Free Republic

Politico reported earlier today that Washington DC has begun to turn against Barack Obama and his administration. Thanks to Obama’s own arrogance, write Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, he has little good will inside the Beltway anyway, and that leaves him with few passionate defenders in the latest scandal cascade: The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of...

Someone get the staff of the New York Times down to NYU for a Biology 101 class. The Gray Lady reported today that abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of killing “fetuses.” Never mind that a “fetus” is an unborn child in the womb, not a baby who was killed after purposefully being birthed in an abortion process that is essentially infanticide. Unlike what the Times reported, a jury of 12 people, who clearly paid attention in seventh grade Life Science class, convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder. But, as the Washington Free Beacon first noted, the...

THE capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.” (Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.) Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and...

Mayor Bloomberg today unleashed an attack on The New York Times, accusing the paper of hypocrisy for publishing an editorial against the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy days after the “paper of record” didn’t bother covering of the murder of a black teenager.

It's rare to get this kind of vindication, so let's enjoy it in memory of Andrew Breitbart for as long as possible. For more than two years, Andrew and Lee Stranahan have investigated the Pigford settlement and the fraudulent claims that not only have cost taxpayers billions, but have left the original black farmers who sued the USDA over discrimination. Today the New York Times reports what Andrew and Lee have been saying all along — that the Pigford settlement was a political hack job by Tom Vilsack’s Department of Agriculture, and that it’s a magnet for fraud (via Twitchy):...

New York Times Co reported a decline in quarterly revenue on weak advertising sales but said it would try to grow out of the slump by expanding its suite of digital products. The 11.2 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter underscores the pressure that the New York Times faces to increase its subscription revenue, especially for its digital products, and find new veins of income.

The public editor for the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, writes on her blog that there is no “vast left-wing media conspiracy” concerning the de facto ban on coverage of the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell in the mainstream media. Until last week, when the pro-life movement was successful inputting enough pressure on the media to cover the trial, most mainstream media outlets had virtually ignored it. As Sullivan wrote: I don’t think that editors and reporters got together and decided not to give the Gosnell trial a lot of attention because it would highlight the evils of abortion. I...

explosion is a reminder that ATF needs a director. Shame on Senate Republicans for blocking apptment articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-01/wor…— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) April 15, 2013

To The New York Times: Be More Like The Drudge Report Limbaugh Ashamed by Noah Rothman video Radio host Rush Limbaugh, reacting to the admission by a senior White House advisor that he is prone to mocking reporters who bring up stories they read on Matt Drudge’s news aggregator, Drudge Report, defended the site from the Obama administration’s criticism. He said that Drudge Report serves the same purpose for average news consumers that the New York Times does for members of the media by setting the daily narrative…

We somehow missed this yesterday, but Newsbusters certainly didn’t, and it’s worth a look even a day later. The New York Times, with reporters around the world and “layers of fact-checkers and editors,� somehow couldn’t properly define Easter in a news article that focused on Pope Francis’ message on Christianity’s most holy of days. This correction has to be a contender for the most hilarious of the year: This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: April 1, 2013An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from...

Who says the New York Times is ignorant of religion? Elisabetta Povoledo is a Rome-based reporter for the paper's international edition, but either she or her copy editor made a mortifying mischaracterization of the meaning of Easter in an online story on Pope Francis posted Monday: "Pope Calls for ‘Peace in All the World’ in First Easter Message." Here's the original final paragraph, vanished from nytimes.com but available on Nexis, emphasis added: Easter is the celebration of the resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life. In...

I remember that early in the Iraq war, the New York Times tried to embarrass the Bush Administration by publishing an article saying that our troops had lost some WMDs they were guarding. I've been looking for that article and several searches have not located it. Does anyone else remember that? Why can't I find it? Has the Times stricken it? Does anyone know where I might locate it?

The self-hating gun owner: Other gun owners interviewed for this article expressed similar reservations, citing their enjoyment of hunting or of introducing family members to the sport while expressing support for stricter gun control legislation. Mr. Kundu, for instance, supports a ban on the kind of assault weapon that he owns, a rifle manufactured by Panther Arms. Yes, AR-15 owners who think AR-15s ought to be banned. Does the New York Times really believe this is a deep well gun control folks can tap in order to get support? This times piece strains credulity. Kundu claims to be a master...

A New York Times blogger became ensnared in controversy yesterday after asking a Weekly Standard author whether he was a Coptic Christian and if this played a factor in his reporting on anti-American and anti-Semitic activist Samira Ibrahim. Weekly Standard writer Samuel Tadros broke the story of Ibrahim’s support for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Bulgarian bus bombing attack of 2012, resulting in the State Department’s decision to “defer” its plan to honor Ibrahim with a women’s courage award. But Times reporter Robert Mackey speculated on Twitter that Tadros’s religious background, which Mackey believed was Coptic Christian, might...

