Free Republic

New research on the spread of online misinformation and disinformation in Ireland has revealed that the influence of the far right is growing. The study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) also shows that tech companies are failing to enforce community guidelines to curb the spread of false, misleading and harmful content on social media platforms. The research, entitled “Uisce Faoi Thalamh: An Investigation into the Online Mis- and Disinformation Ecosystem in Ireland”, analyzed more than 13 million posts from 1,640 accounts across 12 online platforms between January 2020 and April 2023. […] According to the research, far-right groups...

"NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon"

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican establishment is coming unglued. They're no longer making even any pretense at camouflaging or hiding who they are, where they are, and what they think. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Republican presidential primary continues to shake out, and the Jeb Bush campaign appears to be -- well, what would you call it when Jeb says, after a meeting of the family brain trust, to figure out how to cut expenses to the tune of a million dollars a month? You know, there's a lot of other things I could be doing about this and getting...

In its latest poll on confidence in U.S. institutions, Gallup reports that Americans’ faith in the three major news media platforms—television news, newspapers, and news on the Internet—is at or tied with record lows, and that trust in Internet or online news topped television news for the first time. The number of Americans who have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers has dropped from its 1979 peak of 51% to 22%, while their confidence in television news has fallen from a high of 46% in 1993 to just 18% today. Online news finished slightly ahead of...

Drama continues to unfold as the Gulf oil disaster drags on. An eyewitness to part of the area effected by the disaster raises this question--what on earth is happening at Grand Isle, Louisiana? Apparently much more than what the public is being told. As previously reported, the Obama Administration has banned all citizen journalists, photographers, bloggers, and other observers from the region. The few 'authorized journalists' of the mainstream media that are being allowed in have been instructed not to photograph or write about anything that could cast the Obama Administration in a negative light. However, at least 2 citizens...

Matt Drudge is trumpeting the fact that Senate staffers have been warned to stay away from the Drudge Report on the theory that it may be spreading computer viruses. (If the old rules apply, that is libel per se, isn't it?) What I thought was even more entertaining was the Drudge Report's traffic totals: The [Drudge Report] was seen 149,967 times since March 1st from users at senate.gov and 244,347 times at house.gov. [There were] 10,825 visits from the White House, eop.gov," the Drudge Report wrote. These numbers appeared on March 8; do the math: 18,750 times a day, Senators...

So one of the greatest athletes in the world is unable to navigate the treacherous arc of his driveway and has to be rescued by his wife? Mrs. Woods breaks the rear window of Tiger's 2009 Escalade to free him and the police arrive to find Tiger "in and out of consciousness" on the ground? All of this most unusual activity takes place at 2:25 a.m. with the same guy who can thread a 1 iron through the fork of a sapling and onto the green suddenly unable to negotiate an Escalade around the same fire hydrant and tree he...

Today, the voice of Americans was heard. The Tea Party U.S.A. is not a one day national event -- it's the continuation of a chain of events and activism that will strengthen our country. We are doing this primarily without main-stream media coverage. That's o.k. Your voice is being heard without the main-stream media. Keep it up my fellow, patriotic Americans.

SNIPPET: "The CMI spokesman says journalists should not let their support for President Obama get in the way of doing what is right. "The mainstream media are on Obama's side in a big way," he observes, "so why are they going to go write about something that they clearly don't agree with and knocks their guy -- even though I think it's pretty obvious that the TEA party protests are non-partisan."

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...

Video here.

Conservative-friendly media better get ready. Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate. Signs of what the new environment will be like for the right are already evident: • When the National Rifle Association recently released television and radio ads in Pennsylvania targeting Obama's history of anti-gun votes, the Obama campaign's general counsel fired off bullying letters to stations that ran the spots, implying that they may have violated public-interest obligations....

What are we seeing when we watch events from the Middle East on our television screens? Is it news or is it terrorist theater? Let us observe two media events which occurred on Sunday in Gaza. Sunday afternoon released hostages and Fox News journalists Steven Centanni and Olaf Wiig spoke before the cameras. The fact of their release and their statements were reported by more than 1,000 news organizations throughout the world. At the press conference, Centanni and Wiig, who were forced by their Palestinian captors to convert to Islam, praised the Palestinians. Centanni said, "I just hope this never...

Josh Wolf has one thing in common with Judith Miller, the last journalist jailed by a federal judge: Both of them refused to disclose confidential material sought by grand juries. Apart from that, Wolf, the 24-year-old San Francisco freelance journalist who was held in contempt of court Tuesday, comes from a different world from Miller, the former New York Times national security reporter who spent 85 days in federal prison last year until she agreed to reveal who told her a Bush administration critic's wife was a CIA agent. "I'm not (interested) in making it in the world of mainstream...

One characteristic of a good executive is that he keeps his door and mind open to new ideas. Occasionally, I test that thesis by dropping a line to a bigwig to see first whether my missive gets through the several layers of filters that all executives have. If so, then the test is not whether the accept/respect my particular idea, but whether they demonstrate an openness to new ideas. I ran this test with Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. He and it failed both tests. Here's the test letter, which received not even a pro forma "thank you for your...

How alternative media have transformed politics on the left and the right.America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, by Richard Viguerie and David Franke, Chicago: Bonus Books, 375 pages, $26.95 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, by Joe Trippi, New York: Regan Books, 252 pages, $26.95 Like most populist presidential candidates, Howard Dean wasn’t nearly as interesting as the movement that assembled itself behind him. The Vermont doctor was capable of staking out independent positions: He attacked the Iraq war when his party’s leaders were either...

As President Bush prepares to make a new appointment to the Supreme Court, the lessons of the failed Miers nomination are still being absorbed. One that deserves study is how a lightning-fast news cycle, a flat-footed defense and the growth of new media such as talk radio and blogs sank Ms. Miers's chances even before the megabuck special-interest groups could unload their first TV ad. Ms. Miers herself has told friends that she was astonished at how the Internet became a conveyor belt for skeptical mainstream media reports on her in addition to helping drive the debate. The rapidity with...

I awoke Sunday morning wanting to know what was happening in the Terri Schiavo saga, and here’s what one of the major news services had to say: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush cut short a holiday to return to Washington and be ready to sign a bill that may keep a brain-damaged woman alive in a case pitting Christian conservatives against right-to-die activists.That sentence is just one of dozens of examples you can find almost daily of what’s wrong with the press. First of all, it is inaccurate. The notion that Christian Conservatives are the only ones on one side...

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AIM Announces Most Underreported/Buried Stories of 2004 By Special Reports 1. How CBS and the Kerry campaign allegedly broke federal election law in trying to defeat President Bush. This is the subject of a Federal Election Commission complaint...