Free Republic

Concerned that “casual” and “irregular” so-called journalists are “confusing” the American people. Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have introduced legislation that attempts to “draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate purveyors of news.” The legislation, Senate Bill 448, would define a legitimate journalist as a person working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, a recognized publisher or broadcaster of news. Those falling outside this definition would be denied the privileges granted to established news media under freedom of the press. “The American people need to be protected from being misled by unauthorized sources,” Feinstein...

Anderson Cooper is fading in the ratings. His 10 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures. Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000... From the start of 2009, he began losing a huge chunk of his nightly audience.

John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to be executed tomorrow for the Beltway-area sniper spree that left 10 innocent people dead in 2002. Several family members of the victims will attend. At the time of the murderous rampage that stretched over three, horror-filled weeks... where Muhammad and his young partner in crime, Lee Malvo, wreaked bloody havoc. I covered two main aspects of the story that were underplayed by the MSM–Lee Malvo’s illegal alien catch-and-release story and Nation of Islam convert Muhammad and Malvo’s Muslim hate-mongering. Snide MSM’ers and the CAIR propagandists attacked those of who called these thugs what they...

The London Telegraph has the bombshell report on Ft. Hood jihadist Nidal Hassan’s ties to the September 11 terrorists. Question: Why is it that we have to read British papers to get the unvarnished truths about the Ft. Hood Muslim mass murderer?

CNN's prime-time programs finished fourth and last among the cable news networks in October. CNN's programs finished behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but also its own sister network HLN.

Get a hit drama in here, stat! Just a couple weeks into the fall television season, the prognosis is not looking good for NBC. To wit:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week. "Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they're just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks," said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.

Today, The Montana Standard launches a new weekly columnist for its editorial page Byron York will serve as a conservative voice every Tuesday... York, a staunch conservative, presents his arguments in a thoughtful, measured fashion, rather than resorting to cheap personal attacks on President Obama and others in the Democratic Party that seem to be the hallmark of the GOP these days, said Standard Editor Gerry O'Brien.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called on President Barack Obama to form a White House commission to help save the press Tuesday night in an impassioned speech at the Aspen Institute. “I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media,” the legendary newsman said. Such a commission on media reform, Rather said, ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive. “A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom,” Rather said in an interview yesterday afternoon. “This is...

I think this is an example of the distraction that the Internet and the New Media have driven the Old Media to, but it seems that the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia was so amazed that someone finally paid attention to its work that it had to write a whole story about itself to brag about how many webpage hits it got on a recent story by staffer Lily Gordon. The L-E was all excited that it got "more than 1,000 comments" and received "712,251 page views" after Gordon's July 14 story headlined, "Soldier balks at deploying; says Obama isn’t president."...

The Denver Post sold an average of 17.4 percent fewer weekday copies in the weeks after the Rocky Mountain News folded than what the Post and News sold together a year earlier, and 12.3 percent fewer Sunday papers, according to the Denver daily's first full circulation report since the News' shutdown. On Sundays, the latest Post report cited average sales of 526,234 -- down 12.3 percent from the Post's Sunday average a year earlier of 600,026. And on Saturdays, the Post said in Friday's report that it sold an average of 435,194 papers, down 11.2 percent from what the News...

Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill leaves committee while ABC, CBS, NBC remain silent. The media love to fret over global warming, but now that a trillion-dollar scheme to address global warming could be just around the corner the networks have been curiously quiet. On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill to cap carbon emissions and create an artificial trading market. The network news media didn’t mention it, but critics say the legislation would be a “huge threat to American prosperity and freedom.” The Heritage Foundation estimates that this bill, known as Waxman-Markey, would cost $9.6 trillion in...

Long gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingswood, Douglass Edwards, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith. These men were true “Broadcast Journalists.” They understood all to well the responsibility that rested on their broad shoulders. You didn’t have to tell Murrow or Brinkley, two men of great honor and distinction, that your job is to report the news, “straight down the middle, and leave your editorial comments out of your copy.” As Americans, we didn’t know if these men were Democrats or Republicans. It wasn’t our business: And they did not wear their...

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad. But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against...

The Denver Post announced Thursday that it will stop delivering print copies to the Western Slope, including Grand Junction and farther reaches of Colorado ... Print subscribers will be switched to online subscriptions

The Baltimore Sun has laid off 61 people in its newsroom, about a quarter of its editorial staff, including veteran editors and managers, columnists, photographers and designers. Maryland's largest newspaper laid off managerial employees at the end of the day Tuesday, and notified union-represented employees Wednesday afternoon... Tribune is operating under bankruptcy protection. Real estate mogul Sam Zell took on a $13 billion debt load when he purchased the company in 2007

NBC Universal witnessed revenue and profitability declines in the first quarter. Net profits sank 45%... General Electric itself had a tough time, with earnings down 35%... Research estimates have show NBC is not alone in its bleak earnings. Other major network groups have also seen revenue and profit declines over the last six months.

