Free Republic

Peggy Noonan had to cough up her Sarah Palin fur ball sometime, I suppose. We heard it coming, but had hoped that Noonan would suppress it by drinking deeply of that gracious political civility she's selling in her newest book, Patriotic Grace. Instead, her Oct. 17, Wall Street Journal column, "Palin's Failin,'" disgorges Palin with all of the civility and grace one finds in the kitty litter. On her book's back cover, Noonan echoes some clichéd sound bites from the upper chambers of political punditry such as, "If I am right, we must change not only the substance but the...

Where is the outrage that was manufactured to run Rush Limbaugh off the air? Is it absent because Gumbel is allegedly black? So just picture for a moment, if you will, that you're watching SportsCenter tonight and Dan Patrick says, "The lack of whites in the NBA makes it look like a welfare office." Think that would get buried like Gumbel's comments? For what it's worth, maybe Gumbel should do some research on the emerging face of the GOP.

The American media is up in arms over reports that the Pentagon hired a public relations firm to write positive news stories about the Iraq war and get them printed in the Iraqi press. But Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad, isn't letting journalists get away with their phony display of outrage. After the New York Times front-paged the "fake news" story Thursday under the headline: "U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers," Gen. Lynch defended the practice. "We don't lie. We don't need to lie," he told reporters in Baghdad. "We...

Troubles abound for the print business, but smart leadership can steer through the roughest seas Good news about the newspaper business is hard to find these days. Already this month, daily circulation losses ... At the demand of disgruntled institutional shareholders, once-proud Knight Ridder - the nation's second-largest publicly traded chain - is considering putting itself up for sale, whole or in pieces. This comes on the heels of deep news staff cuts at many of the nation's most respected regional papers, Newsday included... Important trends are downward and reinforcing... Profit margins, down from their peak, but still at 20...

Most Americans, regardless of their position on the war in Iraq, don't object to the expression "Support Our Troops," but earlier this week one National Public Radio commentator asserted that in at least one context, that phrase is "glib," "self-righteous," "partisan," and "vaguely...Ann Coulterish." He also declared darkly that "analyzing its rhetoric" may constitute "treason." [Tom Johnson, who monitors NPR for the MRC, filed this item for CyberAlert.] This past Monday on All Things Considered, Bob Sommer, whose son recently completed a year's service in Iraq, began his segment: "You would think that the sight of a yellow-ribbon magnet on...

  Tooth Fairies and LiberalsNovember 18, 2004 So the marquee on Times Square reads “Maureen Dowd launched a Midol attack because she got stiffed by the tooth fairy”.  Who knows, next she will be sending hate mail to Santa. Dowd is in a cramp because the President is fighting, “a war shaped by the political clock, a war with no visible enemy, no coherent plan and no exit timetable.”  Apparently, Dowd thinks war should be like her years at Catholic University.  Where’s my reading list and syllabus? I wonder what Franklin Roosevelt thought about “war shaped by the political clock”?  Great Britain declared...

Kerry got the “best press ever” during the 2004 campaign, according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). The senator received the most favorable news coverage of all presidential candidates in the last 25 years. Bush was covered very negatively this year, according to the study, but he did not match the amount of bad press faced by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Kerry received a total of 58 percent positive evaluations from the media, in the time from Labor Day to Election Day. Not surprisingly, Bush did much worse at 36 percent positive and 64...

A new study of campaign reporting concludes that Senator John F. Kerry, buoyed by his performances in the presidential debates, was covered by the media far more favorably than President Bush in recent weeks. The survey released yesterday by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 59 percent of the stories that were primarily about Bush from Oct. 1-14 were negative in tone, compared to only 25 percent of the stories about Kerry. And while 34 percent of the Kerry coverage was favorable, a mere 14 percent of the president's coverage put him in a positive light. The...

Targeted, Truthful Ads Gutting Kerry Campaign Written by Chris Long Monday, September 27, 2004 George W. Bush spent the first months of the political campaigning season like a boxer in a huddle, covering up and weathering a barrage of blows from the upstart. The Kerry/DNC ads were a scattershot affair, alleging anything and everything, flitting from accusation to spectacular accusation, not unlike the flip-flopping candidate. Indeed, the Bush campaign seemed to obeying the military axiom of ‘concentration of forces’: gather your troops for decisive blows in the face of a scattered, approaching enemy. The hundreds of millions of dollars expended...

