Free Republic

One of leading moonbat "Opinion Drivers"/Propogandists at DAILY KOS is now trying to pigeon-hole Republican Legislators in to denouncing Rush Limbaugh. For those of you who don't know, (or don't even care), who this woman is, she is deranged "Housewife" that is OFTEN quoted (But never credited) by Lib and Democrat pundits on TV. If she is pushing it, you can almost be assured that it will be driving Democrat pundit talking points over the next few days. In a diary titled "Rush Limbaugh: The Voice Of The Republican Party", she tells us she is calling Republicans in Congress, asking...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The San Francisco Chronicle joined the lengthening list of imperiled newspapers Tuesday as its owner set out to purge the payroll and slash other expenses in a last-ditch effort to reverse years of heavy losses. If it can't reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the Chronicle, northern California's largest newspaper with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430. Hearst didn't specify a savings target nor a deadline for wringing out the expenses. A Hearst spokesman didn't immediately respond to messages Tuesday. But management made it clear...

During the recently completed presidential campaign, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff was all excited over his "web exclusive" piece on staffers with the McCain campaign that had connections with past lobbying efforts. Back in those days Newsweek was all about the evils of those darn lobbyists. For their part, Obama supporters at the time ballyhooed the pledges that Barack Obama had made stating that his was going to be a kinder, gentler campaign, one that chased those evil lobbyists away. Phooey on those lobbyists, became the popular mantra. But, now that The One has made a successful and historic run for the...

As the presidential campaign comes to a close, a majority of voters (51%) say most reporters have tried to help Barack Obama win the presidency. Just seven percent (7%) think they tried to help John McCain. Thirty-one percent (31%) say reporters have offered unbiased coverage, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Ten percent (10%) are undecided. Men are far more suspicious than women. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of male voters think reporters actively favored Obama, compared to a plurality of female voters (46%). Eighty-four percent (84%) of Republicans and 51% of unaffiliated voters say reporters have tried to...

Objecting to Andrea Mitchell's incredible bias on the Biden incident.

WASHINGTON, October 21, 2008—As The New York Times increasingly comes under fire for an October 18 story that delved into Cindy McCain’s personal life, a prominent critic of the paper is calling for a boycott of what he terms “America’s newspaper of wretched.” Don Feder, the editor of the Boycott The New York Times website http://boycottnyt.com, says the lengths that The Times went to in order to “trash” Mrs. McCain is further proof of a relentless pro-Obama bias at the newspaper. “How low will The New York Times go to trash John McCain and his wife Cindy? Think the bellies...

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? By Orson Scott Card Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism. An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. This housing crisis didn't come out of...

There is an article in today's Washington Post that exemplifies the despicable bias of the mass hysterical media. In a column written by Juliet Eilperin the distortions could not be more apparent. To Avoid Being 'Depressed,' Palin Skimps on Campaign News No wonder GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin harbors such hostility toward the mainstream media: her staff imposes limits on her access to it. Isn't that the stupidest premise you have ever heard? It represents exactly why the majority of us don't listen to or read the crap these people call reporting any longer. I wonder if the tiny...

Obama remains unknown Tony Blankley Wednesday, September 24, 2008 The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other. This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who...

Borrowing from the nickname for a federal earmark that would have built a multi-million dollar bridge for an Alaska town of 50 people, Newsweek's Mark Hosenball offers readers of the September 29 print magazine a look at "[Gov. Sarah] Palin's Pipeline to Nowhere." Hosenball suggests that Palin's $500-million "principal achievement" as governor "might never be built after all." But while the headline evokes images of the "Bridge to Nowhere," this isn't a case of government waste as much as it is of the endless red tape of lawsuits.: Approximately half of the proposed pipeline would run through Canada; native tribes...

NYT editor responds to McCain camp broadside Michael Calderone: NY Times executive editor Bill Keller responded, in an e-mail to Politico, to Steve Schmidt's contention that the paper is pulling for Obama, and that "it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization." "The New York Times is committed to covering the candidates fully, fairly and aggressively. It's our job to ask hard questions, fact-check their statements and their advertising, examine their programs, positions, biographies and advisors. Candidates and their campaign operatives are not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny, but it's what our readers expect and deserve."

