Free Republic

Sharyl Attkisson talked to Matt Boyle Friday about current events and an extremely disturbing trend. Elites have become adept at controlling media narratives, going so far as to ostracize reporters who “veer” from a particular narrative: “It’s certainly happening here in the United States,” said Attkisson. Asked if American media appear to be aggressively pushing a particular narrative, specifically gun control in light of the recent terrorism in Orlando, Attkisson said: I think they’ve been pushing narratives a lot for the last couple of years in a way I haven’t seen five years ago … ten years ago, for sure....

Almost exactly a century ago at the great naval battle at Jutland, David Beatty said "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today" after two of his battleships exploded under German gunnery and incompetent seamanship by his sailors. Well, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody newspapers today as well. The New York Times runs an editorial on "The NRA's Complicity in Terrorism," but the Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen isn't a member of the NRA. He is a member of the Democratic Party, who voted for Obama twice, and worked as a subcontract security...

CNN’s Don Lemon snapped at Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany for accusing media of shifting focus away from radical Islamic terrorism and toward guns. After reading McEnany a ruling from PolitiFact, which said Trump had falsely represented Hillary Clinton‘s record on guns, McEnany deflected by blaming the media for “being desperate” to make the discussion following the Orlando terrorist attack about guns and not about Islam. Lemon, reporting from Orlando, snapped: “No the media’s not trying to make this about guns. It’s not, it’s not,” he said. “Yes, they are!” she responded. “Kayleigh, it is not trying to make this about...

In the hours after Sunday’s mass shooting at an Orlando night club, Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said the gunman’s weapons included a pistol and an “AR-15-type assault rifle.” On Monday night, officials clarified that the rifle Omar Mateen used in the shooting was not an AR-15, but a Sig Sauer MCX rifle. While aesthetically similar to and just as lethal as an AR-15, the MCX is internally a different beast, thus all but removing it from the AR-15 family of rifles. Yet while the weapon is different, the MCX and the AR-15 share the same design...

I'm an old guy who grew up playing rough-and-tumble from an early age, fighting when necessary to maintain my place in the upper-middle of the testosterone-fueled hierarchy in my small southern town, a kid who couldn't wait to get his first gun and go hunting and was later equally eager to learn the professional use of many lethal military weapons in combat against a deadly enemy. So it's really difficult for me to believe that any man could publicly and apparently proudly proclaim himself to be such a totally emasculated milquetoast, and an ill-informed one at that, as New York...

Donald Trump's favorite nickname for the news media is the "dishonest press." He swaps in "disgusting press" from time to time. And sometimes, he puts it all together: "disgusting, dishonest human beings." The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has a whole menu of takedowns for individual reporters and news organizations. In recent weeks, he's used his microphone and his tweets to label them "third-rate," ''not nice," "disgraceful," "phony," "low-life," "very unprofessional" and "bad people." Or, for extra emphasis in a tweet, "BAD." [Snip] Trump seems to be perpetually mad at the press, but there's a method to his madness. He sees...

"It feels like a bazooka - and sounds like a cannon." How do we know AR-15s are the single most lethal weapon on the planet? Because they're SO LOUD. LOUD, YOU HEAR ME?! LOUD!!!! This is one of those things that must be read to be believed, and no, this was not found in The Onion, amazingly. New York Daily News reporter Gersh Kuntzman set out to test shoot an AR-15. “It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon,” he writes. A cannon. And Bazooka? The same bazooka also known as a "recoilless rifle"? I would like...

The false narrative emerging from the media seeks to make a few points, all of which are red herrings and straw men designed to take attention from the truth. The shooter, Omar Mateen, was homophobic because he hated gays. Mateen was unstable because he was mean and beat his wife Mateen had too much unfettered access to guns Mateen was not religiously motivated Story after story references these points, and they quote each other liberally (take the pun as you wish).

On Sunday, even after the FBI hinted the presence of a link to radical Islam, the panel on ABC’s This Week blamed the terrorist attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida on heated election rhetoric and guns in America. “I think we all ought to pause with what happened in Orlando today,” stated ABC’s Matt Dowd when asked if third party candidates could gain supporters, “And if we understand that all of the hateful thoughts become hateful words become hateful actions.” Dowd continued, “And now, maybe in the course of this, after what happened, the temperatures will go down...

A Telemundo reporter in Philadelphia was punched in the face on the air during a live broadcast, video shows. Iris Delgado was concluding a report outside City Hall on Thursday night when she was approached by Waheedah Wilson.

Liberal Journalist Visits Border And Is Surprised By What Residents Want

Is the American population at large capable of independent thought anymore? With politics going the way they are today, it’s a question worth asking. As the 2016 election season progresses, it becomes more and more apparent on a daily basis that a vast majority of Americans on both the left and the right require their news to be ruminated, masticated, hashed and rehashed prior to consumption. Instead of using their brains to consume and synthesize facts concerning their country’s politics and politicians, Americans – more often than not – have consigned themselves to a state of cerebral laziness. For such...

A Washington D.C. law professor has given credence to Donald Trump’s charge that U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel has a conflict of interest in a court case involving the likely Republican presidential nominee, saying the judge’s affiliation with a group that advocated for illegal immigrants creates “an appearance of impropriety.” Mr. Curiel’s membership and active role in the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, whether or not it creates an actual bias, is enough to disqualify him from presiding over the case, said Victor Williams, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. “The standard isn’t that one...

Last night, Associated Press – on a day when nobody voted – surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to...

There is currently no indication that Muslim UCLA shooter Mainak Sarkar had any terrorist motives. Though his note has as yet of to be released. But of somewhat more interest is the question of why Sarkar was misidentified as a "white male". One of the more obvious things about Maniak Sarkar is that he is not a white male. He can't be mistaken for a white male. But media coverage has prompted people to expect white male shooters. It's a type of prejudice that we don't much talk about because it's a politically correct prejudice. It's a prejudice encouraged by...

Bias: Hillary Clinton must have some good friends in high media places. Or so it would seem, given the two big helping hands the press just gave her.

On Monday night - the day before California’s primary election - the Associated Press announced Hillary Clinton had finally secured enough delegates to win the Democratic Party nomination. [Snip] But now there is evidence that this announcement the night before the nation’s largest primary was planned days in advance.

But can't think of anything to do about her, like, oh, say, fire her for being a dishonest hack. It’s impossible to feel any sympathy for Yahoo here. When they made Katie Couric their “global anchor” on the apparent belief that she was some sort of serious journalist, they either knew what they were getting into or were so ignorant of the real truth that they were investing in their own demise. And Yahoo has enough problems apart from the fact that the face of its news operation is a lying left-wing propagandist masquerading - and not very convincingly -...

What was your intention with inserting that pause? You have Katie asking the group this question, “Do you think people on the terror watch list should be allowed to own guns?” Katie’s asking the question of the group, but as the filmmaker, I want to ask the question of the audience. So what I was thinking, my editor was thinking was we need to stop for a second, because the film moves along at a really fast clip. So you’ll see that throughout we’ll stop down after something happens or when we present something. The terror watch list is a...

It’s looking to be a long hot summer, full of violence against Trump supporters, exposure of Clinton wrongdoing, and continued loathsome behavior by the president, academics, and the media. To its shame, at this crucial juncture many of the once-respected members of the right’s commentariat are failing their readers and proving to be America’s biggest losers. Space constraints prevent me from detailing all the wrongdoing of Hillary Clinton and her aides and allies, but here are just some turned up this week. Breitbart reports that it is now clear that Hillary shared the names of covert U.S. intelligence figures on...