Free Republic

When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC. Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations...

National Public Radio (NPR) is paying the lobbying firm Bracy, Tucker, Brown & Valanzano to defend its taxpayer funding stream in Congress, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate. The taxpayer-funded radio network hired the firm in the second quarter of 2011 to work on issues regarding “funding for NPR and affiliate stations.” It will remain unclear how much NPR is paying for these lobbying services until second quarter lobbying forms are filed. But before NPR hired the firm to represent it on funding issues, the network spent $131,666 in 2011’s first quarter on an...

The bleeding hearts at NPR (funded by you) are worried that Americans are celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden (world hide and seek champion 2001-2011). “Is there moral philosophical justification for rejoicing over the demise of someone like bin Laden?” the article asks, the argument seems to be that no, indeed there is not. In fact the article goes so far as to draw parallels between those celebrating Bin Laden’s death, and those that danced on the streets of Gaza after the 9/11 attacks. Here are a few simple reasons why the good folks at NPR do not know...

In the great state of Minnesota, we have something called the Legacy Amendment which increased our state sales tax to create a slush fund for all kinds of extraneous goodies related to "outdoor heritage, clean water, parks and trails, and arts and cultural heritage." The result has been increasingly odious lobbying efforts to claim a slice of that taxpayer pie. Legislators can't seem to give the money away fast enough. As the state wrestles with a $5 billion budget deficit, funds raised by the Legacy Amendment go to such essential items as paying a science-fiction writer $40,000 to speak to...

Thousands of pages of previously secret military documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison now put a name, a history and a face on hundreds of men in captivity there. The documents include details on 158 men on whom no information has ever been released. The hundreds of classified documents - marked "secret" and "noforn" meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries - are assessments, interviews and internal memos from the Pentagon's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. The task force was supposed to determine who the detainees were, how they might be connected...

On Friday's "Inside Washington," during a discussion about American foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa, PBS's Mark Shields actually said, "The most urgent priority that we have is to find jobs somehow, not simply for Americans, which is an urgent priority, but for young Egyptians" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

National Public Radio is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In 1971, it began at the height of "anti-war" fervor against the U.S. government and its immoral war-mongering. That flavor remains at NPR to this day. Last Sunday, NPR anchor Noah Adams reminded listeners of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and naturally, the theme was anti-communist paranoia: NOAH ADAMS: Today, April 17th, marks exactly 50 years since one of the biggest disasters in American foreign policy: the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961. JIM RASENBERGER (Author, "The Brilliant Disaster"): You know, I think the thing that you have to keep...

Impeached Governor Not Hero Of His Own Legacy?by Jessica Jones April 16, 2011 It was in 1870 that North Carolina Gov. William Woods Holden was impeached and removed from office. He had used the state militia to quell the Ku Klux Klan. Others have begun to question that legacy, saying that he was no early champion of civil rights, but instead a political opportunist. North Carolina Public Radio's Jessica Jones has the story. SCOTT SIMON, host: The North Carolina legislature is working to clear the name of a Reconstruction-era governor. William Holden was cast out of office in 1871 after...

The central Republican message of the Obama era is that these are, at least potentially, the end times. Polls show that a significant percentage of the GOP's base believes fairly out-there stuff about the world we live in. President Obama himself may well be a foreign-born Manchurian candidate, hell-bent on destroying the American capitalist way of life. Or so the far Right would have you believe. But even mainstream conservatives espouse a remarkable range of ideas about the fiscal cliff that we are perched upon as the Federal deficit surges, with some claiming that we are close to a Greece-style...

Who says public radio is boring? We spiced it up Monday by injecting the radical concept of blind justice into a debate over the federal budget deal. Called upon to bring the Tea Party perspective to a roundtable discussion on NPR affiliate KCRW's To the Point, I joined host Warren Olney, Mother Jones' David Corn, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and others. The panel was asked to consider who came out of the budget deal a winner. The exchange began with politics-as-usual. Rubin and Corn agreed that House Speaker John Boehner had emerged as the political victor, though they parted...