The Mainstream Media Is Dead As It Attempts To Steer Election By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin 09/19/2008 You should be aware of how, in a most unexpected and unintended way, the mainstream media is determining the outcome of this election. As every reader of this column knows and, as perhaps everyone knows or suspects at this point, the mainstream media has been in a massive full court press to sell Sen. Barack Obama as president, without vetting him, without asking him tough questions and with treatment that some would think should be reserved for the second coming. By the mainstream media,...

It's not a great idea to run a government using Yahoo! e-mail accounts. Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail habit of using a private account to communicate with aides echos the worst practices of the Bush administration, says one expert. That's the word from experts, anyway, reacting to news that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail had been hacked earlier this week. McCain's vice-presidential pick apparently used the accounts to communicate with key aides about government business. The practice is dangerous, said experts, and can run counter to laws ensuring government is open and accountable -- a tough point for Palin, who...

You... yes, you reading this right now. McClatchy wants you to know you are mean to them, your mistrust of them is merely egged on by a sly political tactic, and you fall for it because you only get your news from an "ideologically tailored" source. In other words, they are telling you that you are misinformed, mean-spirited, easily led... well, they are telling you that you are stupid. And then they wonder why people don't trust them! In "McCain campaign systematically targets the news media," McClatchy writers Steven Thomma and Margaret Talev decided to try and explain why...

ABC "News" Charles Gibson Interviews Barack Obama Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee June 4, 2008 (after Hillary Clinton concedes) http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5000184 GIBSON: Senator, I'm curious about your feelings last night. It was an historic moment. Has it sunk in yet? GIBSON: What did your grandmother say? GIBSON: Public moments are not your own. There's a million people pulling you in a million different directions, but when everybody clears out, the staff is gone, you're in your hotel room at night and you're alone -- do you say to yourself: "Son of a gun, I've done this?" GIBSON: (inaudible) when you announced, did...

Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post is surprisingly blunt and surprisingly revealing. The mainstream media, Kurtz says, are mad. Their anger, though, is oddly unidirectional: "The media are getting mad. Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches. Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that)." There certainly isn't. Barack Obama has been manipulating the press...

This one has got to take the cake for stupidity and lack of journalistic integrity. The Old Media has been gyrating in ever widening circles to find new and unheard of ways to destroy Governor Sarah Palin and now from the Hartford Courant (Connecticut) we find the most ridiculous one yet. With this Robert Thorson column we have now gone from slandering Gov. Palin herself, to attacking every last member of her family -- including her Down Syndrome child, Trig -- to this latest stop on the smear Palin express: attacking Palin's hometown Wasilla, Alaska. Thorson seriously tries to make...

She was a recently elected governor and the mother of five children, including a handicapped infant. The scorn from the mainstream press and the left-leaning blog world was both intense and instantaneous. Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic immediately began circulating rumors that Trig was not the governor's baby - that she had engaged in a huge charade to cover up her teen daughter's illegitimate child. The New York Times reported on Page One that Mrs. Palin had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek described the reaction of most newsrooms to Mrs. Palin's elevation as...

Five days after Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was picked as the Republican vice presidential nominee, NBC's David Gregory falsely disputed the idea that the media had crossed a line by suggesting Palin's family life conflicted with her candidacy. Referring to an earlier interview, Gregory argued on Today: "Rudy Giuliani said questions have been asked about whether she can balance this with her kids. That question has not been brought up by the media.” Gregory was wrong — that precise question was posed repeatedly on ABC, CBS and NBC as the networks invaded every nook and cranny of Palin's family life....

We all know that CNN is cable television’s most fair and balanced independent-minded news station. In turn–and, apparently, irrespective of nuance–CNN is committed to asking the same questions of Republican and Democratic candidates. When convenient, it even tries to craft the same answers. In this vein, last night on AC-360, Anderson Cooper ran a special segment on Sarah Palin’s church, explicitly asking the same questions of Palin’s religious outlook as CNN formerly asked regarding the influence of Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Barack Obama’s outlook. Yet through this line of questioning, CNN drew an outrageously inaccurate analogy between Obama’s longtime mentorship...

