Free Republic

From Romenesko: July 29, 2005 To the staff: As many of you already know, a number of our colleagues are leaving The Times newsroom after accepting the company's recent buyout offer. Some will not leave until later in the summer; a few will stay on longer. You have already seen a few articles about your departing colleagues in Ahead of The Times, and more tributes will follow. But since a handful of those who have taken the buyout will mark their last official day at the paper today, we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to wish them...

WOBURN, Mass., Dec. 24 - When Massachusetts this month became the first state to install an electronic instant-check system complete with a fingerprint scanner for gun licenses and gun purchases, the impact was quickly apparent. On Wednesday, for example, moments after a court placed a woman's husband under a restraining order, a notice about the order popped up on a new computer terminal at the police station here. Given that information, the Woburn police went to the man's house and confiscated his guns, all 13 of them. The computer is part of the record-check system and allows the police and...

  Ask the Fox about the HenhouseDecember 2, 2004 Ann Coulter once observed that, “Most journalists are so stupid, the fact that they are also catty, lazy, vengeful and humorless is often overlooked.”  Someday (perhaps at CPAC 2005) I have to ask her if the NYT’s Fox Butterfield qualifies for a dunce cap.  If Butterfield is an example of a Pulitzer Prize winner, I’ll remain content winning at the Sunday turkey shoots. When 36-year-old Hmong warrior Chai Vang took his walkabout and murdered six Wisconsin hunters this past week, Butterfield felt compelled to let his brilliance shine anew. In a riveting NYT’s piece...

"The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and longer terms..."

A large number of police chiefs and other law enforcement officials have joined gun control advocates in a campaign to defeat a Senate bill that would grant gun makers and dealers almost total immunity from lawsuits. The bill, which is strongly supported by the National Rifle Association, is scheduled for a Senate vote in early March but could come up for a vote even sooner. As many as 59 senators have signed on as sponsors, only one vote shy of the number needed to defeat any attempt at a filibuster. A similar bill passed easily in the House last fall....

The Gray Lady of American newspapers is red with embarrassment caused by reporter Jayson Blair, who admitted that many of his stories involved invention or plagiarism. Some New York Times reporters have expressed concern that the exposure of so many bogus stories over such a long period of time from such a respected newspaper could cause readers of American newspapers to doubt the credibility of what they read. On gun-control issues, those doubts are well-merited; the Times's credibility when it comes to guns is about equal to that of the National Enquirer's reporting on celebrity romances: Some of it...

Follies Conscientious readers may have noted a certain fondness for exposing folly animating these precincts from time to time. The professoriat and the pretenders of the press are frequent targets. I am certain by now that I will never run out of material. A few days ago I noted a reference to a learned paper produced at U. C. Berkeley which undertook to inquire into the psyche of conservatives. I knew immediately it was not science and had to be nonsense, bigotry, in fact. So I wasn't surprised to find that A. Hitler, B. Mussolini, Rush Limbaugh, and Ronald Reagan--conservatives...

A federal jury ruled today that the New York Times and one of its reporters libeled an Ohio Supreme Court justice in an article about a lawsuit filed by the son of Sam Sheppard. But the jury said it was done without malicious intent and refused to award damages. Justice Francis Sweeney was seeking $15 million. He accused the newspaper and reporter Fox Butterfield of libeling him in an article published April 13, 2000. Sweeney said the report defamed him by falsely saying he used his influence in a case he had been involved in earlier as a prosecutor. New...