Free Republic

September 2008 Killing talk radio by Brian C. Anderson, Adam D. Thierer On the lurking threat to the freedom of the airwaves. The Left has watched uneasily as power drains away daily from the CBS Newses and the Time magazines of the liberal mainstream media and flows toward a more politically pluralistic array of new media alternatives that range from (mostly) conservative talk radio to (Fox-dominated) cable news to the ceaselessly expanding (thoroughly bi-partisan) Internet. And make no mistake: liberals want to snuff out this exciting, democratic world of analysis and debate and return to the good old days, when...

Is there anyone out there who has been dredging up dirt on Arianna Huffington for the last decade and would like a place to dump it? If so, I may have a spot for you. That's my reaction to the Huffington Puffington Post's publication of a piece written by a professional (read George Soros-funded) WND hater by the name of Terry Krepel under he poetic headline: "Anti-Obama Author Corsi Reflects the (Lack of) Journalistic Values of his Employer, WorldNetDaily." Normally I ignore the slop Krepel dishes out daily in his screeds against me, my family, my business and my employees...

Did he or didn't he? Technically, Hardball host Chris Matthews did say "she-devil" when talking about Sen. Hillary Clinton during the primaries. But now he's fighting back over how it's being interpreted. "I never called her a she-devil," Matthews says of the phrase that has been dogging him as he considers a run for the Senate in 2010. Here's what happened: Matthews opened a November 2007 show that explored GOP attacks on Clinton, who at the time was the Democratic front-runner. "She-devil? Republicans are absolutely demonizing Hillary Clinton," he barked before the screen displayed Clinton with horns. "You can see...

The popular, if controvesial, liberal activist group MoveOn.org today targeted an email campaign at Associated Press executives and the AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier after what it termed yet another Fournier attack on Barack Obama. Fournier's article on Obama's selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate gained wide linkage at the Drudge Report, Hot Air and numerous other conservative sites, while it was panned on liberal blogs such as DailyKos and Talking Points Memo. The MoveOn rallying cry to its members included the following. The full Fournier article follows after that. "Today, the Associated Press (whose articles...

When Liberals just can't take it - Conservatives' SuccessAugust 17, 2008 Sadness at Libs-Nation at Obama-nation's number one on NYTimes best sellers list. So, somebody at the Liberal community dropped a 'bomb-rumor' that conservatives were bulk-buying the book and that was/is the "reason" for it being the number 1 best seller. From then on it became a "fact" by reporters, such journalists that pride on being thorough on real facts like: 'Newsweek' explained it not just as a probable cause, but as, again, a "fact". Without addressing if there was a bulk buying by cons. or not. First, Is anyone...

It seems that 'Media matters' is OK with murder in its name August 15, 2008 'Media matters' is basically a radical group that poses as "fighting inaccuracy", in it's fanatical goal it even cows to Islamic militants' actvists such as "CAIR" and those that dare criticize militant Islamic terrorism against the entire world in the name of Islam and its attempts of conquest (otherwise known as Islamo-fascism) as "islamophobes" their "charge" against Michael Savage (for speaking out against this danger) who just (15 August, 2008) stopped his valid case against CAIR for defamation.. only because of advisors advising him that CAIR's tactics might...

Paul Waldman of Media Matters said Swift Boat Veterans are liars.

We are not allowed to post Media Matters' Soros funded garbage here, for good reason. But Corsi on Fox news this AM brought up Obama's forged COLB. And Media Matters immediately jumped in to defend the forgery as legit. Folks, let's push this thing fast and hard. Obamaramadingdong needs to be kicked out of the Senate for producing this forgery, even if the info on it is mostly accurate.

ConWeb Artists by: Bethany Stotts, August 12, 2008 At the left-wing blog, ConWebWatch, dedicated to “monitoring” conservative news websites, Terry Krepel has doggedly been criticizing Accuracy in Media. Krepel also serves as a senior editor at Media Matters the liberal media watchdog “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” But if Krepel’s critique of this correspondent’s August 1st article, “McCain’s Reverend Wright?,” is any indication, Krepel’s criticisms of AIM are largely misplaced. In “McCain’s Reverend Wright,” this correspondent discussed how news outlets were associating Pastor John Hagee with John McCain (and, specifically, the McCain...

