Free Republic

Well now they have done it. They killed a priest. A high priest. A secular high priest. They killed a journalist I mean. “In the video released on Tuesday,” reports Asia News Channel, “an individual presumed to be [freelance journalist James] Foley - who was captured by militants in Syria in November 2012 - is seen on his knees in a desert landscape reading a statement asking his family to stop the US intervention in Iraq. A man standing next to him dressed in black with his face covered and holding a knife then says in a distinct British accent...

Man, 21, fatally shot by police on Far South Side By Jeremy Gorner A man on a bike was fatally shot by police on the Far South Side after he aimed a gun at officers, authorities said. A Calumet District tactical team had tried to stop the 21-year-old man for questioning as he rode a bicycle in the 13300 block of South Forrestville Avenue about 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, authorities said. Someone had earlier called police about an armed man on a bike, according to a preliminary statement from the Chicago Police Department. Police: 21-year-old man fatally shot Pat Camden, spokesman...

Anonymous comments, even positive ones, damage trust in the news media. Despite their ubiquity on news sites around the Internet, a movement against anonymous comments sections has slowly gathered steam over the past few years. The first call to action came in 2010 when the American Journalism Review said, “It is time for news sites to stop allowing anonymous online comments.” Since that bold declaration, a wide variety of media outlets, including ESPN, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Sporting News and USA Today have either banned anonymous posts on their sites or eliminated comments sections altogether. In August 2013, the...

President Obama went back to his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard Tuesday evening following less than 48 hours in Washington, leaving people puzzled over why he came back in the first place. Obama’s two days in Washington were mostly quiet, and concluded with the president receiving his daily national security briefing in the morning, and joining Vice President Biden to huddle with members of his economic team in the afternoon. Administration officials have insisted for weeks that the president just wanted to return to the White House for a series of meetings, but the explanation was met with a healthy dose...

A tweet by St. Louis Post-Dispatch crime reporter Christine Byers dropped a bombshell in the ongoing reporting on the shooting of unarmed 18 year old Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. “Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop’s version of events in shooting Ferguson.”

Police in Ferguson, MO arrested two journalists for covering the protests over their fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager eight times, including in the back. Officers shoved Wesley Lowery, of the Washington Post, into a soda machine for taping them, before he was cuffed in plastic binds. An officer rammed Ryan Grim’s head against glass. The reporter for the Huffington Post wasn’t packing up his reporting gear quickly enough. Both journalists’ respective papers released statements condemning the Ferguson police, but the decline of free press reaches further than one town in Missouri. Unfortunately state suppression of the press is hardly...

Sunday, August 17, 2014 How to Write About Israel Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week. At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won't give up. Wars can be covered from thousands...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)With the release of tape today by the Ferguson Police Department of a man who appears to be Michael Brown allegedly physically assaulting a much smaller clerk while stealing Swisher Sweet cigars, the media’s narrative has collapsed. The media – and top-level politicians across the political spectrum – portrayed Michael Brown in saintlike fashion. That narrative no longer holds. The report from the police department states: Brown grabbed a box of Swisher Sweet cigars and handed them to Johnson. [REDACTED] witnessed [REDACTED] tell Brown that he had to pay for those cigars first. That is when Brown reached across the...

Sen. Mary Landrieu, R-La., walks to the Senate floor for a vote, May 13, 2014. Republican Louisiana Senate hopeful Rep. Bill Cassidy is calling on Sen. Mary Landrieu to apologize and return all taxpayer money she has spent on charter flights after a CNN report revealed the Democratic incumbent violated federal law by using taxpayer dollars to charter a private flight to a campaign event. "Senator Landrieu's disregard and abuse of taxpayer money is unacceptable and, reportedly, illegal," Rep. Cassidy said in a statement. "She should return all the taxpayer money she has spent on charter flights, open up her...

5 Race Riots in Obama's Post-Racial America by Ben Shapiro 11 Aug 2014 Riots and looting in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer represent just the latest spate of race-based mass violence to break out in President Obama’s post-racial America. When Obama was elected in 2008, many Americans hoped that racial conflict in the country would calm. Instead, precisely the reverse seems to have occurred. Not all riots across the country have been racial in nature, of course. Occupy Wall Street participated in riots repeatedly in 2011, and May Day protesters rioted in...

Well, it looks like the Progressive lapdog media has been colluding again. Media Trackers, a site that tracks media stories and works for transparency in government, uncovered a group with over 1,000 members that is literally a who’s who of the Progressive Left in media. And I would wager, it is only the tip of the iceberg out there — I am sure that the collaboration is widespread and well-organized.  The group is called Gamechanger Salon and boasts members that include a CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine,...

Earlier this year, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a trash-talking article in New York Magazine begging conservatives to dig back into the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Hillary Clinton is preparing to run for president again, and he thinks it will help. Rich delighted in "how inexorably the Clintons will seduce the GOP into another orgy of self-destruction" by focusing on Whitewater or Bill Clinton's sexual harassments, making Hillary look again like "a victim of drive-by character assassination." While every Clinton scandal is automatically "old news," even when it's fresh news, somehow Watergate never fades as a...

While the media basks in the artificial light of a 4 percent GDP print for the second quarter, jobs continue to disappoint—and so does GDP. You wouldn’t know it, however,r by the way the media covers the economy. “The high-flying labor market showed no let-up in July,” writes USAToday, “as employers added 209,000 jobs.” Of course economists expected a bigger gain of 238,000 jobs, but you know: Who’s counting? Numbers and math are so overrated. We have gotten to the point that a missed estimate of 30,000 jobs is no big deal, while an uptick in unemployment is good...

As if to say, "don't let the door hit you on your way out," President Obama -- on the eve of the August Congressional recess -- decided to take a big swat at Republican lawmakers today. It was clear the president was in the mood for a summer scolding. Here are seven ways the president basically called Republicans bums today: 1. 'They're Not Even Trying' 2. So Sue Me? 3. Diplomatic Delay 4. ‘A Little More Extreme' 5. They Can't Even Agree With Themselves 6. ‘Congress Is Failing' 7. Problem Solving? Not So Much

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS ILLINOIS TO ALLOW GUN CONTROL RECRUITERS AT CRIME PREVENTION EVENT We just got word that the Arlington Heights Park District will allow the BLOOMBERG MOMS to set up a recruitment booth at the National Night Out event. National Night Out is supposed to be a non-partisan, non-political public service event that informs citizens on how not to become a victim of crime. Arlington Heights has now turned National Night Out into a GUN CONTROL event by allowing the Moms' recruiters to have a booth at the event. Of course, no pro-gun organizations will be allowed to have a...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obama supporters at Wikipedia have censored information about his “transparency” Wikipedia’s article Presidency of Barack Obama has a section called “Transparency.” The section contains various claims by Obama about how supposedly transparent his administration is.A crazy person who lives in my apartment building added some examples of Obama’s non-transparency to the section. However, the Obama supporters at Wikipedia erased them, and banned the account of the person who had added them. This is the content that was added and then erased:In February 2013, ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who covered Presidents Ford, Carter,...

And why reporters won’t talk about it. The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. So why aren’t reporters in Gaza ferreting it out? The precise location of a large underground bunker equipped with sophisticated communications equipment and housing some part of the leadership of a major terrorist organization beneath a major hospital would seem to qualify as a world-class scoop—the kind that might merit a Pulitzer, or at least a Polk. So why isn’t the fact that Hamas uses Shifa...

Thousands attend EID prayer at Toyota Park BY NICK SWEDBERG Correspondent Updated: July 29, 2014 2:08AM Thousands of Muslims filled the field at Bridgeview’s Toyota Park Monday morning for an unusually somber Eid prayer ceremony in the light of heightened hostilities between Israel and Gaza. Volunteers collected signatures for the 5,000 postcards brought to the event. They intend to mail them to President Obama over the latest deaths in recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The postcards, which 10 chapters of the American Muslims for Palestine across the country distributed Monday, demand that the White House intervene in the fighting...

On Thursday, with PJ Media's J. Christian Adams as her guest, Fox News's Megyn Kelly recited a list of assertions (under oath, she reminded us) made by Internal Revenue Service officials which have later been shown to be lies or cause for agency flip-flops after "new" facts have been revealed. It's a significant list. By implication, it's an indictment of the vast majority of the establishment press, which has refused to give the IRS scandal the attention it deserves. Video and a transcript follow the jump. ... The establishment press has been almost completely uninterested in telling their readers, listeners,...

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, calls out CNN’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza as irresponsible and one-sided.