Free Republic

The New York Times covered the latest annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with its usual mix of suspicion, overloaded labeling bias, and anti-GOP doomsaying. The paper's skeptical coverage of the three-day conservative confab, held this year at National Harbor on the Potomac, opened with two stories in Friday's edition, one on the organizers's attempts to put "a less strident face on the convention and the party."

Shrewd reporting about the Ukraine crisis comes from The Onion, which declared that American reaction is evenly divided — between the “wholly indifferent” and the “grossly misinformed.” In the latter category, it seems, belong the chest-thumpers who blame the Crimea catastrophe on President Obama. “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression,” scolded Senator Lindsey Graham (revealing his own weakness: grammar). “President Obama needs to do something!” Likewise, Senator John McCain complains that Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless,” so that “nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.” Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, worries that...

If there’s one thing more annoying than an American liberal elitist lecturing Americans on appropriate conduct and conversation, its a British liberal elitist lecturing Americans on appropriate conduct and conversation. Piers Morgan is out at CNN. Cheerio! The New York Times reported: There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

One day in the foreseeable future, high school students will no longer read Elie Wiesel's Night to learn of the incredible bounds of human resilience. They will instead read the memoir of Vanessa Csordas-Jenkins. They will read, and they will be inspired. Who is Vanessa Csordas-Jenkins, you might ask? Only the subject of the most harrowing story you will ever read in the New York Times. Csordas-Jenkins suffered indignities that no human being should ever have to suffer. And she did so with grace and dignity that only [can] be described as vintage Csordas-Jenkins. Our story begins with Ms. Csordas-Jenkins,...

Longtime readers here may recall that yours truly and others have written about liberties New York Times reporter Kate Zernike has taken with the truth, especially in her reporting on the Tea Party movement. Her penchant for inventing baseless stories about alleged racism in the movement once caused the late Andrew Breitbart to label her "a despicable human being." Breitbart might well have the same reaction to the hours-later revision made at Zernike's Times story Friday about Chris Christie. Several alert bloggers and tweeters noted that her story about Christie's knowledge of shut lanes on the George Washington Bridge conveniently...

RUSH: Have you seen, folks, the New York Times magazine cover this Sunday? Here, let me turn the Dittocam off. I've gotta zoom in on something. This is the ugliest damn thing I have ever seen, and I do not know what they are thinking. Okay, I want to show you here on the Dittocam, and we'll put it up at RushLimbaugh.com. "Planet Hillary." That is the cover of this Sunday's New York Times. Yes. And you see planet Hillary. What you can't read, the neighboring little star shooting there, people like her daughter and Huma that are in her...

Hillary Clinton has not yet declared her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — but you wouldn't know it from The New York Times Magazine to be published on Sunday. The cover story, titled "Planet Hillary," is illustrated by a graphic showing a solar system with a huge planet at the center which features Clinton's smiling face. The teaser for the article by Amy Chozik, a national political reporter for the Times, reads: "The gravitational pull of a possible 2016 campaign is bringing all the old Clinton characters into her orbit. Can she make the stars align, or will chaos...

With the endless gridlock of modern Washington, it’s tempting to want to ditch the whole American constitutional system and install a king, who could at least get things done. This is essentially what David Brooks is proposing in his column this month, though he doesn’t quite come out and say it. Brooks is right that gridlock is stifling desperately needed policy innovation and reform, but is wrong about the cause and solution for it. The problem is too much power and authority is centralized in the federal government. The solution is to look to the states, which are already a...

For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it. All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, and then given to the states to spend as they see fit. He actually believes that states will “design and fund creative initiatives” to address inequality. “Washington continues to rule over the world of anti-poverty policy-making, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing...

(CNSNews.com) – The New York Times Company says it’s not for sale, but a high-profile Chinese businessman and philanthropist eager to buy what he views as the world’s most influential newspaper plans to fly to New York City this week to push ahead with his bid. Chen Guangbiao on Wednesday told the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated paper, that he has a meeting scheduled Friday with a city firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions, followed by dinner on Sunday with “a middle-level leader” from the Times.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inaugural was filled with “backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug” The The New York Times said in a scathing editorial Friday. The paper’s editorial board called out three inauguration participants for their demagoguery and defended former Mayor Michael Bloomberg from the speakers’ jabs at his tenure. “Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” read the Times editorial. James, who now holds the office formerly held by de Blasio, brought a...

Benghazi: The attempt to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton begins as the New York Times revives the long-ago debunked "video clip" excuse for the well-planned Benghazi massacre while denying documented al-Qaida involvement. These days it's all the news that is fit to be made up that graces the pages of the once-proud Gray Lady that has morphed from a self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" to the house organ for the Obama administration. The latest example is a piece on the Benghazi terrorist attack of Sept. 10, 2010, titled, "A Deadly Mix in Benghazi." It resembles the infamous White House talking points — on...

After reading the David Kirkpatrick's NYT piece this evening, I decided to do a little cross-checking/fact-checking, as my web search came up bupkis. Specifically, I found no mention of a key suspect in the Benghazi attack in either the NYT piece nor any critique thereof. The suspect in question: Muhammad Jamal al Kashef. It didn't take long to find the UNSC addition of al Kashef to the Al-Qaida Sanctions List, as it had occurred in October and was easy to find. I also found several other casual 'honorable mentions' thereof such as this piece from Long War Journal in February...

Chinese recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao said on Tuesday he is set to begin negotiations to buy the New York Times. “If I acquire the Times, the paper will only report the truth and must verify all information,” Chen told Reuters. Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has said the paper is not for sale, and industry insiders doubt the Ochs-Sulzberger family would sell Chen the paper. But Chen told Reuters he believes the company is worth $1 billion and that money can change minds. “There is nothing that can’t be bought for the right price,” Chen told Reuters. Chen says he...

Chen Guangbiao, listed as one of China's 400 richest people and a man known as much for his publicity stunts as his wealth, claims he is in talks to buy the New York Times. "Soon, I will go to America to do three things," Chen told a crowd Monday night at a news media award reception in the southern Chinese boom town of Shenzhen, according to the semi-official China News Service. The first, he said, "is to go discuss the acquisition of the New York Times". Asked later to elaborate on his plans, Chen simply told reporters "the negotiation is...

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s air power...

On Monday, the editor of the New York Times Editorial page was compelled to write that the publication has not decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 yet. His pronouncement came two days after the paper attempted to whitewash the Benghazi tragedy by printing a story that alleged that there was no al-Qaeda involvement in the attacks that killed four Americans (contradicting the paper's own reporting), murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens had "little understanding" of the region, and that the terrorists were motivated by an anti-Muhammed YouTube video. On a blog post on the paper's website, Andrew Rosenthal...

Politico, trying to find a juicy angle on the latest chapter in the Benghazi saga, asks the arrogant question “Could the New York Times have saved ’60 Minutes’?” They are referring, of course, to “60 Minutes’” infamous use of charlatan Dylan Davies as a source when he did not, in fact, scale the compound wall the night of the attacks, nor see Ambassador Chris Stevens’ body in a Libyan hospital. Davies was outed by Washington Post sleuthing, and then by the New York Times, which spoke with the FBI about Davies. The FBI confirmed that this bad source had told...