Free Republic

“Even the AP is acknowledging that there is deception” in modern media, said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, host of “Washington Watch,” on Wednesday. Perkins referenced an Associated Press headline published on January 31, which read, “Grave peril of digital conspiracy theories: ‘What happens when no one believes anything anymore?’” That’s “a very profound question,” said Perkins, but he added that the AP failed to “get to the real problem and the source or the solution.”

To give scale to the growing insignificance of broadcast news networks, consider this fact-based analysis. Tucker Carlson released a two-minute video on Twitter that had 72.7 million views in 24 hours. The entire cable news industry combined, every show on every channel, over the corresponding timeframe had 53.1 million views. ... Tucker Carlson had more viewers than the combined total legacy media cable news networks combined. Yeah, there are more of us than them…. and Tucker Carlson is the most powerful man in the media right now. “When honest people say what’s true … they become powerful. At the same...

Joe Biden capped off his lengthy vacation without stepping out of his beach house for three straight days, and the self-proclaimed “defenders of democracy” in legacy media do not seem to care that much as to what exactly he is doing behind closed doors. ... All week/weekend long, the White House reporters camped out in Rehoboth Beach, Del., waited for Biden to leave for a nice bike ride or walk on the beach. And waited. But after decamping from Wilmington for his beach house in Rehoboth on Saturday evening, the president didn’t do much of anything,” Politico’s writers observed. “As...

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle blasted the legacy media for its collective dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election. In a piece published on Saturday, McArdle began by noting what a friend coined was a "growing 'epistemic closure' on the right" that filters out what is reported in the distrusted liberal media. "This frets the mainstream media. It is our job to provide information, so naturally we worry when so many customers aren’t buying… In fact, we in the mainstream have been so busy denouncing ‘fake news’ that we failed to notice we’re developing a...

Journalists, other liberals agree: Press went easy on Trump, too critical of Biden White House officials have been hosting secret meetings with journalists in an effort to "reshape" coverage of the Biden administration that they view to be unfair. CNN reports: The White House, not happy with the news media's coverage of the supply chain and economy, has been working behind the scenes trying to reshape coverage in its favor. Senior White House and admin officials—including NEC Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti, along with Ports Envoy John Porcari—have been briefing major newsrooms over the past week, a source...

The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of our elites and the institutions they control is a sign of their weakness and impotence and loss of control.If you want to know how well our elites are managing to control the discourse, consider this: a pair of “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems shot to the top of iTunes chart rankings this week.Rapper Bryson Gray’s song hit number one despite getting banned from YouTube on the ridiculous pretext that it contains “medical misinformation,” while rapper Loza Alexander’s “Let’s Go Brandon” hit number two. Both of them beat out Adele’s “Easy On Me,” which was knocked down...

What happens if COVID death rates plummet to the point of no longer being a pandemic threat? The media will turn it on Trump.> Legacy media became predictably hysterical after President Donald Trump’s speech Friday defending American exceptionalism at one of the nation’s most iconic monuments, Mount Rushmore. “We will state the truth in full, without apology: We declare that the United States of America is the most just and exceptional nation ever to exist on Earth,” Trump proclaimed from the South Dakota Black Hills. “We are proud of the face that our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and...

Everything 'flattening the curve' represented has been abandoned and now thousands have needlessly died, millions are out of work, and cities are burning. At one point, the theory of “flattening the curve” was ubiquitous. The basic concept was that lockdowns could slow the spread of coronavirus, and this was of great importance since, as we were told at the time, “We can’t stop this virus.” The narrative went that if the virus were to spread unchecked, hospitals would be overwhelmed and both people with coronavirus and those needing medical attention for other ailments would die from the lack of access...

VIDEO Of all the things that YouTube does that irritates YouTubers the most, one of the worst is the way they shove Legacy Media channels down our throats. It's like they are flooding the zone of the search results on anything that is in the news with Legacy Media at the expense of YouTubers. Sort of like using Legacy Media as a cloaking device to shield YouTubers from each other. The solution to this is to set up a Legacy Media filter in their search function. That way, people who really do want to see Legacy Media coverage can...

