Free Republic

UNDERCOVER journal ism is only acceptable when it fits a liberal agenda. That's the message from professional reporters and left-wing activists outraged by the successful video stings targeting President Obama's old friends at the left-wing, tax-subsidized outfit ACORN. Summing up the ACORN Housing Corp. philosophy, a Brooklyn ACORN official told BigGovernment.com's James O'Keefe (playing a pimp) and Hannah Giles (posing as a prostitute) bluntly: "Honesty is not going to get you the house." ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson blasted the investigation as gotcha journalism. That would be gotcha multiplied by at least five: The pair has so far caught ACORN operatives...

NBC's Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd does not fault the state-run media for ignoring the communist-Truther Van Jones controversy. He says it was a waste of time. For the record-- Van Jones was in charge of doling out $80 billion of Stimulus money to selected green projects. He was certainly no low level czar as Chuck Todd suggested.

Tom Brokaw: "It's frightening, frankly."

I missed this yesterday at Newsbusters but Treacher, rightly aghast, tipped me to it this afternoon. Never will you see a starker example of MSNBC getting away with the sort of deception for which Fox News would be pilloried, especially in the context of race. If you missed Monday’s post about this, go watch the footage (or look at this photo) and see if you can deduce why they wouldn’t want to show the guy with the rifle from the neck up during this particular segment. For all the well-deserved heat that MSNBC’s primetime line-up has taken for its demagoguery...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Execution-style killings, not headline-grabbing bombings, have been the leading cause of death among civilians in the Iraq war, a study released Wednesday shows. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the brutal sectarian nature of the conflict, where death squads once roamed the streets hunting down members of the rival Muslim sect. Estimates of the number of civilians killed in Iraq vary widely. The study was based on the database maintained by Iraq Body Count, a private group that among other sources uses media reports including those of The Associated Press. The...

(CNSNews.com) – As the U.S. troop surge in Iraq has succeeded, leading to a dramatic decline in the number of U.S. casualties in that country, The New York Times’s coverage of the Iraq war also has declined, falling to an all-time low in the last two months, according to a CNSNews.com analysis of stories retrieved on the Nexis database. At The Washington Post, coverage of the war has been significantly lower this year than in previous years. In the months leading up to the 2004 and 2006 elections, when U.S. casualties were running higher in Iraq, coverage of the Iraq...

Rush Limbaugh, in today's show, referred to Clarence Thomas' book "My Grandfather's Son" to reveal Biden's slippery approach during Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Here is what Claremce Thomas wrote about it in pages 235 and 236 of that book. Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said. ”I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist...

In her first post-nomination interview, Governor Sarah Palin was confronted by ABC's Charlie Gibson with the following question: "You said recently, in your old church, 'Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from G-d.' Are we fighting a holy war?" The record after this is a little confusing because ABC has edited the video and their transcripts several times, before and after it first aired. ..... Some commentators have noted that Gibson's question and quote were "out of context," but they do not point out the obvious intellectual dishonesty at play. In all likelihood most...

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win. We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that. -- memo from Mark Halperin, then the ABC News Political Director, to his staff, October 8, 2004. All campaigns fall short, but some fall far shorter than others. And it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures without measuring the...

Madonna Constantine, the Columbia University professor who found a noose on her office door Tuesday morning, said she felt not only angry but embarrassed when she saw the noose. "I know I don't really have a reason to be embarrassed about it because this was the work of someone who, you know, is not a secure person at some level, but it felt as though it was directed toward me," Constantine said in an exclusive interview today on "Good Morning America." "It felt very personal and very degrading," she said. New York police are treating the incident as a hate...

Excerpt - BAGHDAD, Feb 18 (Reuters) - On any given day in Baghdad, Iraqi police can be expected to report finding up to 50 bodies shot, tortured and dumped in the streets of the capital, but on Saturday only five were found, police said on Sunday. It was the most dramatic sign yet that a stepped-up military offensive by more than 110,000 Iraqi and U.S security forces is, at least for now, curbing the sectarian violence that has turned the city's streets into killing fields. There has been a relative lull in sectarian attacks since Operation Imposing Law, seen as...

Sweetness and Light has noticed that the press has quoted two former counterterrorism experts in defense of Mary McCarthy but omitted one interesting detail, which may or may not be relevant. Here's ABC News report quoting the first expert, Ray McGovern to the effect that McCarthy had a higher duty to "defend the constitution". To supporters, McCarthy is a woman of conviction who exposed actions she believed were against the law."This a matter of principle," said Ray McGovern, a former fellow CIA analyst, "where she said my oath, my promise not to reveal secrets is superceded by my oath to...

After Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had an embarrassing appearance on "The Daily Show," many had a good laugh. The Associated Press even reported on it: Blagojevich says he didn't realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled Democratic governor. CNN also picked up the wire story, but decided to change an interesting detail: Blagojevich says he didn't realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the...