Free Republic

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former intelligence worker who leaked details of NSA data collection to journalists, first approached the Washington Post with his trove of information, The Post's Barton Gellman reported on Sunday. But when the paper wouldn't meet Snowden's conditions, he went to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, who first published the story about the NSA collecting Verizon customers' phone records. The Post did get the PRISM story in the end, and along with it Gellman's rather thrilling account of dealing with his mysterious source, a former NSA analyst and Booz Allen Hamilton employee who used the code name Verax....

Barton Gellman posted a story cobbled from his chat transcripts with Snowden late Sunday, which contained this exchange concerning the whistleblower's conditions to keep the story the Post's: To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source....

Politico reported today that net income at The Washington Post Co. dropped an astonishing 85 percent from the first quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year. The newspaper division posted an operating loss of $34.5 million over that period. It looks as if the Post, like many other newspapers around the country, may have entered an age of decline. Newspapers just aren’t as profitable as they once were. The proliferation of online news outlets has given consumers a plethora of free news sources to choose from. But another factor may be the Post's persistent liberal bias,...

The Washington Post ignored the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell until pro-life advocates raised such a ruckus it was forced to acknowledge it. Now the newspaper that acts as a frequent apologist for the pro-abortion movement is blaming conservative news outlets with a pro-life editorial stance for not covering it. The only problem is the Post has its facts wrong. It’s so wrong the Post may deserve a couple of Pinocchios or more, as it is famous for giving to politicos who bend the truth. As the newspaper claims: The charge of liberal media bias is perhaps undercut...

.... Over the next two days, the justices will consider two of the weightiest civil rights cases in years, both about the continuing struggle of gay men and lesbians to obtain equal recognition under the law. On Tuesday, the court will consider the constitutionality of Proposition 8, .... On Wednesday, the justices will turn to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a law enacted in 1996 that bars the federal government from offering benefits to same-sex couples, even if they were legally married in their home state. The justices have many options as they consider how to rule. But more...

Without informing readers in the story or elsewhere, on Monday night The Washington Post deleted its explicit claim that the Dominican prostitute who recanted her allegation against Sen. Robert Menendez had appeared in a video posted to The Daily Caller. In a story by investigative reporter Carol Leonnig, the Post initially reported at 4:47 p.m. that “the women’s videotaped claims, with their faces obscured, were played on the conservative Web site The Daily Caller. The news site reported that ‘the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic.’”

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward continues to break ranks with his Obama-loving colleagues by holding the President's feet to the fire concerning the looming budget sequester. Just days after he wrote a piece in the Post exposing the inconvenient truth that it was indeed the White House that initially proposed sequestration during the 2011 debt ceiling debate, Woodward appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe Wednesday saying that Obama's decision to not send the USS Truman to the Persian Gulf as a result of these deliberations was "a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time" (video follows with...

Though she's not getting much credit for it, it's just a fact that most of the important media scoops of late have been coming from Betsy Rothstein at FishbowlDC. Today marks another scoop and, better still, another moment to savor in the slow-motion collapse of the mainstream media. According to Rothstein's reporting, a round of 54 layoffs are planned at the once-legendary Washington Post. It's amazing how quickly a left-wing newspaper will turn into the stereotypically evil corporate maven. The Post is not only trying to hush-hush the layoffs, but also using cold, calculated words like "inefficiencies" to describe the...

Another journalist fell prey to a fake story on a satirical website, and reported it as news. This time, a blogger for the Washington Post reported—wrongly—that Sarah Palin, the former Republican candidate for vice president who recently parted way with Fox News, had moved on to the Al-Jazeera network to reach millions of "devoutly religious people."

