Free Republic

On September 10, 2010, the day before our enormous freedom rally at Ground Zero protesting the Ground Zero victory mega-mosque, the New York Times profiled a Muslim named Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, who had no place to pray. The whole story was a subtle advertisement for the Ground Zero mega-mosque. But as it turns out, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam is not quite the "moderate" that the leftist NYT dhimmis assumed he was, but calls openly for the murder of apostates from Islam -- here in the U.S. Here again we see The NY Times legitimizing and norming the most extreme voices. They...

especially interesting in a New York Times story from Friday on Iran, where they found it advantageous to edit out an America-hating Iranian who wished the Times building would burn down: “He is a war veteran, a good manager and a religious person,” said Noushin Sobhani, 31, a gynecologist. She and her parents voted at the Imam Sadegh University, where most of Iran’s cadre of bureaucrats are trained. “We hate America,” her father said, smiling. “I hope The New York Times building burns down.”

MSNBC’s ratings are so bad that even The Huffington Post is slamming its decline. On their media page, Olivia Nuzzi wrote an article titled “MSNBC: ‘All In’ or ‘All Over’?” “MSNBC has hit a ratings low in primetime not seen since the days that the network still carried a show hosted by raspy-voiced Fox News refugee Rita Cosby,” Nuzzi wrote. Especially disappointing were the 8pm ratings of "pleasant but exceedingly dry" Chris Hayes after they put Ed Schultz out to pasture on the weekends: Chris Hayes' new 8 PM lynchpin show has lost a third of the audience Ed Schultz...

The studio space at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. is changing hands, Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports. Next month, ABC’s “This Week” will vacate the space and return to the network’s Washington bureau, and Al Jazeera America will move in. ... Al Jazeera America, which B&C reports will have both office space and editing facilities in the Newseum, is preparing for its launch later this year. The network recently hired Adam May, a local reporter from Baltimore, as a D.C.-based national correspondent.

Larry Connors, the KMOV anchor who asked Barack Obama some tough questions about his family's vacation habits and claimed earlier this week that he might have been harassed by the IRS as a result, has been taken off the air.

The Boston terror attack allows one easy conclusion – the Old Media is not afraid to jump the gun on its reporting. The AP could have checked its facts before incorrectly reporting that a bomber was in custody last week; a simple phone call to the police or FBI would have cleared up any confusion. Probably in a race against its competition, the OM did not check its facts and endangered Bostonians who may have thought the threat was over. Other news sources ran the AP's error, but with a caveat that they could not confirm its accuracy. The OM...

Last week famed film critic, Roger Ebert, passed away, having long suffered from Cancer. Vitriol against the dead is unseemly, and Shout Bits does not want to lower itself to the leftists who inevitably will denigrate the late PM Margaret Thatcher, one of the true greats of the 20th Century. Still, Ebert's story cannot be told without understanding his rabid partisan leftism. Especially after he was robbed of the ability to speak, Ebert was famous for his anti-Republican and anti-capitalist screeds. As with Walter Cronkite, Ebert's role has been supplanted by a more egalitarian system that far better serves the...

High profile-gang rapes in India have been in the headlines since December. The phenomenon is growing across Europe too, but tends to be under reported due to the high incidence of Muslim perpetrators which makes it politically incorrect to mention. In December 2011 a Swedish mother-of-two was subjected to a brutal gang-rape by 12 Afghan immigrants in a refugee camp . ... The main perpetrator Rafi Bahaduri, 25, had already committed four other rapes in Sweden. The case is not unique. There is a growing trend of gang-rapes perpetrated against white women by Muslim rapists. In the U.K. there has...

With The Denver Post‘s DC reporter, Allison Sherry, under fire for her conflict of interest by dating a member of the Green Lobby without disclosing that to readers, it’s fascinating to see alternative Colorado publications leading the way on coverage of our nation’s capital. News today from The Colorado Observer is that they’ve hired a second Washington, DC -based reporter to cover federal issues and the Colorado congressional delegation. The media environment in Colorado has been weakened ever since the closing of the late, great Rocky Mountain News, virtually allowing Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton to be the sole press...

