Free Republic

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. * * * * Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the...

A news reporter based in Washington, D.C., Matthew Anthony Harper, is facing the ultimate censorship by the Washington bureaucracy: exclusion from press events. WorldNetDaily – itself a veteran of legal and bureaucratic battles over press access in the nation’s capital, once having threatened to sue all the officials of the Senate Press Gallery and ultimately winning its desired press pass – interviewed Harper, of the Christian newspaper InterMountain Christian News, whose access is now threatened. Harper explained to WND that the White House press office is requiring him to hold a press pass with Congress and/or the Supreme Court as...

At Gov. Ron DeSantis's (R-FL) urging, Florida Republicans are eagerly drafting a bill to expand the scope of defamation law. But not everyone in the conservative movement is a fan. During an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner, former Vice President Mike Pence made clear that he was not thrilled about challenging New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court case establishing the actual malice standard for defamation of public figures. "Well, let me just say in the broadest sense, I believe a free and independent press is a bulwark of our nation," Pence said. "From my years in Congress,...

About 500 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. The online video-sharing platform houses more than 800 million videos and is the second most visited site in the world, with 2.5 billion active monthly users. Given the deluge of content flooding the site every day, one would surmise that YouTube must have an army of people guarding against the spread of misinformation — especially in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that was fueled by lies on social media. Well, not actually. Following recent cutbacks, just one person is in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, according...

They’re making a list and checking it twice. President Biden is facing an outcry from the White House press corps for the “petty” exclusion of journalists from the traditional presidential media Christmas parties. In a seeming break from Biden’s pledge to restore “civility” to public life, a number of journalists — many believing themselves excluded for “naughty” rather than “nice” coverage — didn’t get invites to the glam soirees on Dec. 8 for TV teams and on Dec. 13 for other press. The holiday fests are prized perks of the beat for media that cover the White House because attendees...

“Reliable Sources,” the media-news program that has been on CNN since 1993, is the latest piece of content to go on the chopping block under the cost-cutting regime of Warner Bros. Discovery. The show, which has grown from a dusty public affairs program in its earliest days to a lean-forward show that often took on Fox News and President Donald Trump under former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, will broadcast its last episode on Sunday, August 21. Its anchor, Brian Stelter, will leave the company. “We appreciate his contributions to the network and wish him well as he embarks on new...

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/watch-live-kane-appears-on-charlie-kirk-show-at-1-pm-eastern/

A left-wing outlet funded by liberal billionaire George Soros whined that the world’s richest man’s plan to purchase Twitter was a threat to democracy. Free Press released a statement April 14 headlined, “Musk's Attempted Takeover of Twitter Would Be Toxic for Its 330 Million Users and Our Democracy.” This follows Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recently announced $43 billion bid for a hostile takeover of one of the most censorship-obsessed platforms in the country. Free Press castigated Musk for being a critic of “efforts by companies like Twitter and Meta to moderate platform content and restrict the spread of hateful and...

Watchdog group Project Veritas published a video on Tuesday showing FBI agents raiding the home of one of their journalists. In the video, which was taken in November 2021, armed agents are shown banging on the door. After entering the home, they shouted, “Let me see your hands!”The footage also shows agents holding rifles and searching the journalist’s home. They went through his bedroom, kitchen, and closets, digging through his belongings. He can be heard telling agents “[his] hands are up.”Last November, RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar reported:Friday afternoon Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe announced that the homes of current and...

The George Soros-funded Free Press is in hot water after it submitted a leftist petition to the Federal Communications Commission that included a comment that questioned if Republicans should be shot. The Free Press petition urged the FCC “investigate its own history of racism and examine how its policy choices and actions have harmed black people and other communities of color.” The petition included the following violent comment: “How come we have racist horseshit like FOX and the other ultraconservative outlets and Christians owning most of our media. What happened to separation of church and state? Are we going to...

The death of Apple Daily marks the end of Hong Kong's free press, and the west must ask: is it wise to continue empowering the CCP's destruction of values we cherish?The Chinese Communist Party and pro-Beijing Hong Kong authorities forced Apple Daily, the last pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, to cease operation this week. The death of Apple Daily marks the end of a free press in Hong Kong, once one of the freest places on the planet.Founded By a Refugee of CommunismThe newspaper was founded 26 years ago by outspoken Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai. Born in mainland China,...

Joe Biden was condemned for taking pre-approved questions from journalists during his Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin - then moaning at a journalist for 'never asking a positive question.' 'To be a good reporter you gotta be negative. You gotta have a negative view of life, ok, it seems to me - the way you all - you never ask a positive question,' Biden told one of the reporters on the tarmac at the airport in Geneva Wednesday before boarding Air Force One for a flight back home to Washington. Biden made his complaint after being asked to provide 'concrete...

...Northwestern University received more than $340 million from the country of Qatar from 2012 to 2019 as it operated a campus in the Middle Eastern country and continued a years-long collaboration with Al Jazeera, a media outlet owned by the Qatari government. That’s according to a 2019 Clarion Project report, which found that Al Jazeera and Northwestern University formed a relationship in 2008 when the Qatar Foundation, which the Clarion Project alleges of being linked to terrorism, funded a Northwestern campus in Qatar. Northwestern, one of the top journalism schools in the U.S., partnered with Al Jazeera in an agreement...

"YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!" is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM" and its occasional variation, "PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!" I cannot say who came up with...

American media woke up Wednesday to shocking news: the Chinese government announced it would expel three Wall Street Journal journalists based in Beijing: deputy bureau chief Josh Chin and reporter Chao Deng, both U.S. citizens, and reporter Philip Wen, an Australian citizen. The last time China expelled so many foreign journalists from a single Western media organization, Mao Zedong was dictator. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said the expulsion was retaliation for a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Real Sick Man of Asia” by Walter Russell Mead. In it, Mead discussed how the Chinese government’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak...

The flailing 2020 presidential campaign of former Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-TX) claimed Wednesday that a staffer ejected Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak from a speech at Benedict College, a historically black college, to protect black students. In a statement Wednesday, O’Rourke’s press secretary, Aleigha Cavalier, attempted to defend against the growing controversy stemming from Pollak’s removal, claiming that while the candidate “believes in the right to a free press,” Breitbart News “walks the line between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech.” “Given this particular Breitbart employee’s previous hateful reporting and the sensitivity of the topics...

President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press? The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light. The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed. “In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR...

Professional journalism groups reacted with alarm after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas released an opinion Tuesday urging the high court to reconsider a landmark freedom of the press decision called New York Times v. Sullivan. The Sullivan ruling generally shields reporters and news platforms from libel or defamation lawsuits provided they were acting in good faith. Though journalists believe that protection is essential, Justice Thomas said the high court was wrong to usurp the role of states in regulating libel. “[Sullivan] and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” Thomas’s opinion reads. “We should not...

It’s been over a year and a half since Obama left office, but it still bothers me hearing him speak. Between his trying to take credit for the Trump economy and his claim that he, unlike Trump, didn’t “threaten the freedom of the press,” it's hard not to get angry when he speaks because virtually everything he says is a lie. His trying to take credit for Trump's economy was pathetic, but his claim that he was not an enemy of the free press deserves to be called out. “It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t...

The Bad Kid Lollipop Lure White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders should do what some doctors’ offices and other outlets do to keep unruly children in line: keep a good supply of lollipops on hand. When CNN’s Jim Acosta sets out on his next whine fest during a press briefing, Huckabee Sanders should just hold up one of the lollipops from the Sucker Press supply. Cable tv viewers and even Acosta colleagues will get the idea.