Free Republic

Facebook had announced it will begin adding warning labels to “fake news” on its site. The plan is to add a link to stories which readers have identified as fake. The link will cite fact-checkers explaining why a story is false or fake. Facebook described the proposed changes in a blog post: "We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully. We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our...

As far I can tell the world is in a much worse place after eight years of President Obama. China, Russia, Iran and Cuba are stronger. The Middle East is in shambles. Terrorism deaths are higher and the world has a massive refuge crisis. I can think of nowhere that the U.S. is better off today after eight years of Obama, Hillary and Kerry. Isn't it time to give new ideas and a man accomplished throughout the world a chance? Not for the legacy media and its Democrat clients. I remember when George W. Bush was in office and the...

UPDATE: Shortly after this report was published Politico contacted The Daily Caller to say: “This tweet is completely unacceptable and is an obvious violation of POLITICO standards. Julia Ioffe is no longer with the publication.” Ioffe is joining The Atlantic in January but this tweet accelerated the timeline of her departure from Politico “immediately,” according to a Politico source. Julia Ioffe, a former contributing writer for Politico Magazine who will be joining The Atlantic as a reporter in January, suggested Wednesday on Twitter that President-elect Donald Trump is having sex with his daughter Ivanka.

"MSNBC is under pressure from [parent network] NBC to toe a Trump line and we need some alternative media out there," said Brock. "I know that there are hosts at MSNBC now who feel their jobs are at risk because the brass is for Trump." Asked if he has heard that directly from a host at MSNBC, Brock said, "One has, yeah. And I've heard of others."

When President Obama took office, he gave journalists great hope by promising unprecedented transparency. The reality has proven to be eight years of slippage in nearly every facet of openness. As the president prepares to leave office, the Society of Professional Journalists have noted the disappointing shortfalls. Forty journalism and open-government groups sent a letter to White House press secretary Josh Earnest* in September after he called for journalists to give the president credit for improvements in government transparency. The Society of Professional Journalists and other groups have “repeatedly outlined to the administration various ways in which transparency has gotten...

The socialist essayist and novelist George Orwell by 1944 grew depressed that as a cost for the defeat of the Axis Powers the Allies had empowered an equally nightmarish monster in the Soviet Union. Since his days fighting for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing Orwell had become an increasingly outspoken enemy of Communism. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, when Stalin renounced all his wartime assurances and steamrolled Eastern Europe, Orwell came to see state socialism under authoritarian auspices as the greatest threat to human freedom. It was not as if right-wing dictators were not equally...

Atheist activist, Green candidate Rob Sherman dies in plane crash Rob Sherman, who died over the weekend in a crash of his small plane in Marengo, operated a business helping people build aircraft from kits. But the 63-year-old was better known as a colorful political activist and Green Party candidate — some might say gadfly — who called journalists and introduced himself as “Rob Sherman, your favorite atheist.” At one time, he had license plates that spelled out ATHEIST. Though he came in for derision as a self-promoter, he challenged the use of government-sponsored Christmas creches and displays and anything...

The Central Intelligence Agency is declaring the Washington Post’s much-hyped story linking the Russian government to hacking the presidential election to help Donald Trump an “outright lie,” according to CIA personnel with direct knowledge of the case. The Washington Post, in a front-page splash on Friday, fingered the CIA for allegedly confirming the wild rumors of Russian hacking that were concocted and spread by Democratic lawmakers for months preceding the election and the weeks since the GOP win. The Washington Post’s story, however, contained no CIA sources and in fact, no credible U.S. intelligence agency sources whatsoever. Instead, it hinged...

Republicans on Capitol Hill are already laying the groundwork for a rapid repeal of President Obama’s signature health-care law beginning on the first day of the new Congress, before President-elect Donald Trump is even sworn in. But the urgent efforts to make good on a Republican campaign promise six years in the making obscure major GOP divisions over what exactly to replace Obamacare with and how to go about it, and how long a transition period to allow before the law’s insurance would go away. Hard-liners are pushing to move as fast as possible, bolstered by a GOP base eager...