Last week, radio talk-show host Michael Savage talked about autism: I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, `Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.” I’m not an impartial observer here. My six-year-old son has high-functioning autism. He is exactly the...

Last week, the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama announced that it had established a “war room” to battle rumors spread on the Internet and amplified by other media reporting. Obama supporters will use a website titled “Fight the Smears” to identify allegedly untrue statements about their candidate and provide evidence in an effort to refute them. That sounds like a good public relations strategy, but the implementation will ultimately have a negative impact on Obama. The campaign employs the Media Matters for America model for dealing with so-called “smears.” In fact, Obama’s war room uses the George...

E.D. Hill and her show, "America's Pulse" has been removed from her time slot at Fox, because of something she said in her news presentation . On June 6th last, on her former program, "America's Pulse," E.D. Hill teased in a segment about body-language about Obama's fist bump with his wife Michelle. Obama supporters and the leftist blogs on the web were in a rage and an uproar about the comments, and George Soros' "Media Matters" began a campaign encouraging people to contact Fox and complaint about what is in their view an unforgivable slight of Obama and Michelle. They...

Miami Herald columnist, Andres Oppenheimer, is like a high school football player who just scored a touchdown. You can spot him in the end zone triumphantly spiking the football and performing his over the top victory dance. However there is something a bit too overenthusiastic about Oppenheimer's self-celebration as if he knows there is a huge caveat to his "victory." You can read his not quite convincing "celebration" in his Miami Herald column, "About time! Reckless TV anchors put on spot:" Bravo! A new study has found widespread fear-mongering and reckless journalism by cable television hosts such as CNN's Lou Dobbs and...

News Outlets Face Increasing Scrutiny in Campaign Bloggers Rip Fox Over Screen Text About Mrs. Obama For the second time this week, Fox News Channel was driven to respond to criticism over on-air statements about Barack Obama, in this case for screen text that described the Democratic presidential candidate's wife as "Obama's baby mama." The term is often applied pejoratively to unwed mothers. Television news organizations, facing unprecedented scrutiny, have often expressed contrition for poorly chosen words during this election season. The latest controversy arose over screen text in a Fox News segment. In a campaign that includes the first...

Smear: LIE: Rush Limbaugh says a tape exists of Michelle Obama using the word "whitey" from the pulpit of Trinity United... Lie: Proven GOP sleazemeister Roger Stone says he has "credible evidence that some indelible record exists" of a tape of Michelle Obama using the term "whitey."

Today, the Washington Post editorial board urged Cindy McCain to release her tax returns, repeating a call made four years earlier to Teresa Heinz Kerry. But the timing seemed coincidental, given that Media Matters just wrote a letter to Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt last Friday. In that letter, the organization brought up the Heinz Kerry editorial from 2004, and asked why a similar request was not made to McCain. Hiatt tells Politico that the letter wasn't the reason for publishing Wednesday's editorial. "The editorial actually had been drafted before the [group's effort] began, or at least before I...

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes in today's Wall Street Journal that George Soros's Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O'Grady notes that Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the...

David Brock, the president and CEO of the George Soros-funded character assassination factory, Media Matters for America (MM), which euphemistically describes its mission as "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media," isn't even pretending to be nonpartisan or fair anymore. Brock has assumed the chairmanship of Progressive Media USA (PMUSA) and in that role will spearhead "a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain," the Politico reports. "We're a little behind where we need to be," Brock said last week of the fledgling group's fundraising following a Manhattan meeting with Soros,...

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Senator John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist. The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA. The...

It's a bummer when an online slime machine is outed.Media Matters was an extremely effective leftwing propaganda outfit until it was found out that they were linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.Copious Dissent explains what happens to a liberal slime machine like Media Matters after being exposed. It looks like Think Progress may be following in their footsteps.  

The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America has gone on the attack against longtime “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, saying he has “regularly smeared” Democrats on a variety of issues. In its “Weekly Update,” Media Matters launched its attack by asserting that Russert, as the host of Democratic presidential debates, has all but ignored important issues such as the mortgage crisis, global warming, wiretapping and executive power, while questioning Dennis Kucinich about his claim to have seen a UFO and John Edwards about his expensive haircut.

Just three years ago the Democratic Party was in disarray. Despite record high-dollar donations from affluent supporters, Democrats had failed to reclaim the White House and Congress. Shell-shocked by their defeat, George Soros and other wealthy liberals formed a loose-knit group to consider how to fund a political comeback. Their answer: Create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups—a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement. The group they created –called the Democracy Alliance (DA)— is meant to be a financial clearinghouse. The Alliance got off to a...

Bowing to pressure from the liberal blog Media Matters, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spent the first five minutes of Thursday night’s "Hardball" personally apologizing to Hillary Clinton for insinuating that she owed her political success to sympathy derived from having endured Bill Clinton’s unfaithfulness.

On “Hardball” Thursday, Chris Matthews responded to critics who claim he recently made sexist comments about Hillary Rodham Clinton, which they say is part of a history of similar conduct. Controversy erupted after Matthews made remarks on Joe Scarborough's "Morning Joe" on MSNBC that "the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit." Matthews first reminded viewers Thursday of his love of politics...

Billionaires for Big Government   By Matthew Vadum and James Dellinger Human Events | Wednesday, January 16, 2008 The Democracy Alliance (DA) is maturing. After several years of internal strife, management squabbles, a few political purges and frustrating electoral setbacks, the group whose mission is to tilt American politics leftward has found its footing. The DA is becoming what leftist blogger Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos fame called for in 2005: “A vast, Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to rival” the conservative movement. It relies less on traditional Democratic Party “machine” politics, which typically draws upon fat cats, institutions (the party...

Media Matters, which describes itself on its web site as a, "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media," has taken aim at MSNBC's Chris Matthews for what it says is a trend of "sexist displays." Media Matters has started a "take action" campaign, urging readers to contact MSNBC and express their disapproval of Matthews current attacks on Sen. Hillary Clinton and past comments. Karl Frisch, Media Matters spokesperson, tells TVNewser, "We encourage people to take action for a variety of reasons — being able to point to a clear...

Chris Matthews was in full flight on today's Morning Joe, vividly expressing himself on everything from the historic shockwaves that an Obama Iowa victory would send, to Media Matters service as a Hillary front, to the role of NewsBusters. But the Hardball host was especially vivacious in describing the way the Clintons use intimidation to keep people in line. CHRIS MATTHEWS: In the world, in the universe, the biggest American political story of modern times if Obama wins the Iowa caucuses. It will be all over the world; it will sweep the headlines in every newspaper in the world: friend,...

BlueHampshire.com, a progressive site in the Granite State, has found that several Clinton staff members slipped into sock-puppet mode to beef up the pro-Clinton diary recommendations on its site. The Caucus learned of this through techpresident.com, which is surprised that anybody still uses sock puppets.

Sean Hannity, the conservative Republican commentator who takes on such controversial issues as Hillary Clinton's legal work in a communist law firm, could be on his way out of the Fox News Channel as a result of Rupert Murdoch's decision to turn the company over to his liberal son James. James Murdoch, 34, who buys into global warming hysteria, has in recent days been labeled the "News Corporation Heir" and "Son King" because of changes in the company that have dramatically increased his power. The Fox News Channel is one part of Murdoch's News Corporation. While James Murdoch is based...

Removing any doubt about how she sees the world from the left, Valerie Plame Wilson, in an interview Thursday which aired Saturday night on a Washington, DC area cable channel, admired the work of the far-left Media Matters as she revealed she seeks out the group's postings for their “accuracy” and presentation of “the facts.” Carol Joynt (her blog), a former CBS News producer who as the owner of the Nathans of Georgetown restaurant every week interviews a newsmaker in front of a lunch crowd in what becomes the hour-long Q&A Cafe on NewsChannel 8, asked whether she reads “news...

Ever since Hillary Clinton boasted at the Yearly Kos convention this summer that Media Matters was indeed her own brainchild, I've been subscribing to the group's daily, vital, emergency, vast-right-wing-conspiracy alerts. So for several months now, a half-dozen Media Matters email screeds have landed in my inbox every day on various topics, all claiming to have unearthed scandalous falsehoods in conservative news outlets, as well as the mainstream media. Since I've actually listened to some of the radio talk being assailed, and read much of the journalism being analyzed for inaccuracies, I'm in a pretty good position to judge the...

