Free Republic

The archive of Journolist has been released to Gawker by the hacker Guccifer, and it presents a terrible dilemma for anyone connected to the Washington reporter scene from 2007ish to 2009, when it was revealed that some people made fun of Sarah Palin on the secret reporter listserv. As Gawker's Hamilton Nolan explains, it forced some reporters to publicly apologize, stirred up conservative outrage, and Dave Weigel left The Washington Post in the aftermath, only to be hired by Slate. The listserv caused problems for a few people who were on it. But now that the whole thing is public,...

Los Angeles police said they have yet to determine the cause of a fiery solo-car crash in Hollywood that apparently killed award-winning journalist Michael Hastings. The death of the 33-year-old Hastings was announced by his employer, BuzzFeed, which said he died in a Los Angeles car accident. But the Los Angeles County coroner's office had yet to determine Wednesday whether a body recovered from a fiery car crash was that of Hastings. The body was “unrecognizable” and badly charred, police told the Los Angeles Times. The body is identified only as "John Doe 117.”

Journalist Michael Hastings died in car accident in Los Angeles today. Details of the accident have not been released. He was 33. Best known for his 2010 profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—it effectively ended the military career of the man who had led the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan—Hastings won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting and wrote a book about his experience reporting on the war, The Operators: The wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan. A second book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, details Hastings’ time as a war correspondent...

President Obama appointed Susan Rice as Chief National Security Adviser on Wednesday, attracting renewed scrutiny to the administration’s handling of the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the death of ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Fox News’ Senior White House correspondent Ed Henry brought up the scandal and General Petraeus’ conclusions that the assessments of the Intelligence Committee on the issue changed so much and were no longer worth anything. Press Sectary Jay Carney tried to slap down the comment. “In every iteration of this, Ambassador Rice made clear as I did that, these...

“Are you kidding me?” I was always stunned to hear reporters ask me — as they did half a dozen times when I worked at the Pentagon — to show them some classified document or other. They’d just pop the question blithely, unfazed, without an apparent thought for the implications. My incredulous retort would usually reap an only half-sheepish answer: “Well, I had to ask.” Countless national security officials have had some version of this conversation – including the State Department security adviser that Fox News correspondent James Rosen allegedly plumbed for information on North Korea. Rosen wrote in an...

Lital Shemesh is a 29-year-old successful, female, Israeli journalist who recently participated in a seminar with other young Israelis and Arabs in hopes of igniting optimism for peace. She returned from the seminar disappointed and disillusioned. She is a rising star in the Israeli media who openly expresses her political aspirations in the Knesset. She worked as Editor-in-Chief for the Yedioth Youth Magazines, reported for the Israel Broadcasting Authority and the Hot CableTV News channel, and is CEO and Founder of a web-based girls magazine “Pinkish – Everything that Girls Love.” In her first video blog in English two years...

NBC is unable to reach its Middle East bureau chief Richard Engel, who was also reporting from inside Syria.

NGOs are urging Syrian rebels to release a Ukrainian journalist, Anhar Kochneva, who is set to be executed Thursday. Meanwhile the group behind the kidnapping warned it would now target all Russians, Ukrainians and Iranians on Syrian soil. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), ARTICLE 19, the International Press Institute and Reporters Without Borders issued a joint statement expressing deep concern about Kochneva’s life and urging the leadership of the Free Syrian Army and of the Syrian Opposition Coalition to ensure that the journalist is safe and set free. The groups also called on the French, British and US governments,...

In case anyone just arrived from Mars, the mainstream media wants Mitt Romney to fail in his quest for the White House. Surprised? They will do whatever possible as “legitimate journalists” to collaborate with the Obama re-election campaign — shamefully so.(Snip)The mainstream media is in the tank for Obama. Every student journalism can recognize that. It’s too late for most already involved “professionally.” Most of them have already violated most of the ethical rules and sold their souls to Obama long ago. As a journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, I am personally ashamed.

Douglas McKinnon teases us with "That said, in off-the-record conversations with my left-leaning journalistic friends, not one believes Obama is going to win re-election. Not one. While most believe Mitt Romney to be a weak candidate, they are still convinced that he will comfortably defeat Obama on Nov. 6. These liberal and jaded journalists privately admit that Obama has been exposed for what he is: an overhyped, self-invented candidate with no real-world experience who has been frozen into inaction by the enormity of the office he holds."

