Free Republic

It is entirely self-serving of me to point out that the classified ads in the Pioneer Press seem to be making a comeback, but I think we are past the point of pretending to hide my affection for newsprint. I am not claiming that the classifieds are as busy as a small-town telephone book, or even a small-town church bulletin. I am merely suggesting that I am noticing a revival of sorts, particularly in my fields of misadventure. In Classic Antique Autos for Thursday, June 7, for example, the category immediately following Volvo and just before 4WD Trucks, there was...

'In the beginning, there must be a news story' before blogs and punditry can exist, 'NewsHour' anchor says. By Patrick George AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Tuesday, November 06, 2007 Although traditional journalists face declining profits and increased competition from pundits, bloggers, comedians and different types of Internet media, Jim Lehrer said, the screams of panic coming from newsrooms aren't completely merited. "Well, I say, 'Calm down, please,' " the anchor and executive editor of the PBS show "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" said to a packed auditorium at the University of Texas on Monday evening. "I believe we mostly have fear...

LONDON, June 15 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Servicecut its credit rating on Tribune Co. (TRB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) one notch on Thursday, sending its debt to "junk", because of the U.S. publisher's plans to increase its debt load to return cash to shareholders. The publisher and broadcaster's plan to buy back stock had already prompted downgrades from Moody's, and rivals Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings to the lowest level of investment grade at the end of May. In a statement, Moody's said it cut its rating on Tribune to Ba1 from Baa3 and assigned a stable outlook. The downgrade...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Verizon Communications (VZ) and CBS Corp. (CBS) on Monday said they have reached a retransmission consent and video-on-demand agreement for CBS shows. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal includes analog, digital, multicast and high-definition rights to programming on CBS owned-and-operated television stations; local video-on-demand content from those stations; and CBS Television Network video-on-demand content, including series such as "CSI," "NCIS" and "Survivor." Verizon said it will offer the programming on Verizon FiOS TV, its new fiber-optic TV service, which is now available in parts of seven states

Posted on Fri, Feb. 17, 2006 Limbaugh makes error about Brown's race Associated Press WASHINGTON - Brown is black in the eyes of Rush Limbaugh. When Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett was forced out of the Democratic primary in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio, the conservative commentator criticized The New York Times for not saying that the Democrats' preferred candidate is black. Limbaugh later found out from e-mails to his nationally syndicated radio show that the candidate, Rep. Sherrod Brown, is, in fact, white. "Uh, Sherrod Brown's a white guy? Then I'm confusing him with somebody. OK, I'm sorry,"...

For all of us at this "small newspaper in South Texas" or as the host of MSNBC's "The Situation" Tucker Carlson says "podunk paper," it's enlightening — and sometimes embarrassing — to look at our big brothers and sisters in the national media on a story we each are covering. The first step we could all see coming. Someone should have given White House press secretary Scott McClellan a blindfold as he stood at the podium Monday afternoon. The White House press corps spent the previous day stewing about how the White House had failed to deliver a press conference...

Ted Koppel kicked off his neo-pundit career by delivering a stern global warming speech in New York while outside a merciless snowstorm bore down on the Eastern Seaboard in a brutal blast of freezing -- Oh, wait -- that was Al Gore, wasn’t it? I tend to get all these neo-pundits mixed up. Mr. Koppel’s post-Nightline era more correctly began with a January 29 Op-Ed in the New York Times which is actually quite similar to Mr. Gore’s address both in fervent presentation and excruciatingly bad timing. Which may explain my confusion. Ted, likely grateful to now be immersed in...

The liberal media have been screaming about federal departments or agencies sponsoring or buying news here and abroad. But they were strangely silent when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced on December 13 that the State Department would launch an Edward R. Murrow Journalism Program to influence foreign journalists. It seems that a federal program honoring an icon of the liberal media is considered an acceptable mix of journalism and state. The Rice announcement buys into the myth perpetuated by the George Clooney movie, "Good Night and Good Luck," that Murrow, a CBS journalist who became director of the U.S....

Craig Newmark's stubby fingers tap at the keyboard in an irregular, accelerating rhythm, akin to kernels in a microwave popcorn bag approaching peak heat. Clack. Click-clack. Click-ity-click-ity-click-ca-click-clack. Newmark peers into one of three computer monitors on his home office desk. The screen displays, in plain black-and-white text, the focus of Newmark's daily life -- much of it, anyway. It's in an e-mail program called Pine, favored by geeks of all ages, partly because it renders the mouse nearly useless. Pine users are, like Newmark, the type who derive an almost perverse pleasure from deleting a message by simply pressing the...

