Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The White House press office on Monday surprisingly snubbed Atlanta’s top newspaper by barring two of its journalists from covering President Biden’s celebration of the Atlanta Braves‘ World Series championship. The stunning slight came about a week after Biden’s press agents turned away four Orthodox Jewish reporters from a presidential event on hate crimes in another confounding access decision. The Journal-Constitution’s Washington correspondent and a photographer unsuccessfully sought to attend the Braves event in the nearly 3,000 square foot East Room. The paper was told that just one person could go — meaning a sports writer was the...

Hong Kong “elected” a new chief while the world wasn’t paying attention. Hong Kong’s current chief Carrie Lam will retire at the end of June. The selection of her successor has followed the rules Beijing dictated since it took control of Hong Kong in 1997. Beijing stamped out any hope of universal suffrage in Hong Kong in 2004. Rather than letting more than 7 million residents in Hong Kong have a say in whom the city’s chief should be, Beijing created a “nomi­nating committee” (which has more than 1,400 members today), the majority of which are pro-Beijing elites. The committee...

The president of the United States celebrated a milestone last week, though I'm not entirely sure milestone is the mot juste. The Washington Post announced that the president had perpetrated the 10,000th lie of his administration at a rally in Wisconsin. The lying began on the afternoon of his inauguration, when he declared that the ceremony attracted the largest crowd in American history. The lies grew and grew and spread like hordes of zebra mussels covering everything in their path. If he keeps up this pace, odds makers say, he will have told 22,500 lies by election day next year....

Saturday night’s White House Correspondents dinner once again came and went without most Americans having paid it any serious attention, and for the third straight year, our president chose to miss this increasingly farcical event where journalists pat each other on the back for the fine jobs they believe themselves to be doing.  What made this year’s event a little different than years past is that none of the other senior members of the White House staff attended, either. “That decision came after Sarah Huckabee Sanders endured cruel taunts at the hands of last year’s featured speaker, comedian Michelle...

Video at link.

A new report by the group Reporters Without Borders ranking 180 countries according to press freedom showed the United States slipped two places, which the report blamed on President Donald Trump. The 2018 World Press Freedom Index reflects “growing animosity towards journalists.” “In North America, Donald Trump’s USA slipped another two places while Justin Trudeau’s Canada rose four and entered the top 20 at 18th place, a level where the situation is classified as ‘fairly good,’” the report stated. “Despite having strong constitutional protections to the contrary, the latest World Press Freedom Index findings on the US and Canada reveal...

The Media’s War on Freedom of the Press The free press is a threat, read about it in the mainstream media. April 13, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. The media took a brief break from its campaign against the Sinclair Media Group to go after the National Enquirer. The two don’t have anything in common except the perception of being pro-Trump. In the good old days, going after rival media outlets meant writing nasty things about them. But...

Full title............................EXCLUSIVE: How Russian lawyer and Soviet spy who met Don Jr schmoozed the Washington elite with wine and hors d'ouevres days later - and Republican lawmaker's staff sent the invitations.............. Natalia Veselnitskaya held a controversial film party at elite venue the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue last summer - just after she met Donald Trump Jr Also there was Rinat Akhmetshin, the ex-Soviet spy who on Friday admitted he was in the meeting too Screening was of The Magnistsky Act - Behind The Scenes, a documentary about the whisteblower who supporters say was murdered to cover up tax fraud Documentary...

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin says inquiries by the Justice Department into Russia-funded news outlets show that U.S. press freedom is in decline. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to a reported investigation into the Sputnik news outlet. A fired White House correspondent says he gave the FBI thousands of internal emails showing it's illegally operating as an unregistered propagandist. A second Russia-funded outlet, Russia Today, said this week the Justice Department told an associated company to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which Sputnik is under investigation for violating.

President Emmanuel Macron has had his first major spat with the media since taking power, after his team imposed restrictions on which journalists could travel with him on a trip to visit French troops stationed in west Africa. The move, which echoes similar conflicts over media coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, sparked an angry joint response by more than 20 of the country’s top media outlets, including Le Monde newspaper, Agence France-Presse and state-owned broadcaster France 3. “In no case must the Elysée decide on those of us who are entitled or not to cover a...

