Free Republic

Journalists’ brains show a lower-than-average level of executive functioning, according to a new study, which means they have a below-average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking. The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analyzed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behavior. It was launched in association with the London Press Club, and the objective was to determine how journalists can thrive under stress. Each subject...

It was, perhaps, the day the media died. Next week marks the fifth anniversary of the bitter night-January 21, 2011-when progressive Americans, and indeed Americans of all political persuasions who value honor, truth, respect, intelligence and decency, were shocked to learn that MSNBC had decided to end Countdown with Keith Olbermann, perhaps the single best news program ever to air on cable television in the United States. The abrupt cancellation of Countdown was a victory for the dishonest political forces Olbermann had forcefully condemned during his nearly eight-year run-and a demoralizing defeat for democracy. Things just haven't been the same...

A swarm of local and national media entered the apartment where Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik lived after the landlord tore off a piece of plywood that was blocking the door. News outlets, including MSNBC, BBC, CBS News and CNN, broadcast live scenes as reporters toting cameras and microphones pushed through the open door and reported from inside the apartment. Door of #SanBernardino shooters' home opened by owner. Media heading in. pic.twitter.com/4XQnNQemmY — Victor Blackwell CNN (@VictorCNN) December 4, 2015 One MSNBC reporter was seen examining items left on the suspects' desk, at one point picking up a child-rearing book....

It’s not often that you come across an article that is concise, insightful, and useful. Jon Gabriel at Ricochet has managed all that – and he put it into a handy chart (The Media Narrative Chart for reporting violent crime). A laminated copy would make a nice gift for any current or aspirational members of The Future Journ0lists of America club.This single chart serves as the equivalent of a masters degree from any one of America’s foremost J-schools. That certainly begins to explain our fascination with the size of Kim Kardashian’s butt doesn’t it?Butt back to the chart: for any...

In the good old days, when a week was as full of gossipy news as this one was, I’d head off to the bar near the National Press Club. There, amid clouds of smoke and the reek of decades of cheap booze, reporters would sit around and spread the dirt in an atmosphere of bonhomie. Now, to watch reporters at leisure I have to go to some damned net cafe where kids fresh out of journalism schools they went to because their grades in area studies stunk and they wanted “to make a difference” hang out. So I went to...

After being told by old and relentless image makers and propagandists that some things are are what they are not, and after a quick Google search, and seeing that I am not going where someone else has already gone, here are two new additions, one of which I recently used on FR. Since the left has called conservatives Wing Nuts, let's return the serve to them with Nutwing. The washed out alphabet television news organizations and major city Newspapers are being complimented by being called mainstream, and since they are all washed up, let's henceforth call them by the much...

I was perusing through the news and saw many articles on the horrific destruction the storm in the Philippines had wrought. As I reading through the stories at Google, yahoo News, the term 'Climate Negotiator' kept on appearing in article after article. Well, I had no idea what a Climate Negotiator is, does. I mean, trying to negotiate with the climate seems a sissyphean task if not the most mentally stable thing to attempt. I tried searching Google, Yahoo for some precise meaning, job description for a Climate Negotiator but information was far and few between. It seems it is...

Political Director of ABC News, Rick Klein pleaded with investors today to tank the stock market in order to “shake things loose” in the GOP ranks. In his ABC’s The Note piece today, Klein seriously proposed a stock sell-off designed for the express purpose of breaking the will of Republicans. When does Wall Street cast its vote? Bipartisan meetings are nice, and new plans that depend on the other side budging certainly can’t hurt at this stage of a standoff. But there may be only one way to jolt the system: SELL. Klein’s rationale: recent talks with beltway strategists suggest the GOP is...

News broke late last evening about the debate playing out over Obamacare and whether members of Congress and their staffs will get special treatment. Yet a detailed analysis of this issue by Heritage Foundation experts found that the Office of Personnel Management does not have the legal authority to do what the Obama Administration promised Congress last night. Furthermore, it is mighty curious that word of the Obama Administration “solving” Congress’ problem was suddenly leaked to a couple reporters at 9 p.m. — just hours before the release of Heritage’s report (embargoed copies of which had been given to the...

I don't care who you are, that's funny! Larry The Cable Guy.

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.”