Free Republic

Lion on the loose: Former San Francisco talk radio host Bernie Ward, who has spent the past seven years in federal prison for distributing child pornography online, was quietly freed Friday.

Angered by Georgia's pending expansion of concealed carry laws within state lines, liberal radio host Mike Malloy said he'd like to invite an NRA board member to come meet him, then shoot the board member and claim "Stand Your Ground" in defense. The Georgia bill--the Safe Carry Protection Act--has passed the state House and Senate but still awaits the governor's signature. It would expand concealed carry into schools, bars, churches, and the portions of airports that are outside the security parameter. According to Newbusters, Malloy's reaction to the bill's passage was: [The] organization founded by Gabrielle Giffords...the former Arizona Congresswoman...who...

The website for progressive talk KTLK AM 1150 in Los Angeles now redirects to a countdown clock, for in a couple days they will become 1150 The Patriot with conservative talk. The new call letters will be KEIB, as in Excellence in Broadcasting. They'll have Glenn Beck (6a), Rush Limbaugh (9a), Sean Hannity (noon) etc. Clear Channel is making KFI 640 in a local-talk type of operation. Progressive talk is now in tatters as they will lost stations in NY, LA, and San Fran. The NY station is WWRL AM 1600, which will switch to Spanish language programming. Also WOR...

Next week, when WWRL 1600 AM flips its format from progressive talk to Spanish-language music and talk, New York will have no left-leaning commercial talk station for the first time in decades — an ironic development just as an unabashedly liberal mayor and City Council are set to take office. It’s not as if liberal voices will vanish — noncommercial stations like WBAI and WNYC are still alive and kicking — but they can’t replace the local flavor and crackling energy of commercial radio, where shows move more quickly to accommodate the ads. The changeover at WWRL comes as a...

Just a few dozen stations now carry liberal talkers, as key affiliates in cities with active left-wing politics are falling like dominoes, going dark or switching formats. Detroit’s progressive outlet shut down in January, along with Seattle’s liberal talk station, which changed to sports. And after last year’s election, Portland’s progressive talk station ended its political programming. With the political battlegrounds of 2014 and 2016 on the horizon, reducing the whopping imbalance between conservative radio, with its huge fan base, and the left has become more important than ever, according to those in the progressive media world. POLITICO spoke with...

The joke in question came from the Bluff the Listener segment of the show Saturday, in which an audience member was asked to identify which of three stories about an old joke coming true had been taken from that week's headlines. Peter Grosz, an actor and TV writer who has appeared as a panelist and guest host on "Wait Wait," offered a supposed news item referencing a joke asking how many Poles it takes to screw in a light bulb.

US broadcast network National Public Radio plans to shed 10% of its staff in an effort to close a $6.1m (£3.8m) budget deficit, a spokeswoman has said. It will offer voluntary redundancies to its roughly 840 employees. The broadcaster put the budget shortfall in part down to a decline in corporate grants amid the slow US economy. National Public Radio (NPR) reaches 27 million listeners a week through 975 member stations across the US. The redundancies follow a series of shake-ups in the non-profit's leadership, and a 2008 reduction of about 8% of its staff. NPR, based in Washington DC,...

... In a tearful on-air announcement on Friday, Summer Reese, the interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, said that after talks with SAG-Aftra, the union that represents broadcasting talent, “we will be laying off virtually everyone whose voice you recognize on the air,” effective Monday.

Remember the 'Flush Rush' boycott attempted by David Brock and Media Matters which called for advertisers to drop their sponsorships of Rush Limbaugh's radio show? How did that work out in the long run? According to liberal radio talk host Thom Hartmann on CNN's Reliable Sources yesterday it completely backfired because it ended up hurting liberal shows: David Brock and Media Matters were leading the boycott Limbaugh crusade, which did presumably some damage to the Limbaugh show. I can tell you it did a lot of damage to progressive talk radio, because a lot of advertisers right across the board...

To all too many on the left, America has barely budged since the '50s when it comes to civil rights. As far as liberal radio host Thom Hartmann is concerned, America has barely budged since the antebellum era. Hard to believe anyone, even a hard-core leftist, can spread such drivel, what with a man of color holding the highest office in the land -- one to which he was just comfortably re-elected -- and the Justice Department being run, go figure, by another man of color. What's truly amazing is that both men are actually slaves, at least in the...

On his radio program Tuesday, radio host Tom Joyner announced that he would fully pay for Rachel Jeantel to attend a historically black college or university of her choice. Jeantel is the friend of Trayvon Martin who was the last person to speak to him before his February 2012 death and the star witness in the trial against George Zimmerman. Joyner told Jeantel on his radio program early Tuesday, “if you want to graduate from high school, and go to an HBCU…if you want to do that, I want to help you do that.” Jeantel is currently 19 years old...

NPR’s gleaming new headquarters building in the shadow of the Capitol in Washington has soaring ceilings, a 24-hour “wellness” center, an employee gym and a gourmet cafe staffed by a resident chef.

...The announcement comes a day after word that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is withholding funding to Pacifica's five stations for insufficient accounting practices, misreported revenues and failure to comply with CPB rules on open meetings and financial transparency

Diana Temple-Raston in NPR’s All ThingsConsidered blames the Boston Marathon bombing on Right Wingers celebrating Hitler’s birthday. Transcript: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED APRIL 17th. Diana Temple-Raston provides insight into the Boston investigation. This thinking as we’re reporting is that this is a domestic extremist attack. And officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. The assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. So according to NPR we Right Wingers were having a...

National Public Radio was quite good at historical re-enactment on Thursday night's All Things Considered. The Nina Totenberg obituary on Reagan's defeated Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork carried almost all the original liberal invective. She included then-Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, who wrote "He looked and talked like a man who would throw the book at you, and maybe the whole country."

On Friday's All Things Considered, NPR anchor Robert Siegel wasn't mincing words about wanting the 2012 presidential race to be over after the secret Romney tape surfaced: " What do you make of that shift, E.J.? Is it just a terrible week with several more weeks to go in the campaign or did the wheels just fall off the Republican campaign?" Dionne temporized a little before saying the speech was "really harmful" to Romney's chances. But he was almost polite compared to "conservative" David Brooks, who dug a grave for Romney, saying he's not a "plausible alternative' to Obama and...

What is it about leftists and their hate-hate affair with America? RadioOrNot.com host Nicole Sandler, formerly of the justifiably defunct Air America Radio, has upped the ante on libtalker Bill Press, who vented about his visceral loathing for the national anthem, and chirpy MSNBC weekend host Chris Hayes, who sniffed in disdain at the notion of fallen soldiers as "heroes." (Audio clip after page break).Libtalker: I HATE This G-D Country!Heck, Sandler hates the nation as a whole, not just its venerated secular hymn and most selfless warriors. Here is Sander filling in for liberal soulmate Randi Rhodes on Tuesday, the...

The toll on public television would also be harsh, says a new revenue analysis from Booz & Company presented in Washington DC. Booz says 54 public TV stations would be at high risk of shutting down, without revenue support from CPB. The outside experts looked at five alternative scenarios, including allowing public stations to accept some advertising. It decided that “a shift from a non-commercial model to a commercial advertising model would have dramatically negative consequences for many of the communities that public broadcasters serve.” It observes that federal support has already shrunk by $50 million in the last two...

It's the end of the road for "Car Talk." After 35 years on the air, Click and Clack have run out of gas, and will stop taping new shows this fall. Tom and Ray Magliozzi have hosted NPR's most popular show for decades, but the brothers say it's "time to stop and smell the cappuccino." The mechanic brothers started their auto advice show in Boston in 1977, and have been dishing out car tips and jokes every Saturday morning on NPR since 1987. "We've managed to avoid getting thrown off NPR for 25 years, giving tens of thousands of wrong...

NPR's Mara Liasson outraged female listeners on Weekend Edition Sunday on April 15 when she said Mitt Romney's political problems aren't with "stay-at-home moms," but rather with "educated women." Seven days later, NPR admitted it scrubbed the clip and the transcript for the website. On April 22, in a letters segment, Liasson claimed "I misspoke and that's one reason why we corrected the interview for later feeds of the show." Maybe she didn't "misspeak" as much as she betrayed her own opinion. She's never stayed at home and her biographies list no children. At least NPR returned to the scene...