Free Republic

MSNBC averaged only 63,000 demo viewers between the primetime hours of 8-11 p.m. ET... MSNBC’s primetime lineup finished with its smallest January audience ever among the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults aged 25-54. The news-heavy month featured an alleged terrorist ramming a truck through New Year's revelers in New Orleans, shocking video of a Tesla Cybertruck exploding in front of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, President Biden pardoning members of his family and political allies on his way out the door, President Trump’s inauguration, the fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel and other significant headlines as the Trump administration began with...

The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Republican Brendan Carr, will reverse the 11th hour decision by the former Democrat chair to reject three complaints against major media outlets, sources tell Newsmax. With days left in her term under the Biden administration, Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, last week announced she was dismissing four pending petitions and complaints before the FCC that she believed sought "to curtail freedom of the press." Three of the petitions related to coverage of the presidential campaign while one was a complaint about Fox News Channel. Carr, appointed Monday by President Donald Trump, plans...

Panic engulfed MSNBC headquarters on Wednesday after parent company Comcast confirmed a massive spinoff of its cable properties — with a top executive even suggesting the left-leaning network may be forced to change its name. ... Staffers fearing looming layoffs peppered him with questions about if the network will need to change its name, logos and headquarters after reports surfaced that the new entity could be cut off from the reporting muscle of NBC News, ... “Everyone is in a panic because everything is up in the air, ... Comcast announced Wednesday that MSNBC — home to anchors that include...

Former CBS News staffers are demanding an independent investigation into “60 Minutes” over the brewing Kamala Harris interview scandal — even as the network digs in its heels and refuses to release the full, unedited transcript, ... The long-running news show has come under fire after cleaning up the Democratic presidential candidate’s answer to a question from “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker about Israel that aired during a special episode on Monday. Her reply was starkly different from the “word salad” the vice president served up in a clip to promote the interview shown by “Face the Nation” the day...

Without a functioning independent media, we’re headed to totalitarianism, but it’s not Trump’s creation. In February, 2017, the Washington Post adopted its now infamous mission statement: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Was it a coincidence that one of the nation’s most influential newspapers — the paper that broke the Watergate scandal and brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency — decided that its role was to save democracy just one month after President Trump was inaugurated? According to then-editor of the WaPo, Martin Barron, writing in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, this was not an attack on...

As bad as you think the media is, it always manages to be worse.. The media routinely plays up civilian casualties in any Israeli air strike. But as the headlines show the game is played very differently when Islamic terrorist attacks kill children. After the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah struck a soccer field in the Israeli Golan Heights killing a dozen Druze children (Druze are a non-Jewish minority group in Israel whose members often serve in the Israeli military), the media did its best to write the most ambiguous headlines possible. Rocket From Lebanon Kills at Least 12 in Israeli-Controlled...

Mollie Hemingway ... his Stephanopoulos interview looks more like a Democrat operative --and he is one-- trying to implore a fellow political ally to get out of the race for the good of the Democrat Party.. We're supposed to believe that they were somehow duped, that the rest of the country could see something that they couldn't see. I don't buy it. I don't think any Americans buy it. The level of media corruption that we're seeing is complete at this point." "They didn't cover the story because they thought it would be bad for Democrats to talk about the...

In an October 1903 article, the New York Times predicted it would take "one to ten million years" for man to develop a working "flying machine." We all know how that turned out. Sixty-nine days later, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first successful flight in the heavier-than-air Wright Flyer in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. The New York Times was wrong then, and they continue to be wrong about many important things. One of the most dangerous in recent years was the Russia collusion story, for which they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize. For...

Washington Post's traffic has fallen off dramatically in Biden era.. ... The Post finished last year by implementing forced buyouts as part of its extensive workforce reduction goal to prevent layoffs. Roughly 240 staffers reportedly took the buyouts, which followed a bitter strike that erupted among aggrieved employees. That led to the exit of many beloved newsroom "Posties" – what Post staffers refer to themselves -- including columnist Greg Sargent and senior editor Marc Fisher, who had been with the Post for 35 years. "The decision to offer voluntary packages to employees across the organization was designed in hopes of...

Who really owns the paper? I’ve seen this before, but never at such a high-profile level. Journalists, including Bari Weiss, were squeezed out at the New York Times and targeted by campaigns coordinated by their colleagues with outside radical leftist outlets like Huffington Post, Vox, and The New Republic, but this time it went bigger than ever before. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos decided that his pet paper, The Washington Post, needed a change of management and brought in vets from the UK’s Telegraph. The Post’s wokes and some around the media decided that wouldn’t fly and began running hit pieces...

Before we get into this abysmal segment, let’s not forget that this network is doing its job: keeping liberal blood pressures low by feeding the sheep grade-A liberal propaganda. It’s not a shock that MSNBC host Joy Reid and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) would label the rape of a minor by an illegal alien as “fearmongering.” I’m not sure it is, given that it’s true. An illegal alien was busted for raping a 13-year-old in Queens, New York, this week (via ABC 7 NY): A 25-year-old Ecuadorian has been arrested in connection with the "horrific" rape of a 13-year-old girl...

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana recently wrote an opinion column that was critical of trans athletes and USA Today-owned newspapers deleted the piece without even notifying Kennedy. This is reminiscent of the time in 2020 when Republican Senator Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that was censored because it sent the paper’s staffers into fits of rage. Cotton had suggested using the military to control the riots in the ‘summer of love.’ Isn’t it fascinating that this censorship always seems to go in only one direction? ... Kennedy commented: “They think they are the speech...

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle called upon the president of Chicago’s Federal Reserve to tell viewers that they are economically far better off than they think. "We need an economic explainer," the MSNBC host said. "People are confused, they’re exhausted, but they’re also doing quite well." Ruhle, who hosts MSNBC’s "The Eleventh Hour," had been discussing a recent Federal Reserve report that "shows people are still struggling to cover day-to-day expenses, even as inflation has slowed." She noted how some major brands are responding by enticing consumers with slashed prices, "Target says it is cutting prices on 5,000 essential items, things...

Some wealthy Jews would like to influence American public opinion. They also appeal to their elected representatives. That is the "news" in a Washington Post "exclusive" that ran Thursday, and the paper makes clear that there is something very untoward about it. The piece, by reporters Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, is based on an inside look into an online chat that included New York City mayor Eric Adams and several wealthy New York businessmen. In that chat, several people pressed Adams to send the New York Police Department to clear out Columbia University’s dangerous, disgraceful, and violent pro-Hamas encampment,...

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...

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....

Is The Washington Post in full-scale collapse? A recent look at the numbers provides a fairly convincing answer to that question. According to the report, not only is the Post losing $100 million a year, but it lost over half of its online engagement by the end of 2023. The signs were already there by mid-year, and the worst has come to pass. See: The Washington Post Is Facing a Financial Buzzsaw“Of that audience, less than one in five read more than a single article per month, while less than one in 500 actually convert to a paying subscription.”— Josh...