Free Republic

Climategate is a global household name. No cat has ever emancipated itself more completely from the bag. It is a world-wide scandal – thanks to the internet. Yet, as its ramifications proliferate and dominoes continue to fall, the most repeatedly asked question online is: how can the mainstream media ignore this? Well, we know the answer to that: the MSM are in thrall to the leftist consensus. End of story. But let me pose a follow-up question that may be becoming more imminently relevant. Are the mainstream media capable of surviving their sidelining of the number one global scoop? Are...

Concerned that “casual” and “irregular” so-called journalists are “confusing” the American people. Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have introduced legislation that attempts to “draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate purveyors of news.” The legislation, Senate Bill 448, would define a legitimate journalist as a person working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, a recognized publisher or broadcaster of news. Those falling outside this definition would be denied the privileges granted to established news media under freedom of the press. “The American people need to be protected from being misled by unauthorized sources,” Feinstein...

BY JOHN LAIRD THE COLUMBIAN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Tea party patrons, rejoice! Unite! Or for some of you, I suppose, to arms! Your grass-roots movement has gained such momentum as to warrant a national blue-ribbon, round-table, fact-finding, rootin' tootin' hoedown! The first National Tea Party Convention is set for Feb. 4-6 at Nashville's Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Convention Center. For details, visit the Web site www.nationalteapartyconvention.com. Hurry, and get an early discount on registration: $558.95 (excluding hotel) to show up and protest excessive spending by the government. Headline speakers will include the electrifying and eloquent Sarah Palin, a renowned expert...

Gay newspapers in several U.S. cities, including the Washington Blade, shut down on Monday, as the company that owned them, Window Media, abruptly went out of business. Window Media had been in serious financial trouble, but employees said they had expected a reorganization or sale, not a liquidation. “We found out when two of the corporate officers were waiting for us when we got to work this morning,” said Kevin Naff, editor of the Blade, a 40-year-old paper that was one of the most important publications written for a gay audience. “It’s not a complete surprise. The abruptness of it...

Sept. 1, 1939 Nazis Invade Poland Overcrowding in Germany Cited Sept. 2, 1939 For Nazis, a Hard Time To Be Europeans Neighbors’ Suspicions Caused Stress, Resentment Sept. 3, 1939 In Central Europe, Other Countries Invade Their Neighbors, Too Sept. 4, 1939 When Fuhrers Snap Rallies, Pogroms Took Toll on Leader

Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli found himself in the middle of an altercation Friday evening between Style reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia and editor Henry Allen, but will not say whether the two have been reprimanded by the paper. “We take this incident seriously and will address it appropriately,” Brauchli told POLITICO, declining to comment further. Reports that Allen punched Roig-Franzia surfaced Monday morning on FishbowlDC, Washingtonian and City Paper (which reported Brauchli was traveling). Multiple Post sources independently confirmed to POLITICO that Roig-Franzia got hit while defending colleague Monica Hesse from harsh criticism leveled by her editor, Allen. Allen, according to...

A few months ago, needing to cut my monthly budget way down, I examined every place where I could cut. One of the things I noticed was how much money I was spending on a liberal newspaper that was continuing to jack its price while constantly shrinking in size and increasing in content from other news agencies (i.e., less NJ news, which is the reason I bought it in the first place). So I quit the Star-Ledger cold turkey. Other than the comics and the weekly food sections, I discovered that I don't miss it. On Sundays, an acquaintance is...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Daily circulation figures for US newspapers released on Monday provided more bad news for the embattled industry. Average daily circulation fell more than 10 percent in the April-September period compared with the same period last year, accelerating a slide that has led to bankruptcies, closures and cutbacks in newsrooms across the country. Average circulation for 562 Sunday newspapers was down 7.49 percent. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures also confirmed a claim made earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal that it had become the largest US newspaper by weekday circulation, leapfrogging USA Today. Of...