President Trump on Monday lashed out at the media, targeting The Washington Post in particular, as he remained fixated on coverage of his ongoing attacks on four progressive congresswomen. In a series of tweets, the president claimed the "Mainstream Media" has "gone bonkers," and accused the media of pushing "Radical Left Democrat views." "It has never been this bad," Trump tweeted. "They have gone bonkers, & no longer care what is right or wrong. This large scale false reporting is sick!" "Fake News Equals the Enemy of the People!" he added. For a second straight day, Trump pushed back on...

Journalism is dead. It wasn’t murder, or old age, it was suicide. Journalism died after drinking a cocktail of contempt, arrogance, ignorance, and enough narrative to kill a whale. Its corpse rolls on, meeting deadlines, publishing stories, and forming cable news panels continuing to extol the virtues of the poisons that killed it. They deserve your skepticism and your contempt.The latest nail in the media’s credibility coffin landed Friday night. It was a bombshell story that declared, “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according...

A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” The Daily Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.” Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were, we were told, lots of...

By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president...

When Ellen DeGeneres dances with Wolf, you know the TV cable news world has boogied right on past another respectability barrier. Not that Blitzer, CNN news' unflappable Iron Man, doesn't deserve to have some fun on Ellen's show. But as CNN advertises its "objectivity" in the face of stiff competition from blatantly polarized and more popular cable networks, it risks stepping onto a different slippery slope: irrelevant circus act. And I'm not talking about reporter John King's weird relationship with his digitized, political blingtronics board. "Black people love Wolf Blitzer!" shouts CNN's hyper-animated morning news anchor, Tony Harris. Wait. Isn't...

“Hello? Daily Planet? I think you should get a photographer over here to North Berkeley because there is a UFO hovering over Solano, and you need to report on it.” “The city is chopping down this really beautiful tree on my street and the neighbors are all out here in tears, and we want the Planet to stop the buzz saws.” “There are some really nasty-smelling barrels that someone dumped on the corner and they kind of look toxic, so can you figure out how to get rid of them?” This last request to the Daily Planet newsroom phone was...

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer. The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks' programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming. That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable...

Obviously, the "main stream" media are hard of hearing and seeing. About 2 million mad-as-hell taxpayers assembling in Washington, D.C. for the largest-ever (most well-behaved ever, most respectful ever) protest did not make it onto their radar screens (or our TV screens). They need our help. Maybe we cannot repeat an assembly of 2 million mad-as-hell taxpaying patriots in one place, but surely those who longed to go and couldn't would love to be a part of Operation "Can You Hear Us Now?" I'll bet for every one patriot who went to D.C. there are 10-20 more who wished they...

So Mayor Gavin Newsom tells The Economist that if The Chronicle were to disappear "People under 30 won't even notice." Hey Mayor Twitter -- if you can hear us from wherever you are outside San Francisco -- that's not what you told CBS5 back in February when asked about the possible effect of a Chronicle closure. "I think it's a very serious concern for all of us," Newsom said waaaaaaaaay back then. "It is part of the fabric of our community. You cannot have a world-class city without a world-class newspaper. So I think it is a very serious concern...

Everyone has an opinion about the dying newspaper industry, including Gavin Newsom. The SF leader turned gubernatorial candidate/media pundit apparently told The Economist if the Chronicle were to fold, "People under 30 won't even notice." This guy looks awfully familiar If that's the case, then people under 30 won't even notice you haven't been our mayor for more than a year. So, Gavin, whether you like it or not, it's time to burn through those frequent flier miles to come back here and take care of your constituents.

Why are most newspaper reporters and editors liberal? I've been working in the business for more than 20 years, and I can't give a quick, definitive answer to the question. But I do think a contributing factor is that editors, like other managers, tend to hire and reward staffers who think as they do. They see their positions as neutral, which is human nature - and is reinforced by the fact that the folks in the desks around them vote the same way they do. When they read about complaints of media bias, editors write the criticism off because they...