Free Republic

Regular readers are familiar with the concept of "Authorized Journalists"—professionals who work for "mainstream media" and are considered (sometimes by government and generally by themselves) to be the exclusive authoritative and credible purveyors of information. Think "Only Ones" with a press pass. These readers are also familiar with the many failings we've demonstrated where establishment reporters bring personal bias, along with "sins of omission and commission" into supposedly straight news stories. And then there are glaring errors where the only explanations seem the writers do not know (or fact-check) their subject matter, or they know damn well but have an...

A new government case plan directs Rifqa Bary, the girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting to Christianity from Islam, to talk about religion with her Muslim parents. The case plan also works toward getting Rifqa to return home. According to reporter Meredith Heagney of the Columbus Dispatch, who wore a hijab when she visited a Columbus mosque and has consistently filed slanted, anti-Rifqa stories on this case, the goal of this case plan is reunification of the Bary family. Ohio authorities would like to have Rifqa living back with her parents. They think...

Helen Thomas Remembers By Norma Zager "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823 On occasion a particular revelation or thought may cause one to laugh out loud. An hour after watching the White House briefing recently where seasoned reporter Helen Thomas took Robert Gibbs to task for White House efforts to control the media, I laughed aloud. It occurred to me, at...

Twitter has been criticized as a time-waster -- a way for people to inform their friends about the minutiae of their lives, 140 characters at a time. But in the past month, 140 characters were enough to shine a light on Iranian oppression and elevate Twitter to the level of change agent. Even the government of Iran has been forced to utilize the very tool they attempted to squelch to try to hold on to power.

Chris Matthews used a gotcha question about evolution to ambush a GOPer off his game yesterday, and gloated about it today. Now here's a way conservative reporters can get prominent Dem. leaders and other liberals to cross a line, hem and haw, or look stupid: "Sir or Madam, are you an ape? Are you a great ape? Answer this question directly, yes or no."

Battered by a one-two punch of declining readership and ad pages, Newsweek magazine is getting an extreme makeover this year that will include a large circulation reduction, deep cuts in operating costs, and a new effort to attract advertisers by concentrating on an elite audience. According to The New York Times, executives at Newsweek say the retooled magazine will focus on being a "thought leader" that focuses on telling readers how to think about news, rather than telling people what happened in the last week. The plan, similar to the editorial outlook espoused by The Economist magazine, is aimed at...

There was a big development in science this year, yet most people missed it. It wasn't induced pluripotent stem cells or global warming or Barack Obama securing 99% of the scientist vote despite his belief that vaccines cause autism, which caused even heterosexual scientists to disregard Jenny McCarthy. No, it was an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.

Health journalists are getting scolded by one of their own. Susan Dentzer, a correspondent for PBS' The NewsHour, argues in a commentary in today's New England Journal of Medicine that medical reporters too often get the facts wrong, fail to provide context about new research, and hype treatments that don’t deserve the coverage.

Poll: McCain has slight lead in Ohio over Obama By The Associated Press – 1 hour ago THE POLL: The Ohio Newspaper Poll, presidential race, likely Ohio voters (20 electoral votes). THE NUMBERS: John McCain 48 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent. OF INTEREST: Almost half of Ohio voters, or 47 percent, say they are worse off than four years ago. About one-third, 34 percent, said they were the same, while 19 percent said they were better off. The candidates have lined up support within their own party, with 85 percent of Republicans saying they would vote for McCain and 81...

First person: Embedded with Iraqi army, where saluting is optional

I hate to pick on a fellow journalist, but if I were Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press, I would be embarrassed. Ms. Aversa covers economic issues for the AP, and I guess it’s hard to come up with actual economic facts every day, so she likes to publish predictions. This tends to precipitate the following chain of events: Ms. Aversa reports that economists expect the economy to tank, jobs to disappear, etc. The economy does not tank, and jobs do not disappear (at least not as much as “economists expected”); Ms. Aversa reports economists’ surprise. Ms. Aversa reports that...

“Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.” Perhaps the above Ronald Reagan quote is a good example of why the Mainstream Media is so gloomy about the economy. If you’re employed by the MSM, job cuts and downsizing is not only a fact of life, there’s no end in sight for the members of the Media Pampered Class. It’s easy to see why the MSM talking heads are so obsessed with bad economic news: if arrogance and conservative-bashing are no longer enough to ensure one’s continued employment in the MSM, then the economy...

