Free Republic

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush may find out that Wall Street money will not buy him the love of GOP primary voters like it does mainstream media elites who are rushing to cast him as the 2016 frontrunner. As soon as Mitt Romney announced that he would not make a third White House run, the mainstream press immediately anointed Bush as the clear Republican 2016 frontrunner. They made their pronouncements even though Bush had not yet proven with his speeches that he can be a successful candidate in the digital age and neither had the best ground game nor the...

Brian Williams, the face of the NBC News division and among its most visible personalities for the past decade, has been suspended from his post at??Nightly News for six months without pay.?? Lester Holt, who has been filling in for Williams since Feb. 9, will continue as interim anchor of Nightly News. "We have decided today to suspend Brian Williams as Managing Editor and Anchor of NBC Nightly News for six months. The suspension will be without pay and is effective immediately," NBC News president Deborah Turness said in a memo, adding that "this was a very hard decision. Certainly...

Enjoy the mocking at the site. SAMPLE: Kevin in ABQ @KevinInABQ Follow Was named after Sir Edmund Hillary #BrianWilliamsMemories 2:55 PM - 4 Feb 2015

Rand Paul does a lot of interviews -- a lot. This, from time to time, has gotten him in trouble. Rarely, though, has it gone as poorly as this. Speaking Monday afternoon with CNBC, Paul: 1) Reiterated his contention that vaccines should be voluntary. 2) Said this: "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." (Michele Bachmann said something similar during the 2012 presidential campaign. It didn't go over well.) 3) Actually shushed the anchor when he thought she wasn't allowing him to answer her questions.

LEIPZIG, Germany – Wednesday night saw a flare of violence and an accompanying police operation on a scale without precedent in recent German history. A group opposing militant Islam in Europe has called a demonstration, the city is deafened by political slogans played over loudspeakers, property is vandalised, and explosives are thrown at police in colossal running battles that involve thousands of people. If you got your news from the mainstream media, what is increasingly known in Germany as the ‘liar press’ (Luegenpresse), the story might very well end there. Then again, the report might also throw in salacious details...

Colorado Springs, Colo. — From the liberal media’s coverage of my beautiful adopted hometown, you’d think we live in a KKK-infested hotbed where every person of color fears for his or her life. Take a look at these ominous headlines: “Bombing of NAACP headquarters harkens to bad old days” — MSNBC “Colorado Springs explosion recalls violence against NAACP” — the Washington Post “NAACP Bombing Evokes Memories of Civil Rights Strife” — Time magazine “Explosion outside NAACP office could be a hate crime, officials say” — the Los Angeles Times Let me and my brown skin assure you, America: Bull Connor...

CNN’s Max Foster interviewed Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal over the weekend. He grilled Jindal on so-called “no-go zones.” Pay attention to what Jindal actually said, as documented by CNN. Jindal was also unable to offer examples during an earlier interview with CNN’s Max Foster, saying that he’s “heard from folks here that there are neighborhoods where women don’t feel comfortable going in without veils … We all know that there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into.” “I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here. Pretending it’s not here...

First Of All, Its A "CNN Poll". So already we can assume they probably did not call people in "Crucial Purple" States". Maybe the far left media is already working on their own version of "Operation Chaos"?.Making sure they keep Ted Cruz and Scott Walker out of the race and polls. As the media keeps bringing up the 2016 race and potential candidates, they seem to be focusing on Bush, Christie, Romney and Paul. And please! enough of the biased polls with GOP candidates against Hillary! We all know that most Conservative candidates will beat Hillary. Lets just wait till...

What follows is an object lesson in why year-end best, worst and other lists shouldn't be published until the year actually ends. A Kwanzaa "parade" was held in Los Angeles yesterday. In reporting on the event, CBS Los Angeles published a work of fiction which absolutely belongs on any 2014 list of most embarrassing moments in journalism (HT Twitchy; bolds are mine):

On Sunday, CNN’s Inside Politics spent several minutes hyping the supposed headache Tea Partiers could give GOP leadership despite the Republican Party winning their 54th Senate seat following Saturday’s runoff in Louisiana. During the discussion, Robert Costa of The Washington Post insisted that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying “to govern responsibly and he wants to set the party up for major gains in '16. And that started in 2014 by pushing back the Tea Party and it starts now by making sure that all the passions and eagerness in the House don't overtake the party.”

