Free Republic

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, facing a likely defeat in next Tuesday's primary election, won't travel to Kentucky before the voting, but said he hopes to have much more time to win over Kentucky voters before the November general election. He also blamed Fox News for disseminating "rumors" about him and said that that and e-mails filled with misinformation that have been "systematically" dispersed have hurt him in Kentucky. "When we're able to campaign in a place like Iowa for several months and I can visit and talk to people individually, I do very well. That's harder...

Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet. In the late 1960s the media placed the halo on Robert Kennedy, the tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil rights credentials made him in life - as he remains to this day in death - a kind of devotional figure for most political journalists. Kennedy at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that these were by no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was conferred a few years later on Jimmy Carter, the...

Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet. In the late 1960s the media placed the halo on Robert Kennedy, the tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil rights credentials made him in life - as he remains to this day in death - a kind of devotional figure for most political journalists. Kennedy at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that these were by no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was conferred a few years later on Jimmy Carter, the...

In the New York Times’ upcoming edition of their Sunday magazine, they take a look at John McCain’s divergent views of the Iraq War from those of his fellow Vietnam veterans. In The McCain Doctrines, Matt Bai reports that most of these colleagues (with the noted exception of Bob Kerrey) attribute McCain’s support for Iraq to the fact that he didn’t serve on the ground in Vietnam — and that his years as a POW somehow “sealed” him away from the war’s lessons: There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq...

NEW YORK - The economic downturn is hitting roughly one in 10 middle-aged and older Americans especially hard, compelling them to borrow money for everyday living expenses and to seek help from family, friends or charities, according to a survey released Tuesday by the AARP. In the telephone survey of 1,002 adults 45 and older, nearly four in 10 said they had helped a child pay bills or expenses. Among retirees, one-third said they’d helped their children pay bills. Eight percent said they’d helped a parent pay bills or expenses. The survey’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus...

Ninety-five percent of Democratic primary voters in West Virginia today were white. About 70 percent of them did not have a college degree. Among white voters without a college degree — largest demographic in the state — Hillary carried, 72 percent to 25 percent. She won white voters with a college degree, 55 percent to 41 percent. Back of the envelope calculation gives Hillary a floor of 64.15 percent... winning by 29 points at least. As discussed last Tuesday afternoon, the dominant voices in the press are ready to declare the race over. Last Tuesday night, we saw some of...

In the last presidential election, leftist special interest groups and socialist billionaires like George Soros waged war with an unprecedented tsunami of negative TV attacks on the Republican incumbent, suggesting he was a draft dodger that knowingly lied us into war. Adding fuel to the fire, Hollywood uncorked nasty -- and equally distorted -- documentaries like "Fahrenheit 911." The Bush-bashing wave was so big Byron York wrote a whole book about it called "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy." This year, our "objective" media turned their eyes on the November race, but they're seeing only one negative side of the street...

ROME, MAY 13, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Most journalists covering the Church have a hard time grasping its scope, and its real nature "slips through their fingers," said an organizer of a seminar that aims to give the press tools for reporting on Catholicism.John Wauck explained to ZENIT the difficulties journalists have when they are assigned to report on the Church and he spoke about the seminar he is helping to organize. Wauck is the president of the organizing committee for "The Church Up Close: Covering Catholicism in the Age of Benedict XVI," offered by Rome's Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.The...

(IsraelNN.com) Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abe Foxman said Tuesday afternoon that mainstream media are turning against Israel. One of the guests at the three-day Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, he told Voice of Israel government radio, "Painting Israel as the cause of the nakba [catastrophe] has taken root in the mainstream." Foxman pointed out that both The New York Times and the Washington Post published front-page articles on Israel's Independence Day that focused on Arab suffering as well as Jewish celebrations instead of describing the miracle of the re-establishment of the Jewish state. He added that American Secretary of State Condoleezza...

