Free Republic

On September 10, 2010, the day before our enormous freedom rally at Ground Zero protesting the Ground Zero victory mega-mosque, the New York Times profiled a Muslim named Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, who had no place to pray. The whole story was a subtle advertisement for the Ground Zero mega-mosque. But as it turns out, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam is not quite the "moderate" that the leftist NYT dhimmis assumed he was, but calls openly for the murder of apostates from Islam -- here in the U.S. Here again we see The NY Times legitimizing and norming the most extreme voices. They...

Americans' confidence in newspapers fell slightly to 23% this year, from 25% in 2012 and 28% in 2011. The percentage of Americans saying they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers has been generally trending downward since 1979, when it reached a high of 51%. Newspapers rank near the bottom on a list of 16 societal institutions Gallup measured in a June 1-4 survey. Television news is tied with newspapers on the list, with 23% of Americans also expressing confidence in it. That is up slightly from the all-time low of 21% found last year....

especially interesting in a New York Times story from Friday on Iran, where they found it advantageous to edit out an America-hating Iranian who wished the Times building would burn down: “He is a war veteran, a good manager and a religious person,” said Noushin Sobhani, 31, a gynecologist. She and her parents voted at the Imam Sadegh University, where most of Iran’s cadre of bureaucrats are trained. “We hate America,” her father said, smiling. “I hope The New York Times building burns down.”

Well, this news should launch a thousand more goofy Beverly Hills Occupy protests: WICHITA, Kan.—Billionaire Charles Koch confirmed that his company, Koch Industries Inc., is looking into the possibility of acquiring newspapers, but insisted he is looking for a profitable business, rather than a forum to advance his politics. "There is a need for focus on real news, not news with an agenda or news that is really editorializing," Mr. Koch said in an interview. Mr. Koch added in a follow-up statement to The Wall Street Journal that the editorial page of any newspaper his company acquired "would be a...

MSNBC’s ratings are so bad that even The Huffington Post is slamming its decline. On their media page, Olivia Nuzzi wrote an article titled “MSNBC: ‘All In’ or ‘All Over’?” “MSNBC has hit a ratings low in primetime not seen since the days that the network still carried a show hosted by raspy-voiced Fox News refugee Rita Cosby,” Nuzzi wrote. Especially disappointing were the 8pm ratings of "pleasant but exceedingly dry" Chris Hayes after they put Ed Schultz out to pasture on the weekends: Chris Hayes' new 8 PM lynchpin show has lost a third of the audience Ed Schultz...

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.

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.

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:...

Washington Post Co. (WPO) reported Friday an 84% drop in first-quarter profit amid one-time charges and a loss from discontinued operations. Decreases in print advertising and circulation at its namesake paper have weighed on the newspaper and education company’s earnings in recent years. Washington Post announced in March that it will begin charging readers for access to its paper’s website, after raising circulation prices in January. The company’s profit tumbled to $5.2 million, or 64 cents a share, from $31.5 million, or $4.07 a share, in the year-ago period. Revenue remained level at $959.1 million and operating expenses were also...

The people of Los Angeles would be up in arms if some out-of-town billionaires tried to buy the Dodgers and institute a rule that only right-handers could play on the team. Petitions would be signed, protests would be organized and politicians would rise up to condemn the sale. It would be nice if there were a similar outcry at the prospect of the Koch brothers buying the Los Angeles Times. After all, as exciting as it may be for a city to have a major league sports team, a good newspaper is a far more valuable asset.

Call their bluff. Wherever you stand politically, we can all agree on that, right? If you’re a liberal, you want to see the fair, balanced, impartial LA Times newsroom rise as one and walk out in protest of having to work for libertarian oligarKKKs. If you’re a conservative, you want them gone for different reasons, partly as a smoking gun of bias and partly because it’ll clear the decks to hire more neutral reporters. And if they don’t walk out, that’s okay — their cheap bravado will have been exposed in all its cheapness. Call their bluff. Break the left’s...

The Koch brothers have become the nation’s leading cheerleaders for free markets where consumers, employees, entrepreneurs and investors are free to pursue their own selfish interests without interference from government or unions or anyone else for that matter. Now comes word that the billionaire brothers want to buy up Los Angeles Times, one of the nation’s last remaining quality newspapers, or its parent, the Tribune Co., which has only recently emerged from bankruptcy reorganization following the disastrous takeover by real estate mogul Sam Zell. All this has come to a head because the bottom-fishing hedge funds that grabbed control of...