Following his on-duty shooting of robbery suspect Michael Brown in August, Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson was targeted by protesters who automatically assumed the white officer was motivated by racism instead of a legitimate threat on his life. When a grand jury privy to the details of this incident determined the veteran officer should not be charged in the shooting, threats against his life only increased as rioters looted and destroyed businesses in the St. Louis suburb. Amid the civil unrest, New York Times reporter Julie Bosman stoked tensions by releasing the name of the street on which Wilson...

Any day now, I am expecting to turn on the tube and see an ad that says, “More Americans get their TV news from Fox than anywhere else.”. Whether that pleases or horrifies you, it’s time to think seriously about what that says about Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the state of network news today and the role TV plays or doesn’t play in providing us with reliable, trustworthy information. Much of the media establishment seems bent on ignoring the incredible ratings success of Fox News. Or, maybe it’s just that Fox has pounded CNN and MSNBC in the ratings for so...

The White House is exasperated with the major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS and NBC -- for skipping out on President Barack Obama’s Thursday primetime address on his executive actions on immigration. “In 2006, Bush gave a 17 minute speech that was televised by all three networks that was about deploying 6000 national guard troops to the border. Obama is making a 10 minute speech that will have a vastly greater impact on the issue. And none of the networks are doing it. We can’t believe they were aggrieved that we announced this on Facebook,” a senior administration official told...

American Soldiers Kill Nine Germans Nuremberg, October 6, 1946 Seven German civilians and two military personnel were killed by American soldiers today in a Bavarian town recently devastated by Allied bombing. The victims were identified as Hans Frank, 46; Wilhem Frick, 69; Alfred Jodl, 56; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, 43; Wilhelm Keitel, 64; Joachim von Ribbentrop, 53; Alfred Rosenberg, 53; Fritz Saukel, 51; and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, 54. The victims either had their necks broken or were strangled.

The Obama administration, despite the president's promises of transparency, is "more dangerous" to the media than any other White House in history, USA Today's Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said this weekend. Page, speaking Saturday at a White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) seminar, also said the administration is "more restrictive," in reference to the its leak investigations and naming Fox News' James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a violation of the federal Espionage Act, writes The Washington Post's Eric Wemple in an opinion piece Tuesday. Veteran New York Times reporter Peter Baker, telling one of the stories, said that while...

At some point, a compendium of condemnations against the Obama administration’s record of media transparency (actually, opacity) must be assembled. Notable quotations in this vein come from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who said, “It is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering”; New York Times reporter James Risen, who said, “I think Obama hates the press”; and CBS News’s Bob Schieffer, who said, “This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush’s did, and his before that.” USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page has added a sharper edge to...

Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," Bob Woodward said there are, "lots of unanswered questions," about the Obama administrations involvement in the IRS scandal surrounding the targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny. Woodward said, "The reality now in my view that in the Obama administration, there are lots of unanswered questions about the IRS, particularly. If I were young, I would take Carl Bernstein and move to Cincinnati where that IRS office is and set up headquarters and go talk to everyone."

The nation’s Big Three TV networks that breathlessly reported the 2006 anti-Bush election which gave Democrats control of Capitol Hill have practically ignored this year’s anti-Obama midterms that are expected to return full control of the Hill to the GOP. A new and exhaustive Media Research Center analysis compared the last seven weeks of CBS, NBC and ABC news coverage with the same period in 2006 and found a 6-1 disparity between the Democratic election wave and the current election. The story count: 159-25.

It's important to remember that, in police shooting cases like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, the initial facts are often wrong. You don't want to end up looking like Rich Lowry, National Review editor, whose March 23, 2012, column on the Trayvon Martin shooting was titled, "Al Sharpton Is Right."

Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes today about a trend at the White House—and throughout journalism—that threatens the quality and credibility of news-gathering: Public-relations "minders" are injecting themselves into our interviews with politicians, CEOs, and other policymakers. Minder madness joins the surge of "background briefings" and the decline of access to decision-makers as evidence that the White House—and other big instititutions—are manipulating the press. It's that, but it's also something worse: It's evidence that journalists are ceding control when they should be seizing it, accepting canned news rather than breaking it. Farhi writes, "Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between...