Free Republic

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

USA Today said it has deleted 23 articles from its website after an investigation found that the reporter who wrote them used fabricated sources. The journalist who is said to have used the fabricated sources was identified as Gabriela Miranda, a breaking news reporter who resigned from the Virginia-based newspaper weeks ago, the paper confirmed Thursday. Miranda’s most recent news story for USA Today is dated April 17. According to the bio on her website, Miranda was assigned to cover “trending news nationwide” while at USA Today. Before being hired by USA Today, she covered education and the Hispanic community...

Think back on all the journalistic grifters whose bylines and totally made-up crap have disgraced the dismal pages of the Boston Globe – Mike Barnicle, Kevin Cullen, Patricia Smith and Jayson Blair, among others. But even those recidivist frauds must be shaking their pampered, protected-class heads over this latest embarrassment to befall the failing broadsheet – a column by a “journalist from Massachusetts” named Luke O’Neil. So far, at least three versions of his piece have appeared on the Globe website. Let’s go over the first sentences – the lede, as they say – in order of their appearance. “One...

A CHARISMATIC Democrat emerges out of nowhere to become chief executive. Democrats rule the House and Senate. They push an unpopular agenda. This is the Massachusetts story behind the stunning story of Scott Brown’s victory, and it is a microcosm of Washington. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick won election by promising hope, change and a different kind of politics. Barack Obama ran on the same promise. Now, President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are pushing an agenda that infuriates voters. Martha Coakley ran a poor campaign for US Senate. The tepid prosecutor lost her case to a slick politician....

I’m going to need some Advil and a cold compress, please. I’m the Massachusetts Electorate, and I have what is bar none the absolute worst hangover of my entire voting life...Think, Electorate, think. What did I do? This much I’m starting to remember. Martha and I walked into the party and everything seemed to be going fine. She wasn’t talking much, but she never really does, and she wasn’t exactly pushing me to bare my soul, either... And now I’m vaguely recalling that stranger across the room, the one in the barn jacket who kept smiling at me and seemed...

Give Greg Sargent credit over at the Plum Line blog for a good catch here.  Read the following exchange, for which Sargent will have audio shortly, and see what it means to you: QUESTION: “Scott, what do you think about the Tea Party movement and what they are trying to do?”SCOTT BROWN: “I am not quite sure what you are talking about, what are they trying to do?”QUESTION: “The anti-smaller government, sort of anti-establishment organization that is trying to take over the country.”SCOTT BROWN: “Taking over the country. I think that is a little bit of an exaggeration.”QUESTION: “Well, they...

Former New York Times managing editor Gerald Boyd who died three years ago from cancer takes a swipe at his former employer on the Jayson Blair scandal in a new book that is set to be released on Feb. 1. From The New York Observer In two weeks, a memoir by Gerald Boyd, the former managing editor of The New York Times who was forced out of the paper along with executive editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, will be published by the small, Chicago-based publisher Lawrence Hill Books. Boyd died three years ago from...

People in Massachusetts are understandably frustrated. Next week's special election comes in the midst of a too-long Senate debate on health care, showcasing much of what is offensive about the rules of the Senate. The fact that a final bill hasn't even emerged has left many people ready to toss away the whole thing. Stir in the anxiety that comes with a still-faltering economy, and voters are angry.

The historic campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., has offered instruction in journalism for well over a century — but probably never quite like this. On Friday, the twice-yearly Washington and Lee Journalism Ethics Institute will hear from its latest keynote speaker: Jayson Blair, the former New York Times reporter who triggered the greatest scandal in the newspaper's history. "Getting Jayson Blair obviously was a departure," says Edward Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee. Indeed. The keynote address is typically reserved for people like Lowell Bergman or Toni Locy, journalists who withstood...

