Free Republic

Times are tough all over for the liberal media. CNN and MSNBC have lost a painful amount of their already small audiences, the Washington Post is retooling their approach because people stopped reading, and now the same whirlwind has reached the New York Times. The liberal paper is telling members of their editorial board to take new positions at the paper, or take a buyout, and a walk, presumably. Over the last eight years, vast swaths of the American media torpedoed whatever credibility they had left in their pursuit of Trump. They pushed countless lies and conspiracy theories and now...

The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.When President-elect Donald J. Trump picked “the Great Elon Musk,” the world’s richest man, to slash government spending and waste, he mused that the effort might be “the Manhattan Project of our time.” On Wednesday, that prediction looked spot on. Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill. In more than 150 separate posts on X, Mr....

Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews. It was a grand event, rich in humor and tinged with nostalgia. I asked a middle-aged partygoer for his thoughts on his lost homeland, and his reply has stayed with me: “I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.” It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po...

Twitter users ripped into The New York Times after the liberal newspaper wrote an extensive piece attempting to paint tech billionaire Elon Musk as a man with immense "white privilege" in an apartheid South Africa riddled with "misinformation" and racism. On Thursday, The Times tweeted the article along with the commentary, "Elon Musk grew up in elite white communities in South Africa, detached from apartheid’s atrocities and surrounded by anti-Black propaganda. He sees his takeover of Twitter as a free speech win but in his youth did not suffer the effects of misinformation." Meanwhile, reporter John Eligon promoting the piece,...

When a new motion was filed by John Durham on Friday night that included information about Hillary's Clinton's campaign and its activities toward Donald Trump's campaign, the mainstream media largely said "meh" and ignored the development (though Townhall did not, and Vespa's story is here). Well now The New York Times is trying to defend its decision...by insulting its readership. In what was apparently another example of the mainstream media's selection bias clouding its judgement and causing it not to cover stories that are negative about their pals in the Democrat party, the usual suspects were oddly silent on the...

NEW YORK – The New York Times is looking into the work of one its reporters following accusations that he plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal and other sources. The paper published an editor's note online Sunday and in papers Monday that said reporter Zachery Kouwe "appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations." The Times said Journal editors pointed out similarities between a Journal story from Feb. 5 and Times pieces later that day and on Feb. 6. The Times said a search found other similar examples taken from media outlets like Reuters and...

Eric Lichtblau’s story in the New York Times, June 22: Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN Eric Lichtblau today, on CNN’s Reliable Sources: "“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret." ---snip---- Here, courtesy of Chris Fotos, is a bullet-point list of quotes from the story saying that the...

Bill Keller was on Face the Nation this morning. -----, and you have to see it to believe it. You know the utter arrogance you have seen in this man’s written defenses of his exposure of classified information? It comes across triple-strength on video. He says the White House has reacted strongly because it’s an election year, and it’s “red meat” to beat up on the New York Times. Also, the White House is just embarrassed that they can’t hold onto their secrets. Also, this wasn’t a secret anyway, because the terrorists knew about it. (He shows no sign of...

Bill Keller and Dean Baquet issue a joint pronouncement today defending their decision to publish classified details of a safe, legal, and effective counterterror program. There’s little new here. The editors don’t try to argue that the program was illegal, that it had inadequate safeguards, that Congress was not briefed, or that the program was ineffective. In the absence of any such argument, their decision cannot be defended, and they make no serious effort to try. Instead we get the same platitudes and arguments we have seen from each of them individually: they hate terrorism too; they took the decision...

This morning’s New York Times editorial on the Swift program displays the same reasoning and persuasive powers we have come to expect from this venerable institution. And I mean that most sincerely. The misleading claptrap begins in the very first paragraph: There have been a handful of times in American history when the government has indeed tried to prosecute journalists for publishing things it preferred to keep quiet. None of them turned out well — from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the time when the government tried to enjoin The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon...

BILL KELLER ISN'T VERY BRIGHT, or else he thinks you aren't. How else to explain this passage in his apologia for the Times' publication of classified information about the terrorist financial surveillance program: "Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)" I realize that the Times' circulation is falling...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 4 — Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy. In Iraq, which depends almost exclusively on oil for its revenues, the officials say that any diversion of money to an insurgency that is killing its citizens and tearing apart its infrastructure adds a new and menacing element to the challenge of holding the country together. In one example, a sitting member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the...