Free Republic

But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances. You don’t sacrifice your principles and embrace someone else’s lame political agenda. If you want to win public credibility and advance a progressive media agenda that actually has a broad impact, this is what you do. That is how politics works. Most progressives understand this. But there is always going to be those who say: “here is a checklist of seven-hundred points that we think reflect the ideological foundations...

Should CNN be using President Obama's pollster as a paid contributor to its network? A Washington insider says dapper data guru Cornell Belcher represents a potential conflict of interest for the cable network, now that he's reportedly going to work for Obama's reelection effort. In February, CNN announced that Belcher - who did polling for the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2008, including Obama's presidential campaign - was joining its team of on-air political contributors.

A standoff between public interest groups and Verizon Wireless could determine whether many consumers can use their smartphone as a modem for a laptop or tablet — or whether they’ll have to pony up for an aircard or separate wireless plan instead. Consumer advocates say Verizon has violated its license agreement to operate over a valuable chunk of public airwaves known as the C-Block. According to (soros funded)Free Press and (soros funded)Public Knowledge, Verizon has asked Google to block third-party applications on Android phones that allow “tethering,” or using a smartphone to connect to the Internet on another device such...

The White House says an off-color remark about President Barack Obama by MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin was inappropriate. Halperin said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he thought Obama "was a dick yesterday." The Time magazine editor at large was talking about Obama's performance at a White House news conference on Wednesday. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the comment was an inappropriate thing to say about any president.

Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitizer prize winning reporter who has worked for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, has revealed that he is an illegal alien in a coordinated media push with the New York Times and ABC News seeking amnesty for illegal aliens like him.Vargas also revealed that he breached White House security by using a fake ID, including when he covered a state dinner. And that a superior at the Washington Post knew and approved of his actions.Vargas made the revelations in an article he authored published in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.Vargas writes that at...

On the reason.com website, there is an article titled "Internet cop", which is 5 long pages. In it, it lists some interesting things that should be discussed on their own. Despite its relative newness and its radical ideas, Free Press has had an outsized influence on the net neutrality debate. It has a former staffer in the FCC chairman’s office: In June 2009, Jen Howard left her job as press director for Free Press to become Genachowski's press secretary. The group also benefited from its longstanding alliance with MoveOn.org, a netroots giant with massive influence on progressive politics. Free Press...

On April 8, 2011, FCC Commissioners Clyburn and Copps spoke at the National Conference for Media Reform, held in Boston by Free Press. The moderator asked Commissioner Clyburn about her comments calling on North Carolina to cease consideration of a bill advanced by Time Warner Cable to preempt local authority to build superior broadband networks. The entire event is available via Free Press' Conference site but we isolated the comments about local authority here.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when The White House got ticked off at Comrade Marinucci for posting video of activists protesting President Obama inside a San Francisco fundraiser? To Team Obama she was violating an unwritten rule on a print reporters posting video and they threatened to exclude The Chronicle from being the pool reporter in the future. To other sentient beings, Comrade Marinucci was -- and pardon the technical term here -- "reporting the news." News that MANY other non-journalists who were there at the fundraiser were recording with various camera phones. And she was perfectly within her...

We have recently heard very much about the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-induced flood of released documents. They show that the anti-free market group Free Press worked quite closely with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uber-Democrat Commissioner Michael Copps in advance of the December 21 FCC Internet power grab, executed so that the Commission could then impose the ridiculous Network Neutrality. This knowledge certainly helps explain why the technologically inept Free Press was cited fifty-three times in the FCC’s absurd write-up of their absurd December Internet folly. ... Free Press continually acts completely insane – at which they...

House Republicans continue to question how the Federal Communications Commission developed and passed rules designed to prevent anticompetitive behavior online. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., criticized what she called "collusion" between the FCC and the advocacy group Free Press on Friday. On Thursday the conservative group Judicial Watch released emails between Free Press employees and Democratic FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and his staff. "I am deeply disturbed by the revelations of collusion between the FCC and Free Press on the net-neutrality issue. The FCC has moved against the will of the people, the wisdom of Congress, and the order of the...

Documents made public yesterday by Judicial Watch describe extensive collusion by Federal Communications Commission officials with a left-wing advocacy group in a campaign to expand government regulation of the Internet. The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch in a December 2010 Freedom of Information Act request, were created after Democrat appointees solidified their 3-2 control of the agency in March 2009. Judicial Watch is a conservative nonprofit that specializes in using the FOIA and other avenues to expose corruption in government. The coordination between FCC officials and Free Press, the advocacy group, was on behalf of a proposal that the agency...

Complete title: FCC Colluded with Leftist Organization Free Press to Push Government Regulation of Internet, Documents Show Organization with Socialist Ties Driving “Net Neutrality” Agenda inside the Obama FCC? Washington, DCJudicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has uncovered documents from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that indicate officials at the FCC colluded with the leftist Free Press organization to publicly push a new plan to regulate the Internet under the FCC’s so-called “net neutrality” program. Judicial Watch obtained the documents pursuant to a December 27, 2010, Freedom of Information Act...

The mainstream media are willfully ignoring many questionable ties and friendships of Barack Obama. The list does not end with the radical racist preacher Jeremiah Wright and unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. They have totally ignored Obama campaigning for the socialist revolutionary Raila Odinga in Kenya. They have also ignored his ties with radical Islamic extremist Khalid Al Masour. LA Times takes things to the next level. They are going beyond the level of ignoring to the level of willfully witholding informative evidence from the public. The associate of Barack Obama in question this time is Rashid Khalidi, a former...

Don't look now but the last time President Obama allowed questions from the press was on April 5 during the budget battle. So far, the press doesn't seem to mind very much. They meekly accept the PR handouts offered by the White House press office and bombard press secretary Jay Carney with questions he couldn't possibly answer anyway. But some in the 4th Estate are noticing. President Obama today met King Abdullah of Jordan in the Oval Office -- statements, no questions. Still, it was better than last week's meeting with the NATO leader:

The White House is engaging in a “troubling” pattern of heavy-handed dealings with the press, media critics said after yesterday’s news that the Boston Herald was frozen out of full access to a presidential visit to its home city. “It’s always troubling when you have the administration deciding what’s fair in the media or what is unfair because that clearly does create a situation where they are trying to select the coverage that they’re going to receive,” said Boston University College of Communication dean Tom Fiedler, who covered the White House as a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Figures. They just can’t help it. The leftists at Obama’s Secret Service can’t stand FOX News. They even tweeted about it.

Media: The Obama administration has picked another fight with a dissident newspaper, kicking the Boston Herald out of the press pool on an unprecedented claim that its coverage is unfair. Who died and elected them judge? If the mainstream media had any gumption at all, they would vigorously protest the strange, new self-appointed arbiter of "fair" press coverage as an implicit threat to their own capacity to cover the news fairly. What the White House has done by telling the Boston Herald it can no longer send a pool reporter to cover local campaign events on behalf of the media...

The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.” “I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit. “My point about the op-ed was not that you ran...

It’s time for the MSM to put its drool buckets in permanent storage. In the past month, we’ve had: – The Pleasanton (CA) Weekly bullied by the White House press shop over a benign article that irked the administration because it made Michelle Obama look snooty. – The San Francisco Chronicle punished by the White House because a print pool reporter used a cell phone to record video of protesters at an Obama Bay Area fundraiser. And now, the Boston Herald has been spanked by the White House for…running a front-page op-ed by Mitt Romney: The White House Press Office...

Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences. "If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president," says Sid Davis, the former NBC...