Free Republic

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...