Free Republic

The infamous “Access Hollywood” tape — in which President Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women by the hoo-ha — was an inside job, leaked by an NBC News staffer on Billy Bush’s own “Today” show, multiple sources tell Page Six. “The tape was leaked by the NBC News division, by somebody at the ‘Today’ show,” says one source. “NBC News knew for a while about the existence of the tape. Billy himself had told them about it. People in the news division became frustrated that ‘Access Hollywood’ was taking too long to air it and decided it had to come...

Journalists "find a renewed sense of mission," reports The New York Times. That's nice. There is some truth to this. And it's not fake news. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, journalism, in a typical pattern of self-congratulatory excess, has dusted off an old cliche to announce that it is once again "speaking truth to power." Behold. That which was lost has now been found. But it isn't exactly like setting out on a long and frightening sea voyage to find an undiscovered country, is it? Because finding a renewed sense of anything suggests that you might...

Irrespective of any policy controversies in his nascent administration, one thing is clear: President Trump’s fearless, effective handling of the liberal media redounds to his benefit in a manner never seen before in Republican politics. He’s the first Republican president who responds immediately to biased reporting and doesn’t let a single charge go by unrefuted. He is totally unafraid of being combative and confrontational. He has empowered and emboldened his advisors and spokespeople, like Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway and Reince Priebus -- to act likewise, with effective results. For the first time, conservatives are not shouting at the TV out...

As promised two days ago on the Sean Hannity radio show, James O'Keefe and his team at Project Veritas just released covertly captured, previously unheard audio footage from within the CNN newsroom. But unlike his usual undercover sting operations, this footage was allegedly sourced from a CNN insider who apparently grew frustrated with the perpetually biased reporting of the "fake news" media outlet. Per O'Keefe's website, today's release includes 119 hours of secretly recorded raw footage from an inside source at CNN with another 100 hours of footage still to be released. Given the volume of footage to be released,...

he current controversy over the immigration policies of President Donald Trump prompted me to engage in some rather deep thinking and introspection vis-à-vis the issue of immigration. In context, of course, this means illegal immigration and border control and the effects thereof in recent decades, which obviously played a significant part in Mr. Trump’s election. When I was a young man, I actually thought I might be something of a racist, and quite honestly, I didn’t have a problem with that. Leaving aside certain popular fallacious definitions of racism (such as the notion that nonwhites can’t effectively be racists since...

Live Presser.

James O’Keefe and Project Veritas are about to strike again. O’Keefe told Sean Hannity that he has “hundreds of hours of tape” that he intends to release tomorrow. The footage apparently comes from the newsroom of a Democratic Party news organization, and was given to O’Keefe by “someone on the inside.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is now saying that his fellow Republicans in the Florida House are using "fake news" to justify their plan to scrap the state's economic development agency. Scott used his campaign Twitter account on Wednesday to distribute a video critical of House Speaker Richard Corcoran and House Republicans. The video labels Corcoran a "career politician" who wasted money by having the House produce a video that trashed programs championed by Scott.

RUSH: I’ve had something very interesting happen to me (I’d say the four or five times here) since yesterday’s big broadcast. You know what it is? I’m actually having people tell me they’re getting tired of all this news bashing Trump. Not that they’re worried about it. That they are tired of it. That it is beginning to bore them. That, to me, is a profoundly good sign. In the old days of the Republicans, you would never have heard that. You would have heard people say, “My gosh, when are they gonna fight back? My gosh, when are they...

Robert Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley and former U.S. Secretary of Labor, has insinuated that President Donald Trump incited Monday’s riots in Sweden — echoing his unproven conspiracy theory just weeks ago that Breitbart News organized violent demonstrations at his university.

There was a great commotion in central London last night. A police helicopter hovered over The Spectator‘s office making a din, police sirens sounded and thudding music rattled the windows. I found out why when I left the office and walked via Parliament Square to Whitehall.There was an anti-Trump protest outside Parliament – #stoptrump was the theme – coinciding with the (non-binding and pointless) debate inside Westminster Hall, about President Trump’s state visit to the UK later this year. The protest was a very slick affair. There was a massive TV screen broadcasting anti-Trump videos, and speeches blared out over a speaker...

James O'Keefe of Project Veritas is set to unleash holy hell Thursday on #FakeNews network CNN. Well, he didn't exactly say it was CNN, but it was heavily implied. Apparently the network has a mole... O'Keefe is known for undercover sting operations which have led to such bombshells as the DNC's paid agitator network, the outing of "DisruptJ20" / Antifa organizers which took place at comet ping pong - and netted three arrests (including a suspected pedophile), and most recently New Hampshire election fraud. Today O'Keefe was interviewed on Sean Hannity's radio show where he revealed that a major network...

President Trump, in his extraordinary press conference last week, called out the media for its brazenly biased reporting. In the 77-minute presser, he dissected their stories, called out the incessant tone of “anger” and “hatred” and clearly enunciated his view that the Trump White House is running just fine, no thanks to them. And the new alpha wolf in town smacked the lapdog media repeatedly on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. “Well, the failing New York Times wrote a big, long front-page story yesterday. And it was very much discredited, as you know. It was — it’s a joke,”...

The Washington Post has a new slogan on its homepage: "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Post spokesperson Kris Coratti told CNN that readers should expect to see more of it on other platforms of the publication. "We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year," Coratti said last week. "We started with our newest readers on Snapchat, and plan to roll it out on our other platforms in the coming weeks."

Lincoln Chafee is deeply unimpressed with the press. The former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator said Tuesday that his experience running in the Democratic primary last year reinforced his belief that reporters are bad at their jobs . . . Chafee is not just unimpressed with how reporters covered the 2016 primaries and general election. He is also annoyed with how they're covering the current administration. "It's just a full onslaught against [Trump], and I think it's just kind of tiresome," he said in reference to the press' ongoing negative coverage of the Trump administration. "He won. I didn't...

One of President Trump’s signature issues — and one continually fact-checked by the mainstream media — is lowering crime rates in our major cities. “Look at what’s happening in Chicago — hundreds of shootings, hundreds of deaths. I’ll tell you what’s happening in Chicago, and many other places,” Mr. Trump told a Florida rally last week regarding the country’s crime rates. The New York Times was quick to call the statement part of what Mr. Trump “got wrong” during his speech.

For years journalists opined self-servingly under the guise of objectivity and got away it because Republicans were too afraid to shatter that illusion of objectivity. They permitted the media to serve as the arbiter of what qualifies as “mainstream,” “extremist,” “racist,” and so forth, and made sure to stay within the media-determined parameters of any discussion. Donald Trump has blown up that absurd arrangement and is beating the media at its own game. He labels reporters in the same way that they label him. He upends their dishonest framing of debates by treating them as what they are, liberal partisans....

Many people are noticing a rather familiar, albeit oddly timed, leftist “anti-Semitism” narrative being pushed into the media broadcasts over the past 36 hours. Yes, it seems to have come out of no-where. Why? No-one is really understanding what’s going on. Understandably, the right-side of the political continuum are referencing the media push from the position of their own camp; that makes them defensive. However, the actual motive of the professional corporate media to push this meme has nothing to do with President Trump or republicans – it’s an internal maneuver and transparently Clintonian. {..snip..}

The Tuesday Morning Briefing at the New York Times tells us that President Donald Trump, at his rally in Melbourne, Florida on Saturday, "claimed that Sweden was experiencing a crisis because of immigration" and had "suggested that a terrorist attack had occurred there the night before." Concerning the latter, Trump said no such thing, nor did he "suggest" it. Concerning the former, if Sweden's not in crisis, it had a funny way of showing it Monday night, as there were riots in Stockholm. This is exactly what Trump said on Saturday: You look at what's happening in Germany, you look...

RUSH: There’s a New York Times story here. This is incredible. It’s an opinion piece. It’s in the op-ed page by somebody named Steve Phillips. And I didn’t… I don’t know who this guy is. I would love to tell you who Steve Phillips is but… Ah. “Senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.” (chuckling) That’s Moscow on the Hudson. Center for American Progress is one of these Obama-Hillary left-wing groups like the Think Progress and it’s, you know, Podesta light. Well, there is no Podesta light. Podesta left. So that’s who this guy is. He’s a fellow, a...