"NEW YORK, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The plunge in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating, according to the latest figures released on Monday, as more people cancel their subscriptions and publishers cut distribution and sales of discounted copies."

NEW YORK — The Wall Street Journal has surpassed USA Today as the top-selling daily newspaper in the United States. The Audit Bureau of Circulations won't be releasing its latest figures until Oct. 26, but the Journal said Wednesday that it gained about 12,000 subscribers in the April-September period, compared with a year earlier. That puts its average Monday-Friday circulation at 2.02 million. The Journal claimed the top spot last week after USA Today released its circulation figures early, but had not given out specifics until Wednesday. USA Today, which has long been No. 1, said last week that it...

After months of hunting for a buyer, The New York Times Company said on Wednesday that it had decided not to sell The Boston Globe, the newspaper it threatened last spring to close because of mounting losses. The Globe did not draw high bids, and the company chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said last month that the paper’s finances had improved enough that the company no longer believed it had to sell if the offers were not attractive enough. Executives said this year that the paper was on track to lose $85 million in 2009, before making painful cost cuts that...

John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading:

Dinosaurs are a popular topic of study, whether in the public imagination or in scientific research. The scientific community, however, has a dirty little secret regarding the manner in which that research is handled. If dinosaur DNA doesn't "look like chicken" (or a crocodile), it will most likely be discarded as "unreliable data" prior to publication--and thus be effectively censored from public access. Why? Because evolutionary scientists are committed to only publish dinosaur DNA data that match their naturalistic tale of origins. Despite the amazing discoveries of soft tissue from dinosaur bones,[1] dinosaur DNA research results (and other dinosaur "connective...

A new study by the National Newspaper Association has found that subscriber cancellations have dropped from previous levels. From FishbowlNY In an effort to survive their recent economic struggles, newspapers across the country have increased home delivery and single copy prices

It’s not just conservatives who accuse the media of showing a liberal bias. A new survey from the Sacred Heart University Polling Institute shows that 89.3 percent of Americans believe the national media played a sizable role in helping to elect President Obama. And 69.9 percent of respondents view the national news media as intent on promoting the Obama presidency, while 26.5 percent disagreed, and 3.6 percent were unsure. More than half of those surveyed, 56.4 percent, said the news media are promoting Obama’s healthcare reform without objective criticism. Another 39.3 percent disagreed, and 4.3 percent were unsure. A majority,...

Independent News & Media is likely to close its flagship London title The Independent by Christmas, the publishing group's second biggest shareholder Denis O'Brien said on Friday. "There's no point in us as a company subsidising a newspaper that really nobody wants to read in the United Kingdom," O'Brien told Bloomberg TV in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Irish Economic Forum. "It's not a relevant newspaper anymore and this newspaper's going to be closed by Christmas,"said O'Brien, who has been at odds with the company's board over plans to refinance a 200-million-euro debt issue that was meant...

The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows. Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media’s performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last...

More than $10bn in advertising disappeared from US media markets in the first six months of this year, according to new data that show intense pressure on media owners and ad agencies as they search for other business models. Preliminary figures from Nielsen show a 15.4 per cent year-on-year decline in US advertising revenues, the largest drop for any period in the decade since the marketing and media measurement group began compiling such reports. The study showed sharp differences in the behaviour of different media and product categories, with cable television the only medium on which ad spend increased, up...

The following is a memo from ABC News president David Westin to ABC News staff today: Today, Charlie Gibson announced to his colleagues at World News that he has decided to step down as anchor effective at the end of this year. I attach below Charlie's full email. I have asked Diane Sawyer to serve as the next anchor of World News, and she will assume that position in January. -snip-

....Platinum has replaced or laid off six of the Union-Tribune’s top eight managers since taking over, and it cut 18 percent, or 192 people, of the staff three days after the deal was completed. It has also hired consultants to monitor the productivity of reporters and editors and is looking to rent out the top two floors of the newspaper’s headquarters.

