Free Republic

It was...a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel. Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?” “That’s going to get some fireworks going,” said managing editor Bill Sammon, grinning....

...But there was never anything silly, nor light-hearted, nor casual, about Barack Obama's efforts to keep the public's eyes from the basic facts of his life, from birth to his candidacy for president. On the contrary, this opacity is a deliberate policy. Why? The presumptive answer, absent testimony from those involved, is to ensure that real facts interfere as little as possible with the image and narrative that he and his associates have carefully crafted for him. Distinguishing between reality and that narrative would require above all a skeptical attitude, sure to be characterized by Democrats and the media in...

The deafening roar of nothingness emerging from the Sarah Palin email trove points up the media’s hypocritical lack of interest in Barack Obama’s pre-presidential record. Just as Palin’s emails were released, Slate’s David Weigel pointed out that Barack Obama’s State Senate records are not available. Weigel quotes Obama’s statement to the effect that he didn’t have the staff or financial resources to preserve office paperwork. As a result, Obama claims, his State Senate records may have been thrown out.

Our guest today is Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor for National Review Online. He has also written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, and Commentary. He is the author of the new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. See Part 1 of the interview below:

HAWAII GROUND REPORT: Could Hawaiian Governor Neil Abercrombie not be as incompetent and foolish as he appears, but orchestrating a deliberate birth certificate recovery dead end to cover his own papakole? UPDATED: Mystery solved! Reason Obama will not release birth certificate is because his name is legally written “Barry Soetoro” on it Here’s an interesting Ground Report from Hawaii that contains an ingenious theory about Hawaiian Governor Neil Abercrombie’s bizarre backtrack on releasing Obama’s birth certificate. Remember, Abercrombie promised that once he was elected Governor he would prove Obama’s birth certificate existed because he would march down to the Hall...

Howard Kurtz has quite a correction today! It seems that Howie mistakenly believed he was interviewing a Congressman, when in fact he was speaking to the Congressman's spokesperson. Weirder: Kurtz waited more than a month to correct the story. [Updated] In late November, Kurtz wrote a story in The Daily Beast about "tough-talking" Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. The story was based on what Kurtz thought was a phone interview with Issa. But it turns out that, no, Kurtz had actually been speaking to Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, the entire time. Hate when that happens! Today, Kurtz writes: On Nov. 29,...

In a nearly eight-minute video, Sarah Palin says “journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence.” Howard Kurtz on her un-presidential move.The talk in political circles has been that Sarah Palin had a rare opportunity in the wake of the Tucson tragedy to reach out beyond her base and recalibrate her image beyond that of a gun-toting mama grizzly.After all, the strategists said, there was some sympathy for her—beyond the Palin-haters—for being tied to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, even if she had erred with her “reload” talk and...

In 1983, authors Rael Jean and Erich Isaac published “The Coercive Utopians” (Regnery). They demonstrated how, after the end of the Vietnam War and the abrogation of the draft, the radicals of the New Left of the sixties turned their attention to careers in academia, law, journalism, and “community action” projects in religious, environmental, anti-nuclear energy, and social service institutions. On April one of that year, a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl...

On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN host Howard Kurtz pressed guest Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post on her hypocrisy for calling for more civility in political discourse even while she is a regular guest on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown show on MSNBC. Huffington claimed that Fox News was worse and more inaccurate than MSNBC, and rationalized her appearances with Olbermann by giving him credit for a lame apology the MSNBC host once addressed to Jon Stewart after Stewart called him out for viciously attacking Republican Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

Howard Kurtz, a three-decade veteran of The Washington Post who came to embody insider Washington media reporting with his weekly column and CNN television show, is leaving The Post for Tina Brown’s news and commentary Web site, The Daily Beast. It was a twist that few in the media world saw coming, with Mr. Kurtz’s pride in his ink-stained heritage (he likes to say his newspaper career began delivering The New York Post as a boy), and Ms. Brown’s ambitions of upending the old media hierarchy. But Mr. Kurtz said the time had come to move on. And The Post,...

It is a seismic shift, at least throughout the narrow landscape of press insiders. Howard Kurtz, the longtime dean of print media critics, has left his throne at The Washington Post to become Washington bureau chief of the Daily Beast, an online publication that bears the motto "Read this, skip that."

Howard Kurtz on Sunday smacked down liberal talk radio host Bill Press for saying the Park Service allowing Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" event at the Lincoln Memorial was like "granting al Qaeda permission to hold a rally on September 11th at Ground Zero." Towards the end of the opening segment of CNN's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz surprisingly brought up last Friday's disgraceful editing job by ABC's "Good Morning America" that Beck himself said was like something Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have done. When finished with this admonishment, Kurtz went right after Press who was seated directly in front of him...

In an August 2 editorial the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz cried a river over the rancor he saw in today's media calling it a "nastiness index" that continues to rise. But his lament is not only off base in many ways, it is also historically illiterate and is built on only one real complaint: the left no longer has a lock on what is considered newsworthy. Kurtz starts off with this lament: "Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks." Kurz sadly says that...

As other media outlets have given Helen Thomas the kid glove treatment in light of her "trailblazing" career, media consumers may be forgiven for assuming that Helen Thomas's anti-Israel, arguably anti-Semitic comments were an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career of assertive but fair journalism. To his credit, Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz made note of other incidents, such as the time Thomas blamed Israel for inspiring "99 percent" of terrorism and the time in 2002 when she exclaimed "Thank God for Hezbollah," the Iran-backed terror group that murdered 241 U.S. servicement in 1983

I'm increasingly convinced that Sarah Palin is running to head a media empire rather than a presidential campaign. On that front, she is nothing short of an extraordinary success. She's got a multi-year gig at Fox News. She just signed a deal with Discovery's TLC for a documentary about her native Alaska. Her memoir was a runaway bestseller. --snip-- For now, Palin takes an obvious delight in tweaking the very media establishment that is fueling her fame. At a rally in Nevada, she took aim (sorry) at news reports that she might be encouraging threats against Democrats by calling on...

A handful of advertisers, such as Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether. Network executives say they believe they could charge higher rates if the host were more widely acceptable to advertisers.

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday. The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history." Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had...

The executive editor of the National Enquirer says he plans to enter his paper's work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize. Don't laugh. "It's clear we should be a contender for this," Barry Levine said by phone Thursday, hours after the former presidential candidate admitted what the paper had been reporting all along: that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting." While the staff never doubted its reports that Edwards had fathered a daughter with his former campaign videographer, Levine said, "there is vindication,...

The executive editor of the National Enquirer says he plans to enter his paper's work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize. Don't laugh. "It's clear we should be a contender for this," Barry Levine said by phone Thursday, hours after the former presidential candidate admitted what the newspaper had been reporting all along: that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting." Although the staff never doubted its reports that Edwards had fathered a baby girl with his former campaign videographer, Levine said, "there is...

Sarah Palin, who regularly rips the media, is becoming a television pundit at a place where she's likely to feel at home. A Fox News executive says the network will shortly announce that the former vice-presidential nominee is signing on as a contributor. Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska last summer, will appear as a commentator on various Fox shows. She will also host an occasional program that will examine inspirational tales involving ordinary Americans. Palin will join Mike Huckabee as a Fox contributor who was also involved in the 2008 campaign. The exposure can only help Palin if...