Free Republic

There are days when you get up and stare at the front page of the newspaper and you just have to put the paper back down. May 30 was one of those days. After escaping for the long Memorial Day weekend, one returns to the real world Tuesday morning. But those who read The Washington Post are reminded that some people live forever in the world of make believe. Witness the front-page headline: "Clinton Is A Politician Not Easily Defined: Senator's Platform Remains Unclear." That is to politics what "The DaVinci Code" is to theology. When you pick up the...

Profile: Indecency Warrior's Campaign Peaking- Brent Bozell's Push May Spur Legislation By Doug Halonen Television Week May 15, 2006 If federal lawmakers, as widely anticipated, soon move to approve legislation that cracks down on indecent television programming, the multibillion-dollar media industry will have to concede defeat largely to one man: L. Brent Bozell III. Mr. Bozell, 50, is president and founder of the watchdog Parents Television Council, the group widely credited for spurring the Federal Communications Commission to hand down millions of dollars of indecency fines to broadcasters over the past couple of years. The PTC is leading the lobbying...

Every morning I log onto the worldwide web, not because I'm a computer geek, but because I want to understand what's going on in the world. I've long since turned my back on the print media for accurate and timely news reporting, and it's getting to the point where I can't even bring myself to watch a televised news broadcasts anymore, simply because tv networks can't seem to report on much of anything these days without insulting my intelligence with some sort of politically correct blather. ... I need a television news network that doesn't slip misleading statements like "after...

Will former White House reporter Helen Thomas ever go away? She's now written up a jeremiad perpetuating the myth that our media are mere whimpering lap dogs of President Bush, tinny arfs all around. She hones in on that old, diseased chestnut that the liberal media went all soft in the "rush to war" in Iraq. Helen's harangue appeared in the appropriate platform: The Nation magazine, which advertises on its Web site the slogan: "If you think it's time to impeach Bush, then it's time for you to subscribe to The Nation." In a preview of her forthcoming book on...

It was some six years ago, and my youngest boy, Reid, along with his best friend Mitchy, both 3, had browbeaten me into taking them to the matinee of the "Thomas and the Magic Railroad" movie. We had settled into our seats, they with their popcorn and soda, and I with the mission of an afternoon nap -- a goal I was well on my way to achieving when I was jolted awake by the dialogue in the preview of the upcoming "Rugrats" movie. Scene after scene concluded with a comedic punchline revolving around soiled diapers, flatulence, mucus and...

(AP) NEW YORK Children's television is studded with violence, much of it darker and more realistic than when Road Runner dropped an anvil on Wile E. Coyote's head, a watchdog group reported on Thursday. The Parents Television Council analyzed 444 hours of kids' daytime programs last summer and detailed 2,794 violent incidents, even after sifting out "cartoony" moments. That's 6.3 incidents an hour -- more than the PTC found in prime time aimed at adults during a 2002 study. Programs like "Teen Titans" on the Cartoon Network and ABC Family Channel's "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" often feature intense fights with...

Time and Newsweek put Dick Cheney’s hunting accident on their covers this week, a dying story already eight days old. The shooting victim, Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, went home after apologizing for all that Cheney had to go through, meaning the thoroughly juvenile media frenzy that followed. Time and Newsweek no doubt imagined Cheney delayed alerting the press until Sunday so that they couldn’t put him on their Earth-changing covers last week. We’ll show you, they said, fists shaking at being so obviously dissed. But we already know every single bit of the story, having heard it hundreds of times...

This year's Martin Luther King Day celebration was a wild and woolly collection of left-wing blather. In Washington, showing remarkable feats of amnesia that he was ever vice president in a corrupt administration, Al Gore gave a speech claiming President Bush was a law-breaking president and his illegal actions a threat to the survival of our democracy, an extraordinary accusation for even this man to make, given the same policies were executed by the Clinton-Gore administration. In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin announced that God wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city again. When challenged that this might make...

Since November, the media have carried around Rep. John Murtha around on their shoulders like a conquering hero for his opposition to the war in Iraq. They’ve thrown around the words “war hero” like clowns throwing candy at a parade. Murtha was broadcast far and wide attacking Vice President Cheney for his five deferments from Vietnam, suggesting these chicken hawks don’t like any suggestions about how to fight a war. If Murtha were a Republican accusing a Democrat like this, we know what would happen. The so-called nonpartisan, objective, “mainstream” media would either (a) totally ignore him as an irrelevant,...