Jayson Blair, who was at the center of a major journalism scandal as a New York Times reporter in 2003, will be the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday, Nov. 6. The title of Blair’s talk is “Lessons Learned.” The public is invited to the presentation at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons. Blair resigned from the Times after an investigation found that he had plagiarized and fabricated major portions of stories that he had written during four years with the Times. Some of the stories that he covered in this manner...

Jayson Blair knows his new profession — life coach — smacks some people in the face like a bad punchline. "People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'" Blair, 33, resigned from the Times in 2003, leaving a journalistic scandal in his wake. The resulting furor led the paper's top two newsroom executives to...

The New York Times was forced to apologise on Monday after it published a fake letter, purportedly from the mayor of Paris, criticising Caroline Kennedy's bid for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat as "not very democratic". "What title has Ms Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton's seat?" the letter in Monday's edition of the newspaper said. "We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling." In an note from the editor posted Monday on its website, the newspaper said the letter signed...

After a humiliating plagiarism scandal that rocked the New York Times [NYT], Jayson Blair is quietly resurrecting his journalism career by writing about the very subject he says brought him down: Bipolar disorder. Blair, 30, has been lending his expertise to 3-year-old bp (bipolar) magazine. He wrote a first-person piece about bipolar disorder and the role it played in his downfall that bp magazine ran last year.

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth" "I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC...

Leslie Cauley, the USA Today reporter who last week “broke” the news that three major U.S. telecommunications companies were assisting the National Security Agency in building a database to more easily track any communications by potential terrorists, is listed as a donor to former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt... A search found a listing for "writer and journalist" Leslie Cauley, indicating she gave $2,000 to Gephardt on June 30, 2003, when Gephardt was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. And that seems not to be her only tie to Democratic politics ... Cauley's link to a Democratic campaign seems likely...

Facing shareholder dissent and getting flak for bloated executive pay deals, The New York Times is frantically searching for crisis p.r. experts as the company gears up for a public battle over the future of the newspaper giant. Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and other top management have been criticized for putting off the concerns of Morgan Stanley portfolio manager Hassan Elmasry and for a share price that's plummeted 50 percent since 2002. Soon after Morgan's attack last week on The Times, the publisher's spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, was phoning Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon seeking advice, sources familiar with the...

Ex-New York Times Editor Writes On Getting Fired In Memoir POSTED: 7:21 pm EDT April 13, 2006 UPDATED: 7:49 pm EDT April 13, 2006 NEW YORK -- Howell Raines, the former executive editor of The New York Times, warns at the beginning of his new memoir that the book is about sport fishing and the "unpredictability of luck," not the episode that led to his firing: the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair was the young Times reporter revealed in 2003 to have fabricated or plagiarized parts of several articles. Raines lost his job over the incident, in part because the paper...

Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. apparently was given quite a chilly reception in his annual state-of-the-Times address..... Newspaper Guild members have already had to give up their raises for the year to rescue their embattled healthcare coverage, and 500 employees are losing their jobs. Floyd Norris, a business columnist, was said.... to be particularly intense in grilling Sulzberger on why (Pinch) would not give back his hefty million-dollar bonus this year to save jobs. "He kept ducking [the question]," ......"It was lame, lame, lame."

Media: The New York Times is under fire from the left and right over the handling of its wiretapping story. But that's just the latest in a pattern of embarrassing mistakes and misdeeds by the "paper of record." It's been all the blues that's fit to print for The New York Times reporters, editors and brass lately. The memory of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal was just fading when veteran Washington reporter Judith Miller was jailed for 85 days for protecting a source — then promptly shown the door amid suggestions of receiving more than leaks from her contacts. It...

Of all the stories leading America’s annual greatest-hits list, the one that subsumes the rest is the evolution of information in the Age of Blogging. Not since the birth of the printing press have our lives been so dramatically affected by the way we create and consume information. What is wonderful and miraculous about the Internet needs little elaboration. We all marvel at the ease with which we can access information, whether reading government documents previously available only to a few, or tracking down old friends and new enemies. It is this latter – our new enemies – that interests...