Free Republic

In a new report released today, the Republican National Committee owned up to a number of mistakes made during the 2012 election cycle. While the central party admitted there were too many presidential debates, it only barely touched on the role that unfair media moderators played in both the nominating process and in the general election. Despite its reluctance to criticize media impartiality, the RNC report did open the door to the creation of a new organization that would be assigned to create and host the debates apart from the media. “We are intrigued with the suggestion some have made...

The New York Times Admits That Virtually Every Major News Organization Allows The News To Be Censored By Government Officials In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories. For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published....

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports. (snip) Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system,...

China's Dalian Wanda Group and AMC Entertainment announced Monday a $2.6 billion deal to take over the U.S. theater group, forming the world's largest cinema chain, according to a new release on the deal. The move is the latest in a raft of deals between U.S. entertainment companies and Chinese firms, linking the world's largest theater market with the world's fastest growing. "This acquisition will help make Wanda a truly global cinema owner, with theatres and technology that enhance the movie-going experience for audiences in the world's two largest movie markets," said Wang Jianlin, chairman and president of Wanda.

Chicago - Everyone expected the "Hunger Games" would rule the box office. But one unexpected side effect of the hit movie and book series is that archery is now hotter than ever. Archery clubs and ranges across the country are seeing a huge boost in interest right now.

If I had to pick a date when the mainstream media became fully vested in protecting Democratic interests, it would be March 11, 1992, the day Bill Clinton swept the Super Tuesday primaries and established himself as the party’s standard bearer. With a Republican in the White House for the previous twelve years, the media had been, if anything, overly inquisitive. Even during the Jimmy Carter years, the media had done their job well enough to make his life uncomfortable. Over the last twenty years, however, our media have descended from the merely partisan to the fully Orwellian. To commemorate...

Politico is a bit upset about the recent investigative journalist piece done by The Daily Caller on Media Matters. In that piece they spoke to many former staffers at Media Matters, and what did they find? Yet those same interviews, as well as a detailed organizational planning memo obtained by The Daily Caller, also suggest that Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media. Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in...

Watch the video from this nitwit. Yep, Diane, the protests have spread to more than 1,000 countries. That means that more than 800 of those protests are on other planets. She has just proven we are not alone.

Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold. When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted...

The Indianapolis Star on Tuesday laid off 62 employees including more than 15 percent of its newsroom staff in the latest round of cost-cutting by Gannett Co. Inc., the newspaper's parent company. Among those laid off in Indianapolis were 26 newsroom employees including 12 copy editors and eight reporters, mostly those covering suburban news. The Star also eliminated 19 open positions, said Robert King, the newspaper's religion and philanthropy reporter and president of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild. "The Indianapolis Star, I’ve been told repeatedly, continues to make money," King wrote in an e-mail. "Yet Gannett, and its corporate bosses in...

Coming off her week-long One Nation bus tour that was widely seen as a test-run for a presidential campaign, Sarah Palin says she’s starting to see that running for president might not be the best fit for her. “Not only do I love my freedom of not having a title and being a declared candidate — that is liberating — I know you can make a difference as an individual,” she said. “Hopefully, I can inspire others to know that you don’t need a title. You don’t need to be in office to effect positive change.”

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...

Last weekend, His Presidency Barack Obama was captured making potentially offensive comments to a group of big money donors who had paid large sums of money for special access to His Presidency. We observed that CBS only released “selectively edited” moments from the raw tape. We know how much the mainstream media values complete and full disclosure of recordings of this nature, so we found it curious, to say the least, that there was not one drop of intellectual curiosity from these guardians of media purity regarding the content of the full recording. Maybe CBS’s motive has nothing to do...

In an interview to air tonight on BBC World News America, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps describes American journalism as having reached “its hour of grave peril.” -snip- It’s a pretty serious situation that we’re in. I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialogue, we’re not producing as much news as we did five years, 10 years, 15 years ago and we have to reverse that trend or I think we are going to be pretty close...

In an effort to meet an Obama campaign promise, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski indicated Wednesday that he will propose new regulations for Internet lines. He is expected to give a speech at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday laying out his proposal. Genachowski's attempt to revive the long-delayed net-neutrality proceeding is a delicate balancing act designed to garner some industry and public interest support without completely satisfying anyone. Genachowski has made concessions to AT&T, Verizon, and the cable industry that could forestall an all-out lobbying blitz by the nation's largest telecom providers. But the concessions have done nothing to...

from the this-won't-end-well dept By now you probably know that over the Thanksgiving Holiday, Homeland Security wasn't just feeling up your grandmother and staring at your naked daughter at the TSA, but ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) went way beyond its mandate to seize a whole bunch of domain names. This is not the first time it has done this, of course. Back in June, we noted a very similar, if somewhat smaller, raid. That one was equally questionable, as not only did it involve seizing domains without an adversarial trial, but also the announcement was made at Disney headquarters,...

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.” COICA is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and...

67% Say They Are Better Informed Than 10 Years AgoSunday, September 19, 2010 While newspapers and broadcast outlets struggle to survive in the Internet age, two-out-of-three Americans (67%) feel they are more informed today than they were 10 years ago. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just eight percent (8%) consider themselves less informed these days, while 22% think their level of knowledge is about the same. Women are more confident than men that they are better informed now. Adults ages 30 to 49 believe that more strongly than those in any other age group. Forty-four percent...

This could confirm what many suspected all along - the corporate heads at General Electric (NYSE:GE) would try to use their media holdings to portray President Barack Obama and his administration in a positive light in order to gain a corporate advantage. That's how former CNBC reporter and current Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino explains it in his forthcoming book, "Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street." According to Gasparino, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt had "helped his company feast off of the subsidies of Obamanomics," including the green energy initiatives and health...