Media Matters has issued a list of "don'ts" for tonight's CNN debate: Don't contradict your own reporting and suggest that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) "cash[ed] in" on a stock deal in which he lost $13,000.

How Hillary's Hit Man Got Imus By Cliff Kincaid | April 17, 2007 In firing Imus, NBC News and CBS got rid of one of Hillary's major political enemies in the media. Do you think something is fishy about the Don Imus affair? Why was the boom lowered on him at this time? The answer may have something to do with his main accuser, the Media Matters group, which is emerging as a front organization for Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and has extensive ties to the national Democratic Party. In firing Imus, NBC News and CBS got rid of...

11/09/2007 Kerry Spokesman Sets Limbaugh Straight on Swiftboat Smears WASHINGTON D.C. – Kerry spokesman David Wade issued the following statement today in response to Rush Limbaugh, who said on his radio show that Kerry’s Swift Boat attackers in 2004, “were right on the money and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort.” “At first I thought, that’s not Rush, that’s just the OxyContin talking. Nonetheless, this is a despicable but unsurprising new lie from a man whose closest brush with combat came when customs officials tried to take...

Media Matters for America (MMFA) was created in spring 2004 in time for the presidential election campaign. Funded by an estimated $2 million in contributions, the group promotes itself as an online watchdog protecting the public from the deceptions and errors of the mass media that has been bullied or blinded by conservatives. In fact, MMFA is a cog in the growing machine of “progressive” activist and advocacy non-profits, including the online radical agitators at MoveOn.org, the liberal policy wonks at the Center for American Progress and the Democratic get-out-the-vote forces at America Coming Together. These groups were obsessed with...

by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, October 22, 2007 Permanent LinkMore Columns CALL IT Bloggergate — the subversion of the blogosphere by Democrat money. Six years ago, most bloggers leaned right-of-center politically. Then something happened. The blogosphere made a sudden, screeching, 180-degree swerve to the left. What caused this upheaval? For years, we could only speculate. Now, at last, we have caught a glimmer of the truth. It is not a pretty picture. “We are . . . putting together a network in the blogosphere,” Senator Hillary Clinton announced on August 4, 2007 at the YearlyKos Convention, a gathering of...

by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, October 29, 2007 Permanent LinkMore Columns LAST WEEK this column unveiled Bloggergate, a massive effort by Hillary Clinton to tilt the blogosphere in her favor, by subsidizing leftwing bloggers. Hillary’s ambition to control the Internet did not form overnight. She was already pondering how to do it in 1995. Of course, no one used the word "blogger" in 1995. In those days, online forums called "newsgroups" provided the medium of choice for anti-Clinton writers. Hillary formed a special task force within the White House Counsel’s office to fight the New Media. As noted in...

WASHINGTON — The House passed a revised children's health proposal Thursday, but not by the two-thirds margin that supporters will need if President Bush vetoes the measure as promised. The 265-142 vote was a victory for Bush and his allies, who urged House Republicans to reject Democrats' claims that changes to the legislation had met their chief concerns. If the same vote occurs on a veto override attempt, Bush will prevail, as he did earlier this month when he vetoed a similar bill. Liberal groups continue to run attack ads against Republicans siding with Bush on the issue, which many...

<p>Glenn Beck's comments draw a rebuke from one media watchdog group, whose spokesman calls them 'heartless.'</p> <p>With at least 1,000 homes destroyed, two deaths reported and more than a quarter-million people ordered to evacuate, the wildfires ravaging Southern California have been as indiscriminate as they have been devastating.</p>

It was quite a spectacle. Democratic Congressmen and Senators standing there denouncing Rush Limbaugh for attacking American soldiers by calling them "phony." We already know how much they hate Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show personalities. Talk radio is the only part of the American media that the Left does not already control, one way or another; that's why they're trying to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine (equal time for all points of view) only for talk radio, while the media the Left controls remains "unfair." But if they can make Rush Limbaugh look unAmerican, unpatriotic, well -- then all...