The Politico's Ben Smith and David Paul Kuhn attempt the first major media post-mortem of the Rudy Giuliani campaign, and wind up revealing more about the media than the campaign. They claim the loss demonstrates the end of 9/11 politics, but that analysis misses a lot about what went right in the Giuliani campaign. It misses because the media never bothered to report anything beyond the superficial for more than a year: Rudy Giuliani's distant third-place finish in Florida may put an end to his bid for president, and it seems also to mark the beginning of the end of...

The Other Fallujah Reporter Posted By Michael J. Totten On December 16, 2007 @ 2:17 pm “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas JeffersonI just returned home from a trip to Fallujah, where I was the only reporter embedded with the United States military. There was, however, an unembedded reporter in the city at the same time. Normally it would be useful to compare what I saw and heard while traveling and working with the Marines with what a colleague saw and heard while working solo....

Is it just me or are we all getting pretty tired of FNC’s abuse of “Breaking News” and “News Alerts”? It amazes me that you can’t watch one day’s worth of programming on America’s “fair and balanced” network without being assaulted by these false overtures. The producers at the FNC must think we are the dumbest viewers in the history of television news. The recent fires in Southern California provided almost every anchor on Fox with the opportunity to over-dramatize the events of the day. I’ve never seen so many “Breaking News” reports on one story in my life. And...

All news must be good news, says Chinese government Jonathan Watts Saturday August 18, 2007   China has ordered its media to report only positive news and has imprisoned a pro-democracy dissident amid a clampdown on dissent ahead of the most important meeting of the communist party in five years. Media controls have been tightened, Aids activists detained and NGOs shut down as president Hu Jintao prepares for the 17th party congress, when the next generation of national leaders will be unveiled in a politburo reshuffle. Chen Shuqing, who is a founder member of the banned China Democracy party,...

Despite decades of evidence from, Walter Cronkite's offense at Tet and "Bush lied about WMDs" to the contrary, today's liberal is fond of claiming there is not only zero lefty bias in today's mainstream media, but often a conservative bias. The Nation's resident leftist prevaricator, Eric Alterman, most recently pointed this out last fall, after he became enraged by the "lies in ABC's mini-series Path to 9/11" (the one the Clinton's had changed in a remarkable cover up). Others look to their perception of the media's "build up of the Iraq War" in 2003, or the Downing Street Memo that...

Who are these people? Katie Couric used to be on the Today Show, then she fell off the map. You’ve never heard of Becky Johnson? Allow me to help. Becky Johnson is a Staff Reporter for the Smoky Mountain News. I know both Becky and her editor, Scott McLeod, and respect their work. If you’re not familiar with the SMN, it covers Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain Counties in western North Carolina. Becky could teach Katie a thing or two about reporting. Case in point: Becky wrote a story in the February 21 issue of SMN, which is a near...

The week before Christmas was filled with excitement for 6-year-old Macenzie and her mother, Lacie Simmons.They decorated the tree, shopped and put an inflatable snow globe in the yard. The festive mood ended abruptly Dec. 20 when Simmons collapsed in the hallway of her parents' Grand Prairie home. When the EMTs arrived, Macenzie clung to her mother."I just need to take care of my mom," she repeated as she patted her mother's arm. It was the last time she saw her mother alive."Her blood pressure bottomed out, her heart failed and that was it," said Lacie's mother, Renee Simmons.Within 26...

The most explosive and far-reaching news story of the year has nothing to do with underage pages and a certain Republican ex-Congressman. This story involves ignition in the streets of Baghdad and six immolations that probably never occurred. While Mark Foley took down a congressional majority, the tale of Jamil Hussein may end up permanently damaging the credibility of the world's premier news gathering source, the Associate Press... The story begins on Nov. 24 when Qais al-Bashir, an Iraqi "stringer" working for the AP, wrote a story in which he alleged that Shiite militiamen avenging earlier attacks burned down four...

Another search through different avenues has failed to turn up AP’s source for more than 60 reports of atrocities and murders: The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty.

