Free Republic

Media Bias: A presidential infomercial posing as a news magazine distorts the record to shamelessly shill for a failed administration. Why do we criticize the man who made the high-speed trains run on time? Political campaigns call it free media: when candidates can make their case and communicate their message through interviews and outlets that don't cost a dime. It helps when a mainstream media sycophant like Andrew Sullivan gets to write a puff piece in Newsweek with the subtle title of "Why Are The President's Critics So Dumb?" The Democratic National Committee couldn't have said it better. Calling the...

Doug Ross got a scoop on Newsweek's upcoming cover... Obviously their art department missed a HUGE typo on this cover, I've set up a corrected version of the cover, though I doubt the one-cent-rag-of-record will alter course...

Newsweek accomplished at least one thing by running a cover story calling the country’s critics of President Obama “dumb” — they awoke the mama grizzly. [SNIP] Directing her message to “@Newsweek,” Palin wrote, “Know what’s truly ‘dumb’? Giving a cover story to the TrigTruther conspiracy kook writer who thinks I didn’t give birth to my son.”

"On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning...

...given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway wrote a few hours ago, "If in recent years it seems as if Newsweek has been descending into self-parody, it's still hard to imagine that this is real." Indeed. Is there anything the mainstream media won't do to get Obama reelected?

It seems almost impossible to believe, but the upcoming issue of Newsweek has a cover story entitled "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" If you think we're kidding, the following picture was tweeted by @Newsweek three hours ago: [image of cover] As you can see, the author is the supposedly conservative Andrew Sullivan. Figures, doesn't it? The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway wrote a few hours ago, "If in recent years it seems as if Newsweek has been descending into self-parody, it's still hard to imagine that this is real." Indeed. Is there anything the mainstream media won't do to get...

Newsweek was jolted by three high-level departures on Monday, a sign that the merger a year ago with The Daily Beast has left the magazine deeply unsettled. The upheaval hit the challenged advertising sales unit and the newsroom, where the editing and reporting ranks are straining under Tina Brown’s high-pressure management style. The executive editor, Edward Felsenthal, who has been with Ms. Brown since The Daily Beast first went online in 2008, handed in his resignation on Monday. He was joined by Tom Weber, the managing editor who started at Newsweek in January. The publisher, Ray Chelstowski, was fired. His...

It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984. Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election. Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek,...

Tina Brown says The Daily Beast website is on track to be profitable this year, but Lucia Moses points out that getting the combined NewsBeast into the black by early 2013 — Daily Beast backer Barry Diller insists that’s possible — will be a daunting task. “If that task takes years and Newsweek can’t find a way to regain the relevance weekly newsmagazines have lost since the explosion of news on the Internet, then Diller and Jane Harman, Sidney Harman’s widow, could reach the point where they finally decide to cut bait,” she writes. “The idea that NewsBeast could ever...

Could Fox News be moving away from the right? As the Tea Party's popularity fades and the country grows increasingly tired of partisan bickering, Fox News chief Roger Ailes is making what he calls a “course correction.” Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin “became a bit of a branding issue for us,” he tells Howard Kurtz in Newsweek. Republican candidates still consult Ailes: when Rick Perry was still weighing a presidential bid, he stopped by Ailes's office and confided he was worried about being able to raise money, and Mitt Romney took Ailes out for a pasta dinner. But Ailes also...

To Protect Obama Donor, White House Pressures General to Alter Testimony Diane Ellis, Ed. In January, the Federal Communications Commission granted a license to a satellite broadband company in Virginia called LightSquared to build tens of thousands of ground stations for a wireless network. However, the Pentagon has since raised concerns that the proposed wireless service could interfere with the military's GPS capabilities, which have not only replaced maps for millions of drivers, but also serve a crucial role in missile targeting and other defense-related tasks. Gen. William Shelton, a four-star Air Force general who oversees U.S. Space Command was...

By Adam Taxin Sunday, August 14, 2011. 2:57 PM Daniel Greenfield, in a column published today titled “Future Newsweek Covers,” takes a satirical look at the once-relevant magazine’s cover this past week featuring a “crazy eyes” photo of Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, one of the frontrunners for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination. Solidly conservative, pro-Israel and anti-jihad, Greenfield's daily column has in recent months become, in the Philadelphia area and elsewhere, among the leading must-reads among taxpaying, patriotic and freedom-treasuring Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Greenfield introduces the piece by reminding people of the remarkable decline of Newsweek: “Newsweek Magazine...

Media: Talk about the elite lagging behind a more sophisticated public. Newsweek, trying to overcome its slide into obscurity, thought it could grab attention by smearing Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann. Big mistake. The smear came in the form of this week's cover story, which tried unconvincingly to depict GOP presidential candidate and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann as "The Queen of Rage," with a cover shot that made her look maniacal. But if anything, Bachmann comes across as Thatcheresque in her unmovable opposition to more deficit spending. Question her opposition a journalist may do, but don't make it out as...

<p>It seems that Newsweek’s cover photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann has already proven to be a game-changer: it got Jon Stewart to defend the Republican presidential candidate for an entire segment– not an easy feat. Stewart blasted the magazine for deliberately finding an unflattering photo of the Congresswoman, arguing “you’ve got to go pretty far” to find an unflattering one, listing examples of Bachmann making “yelling into a bullhorn” look attractive, and giving editor Tina Brown a dose of her own medicine.</p>

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - Jon Stewart says the worst part about conservative complaints of media bias is when they contain "a kernel of truth" -- and that conservatives have a point about Newsweek's unflattering Michele Bachmann cover. The cover describes her as "The Queen of Rage." Stewart called Newsweek out on Tuesday's "The Daily Show" for using cheap attempts to undercut the Minnesota representative and Republican presidential candidate. He mocked the magazine's statement that it ran the photo to capture the way she has galvanized Iowa voters. "I get it, Newsweek," Stewart said. "You put in 'The Queen of Rage'...

Rep. Michele Bachmann has declined to get into the scrum with Newsweek over its cover story of the presidential candidate called "The Queen of Rage," accompanied by an unflattering photo of the Minnesota Republican, but others are calling the magazine out of bounds in its depiction. The National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terry O'Neill said that the cover of the magazine's latest edition is "sexist" and referred to a simple test by the group's founder Gloria Steinem to explain how they determined that conclusion -- would the magazine do the same to a man.

The buzz about Michele Bachmann's crazy eyes photo on the cover of Newsweek refused to go away on Tuesday, a day after the magazine came out. Editor-in-chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast Tina Brown defended the photo on Twitter. Her one-line response was simply: 'Michele Bachmann’s intensity is galvanizing voters in Iowa right now and Newsweek’s cover captures that.'

Rep. Michele Bachmann has declined to get into the scrum with Newsweek over its cover story of the presidential candidate called "The Queen of Rage," accompanied by an unflattering photo of the Minnesota Republican, but others are calling the magazine out-of-bounds in its depiction. The National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill said that the cover of the magazine's latest edition is "sexist" and referred to a simple test by the group's founder Gloria Steinem to explain how they determined that conclusion -- would the magazine do the same to a man. "Who has ever called a man 'The King...

The president of the National Organization of Women actually rose to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s defense yesterday (didn’t see that coming!), while Newsweek editor Tina Brown tried to justify the “Crazy Eyes” cover that inspired so much conservative commentary yesterday. But one person seem disinclined to talk about the cover one way or another and that was Bachmann herself. As of yesterday afternoon, Bachmann still hadn’t seen the picture and she didn’t seem to care too much to talk about it when she could be talking about her campaign and her ideas for the country: Brown claims the cover is OK...