Floyd Corkins Jr. pleaded guilty on Wednesday to wounding a security guard at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobbying group fighting against gay marriage, on August 15 last year. Corkins was carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches at the time – the restaurant chain noteworthy for its public, Christian-based opposition to gay marriage – and intended to rub the sandwiches in his victims´ faces. The New York Times made do with a brief from Reuters that did not mention a vital angle

New York Times and Washington Post knew about secret drone base in Saudi Arabia but agreed not to disclose it to the public US news organisations are facing accusations of complicity after it emerged that they bowed to pressure from the Obama administration not to disclose the existence of a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia despite knowing about it for a year. Amid renewed scrutiny over the Obama administration's secrecy over its targeted killing programme, media analysts and national security experts said the revelation that some newspapers had co-operated over the drone base had reopened the debate over the...

Looks like liberals are still trying to peddle the discredited allegation that Tea Party members attacked black members of Congress. The op-ed page of today's New York Times contains a column by James Sleeper, a long-time left-wing activist, now a lecturer at Yale. The gist is the grudging respect that Sleeper came to have for Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor who passed away two days ago. Sleeper writes of how as mayor, Koch wrestled to the ground a protester who had stormed the stage as he spoke and pelted him with eggs. Sleeper wrote that Koch's asking...

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is facing criticism after retweeting a controversial message that referred to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the National Rifle Association as “the 2 most pig like lobbies” in America. Longtime Israel critic M.J. Rosenberg, who was dumped by the liberal Media Matters for America for his use of borderline anti-Semitic language, authored the controversial tweet Wednesday afternoon. It called to mind recently unearthed statements by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi that referred to Jews as “pigs.” “OBAMA told the 2 most pig like lobbies, AIPAC & NRA, to drop dead in same month....

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said it is “frightening” that the Obama administration has never included progressive economists, who have “been right about everything so far.” “I think it’s frightening that at no point in this administration have there been any serious representation of what you might call the progressive economist wing, which is a pretty big part of Obama’s support,” Krugman said Sunday in an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. … Krugman, a Keynesian economist, has long advocated for more stimulus spending, saying the $833-billion stimulus package of 2009 did not spend enough. …

Susan Jacoby, an author and atheist wrote a column in last Sunday’s New Your Times entitled “The Blessings of Atheism.� In it she proposes that atheism has a lot to offer, especially in times of tragic loss and that it frees human beings from having to ask and answer difficult question. As you may imagine, I am not so sure that asserting a question can be avoided means that it has actually been avoided, or that what she calls blessings are in fact blessings.I would like to excerpt her article and make a few comments. Her original writing is in...

The next two weeks are going to get tense inside the headquarters of the New York Times. Last month, executive editor Jill Abramson told the staff she’d have to cut 30 positions from the news division to buffer against financial losses from rapidly declining advertising revenue. Reporters and editors would be offered buyouts, she said, but if she didn't have enough takers in a month’s time, she would be “forced to go to layoffs.” As the January 24 deadline approaches, only two people, assistant managing editor Jonathan Landman and reporter Jacques Steinberg, have formally announced their exits.

In Sunday's New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal claimed, as the title of her article put it, "More Guns = More Killing." She based this on evidence that would never be permitted in any other context at the Times: (1) anecdotal observations; and (2) bald assertions of an activist, blandly repeated with absolutely no independent fact-checking by the Times. There is an academic, peer-reviewed, long-term study of the effect of various public policies on public, multiple shootings in all 50 states over a 20-year period...It concluded that the only policy to reduce the incidence of, and casualties from, mass shootings are...

... The whale comes last: "Greater progressivity would reduce rising income inequality, and with it, inequality of opportunity that is both an economic and social scourge." The Times is arguing forthrightly for confiscatory taxation of income and wealth, in order simply to reduce post-tax incomes. This isn't "redistribution," it's "off with their heads!" Inequality of opportunity? No, President Obama's kids should not go to Sidwell Friends, they should go to DC public schools like everyone else? Mayor Rahm Emanuel's kids shouldn't go to the University of Chicago Lab school (mine go there too, but I don't preach this stuff), they...

We are not having a debt crisis. It’s important to make this point, because I keep seeing articles about the “fiscal cliff” that do, in fact, describe it — often in the headline — as a debt crisis. But it isn’t. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows. And even the confrontation over the debt ceiling that looms a few months from now if we do somehow manage to avoid going over the fiscal cliff isn’t really about debt. No, what we’re having is a political...

