Free Republic

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,...

CNN’s new boss said the network faces an “existential crisis” because of cord cutting — and that he plans to eventually pivot away from cable TV toward a subscription-based streaming model similar to YouTube and TikTok. “There are plenty of things we have to fix at CNN,” Mark Thompson, the former New York Times and BBC executive who was hired by Warner Bros. Discovery to dig CNN out of its third-place slump in the cable news race, told Financial Times. He also hinted that more cost-cutting measures are in the offing, saying that there are “likely to be significant opportunities...

Television has been a staple of American culture for over half a century, and along with it, the commercials that go with it. In fact, the television commercial is so integral to the medium of TV that the two are nearly inseparable! From simple product placements to elaborate marketing campaigns, TV ads have been a mainstay in our lives since the early days of television. Let’s take a closer look at the evolution of television ads over time.

With only 19.5 million viewers, Sunday night’s Academy Awards bombed with the fourth-lowest viewership in Oscar history.

The eagle has landed. President Joe Biden made a surprise appearance Monday on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" alongside comedian Amy Poehler, who he joined on stage to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Meyers' show.... ...Poehler left the stage and just Biden and Meyers got to more serious subjects. Addressing criticism about his age, the 81-year-old president noted former President Donald Trump is also older, while taking a dig at his Republican rival's own mental acuity and policy ideas.

My Sony flat screen TV is old and is rebooting at least once a day. And the pimps at Sony have overridden my "preferences" to hawk their "woke" alerts and advertisements. All this on the home screen. Since I'm going to upgrade anyway, is there a brand that doesn't pimp the Psuedo Cause du jour when it fires up?

All those obnoxious pharmaceutical commercials that get laced into just about every television and cable “news” program that airs in the United States these days might seem like they are simply about selling more drugs and getting people hooked, but Big Pharma’s true agenda is actually much more sinister than that. Former pharmaceutical industry insider Calley Means spoke to Tucker Carlson recently about what he described as an “open secret” within the pharmaceutical industry. In essence, Means says that Big Pharma is buying the media with all those ads, which allows the drug industry to control what gets broadcasted on...

One of the most unexpected legacies generated by The Simpsons is the repeated insistences in which the creative team have some form of clairvoyancy, with so many real-world events appearing to be predicted well ahead of time by Springfield’s most famous family. With that in mind, it was inevitable that an episode removed from the airwaves in the aftermath of the September 11th terror attacks gave rise to a predictive conspiracy theory, even if it was nothing more than a matter of coincidence and a show of respect. The first episode of the ninth season, ‘The City of New York...

Though it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller and the wave of revisionist westerns that came out of Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles doesn’t need any artfully hazy Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography to upend Old West mythology. True, it is a comedy where a horse gets cold-cocked, a Native American chief (one of three characters played by Brooks) speaks Yiddish and Count Basie’s orchestra makes an appearance on the plains. Yet from the opening sequence, where Chinese immigrants and recently freed Black slaves work under...

I've collected more ATSC 3.0 over the air television news. Unfortunately it's not great news: I learned that all ATSC 3 tuners will have certificates that will expire after a certain length of time and there's been very little progress towards getting gateway devices to work.00:00 - Intro00:59 - DRM Petition Update02:23 - Tuner Expiration Dates04:13 - All ATSC 3 Devices "Phone Home" For Decryption04:48 - Zero Progress on Gateway Devices05:44 - ATSC 3 statement10:08 - Broadcaster Moving 4k to Streaming Only11:07 - Could Cable Access Channels Use Unwanted Spectrum?13:58 - ConclusionAll ATSC 3 TV Tuners will EXPIRE & More...

Three's Company star Suzanne Somers passed away at age 76 on October 15- one day before her 77th birthday - in Palm Springs, California. Now her husband Alan Hamel, 87,has said that 'very strange' things are happening inside the house they shared together. In one day, three unusual things occurred that made him wonder if the blonde beauty's spirit was in their home, he told PageSix.

A decades-long legal battle over the part of the NFL's television package may soon be decided and the verdict could cause a broadcasting earthquake that would affect all of the league's 32 teams, Deadline has reported. The $6.1 billion lawsuit was first filed in 2015 when Sunday Ticket was on DirecTV and was bought by "2.4 million Sunday Ticket subscribers in the residential class and nearly 50,000 bars, restaurants, and other establishments in the commercial class," Deadline reported. The essence of the class-action suit is that fans were compelled to pay higher than market prices to the NFL to watch...

Sopranos creator David Chase is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his iconic show’s premier and lamenting the death of television’s exquisite Golden Age. In an interview with the Sunday Times, the 78-year-old who changed television, but sadly not forever, said, “Yes, this is the 25th anniversary, so of course it’s a celebration. But perhaps we shouldn’t look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral.”

Joyce Randolph has passed away at the age of 99. The actress - who played Trixie Norton on the TV show The Honeymooners - died in her sleep in New York City on Saturday, her son told TMZ on Sunday. The star was in hospice as she was suffering the effects of old age, it was added. She played one of the main characters on the popular sitcom The Honeymooners, which aired from 1955 until 1956. The show was centered around Jackie Gleason's rough NYC bus driver character Ralph Kramden who was always yelling at his wife Alice, played by...

A live broadcast by Ecuadorean television station TC was interrupted on Tuesday by armed people who obliged staff to lie and sit on the floor, as shots and yelling were heard. The people, wearing balaclavas and largely dressed in black, were seen wielding large guns and accosting huddled staffers on the live feed, which eventually cut out. Some of the invaders gestured at the camera and someone could be heard yelling "no police".

The early 70's tv show, starring Jack Elam and Gary Busey

Fool's Ball Week 17!!!!!!!!!! Your home for all things Fool's Ball! In Memoriam Danny Lee (BENDER2)

Andre Braugher, the two-time Emmy winning actor who starred in the hit television series “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” died Monday after a brief illness. He was 61. Braugher’s publicist Jennifer Allen confirmed the news of his death to Variety. Braugher was known for his role as Captain Raymond Holt on the police procedural comedy series “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” from 2013 until 2021. His character’s stoic and no-nonsense personality made him an instant fan favorite of the show, especially when paired with Andy Samberg’s hotshot Det. Jake Peralta in a scene. He won a lead actor Emmy for...

"War. War never changes."This actually looks pretty good. It's got a strong cast coming together also. Anything with Michael Emerson is bound to be good.

Pro-Ukrainian saboteurs hacked into Russian television channels in Crimea overnight to air President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech vowing to liberate the occupied peninsula. In a further humiliation to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, the pranksters renamed all 20 channels in Crimea’s IPTV network “Putin is a d—head,” as seen in videos shared online. In his brief address to the people of Crimea, who have lived under Moscow’s control since the region was illegally annexed in 2014, Zelensky promised that the occupiers’ presence there “will not last forever.”