Sarah Palin got to take another jab at the “lamestream media” on Tuesday after The Washington Post issued an embarrassing correction on a false report that the former Fox News commentator is joining Al Jazeera. The Washington Post’s attention-grabbing mea culpa followed reporter Suzi Parker’s claim that Palin signed a deal to be a host and commentator for the Qatari-based network. Parker had called the faux-scoop “a cautionary tale about what can happen with politics and celebrity meet.” The story became a cautionary tale of another sort, however, when it emerged that the “news” came from The Daily Currant, a...

On Thursday afternoon, less than a day after the Times' story was posted online, its ideological rival the Wall Street Journal revealed that it, too, had been attacked by Chinese hackers. On Friday, the Washington Post, following a scoop by a former staffer, was forced to admit that its networks had been penetrated for years. The Journal provided fewer details than the Times, but said that "in the most recent incident," hackers had managed to break into computers in the Journal's Beijing bureau in mid-2012. From there, the Journal said, the intruders were able to access the Journal's worldwide computer...

Per Twitter WaPo/ABC tracking poll has Romney up 1, 49-48. Sample moved from D+4 Fri to D+6 Sat to D+7 today. Romney up 15 w/ indies. WaPo/ABC tracking Thur-Sat has same turnout adv for Dems as 08. In 08 Obama won by 7%, today he loses by 1. Yep... moved from D+4 two days ago to D+7 today. Yet Romney maintained 1 point lead even through the shift.

What happened to the ABC/WP Tracking Poll? It is supposed to be released at 5 pm EST, every day. So far, nothing has been released today. I am becoming paranoid that they are dumping "special sauce" on their data showing a Romney lead, in order change the narrative in time for the Sunday talkfests.

Oct 25, 2012 5:00pm Romney Hits the 50 Percent Mark, With a Clear Edge on the Economy Mitt Romney has seized further advantage on economic issues at the core of the 2012 campaign, taking him to 50 percent support among likely voters vs. 47 percent for Barack Obama – Romney’s highest vote-preference result of the contest to date. The difference between the…

The Washington Post has decided to back President Obama for reelection — acknowledging the shortcomings of his first term: President Barack Obama is better positioned to be that navigator than is his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. We come to that judgment with eyes open to the disappointments of Mr. Obama’s first term. He did not end, as he promised he would, “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr. Obama is committed to the only approach that can succeed: a balance of entitlement reform and revenue increases. Mr. Romney, by contrast, has embraced his...

I may just poll my comment section and pass that off as a Battleground State poll. The Washington Post explained that rather curious “Swing State” subsection in today’s national poll where Obama had an incredible 11-point lead relative to his national lead of only 2-points: The WaPo-ABC ‘swing state’ poll numbers, explained Monday’s Washington Post-ABC News poll adds to the evidence of an emerging, important dynamic in the presidential contest showing closer parity nationally than in key battleground states, where President Obama has had clear leads.

With just seven weeks of campaigning left before the November election, President Obama holds a clear lead over Mitt Romney in Virginia, buoyed by growing optimism about the state of the country and fueled by a gender gap working in his favor, according to a new Washington Post poll. Obama leads his Republican rival by 52 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. Among all registered voters, the president leads by 50 percent to 43 percent, a margin identical to that recorded in a survey in early May. That indicates that Romney has made up little apparent ground against Obama...

Since Wednesday, the Obama-loving media have been working overtime trying to disprove a number of statements made by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan during their respective speeches at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. On ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will called out Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler for claiming Ryan had mislead Americans about a GM plant closing in Janesville, Wisconsin (video follows with transcript and commentary):George Will Calls Out Washington Post Fact-Checker MATTHEW DOWD, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: From my perspective, what happened at this convention is that nobody is calling on it, or maybe a few people are calling...

"Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues." "I am not here dreaming of (or worrying about) a world in which computers have displaced the printed word, and us too. I could find no one at this conference who would predict the demise of the newspaper. No one. All saw an important place for us." Those words come from a remarkable letter written by Robert Kaiser, then the Washington Post's newly appointed managing editor, to publisher Donald Graham following a 1992 conference on the future of digital media. Kaiser had attended the event after being...