Free Republic

On Thursday, Minneapolis station WCCO reported on guns and crime in Minnesota. Anchor Frank Vascarello's introduction: "More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains low." Imagine that. Reporter Pat Kessler also treated more guns and less crime as paradoxical. Reporting on crime and guns has been infested with the "Fox Butterfield effect." It is named after a New York Times reporter, who in November 2004 was surprised that: The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell. Later, a puzzled Butterfield referred to "the paradox...

In his second speech on Sunday morning's terrorist massacre in Orlando, Florida, President Barack Obama said  on Monday that "the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet," that "we see no clear evidence that he was directed externally," and that "this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time." The press, led as usual by the Associated Press, is certainly cooperating with those characterizations. Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has clearly made up her mind that...

Layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Columbus (OH) Dispatch and others involved in its production "somehow" failed to detect the creation of an obviously false caption to a campaign rally photo of Donald Trump taken by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer. The photo, taken on Friday at Trump's St. Louis appearance by the Post-Dispatch's David Carson, had the following caption, apparently added surreptitiously, when it appeared in print at the Columbus Dispatch: "Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally in St. Louis. He was scheduled to go to Chicago for a rally, but canceled as his supporters became violent."  If any press...