Free Republic

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:...