...Some of the problems that have beset music magazines are familiar from discussions about the publishing industry's woes in general: Readership's down, advertising's down, the old guard has been slow in adapting to the Internet. But like newspapers and shelter titles, music magazines have proven especially vulnerable. ...leave aside the question of whether Blender and Vibe somehow deserved their undoing... and whether Rolling Stone and Spin deserve their present difficulties.... 1. There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover. Say Beyoncé—or Kanye, or Kelly Clarkson, or any of the few musical acts that still...

July 21, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Famed CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite has been lauded in the media since his death on Friday, at the age of 92, with tributes paid not only from secular media, but even Vatican Radio and other Christian news sources.  But while remembered by many as "the most trusted man in America," many of Cronkite's more radical, but lesser known views, would be considered repugnant even to many of his greatest fans.For instance, up until his death Cronkite served as honorary chair of the Interfaith Alliance, an organization dedicated to countering the influence of conservative Christianity on...

The network news divisions are enjoying the unprecedented coverage they’re providing President Obama, not just because they support him, but because White House specials are cheap and do well in the ratings. “Obama should change his middle name from Hussein to Nielsen,” quipped longtime TV reporter Gail Shister in a story by David Bauder of the Associated Press. It seems like a never-ending spin cycle: laudatory coverage leads to popularity, which leads to higher TV ratings, which leads to more laudatory coverage. But it’s not working anymore. Behind the glittery curtains, Obama’s polls are falling. Worse, some ink-stained wretches are...

Thousands of people have come out to show their support of the new government in Honduras. But the media is reluctant to cover or report accurately what has happened, and what is happening in Honduras. But these Honduran bloggers are determined to get the word out and set the record straight in light of media bias, and the irresponsible support Obama and other world leaders are giving to this would-be usuper. More-

The country’s third-largest newspaper chain looks perilously close to bankruptcy. An agreement between McClatchy Co. and its banks puts the country’s third-largest newspaper chain at risk of defaulting on its debt by the end of the year, according to credit analysts. If that happens, Bank of America and other creditors could either show leniency and rework the terms of their agreement or push the publisher of 30 daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee, into bankruptcy. In the current environment, banks are less likely to sustain companies on life support, said Shelly Lombard, an analyst at Gimme Credit....

Thirty years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini used audio cassettes and videotapes to spread his message of dissent and Islamic revolution across Iran. The old theocrat and his followers knew how to exploit the audio-visual media available to them to stoke rebellion. A generation later, young Iranians have again taken to the streets, this time to protest the "landslide" re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vote that his reformist opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, insists was rigged. But this is a very different media environment. The Iranian government can ban and restrict the professional journalists who are trying to cover the demonstrations....

We hear Platinum Equity has been doing some serious tire kicking at the bankrupt Sun-Times Media Group, which is not only ready but eager to deal. Platinum Equity is a Beverly Hills-based private-equity company that, in its own words, finds itself "typically working with 'strategic sellers' that seek to shed a non-core asset in order to refocus their business operations." The STMG is willing to shed everything -- in one swoop or in bits and pieces. This March Platinum Equity bought the formerly prosperous, influential San Diego Union-Tribune -- for what online newspaper analyst Ken Doctor said was reportedly a...

Nielsen Media Research has conceded making an error and is performing a recount after the company's ratings on Tuesday initially indicated that ABC's "World News" most likely had its smallest audience ever. The dispute with Nielsen was a downer for the network after the entertainment division—keyed by the National Basketball Association finals—won in the prime-time ratings for the first week since September. It was ABC's most-watched week in the summer in five years, according to Nielsen. ABC asked Nielsen for an investigation after its ratings showed "World News" averaged 6.2 million viewers last week (4.3 rating, 9 share), its worst...

