Free Republic

What happens when a National Public Radio host interviews a New York Times reporter on the subject of Venezuela’s economic collapse? You get a perfect storm of cluelessness. The host is Terry Gross, the guest is New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey, and the program is Fresh Air. Gross asks Casey about the utter disaster that Venezuela has become. Casey understands the depth to which Venezuela has fallen–he lives in Caracas!–but he can’t bring himself to offer an honest diagnosis.

WAMU welcomes Murray Horwitz as new host for The Big Broadcast. For over 50 years, The Big Broadcast has kept old time radio alive for Washington audiences, airing shows like Gunsmoke, Dragnet, The Jack Benny Show, The Lone Ranger, Suspense, and Fibber McGee and Molly. Murray will take the mic as host of The Big Broadcast on Sunday, June 12. He will be joined by co-producer Jill Ahrold Bailey. While he has big shoes to fill, Murray has a great deal of experience in radio and theater. He helped to create several entertainment shows while at NPR, receiving three Peabody...

David Gilkey, a veteran news photographer and video editor for National Public Radio, and an Afghan translator, Zabihullah Tamanna, were killed while on assignment in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, a network spokeswoman said.

Bob Garfield, co-host of WNYC's "On the Media," says the annual mingling of reporters, celebrities and sources at the White House Correspondents Association dinner is "repulsive." Source: CNN

The first lesson from how the Iran deal was sold to the public is that it is important to follow the money. Eight hundred eleven op-eds. Three hundred fifty- two letters to the editor. Two hundred twenty-seven editorials. That’s the number of “pro-diplomacy” articles that Ploughshares Fund takes credit for helping support as part of its “proactive” media campaign to support the Iran deal last year. They “were published during critical moments of the Iran campaign,” the website of the fund boasts in its 2015 annual report. The revelations about the work that this one fund did to support the...

A group the White House recently identified as a key surrogate in selling the Iran nuclear deal gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the pact and related issues, according to the group's annual report. It also funded reporters and partnerships with other news outlets.

When you first wrap your head around its plot, the new film Captain America: Civil War seems to have abandoned most of the pointed political content of Marvel's 2006 comics series Civil War, on which it's based. ("Loosely based"? Let's say "semi-loosely based.") In the books, the conflict between Captain America and Iron Man is fundamentally about the Registration Act that would require superheroes to abandon their secret identities, be registered and tracked, and become government employees subject to oversight. The Act follows a tragic series of events that are not actually the fault of The Avengers; in a way...

Third-grader Victor Reza was watching CNN in the living room in Houston with his family when Donald Trump was announced as the winner of the Florida Republican primary. Victor teared up, his older sister, Maria, said in a telephone interview. "I don't want him to win," he announced. "If he wins, I'm never going to see any of you again." Victor, 10, is a U.S. citizen, but members of his immediate family are undocumented. And, says 21-year-old Maria, "I'm pretty sure he's heard hateful rhetoric from his classmates at school. His friends at school were saying, 'Ha-ha, your family's going...

It took a tragedy the magnitude of the suicide bombings that injured hundreds and killed nearly three dozen in Brussels, Belgium to derail the media’s obsession with Donald Trump rallies and their inevitable descent into riots (with as little as a single punch thrown now considered a “riot”).NPR has realized that it has been sending its reporters right into the danger zone, inspiring the network to offer safety training to those on the front lines.

NPR is acting to clarify the role of longtime analyst and commentator Cokie Roberts after she co-wrote a syndicated newspaper column calling for "the rational wing" of the Republican Party to stop Donald Trump's march toward its presidential nomination. NPR has a policy forbidding its journalists from taking public stances on political affairs. She has not been a full-time employee for decades, and several years ago Roberts officially was named a commentator. (The timing was confirmed in separate interviews with Roberts, NPR officials and the former senior vice president for news who made the decision.) The role gives Roberts more...

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...