Free Republic

NPR touts Muhammad’s example as means to counter “extremism” This article is more ridiculous than most. Muhammad loved dates, melons and cucumbers and that’s supposed to make Muslims less susceptible to “extremist propaganda”? His non-snoring blowing sound while sleeping is supposed to make Muslims “emphasize charity and respect for other faiths”? “Hassan argues that if Muslims had more knowledge of how the Prophet Muhammad actually lived and what he taught, they would be less vulnerable to extremist propaganda. Counterterrorism officials — who’ve focused largely on surveillance, sting operations and community policing — would have more success countering extremism, he says,...

National Public Radio collaborated with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to survey Americans’ recent experience with health care. As to the Affordable Care Act, the survey’s findings are damning. They suggest that Obamacare has been worse than a complete waste of money. This is the survey’s only question directly on Obamacare. Most respondents say that Obamacare hasn’t affected them; where it has affected them, most say the law’s impact has been harmful: The promises that President Obama made about the ACA–cheaper premiums! lower co-pays and deductibles! better coverage!–have completely failed to materialize....

Penny Starr at CNSNews.com found an appalling example of journalistic fawning over the Castro brothers of communist Cuba on Wednesday’s All Things Considered, the evening newscast of taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio. Ramon Castro, the older brother of Fidel and Raul Castro, died last week at age 91. NPR reporter Lourdes Garcia-Navarro warmly recalled his sense of humor from going to a party in Havana for American business people (despite the ongoing trade embargo).

Here are more signs Sarah Palin could face an uphill battle with PBS host Gwen Ifill. Professor Sherrilyn Ifill of the University of Maryland Law School, whom Gwen Ifill has lauded as "my brilliant baby cousin," has written that black women are not buying Sarah Palin's "false claims to feminism" and is portrayed as too perfect: "when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it's offensive to black women." The Community Times, a suburban Maryland newspaper, found Professor Ifill was ardently opposed to the Alaska governor when they did an e-mail interview: "From the first...

Until last year, the architect of Donald Trump's presidential campaign was an obscure political operative in New Hampshire. Now, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski can claim to have engineered victories in South Carolina and New Hampshire and a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, a winning streak that gives Trump a strong shot at the Republican nomination. On the night of his New Hampshire primary victory, Trump acknowledged Lewandowski's role in the win, asking, "Does Corey have a ground game or what?" That night, Lewandowski stood stage right to Trump, looking relaxed, a rare moment of rest for a man who's...

Analysis explores the relationship among college football, binge drinking and sexual violence on campus. It suggests that reports of rape increase 41 percent on college football home games.

Gun rights is a topic which seems all too readily broken down among racial lines if you get all of your news from cable TV or the New York Times. Black Americans don’t like guns and white people are just crazy about them, right? (Or just crazy, I suppose.) But while there are some definite trends to support the stereotype, no group is ever as homogeneous as the press would have you believe. While I rarely turn to NPR for my news, I ran across an interesting interview this month conducted by Karen Grigsby Bates, speaking with one black gun...

WASHINGTON — National Public Radio’s (NPR) ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen released an explanation and apology Monday for a map published on the news organization’s website that erased Israel from the Middle East. On January 24, NPR’s blog Goats and Soda, which covers health and culture issues around the world, ran a piece titled, “What Are You Afraid Of In 2016? Globetrotters Share Their Fears.” The post focused on travelers’ anxieties for the coming year, and included an illustration of the Middle East and North Africa, the region of the world that travelers most perceive as being at risk. “The map portion...

In an article published on National Public Radio's (NPR) website Monday, a map of the Middle East failed to include Israel, labeling Palestine in its place. The map was an illustration accompanying the article "What Are You Afraid Of In 2016? Globetrotters Share Their Fears." The article referenced travelers' fears of Islamic radicalization and extremism in the region. Immediately following the publication, the website's comment section was flooded with criticism from readers and journalists who questioned the online publication's decision to use an illustration of this nature. As a result of the abundance of complaints, NPR removed the photo and...

