Free Republic

I caught a bit of "The Factor" on TV. Dick Morris was talking about his new book (don't recall the title). In discussing the book, Morris mentioned the Society of Professional Journalists, which has established explicit guidelines for members - guidelines that affect the manner in which the "news" is presented to a largely unsuspecting public. For example, on this page http://spj.org/blog/blogs/diversity/archive/2008/06/23/20797.aspx the SPJ explains why one should not use the term "illegal immigrant". A sample: Both national and local media regularly refer to undocumented immigrants as illegal immigrants, or the most inflamatory phrase, illegal aliens (as if they came...

Dear Friends, You have probably heard at least a little bit in the past several days about Dr. James Dobson’s comments regarding presidential candidate Fred Thompson. It is true that Dr. Dobson, as a private citizen in an e-mail to friends, raised questions about former Sen. Thompson’s suitability to be president. What has not been true, in the days that have followed, is the media’s attempt to paint the incident as World War III among socially conservative Christians. Do some other evangelical leaders disagree with Dr. Dobson’s opinion about Sen. Thompson? Yes. But that is hardly uncommon in the realm...

I have obtained new documentary evidence regarding Dan Rather's relationship with his former bosses at CBS News. Obviously, I cannot identify my source. But he told me during a collect call from Sofia, Bulgaria, that he has access to Rather's "personal files" and that his typewriter was built after 1966. To authenticate the document, I showed it to some of my kids' friends, and they said it was awesome. Here, then, the letter -- written by Dan Rather and dated Nov. 31, 2006: "Dear CBS News: "My new career at HDNet is keeping me busier than a bordello at Mardis...

Every four years, journalists present themselves as objective questioners in presidential debates only to be roundly, and correctly, denounced by conservatives for being anything but. When, oh when, we ask, will America be able to enjoy a candidate forum free from liberal reporters inserting their slanted worldviews into the discussion? When, oh when, we ask ourselves, will they get out of the way? It looks like we should be very careful what we ask for. On Tuesday night, CNN did this -- or at least said it was doing this. The network teamed up with the video site YouTube to...

MSNBC's "Weekends with Maury & Connie" is being cancelled, TVNewser has learned. The program, hosted by Maury Povich and Connie Chung, will end its run next week. The husband and wife team taped their second-to-last show on Friday. "Weekends" launched almost exactly six months ago, on January 7, 2006. It launched to quite a bit of fanfare, and it aired four times a weekend (twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday) but it never seemed to find an audience. There's no word on whether Maury, Connie, or EP Lizz Winstead will have a future role at MSNBC...

I was flipping through channels at the gym today, and I saw something I couldn't believe. Connnie Chung on CNN did a segement where she was fantasizing writing a letter to Ann Coulter. It was filmed like a dream sequence, and it showed her writing with a voiceover reading the letter. In the letter she says that maybe her psychological problems would be cured if she ate ...maybe a raisin or something. If that wasn't bad enough, at the end, she said, PS: BY THE WAY, DEAR..QUIT MIXING THE FINLANDIA WITH YOUR HALDOL!!! I couldn't believe it...then she and her...

The seminal moment of this week's hearings on 9/11 surely came yesterday when Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton administrations, opened his testimony by apologizing to the families whose loved ones died in the terror attacks. The government, Mr. Clarke said, had failed them, "and I failed you." He added, "We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed." It suddenly seemed that after the billions of words uttered about that terrible day, Mr. Clarke had found the ones that still needed saying. The two days of hearings by the commission investigating the attacks...