Free Republic

While mainstream media organizations continue to worry about foreign meddling in our last election and the next one, we should take a look at how they themselves are meddling. Without letting any of the media off the hook, the ViacomCBS behemoth deserves special consideration. The threat from its meddling in the upcoming presidential election is a case study of a multi-headed media organization's direct practice of attempting to defeat one candidate and help boost and cover for the other. Anything Russia did in the last election, or any of the last 20 elections, pales in comparison. These days, the company...

MTV is breaking down barriers regarding sexuality and has announced its dating show cast this year will be the first ever in United States to all identify as sexually fluid. In June, the broadcast network will air another season of 'Are You The One?' — which stars 16 men and women in their 20s, who will be dropped off in Hawaii in hopes of finding the 'perfect match' while also competing for a $1 million grand prize. The cast members this year, though, are exclusively singles who identify as sexually fluid, meaning gender does not limit their options when finding...

The narrative propagated by CBS, actor Michael Weatherly, and writer-producer Glenn Gordon Caron is deceptive and in no way fits with how they treated me on the set of the television show “Bull’’ and retaliated against me for simply asking to do my job without relentless sexual harassment. This is not a “he-said/she-said” case. Weatherly’s behavior was captured on CBS’s own videotape recordings. I feel compelled to chronicle what actually happened after The New York Times published a story about how CBS handled my allegations. I declined to be interviewed for that piece because I wanted to honor the terms...

To offer a corporate tribute to a national school walkout for gun-control measures, Viacom -- which owns several major cable networks -- "will suspend regularly scheduled programming for 17 minutes" at 10 am on Wednesday. Liberal student activists will take over MTV's Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat accounts. MTV, VH1, Logo, Comedy Central will have orange (the color of gun violence prevention) logos until the "March for Our Lives" on March 24. Their press release is headlined "Viacom to Support Courageous Youth Activists Who Have Had Enough of Gun Violence." Or one could suggest "Viacom to Stick It to the NRA."

MTV awards go political in Trump era By Afp Published: 21:50 EDT, 27 August 2017 | Updated: 21:50 EDT, 27 August 2017 MTV's glitzy awards show took a political turn Sunday at a tense time in the United States, with the music world's top stars taking aim at white supremacists and President Donald Trump. The Video Music Awards, generally watched more for pop culture moments than for news of the winners, also gave Taylor Swift a platform to show off a new, darker image as she premiered her new video. Pop superstar Katy Perry, the host of the gala, floated...

Typically when the “bleep” sound is heard on television, it means that someone used an expletive or took something to the extreme. But not for Broad City, the Comedy Central show co-created by Ilana Glazer. On that show, when you hear the bleep, it means someone said the word “Trump.” The horror. Following in the footsteps of Hollywood’s attempt to take down the president at every opportunity, the fourth season of Broad City will bleep out every use of Trump’s name on their show. As llana Glazer told USA Today in an interview, “There’s no airtime for this orange (person).”...

Dissent may be the highest form of patriotism (when the GOP has power, anyway) but circulating nasty drawings of political opponents has to be the lowest form of dissent. And that’s what the left’s giant temper tantrum has come down to.   According to LA Weekly, “illustrators from studios including Disney, Sony, Nickelodeon and DreamWorks have gotten together to collaborate on the picture book Not My President. A crowdfunding campaign is in progress, and proceeds will support the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and L.A. Justice Fund.” The drawings are all too predictable: Trump as Fascist, Trump as diaper-clad infant, Trump supporters as racists. This...

Stephen Colbert’s first night on the Late Show proved he’s still every bit the left wing hack he was on Comedy Central. He spent almost six solid minutes bashing Donald Trump but not a single joke about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal or crazy Socialist Bernie Sanders. In the course of his anti-Trump routine, he even put Donald Trump’s face on screen with an image of the KKK.

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed that the jailing of Rowan County, Kentucky Democratic Clerk Kim Davis “could be the last front in a losing battle against same-sex marriage” as she had been refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage on June 26. While the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all led with Davis being jailed and how she had cited her Christian faith in declining to issue licenses, they have yet to mention in any of their coverage in past three...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump sought to redirect incoming fire at rival Republican Jeb Bush, saying that Bush has a "huge" problem with women and he is by far the better candidate with that demographic. Trump excoriated Bush for saying "I'm not sure we need half a billion dollars for women's health issues" at a speech in Tennessee last week. Bush later said he misspoke, and he was only questioning the federal funding that goes to Planned Parenthood. "This is worse than what Romney did when he blew 47 percent of the vote with his ridiculous statements," Trump said, referencing a...

For Jon Stewart, this certainly isn’t the high note he wanted to go out on. The guy who prides himself on speaking truth to power, as the anti-establishment, take-to-both-sides-hero for millennials everywhere… reduced to a stenographer for a sitting president so thin-skinned about any and all criticism that he needs to dictate his own comedy. As originally reported in Politico by Darren Samuelson, the outgoing Daily Show host met with President Barack Obama twice in the past four years but failed to let anyone know about it. It was only then that Stewart — who loves to play the “I’m...

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

It looks like Spike TV didn’t find Clint Eastwood’s joke about Caitlyn Jenner during the Guys’ Choice Awards taping on Saturday very funny. A rep for the male-centered network said the reference will be cut from the telecast. “We will remove the reference in the version that will air,” David Schwarz, Spike TV senior vice president of communications, said in a statement. During the taping, while presenting “San Andreas” star Dwayne Johnson with a special award, Eastwood compared Johnson to other athletes-turned-actors like “Jim Brown and Caitlyn Somebody.” Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, made her debut as a...

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush. George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials. It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with...

The First Lady had a pretty special first date with the man who would go on to become both her husband and the president of the United States — and now, Michelle and Barack Obama’s romance is about to get its own movie. Entitled “Southside With You,” the indie film will follow the young couple on their first date in Chicago’s South Side.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Six kids from the block where Michael Brown was killed tell the truth about race with some humor in video.Six kids from Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot and killed, have something to say about the state of racism in a humorous video called "Hey White People: A Kinda Awkward Note to America by #Ferguson Kids" created by the T-shirt company FCKH8.com. "Sometimes white people are like, 'But is racism still a thing?' Spoiler alert: Duh. Just because Beyoncé is on your playlist and you voted for Obama, doesn't mean that our generation has seen the end of racist...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

When I interviewed The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart two years ago for a documentary I co-directed, The Muslims Are Coming!, one of the questions I posed to the talk show host was: Do you think your show has had an impact on issues? Surprisingly, Stewart responded “no.” At first, my co-director, Negin Farsad, and I thought Stewart was being unduly modest. But he was actually being sincere. Stewart went on to list issues he had railed against for years—such as media sensationalism—and noted that nothing tangible had changed despite his best efforts. But if that question were put to Stewart...

In the early hours of Thursday morning, “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” on CBS featured a guest musical performance with vehemently anti-religious lyrics, including a line wishing the mother of Jesus “would’ve had an abortion.” Kristeen Young was host Craig Ferguson’s guest, performing her song, “Pearl of a Girl,” which takes all three of the world’s major, monotheistic religions to task for allegedly repressing women. “I never knew I was a girl until they stooped to tell me,” Young sang in the first verse of her song. “I never knew I was disturbed until they dropped three volumes...