Free Republic

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

Last night John rendered his "Verdict: The New York Times blew the story." The "story" was the testimony of five federal judges -- Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum and four former FISA court judges -- on Senator Specter's proposed revision of the FISA statute. According to yesterday's New York Times story by Eric Lichtblau: In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel...voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They...

Are the NYT's and James Risen at fault here? Investigators of the failed car bombing in Times Square are looking for a money courier they say helped funnel cash from overseas to finance a Pakistani-American's preparations to blow up the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb in the heart of New York, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. Investigators have the name of the courier they believe helped Faisal Shahzad pay for the used SUV and other materials to rig up a car bomb that would have caused a huge fireball in Times Square if it had gone off, the official...

The media have two great loves in life: liberals, and conservative who "grow" and become liberals. Jeb Bush, who clearly falls in the latter category, was the subject of a fawning piece in the New York Times. The article starts with a big photo of Jeb doing charity work a month ago (that's big news now!) and talks about Jeb's "progression" from "headbanging" conservatism to a "more nuanced approach." Yes, Bush calls conservatism "headbanging," which tells you in just one word what he thinks of conservatism. Mr. Bush, 61, the former governor of Florida, insists that he will not contort...

A dozen people may have been murdered by Islamic terrorists in Paris Wednesday morning, but The New York Times can’t help but note the real tragedy behind the shooting: the growth of Islamophobia. (RELATED: The Ever-Growing List Of Cowards Refusing To Publish The Mohammad Cartoons)The attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for its publication of images of Muhammad is “sure to accelerate the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe, feeding far-­right nationalist parties like France’s National Front,” frets Times reporters Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold in an article entitled “Paris Attack Reflects a ‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe.”[Snip] The Times...

Job cuts at the New York Times will exceed the stated goal of 100 newsroom positions eliminated, the Newspaper Guild of New York said yesterday in a memo to union members. According to the guild, the Times said yesterday it will lay off 21 union-represented employees starting as early as today, after 57 guild members and roughly 30 non-guild members accepted buyout applications. That amounts to more than the 100 newsroom positions the newspaper said it needed to eliminate as a cost-cutting measure on Oct. 1.

There is some good debate and conversation happening in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. But there is also plenty of nonsense. Consider this gem from the New York Times editorial of this morning about police arrests: "there can never be a justification for any lethal assault on an unarmed man." How absurd. In Ferguson, there is evidence that Michael Brown was attempting to wrest the officer's gun away. Should Darren Wilson have waited until Brown was successful before defending himself? Whatever the facts from Staten Island, if a single officer finds himself in a struggle...

Progressive New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall wrote on Tuesday that Democrats' embrace of Obamacare's redistribution scheme has angered and alienated working-class and middle-class Americans. "Even though midterm elections favor Republicans, the 2014 results show middle and working-class dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party rising to dangerous levels, which threatens the party's growing demographic advantages," wrote Edsall. As Breitbart News reported last Wednesday, the latest Gallup poll finds that President Barack Obama's approval rating with working-class white voters has hit an all-time low 27%. Moreover, the Gallup poll's findings were taken from opinion data collected prior to racially-charged riots in...

New York Times reporter, Julie Bosman who along with her colleague, Campbell Robertson, thought is was perfectly okay to write an article revealing the town and street where former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson lives. This act of complete obliviousness to the safety of officer Wilson caused quite an uproar including from Sean Hannity who blasted the Times for revealing this personal information about Wilson's home address. One result of this backlash was the publication on the Web of the home addressses of both Bosman and Robertson so they could experience a bit of karmatic kickback. Apparently this was a...

Media Malfeasance: Short of handing local rioters a locator map, the newspaper of record provides enough information to find the home of the police officer some still accuse of murdering Michael Brown for no good reason. We're not sure what the New York Times was thinking when it published an item last Monday by Julie Bosman on the recent marriage of Officer Darren Wilson along with the town they lived in and street they lived on. The street in the small St. Louis suburb they live in is only two blocks long, and the piece had almost all the information...