On the Thursday, October 5, 2006, edition of the Today Show, Matt Lauer announced that Ms. McGee was "unemployed" because "she says she showed some students some art and it got her fired." Ms. McGee also stated on camera "[i]t really blindsided me to go in the next day and realize my job was over." Finally, Ms. McGee claimed the principal reprimanded her for exposing students to nude art. All of these statements are false, despite the real facts being available to the media and Ms. McGee for weeks. The real facts are: 1) The Today Show showed its audience...

Time magazine's much-publicized July 17th cover story, "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," has been viewed as a seminal media effort to capture the transformation of the Bush Administration from a trigger-happy approach in foreign policy to reliance on other nations and the U.N. But a careful analysis shows that Time exaggerated and distorted the facts in order to produce a story that would entice and mislead its readers. It would be foolish to insist that changes in the Bush foreign policy have not been made. Since Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State, she has clearly been relying more on the...

(Machine Translated) *Critical excerpts of the text: Till this day Islamic terrorists have not succeeded yet in striking in Germany. But mean the mess according to unanimous expert's opinion nothing. Above all not, because it already three attempts given hat: In 2002 one wanted to commit an Abu Mussab al-Sarkawi attached terror cell posters against Jewish and putatively Jewish equipment in Berlin and in the Ruhr area. In 2003 Tunisian Ihsan Garnaoui should have planned to explain a poster in the midst of a demonstration in Berlin. In the end of 2004 lifted security services a group of Kurdish Iraqis...

SANTA ROSA A Roman Catholic church official apologized Saturday for waiting several days to notify authorities about sexual abuse allegations against a priest, a delay that may have allowed the priest to flee to Mexico. Bishop Daniel Walsh of the Santa Rosa diocese said in a one-page statement to parishioners he put "caution" before "doing the right thing" in handling the allegations against priest Xavier Ochoa. Church officials say Ochoa admitted April 28 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old altar boy, but the allegations were not reported to Child Protective Services until May 1, and Ochoa disappeared the next day. "I...

If Mary Mapes is looking for a way to fill her days, HDNet's upcoming "Dan Rather Reports" seems to have plenty of job openings left to fill. According to Dan Rather's new employer, the debut of "Dan Rather Reports" is scheduled for just two months from now, in October. Yet according to HDNet's Web site, the program is currently (as of August 3) seeking multiple producers, associate producers and editors -- basically, all of the off-camera reporters and production staffers who make a big TV news show work. For the job listings page: www.hd.net. [This item by Rich Noyes was...

J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out of touch with the war. "You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on." Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists. Military blogger J.P. Borda,...

WASHINGTON - The House on Thursday approved a Republican-crafted resolution condemning news organizations for revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing, saying the disclosure had "placed the lives of Americans in danger." The resolution, passed 227-183 on a largely party-line vote, did not specifically name the news organizations, but it was aimed at the New York Times and other news media that last week reported on a secret CIA-Treasury program to track millions of financial records in search of terrorists. Most Democrats opposed the measure, protesting language in it that asserts that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program was...

Award Worthy?Last year the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard gave an award for investigative reporting to David Willman of The Los Angeles Times. Willman, in turn, has picked up a few other notable trophies. “He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, first, as a member of a team thrown into the breach to cover a disastrous earthquake, and, second, in 2001, for his own investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s very flawed drug approval process,” Alex Jones of the Kennedy School pointed out. I can’t speak about the earthquake but I did some reporting on the...

Interview with Peggy Wehmeyer In 1989, Peter Jennings pulled Peggy Wehmeyer out of local television in Dallas to join ABC World News Tonight, where she broke ground as the nation's first network religion correspondent. For the next seven-and-a-half years, American viewers followed Peggy's award-winning push for truth into the faith-and-culture issues of U.S. presidents, gay marriage, prisoners, Muslim clerics, Rabbis, abortion, school shootings, academicians, missionaries … and in a particular coup, her hour-long special with the McCaughey parents and their new septuplets. In 2002, Peggy joined World Vision to help found and host the World Vision Report—a weekend newsmagazine and...

WHISPERS WITH BIAS ....would be Rocco Palmo's Indian name. ... He reports on a blessing ceremony at the Cathedral of Vienna, where homosexuals where also blessed. His account, however, deliberate or not, is not quite accurate in the most crucial question. OK, it seems that St. Blog's will want some 'splaining on this one.... Gay couples were apparently included in the Valentine's Day liturgy at the Stephansdom in Vienna, and it's being hung around Schonborn's neck like an albatross. Well. Schoen langsam, Rocco. I've read the German article. What happened? Valentine's Day blessings (not a Mass) for "people in love",...