On May 21, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls to select a new mayor. Who will govern Los Angeles, however, is only the second-most important local question in the city today. The most important, by far, is who will buy the Los Angeles Times. The Times is one of the eight daily newspapers now owned by the creditors who took control of the Tribune Co. after real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell drove it into bankruptcy. Others include the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant. The Tribune board members whom the creditors selected...

Tribune Company’s moves to sell its newspapers—a string that includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune—has reportedly sparked the interest of a number of heavyweight financiers. These include familiar media moguls like Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch. But heads turned when another pair of possible bidders emerged early in March: the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers, of course, are best known for funding conservative causes and conservative politicians. Unlike Buffett, who has purchased 63 newspapers in the last 15 months, and Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Protesters were set to gather Monday in downtown Los Angeles to urge the owners of the Los Angeles Times not to sell the newspaper to “political propagandists”. Members of the self-described “progressive” Courage Campaign along with MoveOn.org and Daily Kos launched an online petition demanding the Tribune Company, publishers of the L.A. Times, to reconsider a rumored sale to billionaire businessmen David and Charles Koch. Protesters were expected to deliver some 100,000 Californian signatures calling on Tribune Company President Peter Liguori “to refuse to sell the paper to political propagandists” to the company’s headquarters near City...

High profile-gang rapes in India have been in the headlines since December. The phenomenon is growing across Europe too, but tends to be under reported due to the high incidence of Muslim perpetrators which makes it politically incorrect to mention. In December 2011 a Swedish mother-of-two was subjected to a brutal gang-rape by 12 Afghan immigrants in a refugee camp . ... The main perpetrator Rafi Bahaduri, 25, had already committed four other rapes in Sweden. The case is not unique. There is a growing trend of gang-rapes perpetrated against white women by Muslim rapists. In the U.K. there has...

With The Denver Post‘s DC reporter, Allison Sherry, under fire for her conflict of interest by dating a member of the Green Lobby without disclosing that to readers, it’s fascinating to see alternative Colorado publications leading the way on coverage of our nation’s capital. News today from The Colorado Observer is that they’ve hired a second Washington, DC -based reporter to cover federal issues and the Colorado congressional delegation. The media environment in Colorado has been weakened ever since the closing of the late, great Rocky Mountain News, virtually allowing Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton to be the sole press...

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for The Hill newspaper. Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.” But that editor’s note...

The New York Times Company said on Monday that it was planning to rename The International Herald Tribune, its 125-year-old newspaper based in Paris, and would also unveil a new Web site for international audiences. Starting this fall, under the plan, the paper will be rechristened The International New York Times, reflecting the company’s intention to focus on its core New York Times newspaper and to build its international presence. ”This recognizes our global reach and is an exciting and logical move,” said Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times. Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of...

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands. The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there). More from Reuters: The sale is expected to come at a big loss. Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Research, estimated that the Globe could fetch about $150 million. The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the newspaper in 1993. The New York Times is putting...

Liberal Fox News Contributor and Daily Beast columnist Kirstin Powers on the Obama-Hillary Clinton "60 Minutes” interview: “It really was something you’d expect from the state-run media. It was that kind of level of propaganda… This was a joke. You look at it and just not challenging basic things…”

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes ... The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. ... Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At...

Last Friday, the sitting president of Egypt – the world’s 15th most populous nation — was exposed for calling Jews “apes and pigs.” And he did it in a TV interview (in Arabic) in 2010, less than two years before he took office. Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn’t. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report....

In the history of mankind there are countless instances of cult figures who have lead their followers to ruin and disillusionment. Names like Jim Jones, David Koresh, The Pied Piper, Bernie Madoff, Adolph Hitler, Charles Manson, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and a whole host of TV evangelists have done their damage. It was easy for those outside and not sucked in by these hucksters to see the message they peddled defied logic, science and the laws of economics: Alchemy, master race, buy your way into heaven, getting something for nothing, all have that common thread. ... Gore was making hundreds of...

Just call him Al Gorezeera. Yesterday morning, the still shell shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting at its San Francisco headquarters, which was teleconferenced to their offices in LA and NYC, to meet their new bosses. That would be two of Al Jazeera’s top guys: Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations, and Muftah AlSuwaidan, general manager of the London bureau. Ominously missing was the creator of Current, the self proclaimed inventor of the Internet and savior of clean energy, Al Gore, although his partner, Joel Hyatt, stood proudly with the Al...

The entirely predictable consequences of the Journal News' decision to publish a map of gun-owners marches on… Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News' decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger. "They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live. That's not acceptable to me," Falco said, according to Newsday. Robert Riley, an officer with the White Plains Police Department and president of its Patrolman’s Benevolent Association,...