The New York Times journalist who published Darren Wilson’s home address wants police protection and has been calling the police nonstop, Gotnews.com has learned. Julie Bosman “keeps calling the 020th District station complaining about people harassing and threatening her,” our source told us. She’s also “complaining about numerous food deliveries being sent to her residence.” Chicago police department sources alerted Gotnews.com about the glaring double standard on Friday. Gotnews.com published Julie Bosman’s address in Chicago after she published the address of Officer Darren Wilson and his new wife in a widely criticized move.

The New York Times reported who published Darren Wilson’s address and has been covering Michael Brown has a shoplifting record, Gotnews.com has learned. Julie Bosman and her co-author famously published Darren Wilson’s address in the New York Times page. The apparent conflict of interest wasn’t disclosed to the New York Times, a source with knowledge in the inside of the Times has told Gotnews.com.

Wal-Mart stores Inc issued an "urgent agenda" memo to its store managers across the United States last month, laying out guidelines to boost sales of "chilled and fresh" food, the New York Times reported. The memo, marked "highly sensitive", asks Wal-Mart marketing managers to make sure they discount aging meat and baked goods to maximize chances of selling them before their expiration dates, according to the report. Wal-Mart, which has posted six straight quarters of flat or declining same-store sales growth, has been battling a stronger dollar and a reduction in U.S. food stamp benefits, which has eaten into...

By Tuesday night about 90 million Americans will have cast ballots in an election that’s almost certain to create greater partisan divisions, increase gridlock and render governance of our complex nation even more difficult. Ninety million sounds like a lot, but that means that less than 40 percent of the electorate will bother to vote... The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has on average...

The New York Times will announce its third quarter earnings on October 30. It’s make or break time. On October 1 President and CEO Mark Thompson said 100 plus staff cuts would “safeguard the long-term profitability of The Times,” and were not the result of any short-term business difficulties. The Times seems more confident chopping its way to survival than developing new revenue sources, and sticking by them, until they deliver profitability on a consistent basis. The Times has not recorded consistent profit growth for five years and can’t realistically expect it again soon. For every bit of good news...

The Pentagon will offer medical examinations and long-term health monitoring to servicemembers and veterans exposed to chemical warfare agents in Iraq as part of a review of how the military handled encounters with chemical munitions during the American occupation, The New York Times reported Wednesday. An Oct. 15 Times story found that while the United States had gone to war looking for an active weapons of mass destruction program, troops instead quietly found and suffered from the remnants of the long abandoned arsenal. Since that article, which detailed instances of exposure that the military kept secret in some cases for...

From the New York Times: WASHINGTON — Bracing for a difficult election in just over a week, when they could lose control of the Senate, Democrats exasperated with the White House are already moving to pin blame on President Obama, whom Republicans have made the centerpiece of the campaign. Even optimistic Democrats say they have little more than a 50-50 chance to retain their Senate majority. Senior elected officials, strategists and donors have begun to openly criticize Mr. Obama, contending that his low popularity and some ill-advised remarks have proved toxic for candidates trying to distinguish themselves from the president...

After a few days of trying to ignore the question, Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in Georgia, acknowledged on Friday that she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. By this year’s standards, that’s pretty forthright, especially compared with Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat running for the Senate in Kentucky, who refuses to discuss her presidential vote. Only one Democratic Senate candidate this cycle has been willing to appear with the president on the stump: Gary Peters in Michigan. The others have spent months keeping their distance from Mr. Obama and some of...

Recently, The New York Times Magazine had an article entitled “The Beggars Of Lakewood”, which I found to be a distorted depiction of the Hareidi-religious Jewish community of Lakewood, New Jersey. The article describes how the people of Lakewood do not turn anyone vetted as needy away. It could—and should—have been called “The Generous Givers of Lakewood.” Because this is a community of Torah scholars who, barring a few, are far from wealthy. Instead, it focuses on those asking for funds. The piece uses the hackneyed stereotype of Jews as money-grubbing beggars—replete with a picture of a black hat surrounded...

A man named Tyler Pearson had posted a list of the 1000 Twittter accounts most commonly followed by the 677 New York Times staffers on the paper’s public list. It is, as you would expect,embarrassingly cocooned: Times staffers follow people who share the liberalish/leftish viewpoint of the Times itself, meaning these staffers are less likely to even find out discordant information. Which may be why they are so often surprised, or late to a story. …