By Al Knight Denver Post Columnist It's been hard lately to ignore the fact that major elements in the electronic news media have stopped concentrating on the collection of information, and have instead focused on predicting the future. It's not a good choice. For one thing, foretelling the future is a really tough job and most journalists have no obvious qualifications for the task.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." -- Old adage "Well, there you go again." -- Ronald Reagan There they go indeed. And shame on anyone for believing them anymore. I mean, of course, the elite liberal media, who will stop at nothing to topple the Bush presidency. Not even if it means manipulating the news about war and natural disasters. Remember all those New Orleans horror stories, the ones that could've given Attila the Hun goosebumps? An Editor & Publisher headline that screamed, "Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane"?...

AQABA, Jordan — Jordanian police rounded up several people Saturday and uncovered the launcher used by militants to fire three Katyusha (search) rockets from a hilltop warehouse the day before, narrowly missing a U.S. Navy ship docked in this Red Sea resort.

As an American journalist working in Moscow, Paul Klebnikov, accumulated a lengthy list of enemies, ranging from Chechen mobsters to billionaire bandits. Those responsible for his murder last year may not have realized just how many allies Klebnikov also had. A team of top-flight investigative reporters from America and Russia has committed itself to untangling the case of Klebnikov, the 41-year-old editor of Forbes Russia who was gunned down at the peak of his career while walking home from his offices in northeastern Moscow on the evening of July 9.

Immigration is a line-in-the-sand story topic that tends to raise the emotions of Americans on either side of the issue, particularly in light of 9/11. Consequently, it's imperative that any story on the subject be reported accurately and with balance, lest the readers' representative get calls and e-mails charging bias. On that note, I've already heard from readers regarding the stories about the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and their plans to send observers to Houston in October to patrol for illegal immigrants. Two specific complaints stand out: The use of the word "militia" in a subhead on a story published...

NEW YORK - Only CNN's Miles O'Brien and NASA truly know how close he was to climbing out of a space suit instead of an anchor booth after the space shuttle Discovery's launch was postponed last week because of a fuel gauge failure. O'Brien recently revealed that he was close to getting NASA's OK to be the first American journalist in space until Columbia broke apart on its return flight in 2003. CNN and O'Brien missed out on the story of a lifetime. But the network's negotiations with America's space agency also raise questions about whether CNN was willing to...

It’s always interesting to see how the elite media reacts when notable events take place. It is also interesting to see what events they choose to ignore. It is by their choice of what to focus on and what to disregard that they sculpt and influence public opinion. It is also how they create angst in the political world. In the hands of an up-front and honest media this would more often than not promote a public good. In the hands of an agenda driven media it becomes quite a problem. It wasn’t until the Afghan campaign was well established...

Many commented on the fact that, on the day of the London bombings, the BBC referred over and over again to these acts as terrorism and to the perpetrators as terrorists. This was in striking contrast to its refusal to use the term terrorist when reporting terrorism in Israel. When a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Bloomsbury, it seemed, the perpetrator was a terrorist but when a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Jerusalem the perpetrator was a ‘militant’ or even ‘fighter’. Now, however, it seems that the BBC has had second thoughts...

WASHINGTON - Most states are reporting lofty high school graduation rates that far exceed reality and mislead the public about how schools are performing, a private analysis found. The majority of states — 36 of them — say 80 percent to 97 percent of their high school students graduate on time, according to state figures provided to the Education Department. Those numbers show "rampant dishonesty," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, an advocacy organization for poor and minority students. The Trust reviewed the 2002-03 graduation rates that states had to provide this year. A series of independent analyses...

Shortly after starting work at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I ran into Keith Spore in the hallway. Then the publisher, Spore had spent his entire 37-year career there, rising from copy boy to the front office, but there was still a lean-limbed, youthful quality to him. That unpretentiousness led some to underestimate his profound impact on the newspaper. The Journal Sentinel was in many ways the realization of his personal vision, and now I was part of that picture. “So,” he asked, “have you figured out why good reporters go bad?” I laughed. Spore and I had met in the...

