Free Republic

We wonder if the folks over at Truthout.org are rethinking their affiliation with reporter and serial fabulist Jason Leopold. Leopold, you may recall, is the freelance reporter who was caught making stuff up in a 2002 Salon.com article, self-admittedly "getting it completely wrong" in pieces for Dow Jones, and had his own memoir cancelled because of concerns over the accuracy of quotations. Leopold's latest addition to his application for membership in the Stephen Glass school of journalism came on May 12 of this year, when he got what appeared to be the scoop of a lifetime. Now writing for Truthout.org,...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- As newspaper publishers convene in New York on Tuesday for the Newspaper Association of America's annual midyear review, one theme that will standout among many will be whether or not impatient and frustrated shareholders can be placated while the industry makes the long transition to an online-driven model. Judging by the way things unfolded at Knight Ridder (KRI), and may now possibly be unraveling at Tribune Co. (TRB), the answer appears to be no. Last November, Knight Ridder put itself on the block after its two of its biggest institutional shareholders demanded that that the company pursue...

A drive-by Media (sometimes referred to merely as a MSM) is an attack on a person carried out with one or more reporters, usually automatic RNCFL (ReportNowCheckFactsLater) or sub-standard reporting from a news briefing room, (or a cubicle on the 40th floor of an unnamed MSM headquarters). They often result in the falsely Reporting of innocent conservatives because the objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of false reporting without attention to accuracy. The CBS - American News Anchor, ""Gunga Dan" Rather, is believed to have invented the drive-by Reporting. Drive by reportings were popular in...

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth" "I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC...

Web media is the dominant at-work media and No. 2 in the home, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association. A research project, conducted by Ball State University's Center for Media Design, tracked the media use of 350 people every 15 seconds. The subjects represented each gender, about equally, across three age groups: 18 to 34, 35 to 49 and 50-plus. The people were monitored by another person for approximately 13 hours, or 80 percent of their waking day. "Someone actually came into their homes and workplaces and had a handheld computer, every 15 seconds registering their...

Peter Handke, perhaps the most preeminent and creative European playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist alive today, has recently been embroiled in a cultural scandal that involves character assassination (his) through ad hominem attacks and calumny, censorship by a faceless theatre bureaucrat, and the relentless abuse of the Parisian bien-pensants, those guard dogs of French palatial conformism. Like in America, getting out of the core political line in France leads to either being utterly ignored or, when famous, being dragged into the mud and punished for crime of lese-majesty. The confluence of intellectual cowardice, financial and strategic interests, and navel-gazing, backslapping...

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Richmond Times-Dispatch said Saturday it fired a reporter for fabricating part of a story and has begun investigating his other work. Paul Bradley, 51, who worked in the newspaper's northern Virginia bureau, was dismissed Friday, the newspaper reported. The article, published May 17, was intended to gather reaction in Herndon to President Bush's speech on immigration. Bradley's fabrications, the Times-Dispatch said, included an interview that did not occur with the director of a center for day laborers and the misrepresentation that he had visited the center by using a Herndon dateline. Managing editor Louise C. Seals...

Truthout doesn't say they were wrong, they don't say they were right. They say: The Rove Indictment Story as of Right Now By Marc Ash, Fri May 19th, 2006 at 04:23:39 PM EDT :: Fitzgerald Investigation On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story's title. The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story....

This just in from source at Black Rock: He/She is at pre-season party in The Hamptons. Other CBSers (The Suits) are there as well. The Suits confirmed: Ran Rather's contract at CBS expires in August. He has not been offered ANY type of renewal. There may be some tiny dollar (the exact fee never to be disclosed) face-saving deal but that's it, Dan is out. This comes after he "resigned" from CBS Evening News position last year in an attempt to stop the bloodletting of advertisers at CBS. As we all know, the primary cause was not so much Rather's...

The major newspapers around the nation are all chirping in harmony that all is well in newspaper-world: the Audit Bureau of Circulation's report showing huge declines in the nation's largest cities' largest newspapers are only down because internet news readership is up. Don't believe it. Two seemingly contraditory trends are happening at once: Readership is down the most in precisely the areas where the network effect would most help newspapers establish a dominance through synergism with their web sites and their hardcopy readerships: the large, urban markets. At the same time, readership is holding steady the best at newspapers whose...

According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News , veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. "For several months now," Kruh writes, "as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon." What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert's columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column...

John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military." With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair? Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we...

NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Thursday cut both Knight Ridder Inc. (KRI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and McClatchy Co. (MNI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) to junk status, citing McClatchy's acquisition of its bigger rival newspaper publisher. In mid-March, No. 9 U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy said it would buy Knight-Ridder Inc. for $4.5 billion to become the second-largest U.S. newspaper chain. Downgrades, particularly to junk, tend to raise a company's borrowing costs. Moody's cut both Knight Ridder and McClatchy's bond ratings to the top junk level of "Ba1" from the bottom investment-grade rating of "Baa3." The new combined...

SEATTLE Former Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll urged editors Wednesday to guard against what he called a “milking" of the industry and increased corporate ownership whose only purpose is to make money. During a luncheon speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here, Carroll, who serves as a guest lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, told a roomful of editors that their business needs to defend the ideas of journalism and “rock-turning” against increased budget-cutting and bottom-line demands. Under Carroll, the Times won a shelf of Pulitzers a few years back, but he exited the...

The Politburo Diktat has a handy chart that reveals all of the connections between Mary McCarthy and the usual Democrat suspects: (hat tip: Brainster) (click on image to enlarge) If you think this chart better resembles a tea leaf than a logical network of personal and professional connections, then you're probably a healthy skeptic that likes to wait until all the facts come out and all versions of events are vetted before rushing to judgement.....

Yes,my comments on the Duke Lacrosse Case! At the exact moment it would be almost impossible to believe the Duke Lacrosse story could get any more bizarre comes one Raleigh News & Observer Columnist Ruth Sheehan in her April 13th column with a personal unsubstantiated allegation of rape against a male or males in her life TWENTY ONE years ago! ( or twenty, read carefully, it makes no sense) In two short sentences she publicly slanders every male with whom she has associated over the past two decades as well as a goodly number of females who she apparently could...

CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Entertainment announced plans to shut down the UPN and WB networks and form a new broadcast network, The CW, to be launched in the fall of 2006. The companies said the new broadcasting network will be a joint venture between Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS, with each company owning 50%. The companies said that CBS and Warner Bros. Entertainment will cease operations of their respective UPN and WB networks. The companies said WB and UPN networks will continue to broadcast their respective network schedules independently until the fall. The companies also announced...

The newspaper's problems are being watched closely in the battle between one and new media. SAN FRANCISCO — When Jeffrey Zalles needed a new cashier for his coin laundry in the South of Market district, his help-wanted ad in the San Francisco Chronicle brought just four responses. So Zalles posted a notice on Craigslist, a San Francisco-based network of websites that specialize in classified advertising. His cyber-ad drew 400 applicants. Zalles found his cashier and hasn't relied on the Chronicle since, advertising instead on the Internet and the city's array of free papers. The venerable Chronicle is struggling, and defections...