The local public radio station, WCVE, is in the midst of its spring fundraiser. As someone who tunes in most mornings, I kicked in some bucks for the good of the cause last week. And if you pay taxes in Virginia, you did, too. Gov. Bob McDonnell tried to have it otherwise. He sought repeatedly to slash state funding for public broadcasting, but was gainsaid by the General Assembly—which trimmed appropriations for public radio and TV by only 10 percent. During debate on the governor's budget amendments last Wednesday, Del. Jennifer McClellan, a Richmond Democrat, displayed an Elmo doll on...

One of two NPR stations in the Los Angeles area, KPCC-FM, suspended its regularly-scheduled Planned Parenthood spots on Friday, in response to Republican demands that Congress eliminate federal funding for the family planning group. Program Director Craig Curtis explained in a Friday memo to staff members, “given that the budget debate in congress is focusing today on abortion in general and Planned Parenthood by extension,” running the spots “might raise questions in the mind of the “reasonable listener” regarding our editorial and sales practices.” A “reasonable listener” might now have questions about the journalistic integrity of the station. The memo...

The government is open because the GOP relented on things like defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood. Why did they cave? Tea Party darling Michelle Bachmann explained it in a blog post yesterday afternoon, before the agreement had been reached. The title says it all: Not A Big Enough Fight. In the end, this half-year budget just wasn't that big of a deal, and it wasn't worth using the political capital. What is a big enough deal? Says Bachmann: I am ready for a big fight, the kind that will change the arc of history. And, I’m hoping that when it...

Despite several ugly recent episodes and considerable movement by conservative activists to defund it, federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio survived an 11th hour deal on a spending bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. The continuation of funding for public broadcasting is one of several significant victories for Democrats regarding the policy riders in the bill still emerging 12 hours after Democratic and Republican leaders struck a deal to avert government shutdown. Another Democratic victory: of dozens of riders included in a House-passed spending bill curtailing strict new...

Tell me something I don’t know…. Today former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller admitted that the liberal establishment is terrified of being exposed for their blatant corruption and far left bias. Fired and failed lib NPR CEO Vivian Schiller spoke Tuesday at the Paley Center for Media in New York and lashed out at the videographers who exposed the bigotry in her organization, calling the undercover sting an “abomination.” She admitted the rest of the establishment is “terrified” of being the next NPR, Planned Parenthood or ACORN…and speculated that the goal of these stings is to instill fear. “It’s terrifying,” Schiller...

Media Matters: How They Deceive and Why It Matters Posted by Lee Stranahan Apr 1st 2011 Yesterday, I did a piece showing how Media Matters used deceptive editing techniques on the Fox / Bill Sammon story. I’m still waiting to hear back from Sammon before I do part two but I wanted to show you a couple of more videos that I’ve done in the meantime. The first one shows how Media Matters used the ‘straw man’ fallacy to attempt to discredit the piece published by Lila Rose yesterday on the Mammosham story. As I say in the video, your...

Last week The House voted to defund NPR by cutting the Gordian ties between Washington and the radio network. A metaphor for everything Washington, nobody knows how much government nectar flows to NPR or in what form – estimates vary from $4MM to $90MM, not to mention its dubious tax exempt status. Sen. Harry Reid offered a typically pathetic defense of NPR by citing critical investigative reporting on dog racing. To be sure, NPR provides a left-leaning window into esoteric topics no other radio station covers, but time has passed NPR by. News sources like 24 hr. cable, blogs, and...

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel. The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as a political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement,...

Local residents have scooped up emergency-supply kits, water purifiers and potassium iodide in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and radiation leak, storeowners said. The rush for supplies, while common shortly after most disasters, has taken on more of a sense of urgency, as possible windblown radiation is expected to hit parts of California by Friday. .......... At Country Sun, Addie Klein, assistant vitamin buyer, said the store has a waiting list for kelp products and is getting in only small shipments. Customers seeking to ship the supplements to families affected in Japan are at the top of the...

Taxes Misspent: It's bad enough that taxpayers are forced to support a left-wing media outlet long since rendered obsolete by the Internet. Now we learn NPR is seeking booty from terrorist sources. Where to begin in describing the damning revelations produced by filmmaker James O'Keefe's Project Veritas in its videotaped undercover sting of National Public Radio officials? NPR claims innocence, but why was Ron Schiller, until recently the president of the NPR Foundation, so eager to do lunch at Georgetown's schmancy Cafe Milano with two men posing as high-ranking members of a Muslim Brotherhood front? The investigative reporters were offering...