Free Republic

While Fox News may be used to taking a never-ending beating from the liberal folks at CNN and MSNBC, you can bet they were not expecting a jab from venerable kids favorite, ‘Sesame Street.’ But that’s just what happened. Sesame Street, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary tomorrow with a visit from Michelle Obama, recently reaired an episode from a couple years ago - when the 2008 presidential election was in full swing - that has Oscar the Grouch launching his own television new channel called “GNN” - Grouchy News Network. After an atypical lighthearted broadcast, Grundgetta, a female Muppet...

CNN GLOATS: "Historic Vote for Obama" Final Vote 220-215

Barack Hussein Obama II, used a crude gay-baiting sexual slur to denigrate Tea Party patriots in a talk with House Democrats yesterday on Capitol Hill, reported the New York Times:According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”The word 'teabag' is used to describe a sexual practice popular in the homosexual community. Earlier this year as the anti-big...

2:15 PM UPDATE: I've learned that 100 people are being laid off across "several divisions" of the A&E Television Networks yesterday and today "as a direct result of the merger". It will make those employees feel so much better that management tells me it's "no one in a decision making role." A&E Television Networks in August acquired Lifetime Entertainment, and everything is now owned by the Disney-ABC Television Group, Hearst and NBC Universal. Big Media = Big Mergers = Big Mistakes.

Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A), doesn't have much faith in the future of print media. In an interview on CNBC's Nov. 3 "Squawk Box," following the announcement of his purchase of Burlington Northern (NYSE:BNI), Buffett was asked to comment on the future of news media, in particular newspapers and business news by "Squawk Box" co-host Becky Quick. Buffett is optimistic on the future of business news. "Our system has just gotten started," Buffett said. "I mean, we've had a couple of hundred years of progress, but we have not exhausted...

"Is Anderson Cooper gay?" That's the big question once again circulating around the Web ... only this time it's not so much is he, but who is he dating and why hasn't he come out yet. Last week, Gawker, Page Six and Perez Hilton started buzzing about supposedly closeted Cooper's rumored new beau, and the glut of attention was accompanied by an almost crushing sense of déjà vu. Why? Because Cooper's sexuality is hardly a fresh topic. As Gawker's Brian Moylan said in an October 29th post on the subject: "Saying Cooper is gay is no longer a scoop. It's...

Bob McDonnell won big tonight in the Virginia gubernatorial race, as did the entire Virginia Republican party. The implications of the race will be sorted out soon enough. But one big loser is the Washington Post which may unwittingly have helped the Republican, despite their best efforts to put his opponent over the top. On the last weekend in August the Post ran the first of dozens of stories about McDonnell's 1989 masters' thesis, in which he wrote, among other things, that working women were detrimental to families and that government should favor traditional marriage over gay unions. While they...

When you're an MSMer, you're an MSMer all the way--even when faced with facts that might make you like, well, ridiculous . . . Mike Allen, appearing on Morning Joe, has declared the NY-23rd race a "real toss-up" despite a new poll from a respected organization showing Doug Hoffman with a 17-point lead. The claim by Allen, Politico's chief political correspondent's, was so absurd that, on the spot, host Joe Scarborough offered 3:1 odds to Allen and anyone else wanting to place a few kopeks on Dem Bill Owens. View video here.

Newsweek Editor Calls Al Gore 'An Eco-Prophet' By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-11-01 18:35 "Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself." Such was Newsweek science editor Sharon Begley's sub-headline of her proselytizing piece "The Evolution Of An Eco-Prophet [1]." Fortunately for the Goracle's loyal followers, Begley didn't ask him how the planet could possibly have cooled the past eleven years despite his warnings about the plague "carbon dioxide." As for all those powerful hurricanes Prophet Al hath foretold, tropical cyclone activity has been at 30-year lows [2] for the last three years. Even New...

NEW YORK (AP) - Pivotal presidential campaigns are frequently defined in retrospect by documentaries. "The War Room" chronicled Bill Clinton's political operation in 1992, adding a phrase to the political lexicon in the process. Alexandra Pelosi's "Journeys With George" captured the oddities of a national campaign on board George W. Bush's airplane in 2000. The makers of "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," which premieres Tuesday—Election Night—on HBO, wouldn't mind the same status. "That was our hope—that we would create something for history," said filmmaker Alicia Sams, who made the documentary with colleague Amy Rice and a key...

Early Saturday morning, 7Online.com, the website for ABC's New York affiliate WABC-TV, reported the previous night's arrest of Jason Shih, an alleged campaign worker for Governor Jon Corzine (D-NJ) charged with "possession of a controlled narcotic and paraphernalia that is used for distribution." For some reason, although the headline "Corzine campaign worker arrested" shows up in a Google News search, the page is no longer available: "We are sorry, but the URL you requested could not be found. The page you are looking for may have been renamed, moved, or deleted." A search of "Jason Shih" and "Corzine" at 7Online.com...

As O'Donnell reminded viewers, President Bush and Vice President Cheney never went to Dover Air Force Base to honor fallen soldiers returning home while they were in office.

So tell me, how do you write a “news” story about an organization paying for a speaker when you don’t even know if the organization is paying for the speaker? Ask “journalist” Jonathan Martin. He knows all about it. You see, Jonny wrote a piss poor story the other day about how the Iowa Family Policy Center will be paying a large speaker fee if Sarah Palin comes to Iowa to keynote the IFPC’s fall funderaiser. The only problem is that Jonny has no sources confirming that any exorbitant fee is being charged or paid. In fact, he had just...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:Last Friday on the Washington Post blog, “On Faith,” English atheist Richard Dawkins said the Catholic Church was “surely up there among the leaders” as “the greatest force for evil in the world.” He labeled the Eucharist a “cannibal feast,” adding that “possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite.” He also blamed the Church for sending missionaries “out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans” regarding condoms. The Church’s outreach to Anglicans, he said, makes it “a common pimp,” noting that those who convert “will be joining an institution...

While the Obama administration continues its war against its media critics, well-known liberal journalists — instead of defending freedom of the press — are joining the attack on a news network they despise as much as does the administration. Gone is any seeming concern for the right of commentators to voice their own opinion, because mainstream liberal editorial writers are sure their opponents are both extremists and wrong. Take, as our first example, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group. Writing in last week’s Newsweek, Weisberg explained at the start that anyone who watches Fox News knows immediately that Anita...

Violence -- especially grotesque, gory or bloody violence -- has become a staple of network television during sweeps periods. But there's a new kind of violence surging -- violence against women. A new study by the Parents Television Council called "Women in Peril" reveals that between 2004 and 2009, CBS, NBC, and Fox (but not ABC) all green-lighted a significant increase in the incidents -- and degree -- of violence against women. On average, during the five-year span, there was a 2 percent increase in overall violence during the primetime viewing hours. But during the same time period, there was...

Would Larry David Urinate on the Koran? by Jamie Glazov In a recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, Larry David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus while he is a guest in someone else’s home. This, in turn, leads to a misunderstanding in which the homeowners think they have a miraculously weeping Jesus.Some Christians are understandably upset.Just some thoughts on what this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm has revealed:Are producers of this show, or Larry David, or anyone else connected to it fearing for their lives right now? Are there Christian groups calling for the death of anyone in connection...

snip It is not only the demise of big-name papers that should raise concern; the rapid decline of the newspaper industry is playing out quietly, with small, reasonably responsible dailies in cities and rural regions across the country disappearing without widespread notice. Dozens of daily and weekly newspapers have closed this year. Cities that once enjoyed the fruits of newspaper competition (Denver, Seattle) are starving. "Surviving" publications -- and many have filed for bankruptcy -- are cutting reporting staffs to the bone (this month, the New York Times said it would cut 100 more newsroom jobs). International bureaus, statehouse bureaus...

