Free Republic

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...