Sarah Palin thinks she is a better American than you because she comes from a small town, and a superior human being because she isn't a journalist and has never lived in Washington and likes to watch her kids play hockey. Although Palin praised John McCain in her acceptance speech as a man who puts the good of his country ahead of partisan politics, McCain pretty much proved the opposite with his selection of a running mate whose main asset is her ability to reignite the culture wars. So maybe Governor Palin does represent everything that is good and fine...

For two straight days, CNN repeated liberal rumors about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s political record – rumors that had already been debunked by their own correspondents, as well as the respected FactCheck.org, a group led by former CNN reporter Brooks Jackson. During Monday evening’s Election Center program, CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin claimed that Palin "wants to ban all abortions," despite a September 2 report by his own network which included a quote from the Alaska governor that she is "pro-life... [w]ith the exception of a doctor's determination that the mother's life would end if the pregnancy continued."...

Nobody should be surprised that the day after Sarah Palin knocked the ball out of the park with her acceptance speech; the Associated Press ran an article claiming she was using a corked bat. This is because the mainstream media, while completely in the tank for Obama, isn’t so blinded by the Messiah’s divine light that they can’t see a huge threat when it appears. In the case of Mz. Palin, her appearance on the political scene has given the liberal press the same sense of dread that the people of Alderaan must have felt when a moon sized space...

After the GOP attacks the media over stories about the vice presidential nominee's family, TV networks and newspapers deny bias and say Republicans opened the door to coverage. News executives Thursday tried to shake off the excoriations of the media emanating from the Republican National Convention, defending their coverage of GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as responsible and evenhanded. While top television network officials and newspaper editors largely dismissed the critiques as partisan rhetoric, some fretted that charges of media bias had reached a new and disturbing level. "I really do take exception to it," NBC News President Steve...

More paranoid fallout from the We-Didn’t-Get-To-Vet-Her whiners in the MSM. Palin is afraid to face us!! Grab some Rolaids, you’ll have to suffer through Olbermann and Howard Fineman to get the initial story.

While watching those speaking at the Republican Party's National Convention on Wednesday and Thursday night, I realized there was a steady theme from those addressing the GOP faithful. There were many opportunities to slap down the mainstream media and I'm happy to say those opportunities were taken advantage of. In fact, a nice swat should be taken at the mainstream press whenever possible. Indeed, media swatting should become a part of the Republican platform. Let me see...lower taxes, smaller government, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, etc. and anti-media, but not necessarily in that order. It's about time Republicans start calling it like...

NEW YORK -- News executives Thursday tried to shake off the excoriations of the media emanating from the Republican National Convention, defending their coverage of GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as responsible and evenhanded. ______ "I really do take exception to it," NBC News President Steve Capus said. "These terms get thrown around in an awfully cavalier way, and they're incredibly damaging. We're in the business where words matter, and those are awfully, awfully strong accusations."

Since the first article on American Thinker warning about the forthcoming types of attacks on Sarah Palin was posted last Friday (Defending Against the First Attacks on Sarah Palin), the assault has come fast and furious from both the media and the Democrats. Perhaps the only surprising thing about it has been, however, the depravity of the attacks.   While the campaign against Governor Palin has been viscious, certainly more so than any I can remember previous, it has managed to expose the soft underbelly of the Democratic Party, including the mainstream media. The Left is, at its heart, a movement...

Howard Kurtz was on the Ed Schultz show today about 11:35. Howard expressed interest in far-left liberal radio host Ed Schultz "getting back to him" on what Ed finds out about Sarah Palin in Alaska this weekend. Ed is going to host a show in Alaska and have an audience tell him their opinions of Sarah Palin. You can bet the audience will be 100% Moveon.org/Dailykos types. So Howard wants a report from lefty Ed on what the gossip on Sarah is in Alaska, and CNN wonders why nobody has an ounce of respect for their so called reporters!

What the media will now do to Palin.By Christopher CookThe disgusting, savage onslaught that the Democrats and the media unleashed against Sarah Palin, her children, and her husband will, as has been said by many, go down as one of the more disgusting episodes in American political history. And until the media, Hollywood, and academia are done revising history so that it never happened—that should take about 15 years or so—it will be remembered, and it will do damage to the press.So how do they recover? How do they accomplish their mission in this environment? They hate Sarah Palin...

Sorry sight last night, post-Palin speech, seeing the Fourth Estaters pooh-pooh Republican charges that the media are pro-Obama. But perception is reality in politics, and according to a new SurveyUSA poll, this limited to Washington State registered voters, folks believe the press is pressing for the Democrat candidate. When asked "Is the media rooting for Barack Obama? Rooting for John McCain? Or trying its best to be fair to both?" 52% said "for Obama," 8% said "for McCain," 35% said "being fair to both." Interesting: 28% of Democrats, 28% of liberals, and 42% of moderates chose "for Obama." It would...

Sarah Palin's sister was interviewed this AM on Fox. Mentioned was that the NY Times is sending a team of slime merchants to Alaska to find anything they can to hurt Palin/the Republicans. (No word on whether the Times will also send a team to Chicago or Indonesia to investigate Madrassa Barry...)

On the Obama Messiah watch, in the last half-hour of ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday, anchor Chris Cuomo interviewed photographer Pete Souza who has a new book of Obama photographs. In addition to cooing over photos of the Obama daughters and Obama with the Kennedys, Cuomo highlighted photos of women looking adoringly at Obama: "And now, of course, the insight you're able to capture out on the trail. You say, it's so much like a religious experience for people as they meet him. Let's see the view that you get. Look at them with their hands clasped." Hallowed be...

I believe I made a mistake when I decided not to attend the Democratic National Convention. The consequence of that decision has been that I have had to watch its highlights on national television. There the media gaggle, with few exceptions, has plangently repeated -- tediously and cheerlessly -- many things that I know to be untrue. The preeminent untruth resounding across the airways is that the Clintons are political geniuses. They are to electioneering what Ludwig van Beethoven was to the piccolo, or Slobodan Milosevic was to ethnic cleansing, to wit, consummate artists. Since the early 1990s I have...

DENVER - There's no shortage of items on Barack Obama's to-do list for the fall campaign. How about a to-don't list? Five AP reporters offer suggestions.

Anyone who thinks the media have been balanced and unbiased during the current election simply hasn't been paying attention. Barack Obama has benefitted from adoring coverage, a lack of journalistic rigor, and a sizeable advantage in media coverage. In short, everything in the media seems to break his direction. Large parts of the American public already recognize this. According to a recent study by Rasmussen Reports, 50 percent of independent voters and even 27 percent of Democrats believe that the media are trying to help Obama win. Just 12 percent of independents said the media were helping John McCain. This...

The ratings for the Democratic National Convention for ABC, CBS and NBC fell by a million viewers compared to the opener for the 2004 convention with headliner Bill Clinton TVWeek is reporting. On the other hand, the cable newsers saw a ratings jump from their 2004 convention ratings. This reveals the further decline in the old paradigm with the big three networks steadily losing their news influence bit by bit to cable outlets. ABC, CBS and NBC brought in 12.1 million viewers in the 10 p.m. hour, down one million from 2004, according to preliminary, fast-national data from Nielsen Media...

Lee Cowan’s “infectious” feelings and Chris Matthews’ “thrill” helped NBC lead the way in positive coverage for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But the other two major networks weren’t far behind in a study of 1,365 network news stories going back to May 17, 2000, the date of Obama’s first appearance on CBS Evening News, through early June 2008, when the Illinois senator secured the Democratic nomination. The study was released Wednesday by the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog and the parent organization of CNSNews.com. The study is titled, “Obama’s Margin of Victory: The Media,” pointing out that...

[MCCAIN HAS BEEN ON COVER TWICE]

Perhaps it's the pied piper effect, but when Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama speaks, the media follow right along in lockstep. The word "disaster" can invoke images of the aftermath of hurricanes, tornados or tsunamis. But, on the campaign trail where there are political points to be scored - it's one quarter of a slight economic contraction followed up by two quarters of shallow economic growth, according to Obama. At an August 19 town hall meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., Obama said an "economic disaster is happening right now." The media ignored the exaggeration. Instead, journalists across the board credited...