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Black people are disproportionately victimized by gun violence, and prominent African-American leaders are among those calling for tighter gun control. Yet as Karen Grigsby Bates of NPR's Code Switch team found out, many other African-Americans believe that owning guns is crucial to protecting themselves and their rights. KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Know how some people can't do without something? April Howard has three possessions that are non-negotiable. APRIL HOWARD: I have a .22, a .38 and a rifle. BATES: And she's keeping them all. Howard's had guns for several years now, the result of a close call...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tim Graham. As night fell on Christmas Eve, National Public Radio was in its usual holy-day mode, using your tax dollars to mock the traditional Christian creed. This time they promoted an activist movie called "The Danish Girl," yet another alleged "true story" about artist Einar Wegener, a married man who wanted to be a woman named Lili. An earlier NPR commercial -- sorry, "underwriting announcement" -- said he was the first recipient of "gender confirmation surgery." Paging Mr. Orwell -- it's NPR on line 1. Focus Features -- part of the Comcast...

Many Republicans may have sided with Donald Trump's controversial proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., but his rival Jeb Bush predicts that the GOP faithful will eventually oppose the plan and see it his way. "Trump clearly banning all Muslims would actually be so counterproductive in our efforts to destroy ISIS that it's foolhardy," the former Florida governor told NPR's Steve Inskeep in an interview Wednesday in Boston. "I mean, it's beyond ridiculous; it's quite dangerous." Earlier this month, in response to terrorist threats, Trump said there should be "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the...

Octavius Humphries' and Seth Smiley's story began on Christmas Eve 2010. They'd met online and, despite a 19-year age difference, agreed to a first date on Christmas Eve. Octavius describes it as an "amazing" first date. And then Seth told him his mother was expecting the two of them for Christmas dinner. "I just thought, nobody really should be alone on Christmas," Seth says. "Me being black and you being white and the age difference," Octavius says, "I thought that this was just going to be a recipe for disaster." But Octavius instantly lit up the house, Carole remembers. "And...

see link Conan, semi-retired ... tells me that as far as he knows the term is meant to connote genitalia. And he doesn’t think his usage makes Trump’s okay.

Donald J. Trump is still coming under fire from Hillary Clinton's campaign and the media, including National Public Radio (NPR), for using the term "schlonged" to describe her defeat in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working-class men to boost his campaign. Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African-American to hold the White House. Demographic changes and economic stresses, including “flatlining” wages and incomes, have meant that “particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they...

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz told NPR in a Wednesday interview that the term “climate change” is the perfect “pseudoscientific theory for a big-government politician who wants more power.”In the interview, Cruz recalled the global cooling arguments from the 1970s, telling NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that some of the same researchers worrying about global cooling as a threat in the 70’s, are the same people now telling people global warming is a problem today.The Texas senator asked Inskeep if he remembered back 30 or 40 years ago when politicians were telling people ” … that we were...

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is a big fan of President Obama, and when he interviews him, he helpfully sets him up. In a recent interview on race relations, Inskeep added little prompts instead of questions. That's not what Ted Cruz received on Wednesday's show. Inskeep was blunt when discussing the new Trump idea of banning Muslims from entering America: STEVE INSKEEP: All this led to a bottom-line question when Senator Cruz visited our studios. [To Cruz] Which Muslims do you want to keep out of the United States? TED CRUZ: Well, I'm not sure that's the way I...

In 1996, Reginald Dwayne Betts — a 16-year-old honor student with braces — used a pistol to carjack a man who had been sleeping in his vehicle. Shortly thereafter, he was caught, sentenced as an adult and sent to an adult prison, where he served more than eight years, including one year in solitary at a supermax facility. "I was 5 feet, 5 inches and 120 pounds. I went to prison with grown men, and I went into what people readily acknowledge as a treacherous and a wild place," Betts tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "My judge, when he sentenced...

More and more colleges and universities are allowing students to choose their own gender pronouns, meaning instead of just "he" and "she," the options now include pronouns like "ze," which are intended to be gender neutral. Harvard is one of the universities that made the change official this year. Now, undergraduate students have a variety of pronouns to choose from when they register. Van Bailey, the director of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Queer student life at Harvard College talks with NPR's Michel Martin about how Harvard is implementing and reacting to the changes. On what led to the change...