CNN's Susan Roesgen went nuts on the air Wednesday at a Chicago tea party, blaming everything (accurately) on Fox News. But maybe she was angry because Fox turned her down for a job—twice! Roesgen got snippy with a crazy interviewee while trying to cover the tea partiers, and the crowd turned on her. "I think you get the general tenor of this," she said. "It's anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox." Back in 2005, though, according to a Fox News source, Roesgen really wanted to work for that right-wing conservative network. She sent...

Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., reported a 60 percent decline in first-quarter profit Thursday and said the decline in its advertising revenue is accelerating. Gannett, which publishes USA Today ... ad revenue shrunk by 33.5 percent. USA Today's total number of paid ad pages in the quarter fell to 527, from 826 a year ago.

Newsweek greeted the coming of Easter with a black cover, and the headline "The Decline and Fall of Christian America," spelled out in red in the shape of a cross. Inside, it was more declarative: "The End of Christian America." Why? Because they found that the percentage of self-identified Christians had fallen 10 points since 1990. OK, then let's compare. How much has Newsweek's circulation fallen since 1990? Just since 2007, their announced circulation has dropped by 52 percent. It would be more plausible to state "The End of Newsweek." At the end of 2007, Newsweek reduced its "base rate"...

US newspaper owners, their advertising revenue evaporating, their circulation declining and their readership going online to get news for free, are fighting mad. The enemy? Websites that use their stories without paying for them. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more," said the chairman of the Associated Press, a cooperative of over 1,400 US newspapers, borrowing a line from the anchorman character in the 1976 movie "Network." "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," Dean Singleton said at a meeting this...

(CNN) -- The Rocky Mountain News, gone. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, gone. The chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune is in bankruptcy. Other papers, large and small, are teetering on the brink. On Monday, the Ann Arbor (Michigan) News announced that it will publish its last edition in July. Taking its place will be a Web site called AnnArbor.com. Three other Michigan newspapers announced Monday they are reducing their publications to three days a week. The Flint Journal, The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times will publish print editions on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, according...

Pay will be cut 5 percent for dozens of journalists and other employees at the Boulder Camera, Colorado Daily and Broomfield Enterprise newspapers in April. The cuts will be across the board starting April 6 at the publications, which employ about 120 people. Prairie Mountain Publishing Co. LLC, the parent company of the papers, is also stopping its 401(k) match for employees of those papers by the end of this month. Prairie Mountain Publishing has nine papers statewide and employs about 160 people. Separately, Prairie Mountain Publishing is weighing offers to buy its headquarters building at 1048 Pearl St., in...

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, citing the "challenging times faced by its members," announced Friday that it was canceling its 2009 convention. it had also become clear that attendance in Chicago would have been "significantly" lower than at previous conventions. The ASNE was founded in 1922. The group said the last time it failed to hold an convention was in 1945 during World War II. The US newspaper industry is facing an unprecedented crisis with print advertising revenue declining, circulation dropping and readers migrating to free news online. The announcement of the Rocky Mountain News' closure came just days...

The Denver Post has laid off six newsroom managers in a cost-cutting effort. MediaNews Group is negotiating with union-covered Post employees for $2 million in wage and benefit concessions. William Dean Singleton, chief executive officer of MediaNews and publisher of The Denver Post, is chairman of the board of The Associated Press.

MediaNews Group Inc., which previously asked workers at its newspapers in California to take one-week unpaid leaves, is now putting employees on furlough at its papers in at least five more states. Unpaid leaves announced or agreed to Friday apply to newspapers in Texas, New Mexico, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In most cases, the furloughs are to be taken by the end of March. It also has frozen pensions and suspended its 401(k) fund match payments for managers and other non-union workers at the Denver daily. A MediaNews spokesman told the Associated Press on Friday that the company's employees...

The agency that handles business for the two Denver newspapers is planning for life in a one-newspaper town. Staff at the Denver Newspaper Agency have drafted a letter for advertisers that says "Effective March 1, 2009, only one major daily newspaper will serve the metro Denver market - The Denver Post." "The letter is a draft, and the dates are purely placeholder dates – they don't mean anything," said agency spokesman Jim Nolan. "The (agency) has not been notified by either owner of any date regarding the Rocky Mountain News. Our plans are to keep publishing the Rocky Mountain News...

Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare raised by the advocates of man-made global warming... Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and, second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC. after years when they could not speak openly on this subject, chirped Ms Watts, "scientists calculate that President Obama has...

Letter alleges improper payment of newsroom costs. The Denver Post violated its agreement with Rocky owner E.W. Scripps when it borrowed $13 million from their jointly owned operating agency to cover The Post's newsroom payroll, Scripps wrote in a letter to Post executives last month. "We request that this practice cease and that the Post find a way to fund its editorial payroll without resorting to this . . .," Scripps executives Rich Boehne and Mark Contreras wrote. The letter was dated Dec. 9, five days after Scripps announced it would sell the Rocky and would pursue other options, including...

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print . . . But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May? It’s certainly plausible. -- End Times, by Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, January/February 2009 [emphasis added] The prospect of the disappearance of the New York Times within a matter of months will bring wildly varying reactions in different quarters. Those gleefully anticipating...

Let me be the first in the new year to declare that the mainstream media are dead. Now, can we please move on? Henceforth, my spam filter will bounce any e-mail that includes reference to the dying or dead mainstream media, or MSM, as the gleeful undertakers prefer. It's over. Done. The old media are no more. We are all new media now. Watching newspapers tumble the past few years, and especially toward the end of last, when even the once-great Tribune Co. declared bankruptcy, has been painful to watch and more painful to experience. No city editor or beat...

Fifteen years ago, I had a stupid idea. I was the co-executive producer on ..."Cheers." NBC...was faltering: Ratings were sliding, money was tight, management was nervous ...Johnny Carson...was retiring... I was 28 then, and like all 28-year-olds, I had no idea exactly how stupid I was. So when I found myself standing next to the president of NBC ...I offered my solution to his network's crisis. "You know what you should do?" ... "You should move the 'Tonight Show' with Jay Leno to 10 p.m. Think of all the money you'd save." "That's a pretty stupid suggestion," he said to...

NEW YORK, Dec 24 (Reuters) - The New York Times Co's (NYT.N) November advertising revenue fell 20 percent, the company said on Wednesday, illustrating how the financial crisis is aggravating dizzying revenue declines at U.S. newspapers. Ad revenue at the publisher's New York Times Media Group, which includes the Times newspaper, fell 21.2 percent from a year earlier because of a drop in real estate and jobs classified advertising. Studio entertainment, automotive, book and financial services ads also were weak, the Times said in a statement. The New England unit, which includes The Boston Globe newspaper, as well as the...

Wolf Blitzer announced we're in a Depression 'greater than the Great Depression' - discussion continues live on CNN.

Without so much as a word of warning to their readers or employees, the Journal Register Co. on Thursday closed three longtime community newspapers in Philadelphia. Staffers of the Olney Times, News Gleaner and Northeast Breeze were told all three weekly publications were going to be shut down immediately during an impromptu morning meeting, said Stuart London, the News Gleaner's sports editor. London said publisher J. Wesley Rowe Jr. cited the struggling economy and an unsuccessful attempt by the Journal Register Co. to sell the papers when he delivered the grim news. Journal Register Co. officials could not be reached...

The Detroit News...and another Detroit daily newspaper, the Free Press, are expected to announce next week that they will halt home delivery of the two papers most days of the week... The move comes in the wake of a 22 percent circulation decline at the News and 15 percent at the Free Press over the last five years. Staff cuts are also likely.... The Free Press is owned by Gannett Co., Inc In the face of the worst business climate for daily newspapers in decades, with steep declines in advertising and rising business costs, other U.S. dailies have examined steps...

Moody's Investors Services on Thursday said that William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group faces increased risk of defaulting on its loans, as it downgraded almost $1 billion of the debt for the parent company of The Denver Post. Moody's said it is concerned that the "downturn of the company advertising sales will be significantly more protracted than previously anticipated, further straining the company's liquidity profile and heightening the probability of a covenant default." The rating downgrade comes a week after E.W. Scripps announced that it is placing the Rocky Mountain News on the sales block, as well as its 50 percent...

In other words, they would have to pay you to take what is rapidly becoming Manhattan's quaint little alternative newspaper off their hands. Yesterday, New York Times Company stock closed at $5.72. That is, by far, its lowest close in the 22 years presented on this chart at Yahoo!: Before today's opening bell, the company is worth $822 million, Using conservatively adjusted numbers from a hysterially titled July 25 Business Week article about the company ("How Can The New York Times Be Worth So Little?"), I will show that the market currently sees the New York Times newspaper as literally...

Obama's stealth campaign has now been exposed by the New Media as just another assault on power by the old-fashioned radical Left, beefed up with race-baiting demagoguery. As a result of constant New Media exposés, the Leftwing media are now discredited and widely distrusted, and teetering on the edge of a death spiral. The New York Times' debt securities now have junk bond status from S&P. The same ideological suicide could happen to the Democratic Party itself. The Obama campaign, with its many incestuous links to "small 'c' communists" and Islamic fascists, could end up discrediting the entire Democratic Party...