With one move, the Senate majority leader embarrassed himself, his party and his cause. Game, set and match to Rush Limbaugh, a result that ought to alarm any Democrat who assumes that the party can't botch the 2008 election. Mr. Limbaugh, who on his Palm Beach-based radio show regularly slams anyone whom he believes to be unpatriotic - that would be anyone who disagrees with him that the Iraq War was justified and is going splendidly - recently called U.S. active-duty personnel who oppose the war "phony soldiers." Whether he meant all such critics or just one is a tedious,...

According to their website.... Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.Launched in May 2004, Media Matters for America put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation — news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda — every day, in real time.Using the website www.mediamatters.org as the principal vehicle for disseminating research and information,...

If this doesn't take the cake, I don't know what does? On an ABC News Blog called the Political Radar, ABC reports on Rush Limbaugh's $2 million condemnation letter and throughout the piece continually links "Democrats" to the charity donation that Limbaugh and the ebay bidder for the letter are giving the money to. After reading this ABC blog report, one gets the sneaking suspicion that ABC thinks that Harry Reid and the Democrats are the ones that should be hailed as the good guys responsible for raising this monumental sum for charity. It is clear that ABC did their...

Wesley Clark's Political Action Committee has a letter on their website to attempt to have Rush Limbaugh removed from Armed Forces Radio. The problem is, Clark made the letter editable. Here is your opportunity to use this letter to send emails to your congressmen supporting Limbaugh and have this little stunt backfire on Clark. http://ga4.org/campaign/dumprush/

I spent the better part of Wednesday trying to get Democrats to say something bad about Rush Limbaugh. You’d think this would not be a difficult task — but it proved surprisingly hard. But first, some back story: As you might recall, there was a bit of back and forth between Republicans and Democrats over which was the most patriotic party. It started when MoveOn published the infamous “General Petraeus Betray Us?” ad in the New York Times. Subsequent revelations about progress in Iraq embarrassed MoveOn for questioning the General’s integrity. A recent Washington Post editorial noted: “It’s looking more...

Rush Limbaugh’s political jiu-jitsu masterstroke comes to a climax at 1 PM, EDT today, when the ebay auction for the letter sent by 41 Senate Democrats to the CEO of his syndicator Clear Channel ends. As this article is written, the highest bid has reached the neighborhood of one million dollars, with the purchase price to be donated to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, benefitting the education of children of deceased Marines and federal law enforcement personnel. Because Rush Limbaugh has offered to match the purchase price, the total donation will possibly exceed two million dollars. The Mainstream Media have...

1st reference to the EBay auction from the Main-Stream-Media that I have seen: LINK to excerpted article With less than 5 1/2 hours to go before it's over, the eBay bidding has topped $2.1 million for the letter signed by 41 senators condemning Rush Limbaugh for using the words "phony soldiers."We've reported several times about what Limbaugh said and the reaction to it. It's Limbaugh who is auctioning the letter Money from the auction will go to the Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation. There's a pdf copy of the letter here.

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Last weekend, Airhead America talk show host Randi Rhodes was reportedly mugged and beaten in New York City. Another liberal host, John Eliot, immediately blamed the supposedly brutal beating on a possible right-wing hate machine. Other left-wing media outlets followed suit. As it turns out, Rhodes wasn't beaten at all. It's believed that she fell while taking her dog for a walk. So will liberal groups like Media Matters go after irresponsible media outlets that repeated this unfounded story?

Gore's Nobel Prize win was a well-deserved honor for one of our finest politicians. It's also a stark reminder of how far into trivia the race to the presidency has fallen. When Al Gore finished his brief statement to the press upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday, he walked from the lectern, ignoring the shouted questions from reporters about whether he would now make another run at the White House. Given how he was treated by the press eight years ago, it would be shocking if Gore had the stomach for another run. What the press has been...

When Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) took to the Senate floor to denounce media commentator Rush Limbaugh for comments that he made on his nationally broadcasted show, Senator Reid called upon Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his remarks -- ending his statement by saying, "I ask my colleagues, Democrat and Republican alike, to join together against this irresponsible, hateful, and unpatriotic attack -- by calling upon Rush Limbaugh to give our troops the apology they deserve." Well, I have listened to the comments Rush made on his 26 September show and have come to the clear conclusion that Rush has nothing...