I was taking a look at USA Today this morning at breakfast. It had a front page article about the Reagan Revolution on the bench. That was the top layer of the article at any rate. Thinly veiled, just below, was the message, "Do you really trust a Republican to appoint any more judges when your rights are at risk?" I guess that's pretty run of the mill journalism, but we'll get a lot of it in the coming months. John Hinderacker is predicting that this year will actually be even worse than what we've gotten used to. Hard to...

The day following the crucial Indiana and NC primaries that seemed to end Hillary's presidential aspirations, a strange thing happened. The media started releasing bits and pieces of Hillary's seldom reported, nefarious doings. Doings that have been in the public arena for years but never followed up by the media. The Washington Times headline Once-Secret Memos Question Clinton's Honesty appeared Wednesday. The article outlined the decades old information that federal prosecutors had assembled hundreds of pages of evidence suggesting she concealed information and misled a federal grand jury. Information that has long been available but, curiously, never reported in depth...

Just a month ago, the Washington press corps was still enthralled with this presidential election year. It was packed with firsts: For example, it was the first time since the 1952 election that neither an incumbent president nor incumbent vice president is a candidate in the general election; the first time a woman was running for president; and the first credible African-American candidate was on the stump. Now, the joy has gone out of the thing. Rather than covering great events, most reporters I know feel that they are on a kind of gaffe watch. Gaffes are important in presidential...

May 10, 2008, 8:30 a.m. Warring HistoryRethinking the Iraq critics. By Michael Barone In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in...

Damsel of Distress is the latest Peggy Noonan piece on the racial divide among the Democrats. In this case, I have to disagree with Noonan. Hillary was speaking the truth. It was just a truth that can't be spoken - at least among the chattering classes who define what is proper and what is not; what is allowed and what is not allowed. Is it really true that truth told during an election campaign is a blunder? Is it really true that telling the truth, even when it’s told by Hillary, is racist? If I can make a confession, at...

Broadcasters on cable TV shows used to pride themselves on their efforts to be objective, or at least not overt in their biases. -- snip --As Hillary Clinton wrestles with a way to continue her underdog fight against Mr. Obama, she is said to be seething about the kid-glove coverage he was accorded for so long. What she forgets is that back in 1992, when Bill Clinton and she were the new kids on the political block, they too benefited from glowing coverage that pushed off close analysis of their many problems until after 1992 election was over.

It wasn't the dinosaurs' fault the asteroid hit them. Okay, let's back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call "the K-T boundary" (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990. It then quickly became Al-Gorey "settled science" - before being...

It appears the Clinton campaign is still going after NBC/MSNBC for their coverage of the candidiate. This time, they are targeting Tim Russert for telling viewers Tuesday night: "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it." Howard Kurtz writes today that Jay Carson, Clinton's press secretary, "fired off an e-mail yesterday to Chuck Todd, NBC's political director. While assuring Todd that he was 'not trying to be a jerk,' Carson wrote: 'Can you think of one good reason we should continue to cart you guys around the country with...

(L)ocal Indiana media "relentlessly hammered" Clinton's gas tax proposal -- using local economists to dismiss the merits of the plan. O'Bannon faced nowhere near the level of scrutiny and negative coverage back in 2000 (in his gubernatorial race against a Republican.)

Now the confessions come in from multiple sources: the media has been in the tank for Barack Obama. (Chris Matthews lets on that it may not be “official” MSNBC policy to back Obama, but we should know they have their hearts in the “right” place.) Oh, and they hate Hillary Clinton too. Salon’s reporter tells us: They were swooning. I was at a speech, I remember it, I will write about it some day, in Manchester, and every, the biggest names in our business were there, and they were, they could repeat some of his speech lines to one another....

NBC's "Today" show invited on "Newsweek International" editor Fareed Zakaria to promote his book "The Post-American World," on Monday's show and during his segment the author depicted the United States as a nation in decline as he declared the "era" of "'American exceptionalism' is over." As examples of America's declining standing in the world the "Newsweek" editor cited such facts as China now having the "Largest ferris wheel in the world," Minneapolis' "Mall of America" no longer being the largest in the world and Macau having surpassed Las Vegas in the size of their casinos.

