Free Republic

CBS News has returned the notes it seized from a high-profile reporter the network fired for 'investigating Hunter Biden' .. ... SAG-AFTRA, the CBS workers' union, called the seizure of her notes 'completely inappropriate' and 'very unusual'. ... CBS News has returned the notes it seized from a high-profile reporter the network fired for 'investigating Hunter Biden.' Catherine Herridge, a veteran reporter covering national security and intelligence, was among the hundreds of CBS employees who were laid off by parent company Paramount last week. Herridge covered investigations into the Biden family, and the network seized her personal notes after her...

Below is my column in The Hill on the trouble brewing at CBS over the seizure of the files of acclaimed investigative reporter Catherine Herridge. The column broke the story on the uproar over not just her being laid off but her being locked out from her files. I am now hearing from CBS sources that the network is moving toward a resolution to turn over the files after the outcry. However, the concerns over Herridge’s firing and the network’s handling of her confidential notes continues to draw fire from journalists and commentators. The union issued a statement (below) after...

When are 335,000 new jobs not 335,000 new jobs? When Washington makes them up and the media dutifully report them with all due breathlessness. ... The workweek, itself, contracted to 34.1 hours from 34.3 in December and 34.4 in November. This is the lowest number since March 2020 (the pandemic) and, before that, November 2008 (Great Recession)." Rosenberg Research calculated that, despite the job gains, total hours worked actually contracted .. In fact, the Household Survey — "the one the media ignores," as Barone put it — "showed up with a -31K headline jobs number, and a fall of -63K...

Earlier this week, reports emerged that digital news outlet The Messenger would shut down entirely.. More than 500 journalists lost their jobs in January as multiple outlets shed staff in the face of adverse industry conditions. A report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas highlighted the 528 layoffs across digital, print, and broadcast news media in January. The figure marked a substantial uptick from the 30 layoffs the firm identified the prior month and the highest total since last March's 532. The news industry lost more than 3,087 positions last year, an increase from 1,808 in 2022 and 1,511 in 2021....

The New York Times is at it again with its dissemination of fake news. This isn’t just another accidentally incorrect story, like so many before, or their “Pulitzer prize-winning” fake Russia hoax stories; this time, they’re actively altering quotes, presumably to shield Joe Biden. This latest fake news scandal comes on the heels of a recent Gallup poll that highlighted a historic low in American trust in the fake news legacy media. Axios: American’s trust in media has fallen to a historic low, according to new polling from Gallup. Why it matters: Trust in media had previously dropped to 32%...

While some homebuyers seek the American dream in Texas, many are leaving the state to find it elsewhere. "Lifelong Texan here. I am definitely preparing an exit strategy," one anonymous user posted on a Reddit thread about leaving Texas. "From the heat to the stripping away of human rights, I'm just done." ***. "I've been in Texas most of my life, and my husband and I were always planning on retiring here (in about 5 years from now)," they wrote. "But between this intense heat, crazy politics, and cost of living, we've decided to leave for good and head to...

Jazmine Hughes, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, resigned this week after a conflict with her editors over signing of an anti-Israeli letter. New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein said Hughes violated the company’s policy on public protest. The incident exposes the inherent conflicts — and hypocrisy — in the shift away from neutrality in reporting in media companies and graduate programs. I have long been a critic of what I called “advocacy journalism” as it began to emerge in journalism schools. These schools encourage students to use their “lived expertise” and to “leave[] neutrality behind.” Instead,...

A major broadcaster in North America is reportedly instructing its journalists not to refer to Hamas attackers as "terrorists." ... Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, which issued an internal memo over the weekend in the wake of Hamas' onslaught of killings and kidnappings in Israel, with more than 700 murdered and at least 2,300 wounded. ... written by CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corp) employee George Achi instructing reporters to: 1. not to mention Gaza has not been occupied since 2005. 2. not refer to Palestinian terrorists as terrorists.. ... do not describe 2005 as 'the end of the occupation' as Israel...

A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll out Wednesday found that former President Donald Trump is increasing his grip on the Republican Party but still distancing a majority of the American electorate. The poll found that 63% of Republican voters “now say they want the former president to run again,” noted an AP summary. The strong support from inside the GOP marked an increase from the same poll last April, which showed 55% of Republican voters wanted to see Trump on the party’s ticket again. “Seven in 10 Republicans now have a favorable opinion of Trump, an...