Denmark continued its position as one of the few success stories in an era in which global media freedom is coming increasingly under threat, says a new report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). For the second year running, Denmark took fourth place on the RSF index, despite it being a year in which the global situation relating to press freedoms has worsened in nearly two thirds of the 180 countries in the Index. The authors of the index cited an article in Denmark’s 1849 constitution which guarantees freedom of speech and says that “censorship and other preventive measures can never...

Freedom of the Press #13 (Canada Free Press and Outpost of Freedom Columnist, Gary Hunt has been released from Jail and is back home safe and sound for the time being. Hunt whose exhaustive Series on American Freedom and Sovereignty chronicled the 2014 Bundy Standoff in Nevada to the 2016 Occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, had refused a judge’s order to “cease and desist writing about the trial in Oregon and had gone to name an all out FBI informants in his reporting. For that he spent the last week in jail and writes about his experience at the...

Let’s go down the checklist here. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump because of misogyny, racism, sexism, the FBI, the Russians, and now the media. Seriously, the media that was banking heavily on her to beat Trump was part of the problem, says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Reportedly, the Clinton campaign is angrier with the Obama White House than Russia or FBI Director James Comey concerning the interference campaign that the Kremlin waged against the former first lady, which was primarily done through state-funded media apparatuses peddling propaganda and social media trolls. That is not the same thing...

Fearing media manipulation in next year’s national election, conservative Union politicians are calling for “fake news” to be a criminal offense. “I find it sensible to toughen punishments for targeted campaigns,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party member, Ansgar Heveling, who is also head of the parliamentary internal affairs committee, to the Rheinische Post. Another member of Merkel’s conservative CDU party, Patrick Sensburg, also voiced similar ideas to publishing group Funke Mediengruppe on Tuesday. “Disinformation aimed at destabilizing the state should be a punishable offense,” Sensburg said. And a member of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU, Stephan Mayer,...

Germany fell by four places in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, released on Wednesday, after more and more journalists came under attack at right-wing demonstrations in 2015. The Bundesrepublik, nevertheless, came in at a respectable 16th place, placing behind other northern European countries, such as Finland which topped the list once again, but scoring markedly better than the USA (41) and France (45). In the report the reasons given for Germany’s slip down the ranking were threats against journalists from the general public rather than greater restrictions imposed by the state. “Violence and hostility all the way up...

Media freedom around the world has suffered a “deep and disturbing decline” due to by pressure from governments and businesses, an international media watchdog said Wednesday. The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in an annual report that many of the world’s leaders have developed “a paranoia” about journalism and are clamping down on the media, while coverage in privately-owned outlets is increasingly shaped by corporate interests. …

A group of 29 European journalists have filed complaints with the EU's Court of Justice, demanding access to documents that will show how members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been spending their allowances. The reporters filed freedom of information (FOI) requests with the European Parliament, asking for copies of documents that show details for the MEPs' travel expenses, accommodation expenses, office expenses, and assistants expenses for the past four years. ...

In recent months, Germany’s government and intelligence agencies have gone after journalists and parliamentarians in an effort to keep classified information secret. Now, their efforts have resulted in a bona fide scandal for Berlin. […] In recent days, the chancellor, Justice Minister Heiko Maas and Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière have sanctimoniously thrown their support behind freedom of the press. But reality often looks different. In reality, senior government officials and intelligence agency heads in Germany have long been pursuing a policy of intimidating and deterring journalists and their sources. Leaks and whistleblowers are being hunted down and criminalized. Treason,...

Time reporter Zeke Miller was at a Teaism cafe near the White House Wednesday around noon when President Barack Obama came in for a surprise visit. Miller started broadcasting Obama’s visit on Periscope with his smartphone. A peeved Obama ordered Miller to stop filming–and Miller obeyed.

Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th. That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana. Some of the U.S.’s closest allies fared even worse, including Saudi Arabia...