Free Republic

There was no press honeymoon for President Trump during his first month in office. A meticulous new study by the Media Research Center finds that 88 percent of the broadcast news coverage of Mr. Trump and his team was “hostile” during the first 30 days of office. The coverage was intense and plentiful. The study, which analyzed both tone and content for evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS, found that the “Big Three” networks produced 16 hours of coverage on the new president and his staff. That is over half — 54 percent — of their total coverage for...

It was an altogether fitting, albeit pathetic, picture. Shortly before Donald Trump delivered the greatest speech of his life, a speech some pundits called historic in its own right, Rosie O'Donnell “addressed a rain-soaked crowd outside the White House . . . during the ‘Resistance Address,’ an event countering President Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress later that evening. She criticized Trump on his foreign policy, stance towards race, and women's rights, while urging the 100 or so gathered to resist Trump (and the weather) through the night” (my emphasis).And so, as Trump spoke to tens of...

CNN reported Wednesday on a senior administration official admitting that the White House intentionally misled reporters ahead of President Donald Trump‘s congressional address in order to get generate positive press coverage as part of a “misdirection play.” Multiple reports Tuesday indicated that Trump would embrace a more moderate tone on immigration and would announce that he was willing to negotiate granting millions of illegal immigrants legal status. Most of those reports, cited to a “senior administration official,” came immediately after anchors lunched with Trump. Some of those outlets then just attributed the claim to the president himself. But when it...

An internal White House strategy review on North Korean options includes the possibility of both military force and regime change to counter the country’s nuclear-weapons threat, the WSJ reports, a prospect that has some U.S. allies in the region on edge. The review comes amid recent events have strained regional stability including last month's launch by North Korea of a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, and the assassination of the estranged half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Malaysia. The WSJ adds that U.S. officials have underscored the possible military dimensions of their emerging strategy...

President Donald Trump continues to shock the media -- this time in incredibly positive ways. Tuesday night his speech to a joint session of Congress caused many in the media to sing his praises describing it as “extraordinary” and “presidential.” The most amazing moment of the night came when Trump honored Carryn Owens, the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens. Her reaction will be the lasting image of the speech as she put her hands together and looked to heaven, crying. It’s a picture that should be on every newspaper front page Wednesday. The bipartisan applause went on...

“We strongly protest the exclusion of the New York Times and the other news organizations,” Times editor Dean Baquet said in a statement last Friday after his publication was excluded from a White House briefing. “Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.” While innocent liberals everywhere were rallying to the Times' defense, many of those who have dealt with the Times up close could only snicker at phrases like “free media access” and “transparent government.” One skeptic is investigative reporter James Sanders. Twenty years ago he and his wife Elizabeth were arrested by the...

The motor of fake news is not inaccuracy. It's malice. I had an insight into this important truth a couple weeks back when I was at a swank New York club for an evening event. The establishment in question is overwhelmingly conventional, i.e., leftish in that smug "We're-all-beautiful-people-who-are-you?" sort of way that publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times, along with such media outlets as CNN and MSNBC, exude like the cloying aroma of paperwhites. I ran into an acquaintance, a female journalist I hadn't seen in years. I knew that her politics were echt conventional in...

RUSH: The left is waiting for and the media, too… Don’t doubt me on this. The media is waiting for the first signs that Trump is ready to surrender for peace. They’re looking for the first signs that Trump’s maybe gonna start waving a little white handkerchief — not a flag, a little white hanky. Because they’re used to being able to affect things with the kind of things they’re dealing with with Trump. Nonstop televising of riots and protests and creating pictures that the whole country’s opposed to Trump. I think they’re used to this kind of thing weakening...

Gorka said the goals for the new Trump administration's counterterrorism program and policies are simple. "As the president said [Friday] we will ‘obliterate' groups like ISIS and wipe the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth," he said. The media attacks prompted friends and supporters of Gorka on Capitol Hill and in the military and special operations community to voice their support. "The bottom line is Sebastian Gorka's work is a necessary tool for all special operations forces in developing critical thinking," said an Army special operations officer familiar with Gorka's counterterrorism lectures in Tampa, Florida,...

Saturday, former Nixon and Ford speechwriter, actor and author Ben Stein said on “CNN Newsroom” that mainstream media like CNN and The New York Times are “looking for a scandal” with President Donald Trump and they want to do to him like they did to former President Richard Nixon. “Look, every day you pick up The New York Times, every day they’re slamming, slamming, slamming [Trump]. I’m a great fan of CNN; I watch it quite faithfully, every day CNN is slamming him, slamming him, slamming him. Every day, they’re looking for a scandal. They’re just turning the woods upside...

WASHINGTON – President Trump won’t attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner because he wasn’t elected to “pretend” to like reporters, a Trump aide said Sunday. “I think it’s kind of naive of us to think that we can all walk into a room for a couple of hours and pretend that some of that tension isn’t there,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders told ABC’s “This Week.” Sanders compared Trump’s open hostility with the press to getting egged. “One of the things we say in the South [is] if a Girl Scout egged your house, would you buy cookies from her?...

Tom Godat, a union electrician who has always voted for Democrats, cast his ballot for Donald Trump last year as “the lesser of two evils” compared to Hillary Clinton. He’s already a little embarrassed about it. There’s a lot that Godat likes about President Trump, especially his pledge to make the country great again by ignoring lobbyists, challenging both political parties and increasing the number of good-paying jobs.

Things arguably got a little embarrassing for NBC moderator Chuck Todd during Sunday’s Meet the Press, after Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton had to explain to him that the claims of anonymous sources should be taken with a grain of salt. “Anonymous sources said Steve Bannon drove from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to confront John Kelly, which we now know is not the truth,” Cotton reminded Todd, “That’s not like the tone of a conversation, that’s someone’s physical whereabouts.” Cotton’s schooling of Todd came as the NBC moderator pressed the Senator on when the media could...

New York Times Continues To Lie On Friday the New York Times published a piece titled Trump’s Blistering Speech at CPAC Follows Bannon’s Blueprint. In the article the New York Times intentionally tried to mislead readers and cause chaos and panic by lying about what President Trump said during his CPAC speech. From the NYT: “ His speech also included a promise to throw undocumented immigrants “the hell out of the country” and a recitation of his law-and-order campaign promises. Click on photo below to ENLARGE

Since President Donald Trump has been sworn in on Jan. 20, authorities have arrested an unprecedented number of sexual predators involved in child sex trafficking rings in the United States. This should be one of the biggest stories in the national news. Instead, the mainstream media has barely, if at all, covered any of these mass pedophile arrests. This begs the question – why?As a strong advocate for sex crime victims, I’ve been closely following the pedophile arrests since Trump took office. There have been a staggering 1,500-plus arrests in one short month; compare that to less than 400 sex...

CNN was not permitted to attend, along with the New York Times, Politico, Buzzfeed and much of the foreign press that regularly attends White House briefings.

Donald Trump’s chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon delivered a powerhouse presentation along with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus at CPAC on Thursday, in which one of Bannon’s main messages was that the media’s daily war against the Trump administration will continue unabated. .. As Business Insider reported five years ago, six corporations control 90% of the media in America, which puts a huge amount of power in the hands of a very few people. That number is down from 50 companies back in 1983. Who runs things? A ranking of the world’s largest media companies of 2015 says...

When writing the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, one area of speech the Founders were specifically interested in protecting was that of a free press. They saw the press as a sort of fourth branch of government, one that would keep the “checks and balances” of the other three branches honest. However, over time the same press that was given protection has eroded into a propaganda machine driven by money and political agendas of those who own the media outlets. They have crawled into bed with the very entities they are to keep in “check” and bust out if corrupted....

What happens when a prolific progressive Huffington Post contributor deviates from the narrative and publishes an article admitting Donald Trump was correct about something? HuffPo deletes the article and bans the guy, of course! Norwegian journalist, author, and world traveler René Zografos had the audacity to suggest that Donald Trump was telling the truth about Sweden's ongoing nightmare related to the violent tidal wave of predominantly North African refugees. Zografos wrote: "It’s well known for Scandinavians and other Europeans that liberal immigration comes with drugs, rapes, gang wars, robbery and violence. Additional to that we see the respective nations cultures...

Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior advisor Stephen K. Bannon appeared before a packed house at CPAC on Thursday, rallying conservatives to support the president’s agenda and taking shots at the media. During a panel moderated by CPAC’s Matt Schlapp, Bannon repeatedly referred to the media as the “opposition party. “When you look at the opposition party and how they portrayed the campaign, how they portrayed the transition, and now portraying the administration, it’s always wrong,” Bannon said. .. “Just like they were dead wrong on the chaos of the campaign, and just like they...