Free Republic

Life is Never Easy, Even When You're Doing Well Posted: 10/28/2005 9:37:00 AM by Donald J. TrumpChairman, Trump University I talked about this earlier in the week on my daily radio show, but I have more to say. Someone just wrote a book about me. It's the biggest pile of garbage I've ever seen, written by a highly questionable and, some people say, disgraced reporter named Tim O'Brien. I looked up O'Brien on the Internet and found stories comparing him to Jayson Blair. Blair was The New York Times' infamous reporter, who was fired in shame after he was found...

The New York Times, which had been operating an all-free Web site, nytimes.com, will begin charging a fee for access to its major columnists under a new program called Times Select. Starting Sept. 19, the New York Times will charge $49.95 a year for online users to access 22 columnists including Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristof and Frank Rich. -snip- Cybergossip Matt Drudge is threatening to boot the Times columnists. "I will yank the Times scribes if I can't find other outlets that are planning to carry them," threatened Drudge. "The Internet is...

Thanks to a virtual blackout by his fellow editors elsewhere in the media, odds are good that you haven’t heard or read that Executive Editor Bill Keller of The New York Times recently capitulated in the debate over bias in America’s newspaper of record. Keller’s capitulation came in a lengthy memo he distributed in the Times’ newsroom in May as a response to an updating of a massive report by a committee appointed in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal to recommend measures to restore the gray lady’s credibility. In a section of the memo headed “The News/Opinion Divide,”...

New York Times Running Out?_____________________ NOTE: Most, and perhaps all, NY Times links require registration._____________________ Nadagate seems to have played out, and barring a shock I don't anticipate, has resulted in a big fat nothing. What is Nadagate? It's the name given by a clever writer to the non-scandal about which I refuse to blog in detail. Its main players, whose full names I refuse to type, have the initials KR, JW, VP, JM, and MC. For the blessed among you who have somehow managed not to hear of it, today's Manchester Union Leader's seven-paragraph editorial has all you'll ever...

A longtime columnist of the Sacramento Bee who resigned amid controversy last month may have invented the existence of 43 people she wrote about over several years, an internal investigation found. The paper announced yesterday it had completed a probe into Diana Griego Erwin's writing, stating: "We have been unable to verify the existence of 43 people she named in her columns. This doesn't prove these people don't exist, but despite extensive research we have been unable to find them." Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez wrote that recent tightening in editorial standards at the paper led to questions about the...

SAF CALLS FOR ‘WAITING PERIODS’ ON PRESS FOLLOWING FATAL NEWSWEEK DEBACLE For Immediate Release: 5/16/2005 BELLEVUE, WA – More than 115 dead or injured, and now a lame “apology” from Newsweek; maybe it is time for the press to accept waiting periods before exercising its First Amendment rights in the same way the press has backed waiting periods on law-abiding Americans before exercising their Second Amendment rights. That’s the observation from the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) now that Newsweek has acknowledged its report about the desecration of the Koran by soldiers at Guantanamo Bay was bogus. “I wonder if Newsweek,...

Jayson Blair, the disgraced New York Times reporter implicated in a plagiarism scandal the paper called a “low point" in its 152-year history, has turned up with a first-person column in the spring issue of bp, a magazine chronicling bipolar disorder. In it, Blair gives his account of being diagnosed as bipolar—a recovery that includes medication and speaking engagements—as well as his take on the May 11, 2003 “7,000-word above-the-fold, front page story (accompanied by a 6,400-word litany of corrections).” Blair writes: “As a team of Times reporters and researchers dug into my background pulling together loose threads for (the...

Report: Trust in journalism has hit all-time low By Breeanna Hare and C.C. Song, Daily Staff Reporters March 17, 2005 Trust in journalism has hit new lows, according to the second annual State of the Media Report. Published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the report showed that in the past 17 years, the public has come to see the press as self-serving and discreditable. The number of those who thought the press was highly professional fell from 72 percent to 49 percent, while the number of those who thought the press covered-up its mistakes rose from 13 percent...

If this battle is lost, the wounded could include you Manning Pynn February 20, 2005 Wounds inflicted by the war on journalism have been neither physical nor fatal, but the injuries have extended far beyond newspapers and television news programs. Recent assaults have included the following: The federal government fed fake news segments, promoting administration programs, to television stations -- some of which naively aired the tapes. The federal government paid columnists and commentators to promote its programs as though the endorsements resulted from their own evaluations. A federal appeals court ruled that, on penalty of going to jail, two...

