Free Republic

A couple years ago the journalist Matt Taibbi came up with a telling new term for the way the media works in our time: bombholing. Bombholing is the practice of publishing wild and unsubstantiated stories in the press, then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they turn out to be false. Then the media hits viewers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” Viewers are led “from mania to mania.” Taibbi once laid it out in more detail: News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale...

Proving once again that the press never learns its lesson, the Washington Post graced us this week with a humdinger: “Trump, GOP seize on campus protests to depict chaos under Biden.” This followed a New York Times headline from December, “As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment.” In short: Nothing is ever a problem because it’s a problem. It’s only an issue because conservatives “seize” on it, or better yet, “pounce.” But Americans, particularly Jewish Americans, are coming to their own conclusions about how terrifying these protests are.

NEW YORK — Dan Rather returned to the CBS News airwaves for the first time since his bitter exit 18 years ago, appearing in a reflective interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” days before the debut of a Netflix documentary on the 92-year-old newsman’s life. After 44 years at the network, 24 as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” Rather left under a cloud following a botched investigation into then-President George W. Bush’s military record. Rather signed off as anchor for the last time on March 9, 2005, and exited the network when his contract ended 15 months later.

“First, conquer the organs of propaganda,” wrote Karl Marx, who was a genius mob agitator and nothing else. Mob agitators were already a kind of specialty in Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe, but Marx wrote the instruction manual, just as Saul Alinsky did in his Rules for Radicals, which became Barack Obama’s manual for political agitators. SNIP About ten years ago, Tucker Carlson helped to expose a radical propaganda internet list called JournoList, a secret Google group of media influencers who made up the headlines for the next day’s news, in places like the New York Times, the Washington...

I'm old enough to remember the hubbub over JournoList, a listserv of leftist reporters from different news outlets who convened regularly in a chatroom to strategize how to spin stories and set narratives, such as how to torpedo Gov.Sarah Palin to get Barack Obama elected president. From 2007 to 2010, JournoList was its own echo chamber, as Politico put it at the time. Now the same thing's happening again, with TV lawyers acting as rhetorical wetwork teams covering the trials of their political nemesis, Donald Trump. JournoList was started by Ezra Klein, who now works for the New York Times,...

If someone says, “Trust the science!” these days, it’s usually an effort to short-circuit debate over weighty policy issues. “Trust the science” has been deployed in the past five years to prevent debate over COVID school closures and mask mandates, over electric-car subsidies, and over sex changes for boys and girls. For my entire time in Washington, though, “trust the science” has been used to oppose a missile defense system for the United States. For my first 20 years as a journalist, I was told that a missile defense system simply cannot work and that anyone who disagreed was a...

PBS/CNN’s Christiane Amanpour joined CBS’s Stephen Colbert for her second late night comedy show appearance of the week on the Wednesday installment of The Late Show. The duo freaked out over the possibility of a second Donald Trump term and that the rest of the democratic world is similarly freaked out and over the same issues, such as American pro-lifers allegedly being comparable to Iran and the Taliban. Amanpour informed Colbert that the rest of the world is “watching your election very, very closely because that is really preoccupying them. Having had a collective nervous breakdown the last time. They...

CBS News Confirmed, launched late last year, is focused on tackling misinformation, including the growing scourge of deepfakes and photos, videos and audio created by generative artificial intelligence. Now, Mahtani will be tasked with figuring out how best to bring its reporting to TV, digital and social platforms. Segments will run on CBS News programs leading up the the 2024 election, and a dedicated streaming show is planned for later this summer. “CBS News Confirmed is the right initiative at the right time,” Mahtani said. “We are witnessing an onslaught of misinformation that makes it harder for people to distinguish...

NewsGuard discovered that The New York Times was never worth its flawless 100/100 score, but apparently only after MRC Free Speech America repeatedly called it out. NewsGuard finally downgraded The Times’ perfect score Feb.1 to a lukewarm 87.5/100. NewsGuard’s beef with the legacy leftist publication was that it “no longer meets NewsGuard standards for handling the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” Wow, what a revelation! Has the dystopian website traffic cop been living under a rock? The head-turning move by the media ratings firm came after MRC released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive...

When President Biden proposed an additional $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine in August, Moscow spin doctors working for the Kremlin were ready to try to undermine public support for the bill, internal Kremlin documents show. In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents...

Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Russian propaganda has “absolutely” infected the Republican base. Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Let’s turn to Ukraine, an issue that’s important to you and your fellow Republican Chairman, Michael McCaul, who runs the form refers committee. Congressman McCaul made a comment this week about what he says sounds like Russian propaganda from some conservative media. Why it’s so difficult to explain to Republican voters why supporting Ukraine is important. He said, “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a...

Now that we have the full autopsy report for Dagney (Nex) Benedict, many of the questions surrounding her overdose have been answered. The full report, released by the Chief Medical Officer and Board of Medicolegal Investigations on March 27th, 2024, confirms what the earlier Medical Examiner’s Office reported on March 13th, 2024. There were “massive” amounts of Diphenhydramine, more commonly known over the counter as Benadryl,” in Dagney’s blood. [snip] n July 17th, 2019, when Dagney was 11 years old, an arrest warrant was issued for James Everette Hughes, Dagney’s father. He was arrested on July 31st, 2019, in Sebastian...

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case of Nicholas Sandmann, a former Kentucky high school student who sued several news outlets for allegedly libelous coverage of his viral encounter with a Native American activist in 2019. Justices decided not to take up Sandmann’s petition against several outlets, including ABC News, The New York Times, Gannett, and others, leaving in place a lower court’s dismissal of the massive libel suit. The former student argued he was defamed by reports about his confrontation with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., five years ago....

The agenda version is front and center with the widespread media pronouncement that the GOP bid to impeach President Biden has stalled. Wouldn’t you know it — CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico and others on the left all reached exactly the same conclusion at the same time. It’s not a coincidence, it’s a conspiracy. They think and act the same way because they’re on the same team. They’re wrong that the probe is dead, but in saying so prematurely, they reveal their goal. From the get-go, they made certain the public would never know the full...

NBC raised eyebrows Friday when it announced that former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel will join the network as an on-air contributor. McDaniel, who stepped down from the RNC at the start of this month, will provide conservative political analysis on NBC and its affiliate MSNBC. She makes her on-air debut on Sunday. NBC News political coverage chief Carrie Budoff Brown explained that McDaniel was chosen because she can provide “an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party.” That insider knowledge is apparently enough for NBC to overlook the rest of McDaniel’s history. Although...

Ronna McDaniel, the former head of the Republican National Committee (RNC), will join NBC News as a contributor. McDaniel will appear on “Meet The Press” this Sunday, giving her first interview since resigning as head of the RNC earlier this year. McDaniel is expected to be featured as part of election coverage on NBC and on the network’s sister cable channel, MSNBC. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, who leads political coverage at NBC, wrote in a memo shared with The New York Times. McDaniel became RNC...

Democrat Party media hacks flipping out for being called out as the anti-Israel haters they are. As they use Hamas numbers, trash Netanyahu, and back Biden’s horrendous war on Israel. How dare Trump or anyone notice such flagrant and grotesque behavior by these frauds.Dana Bash and the other narcissistic media Democrats must be called out for what they’re doing and saying. Never Again must anyone be intimidated into silence while they spew their disgusting poison. No more. No more 1940s New York Times-like betrayal of the Jews by media self-haters.https://mediaite.com/news/cnns-dana-bash-unflinchingly-rips-trump-anti-semitic-and-incredibly-dangerous-comment-about-jews-calling-it-what-it-is

The left wing media is impervious to the facts and to the truth and cannot wait to seize upon anything and everything Donald Trump says no matter how much they need to warp the truth. Warp they did, with gusto, and it's turning into a bloodbath for them. Here is the Trump speech in full and context Speech with full contextpic.twitter.com/7ly7Cf3fEG— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2024Here's the text: China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they're going to sell those cars into the...

Joe Scarborough: not just a TV talking head anymore. Now, perhaps the world's greatest military strategist and oracle. On today's Morning Joe, "General" Joe repeatedly called it a "lie" that Israel needs to conduct a ground invasion of Rafah. Why? "Because that's the lie right now that you hear. Oh, if they don't go in and kill another 10,000 civilians, Hamas is going to come back to power. It is a lie. Hamas will never regain power in Gaza, ever. That's over."How many Israeli lives is Scarborough willing to bet on his prediction? Get the rest of the story and...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is defending former President Donald Trump on Sunday after multiple establishment media outlets ran headlines stating that the former president warned the U.S. would see a "bloodbath" if he is not reelected. Although Trump did use the word "bloodbath" during a speech in Ohio on Saturday, outlets such as NPR, Politico, The Hill, NBC News, The New York Times and others used the term in headlines without context. Musk said the headlines were "legacy media lies" and he made multiple posts Sunday criticizing their use of the term and stressing the need for context. Musk responded...