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for The Hill newspaper. Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.” But that editor’s note...

Liberal Fox News Contributor and Daily Beast columnist Kirstin Powers on the Obama-Hillary Clinton "60 Minutes” interview: “It really was something you’d expect from the state-run media. It was that kind of level of propaganda… This was a joke. You look at it and just not challenging basic things…”

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes ... The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. ... Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At...

Last Friday, the sitting president of Egypt – the world’s 15th most populous nation — was exposed for calling Jews “apes and pigs.” And he did it in a TV interview (in Arabic) in 2010, less than two years before he took office. Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn’t. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report....

In the history of mankind there are countless instances of cult figures who have lead their followers to ruin and disillusionment. Names like Jim Jones, David Koresh, The Pied Piper, Bernie Madoff, Adolph Hitler, Charles Manson, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and a whole host of TV evangelists have done their damage. It was easy for those outside and not sucked in by these hucksters to see the message they peddled defied logic, science and the laws of economics: Alchemy, master race, buy your way into heaven, getting something for nothing, all have that common thread. ... Gore was making hundreds of...

Just call him Al Gorezeera. Yesterday morning, the still shell shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting at its San Francisco headquarters, which was teleconferenced to their offices in LA and NYC, to meet their new bosses. That would be two of Al Jazeera’s top guys: Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations, and Muftah AlSuwaidan, general manager of the London bureau. Ominously missing was the creator of Current, the self proclaimed inventor of the Internet and savior of clean energy, Al Gore, although his partner, Joel Hyatt, stood proudly with the Al...

WASHINGTON - The Manassas News & Messenger is no more. The paper printed its final edition after 143 years of covering the news in Prince William County, Manassas and Manassas Park Sunday. The paper's parent company, the Warren Buffett-owned World Media Enterprises, decided to close the paper and its website ... World Media Enterprises purchased the paper, as well as several others, from Media General in June. ... All employees lost their jobs, and

On Sunday, liberal New York newspaper The Journal News published the names and addresses of legal permit holders in two counties online and in print. If that wasn’t bad enough, this weekend, the Gannett owned Journal News announced that it will publish more names and addresses of residents holding pistol permits in the New York area. Enough is Enough. Two other outlets have posted names and personal contact info for the employees of this Gannett owned paper. Isn’t it about time the Gannett Board of Directors were contacted for their official reaction to this controversial practice? Do these board members...

The story behind the story is that “tax reform,” as we know it, is dying. During the 1980s, no major piece of legislation better symbolized bipartisan consensus than the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was regarded by both liberal and conservative experts as the best tax law since World War II. The basic idea was simple: Reduce tax rates and recover lost revenue by ending (or limiting) tax breaks. The struggle between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner over the “fiscal cliff” indicates that this beneficial consensus has collapsed. Just the opposite is occurring. ... many politicians support...

The Board of Directors of The Washington Post Company (WPO) today announced ... an accelerated cash dividend ... This accelerated dividend is intended by the Board to be in lieu of regular quarterly dividends that the Company otherwise would have declared and paid in calendar year 2013

Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly "pushed through the 234-article draft (constitution) in just 21 hours from Thursday into Friday ... (after) Coptic Christians and liberals earlier had walked out." The draft constitution includes several articles "that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities," and omits "bans on slavery or promises to adhere...

This is all Americans need to know about just how disgraceful a "news network" MSNBC is. A new study just released by the Pew Research Center found that in the final week of the just-ended presidential campaign, the "Lean Forward" network did absolutely no negative stories about President Obama or positive ones about Mitt Romney. MSNBC's coverage of Romney during the final week (68% negative with no positive stories in the sample), was far more negative than the overall press, and even more negative than it had been during October 1 to 28 when 5% was positive and 57% was...

By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president...

