Free Republic

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama. Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility. “Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report. “Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing,...

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama. Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility. “Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report. “Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing,...

Declan McCullough dives into the East Anglia CRU exposure and delivers a well-researched and fair look at the controversy for CBS News. McCullough looks at the various e-mails, including portions that have not yet gotten much attention from the media, and concludes that the CRU has acted without transparency. He also shows why the data itself has become suspect, as well as the modeling on which anthropogenic global-warming activists rely for stoking public demand for action:

Sarah Palin says she was blindsided by Katie Couric's devastating interviews last year because John McCain's aides lulled her into thinking the CBS anchorwoman was a fan. In Palin's new book, "Going Rogue," the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee reveals that her handlers talked up Couric as a working mom - just like her - who was struggling with low self-esteem and even lower ratings. Couric liked and admired her, advised campaign media honcho Nicolle Wallace. The interviews would be a nice favor. The scouting reports were so sympathetic, Palin writes, that that she almost began to "feel sorry" for...

At the end of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer offered commentary on the cause of the mass shooting at Fort Hood: “That doctor [Major Nidal Hasan] should not have been at Fort Hood. I don’t care how hard-up the Army is for mental health professionals....sadly, this shows the Army still does not take protecting soldiers’ mental health as seriously as it does training them to shoot.” Schieffer went on to argue: “And then there is the other part that often happens in government. Don’t deal with the problem, shuffle it off to somewhere else. When he...

CBS News skepticism regarding the number of jobs saved by the Obama Administration’s stimulus legislation raised ire at the White House. CBS News reporter Chip Reid aired a report revealing that many of the Administration’s claimed “job saved or created” totals were either exaggerated or false. Separately, CBS investigative reporter Stephen Stock worked undercover to expose a pattern of fraud at medical clinics operating in South Florida. This is part of an estimated annual $60 billion worth of fraud perpetrated in the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. “We’re putting CBS on notice,” said Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel....

On the dirt he has on Sarah Palin: "There are some things that I have that are huge. And I haven't said them because I'm not gonna hurt her that way... I have things that can, you know -- that would get her in trouble, and could hurt her. Will hurt her. But I'm not gonna go that far. You know, I mean, if I really wanted to hurt her, I could, very easily. But there's -- i'm not gonna do it. I'm not going that far." Says he's referring to things Palin did while she was governor of Alaska....

In August 2009, CBS News made a simple request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for public documents, e-mails and other materials CDC used to communicate to states the decision to stop testing individual cases of Novel H1N1, or “swine flu.” When the public affairs folks at CDC refused to produce the documents and quit responding to my queries altogether, I filed a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the materials. Members of the news media are entitled to expedited access, which I requested, since this was for a pending news report and on an issue of...

Showing that the media sees every act by the Obamas as an historic achievement, at the end of Sunday’s Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer was amazed by the romping of First Lady Michelle Obama: “Michelle Obama took it to another level as she set records as the first First Lady to run barefoot across the White House lawn. She also became the first to jump rope there.” After explaining how Mrs. Obama “took it to another level,” Schieffer praised her efforts as example to the rest of us: “But whatever her skills at jumping rope, she performed a mean...

Back on October 7, when the Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal deficit had ballooned to a massive $1.4 trillion during President Obama’s first year on the job, Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News did not tell viewers. But Couric finally caught up to the bad news after the Obama White House put out its final numbers on Friday afternoon. Couric disclosed the news in a brief item on the October 16 Evening News that never mentioned Obama by name: “It’s the biggest IOU Uncle Sam has ever written. Government figures out today show for the last fiscal year, which...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Bush administration says it's treating CBS New as a political opponent, and executives at the top-rated news network are responding that the White House can't tell straight reporting from opinion. White House communications director Karen Hughes recently told Time magazine that she thinks CBS offers "opinion journalism masquerading as news," and kept up the criticism on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday and in The New York Times Monday. CBS News president Sean McManus issued a statement Monday, saying: "It's astounding the White House can't distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part." And...

Dan Rather's legal wrangling slogs into its third year: His lawyer vows he will appeal a New York court ruling Tuesday that tossed out the former evening news anchor's $70 million breach-of-contract suit against CBS Corp. The complaint "must be dismissed in its entirety," ruled the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, saying there was no breach of contract because CBS had honored the "pay or play" clause in Rather's contract. That is to say the company had continued to pay Rather his annual salary -- $6 mil -- even after he left the "CBS Evening News"...

NEW YORK – A New York court on Tuesday dismissed Dan Rather's $70 million breach of contract lawsuit against CBS Corp., noting that the network continued to pay the anchor $6 million a year even after he left the evening news broadcast.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York state appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former TV newsman Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS Corp in which Rather claimed he was made a scapegoat in a scandal over a 2004 report on then-President George W. Bush's military record. The ruling by a panel of judges of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division said Rather's $70 million complaint should be dismissed in its entirety and that a lower court erred in denying CBS's motion to throw out the lawsuit. CBS said it considered the legal fight "effectively over" and put an end...

Here is video of Glenn Beck talking with Katie Couric about his comments on Barack Obama being a racist. Beck pointed to Obama's more than 20 years of sitting in the pew listening Rev. Jeremiah Wright's vitriolic statements against white people as evidence that he was comfortable with that kind rhetoric. (Video)

For much of 2008, the TV cognoscenti assumed that Katie Couric would be anywhere but in the “CBS Evening News” anchor chair by now. But despite some of the lowest ratings in the newscast’s history, she says she will remain there until her contract expires in 2011. Borrowing from Mark Twain, she said cheerfully in a recent interview, “I think reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.” What changed? For one thing, Ms. Couric and her bosses say her departure was never actually imminent, despite reports to the contrary. They also credit her work ethic and her election coverage —...

A New York judge on Monday rejected CBS Corp's bid to dismiss former TV news anchor Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit claiming he was fired over a controversial election-year report on former President George W. Bush's Vietnam War-era military service. New York State Supreme Court Justice Ira Gammerman set a December 22 hearing in the case and directed that testimony be taken from witnesses, including Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom Inc, which controlled CBS at the time. "Let's get this case moving," Gammerman said. "I would really like to get this case ready for trial." Rather, 77, sued CBS,...

To Set The Record Straight, first pubished in 2008, is much more than a history of the 2004 presidential race, and the effects the Swiftboat veterans had on that campaign. TSTRS uses the Swiftboat veterans' story to focus upon the role the mainstream media has played in shaping American public opinion over the past forty years, from the Vietnam War until the recent past. When Senator Kerry decided to make his military record a central part of his campaign, the Swiftboat veterans who knew him the best were angered and sickened. They had had enough, and they decided literally “to...

On Friday’s CBS Early Show, White House correspondent Bill Plante highlighted President Obama’s latest media blitz on health care reform and touted a new piece of the PR arsenal: "The President does have a new partner in his nonstop effort to sell health care, it’s the First Lady....Michelle Obama will be more like a stealth weapon in the battle for health care, giving it a softer touch."

Forget Bipartisanship, Comity or Civility - Schieffer Says Mindless Meanness Has Invaded the Public Commons (CBS) That was not a State of the Union speech we heard the other night, but it had all the trappings - and when that Congressman hollered "You lie!" at the President, we did get a snapshot of the nation's state. It was not a pretty picture. The country is in an angry mood - people are frustrated, tempers are short, congressmen are being shouted down at town hall meetings (where constituents sometimes show up with guns), and at rallies like the one yesterday in...