Taken together, these elements add up to a profound portrayal of anxiety for the coming years. We have the implicit placement of Trump in the mid-1900s (looking through the Time Magazine cover archives, no images really resemble this cover, save the one seen on the left [a purely visual comparison]). We have a suggestion of the scheming, sordid underside of power. We have the crumbling facade of wealth, which, like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” suggests more than just a physical deterioration.

The Founding Fathers gave the press a First Amendment protection because the media was supposed to be a watchdog of government and made that privilege to keep said government accountable to the people. Journalists were never intended to be friends with the powerful, go to their parties, donate to their campaigns and give off the stench of favoritism. Journalists were never given that First Amendment protection as a shield for lies, lack of industry standards and ethics like the use of anonymous sources, lack of attribution, one-sided accusations without thorough investigation and verification; you know, Journalism 1.01.

Six years ago, Newsweek sold for a grand total of one dollar. Many would say that amount was way overpriced and one big reason is the completely unprofessional sick smear job they are pulling on Donald Trump. An example is an article written by culture writer Ryan Bort, who makes no attempt to hide his Trump hate. Bort used a timeline of rough years throughout human history to exhibit his Trump Derangement Syndrome. Somehow, Bort felt it pertinent to go as far as to even link Trump and the Bubonic Plague from the year 1347.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is engaged in talks with ABC, according to a Thursday report. A person familiar with the discussions told Vanity Fair that "ABC has renewed, and perhaps sweetened, its effort to woo Kelly" within the last month.

Negative media coverage of Donald Trump was 77 percent during the general election, according to a study released Wednesday by the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Trump complained during the campaign that the media was biased against him in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton. The study found that while Clinton also received more negative coverage than positive, it was only 64 percent negative in the general election.

Media Bias: The media dropped the ball during the last campaign with its overwhelmingly negative coverage of the major candidates, especially Donald Trump. That's not the conclusion of some disgruntled conservative media watchdog, but of a new report from Harvard University's impeccably liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. You know when left-0f-center media watchdogs see media bias against a conservative candidate it must be really egregious. And the respected Shorenstein Center's report found that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took their share of hard hits by the media. But Trump came in for especially vicious treatment....

Two words - "nailed it" What a difference 4 months makes ... From Meltdown to Total Meltdown to Man Of The Year ... As FoxNews notes however, while President-elect Donald Trump was named Time magazine's Person of the Year on Wednesday, the honor basically ended there. While describing Trump as the real change-maker of 2016, the magazine also ragged on the Republican president-elect as a "huckster" and "demagogue" while reserving its most glowing praise for runner-up Hillary Clinton -- whom the edition breathlessly described as "an American Moses." In describing Trump, Time's article almost exclusively used backhanded compliments. For instance,...

One of Donald Trump's hobbyhorses during the presidential campaign and even now that he has emerged as the president-elect is how deeply negative the media coverage of him was during the 2016 race. Turns out he was right, according to a new study out of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “His coverage was negative from the start [of the general election] and never came close to entering positive territory,” writes Thomas E. Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard. “During his best weeks, the coverage ran 2-to-1 negative over positive. In his...

On Monday’s broadcast of “The Five,” Fox News analyst Juan Williams stated that members of the media, most of whom are liberals are “disappointed” about Donald Trump’s presidency, but that it is the job of people in the press to hold the powerful accountable and not be their friends. When asked if he thought journalists are angry about a Trump presidency, Williams said, [relevant remarks begin around 4:20] “I think they’re disappointed. If you want to know, I think most of them are liberals, if that’s your point.” He continued, “But, what you’ve got here, going back to Friday when...

Ohio State University is still reeling from the attack last week. A terrorist followed the Islamic State playbook as he drove his car into a crowd of students and slashed others with a knife — 12 people were injured. Fortunately, a campus police officer was able to shoot the attacker in a record time of less than two minutes. University President Michael Drake took this as evidence that only campus police should be armed on campus. Police are very important, but they virtually always arrive after the attack has occurred and they have an extremely difficult job stopping terrorists —...

During a presented Don Lemon discussion panel Monday night, the severity of ridicule against Dr. Ben Carson was jaw-dropping and unprofessional in the extreme. Removing all pretense of substantive discussion, Don Lemon, Marc Lamont Hill and Peter Beinart began openly mocking the nomination of Dr. Carson for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).