In August, I blasted the Commission on Presidential Debate’s choices of three Beltway lib journo-tools — CNN’s Candy Crowley, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and CBS’s Bob Schieffer. So far, they’ve acted just as expected and predicted. As I noted: While the debate panel trumpeted the gender diversity of its picks, the chromosomal diversity is far outweighed by the political uniformity, class conformity and geographical homogeneity of the group. ... The presidential debates are the last bastion of “mainstream” media self-delusion in the 21st century. They are a ritual laughingstock for tens of millions of American viewers who have put up with...

Newsweek magazine announced today that it will cease publication at the end of the year. The magazine, published since 1933, has experienced a sharp decline in readership - roughly proportionate to its increasingly hard left editorial bent. There is no word how this move will affect Newsweek's roughly 225 subscribers. One positive aspect of the move is that President Obama and first lady Michelle will now have more free time, thanks to not having to pose for monthly Newsweek cover story photos.

Barack Obama was a guest at the 1991 wedding of ABC senior foreign correspondent and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz, The Daily Caller has learned. Obama and groom Julius Genachowski, whom Obama would later tap to head the Federal Communications Commission, were Harvard Law School classmates at the time and members of the Harvard Law Review. After TheDC made preliminary inquiries Monday to confirm Obama’s attendance at the wedding, ABC leaked a pre-emptive statement to liberal-leaning news outlets including Politico and The Daily Beast Tuesday, revealing what may have been internal network pressure felt just days before Raddatz was...

OWN, which has been a disaster from nearly day one with terrible ratings and Discovery quickly learning that their supposedly brilliant acquisition was quickly transforming into a money pit. Just in the past year, the signs have been pointing towards OWN’s imminent demise. First Oprah begged Nielsen viewers to watch her flailing network, and then Oprah fought with Rosie O’Donnell over the latter’s cancelled show.

Unfortunately for CNN, “Piers Morgan Tonight” was the apparent victim of the busy night, drawing only 39,000 viewers 25-54 at 9 PM. To say those ratings are anomalous would be something of an understatement. That is the lowest 9 PM weekday demo rating for CNN since at least 1997.

Washington Post columnist Patrick Pexton made a rather startling admission in the paper’s Sunday edition: The Post never meant for their recent story about how President Obama’s health care law expands the budget deficit to become a viral Internet sensation. In fact, they deliberately tried to bury the story. ... The story in question was titled “Health care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds.” It pointed out that the administration had double-counted Medicare savings in the law and once you adjusted for that it added to the deficit rather than reducing it, as the White House...

Today’s opening snark courtesy of Journolister Dave Weigel from his Slate perch: Big Government breaks the news that Bill Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama; well, this was broken by Ben Smith in 2007, but still. I call it a “snark” because the word “lie” feels a little harsh during this holiday season. However, it’s just a fact that Big Government didn’t position the piece as “breaking news” and as far as I can tell it wasn’t even a featured story. But you have to admire a guy like Weigel who poses as an objective journalist and yet sees...

Press watchdog Reporters Without Borders urged media organisations on Friday to take care to protect female reporters from sexual assault while covering unrest in Egypt, following several serious attacks. The group initially warned women journalists not to work in Cairo's Tahrir Square...It is more dangerous for a woman than a man to cover the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. That is the reality and the media must face it ... On Thursday, French television reporter Caroline Sinz from the state network France 3 was subjected to a violent sexual assualt by a gang of young men and boys and her cameraman...

Real-estate and newspaper mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voted for Obama but began seeing trouble as soon as the stimulus went into the pockets of municipal unions. 'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman ... The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision"...

Left-wing financier George Soros is at it again. While he may claim he’s not behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, funding from his foundations says otherwise. Soros threw his support behind the movement at a United Nations panel on Oct. 3, “I can sympathize with their grievances.” But he does more than just sympathize, his foundations funded groups that back the protests and steer their “progressive” message..... it is hard to ignore the concerted effort by liberal groups, unions, and other Soros-funded entities that prop-up and fuel the Occupy movement. An echo-chamber of left-wing blogs and news sites that receive...

The paper's Jerusalem bureau paid barely minimal attention to the recent killing of an Israeli man and his one-year-old son by stone-throwing Palessinians who attacked their car -- with one huge stone smashing through the windshield and hitting the driver. ... Like most Western reporters, Kershner assumes that a logical peace treaty must divide Jerusalem, with Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem remaining in Israel and Arab neighborhoods becoming part of Palestine. But neither she nor her colleagues have ever checked with Arab residents of Jerusalem about what their real preference might be. Had they done so, they would have found...

New York Times Co. swung to a second-quarter loss on a write-down tied to its news media group, along with the continuing decline of advertising revenue and higher promotion costs related to the launch of digital subscription packages. New York Times, which also owns the Boston Globe, has signaled that its cost-cutting efforts, which have allowed it to remain mostly profitable despite its top-line declines, may be winding down. Most publishers have seen slower advertising-revenue declines, but the newspaper industry continues to battle circulation losses as readers migrate to the Internet. ... Revenue dropped 2.2% to $576.7 million, reflecting a...

The 2010 elections, which changed the balance of power in the House, were driven by popular opposition to government spending, debt and the threat of tax increases. Yet even with the federal debt limit already breached and only days left to prevent a national default, the media continue to ignore the public's wishes. The theme of network reports on the debt ceiling battle is that some agreement MUST be reached so that the limit can be increased, but many Americans disagree with raising the debt limit and are more concerned about government spending. But that has barely been mentioned in...

The parent company for the Hartford Courant has announced plans to eliminate jobs in an effort to cut costs. The newspaper cites an email from CT1 Media saying that some of the positions being eliminated include those in the newsroom as well as production and administration departments. The paper reported late Thursday that it was not immediately clear how many positions will be cut and when that will happen.

RUSH: I want to move on to Sarah Palin now. You know the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour? You know the...? That was actually, ladies and gentlemen, an experimental movie that the Beatles made about a bus tour, and nobody could figure out what the Beatles were up to, either. By the same token nobody knows what Palin's up to. They're all trying to figure it out. The Drive-Bys are trying to figure out what Palin is up to. Now, the interesting thing is that whatever it is she's doing, she is doing it bypassing the media. She's doing an end-around...

Palin is rubbing the media mob’s sense of entitlement right back in its face. In the 1970s, The Boys on the Bus exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus — and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. We’ve come a long way, baby. Amid frenzied speculation over her potential presidential-campaign plans, former GOP Alaska governor Sarah Palin launched an all-American road trip with her family this Memorial Day weekend. Establishment media types...

Sarah Palin’s efforts to confuse the media about her bus tour seems to have worked; she’s turning them against each other. “I want them [the mainstream media] have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this,” Palin told CNN. This morning, she fooled some of them, leaving her bus behind as a decoy. Reporters have resorted to chasing her bus. All of this confusion seems to have gotten to the press who, understandably, are trying to get the story and do their jobs. Now, some of the media frustration is playing out on Twitter. Some journalists...

Since Palin and her team won’t share where the potential candidate is headed, reporters and producers have little choice but to simply stay close to Palin’s bus. This has resulted in scenes of the Palin bus tooling down the highway followed by a caravan of 10 or 15 vehicles – including a massive CNN bus – all trying to make sure they don’t lose sight of the Palin bus. It adds up to a dangerous situation, says CBS News Producer Ryan Corsaro. “I just hope to God that one of these young producers with a camera whose bosses are making...

Meet the Press" host David Gregory said Friday there are "prominent views within Israel" that support President Obama's controversial Mideast peace ideas expressed the day before. When asked by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, "What major Israeli public figures have come out supporting the President's speech," Gregory couldn't name one (video follows with transcript and commentary): ... Unfortunately for the "Meet the Press" host, Scarborough exposed the charade with a simple question. Readers are reminded that Gregory has been celebrated by his comrades in the media all week for his gotcha interview with Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich last Sunday. Unlike those...