My tour of Israel continues with the Young Jewish Conservatives. Today we had the opportunity to meet with Gil Hoffman — the Chief Political Correspondent of the Jerusalem Post. He told us that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Israel in a few days is because the “Palestinians are afraid of Mitt” and understand that he has a good chance of winning the election. The Palestinians are worried that a potential President Romney, who is scheduled to visit Israel soon, as well, will be much harder on them, and therefore believe that now is the time to draw...

Robert Maurius Reno, one of former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s two younger brothers, died Saturday morning, according to their sister, Maggy Hurchalla, of Stuart. The Miami native was born Dec. 11, 1939, at Jackson Memorial Hospital and succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease at the Miami Veterans Administration Medical Center, where he’d been living for about four years. He was 74 and, said Hurchalla “a proud liberal Democrat.’’ Reno became a journalist, like his parents, the late Henry and Jane Reno, and spent most of his career at Newsday, the New York daily, starting as a reporter in 1968. As a...

News channel France 24 hosted a panel Monday night to discuss Egypt’s first civilian president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. One of the guests on the panel, via satellite from Cairo, was Nader Amram, a member of the Freedom & Justice Party’s foreign relations committee. (The Freedom & Justice Party (FJP) is the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party.) When Amram learned that an Israeli journalist was also included on the panel, he protested that he had not been informed beforehand that he would have to appear with an Israeli. He then launched into a mini-diatribe about how Israel is the real...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reacted with "anger, shock and disbelief" at a decision by a Rome judge to fine an Italian journalist who had the courage to speak out against an anti-Semitic cartoon. In a ruling last week, Judge Emanuela Attura ordered journalist Peppino Caldarola to pay a fine of 25,000 euros for slandering extreme-leftist writer Vauro Senesi, whose caricature of Italian Jewish politician Fiamma Nirenstein was published in 2008 in the communist newspaper Il Manifesto and has been widely condemned as anti-Semitic. The cartoon, titled "Fiamma Frankenstein," depicted the Italian Jewish candidate for parliament as monster-like, with a hook-nose,...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that there is no proof that in-person voter fraud is a problem. He's about to see proof that even he can't deny.In a new video (below) provided to Breitbart.com, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas demonstrates why Holder should stop attacking voter ID laws--by walking into Holder’s voting precinct and showing the world that anyone can obtain Eric Holder’s primary ballot. Literally. The video shows a young man entering a Washington, DC polling place at 3401 Nebraska Avenue, NW, on primary day of this year--April 3, 2012--and giving Holder’s name and address. The poll worker promptly...

Last night things got so shrill on Roseanne Barr's Twitter timeline that we're pretty sure this tweet from Roseanne to our own Dana Loesch broke some windows:

New Delhi An Israeli official said an explosion was hit an Israeli diplomat's car in New Delhi on Monday. He said one person was hurt in the blast, but did not identify the victim. Israeli Embassy spokesman David Goldfarb said the car was near the embassy when the blast went off. Indian police said only that a car was on fire on the street outside the embassy.

LONDON (AP) — She was instantly recognizable for the eye patch that hid a shrapnel injury – a testament to Marie Colvin’s courage, which took her behind the front lines of the world’s deadliest conflicts to write about the suffering of individuals trapped in war. After more than two decades of chronicling conflict, Colvin became a victim of it Wednesday, killed by shelling in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. Colvin, 56, died alongside French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, the French government announced. Freelance photographer Paul Conroy and journalist Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro were wounded.

A court ruling last December would seem to indicate that no, bloggers are not privy to the same legal protections afforded so-called real journalists. Via the Washington Examiner: This past December, federal judge Marco Hernandez of Oregon issued a ruling in the libel trial of Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox that has dangerous First Amendment implications. Hernandez ruled that blogger Crystal Cox was not entitled to the same protection under media shield laws that other members of the press enjoy. This ruling made it easy for a jury to find her guilty of libel. That result threatens the First Amendment...

Not long after North Carolina State lost to rival North Carolina for the 11th straight time on Thursday night, reporters asked junior forward Scott Wood how frustrating it was to have never beaten the Tar Heels. Wood's response was brilliant in its simplicity. "Has your wife ever cheated on you?" Wood deadpanned in response. Then after a few seconds of the most awkward silence imaginable, he responded, "that's probably how frustrating it is."