Free Republic

It’s telling that a new report on the Obama administration’s dealings with journalists comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists — an organization that normally focuses on press freedoms abroad. President Obama’s White House has been so extraordinarily unfriendly toward investigative journalism — not just unfriendly, but an outright enemy — that CPJ had to look inward this time, examining the loss of freedoms of the press in our own country rather than pointing out problems in some Third World backwater. And the report, by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, found that the administration...

Trashing the "excessive secrecy" of the Bush administration, Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen far short of that promise. Former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie released their tough report at the Committee to Protect Journalists on the Obama administration’s tight control and aggressive prosecution of leaks. The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." What sets the Obama administration apart from others, said Downie, is not its attempt to control the media narrative but rather its shameless ability to do so.What’s significant here is...

One would think reports like this would be more than a worrisome to any reporter who prides themselves on even making a moderate attempt to report the truth. When President Obama first took office, he made the following claim. We were told that his administration would be the most honest and open presidency in modern American history. He made that statement in response to what he felt was far too much secrecy from the Bush administration. During his first four plus years in office, I wonder how Obama is doing with making good on that claim. My impression is not...

Editor's note: This is the first of a two part series on George Soros and the media. When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC. Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane...

Local TV teeters as staff, anchors are axed As a top anchor in Los Angeles, John Beard worked during the heyday of local TV news -- covering earthquakes, riots and the occasional celebrity on the loose. Beard was a familiar presence on L.A. TV screens for 30 years, via lead anchor roles on KNBC and then KTTV. But three decades after arriving on the West Coast from Buffalo, Beard is back where he started, anchoring a morning newscast in that small western New York community. Beard had a great run in the nation's No. 2 market -- but his exit...

Rivals Strike From Left As She Courts Center; 'Responsibility Gene' BALLSTON, Va. -- As Hillary Clinton huddled with advisers not long ago, she was pressed to stake a position popular with the party's left-leaning voters on one issue. But the presidential front-runner resisted. It wasn't her position. "If I do what you all want me to do, I'll look great for the next couple months," she said, according to one insider's account. "But what if I'm the nominee? I'll be ripped apart by the Republicans. And what if I'm the president? My hands will be tied." The New York senator's...

BALTIMORE -- For the first time, the operators of a California-based Web site are revealing they have evidence that an e-mail address from the Maryland Democratic State Party is associated with MD4BUSH. WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said the operators of FreeRepublic.com are not revealing the name behind MD4BUSH. But this is the first time that they are suggesting the state democratic party is associated with the MD4BUSH account on their Web site. Jim Robinson, the president of the conservative Web site, issued the following statement: "Free Republic has evidence that an mddems.org (Maryland Democratic Party) e-mail address...

Today's Toles cartoon in the Washington (com)Post, entitled The 20th Hijacker Arrives, depicts the U.S. Capitol building being blown apart by "The Deficit," and with a sub-title, "Who Could've Foreseen?"

The New York Times once epitomised all that was great about American newspapers; now it symbolises its industry’s deep malaise. The Grey Lady’s circulation is tumbling, down another 3.9% in the latest data from America’s Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Its advertising revenues are down, too (12.5% lower in March than a year earlier), as is the share price of its owner, the New York Times Company, up from its January low but still over 20% below what it was last July. On Tuesday April 29th Standard & Poor’s cut the firm’s debt rating to one notch above junk. At...

General Leopoldo Galtieri was never one of your big-time dictators, just a run-of-the-mill generalissimo of the kind who once had a hammerlock on Latin America's presidential palaces. He died on Sunday in Buenos Aires, under house arrest or, more accurately, under one-bedroom apartment arrest. But boy, you should've seen him in the old days, back at the Casa Rosada. Everything was going swell until he made one tiny slip-up: He decided that the answer to Argentina's impending financial collapse was to invade the Falklands. Hitherto, the regime hadn't put a foot wrong: some 30,000 Argentine dissidents are thought to have...

