Free Republic

My e-mail: Dear Sir, Your decision to terminate Reporter Larry Conners after he was abused by the IRS for asking probing questions of Mr. Obama is shameful, to say the least. This action proves to millions of viewers and others that the press is so far in the tank for the Obama administration and the Left in general that they don't realize they've grown gills. Hopefully, your station will either go out of business, lose their license or be sold to someone concerned with journalism, not partisanship. Also, I hope that you and anyone else responsible for this decision will...

Shot: President Obama’s speech today: Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law. That is why I have called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government over-reach. I have raised these issues with the Attorney General, who shares my concern. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and will convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I have directed the Attorney General to report...

In chapter 1 of the book "Public Opinion", Walter Lippmann writes the following: (page 40) The wireless constantly used the statistics of the intelligence bureau at Verdun, whose chief, Major Cointet, had invented a method of calculating German losses which obviously produced marvelous results. Every fortnight the figures increased a hundred thousand or so. These 300,000, 400,000, 500,000 casualties put out, divided into daily, weekly, monthly losses, repeated in all sorts of ways, produced a striking effect. Our formulae varied little: 'according to prisoners the German losses in the course of the attack have been considerable' ... 'it is proved...

From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs of government.

teaPatriots, I got this horrible feeling watching the MSM on the cable news TV shows playing down the Obama scandals. I thought, does Obama being liberal and “black” trump any and everything? Will the MSM continue to side with him no matter what? Will all of the lies, corruption, betrayals and probable criminal activity simply roll off the Obama Administration's back like water off a duck? Will Obama and company get away with it all? Heaven forbid! Heck no! Not on our watch! On the Fox News show, The Five, it was reported that some are calling the current Administration...

BREAKING: KMOV FIRES LARRY CONNORS In April 2012 St. Louis News 4’s Larry Conners grilled President Barack Obama on his extravagant vacation schedule and on bullying the Supreme Court. “The economy is a big concern for folks, I mean the unemployment, trying to make ends meet, gas prices, food prices going up. Some of our viewers are complaining that they get frustrated and angered when they see the first family jetting around different vacations and so forth…” It was one of the few hard-hitting interviews the president sat through last year. Last week Larry Connors revealed that after his interview...

The studio space at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. is changing hands, Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports. Next month, ABC’s “This Week” will vacate the space and return to the network’s Washington bureau, and Al Jazeera America will move in. ... Al Jazeera America, which B&C reports will have both office space and editing facilities in the Newseum, is preparing for its launch later this year. The network recently hired Adam May, a local reporter from Baltimore, as a D.C.-based national correspondent.

You know, a White House that just got exposed for spying on journalists probably should be doing some bridge-rebuilding, especially for an administration who needs a friendly media as much as this one does. What’s the worst possible way to get back in the media’s good graces? Accusing them of being conspiracy nuts for asking about Kathleen Sebelius’ fundraising for ObamaCare, starting with CBS’ Major Garrett, who just got done fronting the Benghazi e-mail defense demolished by Glenn Kessler today. Thanks bunches, Major: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Struggling with a reporter about which Republican concerns are and are not legitimate, White House spokesman...

You just knew this was bound to happen. Some on the left are trying to blame George W. Bush for Obama's IRS fiasco. Take for example Mediaite's resident Obama apologist Tommy Christopher, who wrote a much ado about nothing post on May 16 insinuating that this egregious abuse of government power stems from former Bush appointed IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman – and that credit for clearing this whole thing up will go to Obama.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold. It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what...

MemeCenter.com   h/t twitter

President Obama didn’t take the bait when a reporter asked how he felt about the comparison some of his critics were making about the scandals in his administration with those that happened when Richard Nixon was in the White House. The question capped a weeklong orgy of rhetoric with Republicans assailing abuses of power at the IRS and Justice Department, and the media all but writing off Obama’s second term as a colossal management failure. Obama didn’t protest “I’m not Nixon,” which would have echoed the former president who once famously said in response to a question, “I’m not a...

Bianna Golodryga opened today's Good Morning America by announcing that it was "a very busy Saturday morning." So busy, in fact, that GMA couldn't spare one second in its first half-hour for the IRS scandal. That despite yesterday's stonewalling testimony by the outgoing IRS Commissioner in which he had the colossal chutzpah to deny there had been any political motive in the targeting of conservative organizations. So what kept GMA so busy? By far the longest segment was devoted to . . . the Powerball lottery. GMA spent 325 seconds—over five minutes—on the Powerball lottery. One report from stores where...

Larry Connors, the KMOV anchor who asked Barack Obama some tough questions about his family's vacation habits and claimed earlier this week that he might have been harassed by the IRS as a result, has been taken off the air.

