Free Republic

US President Donald Trump has blamed a teleprompter going "kaput" for a glaring anachronism in his Fourth of July speech. He told crowds on Independence Day the Continental Army "took over the airports" from the British during the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Explaining away the slip-up on Friday, Mr Trump also said it was hard to read the teleprompter in the rain. He hosted a military parade at the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday. During his "Salute to America" speech, he was talking about the year 1775 when he said: "Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it...

There was something wonderfully strained about how various media organisations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable — if sternly repressed — dismay. One of the first headlines that the Ba’athist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: “US celebrates ‘good’ Iraq news”. The quotation marks around “good” did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorialising on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not...

The head of BBC News has warned its journalists that they need to be more concerned about "impartiality" on contentious issues. Addressing an internal staff meeting of BBC journalists, he said: "We need to be on our mettle, particularly over the question of impartiality." The main battlefields were Europe, the urban-rural divide and the Middle East, he added. The three issues are areas where the BBC has faced particularly vociferous allegations of bias. The corporation was accused by supporters of the Countryside Alliance of consciously underplaying the importance of the recent Liberty and Livelihood March because of the urban, pro-Labour...