The PBS NewsHour has yet to invite a strong conservative on the program to talk about the fiscal cliff. Tuesday night they had New York Times columnist, left-wing economist, and Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman to detail his view. Wednesday night they had moderately-conservative Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn), but last night was the most interesting. PBS invited the Norquist of the left, Max Richtman, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who insisted we shouldn’t be in a rush to reform our entitlement spending. After all, when the unfunded liability of both programs is around $100 trillion, what’s...

The New York Times might contain “all the news fit to print,” but it also contains bias, distortion and outright lies supporting failed policies and irrational fears. On Black Friday, as Americans were setting another record in single-day firearm purchases, the Times editorial board was decrying the lack of action in Congress on gun control and calling for President Obama to keep his promises to pursue gun-control legislation. In typical, disingenuous Times fashion, they denigrated gun owners for taking Obama’s “tepid remark” about gun control during the presidential debates as a threat, and then characterized these same remarks from Obama...

The New York Times is attempting to save costs by implementing another round of newsroom staff cuts. According to a memo sent by executive editor Jill Abramson this morning, the newspaper is looking for 30 buyouts among newsroom staff. Over the next few days, Abramson wrote, certain employees will be asked to accept voluntary severance packages. (Newspaper Guild members also have the option to apply for a buyout even if they’re not among those contacted by the NYT.) If the quota isn’t met through buyouts, Abramson will be “forced to go to layoffs,” she said.

he New York Times on Monday announced that it would offer buyout packages to 30 newsroom employees, and that layoffs would ensue if the 30 spots were not voluntarily filled. Citing a difficult "economic environment" that has led in recent years to a 60 percent staff reduction on the paper's business side, Executive Editor Jill Abramson said, "There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced." While the loss of 30 jobs pales in comparison to the ousting of roughly 100 newsroom staffers in 2008, it is the latest evidence that...

— Columbia University has a “director of the center for gender and sexuality law” by the name of Katherine Franke who is considered an authority on sexual matters by The New York Times. Her position seems to be that recent scandals in the news are not really scandalous, except in terms of being sensationalized and overblown by the media. She told the paper that Kevin Clash and David Petraeus were victims of a “sex panic” when they resigned from their respective positions. The Times story written by Elizabeth Jensen and Brian Stelter is noteworthy for the claim that Clash, the...

The New York Times, in its reprehensible campaign to vilify Israel and whitewash Hamas, has resorted to lying about terrorists Israel has killed by pretending the targets were journalists. The author, one David Carr, reported in a piece titled “Using War as Cover to Target Journalists” that two senior Hamas terrorists Israel killed last week were “journalists.” Carr claims that the two terrorists, Mahmoud al-Kumi and Hussam Salama, were cameramen for Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas. They were supposedly covering the Gaza conflict when a missile struck their car. What Carr didn’t report was that the two men...

The New York Times once again appears to be unaware of the presence of terrorists in the Gaza Strip. In a new report on developments in the latest round of Israel-Hamas violence, the Times says: On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al Arabiya, had offices. That attack, which struck a computer shop on the third floor,...

At 11:45 a.m. last Tuesday, the editorial staff of The Washington Post was summoned on short notice to an announcement on the fifth floor of its building to hear something they already knew — that Marcus Brauchli would be leaving after four years as executive editor. After Mr. Brauchli spoke, Katharine Weymouth, the newspaper’s publisher, told employees that he would be replaced by Marty Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe. As the meeting was concluding, Valerie Strauss, a longtime reporter, asked Ms. Weymouth why she was making the change. Ms. Weymouth, perhaps because of employment agreements that limited what...

 Tomorrow, Mark Thompson takes over as the new President and CEO of The New York Times. Thompson is a practicing Catholic who believes "that the truths of the Christian faith are objective truths, rather than being entirely subjective."The position is primarily focused on running the business aspects of the Times. Thompson turned the British Broadcasting Company into a global online media powerhouse, and the Times management feels that he could do the same here.The New York Times Company announced on August 14th that Thompson would become its new President and CEO. Thompson left the position as director-general of the British...

New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson is starting his job on Monday amid a widening scandal at his former employer, the BBC. When the Times hired him in August, Thompson was hailed as someone who could help the company generate new revenue at a time when print publications are suffering from the loss of readers and advertisers. Thompson had spent eight years as director-general of the British Broadcasting Corp., a publicly funded television network that boasts a weekly global audience of 166 million people over multiple platforms, including radio, digital satellite and cable channels. In recent months, Thompson has...

Barack Obama for Re-Election The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to...