Reuters went to bat for its candidate, hoping to give him a boost after the shellacking Mac gave him at Saddle Back last weekend. It probably felt more like Brokeback to the Senator from Chicago.Anyway, Reuters published a subtle little piece on patriotism and the presidential candidates. In it, they call white America racist and questions its patriotism.Here's the first excerpt:The U.S. presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation's founders.When in the heck has Obama...

CNN correspondent Mary Snow’s report on Monday’s The Situation Room about Barack Obama’s charge that pro-life "folks are lying" about his abortion record actually just presented both sides of the controversy without getting to the reality of the matter. The report, which was promoted as "checking the facts" by host Wolf Blitzer, also omitted how Obama’s campaign conceded on Sunday that the pro-lifers were actually accurately representing his record. Before Snow’s report aired just before the top of the 6 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program, Blitzer read two promos for it. In the first, he announced how "Barack...

I slapped the side of my television in April when economist Joe Stiglitz called this the worst recession "since the Great Depression." But now the economy is not only hurting homeowners; it's apparently harming parakeets, too! An AP item reports that pet owners are abandoning their furry and feathery friends to animal shelters because they can no longer afford to feed them. Never mind that GDP is puttering along in positive terrain. Headlines still scream that we're closing in on 1929, not 2009. Are we a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm put it a little while ago, getting himself...

Despite the many mea culpas by the mainstream media about their failure to report on the John Edwards scandal in the wake of Edwards' admission of an affair with his mistress last Friday, they continue to make the same errors as before. Following an initial flurry of reporting about what Edwards said on ABC's Nightline and some analysis of the scandal, the MSM still continues to leave the bulk of the investigative reporting to both the National Enquirer and the blogosphere.

Where your tax money goes - to Liberal BS PBS (August, 2008)   Clean up the 20% garbage at the PBS! Do not mix them with the majority of 'good programming', the "news" and current "editorial" parts are totally unprofessional!   The PBS & NPR problem of having one sided biased agenda whenever reporting or editorializing news and current events.   PBS says it's "independent", Huh?   PBS has a banner about 'Vote 2008' that describes itself as "independent".     TIMING:   Can anyone come up with an explanation why the next 2 "documentaries" had to be aired just so...

Voters overwhelmingly believe that politicians will “break the rules to help people who give them a lot of money,” but most say there’s a bigger problem in politics today—media bias. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 55% believe media bias is more of a problem than big campaign contributions. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree and think that campaign cash is a bigger problem. People believe media bias is a bigger problem even though 63% believe most politicians will break the rules to help campaign contributors. Just 14% believe most politicians would refrain from breaking the rules for a...

The moderators for the 2008 presidential and vice presidential debates have been announced and once again they all have one thing in common: they are all liberal hacks from the main stream media. This year's questioners are NBC's Tom Brokaw, CBS' Bob Schieffer and PBS' Jim Lehrer and Gwen Iffl. Pathetic choices, again.

Obama's Magical Mystery Tour After a week of intense media foreplay, Obama has finally embarked on his magical mystery tour. As he boarded the plane that took him on the first leg of his anxiously awaited Middle East and European tour, a pair of uniformed Air Force officers saluted simultaneously, as they do each time President Bush boards Air Force One. As the media-anointed President in waiting, Obama is virtually guaranteed superstar non-stop media coverage as he makes his taxpayer financed 'fact finding' tour this week. Joining him on this excellent adventure are all three of the major network anchors...

The belief that reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the fall campaign has grown by five percentage points over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago. Just 14% believe most reporters will try to help John McCain win, little changed from 13% a month ago. Just one voter in four (24%) believes that most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage. A plurality of Democrats—37%-- say most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of...

Barack Obama is going on a five nation middle east tour accompanied by all three network news anchors, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Katie Kouric. This is effectively an around the clock campaign commercial designed to play him in the best light to all of America on the 6:00 o'clock news. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?