Free Republic

A couple years ago the journalist Matt Taibbi came up with a telling new term for the way the media works in our time: bombholing. Bombholing is the practice of publishing wild and unsubstantiated stories in the press, then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they turn out to be false. Then the media hits viewers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” Viewers are led “from mania to mania.” Taibbi once laid it out in more detail: News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale...

Overwhelming majorities of Americans have lost their trust in the media to accurately report the news, according to a new poll out Wednesday. In a survey from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a whopping 83 percent of respondents said they were concerned the media would “report inaccurate information or disinformation” in their 2024 election coverage. Eighty-one percent said they are worried the media will report unverified information, and 77 percent said they feared the media would stick to the facts — but be dishonest in their framing, only covering things favorable to...

Columbia University banned media access on its campus Tuesday as pro-Palestine protests continue. "Media access to campus is suspended. Campus is accessible only to CUID-holders and essential personnel as a safety measure and that includes media," read an announcement on the university website. The university also revealed that early Tuesday morning, "a group of protestors occupied Hamilton Hall on the Morningside campus of Columbia University."

Proving once again that the press never learns its lesson, the Washington Post graced us this week with a humdinger: “Trump, GOP seize on campus protests to depict chaos under Biden.” This followed a New York Times headline from December, “As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment.” In short: Nothing is ever a problem because it’s a problem. It’s only an issue because conservatives “seize” on it, or better yet, “pounce.” But Americans, particularly Jewish Americans, are coming to their own conclusions about how terrifying these protests are.

A stricter abortion law is set to take effect in Florida on Wednesday — dropping the state’s 15-week ban to a six-week ban — and it will likely affect thousands of people seeking abortion care within the first month alone. Florida has become a key abortion access point...

A fight involving several students at Miami Norland Senior High School in Miami Gardens Monday afternoon escalated to shots fired and 5 people injured, including 2 teenagers. Miami Gardens Police said they responded to an

A group of Republican senators reached out to National Public Radio (NPR), urging the network to “start a course correction” to shake off a left-wing bias controversy under the leadership of CEO Katherine Maher. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) led a letter sent to Maher on Monday, highlighting concerns raised by Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR who resigned this month after he stoked fresh scrutiny of the media organization with claims that it “lost America’s trust” with an increasingly leftist bent. “It is not NPR’s job to tell Americans what to think but to inform them with unbiased facts....

NEW YORK — Dan Rather returned to the CBS News airwaves for the first time since his bitter exit 18 years ago, appearing in a reflective interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” days before the debut of a Netflix documentary on the 92-year-old newsman’s life. After 44 years at the network, 24 as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” Rather left under a cloud following a botched investigation into then-President George W. Bush’s military record. Rather signed off as anchor for the last time on March 9, 2005, and exited the network when his contract ended 15 months later.

“First, conquer the organs of propaganda,” wrote Karl Marx, who was a genius mob agitator and nothing else. Mob agitators were already a kind of specialty in Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe, but Marx wrote the instruction manual, just as Saul Alinsky did in his Rules for Radicals, which became Barack Obama’s manual for political agitators. SNIP About ten years ago, Tucker Carlson helped to expose a radical propaganda internet list called JournoList, a secret Google group of media influencers who made up the headlines for the next day’s news, in places like the New York Times, the Washington...

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further. The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents. The West’s favored methods of supporting...

A man was arrested, accused of brutally beating a [man who pretended to be a woman] to death on the steps of the Miami City Ballet, police said. The Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) said the [man] — now identified as 37-year-old Andrea Doria Dos Passos — was found on the front steps of the Miami City Ballet on Tuesday morning by a security guard who thought she was just sleeping. Police said she was partially clothed and wearing a blood-soaked blanket.

I'm old enough to remember the hubbub over JournoList, a listserv of leftist reporters from different news outlets who convened regularly in a chatroom to strategize how to spin stories and set narratives, such as how to torpedo Gov.Sarah Palin to get Barack Obama elected president. From 2007 to 2010, JournoList was its own echo chamber, as Politico put it at the time. Now the same thing's happening again, with TV lawyers acting as rhetorical wetwork teams covering the trials of their political nemesis, Donald Trump. JournoList was started by Ezra Klein, who now works for the New York Times,...

A new article out from Politico reveals that a select group of lawyers and legal pundits have been working behind the scenes to quash a Trump second term using the media. They've been sharing narratives, honing points, and working together to "intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system." The names of those who have been at these meetings are all too familiar and their tactics mirror those undertaken in 2020 to manipulate media to sway the presidential election in Biden's favor. A group began meeting weekly in 2022, every Friday, on Zoom calls...

The Tampa Police Department took five suspects into custody after officers were shot at while attempting a traffic stop, leading to a brief pursuit on Monday night.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said Monday that he has “lost faith” in his alma mater, Columbia University, amid reports of antisemitism during campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war and said he’s “not comfortable supporting the university” until things change.

Until now, corporate media haven’t blinked an eye over the destruction of hundreds of millions of innocent embryos.After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen human embryos should be treated with care, corporate media spent months lambasting in vitro fertilization critics and advocating for killing the embryos at adults’ leisure. Outlets’ tunes, however, changed this week when stories began to circulate about Israel allegedly destroying the “majority of Gaza’s frozen embryos.” Reuters published an article, video segment, and podcast last week lamenting a December airstrike it says destroyed an estimated 4,000 frozen embryos in Gaza City’s Al Basma IVF facility, as...

“Social media isn’t real life.” It’s a phrase we hear a lot. But is that really true? When Congress threatened to block China from controlling TikTok, the company riled up a mob of tweens to threaten Congress. If the Senate gives in, the outcome will be real enough. TikTok certainly is real life. If you doubt it, look at the rate of teenage girls who have themselves mutilated because of trans trends on the app, even younger girls who killed themselves over material in the app’s algorithm or the spread of verbal or motor ‘tics’ to teens over the platform....

Joe Biden on Tuesday traveled to his *hometown* of Scranton, Pennsylvania for a campaign event. And literally no one cares. VIDEO AT LINK............ Virtually no one showed up to see 81-million vote recipient Joe Biden – in his hometown – in a state he supposedly won in 2020. Biden is delivering remarks on the US tax code at the Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple. Perhaps he should tell his own son Hunter Biden to pay his taxes. Hunter was indicted on federal tax evasion charges. The press line was longer than the attendee line, according to Newsmax. Per...

Yet another leftist media outlet may be on the brink of collapse. The Intercept, which was founded by left-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald back in 2014, is said to be in serious financial difficulty amid an escalating power struggle between warring factions. Semafor reports:The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor,...

The Biden campaign didn't like a headline written by the staff at USA Today, so USA Today was happy to oblige and change it. John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.