Free Republic

The Washington, DC, establishment absolutely loves itself. Every profession in the city is riddled with people who dine out on titles and past accomplishments, and will do so for the rest of their lives. “Right this way, Ambassador,” is muttered daily to someone who served for 20 minutes in an administration generations ago. They absolutely love it. So it’s no wonder Jill Biden felt the need to order people to refer to her as “doctor,” since she’s spent most her adult life in the shadow of people who pat themselves on the backs so hard over titles that you’d think...

On the precipice of the 2020 presidential election, the American ruling class pulled off every stunt imaginable for its preferred candidate, Joe Biden. Presidential debate moderators deliberately refused to delve into the realm of foreign policy, an area in which Uncle Joe has been wrong on every major issue for four decades. Media elites dutifully praised the Supreme Court's unwise failure to intervene and clarify that state legislatures, not governors or state courts, retain sole power over changing election law. The most anodyne of questioning about the unprecedented proliferation of inherently destabilizing mail-in balloting was roundly denounced as "voter suppression."...

Our Establishment is revolting – in fact, it stinks on ice. What you see out there is our alleged betters struggling mightily to hold onto the power that we Normal people dared to wrest away from them in 2016. One component of their campaign is the burning and looting information operation conducted by black-clad pawns. The other component is the soft power corporate/media/cultural conspiracy to silence dissent and enforce fearful conformity to their narrative. Usually, a revolution is conducted by the peasants to throw off a tyrannical ruling class. Here, the ruling class is waging a political and cultural war...

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that...

Noah Millman wrote a marvelously honest piece for "The Week" last week about the pay-to-play college admissions scandal. He acknowledges what many have known for a long time: First, that admission to the most elite schools is not purely based upon merit. Second, that education as good as -- and often better than -- that at the Ivies and other top-tier institutions can be obtained elsewhere. What parents are really after, Millman says, is status. This has become more important than the education itself, or even connections, which the children of these grasping, bribing parents frankly already have. Millman makes...

Newt Gingrich instantly brought the crowd to its feet last night at the last debate before Saturday's all important primary in South Carolina. What was the multitude cheering? Not his stance on tax policy, or on abortion, but rather his acid assault on the “elite media.” Gingrich expressed outrage that moderator John King of CNN would lead off the evening by asking about potentially damaging charges made by the Speaker’s second wife in an interview with ABC News's "Nightline." The audience howled its approval as Gingrich tore into the “destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media…” As...

The first question at Thursday night's debate in South Carolina went to Newt Gingrich, giving him an opportunity to denounce a "vicious" news media that is "protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans."

Nearly 200,000 Americans showed up to protest high taxes in hundreds of cities around the country today. The New York Times and The Boston Globe ignored “Tea Parties” altogether. ABC and CBS reporters were nowhere to be found. NBC, on the other hand, simply made obscene references — using a tea-related colloquialism — to express its corporate disgust with America’s founding principles. And a CNN journalist, rather than reporting on one event, decided to debate the crowd! Here’s the transcript: CNN: “Let’s see… drop taxes… drop socialism. Okay, let’s see. You’re here with your two-year old daughter and you’re already...

Atlanta - They came to public squares and parks across the country by the hundreds and thousands on Tax Day, April 15, hoping for nothing less than a second American revolution. Their "tea parties" are part of a burgeoning national movement, they said – a nonpartisan wave of Americans outraged by Washington's profligacy and its intrusion into every aspect of daily life. And yet ... only a whisper in the mainstream press, they complain. To tea partyers, the disconnect points up the wide divide between elite media and the population at large. To others, any downplaying of the protests is...

Peggy Noonan had to cough up her Sarah Palin fur ball sometime, I suppose. We heard it coming, but had hoped that Noonan would suppress it by drinking deeply of that gracious political civility she's selling in her newest book, Patriotic Grace. Instead, her Oct. 17, Wall Street Journal column, "Palin's Failin,'" disgorges Palin with all of the civility and grace one finds in the kitty litter. On her book's back cover, Noonan echoes some clichéd sound bites from the upper chambers of political punditry such as, "If I am right, we must change not only the substance but the...

Where is the outrage that was manufactured to run Rush Limbaugh off the air? Is it absent because Gumbel is allegedly black? So just picture for a moment, if you will, that you're watching SportsCenter tonight and Dan Patrick says, "The lack of whites in the NBA makes it look like a welfare office." Think that would get buried like Gumbel's comments? For what it's worth, maybe Gumbel should do some research on the emerging face of the GOP.

The American media is up in arms over reports that the Pentagon hired a public relations firm to write positive news stories about the Iraq war and get them printed in the Iraqi press. But Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad, isn't letting journalists get away with their phony display of outrage. After the New York Times front-paged the "fake news" story Thursday under the headline: "U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers," Gen. Lynch defended the practice. "We don't lie. We don't need to lie," he told reporters in Baghdad. "We...

Troubles abound for the print business, but smart leadership can steer through the roughest seas Good news about the newspaper business is hard to find these days. Already this month, daily circulation losses ... At the demand of disgruntled institutional shareholders, once-proud Knight Ridder - the nation's second-largest publicly traded chain - is considering putting itself up for sale, whole or in pieces. This comes on the heels of deep news staff cuts at many of the nation's most respected regional papers, Newsday included... Important trends are downward and reinforcing... Profit margins, down from their peak, but still at 20...

Most Americans, regardless of their position on the war in Iraq, don't object to the expression "Support Our Troops," but earlier this week one National Public Radio commentator asserted that in at least one context, that phrase is "glib," "self-righteous," "partisan," and "vaguely...Ann Coulterish." He also declared darkly that "analyzing its rhetoric" may constitute "treason." [Tom Johnson, who monitors NPR for the MRC, filed this item for CyberAlert.] This past Monday on All Things Considered, Bob Sommer, whose son recently completed a year's service in Iraq, began his segment: "You would think that the sight of a yellow-ribbon magnet on...

  Tooth Fairies and LiberalsNovember 18, 2004 So the marquee on Times Square reads “Maureen Dowd launched a Midol attack because she got stiffed by the tooth fairy”.  Who knows, next she will be sending hate mail to Santa. Dowd is in a cramp because the President is fighting, “a war shaped by the political clock, a war with no visible enemy, no coherent plan and no exit timetable.”  Apparently, Dowd thinks war should be like her years at Catholic University.  Where’s my reading list and syllabus? I wonder what Franklin Roosevelt thought about “war shaped by the political clock”?  Great Britain declared...

Kerry got the “best press ever” during the 2004 campaign, according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). The senator received the most favorable news coverage of all presidential candidates in the last 25 years. Bush was covered very negatively this year, according to the study, but he did not match the amount of bad press faced by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Kerry received a total of 58 percent positive evaluations from the media, in the time from Labor Day to Election Day. Not surprisingly, Bush did much worse at 36 percent positive and 64...

A new study of campaign reporting concludes that Senator John F. Kerry, buoyed by his performances in the presidential debates, was covered by the media far more favorably than President Bush in recent weeks. The survey released yesterday by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 59 percent of the stories that were primarily about Bush from Oct. 1-14 were negative in tone, compared to only 25 percent of the stories about Kerry. And while 34 percent of the Kerry coverage was favorable, a mere 14 percent of the president's coverage put him in a positive light. The...

Targeted, Truthful Ads Gutting Kerry Campaign Written by Chris Long Monday, September 27, 2004 George W. Bush spent the first months of the political campaigning season like a boxer in a huddle, covering up and weathering a barrage of blows from the upstart. The Kerry/DNC ads were a scattershot affair, alleging anything and everything, flitting from accusation to spectacular accusation, not unlike the flip-flopping candidate. Indeed, the Bush campaign seemed to obeying the military axiom of ‘concentration of forces’: gather your troops for decisive blows in the face of a scattered, approaching enemy. The hundreds of millions of dollars expended...

Startling similarities stand out between British media's attacks on Churchill for warning of the Nazi threat, and 'mainstream'American media's on-going assault on Bush and the "neocons" for the current war on terrorism. Eerie parallels between the appeasement craze in the mid-1930s and today's denunciations of a war on terrorism are striking. Winston S. Churchill clashed with news media for warning of Nazi tyranny and for pitching resolve to meet the Nazi threat. President George W. Bush is skewered by media for the war on terror. Both confronted not only a smug and hostile press, but also a less-than-loyal opposition perhaps...

ABC a fourth-place network for two months - - - - - - - - - - - -David BauderApril 18, 2003  |  NEW YORK (AP) -- Fox's resurgence over the past few months means ABC is frequently the fourth-place network, and its weakness was evident again last week. Only two ABC programs -- "Primetime Thursday" and "The Bachelor" -- were among the week's 40 most-watched prime-time programs last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. By contrast, NBC had 16 shows in the top 40, CBS had 15 and Fox had seven, Nielsen said. ABC has been the fourth-place network...