Signaling that worse times are ahead for magazines, Time Inc. is expected to announce next week that it will cut $100 million from costs, including another big round of layoffs. The timing is coordinated with parent company Time Warner’s third-quarter earnings announcement, sources said, scheduled for Wednesday morning. Time Inc., the publisher of titles like Time, Fortune, and People, has already cut costs dramatically: a year ago, it announced it was dismissing 6 percent of its work force, or about 600 people. That was apparently not enough to make up for revenue declines. The $100 million in costs is expected...

Victory for Obama Over Military Lobby CHRISTOPHER DREW October 28, 2009 When the Obama administration proposed canceling a host of expensive weapons systems last spring, some of the military industry’s allies in Congress assumed, as they had in the past, that they would have the final say. But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years. Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that...

NEW YORK — U.S. first lady Michelle Obama is fashion's star, but that's not why she's one of Glamour's December cover models. Mrs. Obama's work in mentoring earned her the spot, which will be rotated with four other covers. She'll receive a special recognition in the annual Women of the Year issue that goes on newsstands Nov. 10. In an interview with new Glamour columnist and CBS anchor Katie Couric, Mrs. Obama said being a role model is one of the most potentially powerful things she can do at the White House. "I see how little bits of exposure and...

Mainstream Media Ignores Juicy ACORN Nuggets by Hannah Giles The “Pimp and Pro” story, exposing ACORN’s willingness to advise a prostitute on tax evasion and child sex trafficking, hit America a few weeks ago. There were a myriad number of angles to report, yet the Mainstream Media's favorite approach seems to be the method in which James O’Keefe and I orchestrated and gathered the information. It’s like going fishing, but instead of taking a picture and raving about the 750lb Mako shark you caught, you blather on about the bait that was used. What happens when people get bored? They...

Here is video of White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett on CNN telling Campbell Brown that Fox News is biased. Campbell Brown asked Jarrett "do you think Fox News is biased?" She answered "of course they're biased." Brown then asked her "do you also think that MSNBC is biased?" She avoided the question and would not say that MSNBC is biased.

There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the Mainstream Media – or MSM – but Monday was one of the worst. New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the last six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime-time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC. Are the two connected? Eric Alterman, a media columnist for the Nation, and a...

My Extremely Cute Chinese Communist SpyPosted By Robert J. Avrech On October 28, 2009 @ 6:51 am In Obama, Politics | 6 Comments T- snip-American Journalism Goes Dark—VoluntarilyJournalism died in America when Barack Hussein Obama was running for President.The dinosaur media gleefully surrendered to the cult of personality—standard for leftist politics—and since then normally skeptical journalists have turned into nothing less than a collective Pravda for the Obama White House.- snip- Elite journalists and editors recognize in Obama a kindred spirit, a hard left, big government ideologue who is adept at mouthing—endlessly, tediously and vacuously—all the politically correct rhetoric. Questions...

Time Inc. is bracing for another round of cutbacks. Sources say the layoffs will be most severe in the division that includes Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Time and Money, and will be carried out before the Thanksgiving break. Since many of the old-line titles at Time Inc. are covered by union contracts with the Newspaper Guild, the company will likely have to offer voluntary buyout options as part of the downsizing. Time is running out if it hopes to complete the layoffs and write off the costs in the fourth quarter. Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc., personally took over supervision...

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser. Snubbing the Dalai Lama. Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers. Freezing out a TV network. Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too. President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda. It’s a sign that the media’s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news...

America has just suffered the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan in more than four years, but Obama doesn't have time to worry about that. He's focused on another war: the war against his political enemies. The assault on Rush Limbaugh was just for starters. Today's victim: Fox News. It's not enough that four-fifths of the news networks march in lock step to the Obama administration and have turned from being the watchdogs to Obama lapdogs. During the campaign, they went from being biased to becoming activists for Obama. Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, was, for the most part,...

"NEW YORK, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The plunge in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating, according to the latest figures released on Monday, as more people cancel their subscriptions and publishers cut distribution and sales of discounted copies."

Here is video of America's future journalists at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism doing a hip-hop rant as part of an assignment, which included an attack on Fox News and Sean Hannity: "But I will never lose touch with my own humanityGet every side to speakBut there's no need to hear crazyOr create false sense of parityLike Fox News and Hannity . . ."Looks like they are training them well, to become clones of the impartial "journalists" at MSNBC. . . (VIDEO)

Return to the Article October 25, 2009The Slander NetworkBy J.R. Dunn It's a rare pleasure to see that Going Rogue doing so well ahead of publication. (Even though rescheduling the publishing date delayed my book -- but I forgive you, lass). When it appears, there's little doubt it will go through the roof.  Along with fits from the Olbermanns and Courics of the world, we can look forward to seeing a few myths definitively punctured -- the "I can see Russia" story, the shooting wolves from a helicopter narrative, or alternately, the "she can't shoot a gun" claim. (Really,...

This is a Politico congressional race story that should have been labeled "WARNING: Read this story with a huge grain of salt." Why? First of all because the poll of the New York 23rd Congressional District was mostly taken before the big events of this past week were well known there. And even more importantly, the source of the poll was the Daily Kos which endorsed the very liberal Republican in the race, Dede Scozzafava. However, before we go into how absurd this poll was, let us watch Josh Kraushaar of Politico get all breathless about this highly questionable story:...

Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N) magazine division Time Inc plans another round of job cuts as advertising declines erode revenue, a source familiar with the unit said on Thursday. The job cuts at Time Inc -- which publishes Time magazine, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune -- would be at about the same level as the division cut last year, the source said. Time Inc. cut more than 600 positions, or more than 6 percent of its workforce, in that round. The company declined to comment, though a spokesman for Fortune magazine separately said that it plans to shave the number of...

Dispatch from the Department of Pot-Meet-Kettle . . . Katie Couric has demanded "humility" from Wall Streeters making seven-figure incomes. This from a woman pulling down . . . eight figures [an estimated $15 million/year] from CBS while cementing the Evening News' caboose status. Couric made her hypocritical plea in her "Notebook" segment yesterday, commenting on Pres. Obama's pay czar's plan to cut compensation for employees of financial firms that have received bail-out bucks [emphasis added]:

Rush: If Fox News Is Talk Radio, MSNBC and CNN Are Pornography By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-10-22 20:03 Rush Limbaugh has responded to Barack Obama's claim that Fox News is like talk radio by stating that if the President is right, MSNBC and CNN are pornography. As NewsBusters' Mark Finkelstein reported [0] Thursday, Obama replied to a question about Fox News from NBC's Savannah Guthrie on this morning's "Today" show: "[I]f media is operating basically as a talk-radio format, then that's one thing, and if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another." This amused Limbaugh who early in...

I think it's safe to say that the gloves are off.

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   Newspapers Gush Over Bloomberg's Latest Gun Control Escapade   Friday, October 09, 2009   Bathed in camera flashes during a "news conference" on October 7, 2009, New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg was in his element in announcing "a wide-ranging undercover investigation by the City of New York into illegal gun sales" that revealed "a willful disregard of the law" by "74% of gun show sellers." Or, so he claimed.  The ego-driven multi-billionaire's publicity stunt was neither "wide-ranging" nor representative of what occurs at gun shows, nor was it intended to be. ...

I guess this is about as close to fairness as NPR is capable of in its reporting on ACORN. The first few paragraphs of today's NPR story on ACORN, by Kevin Whitelaw, tell you all you need to know about Whitelaw's perspective on the embattled radical advocacy group: ACORN, the community organizing group, is fighting for its survival these days, but its current plight has been years in the making. Part of the story is the group's own missteps. ACORN was founded to help low- and middle-income Americans, but its edgy tactics and a series of gaffes fed the notion...

Here's a curious turn in the White House vs. Fox News fight. On Monday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among several people who attended an off-the-record briefing with Pres. Obama at the White House. Sources tell us other attendees at the two-and-a-half hour chat included Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gwen Ifill of PBS and Gloria Borger of CNN. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one from Fox News was in the room. ...Update: The White House has sent TVNewser the complete list of those who attended the off-the-record briefing Monday: Eugene...