In April 2012 St. Louis News 4’s Larry Conners grilled President Barack Obama on his extravagant vacation schedule and on bullying the Supreme Court. “The economy is a big concern for folks, I mean the unemployment, trying to make ends meet, gas prices, food prices going up. Some of our viewers are complaining that they get frustrated and angered when they see the first family jetting around different vacations and so forth…” It was one of the few hard-hitting interviews the president sat through last year. On Tuesday Larry Connors revealed that after his interview with Barack Obama the IRS...

Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving "extra scrutiny" to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear - if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that...

...while some junkies live, Elvis died. And this Elvis syndrome is, oddly enough, happening again right now, politically. And now, this week, the chickens have not only come home to roost, they’re freebasing in the garage. The family is fed up. Our national hive of hacks are really nothing more than the Memphis Mafia, the folks who protected Elvis Presley through his worst excesses, until his particular administration ended on a toilet. But why did the media become so much like this mafia? This behavior is caused by a deep desire to be liked and to be perceived as cool....

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It's clear that that the press has turned. I'm not sure how permanent it will be but this is surely different than what we've seen over the four years being acolytes and cheerleaders and really supine. And the reason I think, a, is the accumulate of scandals all at once and the remarkable coincidence that the president was speaking early on about conspiracies and don't worry about government, tyranny, you know. The IRS scandal, which is the second most powerful agency in government as an agent suppression of political speech is almost a definition of tyranny. But that...

FULL TITLE - "The Media Meme of the Day is BS! Obama Isn't Disengaged -- He Leads a Government Waging War on Its Domestic Enemies" BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Did you hear how David Axelrod attempted to defend Obama on the IRS scandal? I think he was on MSNBC today. David Axelrod said (paraphrasing), "Well, you know, the government's too big. The government's simply too vast for Obama to control it." Bingo! Exactly! That's the whole reason the Tea Party exists. The government is too big. Not only is the government too big, it's growing. It's growing to the point that...

This morning from The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker: "Breaking news: Conservative organizations suddenly have found common cause with one of their favorite objects of contempt — the benighted Mainstream Media ... Or as the tea party queen and former Alaska governor likes to put it, the ‘lamestream media.’ In a twist of irony, the two groups have coalesced around a common enemy: the U.S. government.” The Tea Party queen here is, of course, Sarah Palin. Interesting, because Parker was among the first to announce, when Palin first arrived on the scene, that Palin was “out of her league.” “The league”...

The press and the left. But Lisa Myers repeats herself. Seriously, though, Myers did make a stunning admission along such lines on today's Morning Joe? H/t NB reader Pam. Describing the harm done to President Obama by the AP spying scandal, NBC senior investigate correspondent Myers said the effect of the scandal has been to turn "one [sic] of the President's most important constituencies, the press and the left, against him." Did Myers make a double Freudian slip in describing the press and the left as "one" and the press as an Obama constituency? View the video here.

Conservatives are not often fierce defenders of the media. But Monday’s news that the Justice Department obtained phone records for several Associated Press reporters as part of a national security leak probe raised a furor on the right, causing numerous Republicans to harshly criticize the Obama administration. While some may have genuine concerns about First Amendment protections, the right’s response also spotlighted an emerging Republican critique of Barack Obama as a Big Brother-style tyrant in charge of a power-abusing surveillance state. Before the AP news broke, conservatives were already up in arms over word that the IRS had targeted conservative...

On Friday's All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes led the show by recounting the news of the "big, bad, scary" scandal of President Obama's IRS targeting conservative groups, but also chided Republicans for continuing to push Benghazi, which he referred to as a "witch hunt" and a "fake, ginned up scandal." After reading a quote from a Tea Party group which brought up Benghazi in reacting to the IRS scandal, Hayes continued: They cannot help themselves. Even when they have real evidence of misdeeds and malfeasance, conservatives still want to change the subject to the fake, ginned up scandal...

The White House on Monday distanced President Obama from the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press telephone records. “Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. Carney said the White House had no involvement in the Justice effort. “We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations, as those matters are handled independently by the Justice Department,” he said. The Justice Department said in a letter to the AP on Friday that...

And the Current Administration calls US, "Paranoid" and they are the ones who are wiretapping the AP.... The AP, pretty much been cheer-leading Obama for them last 6 years and when he gets into power what does he do? He wiretaps them like Nixon.... Oh sure, trust the government, or tell the students at that college last week to trust the government... Oh really... Well what the hell was he expecting from the AP, to Fawn over Obama EVEN MORE than they currently do... That would have actually pushed MORE people to the tea party as they would have seen...

Victoria Toensing, attorney for Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks, says Hicks is a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries, and President Obama twice for President. Toensing also said that NBC News "spiked" the story this week, prior to Hicks' dramatic testimony before Congress. Toensing appeared on WMAL-FM in Washington DC Saturday with host Steve Malzberg. "He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings......It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan...