The man who tried to soar above politics has been brought back to earth by the same media organizations that helped fuel his spectacular rise. After more than a year of mostly glowing coverage, Barack Obama is having to defend his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his temerity in not sporting a flag pin, even his arugula-loving, bad-bowling, let-me-eat-my-waffle persona that fostered what Newsweek has branded "the Bubba Gap." "The media have decided to get tougher on Obama," says St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans. "There was so much talk about him getting such an easy ride that...

If "free" is what you want - and who doesn't? - "free" is what you're going to get. So says Chris Anderson, editor-in chief of Wired magazine and, according to Time magazine, one of the world's Top 100 influencers. Speaking to The Globe and Mail from his office in San Francisco, the author of The Long Tail, who pseudonymously curates Wikipedia entries in his spare time, explains how "free" has emerged as the new economic model. Let's start with the term "freeconomics." What is it and how do you define it? It's a little bit cheeky, I know. It's a...

Joseph F. Pisani, who ushered The Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time into the digital age while wearing bow ties and surrounding himself with vintage typewriters, has left as editor of the newspapers. A replacement has not been named, and Pisani declined to comment for this story. "The nucleus of the team Joe built and worked with is still there and will continue," said John Dunster, publisher of The Advocate and Greenwich Time. "Finding a replacement for him will be important within the company but also for the communities. . . . He will be hard to replace." Dunster echoed the...

The news media successfully predicted 10 out of the last 3 recessions, so obviously we can trust them about the current one they keep trying to ram down our gullets, right? Well, I suppose if you define a "recession" as being in a generally pessimistic, defeatist mood and really wanting Barack Obama to win the next election, then yes, the news media is in the midst of one of the most pronounced recessions in the whole of human history. The rest of us, though... aren't actually doing so bad. Job losses aren't materializing as predicted, the dollar has begun a...

On Monday April 28th, I was seated directly in front of Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club as he recommitted himself to the very bigotry-laced anti-Americanism that his most famous long-time parishioner, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, had contended were feelings the reverend no longer possessed. Exactly one month earlier on ABC Television's “The View,” Mr. Obama argued that he wouldn't have stayed with Trinity United Church of Christ had the reverend “not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people” and was “inappropriate.”

The week-from-hell in Washington was endurable only because the return ticket to San Antonio was carefully tucked into my coat pocket. The business trip included some of my oldest haunts: the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, even a network TV studio – pretty much the heart of the beast. Within hours of returning, I fled to Cranky Frank’s in Fredericksburg, where they treat rookie Texans with tolerant kindness. Before serving one of their signature barbecue plates, they showed off a classic clipping of a Hill Country deer hunter. It was not particularly unusual to see a Texan carefully sighting a distant target...

Time magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel defended the magazine’s manipulation of the classic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo into propaganda for Al Gore’s climate change campaign as “necessary for conveying the message that we must take action against global warming. A full account of facts would be too complicated and confusing for our readers.” “Trying to give balanced coverage plays into the hands of those who would spread doubt about the need for government to take charge in this crisis,” Stengel went on. “There is no time for debate. We don’t need for voters to understand the science. We just need...

I once heard Rush Limbaugh say the way he deals with a recession is to “not participate in it.” Today we found out that in our current so-called recession, the economy itself is not participating. You’ve heard, of course, about the “recession.” The Associated Press has been referring to it as an established fact for much of the year. Every day, we see interviews with economists who grimly warn that we are surely already in a recession. The only debate is how bad it will get. Oops. Some facts just arrived, and they’re not what the media, the economists and...

Presidential candidates rarely turn down a network television interview, especially on a highly rated program. But some prominent liberals are wondering why Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama agreed this week to sit down for interviews on the Fox News Channel, for years the highest rated cable news network and the bastion of conservative TV news analysis. The dilemma for the candidates: Is appearing on Fox a smart political move before Democratic primaries in two largely conservative states - Indiana and North Carolina - or not worth the effort to court what could be a small amount of persuadable...