Newspaper Hires Armed Guards After It Enraged The Community By Publishing Info On Local Gun Owners Abby RogersJanuary 2, 2013Caryn McBride, Journal News Rockland Editor A New York state newspaper is taking drastic steps to protect its staff after it enraged gun owners in two counties. The Journal News, a Gannett-owned newspaper in Westchester, N.Y., published a map showing the names and addresses of licensed gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. The Journal News tried to do the same for Putnam County, but the newspaper's request for records was denied because of the outrage the map had already caused...

WASHINGTON - The Manassas News & Messenger is no more. The paper printed its final edition after 143 years of covering the news in Prince William County, Manassas and Manassas Park Sunday. The paper's parent company, the Warren Buffett-owned World Media Enterprises, decided to close the paper and its website ... World Media Enterprises purchased the paper, as well as several others, from Media General in June. ... All employees lost their jobs, and

On Sunday, liberal New York newspaper The Journal News published the names and addresses of legal permit holders in two counties online and in print. If that wasn’t bad enough, this weekend, the Gannett owned Journal News announced that it will publish more names and addresses of residents holding pistol permits in the New York area. Enough is Enough. Two other outlets have posted names and personal contact info for the employees of this Gannett owned paper. Isn’t it about time the Gannett Board of Directors were contacted for their official reaction to this controversial practice? Do these board members...

The story behind the story is that “tax reform,” as we know it, is dying. During the 1980s, no major piece of legislation better symbolized bipartisan consensus than the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was regarded by both liberal and conservative experts as the best tax law since World War II. The basic idea was simple: Reduce tax rates and recover lost revenue by ending (or limiting) tax breaks. The struggle between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner over the “fiscal cliff” indicates that this beneficial consensus has collapsed. Just the opposite is occurring. ... many politicians support...

The Board of Directors of The Washington Post Company (WPO) today announced ... an accelerated cash dividend ... This accelerated dividend is intended by the Board to be in lieu of regular quarterly dividends that the Company otherwise would have declared and paid in calendar year 2013

Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly "pushed through the 234-article draft (constitution) in just 21 hours from Thursday into Friday ... (after) Coptic Christians and liberals earlier had walked out." The draft constitution includes several articles "that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities," and omits "bans on slavery or promises to adhere...

Newsmax Conrad Black: Jewish-Owned Media ‘Habitually anti-Israel’ Thursday, November 29, 2012 02:50 PM By: Newsmax Wires The Jewish-owned American media don’t treat Israel fairly, says former newspaper publisher turned author Conrad Black. Black, writing in the National Review, expresses agreement with a Twitter posting from News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch earlier this month that read, “Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” Murdoch subsequently apologized after the tweet sparked heated criticism. “Rupert Murdoch and I have had our differences over many years, but I must join with him entirely in his recent tweeted complaint that most...

This is all Americans need to know about just how disgraceful a "news network" MSNBC is. A new study just released by the Pew Research Center found that in the final week of the just-ended presidential campaign, the "Lean Forward" network did absolutely no negative stories about President Obama or positive ones about Mitt Romney. MSNBC's coverage of Romney during the final week (68% negative with no positive stories in the sample), was far more negative than the overall press, and even more negative than it had been during October 1 to 28 when 5% was positive and 57% was...

By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president...

In August, I blasted the Commission on Presidential Debate’s choices of three Beltway lib journo-tools — CNN’s Candy Crowley, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and CBS’s Bob Schieffer. So far, they’ve acted just as expected and predicted. As I noted: While the debate panel trumpeted the gender diversity of its picks, the chromosomal diversity is far outweighed by the political uniformity, class conformity and geographical homogeneity of the group. ... The presidential debates are the last bastion of “mainstream” media self-delusion in the 21st century. They are a ritual laughingstock for tens of millions of American viewers who have put up with...

The publisher of the Guardian and Observer newspapers is close to axing the print editions of the newspapers, despite the hopes of its editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger to keep them running for several years. Senior figures at Guardian News & Media are seriously discussing the move to an entirely online operation, it has been claimed, leaving Mr Rusbridger increasingly isolated. The longstanding Guardian chief wants to develop the Guardian’s digital-only US operation before pulling the plug on the print edition, in the hope that it will provide a useful blueprint for the online business in Britain. However, trustees of the Scott...

They called him Punch, and he earned the sobriquet. A Marine, he came home from serving in the Pacific theater, then in the Korean Conflict, to help run the family business, which in the case of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was the New York Times. Imagine that -- somebody with a military background running the Times. Even harder to imagine these days, when the good gray New York Times has become as pretentious as it is ideological, is that it once had a publisher with a sense of humor. Punch Sulzberger used to say his family never worried about him when...