The year 2005 is ending as it began, with another successful election in Iraq and a liberal media still flapping around trying to find other controversies to submerge it. It does not matter to them that a Gallup poll found that 74 percent of Americans express confidence in their military, but only 28 percent express confidence in their newspapers or TV news outlets. The "mainstream" media excels in excoriating the performance of nearly everyone else, but acts as if nothing they do should be held up as ineffective, inaccurate or just plain absurd. That's why the Media Research Center and...

  Newsweek's Bush-in-the-Bubble cover By Brent BozellDec 14, 2005 They call the magazine "Newsweek," but in today's 24-hour news cycle, a weekly magazine that is seen as a recycler of old news is courting a death wish. To avoid this, Newsweek gives us haughty pieces of attitude, not only in the cover stories, but on the cover itself. Remember the cover on Iraq with the words "Bush's $87 Million Mess"?   This week's edition is the latest in a series of let-'er-rip Bush-bashing covers. It pictures President Bush floating encapsulated in a bubble with the headline "Bush's World. The Isolated...

Brian Williams has wrapped up his first year anchoring the “NBC Nightly News,” and he is presenting himself as this year’s new face of the TV news kingdom. He’s a knight on a white horse raging against poverty and indifference, especially in the poorer sections of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. He believes the issues of race, class, oil, war, and the environment make Katrina the “monumental story of modern times.” The NBC anchor shared his thoughts with Howard Kurtz on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Kurtz asked the obvious question: Has Williams become a crusader? “I don’t think so,” said Williams....

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The news media elite are to the left of the public in several policy areas related to the war on terrorism, a poll "of opinion leaders and the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Relations," found. While 56 percent of the public believes "efforts to establish a stable democracy" in Iraq will succeed, 63 percent of the news media elite think it will fail; a plurality of 48 percent of the public think going to war in Iraq was correct, but 71 percent of the...

After the last election, a Newsweek poll found 67 percent of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, and 82 percent believe Jesus is the Son of God. Exit polls also found the No. 1 issue for Americans is "moral values." Hollywood declares (boasts?) it is delivering to the marketplace products demanded by the market. If that is so, why is the entertainment industry so incapable of looking at numbers like that as an opportunity to mine a vastly untapped source of riches? The massive turnout for Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ was supposed to change Hollywood's...

The Washington Post recently reported, and then mocked, plans at the FBI to put a few field agents on pornography prosecutions. One unnamed FBI agent who, according to the Post was awarded anonymity since "poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing," derided the idea, saying, "I guess this means we've won the war on terror." The Post reporter also recycled jokes made at FBI headquarters, such as "Things I Don't Want On My Resume, Volume Four," and "I already gave at home." It was a cheap and easy dig. No one puts pornographers in a league with Osama...

Bill Clinton has stepped back into the spotlight for the latest round of public yak-yak. His foundation created something grandly called the "Clinton Global Initiative," a hot-air meeting of monarchs and global bureaucrats. He granted interviews to ABC, NBC and CNN, and all three networks genuflected before him on cue. Let's first dismiss the "news" that emerged, because it was another Clintonian yawner. Clinton bashed President Bush for supporting tax cuts and accused Republicans of intentionally lowering living standards for our children. In other words, it was the same old class warfare, Democrat-style, and worse. Clinton just can't stay in...

A major news event follows a very routine pattern. First, we get the hard news phase, where reporters relate the unfolding dramatic facts. In the second phase, those same reporters become analysts, commentators passing moral and political judgment on the story. By its nature, the first phase tends to be devoid of bias. But the second phase often comes loaded with politicized gotchas and predictable liberal editorializing. Hurricane Katrina and its flooding aftermath in New Orleans is a good example. No one can fault reporters' emotional statements as they eyewitness the tragedy. Nor is it inappropriate for them to ask...

America's most prominent media watchdog plans to launch its own blog on Tuesday with a goal of further exposing and combating the perceived liberal bias in the media. Newsbusters.org is the latest project of the Media Research Center, which is also the parent organization of Cybercast News Service. The new blog will feature posts by some of the nation's most widely read experts on the issue of media bias, an issue that Michael Chapman, press secretary for the Media Research Center, said "is almost overwhelming." "Thirty to 40 million viewers are getting news from sources with a liberal bias," Chapman...

The bomb-go-boom networks Brent Bozell August 3, 2005 My son's friend Todd Jones just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. At a celebratory gathering at his parents' home, we chatted a while, and I asked him what he thought were the biggest problems facing the military. Without hesitating, he shot back: "The terrorists and the media."  In a rare moment of balance on CBS, Army Capt. Christopher Vick echoed that sentiment: "I think it's hard for Americans to get up every day and turn on the news and see the horrible things that are going on here, because...