You may have noticed the latest mini-crisis from Gaza: on Monday, five Palestinian civilians, including four children, were killed in a clash between the IDF and Hamas. How did the civilians die? Narratives collide: the IDF says two of the terrorists involved in the battle were carrying backpacks filled with explosives, which detonated and destroyed the nearby house that contained the civilians. Palestinians say the house sustained a direct hit from an Israeli tank shell or missile. You'd think that anyone reporting the incident would be compelled to allow the ambiguous nature of the battle to feature prominently in his...

Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan. "I was pleased I wasn't being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance," he said. Butler said he lost about 42 pounds and during the last 12 days of his captivity, ate one tangerine and four boiled eggs. On the day he was found, he heard voices outside where he was staying that escalated into a gunfight. The door to his room was kicked in. A soldier aimed a...

In 1947, a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla made the pilgrimage to a small town in Puglia to have his confession heard by Padre Pio, the mysterious Italian monk with the Christ-like stigmata wounds on his hands. It was that encounter — along with Wojtyla's belief that a prayer by the Capuchin monk had cured a friend's cancer in 1962 — that helps explain why Padre Pio was fast-tracked for sainthood once Wojtyla had risen to the papacy as John Paul II. But some may now wonder if the current Pope, the cerebral and professorial Benedict XVI, has the...

NEW YORK Print circulation continues on its steep downward slide, the Audit Bureau of Circulations revealed this morning in releasing the latest numbers for some of the country's largest dailies for the six-month period ending March 31, 2008. When a full analysis appears it is expected to find, according to sources, the biggest dip yet, about 3.5% daily and 4.5 for Sunday. The following circulation compares the new data to the same period a year ago. Daily circulation is the Monday-Friday average. --The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, blasted news media he said had sensationalized his remarks in an often confrontational appearance at a reporters' club on Monday. But the Chicago preacher stood by the fiery sermons that have dogged Obama's Democratic presidential campaign since they gained public attention in March. "You cannot do terrorism on other people and not expect it to come back to you," Wright said at the National Press Club when asked about a speech in which he asserted the September 11 attacks were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy. Asked about another sermon...

What ahppened to Laurie Dhue? She seems to have disappeared again. She isn't on Gearldo anymore (not that I'd know, except that I tunedin too early for Hannity's America), she isn't reading news or anchoring the weekends (though Julie Banderas isn't bad at all), and the Dhue Point has disappeared. So where's Laurie?

Normally I am saddened to witness a fellow human sink into the abyss of madness. But for Tim Robbins I’ll crack open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and and bid his brain a joyous bon voyage. ... Leveraging his marginal fame, which in turn is based on his marginal acting abilities, Tim thrust himself into the political arena with the confidence that only complete idiots posses. ... “Just when we were close to a national news media providing a general consensus on what the truth is …“ First is the rather psychotic notion that the media has ever come...

This is getting ridiculous. On Wednesday night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman, discussing Hillary Clinton’s continued presence in the Democratic nominating contest, conducted the following exchange: Fineman: What this is going to require…is some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. That’s what’s going on. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to really decide this. Olbermann: Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out. You can watch the...

WASHINGTON The Commerce Committee sent to the U.S. Senate floor a resolution to nullify changes to the longtime ban on same-market common ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations. The resolution targets last December's Federal Communications Commission vote, along party lines, that permits daily newspapers in the nation's 20 largest markets to own either one lower-rated TV station or radio station. Cross-ownership would continue to be prohibited in smaller markets. But the many critics of the rule change say it includes exemption provisions that could permit cross-ownership elsewhere. Speaking to reporters after the vote, the resolution's chief sponsor, Sen. Byron Dorgan...

The NYTs seems to be posed on the brink of a new crusade. They have "uncovered" the fact that the Department of Justice, has - in a time of economic uncertainly and possible contraction - decided to forgo proceedings that might prove as ruinous to companies now coping with the difficulties of the current economic circumstances as were the legal actions that closed the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson in 2002 - leaving 28, 000 of its employees without work as a consequence. Apparently - to the staff of the Times - another "fix" is called for. Perhaps a really...