AP Reporter Lara Jakes Jordan wrote about a letter that had "been sent" but not yet delivered to Attorney General Mike Mukasey. The reporter had a significant number of facts, including that the signers of the letter were Obama donors, that she did not disclose.

NEW YORK, Oct 23 (Reuters) - The New York Times Co (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) posted a quarterly loss from continuing operations on Thursday, hurt by charges for job cuts and said it is looking for ways to reduce debt. The company, which reported a 16 percent drop in advertising revenue at its news media group, also said it may write down the value of its New England operations by up to $150 million, underscoring the dismal state of newspaper advertising. Its shares fell more than 10 percent on Thursday afternoon, hitting its lowest level since 1991. Separately,...

For most of its 137-year history, The Columbus Dispatch has carried articles and images from The Associated Press. Like most big American newspapers, it supplements the work of its own staff with dozens of items daily from The A.P. That may end soon. Unhappy with both the A.P. service and its price — more than $800,000 a year at a time when The Dispatch’s finances are severely pinched — the paper on Friday took the once-unthinkable step of saying it would drop the service. What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against The A.P. suddenly grew much more serious last...

"Meet the Press" interim moderator Tom Brokaw sits on the board of a liberal foundation that has given radical left-wing group ACORN $821,000 and that in turn is funded by liberal uber-donor George Soros, research reveals. Conservatives have long considered Brokaw's political views to be somewhere on the left, but these revelations raise new questions about the former NBC News anchor's objectivity.

Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began. Tribune, which owns nine daily papers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, joins a growing list of newspapers that have sought to end AP contracts, or given notice of that, following plans to introduce a new controversial rate structure in 2009. The notice was given earlier this week. AP Spokesman Paul Colford confirmed the cancellation notice, but said he had...

Newspaper companies have been skipping loan payments, missing financial targets in debt agreements and accepting higher interest rates in exchange for more flexibility - and they're not even directly feeling the impact of the credit crisis yet. With revenue at newspapers shrinking and few investors willing or able to buy them, lenders are loathe to force companies to liquidate assets that are plunging in value. They have few alternatives but to help newspapers stay on track with their payments and hang on until ad prospects improve - if they ever do.

The number of foreign journalists in Baghdad is declining sharply, a media withdrawal that reflects Iraq's growing stability and the financial strains faced by some news organizations. In a stark indication of the changing media focus here, the number of journalists traveling with American forces in Iraq has plummeted in the past year. U.S. military officials say they "embedded" journalists 219 times in September 2007. Last month, the number shrank to 39. Of the dozen U.S. newspapers and newspaper chains that maintained full-time bureaus in Baghdad in the early years of the war, only four are still permanently staffed by...

Since the Associated Press announced its controversial rate change last year, many newspapers have started considering other content options. And things are not likely to calm down any time soon. A handful of dailies — including several who admit their AP rates actually fell — have given notice to drop the service, editors in several states are forging content-sharing alliances, and Politico and PA SportsTicker are quickly positioning themselves to help replace the 160-year-old news cooperative in daily news pages. "AP is going to lose newspapers, it is a question of how many," says Editor Dean Miller of the Post...

I am going to keep this short and to the point. I do a fair bit of air travel and have for the last decade or more pondered why CNN is the only station ever available in every airport in the US. Does anyone else ever question this media monopoly which is able to capture the attention of every air traveler in the country? I don't get it. Why does CNN have this exclusive monopoly in public airports? They have the lock on the attention of the millions of air travelers that move throughout the country. Why is CNN allowed...

At the entrance of "The Big Tent" -- a refuge for bloggers a short walk from the Pepsi Center -- there's a signup sheet for visitors from newspapers and television and others of their ilk. "Traditional Media," it says. It's a subtle putdown, but illustrative of a larger truth: the "new media" -- the Internet journalists, the V-loggers, the satellite radio hosts -- are on the ascent at this convention. They're the ones with the swagger, the ones with the coolest parties and the wonkiest panel discussions. At "The Big Tent," funded in part by Google and progressive blog DailyKos...

CHICAGO (CBS) ― In a bombshell announcement in the world of sports journalism, star columnist Jay Mariotti has abruptly resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times. The Sun-Times says Mariotti left to "pursue other opportunities." But Mariotti told the Chicago Tribune he decided to quit after covering the Olympics in Beijing because newspapers are in serious trouble, and he did not want to go down with the ship. "I'm a competitor and I get the sense this marketplace doesn't compete," he said in the Tribune story. "Everyone is hanging on for dear life at both papers. "To see what has happened in...