Barbara Walters is saying goodbye to TV journalism. After more than half a century in the industry, the veteran ABC News anchor plans to retire next summer, an ABC spokesperson confirmed to The Times on Sunday night. Walters, 83, is set to make it official Monday morning on “The View.” And the network plans to make good use of her while it can. The legendary TV personality will continue to anchor and report for ABC as well as continue to appear on “The View” and anchor specials throughout the year.

Hillary better thank her god, The Father of Lies, that she’s not a conservative like Sarah Palin, because if she were a conservative, after last week’s blistering testimony against her by the Benghazi whistle blowers, all news outlets, far and wide, would be yelling “off with conservative Hillary’s head”. But not The Original, Leftist, Hillary. Original Hillary gets a pass. Yep, the numb-nuts that make up the ubiquitous fake news organizations gave scant to zero coverage of the testimonies that completely contradicted Mrs. Clinton’s account of the Benghazi Massacre. For instance, MSNBC gave no live coverage for the Benghazi hearings...

The term Liberal Redneck will strike progressives as an absurd contradiction. Yet, Conservatives will have an immediate, wearying familiarity with the angry, judgmental, uninformed and doctrinaire viewpoint of this group. In fact, the Liberal Redneck is every bit as small-minded, bigoted, dismissive, self-righteous, judgmental, uneducated and intolerant as the worst fundamentalist. The problem in America today is that there is never a level playing field offered for the discussion of ideas. Therefore, most important topics are only mentioned in a predetermined format. In other words, one can mention, for example—gay marriage, but only with the proviso that the topic for...

THE capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.” (Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.) Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and...

After examining all the details that emerged on Friday relating to the efforts by members of President Barack Obama’s administration to remove references to Islamic terrorism when explaining the reasons behind the 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, the panel guests on MSNBC’s Now agreed that the appearance of a scandal makes the White House “look terrible.” One guest even suggested that the controversy could lead to impeachment proceedings against the president. NBC Reporter Kelly O’Donnell read from portions of emails in which high ranking State Department officials coordinated with the CIA to alter the official talking points...

The most notable takeaway from Jay Carney’s incomprehensible Friday appearance had little to do with his Klingon grammar. Carney does not represent the historical value of the event – you should be wise to forget his performance, and instead take note that he was flanked by the entire room, without exception. Do not underestimate the significance: the Obama administration has not faced such an onslaught of truth-seeking since he took office in 2008, and further, no Democratic administration has been charged from all sides like this in recent memory. That press conference was unthinkable just days ago. For a left-leaning...

CBS Anchor: 'We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again' "Our house is on fire." Daniel Halper May 11, 2013 12:09 PM CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists "are getting big stories wrong, over and over again." "Our house is on fire," said Pelley. The video of Pelley's speech is courtesy of nowthisnews.com. "These have been a bad few months for journalism," he added. "We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again." The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. "Let me take the first arrow:...

If there’s one thing you want to do when accusations are flying about an attempted cover up and a disinterested, collusive media, it’s holding an off-the-record briefing. Time for the team to huddle. "The White House held an off-the-record briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO." "The meeting began around 12:45 p.m. and postponed the daily, on-the-record White House press briefing to 1:45 p.m. White House press secretary Jay Carney did not respond to a request for confirmation of the meeting." "The off-the-record session was announced...

Ever heard of Al-Aqsa TV? You may think you haven’t, but if you’re a longtime HA reader I’ll bet you have. They’re responsible for the charming children’s characters Farfour, the Jew-hating mouse; Nahoul, the Jew-hating bee; and Assud, the Jew-eating rabbit. Apart from their stellar children’s programming, they’re known for Holocaust revisionism and various forms of pro-terrorist/anti-semitic propaganda. Per Philip Klein, the Treasury Department designated Al-Aqsa TV as an arm of Hamas three years ago and therefore subjected it to U.S. sanctions imposed on officially recognized terrorist groups. (“Treasury will not distinguish between a business financed and controlled by a...

NBC News is on the verge of naming Deborah Turness, the head of Britain’s ITV News, as its next president, according to several people with knowledge of the appointment. Ms. Turness, if appointed, would be the first woman president of a network television news division in the United States, succeeding Steve Capus, who stepped down from the position in February after a tenure of nearly eight years. A spokeswoman for NBC News, a unit of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, declined to comment. Ms. Turness responded on Friday to an e-mail, “I can’t comment on what is pure speculation.” But others with...

They don’t call Big Guy the luckiest man in the world for nothing. Can you believe it? Not only did the the Cleveland House of Horrors story break the day before the whistleblowers testimony, butt then the Jodi Arias verdict come down yesterday afternoon too. Don’t ask me who she is or why anyone should care, butt apparently LIV’s (Low Information Voters) have been following her soap opera for months on end and find it far more riveting than the Benghazigate story. If you were paying attention to the hearings, you would have learned quite a bit by yesterday’s testimonies. Fortunately...