The path towards irrelevancy and future insolvency taken by The New York Times continues at a frenetic pace. Democracy Now! is reporting that the publication has announced the elimination of another 100 newsroom positions, or about eight percent of the paper’s news staff, due to declining advertising revenues and circulation numbers that are in freefall.

You Tube has shut down without warning the most subscribed Michael Savage video channel. Imitator777,a You Tube member since August of 2007 had over 350 videos and over 2,500 individual subscribers..this morning we awoke to find everything completely erased..they deleted all his videos and his channel without warning or reason. You Tube has been well known to censor or delete channels in the past (let's face it, they are owned by Google), but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that they have specifically targeted a channel predominantly dedicated to a radio talk show host. Imitator has created a...

Here's a curious turn in the White House vs. Fox News fight. On Monday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among several people who attended an off-the-record briefing with Pres. Obama at the White House. Sources tell us other attendees at the two-and-a-half hour chat included Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gwen Ifill of PBS and Gloria Borger of CNN. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one from Fox News was in the room.

We already know where Jake Tapper stands on this point, but the real question is why more journalists in the White House aren’t making their position clear. Brit Hume wondered whether American journalists from other news organizations really will become the lackeys of the Obama administration by ignoring news stories originating at Fox, just because Robert Gibbs disapproves of Fox. Toby Harnden of the London Telegraph channels Pastor Niemoller in his blog today: "Those journalists sitting this one out need to ask themselves what they will do when the White House comes after them or their news organisation."

Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”). Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure...

ITHACA, NY-“Why is it just so difficult to make the search for truth the highest journalistic value?” Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Reporter Linda Greenhouse asked a packed Lewis Auditorium yesterday. Greenhouse relied on her wisdom and experience as she spoke about the state of today’s news media, questioning the very rubric by which today’s journalists operate. Adolph S. Ochs, the founder of today’s modern New York Times, laid out his goal for the creation of a newspaper that would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved."Veteran mind: Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer...

A good gregalogue.

Accuracy in Media (AIM), America's first independent watchdog of the news media, is giving FREE tickets to FReepers to attend AIM's 40th Anniversary Conference in Washington, DC on Friday, October 23, 2009. To get your ticket, visit www.aim.org/events and enter discount code "freerepublic" or go to: http://aim40thconference.eventbrite.com/?discount=freerepublic Speakers include Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Tony Blankley, John Fund, Andrew C. McCarthy, Cliff Kincaid, Trevor Loudon, Anita MonCrief, Hans von Spakovsky, Marc Morano, Robert Bluey, Ann McElhinney, J.P. Freire, and Don Irvine. Tickets are regularly $75 and include a buffet luncheon and morning and afternoon snacks. YOU MUST REGISTER IN ADVANCE for...

Having worked in, on, and around newspapers for over two decades, I can say with some authority that the vast majority of reporters, editors, and publishers are about as sharp as a pound of wet leather. The general consensus amongst their fraternity is, quite simply, that readers are too addle-brained to know what is good for them. The conventional wisdom within the hallowed swamps of journalism is that your garden variety reader doesn’t know what is important, that they are a wrong-thinking lot who put on their shoes and socks in that order. Journalists, as a rule, feel that the...

POLITICO's Mike Allen and Josh Gerstein wrote today on the White House strategy of trying to delegitimize Fox News. Now MoveOn.org is getting involved. The liberal activist organization has started a petition aimed at Democratic members of Congress, urging them not to appear on the network as long as Obama stays away.

The ABC's of Media Bias By: Lowell Ponte FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, October 14, 2004 IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA BIASED against conservatives? Dan Rather remains in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News despite his involvement in recent news stories based on dishonest reporting, fabricated documents and even Internet gossip falsely alleging that President George W. Bush secretly intends to begin the military conscription of students. These stories were obviously designed to damage Mr. Bush in the final weeks before a national election. And now ABC News has left in place its Political Director Mark Halperin. ABC has done this...