Since the inception of controversy over University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, the Rocky Mountain News has led all other media in news coverage, investigation and analysis. Now, that newspaper has published the results of a detailed, exhaustive two-month investigation into multiple allegations against the embattled professor. The five-part series of reports, which began on June 4, constitute remarkable journalism of a kind too rarely practiced, regardless of subject matter. It is thorough; it is careful; it is balanced. It is investigatory and scholarly, analytical and insightful, as clear and as compellingly written as any complicated, contentious story can be....

Al Jazeera denies Rumsfeld charge it airs killings Sat Jun 4, 7:57 AM ET DUBAI (Reuters) - The Arab TV channel Al Jazeera rejected on Saturday as unfounded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's accusations that it was encouraging Islamic militant groups by airing beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq. "Al Jazeera ... has never at any time transmitted pictures of killings or beheadings and ... any talk about this is absolutely unfounded," the television said in a statement. Al Jazeera, repeatedly accused by Washington of biased reporting on Iraq, has often shown video of hostages pleading at gunpoint for their government...

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's chief accuser Peter Paul said Saturday that yesterday's acquittal of her former campaign finance chairman, David Rosen, doesn't mean she's in the clear. "This is by no means an exoneration of Hillary's campaign," Paul told NewsMax. "In fact. it's an indictment of her campaign." Calling Rosen a sacrificial lamb who was set up to take the fall for higher-ups, Paul said, "The jurors clearly didn't believe that he filed these false FEC reports on his own." Paul's allegations about expenses he covered for an August 2000 gala fundraiser for Mrs. Clinton spurred a four-year investigation...

"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media for they will steal your honor." - Bobby McBride, Crew Chief, 128th Assault Helicopter Company, RVN 1969-1970 Attention on the Net, this is Blackfive... People that know me know that I usually can maintain my composure during most circumstances. But on a phone call with Bill Roggio of the Fourth Rail and Winds of Change, in reference to Linda Foley (after her "clarification" of her slanderous statement), I actually lost it a bit and Sergeant Blackfive came out...

Sometimes I get the idea that my daily newspaper, the L.A. Times, is cutting a few too many corners. I’m getting the feeling that in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks, they’ve slashed not only editors, copyreaders and fact checkers, but even reporters with junior high diplomas. I mean, it’s one thing to put out a newspaper while keeping an eye on the bottom line and quite another to hire a bunch of people who can’t spell bottom line. Having studied the paper closely for the past several months, I’d say that the mistakes fall mainly into three...

Having read Michael Isikoff and John Berry’s May 9 th article in Newsweek magazine I was forced to come to a conclusion: Cuban toilets were much better than those in the United States. But, with Newsweek’s retraction of Isikoff and Barry’s ‘Quran flushing story’ it would appear that Kohler is safe, at least for now. You may ask me how I could have possibly come to the conclusion that Cuban toilet artisans were superior to their American counterparts, what with the travel ban to Cuba and all. My conclusion was based in common sense and deductive reasoning. In Isikoff and...

The year is 2014. The press as we know it no longer exists. Traditional reporting has collapsed. News is churned out by the media giant Googlezon (Google has taken over many companies and joined forces with Amazon). The news consists of blogs, attitudes, discoveries, preferences, claims and random thoughts, gathered and shaped by computers and human editors, and fed back to ordinary people. The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly. This is the finding of a clever eight-minute mock documentary, "Epic 2014," produced by the fictional Museum of Media History (in...

Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. Chinook helicopters teetering precariously on the Embassy roof, evacuating the last Americans even as North Vietnamese Communist Army tanks rolled into the outskirts of the city. Huey gunships, the very symbol of American combat power in Vietnam, commandeered by fleeing South Vietnamese Army pilots, either ditched into the sea or pushed overboard from the decks of crowded American aircraft carriers. If the film footage...

Kalamazoo paper fires reporter, photographer 4/25/2005, 4:25 p.m. ET The Associated Press KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) — The Kalamazoo Gazette has fired a reporter and a photographer after they told editors that they consumed alcohol while working on a story for a recent series about problem drinking among college-age adults, the newspaper said. The story, about a drinking game called "beer pong," also was written as if the events occurred in one evening when they actually happened over the course of two evenings, the paper reported. Reporter Craig McCool, 27, and photographer Mairin Chapman, 23, did not tell their editors that...