When I was linking to CBS News for my Stupefy Me report earlier today (directly below), I came across this gem of a story (FR THREAD ON THE CBS ARTICLE: Blogs: New Medium, Old Politics NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2004). It appears that CBS News not only is striking back at the blogs and bloggers that took out Dan Rather and embarrassed their entire organization, but they are also supporting censorship of us rascally citizens. Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining...

Saturday after Thanksgiving is the traditional day to purchase stamps for my annual Christmas card mailing... [snip] So, shortly before noon on that most recent post-turkey day, I sauntered into a neighborhood "U.S. Postal Store," [snip] and headed for the stamps-only section. I quickly found a packed wall of display racks offering a panoply of first-class postage devoted to the various elements of the year-end holiday season, specifically: 1) Christmas, featuring colorful, contemporary designs of Santa Claus with an array of inanimate, secular Yule symbols; 2) Kwanzaa, with not just one but two stamps promoting a totally fabricated "harvest holiday"...

CHRISTMAS IS NOT THE TARGET: Much has been written and discussed in talk radio and on the internet this holiday season as to why certain decisions are being made when it comes to certain symbols of Christmas. I have seen or heard stories along these lines on all of the following topics just in the past 24 hours... 1. TARGET vs. Salvation Army 2. Macys banning "Merry Christmas" 3. Bloomingdales banning "Merry Christmas" 4. The Denver Parade of Lights banning "Christmas" floats 5. Maplewood Schools in New Jersey banning all Christmas and Hannukah music from its Winter Concert. 6. Bloomberg proclaiming the NYC no longer...

Just in time for Christmas, America's two largest news magazines devote this week's cover stories to debunking the story of Jesus' birth. Among the conclusions in Time and Newsweek: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem; there is little evidence of three kings following a star, and the story of the virgin birth may have been borrowed. "The Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology," Newsweek writes in examining the Sunday-school version of the birth of Christ. This may be unwelcome "news" to most Americans. A Newsweek poll...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - A "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Dylan that was set to air Sunday about his new autobiography marked the third Simon & Schuster book this year to get exposure on television's most venerated newsmagazine. The publisher's marketing department might want to take all the credit. But it probably doesn't hurt that S&S and the network "60 Minutes" calls home, CBS, are owned by the same parent company, Viacom. The newsmagazine stirred up angst among media watchdogs in March for not disclosing that fact on-air during a report on the S&S-published book about the Bush administration...

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times Co. told investors Thursday that its fourth quarter and full-year earnings would come in below Wall Street estimates on weaker-than-expected advertising in the fourth quarter and higher costs for promotion, printing, distribution and newsprint. The company also said it would begin expensing the cost of stock options and its employee stock purchase plan. It also said that it would no longer provide estimates for full-year earnings, focusing instead on quarterly estimates, due to the greater uncertainty in the current environment for media companies. The company, which also publishes The Boston Globe and...

"Prior to his broadcasting career, Williams worked in the White House during the Carter administration, beginning as a White House intern."

Good night, Tom. An emotional Tom Brokaw, 64, signed off from the "NBC Nightly News" yesterday for the last time, thanking viewers of his top-rated evening newscast for watching him, his co-workers and especially "The Greatest Generation" of World War II veterans he has profiled so often in several books. "Whatever the story, I had only one objective — to get it right," he said in the closing moments of the broadcast as he recounted what he has learned after nearly 23 years in the anchor chair. "[The Greatest Generation] did not give up their personal beliefs and greatest...

NEW YORK Feeling a bit lost lately? You should, at least according to a compendium posted today at Jay Rosen’s popular PressThink Web log, because the biggest loser on Election Day was not John Kerry but the mainstream media. Daniel Henninger, writing in The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, put it this way: "It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on. Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big." "I was interested...

Hoo-boy. It's a hot time in the old blogtown. The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather's announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after 24 years. "This has been a simply outstanding month," crowed a poster on http://www.freerepublic.com. "Bush won, Arafat died, we're kicking ass in Fallujah, and now this!" Typically, the above-quoted "Freeper" didn't get that Rather may be down, but he certainly isn't out. When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he...

"If Walter Cronkite was around today," USA Today founder Al Neuharth proclaimed in a speech in South Dakota last week, "I think John Kerry would be President" because of "the trust the people in Middle America had in Cronkite, when he returned from Vietnam opposed to the war, public opposition soon followed." As recounted by the Daily Republic in Mitchell, South Dakota, in addition to boasting of the influence of Cronkite's bias, Neuharth "said he thought if McGovern had won the presidency in 1972, U.S. troops would have pulled out from Vietnam a lot sooner with a lot fewer casualties,...