Free Republic

"To have found himself in such high clover -- Friend of Bill Clinton, Keeper of the Secrets, Defender of the Middle Path -- is surely to feel a little giddy, a little wonderful. In 22 years of diplomatic reporting for Time magazine he had allowed himself only one Walter Mitty fantasy, and that was to be ambassador to Moscow. Now he is the number two man at State. Now there is not only Russia to deal with, but Bosnia and Haiti. Already he has learned to strike the note of cautious optimism ("We have faced up to Bosnia in a...

Have you ever wondered why Elvis pulled out a gun in his Las Vegas hotel suite and shot his TV screen? Well, if Elvis had been watching a TV show just a tenth as annoying as MTV's "The Paper" you could easily understand why he did it. Normally, I don't watch ANY MTV "Reality" shows which are all completely unreal. I watched just one of them years ago and found the spoiled kids on the show so completely obnoxious that I have avoided all such MTV shows like the plague. So why am I now watching "The Paper?" Mainly...

AUSTIN - For years journalists have been hesitant to lobby for a shield law to protect their notes and tapes, but now is the time, many say, before it becomes too late. "We run the very real risk of seeing our reporters and photographers and editors jailed for simply doing their jobs," said Donnis Baggett, publisher of the Bryan-College Station Eagle and legislative chairman of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association and the Texas Press Association. "We are on dangerously thin ice." A Senate committee heard testimony last week on a bill that would give journalists a qualified privilege for the...

There's A Fourth Estate And A Fifth Estate BY JOSEPH CURL James Dale Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, the former White House correspondent for Talon News, set off a firestorm of controversy and introspection last week inside the cramped press work quarters behind the West Wing briefing room. The unabashedly conservative reporter had already disappeared in a flash of green smoke, drummed out by left-wing bloggers who had set out to expose the personal background of the short, shaved-head man after he asked a particularly right-wing question in a presidential press conference. The blogospheric probe had gotten ugly—democrats.com charged that Guckert...

From S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, 65-66: Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, and CounterspyPhilip Agee and Victor Marchetti, along with members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, launched the journal CounterSpy, under the aegis of the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5). OC-5 stated that its purpose was to develop an "alternative intelligence community. . .with the flexibility of employing both revolutionary and reformist methods. In an early CounterSpy article, "Exposing the CIA", Agree spelled out the OC-5 program: "The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA...