Free Republic

Tribune Company’s moves to sell its newspapers—a string that includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune—has reportedly sparked the interest of a number of heavyweight financiers. These include familiar media moguls like Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch. But heads turned when another pair of possible bidders emerged early in March: the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers, of course, are best known for funding conservative causes and conservative politicians. Unlike Buffett, who has purchased 63 newspapers in the last 15 months, and Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York...

When you’ve got a country to transform, any caviling is disloyalty. Today’s Washington journalists are like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ring wraiths, petty lords who wanted a few shiny golden Obama rings — only to end up as shrunken slaves to the One. The Bob Woodward/Ron Fournier/Lanny Davis psychodrama is another small reminder that the Obama administration continues to assume that the press should be little more than a veritable Ministry of Truth. Its proper duty is to serve the White House and promote the progressive agenda of Barack Obama. Any were considered suspect who questioned whether those exalted ends...

They’re at it again. The latest public rant against Michelle Obama’s effort to promote low-calorie school lunches was recently caught on tape in Alabama — the usual protest against the federal government meddling in local business. And then it quickly found its way around to the first lady’s posterior. “Fat butt Michelle Obama,” said Bob Grisham, a high school football coach who was surreptitiously recorded by one of his students. “Look at her. She looks like she weighs 185 or 190. She’s overweight.” Grisham, who was suspended Monday, is neither the first nor the most high-profile person to feel moved...

It’s not often that I laugh out loud while reading my e-mail (and that’s not an invitation to forward the jokes from 1996 still circulating, either), but today’s entries left me no choice. No less than three media outlets have scoops about the Mitt Romney campaign this morning that describe changes in strategy and direction. The only problem is that all three contradict each other despite having come from sources inside the campaign.

New independent circulation numbers show a sharp decline in readership of Politico and other left-leaning news websites, an ominous trend for the suburban Virginia-based news outlet and its peers as Americans head into an election year. Recently published and publicly available Web traffic data indicates that “unique visitor” traffic to politico.com in November 2011 was 15 percent lower than in the previous month, and 31 percent lower than in November 2010. The data, from Compete, Inc., also show an overall two-year decline. Political websites gain and lose readers throughout election cycles, with presidential election years trending higher in unique Web...

If you've been following the news this week, you'd get the impression that America is a scandal-plagued nation. Scandals to the right of us, scandals to the left of us. Take your pick. There’s the media assault on GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the deadly "Fast and Furious" federal gun-running case, the Solyndra solar loan fiasco, the collapse of MF Global, led by former Democratic N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine and, of course, the deeply disturbing allegations of child sexual abuse at Penn State. But the real scandal isn’t any one of those. It’s how journalists pick and choose which controversies...

Newsweek Editor Wins 'Obamagasm' Award: Obama 'Sort of God' Monday, May 09, 2011 By Eric Scheiner (CNSNews.com) - The Media Research Center held it’s 2011 Gala and DisHonors Awards event this past Saturday. The DisHonors awards recognizes and roasts the liberal media’s worst moments, with winners in several different categories and an overall ‘winner’ with a ‘Quote Of the Year’. In the “Obamagasm Award” category, the winner was Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas who said, “Reagan [at the 1984 D-Day commemoration] was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is, ‘We are above that now. We're not just parochial,...

FULL TITLE - St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact, Lane DeGregory win 2009 Pulitzer Prizes For the first time in its 125-year history, the St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. Staff writer Lane DeGregory, 42, captured the feature writing category for "The Girl in the Window," a moving account of a Plant City child whose mother kept her locked in a filthy room, and the adoptive family who worked to overcome her feral beginnings. The Times staff won the national reporting prize for PolitiFact, a Web site, database and "Truth-O-Meter'' that tests the validity of political...

Media Matters: How They Deceive and Why It Matters Posted by Lee Stranahan Apr 1st 2011 Yesterday, I did a piece showing how Media Matters used deceptive editing techniques on the Fox / Bill Sammon story. I’m still waiting to hear back from Sammon before I do part two but I wanted to show you a couple of more videos that I’ve done in the meantime. The first one shows how Media Matters used the ‘straw man’ fallacy to attempt to discredit the piece published by Lila Rose yesterday on the Mammosham story. As I say in the video, your...

As The Daily Caller’s coverage of the now-defunct liberal listserv Journolist’s 2008 Obamamania campaign grew more intriguing each day this week, a slew of emails hit my inbox asking variations of this: “So, when do you think the P-bomb’s going to drop?” Of course, they were referring to the fact that there was no way in heck Sarah Palin could’ve steered clear of scathing remarks. I responded with, “My guess is it’s on its way.” And whad’ya know? Yesterday’s headline read: “Liberal journalists swapped their best lines of attack for coordinated ‘non-official campaign’ against Palin selection.”

A teenager was recovering from a lightning strike that happened while he stood inside his own garage on Wednesday afternoon. Stephon Owens, 15, was just about to push a button on the garage door opener when a surge of electricity shot through the house on Bell Meade drive in Douglas County, his parents told Channel 2 Action News reporter Eric Philips. “They came in here to put the basketball hoop together and ….and that’s when it went through his arm,” said Sabrina Bryan, Owens' mother. The teenager and his father were working to assemble a basketball net when the storm...

From a remote location on an island off Alaska’s coast, former Governor Sarah Palin is blasting what she describes as the “sick puppies” in the media who immediately and ruthlessly attacked her when Sen. John McCain picked her as his running mate during the 2008 presidential campaign. In exclusive remarks to The Daily Caller, Palin described “hordes of Obama’s opposition researchers-slash ‘reporters’” descending upon Alaska in the days after she was picked by McCain. She said the media became a key reason she decided not to finish out her term as governor and faults, in part, the McCain campaign for...