After yesterday's press conference in front of The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. that criticized The Post for violating their sourcing guidelines and for accessing a FreeRepublic.com account in possible violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an editor for The Post is now claiming authorization to log-in to the account of MD4BUSH.Earlier this week, Post Maryland editor R.B. Brenner made statements that reporter Matthew Mosk had logged in to MD4BUSH's account "two or three times" after being given the password by an "intermediary" in order to authenticate private messages sent between MD4BUSH and NCPAC on Free Republic.Brenner...

Per MSNBC

The reporter-source relationship can blossom into something more intimate and more troubling, as evidenced by the Suzy Wetlaufer-Jack Welch affair. But other types of close ties between journalists and newsmakers can also pose nettlesome problems. It was a cozy reporter-source relationship in the extreme, a clear conflict of interest and a deliciously scandalous affair that produced gasps and gossiping among journalists. The editor--not just a lowly reporter--but the top editor of the Harvard Business Review had become romantically involved with the married former General Electric chairman, Jack Welch, after she interviewed him for a story. Now, Suzy Wetlaufer did what...

Time to check back on the Kerry thing... Here's going back to FR post back re the Kerry thing back on April 2003: The Hill: Boston Globe to Probe Kerry Private Affairs

<p>The story is being shushed around the family dinner table &#8212; and in newspaper city rooms &#8212; but all the neighbors are talking about it.</p> <p>What the neighbors are talking about are rumors of marital infidelity by Democratic White House front-runner John Kerry, and they have learned about them from the Internet, talk radio and the foreign press.</p>

In case the latest ZenithOptimedia ad-spending forecast wasn't depressing enough, the outlook for newspapers and magazines is especially bad -- even relative to the grim state of advertising in general. Among the gloomy predictions: while overall ad spending is expected to rebound somewhat in 2011, newspapers and magazines will continue to decline due to secular factors, including Internet competition. ZenithOptimedia expects total ad spending in developed markets to drop 9.9% in 2009, followed by a further 2.9% decline in 2010, thanks to continuing structural economic problems. After this, the Zenith forecast has ad spending in developed markets growing 1.5% in...

Posted on Fri, Feb. 13, 2004 Kerry sex scandal lurking?Internet report cites suspicionsBy WILLIAM BUNCHbunchw@phillynews.com Here we go again?The worlds of politics and the media were all atwitter yesterday over a report on the popular Internet site, the Drudge Report, that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry - the Democratic presidential front-runner - may be brought down by a sex scandal.Six years ago, it was a similar item on the Drudge Report that brought the world's attention to the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky - sparking the scandal that led to Clinton's impeachment.Late last night, Matt Drudge...

Arnold Groped Us! Six Women's Horror Stories" "Schwarzenegger Shocker: I Admire Hitler." No, these scoops did not appear first in the supermarket tabloids The National Enquirer, The Star or The Globe. The news breaks, albeit with significantly more subdued headlines, actually came from mainstream news organizations like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and ABC News. The top supermarket tabloids, as of Sunday morning, had let such news about Mr. Schwarzenegger alone, content in the last seven weeks of the California recall campaign to stick to the ups and downs of Ben and J. Lo or Demi and...

WASHINGTON, D.C. The last time Ben Bradlee was cruising through the islands near Guadalcanal in the South Pacific was in 1943, aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer. Enduring some of the worst combat of World War II, the Navy spent months battling through the waterway known as "The Slot." "It was where cruisers and destroyers met up with the Japanese and played bang-bang at night," Bradlee describes it today. Nearly 63 years later, the legendary journalist is ready to return. This time, however, the destroyer is being replaced by a leisurely cruise ship, and his youngest son, Quinn, will accompany him....

ARE CNN, AND THE AMERICAN MEDIA ELITE, CASTRO’S PUPPETS? By: Jesus J. Chao February 21, 2002 It borders on treason when CNN encourages Americans to travel illegally to Cuba and to break the U.S. laws in order to further CNN’s unflinchingly support of a terrorist state undermining President Bush’s war against terrorism. The fact that Cuba has an horrendous record of human rights violations and that its leader, Fidel Castro, as recently as May 2001, has pledged to destroy us, has no bearing on CNN’s behavior. Since its inception, CNN’s coverage of Cuban affairs seems to come directly from Castro’s ...