For George Soros and ProPublica’s other liberal backers, it was again proof that a strategy of funding journalism was a powerful way to influence the American public. It’s a strategy that Soros has been deploying extensively in media both in the United States and abroad. Since 2003, Soros has spent more than $48 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news – journalism schools, investigative journalism and even industry organizations. And that number is an understatement. It is gleaned from tax forms, news stories and reporting. But Soros funds foundations that fund other foundations in turn, like the Tides...

Virtually unreported by the national media - because it might detract from President Obama's victory lap... The "Father of Waters," as President Lincoln called the Mississippi, is on a historic rampage. Almost no one now living remembers such a river crest. The levees were blown on the Missouri side of the river, below Cairo, last Monday night. Memphis is being surrounded by water. New Orleans will not even see the river crest before Memorial Day Weekend... Is CNN going wall-to-wall? Nope. ... What might this historic flood mean? Well, no one's talking, no one's predicting. Because doing so might affect...

A key backer of a political bill that could put Dog the Bounty Hunter and other bail bondsmen out of business is facing a grand jury probe that could put her behind bars for a car crash that killed a pregnant woman. Colorado state Senator Suzanne Williams is a key supporter of a bill that would allow convicted criminals to post their own bail, effectively replacing bounty hunters like Duane Chapman with the government. The problem, say opponents of the bill, is that it would flood society with criminals and no one to chase them down and bring them back...

Meanwhile, Obama says: 'Let them buy smaller cars.' It apparently didn't occur to the president that people for whom it is a hardship to pay a dollar more a gallon for gasoline can't afford to buy a new car. The remark makes Mr. Obama sound clueless, or callous, or both, but most of the journalists who covered his visit to Gamesa Technology Corp. didn't report this exchange... Gas prices have doubled since Barack Obama became president. With wages stagnant, unemployment high and food prices rising at the fastest rate since the 1970s, this imposes real hardship on many Americans. It...

A U.S. President beset by angry mobs screaming “Yankee Imperialist Go Home”, exploding Molotov cocktails, rubber bullets, tear gas, riot police. Hmmm. Could this be why the President “cancelled a public speech he was scheduled to deliver Sunday” in an “historic plaza” in the “heart of Rio de Janeiro?” Well, we may never know from most in the Make-Believe Media. Yahoo News and New York Times are too busy breathlessly praising Obama as the guru of Hoops citing his so-far superb basketball bracket noting that even women’s hoopsters have attracted Obama’s laser-like focus, promoting my new moniker for our Bookie-In-Chief:...

The rarefied world of academics recently confirmed a sneaking suspicion: those “breaking news” banners on CNBC actually hardly ever, well, break news. And the market knows it. A study that culled from almost 7,000 interviews with chief executives on CNBC over nearly a decade found a recurring pattern: the stock surged on the day the company’s head gave an interview to the business news cable television channel, then dropped right back down over the next 10 trading days.

The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix...cable operators were hard hit, with subscriber numbers falling by 741,000 – the largest decline in 30 years. The figures suggest that “cord-cutting” – one of the pay-television industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.

Every now and again I like to play "name that party." This is the fun parlor game where you read a story about a politician that has either been indicted, arrested, or imprisoned and try to guess by the story from which party he hails. If you read the story and no political party affiliation is mentioned, 99 out of 100 times you can be sure that the troubled pol is a Democrat. However, if it is a Republican that is going to jail or to court his party usually makes the first paragraph if not the headline itself. Well,...

The recent firing of longtime news analyst Juan Williams of National Public Radio was a wake-up call for many Americans to the political correctness and liberal bias at the station. However, it's not so much the bias that offends me, but the fact that my tax dollars are funding it. On its website, National Public Radio describes itself as "an independent, self-supporting media organization ... that receive(s) no direct federal funding for operations." That carefully worded statement is disingenuous and hides the truth about the extent to which taxpayers are supporting the station and its liberal agenda. NPR is a...