All three evening news broadcasts Thursday ignored the United States Supreme Court ruling against the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and sharply limited its powers to regulate wetlands. It was a big win for property rights in the United States and a stinging defeat for the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Since that was the case, it's unsurprising that the "big three" evening news broadcasts of ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News would ignore the story. Instead, news about a recent shark attack (ABC & CBS), and another segment on recently deceased singer Tina...

When asked if they agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” 59 percent of those polled agreed, while only 36 percent disagreed. In other words, a pretty large majority of Americans agree with former President Trump that the media are our enemy — which is 100 percent true. Rasmussen surveyed 1,002 likely American voters between May 16-18 and also discovered most people know the political media cannot be trusted, and this same political media favor the Democrat party. “Do you trust the political news you are getting?” Only 30 percent said yes, while 52 percent said...

The Washington Post and The New York Times knew from the beginning that the purported Russia “collusion” story — the assertion that Donald Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election — was a hoax, ... WaPo and the NYT garnered Pulitzer Prizes — the most prestigious award in American journalism — for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage” of the Democrat-pushed hoax. Uh-huh. Deeply sourced from the likes of thoroughly discredited former FBI director, James Comey and others. Moreover, both formerly-respected papers refuse to return the Pulitzers, following the release of the damning Durham Report, which...

The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.. Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered. FBI’s...

Attacks on churches and Christian institutions on American soil are at an all-time high. The March 27, 2023 killings in Nashville — where a woman claiming to be a man (aka “transgender”) stormed a private Christian school and murdered three children and three adults — is just the spectacular tip of a growing but concealed iceberg. According to recent reports by the Family Research Council, “criminal acts against churches have been steadily on the rise for the past several years. ... there were more church attacks in the first quarter of this year than there were in the first quarters...

To give scale to the growing insignificance of broadcast news networks, consider this fact-based analysis. Tucker Carlson released a two-minute video on Twitter that had 72.7 million views in 24 hours. The entire cable news industry combined, every show on every channel, over the corresponding timeframe had 53.1 million views. ... Tucker Carlson had more viewers than the combined total legacy media cable news networks combined. Yeah, there are more of us than them…. and Tucker Carlson is the most powerful man in the media right now. “When honest people say what’s true … they become powerful. At the same...

Twitter has removed the “US state-affiliated media” label from National Public Radio’s official account and has instead replaced it with “Government Funded Media.” The change was made after the social media site was widely criticized for giving NPR the designation. Defenders of NPR — who were angry over comparisons to other state-run outlets such as Russia Today and China’s Xinhua News Agency — noted last week that while the station does take some funding from the government, it has full editorial independence. ... Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted last Wednesday that NPR met the site’s definition of “state-affiliated media” as...

Google News heavily skewed in favor of left-leaning media outlets—both in the news articles featured on its homepage and in the search results for specific topics—in five of the days leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, according to an AllSides study Google criticized as “deeply flawed” in comments to The Daily Signal. “Imbalanced or heavily biased news search results can have a negative impact on our democracy and elections,” Julie Mastrine, director of marketing and media bias ratings at AllSides, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “When people cannot access the full range of views on political...

Fifty percent of Americans believe that the news media lies in order to promote a narrative. Only 25% actually believe this isn’t true. The rest are skeptical, unsure of what to think. Guess who that 25% are… ... These numbers don’t come from some right-wing polling outfit. They come from Gallup, not Rassmussen or OneAmerica. If you look at these numbers Americans believe that the news media is rich, but don’t care about them or tell the truth. Which, to be honest, is exactly right. They are wealthy and do only care about themselves and their allies. And they surely...

We previously discussed the movement in journalism schools to get rid of principles of objectivity in journalism. Advocacy journalism is the new touchstone in the media even as polls show that trust in the media is plummeting. Now, former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.” Notably, while Bob Woodword and others...

The New York Times has long ago abandoned any pretense of being an actual news source and has settled into its role as the foremost propaganda arm of the hard Left, capitalizing upon the fact that there is still a considerable number of people in the U.S. and around the world who still think that the Times can be trusted to report events impartially and accurately. In reality, the only thing the Times is good for is revealing what the political and media elites are thinking.. the Leftist establishment is through with Old Joe Biden. Watch for him to be...