Free Republic

LETTER TO THE EDITOR For several days now, I have been looking for an IR(Independent Record) story of Washington’s disgraceful cover-up of the killing of Americans in Benghazi and have found nothing. I cannot believe the lack of information coming to the public on behalf of liberal journalism. If the president were a Republican, the papers would be crucifying him, on a daily basis; yet we hear nothing from Lee Newspapers. Washington is withholding the truth about their failure to respond to calls for help in Libya until after the elections. This lack of information supplied to everyone is a...

If Werner Heisenberg hadn’t been such a crackerjack physicist—also, if he weren’t dead—he might make a fine “public editor” for the New York Times, or maybe an “ombudsman” for the Washington Post. Ombudsmen are those unemployed people whom news organizations hire to assess reader complaints and rap the knuckles of reporters and editors who get out of line. My guess, though, is that none of his employers would have listened to Heisenberg. His great insight, the Uncertainty Principle, cuts straight through to the fantasy most cherished by the mainstreamers of the American press. Heisenberg’s principle can be crudely generalized (it’s...

Barack Obama has always been less real than dream—a media dream. Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him as FDR, the Newsweek cover of the same year on which he was shown casting Lincoln’s shadow, or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—this in 2009, less than a year after he had taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these outsized comparisons and...

This just in from the Gallup organization: Americans' distrust of the media has just hit a  new record, with six in 10 Americans saying they have "little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly." Forty percent say they have a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of trust, and I assume this is the same crowd who approve of the job Congress is doing. Where do they find these people? Gallup says the 20-point difference between positive and negative views of the media is "by far" the highest Gallup has seen since it...