New York (CNN) -- Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the influential publisher of The New York Times who served from 1963 to 1992, has died at age 86, the newspaper reported Saturday.

Americans are fast turning to mobile devices to get their news, resulting in stunning viewership declines for CNN and existence-threatening readership drops for newspapers, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The winners: social network sites, online news and websites like the Drudge Report and Yahoo. In Pew's latest look at trends in news consumption, Americans said that they have turned away from CNN. In just four years, the percentage of those who say they watch CNN has dropped from 24 percent to 16 percent. Viewership of the competing cable giants, Fox and MSNBC, has remained fairly stable with...

There are three important things to keep in mind when looking at this gorgeous graph: 1. The graph is adjusted for inflation. 2. The red line accounts for online ad revenue. 3. The end began with the rise of the online blog. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we're winning, because the corrupt media still has the power to create its own reality – to create the illusion that they're everywhere and still quite capable of manipulating opinion, facts, and the truth. But this graph proves that we're the ones who are winning and on two fronts. First off, the business...

Below, via Mark J. Perry and Bill Gross, is a chart we've run before. It shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years. Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-advertising-collapse-2012-9#ixzz26jSCZVzI

USA Today is unveiling its most extensive redesign since its launch 30 years ago, effective with today’s paper. The paper that revolutionized newspapers three decades ago with splashy color photos and info graphics is going to increase color, photos and info graphics even more with the redesign. The website’s redesign will go into effect in beta form over the weekend before going live on Monday.

"Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues." "I am not here dreaming of (or worrying about) a world in which computers have displaced the printed word, and us too. I could find no one at this conference who would predict the demise of the newspaper. No one. All saw an important place for us." Those words come from a remarkable letter written by Robert Kaiser, then the Washington Post's newly appointed managing editor, to publisher Donald Graham following a 1992 conference on the future of digital media. Kaiser had attended the event after being...

(Financial Times) -- Mark Thompson, the outgoing director-general of the BBC, has been named president and chief executive of the New York Times Co, signalling an attempt by the newspaper publisher to expand its business digitally and internationally. Mr Thompson, 55, has led the BBC since 2004 and said he would step down after the London Olympics. He is credited with building the BBC into one of the world's biggest digital news brands while finding new revenue streams at its BBC Worldwide commercial unit. He most recently led the BBC's multimedia coverage of the Olympics, deciding to stream everything live...

The New York Times Company, which has been shedding assets and focusing on its core newspaper and Web site, is preparing to sell another of its properties. The company has a letter of intent to sell the About Group, the unit that includes the About.com online resource guide, to Answers.com, a question-and-answer site, for $270 million, a person familiar with the deal said on Wednesday. It is not clear when the deal will close because financing has not yet been secured. When the Times Company originally purchased About.com in 2005 for just over $400 million, analysts questioned how compatible About.com...

All of which lends a certain pungency to something Sarah Palin said recently at a conference of conservative activists in Las Vegas. "Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be," she said. According to Politico, she was quoting Matt Drudge. Ordinarily, you would dismiss it as just another silly thing Sarah Palin said. There is no shortage of those.

Managers at The Times-Picayune informed more than 200 members of the newspaper staff Tuesday that their last day at the company will be Sept. 30. The Times-Picayune, according to company executives, is shrinking its overall staff - including news, advertising, circulation and other departments - by 32 percent, or 201 employees. Employees who were not laid off were offered new jobs beginning this fall with Nola Media Group or Advance Central Services Louisiana, two new companies that will oversee news coverage and production and distribution, respectively, for The Times-Picayune and its affiliated website nola.com. The layoffs come as part of...

McClatchy Co., one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers, is planning to introduce online paywalls at its newspaper Web sites, according to an internal memo first obtained by Jim Romenesko. The news comes as other big publishers implement online paywalls at newspapers nationwide. McClatchy has 30 daily newspapers, including The Miami Herald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Charlotte Observer, Kansas City Star and Sacramento Bee. In the memo to employees, McClatchy Vice President for News Anders Gyllenhaal wrote that “after more than a year of experiments and analysis on pay models, McClatchy newspapers will begin a robust test of a pay plan...

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which distinguished itself amid great adversity during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is about to enact large staff cuts and may cut back its daily print publishing schedule, according to two employees with knowledge of the plans. Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, will apparently be working off a blueprint the company used in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it reduced the frequency of the Ann Arbor News, emphasized the Web site as a primary distributor of news and in the process instituted wholesale layoffs to cut costs. A request for comment late Wednesday night from the...