Free Republic

Who’s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer Behind almost every correction in The Times, there is a story. In the case of the correction about Alexa O’Brien, the story is a particularly interesting one. The correction, which was in Wednesday’s paper, read: An article on Tuesday about the role of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, referred incompletely to Alexa O’Brien, who has closely followed the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of providing military and...

Helen Thomas, a longtime White House journalist whose career covering ten presidents once earned the nickname the “Dean of the White House Press Corps,” died Saturday at 92, the Associated Press confirmed.

Helen Thomas, whose career covering the White House dated back to the Kennedy administration, died on Saturday at the age of 92, the Gridiron Club announced in an email to members on Saturday. Thomas was the the first woman to join the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first woman to serve as its president. She was also the first female member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's historic press group. Present at the press briefings of ten consecutive presidential administrations, Thomas's career in journalism ended in 2010 after controversial remarks she made about Israeli Jews were caught on camera. "Former...

LEIMERT PARK (CBSLA.com) — A CBS2/KCAL9 photographer and reporter were assaulted Monday night while covering a George Zimmerman protest in Crenshaw. Reporter Dave Bryan was conducting an interview around 10 p.m. when the suspect tackled him and his photographer, the station confirmed. “All of the sudden, this guy came up from behind, he had a hood, and he knocked David on the head and he pushed the camera guy down. The camera guy went down, the camera went down, David went down,” witness Joseph Deguerre, said. “I was in shock.” The suspect then fled the scene and the crew was...

Can you hear it? The stampede of Hollywood actors scrambling to condemn Alec Baldwin? The cacophony of icy tweets and acidic statements snarled by publicists like demented pantomime horses? That din of Tinseltown turning inwards when, in a rare fit of righteousness, of actually believing in something real and heartfelt and important, it stands up, en masse, to one of its own?

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...