The Associated Press could not very well ignore today's hearing at which whistleblowers are testifying as to the events surrounding the Benghazi attack and the Obama administration's failed response thereto. So AP did the next best thing from its liberal perspective: it downplayed the hearing's significance, casting it as a purely partisan event in its headline as a "GOP hearing." That is not mere MSM spin: it is blatant journalistic malpractice. This is not some unofficial hearing held under Republican auspices. It is an entirely official hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Yes, there has in recent...

Have you heard about the newest Big White gimmick information-sharing tool? (h/t Gerard). In the “Social Media ‘R Us” world of presidential politics there isn’t a single techno-media trendoid we haven’t embraced now. Still, I’m not sure this one is really projecting the proper message: WHITEHOUSE.TUMBLR.COM (SNIP) “We see some great things here at the White House every day, and sharing that stuff with you is one of the best parts of our jobs.” Like candid pictures of Lady M signing copies of her Midnight in the Organic Garden of Good and Evil book “That’s why we’re launching a Tumblr....

Nowhere is [the result of mainstream media bias] more obvious than in the relentless imploding viewership of once financial media titan, CNBC, which lately has become a sad, one-sided caricature of its once informative self, whose only agenda is to get the most marginal Joe Sixpack to dump his hard-earned cash into 100x P/E stocks, and where according to data from Nielsen Media Research, the total and demographic (25-54) viewership during the prime time segment (9:30am - 5:00 pm) just tumbled to 216K and 40K - the lowest recorded viewership since mid 2005 and sliding. So why the relentless collapse...

If ponies rode men and grass ate cows, And cats were chased into holes by the mouse … If summer were spring and the other way round, Then all the world would be upside down. Once in a long while, an event evokes one of my favorite historical images: the British Army band, at Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which sealed the Americans’ revolutionary victory, playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”In this case, the event is the dramatic change over the past two weeks in the “mainstream” media’s coverage of President Obama. From reporters to opinion writers, from newspapers to...

Sarah Palin showed up at the NRA convention the other day, which was merely perfect. She belonged there as much as anybody in the hall just because from the start, from the time John McCain picked her out of the chorus, Palin has most appealed to mean, dumb, angry crowds exactly like the one she found in Houston. Palin should have worn a prom dress, but on this occasion wore a T-shirt that read “Women Hunt.” In her case, that means hunting for attention. Or relevance. She wants to be a populist and a patriot, the way the phonies cheering...

Political satirist Greg Gutfeld said: The media would not know a good story if they woke up next to it after they were drunk last night. For them Benghazi is like an ugly wallflower at the prom. They just want to dance with Obama all night. It's a way of life that's not without consequences to them or us. The Washington Post Co. reported Friday an 84% drop in first-quarter profit. To be sure waltzing Obama's not the only reason. There's the mindless drivel of the style section gushing over Michelle and her latest upscale food and clothing fancies; the...

Thanks to NRO's Andrew Johnson, we learned that on Friday MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts used selective clips from a speech by Vice President Joe Biden to make it look as though Biden was making a push for gun control. Biden's speech had nothing to do with guns.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ripped the media and took a subtle dig at President Obama during an CSPAN interview dated from April 9th. When asked about how he felt about the nation’s first black President, Barack Obama, Thomas said he always knew it would have to be a person who was “approved by the elites and the media” because if it was someone who they didn’t agree with, that person would be picked apart.

Two very different pictures are emerging of what took place this weekend at a series of townhall meetings by Kelly Ayotte, the Republican senator from New Hampshire.Ayotte traveled back to the Granite State to meet with constituents, and among the topics that came up were her votes against new gun control measures. But local and national news media are giving sharply contrasting accounts of what really happened when the gun control issue surfaced.If you read about the meetings in the national press, you likely went away thinking the Republican lawmaker was overwhelmed by pro-gun control critics. You might think the opposite if...

Back in 2011, I wrote about how George Creel's plan with the Committee for Public Information (CPI) was to make journalists associates of the state. Here is in part what he wrote: (page 17) With the nation in arms, the need was not so much to keep the press from doing the hurtful things as to get it to do the helpful things. It was not servants we wanted, but associates. Better far to have the desired compulsions proceed from within than to apply them from without. And from page 18: My proposition, in lieu of the proposed law, was...

No Excerpt Per Bloomberg's Rules But this article helps summarize the incestuous relationship between Hollywood, D.C. and the Main Stream Media. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/how-sarah-palin-is-right-about-washington.html

Warner Todd Huston reported at Breitbart Monday that “in some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press failed to include one of President Obama’s own gags.” Obama said: “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be.” But, noted Huston, “in one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper forgot one part of the President’s joke,” reporting his...