ABC is refusing paid ads for its health care program at the White House. Thus they're refusing even a paid-for alternative viewpoint. Conservatives for Patients Rights requested the rates to buy a 60 second network spot immediately preceding the broadcast of the Town Hall meeting. Here is statement from Rick Scott, chairman of Conservatives for Patients Rights. "It is unfortunate - and unusual - that ABC is refusing to accept paid advertising that would present an alternative viewpoint for the White House health care event. Health care is an issue that touches every American and all potential pieces of legislation...

When thousands of Iranian citizens flooded the streets to protest the controversial results of last Friday’s presidential election, news viewers in the U.S. rushed to Twitter to protest what they saw as a lack of coverage of Iran on CNN. Their complaints caused an explosion in the use of a new Twitter hashtag, #CNNfail, which became one of the top ten trends on Twitter on Saturday and continued on Sunday. Snarky tweets included, "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran," "The revolution started on the weekend, people! Give them a break. ," and "Howie Kurtz:’It was middle of...

From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life. And since the British sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the moral panic phenomenon in the early 1970s as hysterical overreactions to imagined threats to social order, no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring...

Boston Globe employees, in rejecting contract concessions, let anger trump self-interest. Now, says Alex S. Jones, a longtime observer of The New York Times Company, their future looks even dimmer. The Boston Globe Newspaper Guild’s narrow defeat of the New York Times Company’s demands for contract concessions has almost certainly made it less likely that the paper can be sold. This is a bitter irony, as many of those casting "no" votes presumably want a sale to happen. The Globe reports that The Times has put the paper up for sale and hired Goldman Sachs to manage the process. But...

You just know it has to be killing the folks at CNN and MSNBC that Fox News has completely overwhelmed them in the ratings. In fact, the combined number of viewers of both of those networks still doesn't match that of Fox News. Could it be that the public is sick of the fawning coverage given to the Obama administration by most of the mainstream media and look to Fox News for providing more balanced stories? That is something that the MSM people just can't confess. So what is their excuse for the ratings dominance by Fox News? CNN co-founder,...

In the two weeks since Newsweek has redesigned, the magazine’s editors have sent out a statement that they intend to sever any and all connection to the turgid, dusty newsweekly of yore. And Jon Meacham, the magazine’s editor, is trying to recapture that age-old magazine editor’s trick for his newly conceived book: buzz. For the next issue that hits newsstands on June 8, Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert will be Newsweek’s guest editor, The Observer has learned.

They were taken before Marilyn Monroe became branded as the voluptuous blonde who oozed sex appeal in dozens of Hollywood films. A 24-year-old Marilyn Monroe poses for Life magazine in August 1950. They were taken before rumors of an affair with President John F. Kennedy swirled and her mental breakdowns became public. They were taken before the beautiful actress's mysterious overdose that resulted in her death at the age of 36. In a collection discovered by Life.com last month, unpublished photographs of Monroe reveal a softer, more innocent 24-year-old budding starlet in a more peaceful time, before her fame peaked....

Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer, is moving to lay off more than 20,000 workers. These days such mass layoffs are sadly unsurprising, but are they ethical? If Caterpillar is to relegate legions of employees to the care of the public, it may not simply echo Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Is there no COBRA?” Instead, it must use its considerable political clout to ensure that those programs are robustly funded, hardly a priority either for Caterpillar or its confreres among the Fortune 500. That is, if Caterpillar is to deprive thousands of people of a...

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad. But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against...

Jon Meacham admits it is hard to explain, even to his own people, why chopping Newsweek's circulation in half is a good thing. 'It's hugely counterintuitive,' the magazine's editor says. 'The staff doesn't understand it.' That step -- along with a redesigned, revamped publication that hits newsstands today -- may well determine whether the 76-year-old newsmagazine survives. Newsweek will concentrate on two things -- reporting and argument -- while kissing off any recap of the week's developments. Time has been gravitating in that direction as well. But Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Co., is accelerating the process because it...

I'm not going to complain about the latest price increases announced by the Boston Globe, since I'm on the record as believing that newspapers can and should charge a lot more for their print editions. But does it have to be so confusing? (snip) Over at the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly, ponders moving to online-only, and asks whether his readers will pay the higher price. My answer: I couldn't rely solely on Boston.com, the Globe's free Web site, because its ad servers are miserably slow. It's fine for reading a few stories, but not the whole paper. (snip) In such...

Just 18% of Americans say daily newspapers will never go out of business, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Sixty-five percent (65%) of adults expect daily papers to be gone within the next 10 years, including 17% who predict it will take less than three years. Among those ages 18 to 29, 83% give print newspapers 10 years or less to survive. Their elders are more optimistic. When asked what they would miss most about daily papers, half (51%) didn’t cite any editorial content. That includes 22% who will miss nothing, 20% who will miss ads or...

The Final Frontier I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism. Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world. Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel. I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t...

SULZBERGERS' FIRM-BASED INCOME SLIPS TO $4.5M The Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 has run the venerable NY Times empire has now lost more than 86% of its fortune and may have to sell their controlling stake to get out of debt......about two dozen descendants had comfortable lifestyles, living on wealth valued as high as $425M....down to a paltry $4.5M, which could shrink even more. Soaring losses amid a devastating media slump have drained corporate cash, pushed the company deeper into $1.3B debt and beckoned a stock vulture -- Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who bailed out the Times with a high-interest $250M...

President Barack Obama ended on a serious note, pledging his undying support for journalists and specifically newspapers. President Obama spoke about media job losses and changes in the industry, then quoted Jefferson, “if he had the choice between Government with newspapers or newspapers without Government, he’d choose the latter.” The gushing was perhaps understandable at a press function, but it’s what he said next that foretold of a newspaper bailout. Obama told the crowd “Your ultimate success is essential to success of our democracy” before shortly saying “Government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the...

CBS Corp. (CBS) said Thursday that it swung to a first-quarter loss on plunging advertising revenues at its television stations, radio stations and outdoor displays, as well as a decline in DVD sales. CBS said it lost $55.3 million, or 8 cents a share, in the latest quarter. It posted a profit of $244 million, or 36 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago, including a one-time benefit from the company's international self-distribution of its "CSI" drama franchise. Revenue fell 13% to $3.16 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting revenue of $3.26 billion

On Thursday’s Countdown show, Michael Musto of the Village Voice appeared to help MSNBC host Keith Olbermann lambast Miss California, Carrie Prejean, because of her expression of opposition to same-sex marriage. After Olbermann set up the segment by revealing that Prejean had received breast implants paid for by the Miss California organization, Musto made a number of crude sexual jokes, and even cracked that she was like a "Klaus Barbie Doll," presumably a reference to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was a Gestapo officer responsible for thousands of deaths during World War II. Referring to the Miss California organization,...

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times is raising its prices for the second time in less than a year to help the newspaper offset a steep drop in advertising revenue. The newsstand price for the Times' weekday and Saturday editions will go up to $2 effective June 1, up from $1.50. The 33 percent increase comes just 11 months after the third largest U.S. daily newspaper last raised its prices. The price for the national edition of the Sunday newspaper will rise to $6,

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...

Gibbs: No bailout for newspapers By: Carol E. Lee May 4, 2009 01:47 PM EST Asked in his Monday briefing if the White House would consider bailing out the newspaper business, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters the government may not have the power to reverse the industry’s decline. “I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,” Gibbs said in response to a question about the Boston Globe’s financial struggles. Noting that it's a "bit of a tricky area to get into," given the relationship between the White House and the media, Gibbs said...

The New York Times Co. said last night that it is notifying federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe, raising the possibility that New England's most storied newspaper could cease to exist within weeks. After down-to-the-wire negotiations did not produce millions of dollars in union concessions, the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law. The move could amount to a negotiating ploy to extract further concessions from the Globe's unions, since the notice does not require the Times Co....

The Denver Post announced Thursday that it will stop delivering print copies to the Western Slope, including Grand Junction and farther reaches of Colorado ... Print subscribers will be switched to online subscriptions