We noted this absurdity already here, but this is worth its own post. In light of the stunning news that the White House was aware of the Benghazi terror attack as it happened, the New York Times still actually reports the YouTube video was behind “riots” in Libya. This just defies belief: Beyond the political issues, the film may carry the risk of associating Mr. Obama with any backlash in a Muslim world already inflamed by the YouTube trailer for an insulting film portrayal of its prophet. In September riots erupted in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere as Muslim crowds reacted...

A spokeswoman for Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s re-election campaign told The Daily Caller that the senator and her husband first learned the criminal background of the man speaking out McCaskill’s husband’s business dealings from The New York Times. McCaskill spokeswoman Caitlin Legacki told TheDC on Friday that she thinks McCaskill and her husband Joseph Shepard discovered Craig Woods’ criminal background “[w]hen the New York Times told me in June that he’s a felon.” TheDC reported Thursday that Woods, a former employee of Shepard’s, alleged in a 2011 audiotape that Shepard used the U.S. Senate dining room to cut business...

WHEN I wrote on my blog recently about The Times’s decision not to give front-page coverage to a Congressional hearing on the consulate attack in Libya, hundreds of e-mails and comments poured in. The amount and vehemence of the reader response struck me as important. I drew a couple of conclusions. First, it is utterly wrong to say that The Times has ignored or buried the Libya story. Second, to be more critical, the Libya coverage has not consistently and effectively helped readers make sense of what is happening. The Times has not effectively connected the dots in a murky,...

Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libya were prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages. But The New York Times was not among them

“We’ve had nine day of lies over what happened because they can’t dare say it’s a terrorist attack, and the press won’t push this,” said Caddell. “Yesterday there was not a single piece in The New York Times over the question of Libya. Twenty American embassies, yesterday, are under attack. None of that is on the national news. None of it is being pressed in the papers.” Caddell added that it is one thing for the news to have a biased view, but “It is another thing to specifically decide that you will not tell the American people information they...

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died early Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

Americans are fast turning to mobile devices to get their news, resulting in stunning viewership declines for CNN and existence-threatening readership drops for newspapers, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The winners: social network sites, online news and websites like the Drudge Report and Yahoo. In Pew's latest look at trends in news consumption, Americans said that they have turned away from CNN. In just four years, the percentage of those who say they watch CNN has dropped from 24 percent to 16 percent. Viewership of the competing cable giants, Fox and MSNBC, has remained fairly stable with...

Have you noticed that in the past few years, and especially in the past few weeks since the murder of the Ambassador and his guards and colleague in Benghazi (a city that Erwin Rommel loved and whose inhabitants he praised), whenever the New York Times refers to Mohammed, they always call him, without quotation marks, The Prophet Mohammed, as if everyone with any sense understands that OF COURSE Mohammed is The One True Prophet and that it's just understood that Mohammed is The Prophet.

Via Mediaite: Long-time New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd is facing a significant backlash over her latest column in which she uses a number of medieval, anti-Semitic stereotypes to describe neoconservatives and, specifically, Dan Senor, a close advisor to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.In Dowd’s latest column, Neocons Slither Back, she describes Ryan’s senior advisor as snake-like. Dowd also describes Senor as the “puppet master” behind Ryan’s supposed lurch towards a neoconservative foreign policy critique of President Barack Obama. This, too, is a trope used for centuries to villainize Jews.Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin savaged Dowd’s column as “creepy”...

The New York Times' coverage of the radical Islamist attacks on 9/11 on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi begins--like the Obama administration--with acknowledging "anger" over an anti-Islamic film, not with the attacks themselves--and criticizes Republican Mitt Romney's statement on Obama's apology. The Times' headline, "Anger Over a Film Fuels Anti-American Attacks in Libya and Egypt"--Update: buried on page A4!--does not even inform readers that U.S. diplomatic missions were attacked, or the fact that one official in Libya was actually killed. The article goes on to criticize Mitt Romney for his allegation that "the Obama...

A New York Times front page story today — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a...

Gays constitute a tiny minority of the U.S. population, less than 2% to be precise.Excluded From Inclusion – NYT WHAT the Republicans painstakingly constructed here was meant to look like the biggest of tents. And still they couldn’t spare so much as a sleeping bag’s worth of space for the likes of me.Women were welcomed. During the prime evening television hours, the convention stage was festooned with them, and when they weren’t at the microphone, they were front and center in men’s remarks. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney both gushed about their moms in tributes as tactical as they were...

The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Here's the front page for the New York Times's national edition, the day after Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention: Peter Roskam, the Illinois Republican congressman and deputy majority whip, said the front page makes Ryan look like the "son of Satan."

Not surprised but happy to see it admitted! This from Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times: "...I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within. When The Times...