by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in 2013 to suddenly stop its long-standing practice of reporting quarterly advertising revenue data, and switch to releasing only annual data ... In a 2013 interview, NAA CEO Caroline Little was quoted as saying that she and the organization’s board decided it was time to stop beating themselves up four times a year with the negative numbers. ... Newspaper print advertising revenues of just $16.4 billion in 2014 fell to the lowest level...