Newspaper Sacks Reporter Over Fake Yahoo Baby Mon Jan 24, 9:58 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters BUCHAREST, Romania (Reuters) - A Romanian tabloid said on Monday it had fired a reporter for making up a story about a couple who named their son Yahoo as a sign of gratitude for meeting over the Internet. Bucharest daily Libertatea published a story this month saying two Romanians had named their baby for the popular Web site and printed a picture of his birth certificate. The news was published internationally, including by Reuters. "It was the reporter's child's birth certificate, which he...

Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer from 60 Minutes who gave us Rathergate, has won the first journalism award given in memory of two of the worst rogues in the history of the profession, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair. Duranty and Blair were both reporters for the New York Times, America’s most corrupt newspaper. To borrow from NBA commissioner David Stern, on his decision to suspend Ron Artest and the other Indiana Pacers thugs in the recent “basketbrawl,” the vote “was unanimous, 1-0.” As previously detailed, Mapes was guilty of no less than three major journalistic offenses -- her “Shot...

The New York Times, once ironically known as the "Newspaper of Record", has a problem. But they aren't lonesome. The same problem threatens CBS news, and the rest of the "mainstream" media. Though Dan Rather will soon be freed from his many duties in the news manufacturing division, and thus be able to enlist the aid of O.J. Simpson in finding the real perpetrator/hoaxer, there remains to the liberal media that nagging problem. And that is "the record". In the past, engineered crises and hard hitting ambushes, once they had accomplished their intended purposes, could be safely laid to rest,...

Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Mediaby Seth Mnookin (Random House, 352 pages, $25.95) JAYSON BLAIR GREW UP IN FAIRFAX COUNTY, Virginia, in a much more upscale neighborhood than this Fairfax-based reviewer can afford. His father was a bigshot at the Smithsonian and his mother a local schoolteacher. The family was heavily involved in a local church. Jayson started a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, even though he was not himself a jock. In eighth grade, he changed the spelling of his name to Jayson to stand...

Jayson Blair, the diminutive ex-journalist who shook up the mighty New York Times when his serial plagiarism was revealed last year, has all but evaporated from public view. Now seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist and working out of a basement office in his parents' home in Centreville, Va., he says he has found God and thinks he has a calling other than journalism — although he's not sure what it is yet. The one thing that hasn't changed is his compulsive reading habit. And on his bedside table these days is Seth Mnookin's chronicle of the Times debacle, "Hard...

Those Dan Rather memos—purportedly from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's personal file, yes, them—they're not forgeries. They are copies of forgeries. Their provenance is unknown, so far. There is speculation in the Kerry camp that Karl Rove, tutored, no doubt, by Mossad and the neocons, planted these forgeries, but we will leave this implicit admission for another Conning Tower. It no longer matters whether Mr. Rather expressly concedes the memos are forgeries. That the memos were phony was proved last week when, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs produced an identical copy of the 18 August 1973 item, identical pixel for...

For a couple days this week, one of the most reviled men in the blogosphere was Jonathan Klein, formerly an executive at CBS News. Speaking on Friday about the scandal at 60 Minutes, which last week based part of a story on documents that were probably forged, he stuck up for the show he used to oversee by sneering at its online critics: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Since then, dozens of those pajama-clad bloggers have...

This is so reprehensible I had to do some research about this 'newspaper' Although he didn't write this rubbish I discovered a rather familiar name on their payroll. If you've ever wondered what ever happened to Howell Raines you now know the answer.To think the New York Times made somebody that associates with rubbish like this their Executive Editor makes my skin crawl.

E-mail to Candidate John F. Kerry #7 From James (Cooter) Thompson Re: Howlin' Dear Senator Kerry: The guys down to Daryl's Bait Shop have been urging me to write to you real quick to straighten you out on various matters pertaining to your campaign. I am happy to oblige. We are concerned that you been getting advice from so-called friends who ain't really friendly to you and have hidden reasons to pretend friendliness, you know, patting you on the back so they know where to stick the knife. We made it clear in our first e-mail to you a few...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...

Pinch Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times, last week blamed the readers of the Times for the Jayson Blair scandal which rocked his newspaper last year and brought it þu and him þu to their knees. Sulzberger made the charge against his readers while he was on a panel at the American Society of Newspaper Editors according to Editor and Publisher magazine, which reported the story this way: ¡°Sulzberger [said] the worst thing to come out of the Blair scandal was ¡­ readers who knew about the incorrect reporting did not complain¡­¡± But Pinch, the readers may not have...