Startling similarities stand out between British media's attacks on Churchill for warning of the Nazi threat, and 'mainstream'American media's on-going assault on Bush and the "neocons" for the current war on terrorism. Eerie parallels between the appeasement craze in the mid-1930s and today's denunciations of a war on terrorism are striking. Winston S. Churchill clashed with news media for warning of Nazi tyranny and for pitching resolve to meet the Nazi threat. President George W. Bush is skewered by media for the war on terror. Both confronted not only a smug and hostile press, but also a less-than-loyal opposition perhaps...

ABC a fourth-place network for two months - - - - - - - - - - - -David BauderApril 18, 2003  |  NEW YORK (AP) -- Fox's resurgence over the past few months means ABC is frequently the fourth-place network, and its weakness was evident again last week. Only two ABC programs -- "Primetime Thursday" and "The Bachelor" -- were among the week's 40 most-watched prime-time programs last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. By contrast, NBC had 16 shows in the top 40, CBS had 15 and Fox had seven, Nielsen said. ABC has been the fourth-place network...

10 years later, memories of Waco tragedy linger City hopes to put fatal Branch Davidian standoff behind it04/17/2003 Associated Press WACO, Texas – During business trips across the country, Mayor Linda Ethridge likes to talk about Waco's small-town comforts and big-city amenities, the new programs at Baylor University and the local plant that makes Snickers candy bars. She can name famous native Wacoans – comedian Steve Martin, author Robert Fulghum and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards among them. Ethridge will talk about the Dr Pepper Museum, honoring the soft drink created here in 1885 and the expansion project at the...

Q. Mr. Answer Man, I notice that R.W. Apple, chief front-page analyst of The New York Times, got caught predicting another quagmire, though he had the wit to avoid the exact word this time. Why does he keep doing this? A. Quagmireology is not an exact science. Perhaps he was using outdated tea leaves. All we know is that from now on, every general hoping for victory anywhere in the world will crave one of Apple's dire predictions. Q. I noticed that when it came time to explain why Jessica Lynch and her brother wanted to join the Army, print...

<p>A top CNN executive kept quiet about some atrocities in Iraq not because the network wanted to protect access but because it worried about putting lives in danger, CNN said Monday.</p> <p>Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, revealed the incidents in an op-ed piece in The New York Times Friday headlined "The News We Kept to Ourselves."</p>

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX MON APRIL 14, 2003 09:25:49 ET XXXXX POSSIBLE MICHAEL MOORE DINNER INVITE UPSETS WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS Fresh off his Bush-bashing speech at last month's Academy Awards, White House officials are growing concerned that DirectorActivist Michael Moore may soon find his way in to the same room as President Bush -- at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner! "We'd hope all invited guests remember it is a night to honor journalists covering the executive branch," a well-placed White House source told the DRUDGE REPORT. There is growing concern in Bush circles over the possibility that Moore will...

April 14, 2003 -- ONE byproduct of war is often a major change in media and news reporting. In the Civil War, photography was born. In World War II, Edward R. Murrow brought radio into its own with his dramatic reports of the Nazi blitz on London. In Vietnam, television became pivotal as images of bloodshed soured American backing for the war. The Gulf War saw the growth of CNN as all-news television became essential. In the Iraq War, the public may well have learned not to trust the broadcast networks or the establishment newspapers. Never before have Americans had...

We are witnessing the most recent iteration of the "Western way of war," a term developed by Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor at California State University, Fresno, about a distinct style of combat used by Western armies over time. Hanson identifies a culture of combat in which predominantly free individuals, possessing private property rights and civil rights, engage in a fighting style that depends heavily on both unit discipline and individual initiative; which simultaneously seeks close combat yet employs standoff weapons; which has unprecedented lethality; and which pursues unconditional surrender by the enemy. It also involves a paradox in...