The bad news began arriving by cell-phone Saturday night: my picture was on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. After 25 years of military service and ten more with NBC, this was not my first media frenzy – but definitely my first at center stage. Several months before, David Barstow, a Times reporter, had contacted me with a surprising request. He began our conversation with the only line guaranteed to turn an author’s best mental defenses into applesauce: “I read your book. Wow.” He even suggested flying to San Antonio for an interview about Warheads, my 2006...

Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate” Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a tree. No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.” There are any number of problems here, starting with the fact that this is simply a lie. Green is not the...

The finances of many states have deteriorated so badly that they appear to be in a recession, regardless of whether that's true for the nation as a whole, a survey of all 50 state fiscal directors concludes. "Whether or not the national economy is in recession — a subject of ongoing debate — is almost beside the point for some states," said the report to be released Friday by the National Conference of State Legislatures. The weakening economy is hitting tax revenue in a number of ways: People's discretionary income is being gobbled up by higher food and fuel costs,...

Over the last seven years, the lunatic fringe in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- have hijacked our democracy, aided and abetted by the news media. The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media's DNA. The latest confirmation came with this week's announcement that Tony Snow, formerly a host at Fox...

The D.C. Chapter of Free Republic invites all FReepers and lurkers in good standing to join us in our nation’s capital for the Tenth Annual Freep of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) Dinner next Saturday. When: Saturday, April 26, 4 p.m. to 8: 30 p.m. What: The D.C. Chapter’s Tenth Annual Freep of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Location: Outside the Washington Hilton, Connecticut Avenue and T Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. Our most fun protest every year. This is your chance to tell the mainstream media to their faces what you think about their biased reporting. You’ll also...

"Mortgage Crisis," shouts the New York Times. The Times has used the term "subprime crisis" at least 11 times. Not in opinion columns -- in news stories. The columns are worse. Paul Krugman writes: "A lot of the financial system looks like it's going to shrivel up and have to be rebuilt." The "financial crisis," says Fortune's senior editor, "is threatening to bring down the entire system, with dire consequences." When the current troubles aren't a "crisis," they're a "disaster". That's what John McCain called them, while Hillary Clinton prefers "crisis," saying, "This market is clearly broken, and, if we...

Last week, Associated Press photographer (and alleged insurgent collaborator) Bilal Hussein was released from custody after an Iraqi tribunal decided his case fell under an amnesty law passed earlier in 2008. The United States military had accused Hussein of working with insurgent groups in Anbar Province, in part because of his uncanny ability repeatedly to photograph insurgents in action. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not, and he deserves the presumption of innocence. Either way, his case brings attention to an issue most consumers of news from Iraq rarely consider: the fact that large media companies--the Associated Press and...

Nothing in the hysteria over last week's Democratic debate – including the unprecedented opprobrium press critics heaped on the ABC moderators – should have come as any surprise. That doesn't make it any less fascinating a guide to current strange notions of what is and is not a substantive issue in a presidential contest, or any less striking an indicator of the delicate treatment Mr. Obama's media following have come to consider his just due. Moderators Charles Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos's offense was to ask questions Mr. Obama didn't want to address. Worse, they'd continued to press them even when...

When Fox News Channel was launched promising news that was “fair and balanced,” mainstream outlets were insulted by the insinuation that their news wasn’t. They shouldn’t have been. In fact, “fair and balanced” news is a bad idea that was never in our past and will not be in our future. Before the printing press was invented, news was spread by word-of-mouth, so everyone had the opportunity to influence the top stories. Even governments had to compete, sometimes by hiring singing, colorfully-garbed minstrels to break through the clutter. A pretty good system, really — a multitude of voices competing in...

Leaders of national and Pennsylvania women's organizations convened at Philadelphia's City Hall Friday to declare their support for Hillary Clinton's agenda for women and families. It's no surprise, I suppose, that she would be endorsed by groups like the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus, Women's Campaign Forum and Feminist Majority. But beneath the surface of this formal endorsement lurks something else: anger and frustration at the way they perceive Clinton's treatment by the media.

My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate. Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance? Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining. That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly...